Chapter 22.
Arsenal Hunt.
Date 26.02.2120.
Siberia and the Arctic.
The hunt had been going on since the morning. The enemy could also rightfully describe their actions as a hunt, only for ground targets. Or rather, this could be stated by those who were on the two arsenal transports that "@enemy" pulled closer to their north.
Two and a half hundred cruise missiles had already been launched, primarily at targets in the SSSF. Most likely, the enemy was interested in the missile launch site, but several dozen of these two hundred and fifty were shot down over regions adjacent to the Kuznetsk Super Federation.
The trajectories of those missiles, flying around the protected SSSF, apparently led to the north. Perhaps "@enemy" had reliable information about the basing of the F-158s that had so successfully bombed targets in Central Asia. Yesterday's raids were remarkably successful - an entire MDS SAA-20 "Grotesque" missile defense terminal was destroyed, which, according to satellite reconnaissance, caught fire and then completely blew up, scattering the remains of its missile defense systems and chunks of concrete for several miles.
This alone could have seriously set the asses of the "@enemy" generals on fire, and there was also an infrastructure construction facility, a bridge, and an ammunition depot that were smashed to smithereens. The missiles also left several clear marks on the hydrodam and destroyed an auxiliary building attached to it. It would be good if arsenals were added to this list today, at least as damaged ones, but this would have required much more effort than destroying all these static ground targets - flying arsenals were part of the strategic reserve and were something like aircraft carriers before the War, and those ships symbolized the power of leading states for a century and a half. In its realistic interpretation, the objectives of the hunt sounded like "drive the arsenals deeper into the rear of "@enemy" and remove the threat to the missile launch site and adjacent facilities on the territory of the SSSF". The "@enemy" generals probably moved their little hands over the map mainly in the place where the missile launch site was depicted, but the airbase with the F-158 was of secondary interest to them - the raiders, unlike the missile launch site, were not static objects and during the flight of cruise missiles could change their location more than once or even leave the continent altogether. A serious advantage of the Super Federation was that its defense, starting with air defense aviation and ending with the AEX AMANDA system, could withstand a very powerful attack load with almost zero damage to itself. True, as in the case of any air defense and missile defense, a slight excess of this load entailed damage relevant to the damage from this small "top". Simply put, the defense basically did not divide, but subtracted, and if the result was less than zero, then everything was calm, and if more, then there was destruction.
Considering that the ammunition included in this "flying top" would primarily hit the defense itself, the "intensity threshold" that guarantees the successful repulse of attacks would begin to decrease, and then it would be the turn of infrastructure facilities.
Fortunately, for the SSSF, this threshold was somewhere at the sky-high heights of its values, but "@enemy", in turn, could one day decide to storm this height. With a favorable outcome, they should have ruined a bunch of ammunition and, possibly, carriers, smashing it all against an unshakable wall, but with an unfavorable outcome for the defenders, a crack would appear in the wall, which would inevitably begin to widen under further pressure.
This is how the interaction of the missile launch site defense and the force that wanted to destroy this missile launch site looked in a figurative description. All this was already beyond the scope of the pre-flight briefing, but Blankenberg had a pretty clear idea of the situation. The rocket launch site itself was part of a system of interactions at an even higher level. Orbital warfare and all that. Blankenberg didn't have a clear vision of it. All these Oppenheimer plans to push War into space, and also the Conversion of War, or its routinization, that is, leaving everything as it was. These were already topics for the highbrows. Nevertheless, the idea of Conversion, that is, the idea that only something in orbit would explode and shoot, and something close to peaceful life would begin below, well, at least to a cold war, looked quite tempting in Blankenberg's eyes.
True, this was too simplistic a description. The mechanism of War was damn complicated. It was complicated in all centuries, but now the devilish machine simply mocked man, allowing him to cause real disgrace in the rear, while functioning as if nothing had happened. This concerned both the SSSF phenomenon and other conflicts in the rear.
For half an hour Blankenberg and two more "Crusaders" had been flying at a speed of five hundred knots over the white desert, moving towards the meeting point with a group of five F-158s heading from an airfield located six hundred miles east of Turukhansk.
The dispersal of twelve machines among different bases was dictated by the fact that "@enemy" had already shown that the target of their strikes was not only objects on SSSF territory, but also, presumably, air bases in the very north of the continent.
Two arsenal transports were hanging in the air for weeks, and most likely moved north yesterday, after the first strikes, when the MDS terminal exploded. If the rear logistics worked as clearly as the frontline "combined combat environment" UCE usually works, then yesterday a transport with something like GBA sys.260 would have arrived in Turukhansk, preferably in a nuclear version - F-158 were capable of carrying these monsters on external suspensions. It would have been even better if a carrier with several hypersonic drones had arrived - it would have been possible to arrange a glorious ambush and ruin if not both, then at least one arsenal. Then it would have been time for "@enemy" to declare mourning. Not a common one, of course, but something would have been necessary - too much noticeable damage and, again, humiliation. The day before, "Grotesk" exploded, and now the arsenal would have crashed. Perhaps the headquarters computers issued persistent recommendations to transfer ammunition and drones, but the people simply did not have time.
Be that as it may, now five and three more F-158 were preparing to launch two AIM-270 missiles in a consolidated strike. Before that, two flights of three aircraft each had launched a total of twelve munitions from two directions. The first attack only allowed them to update the data on the air defense of "@enemy" in their immediate rear. Another two dozen Su-37 and Su-57 of the National Armed Forces of the Russian Federation were conducting their own raid on enemy SAMs - the attack aircraft had their own well-established tactics based on the use of subsonic anti-radar drones and conventional anti-radar missiles. They managed to knock out something.
Despite these joint efforts of the NaAmF RFR and the "Crusaders", the arsenals continued to circle along their routes, and all the AIM-270 missiles of the first wave were shot down approximately in the middle of their trajectory.
A hypersonic drone was definitely needed - this one could fly too high and fast for most frontline SAMs and low and maneuverable for the MDS. This is exactly the kind of thing that was needed. Even an attack from orbit could not be successful - the sector was covered.
In general, such a task could only be solved by using a drone, and not just one, otherwise all the arsenals would have been shot down by shuttles long ago, or rather by gliding blocks, which they would have dropped. In turn, the super-aircraft-arsenals always circled only where they were reliably protected by the MDS, and one exploded terminal did not change anything and did not critically weaken the defense. Finally, the machines from the second group approached so close that they became visible to the naked eye. The Crusaders, now on parallel courses, continued to approach each other in a relatively dense group with an interval of no more than half a mile.
Blankenberg's plane had already crossed the sound barrier and was still gaining speed. Blankenberg pulled the stick back and the altitude indicator on the transparent glass display-sight HUD jerked from the thirty thousand foot mark and began to creep up. The AIM-270 missiles had to be thrown to the upper boundaries of the stratosphere in the same way as yesterday's ones, which attacked ground infrastructure.
Their maximum range was a rather arbitrary indicator.
There was no need to talk about how the actual range of destruction depended on the flight configuration of the target and could be reduced several times. However, those declared six hundred and eighty miles could well have been exceeded - the rocket engines allowed them to fly further during high-altitude launches, but the developers generally did not assume that the carriers would specifically enter some special trajectory, so when declaring the characteristics, they proceeded from a certain given value, which constituted these six hundred and eighty miles. The missile guidance systems had long been modernized - earlier, A-A missiles, that is, air-to-air missiles, flew, guided exclusively by ballistics and lead - now the onboard AI could load pre-launch instructions into the missile autopilots, allowing the use of weapons more flexibly, for example, launching weapons along a ballistic trajectory in order to enter the target sector blindly. Already there, within the short range, the intended target was captured - this tactic was very rash, and by the standards of the pre-war time, reckless.
Not only could the missile fail to find the target, it could also find the wrong target, a civilian aircraft, for example. The recognition system was there in most cases, but it could also be wrong. Now, when it came to hitting a flying arsenal in the enemy's rear during wartime, the tactic was definitely suitable.
In order to increase... one's own moral character in one's own eyes, one could proceed from the idea that there could be no civilian aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the arsenal.
In addition to the above-described technique with a high-altitude launch, there were a bunch of other tricks and gimmicks - for example, if it was necessary, as now, to send an A-A missile along a slightly changed trajectory bypassing enemy SAMs, one could manipulate the quasi-ballistic section of the trajectory, providing for something like a turn bypassing the air defense zone. In the last century, when there were quite decent carriers and missiles with decent guidance systems, tricks with bypassing SAMs and choosing the optimal launch position to exceed the maximum range could only be done in simulators, and not even the first time.
Now AI did what no crew could do. It was not a matter of some huge computing power required that was unavailable in the past, it was just that the developers did not immediately figure everything out. Especially in terms of integrating everything into a single working UCE. All this despite the fact that even at the beginning of the last century, NATO, the then Western Bloc, greatly bragged about this information integration. By 2120, everything had long been done for real, and now it was hard to imagine how people once managed without all this.
And now AI had already calculated and drawn the lines of opening fire on the map. The location of the three lines took into account the location of enemy SAMs and allowed the pilot to independently choose the level of risk and success. As usual, all the crews agreed on the middle option.
All that was left was to make a three-flying slingshot and send two missiles each towards the "big @enemy". The maneuver allowed adding fifty miles to the maximum range, and although the arsenal was located less than six hundred and eighty miles from the firing line, the gain in range was converted into a gain in speed and trajectory altitude, which was the protection of an individual missile from SAM. The hunter, that is, the missile, was also the target.
The carrier, rushing through the stratosphere, was moving towards the front and had to have time to turn away, and at such altitudes and speeds, maneuverability was so-so. It was quite logical to assume that such a configuration was favorable when the carrier was moving towards the target, firing a missile, and the approaching front line was not perpendicular to this direction, but was located at some angle, and it would be even better if the direction to the target was parallel to this line. The AI, not so much onboard as staff, took this into account, configuring the route points so that the group would be located, if not very close, then at an angle to the conventional front line.
The front line here was understood to be a broken line between numerous radars and air defense launchers, which also had different ranges. Staff computers could easily bring all this in the form of some line drawn on the map, to a line that cannot be crossed if you do not want to get a missile launched in your direction. However, staff computers needed data composed of countless received signals from enemy air defense radars.
Here we must give credit to the Russian attack aircraft - it was they who obtained up-to-date data on enemy SAMs using their drone missiles, or even exposing themselves. Moreover, they also "deformed" this line in the right direction, knocking out the enemy air defense with varying degrees of success. However, the unfortunate fact was that in the morning both arsenals were hanging out just three hundred miles from the conventional air defense front - that's when an attempt was made to launch AIM-250s en masse from different directions. One group launched over the Altai Mountains - the terrain there allowed them to dive after the launch into the natural cover of the mountains, and accordingly approach the target somewhat closer. The second group fired from the plains of Kazakhstan. The only result was that both arsenals simply crawled to their rear. In justification of this omission, it could be said that at that time, at the time of this rash attack, the conventional air defense front line had not yet been determined and they acted purely according to circumstances, launching from low altitudes, safe from the point of view of their own secrecy. But still, this did not cancel the most important omission. It was still puzzling that no one had bothered to deliver heavy missiles or hypersonic drones to the sector.
Blankenberg already imagined how he would discuss all this after the flights in the bar. He would definitely do it. Knowing that there would always be a couple of rats from the security service there. Let them listen. Let them speak in talking letters. Here it was time to believe in the mysticism about the Earth, that the spirit of the Earth somehow influences a person. In the sense of the territory, not the planet as a whole.
The thing was that before, every now and then, you could stumble upon a description of the confusion inherent in the Soviet state and the army in particular.
They continued to tell and show this in films, when the Soviet Union no longer existed.
Now, the coalition command, having staff computers, UCE and everything else, itself carried out something similar, having two arsenals within three hundred miles, and not having anything suitable for destroying them. It must be that the Earth somehow mystically influences. The sky darkened, the sun's rays would have been unbearably harsh if his eyes hadn't been protected, but the helmet's light filter adjusted itself. Five hundred yards to the right, a bright flash flashed - it was just a glare on the glass of the "Crusader-12-05".
Below, the white plain of the Novosibirsk region, a region neighboring old rebel acquaintances, floated by.
The display on the right showed a complex map containing both navigation data and target marks.
Blankenberg entered the target parameters menu and brought up data from the satellites tracking the arsenal in real time. The arsenal was in place and slowly floating against the background of some kind of rocky or sandy relief. Unfortunately, this modification of the AIM-270 did not have video systems for visual aiming - their main purpose was to intercept small hypersonic targets, and missiles with visual recognition were supposed to hit such arsenals, including the same "270", but a different version. They could choose which part of the flying machine to hit. It was most expedient to destroy the turbine of the nuclear engine or hit the ammunition distributed in the middle part of the fuselage.
Hitting the cockpit would also make sense, but the cockpit of the huge device was only the main control post, which could be carried out from other posts or even assigned to AI. In any case, a strike on the central post would also temporarily complicate the arsenal's performance of its vile tasks, but knocking out at least one engine was much more tempting.
The latitude slowly but surely changed. Now Kazakhstan was below. Nevertheless, the ground below was still covered with snow. The flight speed reached two point nine tenths of Mach. The altitude was fifty thousand feet.
Blankenberg activated the weapons - the markers of both missiles lit up green. Now it was the turn of the false targets - they also had to be turned on in advance - these devices were not simple. AN/APQQ-560 generally had a miniature ramjet engine
The distance to the line of opening fire, shown on the display, was rapidly decreasing - eighteen miles, seventeen miles ...
Blankenberg pulled the stick towards himself. The pilots of the other "crusaders" did the same.
The altitude indicator went up, the speed, as expected, began to decrease.
When there were twelve miles left, a warning signal about radar irradiation sounded. Fortunately, there was no radio beam fixation. In general, irradiation can precede long before aiming, before the beam is fixed, but this is the general case. It is not uncommon for air defense forces to set up ambushes, and if such a hidden radar with a SAM battery had been activated now, everything could have ended badly. It remained to hope that the Russians had reliably combed the front-line sector and the interlink and staff computers had complete and exhaustive information about the location of batteries and individual enemy air defense systems.
A mark appeared on the fire display, indicating that it was already possible to open fire.
- Open fire on command, - the voice of the leader was heard in the helmet.
The leader began the countdown, starting from five. When there were three miles left until the designated "average" firing line, the first missile rushed forward and up - the leader clearly wanted to gain a few seconds and a few miles, so as not to enter the space defended by the enemy.
Blankenberg fired the first missile, then a couple of seconds later the second. The plane, entering the rocket's exhaust trail and its turbulence, shook slightly. It was cheerful. At the moment of the first launch, the altitude was seventy-five thousand feet and continued to rise. The speed, of course, was spent, but it was still above the speed of sound - about one and seven tenths of Mach, even a little more.
When all sixteen smoke threads rushed into the sky, it was time to shoot off the false targets. Four light "710"s flew out in pairs with an interval of one and a half seconds, then, after another two more, two more advanced "560"s were shot off.
At the same time, immediately after the launch of the second-stage missiles, the carriers began to reduce speed, using aerodynamic brakes. Now it was necessary to disperse the excess energy of flight into the air as quickly as possible, mainly the speed, which reduced maneuverability. The altitude, which had just shy of ninety thousand feet, was also not a friend of maneuverability, so all the machines fell onto the left wing and went down. This inevitably led to an increase in the lost speed, which had to be controlled. At an altitude of sixty thousand, the speed, whose growth was restrained by the braking surfaces, amounted to one point three tenths of Mach.
By that time, the course had changed by more than ninety degrees. The turn became noticeably easier to perform. Eight aircraft were flying next to a scattered cloud of more than four dozen simulators. The signal about the radiation did not subside. Judging by the nature of the radiation, the SA-210 radar was working.
It turned out that this was not all. A whole series of warning signals sounded in the headphones. Several marks appeared on the screen in the form of expanding and narrowing circles, scattered many miles from each other - the satellites detected the SAM launches.
A dozen and a half missiles were sent after the "Crusaders" at once - almost as many as the F-158s themselves launched.
- Beam! - a cry of one of the "Crusaders" was heard in the headphones. - "Crusader - twelve-zero-five", beam, - the voice clarified.
- We continue the maneuver, we are already leaving - the leader commanded.
- The group of false targets was dispersing. The formation of eight aircraft was also dispersing - the AIM-270 missiles had been launched and were heading towards the target in their consolidated order, and now there was no need to go in a tight group.
One after another, the aircraft turned on maximum afterburner - now that the turn was almost completed, it was possible to increase speed again in order to quickly get away. The irradiation signal still did not disappear.
- I'm still in the sights! - reported "12-05". - Turning on the tail radar.
Turning on the radar was not the best solution from the point of view of radio stealth, but since the aircraft were already energetically moving away from the threatening sector, the action was quite acceptable.
- Three SA-210, distance one hundred eighty miles, speed five and two mach, speed is decreasing, - reported "12-05".
On the radar screen, without any message, the marks of the missiles attacking "12-05" appeared - of course, the data exchange system was working.
Blankenberg felt relieved - all the data, including the calculations of the onboard AI of Blankenberg's machine, indicated that the missiles would not be able to catch up with the group and would hardly even be able to reduce the distance to a hundred miles. This was just a gesture of impotent rage on the part of "@enemy".
- How are our birds? - The voice of "12-07" sounded.
- Under attack, but still okay, - answered "12-05", who also scanned the AIM-270 flight area with his radar.
- The birds are still okay, - Blankenberg announced, who from the very beginning opened the communication window with the missiles on his display.
Blankenberg was already constantly glancing at the display, which showed a pile of sixteen marks, which had already crossed not only the air defense front line, but the front line as such. At the same time, red circles were flashing every now and then, expanding and contracting - the satellites were detecting numerous launches of anti-aircraft missiles.
Now the planes were flying at an altitude of fifty thousand feet at a speed of two and a half Machs. Another couple of dozen miles and it would be possible to turn off the afterburner and fly to the base in economy mode.
In less than a minute, the flock of launched missiles had already thinned out - nine remained out of sixteen. Of the five hundred miles, sixty percent had been covered. If the maximum density of air defense was at the front line, then the missiles had already passed this most dangerous strip, although there could still be much more waiting for them ahead, including the arsenal's own defense, which the missiles were to meet in the final leg of their flight.
Directly ahead was the rebellious region, behind which, hundreds of miles away, was the northern base.