Episode 108

“Ace One One”

44th Reconnaissance Squadron, Creech AFB, Nevada

Lieutenant Reeves stretched his tired back. Six hours straight “on the box” was tough on his back. Not as tough as sitting in a fighter plane, but no cake walk either.

Getting the Avenger drone into position hadn’t been easy. While they were more stealthy than the Predators which would normally take this mission, they weren’t nearly as stealthy as the RQ-180 which they had used in mainland China previously.

Unfortunately for this mission, those drones are SO stealthy they don’t allow for things like laser targeting turrets. They were strictly sensor platforms. In this case, the Avenger drone, which is a jet powered descendant of the trusty Predator, was carrying the still classified MS-177 multi spectral sensor suite. This included a retractable ball turret under the aircraft that could be used to track and lase targets.

This capability was CRITICAL for the mission today.

“We good on time?”

“Yeah first wave in thirty seconds.”

Reeves reached over to a control that tamped down the sensitivity of the cameras in the nose of the Avenger drone. Even with the sensitivity turned down, the explosions were impressive.

“Whoah!”

“Yeah, holy shit. What was that, like twenty strikes?”

“More like forty.”

“Damn.”

“OK, heads up. They’re probably still coming in.”

Although the strike had been timed to catch aircraft on the ground returning from strikes in Korea, there was no way to ensure that they would get all the aircraft in a single strike. Indeed, only about half the aircraft from this particular base had been on the ground when the first strike arrived. This is one reason why the strike had been designed specifically to avoid the runways.

“OK. We have a pair in the pattern now. Looks like they’re still going to land.”

“Shit, I think I would divert after all that kaboom.”

“They’re probably bingo gas, man.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Let’s wait for a few more.”

“Gotcha.”

Slowly, the Chinese fighters began to land. They watched as the planes taxied to a remote part of the base, away from the fires still raging on the ground.

“Ace One One to Dealer. Ready to start the music.”

“Wait one. Proceed.”

Carefully, the weapons officer targeted one of the planes on the ground. The sensor was capable of automatically tracking moving targets, but the plane had stopped. He issued a command and the targeting pod on the Avenger lased the target with an infrared laser. Invisible to the human eye, it was designed to allow “smart” weapons to precisely target things that moved. Like aircraft.

Forty seven hundred miles away from the two operators in Nevada, a B-2 orbiting at forty thousand feet near the target area in China dropped a single Laser JDAM (LJDAM). This recent upgrade to the JDAM program allowed aircraft to use a single munition to attack both static and moving targets in a single sortie. In this case, the aircraft position wasn’t known exactly until a few moments before the attack.

“HIT! That’s a hit. Looks like the planes on either side are going up. Must have had some fuel in it. Let’s shift to the group to the left.”

The team in Nevada continued to guide LJDAMS into individual aircraft for almost twenty minutes before the Chinese decided to abort any inbound aircraft to other fields.

“That’s it, time to bug out. Ace One One to Ace One Flight, RTB.”