The Kremlin Phoenix Read Free

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    May 2, 1999
     
    “Merk Four, this is Aviano Control. You
are cleared for take-off. Over,” the air traffic controller’s voice sounded
over the speaker.
    “Aviano Control, Merk Four, Affirmative,”
Colonel Jack Balard acknowledged, releasing the brakes, letting his F117
Nighthawk begin to roll down Aviano Air Base’s main runway. It was three hours
past sunset when the Nighthawk climbed into the sky over north eastern Italy,
and turned towards the Adriatic. The route over the sea was the long way
around, but there was no alternative. Allied aircraft were not allowed to
overfly Bosnia for political reasons. The restriction made their flight paths
more predictable than good tactics demanded, yet it was the reality of fighting
in a such a politically sensitive region.
    Jack leveled off at two thousand meters
above sea level, settling in for a slightly bumpy, moderately low level flight
to his target. The awkward shape of the F117, nicknamed the Wobbly Goblin, was
designed to deceive radar, not provide efficient aerodynamics. She wasn’t a
fighter, and she wasn’t pretty, but she hit her targets hard.
    Flying alone, he watched the
lights of small Croatian coastal towns slide by until it was time to turn east
and sneak across Montenegro into Serbia. Occasionally, he picked up Allied radio
traffic, mostly NATO controllers and other combat aircraft, while he maintained
radio silence all the way to Belgrade. Somewhere to the south was an EA-6B
support jammer and a pair of F-16CJs carrying High-speed Anti-Radar Missiles. Their
job was to destroy enemy ground radars threatening his Nighthawk. It was
proving to be a task more difficult than expected. There’d been problems with
the Serbs moving their ground radars, and with the mountainous terrain, which
had made the suppression of enemy air defenses much harder than in the ‘91 Gulf
War. That earlier war had been a walk in the park compared to the Serbian
campaign. Even so, Jack was confident his support team had his six.
    Soon the outskirts of Belgrade appeared
on the horizon. As expected, the capitol city was blacked out, which was no
defense against satellite navigation, but it made the defenders feel less
vulnerable. Off to the south, he saw ground flashes from HARMs, launched from
high altitude, striking their targets. It occurred to him that his support team
had drifted a little far to the south, although it might mean there weren’t air
defense radars along his flight path. Streams of triple-A laced the sky to the
south as anti-aircraft guns threw a wall of shells up at the high flying fast
movers, but there were no flashes in the sky indicating hits.
    His map display indicated he was
coming up on his aim-point. At various locations across Greater Serbia, other
F117s were approaching similar points on their flight plans as part of a
coordinated attack on Serbia’s electrical power infrastructure. It would be hard
for the Serbs to continue their ethnic cleansing of defenseless peasants
without electricity.
    Jack opened the bomb doors and
armed his payload, a BLU-114/B. The super secret ‘soft bomb’ was not a
conventional explosive. Its purpose was to scatter a carpet of submunitions
over the target area. When the submunitions detonated, they spread a cloud of
chemically treated graphite filaments over critical electricity distribution
equipment, causing them to short circuit while inflicting very few civilian
casualties. He knew tonight the world would discover the existence of this new,
strange weapon, a weapon which had never before been used, and was about to
bring another murderous dictator to his knees.
    A radar alarm sounded in the
cockpit, warning that ground radars ahead had suddenly activated and were searching
for him. He quickly began the process of activating the cruise missile that
would carry the soft bomb to a large substation in northern Belgrade. If
successful, a quarter of the city would be blacked out. A second alarm sounded,
one he’d