Waveoff (Murphy's Lawless Book 6) Read online

“Yes, Primus,” Ferenc said, then he bowed and left.

  * * *

  Bowden didn’t get the word that the equipment was ready for testing until another five days had passed, and he was starting to get antsy. Murphy hadn’t said when the strike was going to happen, but Bowden knew it needed to be soon. In the interim, he had asked the major for a couple of troopers to attend the next briefing, so he could familiarize them with the handheld lasers. No decision had been made yet on whether a squad would be sent to attempt a ground designate for the targets, but Bowden wanted people prepared for the mission. They probably wouldn’t know until it was nearly “go time,” and if he waited, there wouldn’t be any time to train them. It was now or never.

  He wasn’t surprised, therefore, when he showed up at the craft for the operational testing and found three troopers in addition to Ferenc and the SpinDog technician who’d been assigned to the project.

  “Lieutenant Bowden?” asked one of the soldiers. “I’m Sergeant Young. I’m the squad leader who’s been assigned to this, if we get the go-ahead to do it.” He nodded to the other two men. “Here are your two victims, Dork and Renaldi. Try not to poke too many laser holes through them.” He walked off, chuckling to himself.

  “Uh, suh, you’re not really gonna poke holes in us, are you?” asked a large, hulking man. The accent placed him from rural Alabama. The other soldier snorted in derision.

  “You’re Dork?”

  “Yes, suh, Private Dorkhouse, but they all just call me Dork, ’cause I, uh, get lost sometimes.”

  “I see.” Probably not the only reason. “No, Private, I’m not going to poke any holes in you. Although you’ll need goggles while dealing with the laser to protect your vision, the laser isn’t strong enough to hurt you. Right, Alak?”

  The SpinDog tech, Alak Lekral, looked up from the wire he was running to the bomb. “No, we tuned it to your specifications. You could stand in front of it all day and not be injured. Although I would not recommend it.”

  “Told you Sarge was just fucking with us,” said the other trooper, Private Adam Renaldi. His accent marked him as a New Yorker. An interesting pair.

  “Okay, thanks. Just didn’t want to get home and have to explain to my mama why I had holes in me.”

  “Your mama’s long dead,” Renaldi said.

  The big man shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. That’s what they say, but we won’t know fo’ sure ’til we get home.”

  Renaldi started to say something else, but Bowden held up a hand. “You guys can argue that later; I’d like to see what Alak’s put together for us.”

  The SpinDog tech nodded. “First, we were able to design some new fins for both the bomb and the missile,” he said, pointing to the guidance assembly on the bomb, “moving them to the nose on both.”

  Bowden stepped up to the bomb. He’d never seen a real-life Skipper before, but the guidance section looked just the way he’d imagined it—a laser receiver followed by movable fins. This was attached to the bomb’s main body—about 1,000 pounds of high explosive—then larger, fixed fins, and the rockets. The rockets still looked stupid in that configuration, and with four, there were multiple opportunities for failure. He shrugged. If this was the best they could do, it was pretty close to what he’d wanted. Assuming the guidance section worked, it’d be fine.

  They could always press in closer to the target if the motors didn’t work. It would suck for the pilots—flying through triple-A was not fun—but it could be done.

  He walked over to where the missile sat in a cradle of its own. While he’d never seen the Skipper guidance package before, he had seen the Sidewinder’s, and the one that was now attached to the missile looked exactly like an early Sidewinder guidance section from back home, including being the same size as the original missile’s. Although the SpinDogs had designed a step-up section to mate the smaller guidance section to the bigger missile, it was obviously not intended for this missile. It was a lash-up.

  “Where did this come from?” Bowden asked.

  The tech shrugged. “There was actually an original missile seeker head in with the Lost Soldiers’ equipment. That allowed us to replicate it much more closely.”

  Bowden inspected it. “This looks like a real Sidewinder guidance section all right. It’s not as sophisticated as the ones I had—it looks like an earlier model—but it looks like a genuine AIM-9 seeker head. Right down to where you filed off the serial number.”

  The tech shrugged again. “I do not know.”

  “You must come over here,” Ferenc interrupted, gesturing toward the handheld laser designator, “so we can provide a quick demonstration.” Once Bowden and the two soldiers had drifted over, he continued, “As you can see, it is the same device as the one hanging from the aircraft, so there will not be any interoperability issues between them.”

  Bowden nodded appreciatively. If true, that would be the first thing without any interoperability issues.

  “We developed a tripod for it to sit on so the operator can keep a steady spot on the target,” Ferenc continued. “The battery on it is the weakest part. Since it is normally wired into a spacecraft, we had to add a battery to it, and the one which worked best will only fire for about ten minutes before you have to recharge it or put on a new one.”

  “That’s not too bad,” Bowden said with a shrug. “I think that’s comparable to ours back home.”

  “Good. I was worried that it would not be long enough.”

  “That’s what we’re here for?” Renaldi asked, looking critically at the gear. Bowden couldn’t blame him; it looked big, bulky, and—what was worse for the troopers—heavy. “What is it? And please, tell me I don’t have to carry that damn thing.”

  “That is a laser designator,” Bowden said, “and that’s what we’re going to use to destroy the antenna the indigs are building to call back to their bosses on Kulsis.”

  “But you said it was safe,” Dork said. “How are we going to blow up the antenna with it if it is safe to stand in front of?”

  Bowden smiled. “That’s a good question. Here’s how this is going to work. When it’s turned on, this box emits a beam of laser light. You’re going to carry this box—and another one just like it—to the target, and then you’re going to point the laser at it. The beam will hit the target and bounce off. Meanwhile, Mr. Ferenc here, along with several others, will fly some of those aircraft behind us into the target area and drop a bunch of bombs. Those bombs will see the laser light that’s being bounced off the targets, and they will follow it all the way down and blow up, wiping out the antenna and the control station.”

  “What’s it weigh?” Renaldi asked.

  “It is only about twenty kilos,” Ferenc replied.

  “Only twenty kilos, says the man who doesn’t have to hump it around on his back all day,” the soldier muttered. The man’s eyes widened as a thought came to him. “You said the bomb follows the laser beam down?”

  Bowden nodded.

  “How does it know to hit the target and not this giant piece of shit I’ve been carrying around all day?”

  Bowden smiled. “It’s all due to the geometry of the attack.”

  “I’m sorry, suh,” Dork said. “I wasn’t very good at math.”

  Bowden chuckled. “You don’t have to know math to use it. What I meant was how things will be arranged.” He pointed to the objects. “Here’s you, standing at the designator, and the target is over on the bulkhead over there. The bomb is coming from behind us. If you’re pointing the laser at the target, the only light the bomb can see is what is reflecting off the target. As long as the bomb can’t see the front of the designator, it can’t see the beam, and it won’t guide on you.”

  “Okay,” the big man said, nodding. “How does it work?”

  The tech moved forward and handed everyone goggles. “Put these on, please. The laser will not burn you, but it is not good for your eyes.” Everyone put on the goggles.

  The tech flipped a switch on the left
side of the box, and it gave off a low hum. “First you turn it on. Then you dial in the code.” He typed in “1666” on the pad between the two switches. “Then you activate the laser beam.” He flipped the switch on the right. “Now you just point it at the target, and the bomb will follow it in. We could not make it any simpler.”

  “The box is on?” Renaldi asked. The tech nodded. “I don’t see a laser beam.”

  “It is invisible. Trust me; it is on.”

  “Great,” Renaldi muttered. “A heavy fucking box that you can’t even tell is on. Probably won’t be working after a day on the march, and we’ll never know.”

  “I can show you it is working,” the tech said. He walked over and plugged a wire into the bomb, and its laser receiver popped up. “See? The bomb can see the reflected laser light, even if you cannot. Move the designator around.”

  Bowden turned the designator to the right and the laser receiver on the bomb followed it. He moved it back to the left, and it tracked left. Then he jerked it to the right, and the laser receiver went back to center.

  The tech nodded. “You have to be smooth with any corrections, or you will break the lock on the bomb.”

  Bowden looked to the soldiers to see if they understood. Renaldi was still frowning, obviously still annoyed at having to carry the box, but Dork’s mouth was open, and his eyes were wide. “It’s just like magic…”

  “Well, not really magic, just science and technology,” Bowden said. “Let me take you through how all this is going to work…”

  * * *

  “Okay, so what do we know?” Bowden asked two hours later.

  “After carrying the heavy piece of shit all day, the mule shoots a laser beam that we aim at the target,” Renaldi said. Bowden nodded, ignoring the soldier’s constant grousing. He’d learned hours earlier that acknowledging it only made the soldier bitch more. He remembered what one of his earliest chiefs had said: “A bitching sailor is a happy sailor,” and let it go.

  “The laser bounces off the target,” Dork said. “The bomb sees it, and it flies into the target and blows it up.” Bowden had almost been to the point of asking for someone else when Dork had finally figured it all out. Although the man could easily lug the box around, Bowden was less sanguine he could operate it correctly. Finally—on the last battery they had before having to recharge them all—the light had gone on for Dork.

  “And what do we need for the bomb to see the laser?” Bowden asked.

  “The correct angle,” Renaldi said. “It’s best if we’re on close to the same line as the attack run.”

  “And you have to punch in the right magic code into the box,” Dork said happily. Bowden had given up on saying “Pulse Repetition Frequency” or even “PRF.” Dork thought of it as a magic code, and that was okay with Bowden, as long as he entered the right code at the right time. As it turned out, Dork could remember a number pattern, he just couldn’t manipulate the numbers. Remember “1555?” No problem. Multiply eight times eight? Dork was more likely to give the answer “apple sauce” than “64.” If he wanted to think of it as a “Magic Code,” that was fine with Bowden.

  “And what’s the most important thing?” Bowden asked.

  “Timing is everything,” they both answered. “The box has to be on and pointing at the target at the correct time,” Dork finished.

  “And we care about that because?”

  “Because the battery only lasts ten minutes,” Renaldi replied, “and we’ll only have two because they’re damn heavy, and I ain’t carrying any more than that.”

  Bowden smiled. They’d go over it again in a couple of days to ensure retention, but it seemed like at least the ground component of the attack understood its part of the mission.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5

  “So those are your weapons,” Bowden said, completing the walkaround of the interface craft. “Any questions?”

  “Nope,” First Lieutenant Thomas Byrd, said. “A super-size Sidewinder and a flying bomb that I need to guide into the target or show it a laser so that someone else can.” Byrd, a former U.S. Marine F-4 RIO, had understood the Sidewinder immediately and had quickly picked up lasers and how the laser-guided bomb worked.

  His pilot when he’d been downed, Captain Sam Hirst, had understood the bomb almost as quickly and had identified the Sidewinder seeker head as coming from an AIM-9B.

  The third American aviator, USAF Captain Dave Fiezel, an F-105F pilot, had picked up the laser-guided bomb mission by likening it to suppression of enemy air defense, or SEAD, missions, where he’d fired anti-radiation missiles at Vietnamese SA-2 surface-to-air missile radar sites. Fiezel had Bowden’s respect; anyone who dueled with SAMs was a serious badass, even if he’d ultimately lost to one in the end.

  “I’m sorry,” Bowden said as he led them aboard the craft and into the cockpit, “but the cockpit controls we’ve put together for this are pretty bare bones. Nothing’s integrated very well, and none of it’s digital.”

  “Hah,” Byrd said with a laugh. “You’ve obviously never been in the cockpit of a Phantom.”

  “Hell, the Phantom’s state-of-the-art,” Fiezel said. “You’ve never been in a Thud.”

  Bowden chuckled. “Actually, I have; I saw it in a museum one time.” He smiled at the other aviators. “Okay, maybe you won’t be out of your element as much as I thought. Regardless, I’m going to have to teach you how to operate all this so that you can, first, fight your way into the target area and, second, blow up the giant antenna they’re building to call Kulsis.”

  Hirst nodded to the dual-piloted cockpit. “Will I be flying with Byrd?”

  Bowden shook his head. “No, you’ll each have a SpinDog who will fly the plane, while you work the weapons systems.”

  “RIO appreciation flights!” Byrd exclaimed happily. “Welcome to my world.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re finally going to get to fly in the front seat,” Hirst said, “instead of being a backseat driver like you normally are. Were. Welcome to my world.”

  Bowden smiled. It was obvious the two men had been a crew; they had the easy camaraderie that developed between two men who had flown together often.

  “Byrd, you’ll be flying with Lotho Ferenc. Hirst, you’ll be with Jukhal Samkamka, and Fiezel, you’re with Burg Hrensku.”

  “All right,” Byrd said, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat on the left. Unlike the U.S. military, where the fixed wing “pilot-in-command” was normally on the left, the SpinDog lead pilots sat on the right, like in U.S. helicopters. He looked down at the switches labeled in English. “What have we got here?”

  * * *

  “What do you make of this?” Major Murphy asked, two hours later as Bowden sat down to a well-earned dinner.

  “I’m sorry?” Bowden asked, looking up from his first bite. “What do I make of what?”

  “This.” Murphy slid some imagery onto the table. “This is the latest imagery of your target.”

  Bowden pursed his lips as he inspected the pictures and pushed his plate to the side. “This is bad. They’re almost ready to use it.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Murphy said. “Almost all the tiles are in place in the dish.”

  Bowden shook his head. “I’m not talking about that.” He pointed to a pad off to the side of the suspected control station where at least 20 vehicles sat. “You know what this is?”

  “That’s what I’m here to ask you.”

  Bowden frowned and looked at the arrangement of the vehicles. He’d seen a lot of vehicle pools and armor depots—right before blowing them off the map. These didn’t look like his former targets. The way the vehicles were parked was not only too tidy, but too tight, as though no one had any intent of having them deploy with any appreciable speed. Not a one of them. Bowden tapped the antenna. “How are they going to supply power to the transmitter? Do they have some sort of generator nearby?”

  Murphy shook his head tightly. “Not that I’m aware. They’re pretty low te
ch. Like I told you before, I’m surprised they were able to make the antenna.”

  Bowden shrugged. “We built Arecibo in the early 1960s. It’s hard, but not really that hard if you have some idea what you’re doing. They’ve been visited by space-faring societies, after all. They have to have some concept of the principles involved.”

  He tapped the image with the vehicles. “That’s what they’re going to use to power it—those vehicles. They are probably charging some sort of battery or maybe a capacitor they’re going to use to power the transmitter. Or, if they’re some sort of fuel cell variants, they could be plugged into it directly. And these shiny panels on the back of this model? It doesn’t look like our models, but I’m betting that’s some kind of solar panel.” He leaned away from the images. “That’s what they’re there for. The fact that all those vehicles are here—rather than running around doing whatever it is they normally do—means the system is close to being operational.” Murphy did not look happy, but neither did he look surprised. “You knew?”

  He shook his head. “You just convinced me. I’ve been talking to a variety of folks who flew or worked on image interpretation. That was one of the leading theories.”

  “And?”

  “And it means the enemy just leap-frogged us and grabbed the initiative. We’d been planning to bring all the vehicles and trained indigs we could to this site. Slowly, in the hope that we wouldn’t give ourselves away until we were within a hundred klicks or so.” He waved at the pictures. “But this changes everything. We still might be able to get two light mechanized columns there to attack, but not to achieve what we’d hoped.”

  “Which was what?”

  Murphy shrugged. “Screen off the entire site with aggressive patrols, mount a feint to pull the enemy into the field, and get them to reveal any heavy weapons or positions. They’d probably have shifted their triple-A into an anti-armor role—and that would have given us the ability to clear your path. Also, we would have been able to suppress or interdict any air defense launches, whether SAMs or MANPADs.” He shook his head. “But now, we’d be lucky to gather sufficient numbers to get there when you do. If we were to send everyone in dribs and drabs, the local defenses would probably tear them to pieces. But waiting for a reasonable mass of force means we could be slipping behind the enemy’s mission clock. We’ve got to get the strike package down to the planet and hit this thing ASAP.”