The God of War by Chris Stewart

Author:Chris Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SWITCHBACK 27

FLIGHT OF TWO F-16 FALCONS

120 MILES OFF THE EASTERN COAST OF MAINE

The pilot of the lead aircraft looked out the left side of his cockpit, then to the right. He sucked a deep breath, the sterile air of his cockpit drying the inside of his mouth. His oxygen mask hung loosely from the left side of his flight helmet and he cocked his head down to speak into the secure radio to his wing-man, who was flying a little more than five hundred feet behind.

“An awesome sight, ain’t it, Killer?”

The radio crackled lightly. “True, that,” his wingman replied.

The flight leader scanned the airspace around him, lifting his head to look straight up at the clouds and darkening sky overhead, then off to his left side again. There must have been three dozen fighter aircraft, and that was just off one side. His radar was tracking almost thirty in front of him, but he knew there were many more. Many more.

All to intercept a single aircraft! He shook his head in disgust. If the entire Russian Air Force, with the North Koreans and Chinese thrown in as well, had threatened to take out D.C., he could understand such a response. But all of this for one fighter?

The F-16 pilot was certain it was complete overkill. He had never seen so many military aircraft packed into so much small space. Most of them were fighters or interceptors of one kind or another, but there were also tankers to refuel them and AWACS to coordinate their flight paths. Amazingly, there were no civilian airliners among them, for they had all been turned away from U.S. airspace or forced to land. For a while he had listened to the chaos on the radio as the air traffic controllers had tried to coordinate all of the civilian flight plans—hundreds of aircraft, some of them getting low on fuel after a transoceanic flight, lining up for emergency landings in Canada or Newfoundland. Those that had the fuel were commanded to turn around, sent back to Europe, the Middle East, wherever they had come from. He had listened to the chaotic radio conversations for a few minutes, then finally turned the VHF radio off. Too much confusion. Too much noise. How did they keep it all straight?

The bottom line—and the only thing that really mattered now—was that the airspace had been cleared of all civilian jets. Anything out there not squawking a military code was to be considered hostile, which was just fine with him.

Keep the rules simple, and they were more likely to succeed.

In his head, he counted through the various formations of fighters around him: F-16s hugging the shoreline, four F-22s thirty miles off his right—they were just splitting up, going out to two-and-two—a flight of navy F-18 Hornets in a CAP a little more than eighty miles farther to the northeast. Beyond that, more navy fighters, a long way out there, over the cold northern seas. Let them have it. The F-16 pilot

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