still struggling to ascend. He swore quietly. Soon he’d have to either pull out of the climb or resign himself to ambling through the sky like a wounded turkey. At any lower speed, he’d be too easy a target for the Tomcat. He’d lose maneuverability, and his low speed vector would be no problem for the Tomcat to overcome.
He reached a decision, dropped nose down, and plummeted one thousand feet within seconds. His airspeed picked up satisfyingly, and he quickly rolled back around to face the Tomcat.
He was on the Tomcat’s six now, with a beautiful view of the Tomcat’s glowing tailpipes. He toggled off his own missile, another heat-seeker, satisfied that the angle might be almost sufficient to distinguish between the aircraft and the sun. Had the American made that same assumption, he wondered, studying the Tomcat’s undercarriage.
Three more Sidewinders hung there, more than enough to waste one shot as the pilot had done earlier. Suddenly, he wasn’t quite so certain that the Tomcat pilot had been foolish.
Tombstone heard the shriek of the missile indicator before Tomboy’s voice cut through the ICS, warning of it. He swore, slewed the Tomcat around to virtually pivot in midair, and pointed nose down at the MiG.
The heat-seeker came on, clearly fixed on the Tomcat rather than the sun.
The Cuban pilot had taken the same chance he had, with better results.
Fortunately, he hadn’t touched his countermeasures so far.
The Tomcat shook lightly as three packets of flares were ejected from the undercarriage. They burst into brilliant white phosphorescent fire, easily outshining both the sun and the heat signature of Tombstone’s exhaust. Later generation heat-seekers were trained to ignore targets that were too good, thus correcting for the tendency to vector on a flare rather than an exhaust and reducing the probability of its racing off toward the sun. Tombstone was betting that the Cubans used an earlier version of the missile, given to them by their Soviet master or their new friends, the Libyans.
“Got it acquiring the flare,” Tomboy said. ‘Tombstone, he’s coming around.”
“I’ve got him. I’ve still got altitude on himhe’s not going to like this.”
Santana was already setting up for his next shot as his first heat-seeking missile exploded harmlessly into a flare. He hardly spared it a thought-he was too busy trying to coax the Tomcat into descending into an angles fight. He could understand the other pilot’s refusal to take the bait, but he was determined not to fight it out in a wild yo-yo of shifting altitudes that would inevitably provide the Tomcat with a marked advantage.
Now what the he watched as the Tomcat nosed over and headed down toward him, surprised to see the pilot descending. Would he actually do that?
Enter a horizontal battlefield, knowing that it would put him at a disadvantage?
Well, he’d seen the pilot make one mistake. Perhaps it had been a mistake, and not a calculated chance. At any rate, this was the battle that a MiG excelled at. And if it was a mistake, it would be his adversary’s last.
“Stoney,” Tomboy gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”
“The only thing I have time to do before we run out of fuel,” Tombstone said grimly. “Start the pre ejection checklist. If this doesn’t work, we’re going for a swim.”
The Tomcat was indeed descending to his level. Santana smirked. It was as he’d thought Americans were not nearly as well trained and proficient as they pretended to the rest of the world to be. Here, in the sky, mono a mono, there was no disguising their foolishness. He swung the MiG around, calculated the intercept, and bore in for the kill. In the last twenty minutes, he’d discovered a real taste for knife fights.
“I see what you’re up to, buddy,” Tombstone said. “It worked on that youngster you splashed, but I’ve been around guys like you too often.
Your kind always does like the close-in fight. That’s because you treat those funny little things hanging on your wings like your balls, protecting them and not using them like you should. Well, if you want to learn some knife fighting, I’m not above teaching it to you.” He watched the MiG bore on in until he was almost within range. The Cuban pilot would be running the geometry through his mind, calculating the exact intercept.
To encourage him to continue thinking the American had made a mistake.
Tombstone toggled off another Sidewinder.
He knew it was well inside the minimum range for shooting one, but he hoped the Cuban would think he didn’t.
It seemed to work. The Cuban MiG didn’t even flinch from its course, continuing to bore on in toward him.
Tombstone felt his eyes go squinty and a muscle in the side of his jaw start to jump. One more kill, one last kill that would be it.
Just as the vectors approached range and optimum angle for firing.
Tombstone did three things simultaneously. First, he swept the wings of the Tomcat forward, overriding the automatic angle configuration that selected appropriate sweep angle for speed. Moving the wings forward decreased his lift, rendering the Tomcat slightly more ungainly in the air, but from this angle was also an almost imperceptible way of draining off airspeed without the other pilot’s noticing. Second, in one quick motion, he popped the speed brakes and dropped his landing gear. Dirtying up all of his airflow surfaces peeled one hundred knots off his airspeed almost instantaneously. Instead of a graceful, powerful fighter, the Tomcat was now a lumbering aircraft configured for landing.
An ugly turkey in the air with a MiG right in its sights.
Third, Tombstone switched the selector over to guns, pressed the buttons, and heard the delicate beelike hum of the gun in his port wing firing. It was almost anticlimactic at first, watching the delicate line of bullets trace their way down the fuselage. He jinked the Tomcat slightly to the right, watching the tracery elevate up and penetrate the other aircraft’s canopy. An explosion of glass and body, followed shortly by a fireball.
“Fuel,” Tomboy insisted, for all the world sounding as though she’d completely ignored the knife fight going on in front of her. “Stoney, vector three-two-zero. Now!”
Tombstone did as ordered, then said, “No comment?
Aren’t you going to congratulate me on that last kill?”
“If it is your last kill, you idiot,” she snapped. “The next one will be us if you don’t get some fuel into this bird.”
The tanker was waiting only one mile away. Tombstone vectored straight in on it, and pulled off the most remarkable plug of his entire aviation career. The probe slid in smoothly, as if the basket had been coated in Vaseline. Two other fighters hung nervously off his port and starboard bow, acting almost as though they could somehow buoy him up should his fuel tank suddenly run dry.
Ah, but the luck was flowing his way now. A smooth plug, fuel good at probe tip within minutes. The tanks sucked the fuel in, and within moments he felt the Tomcat start to grow heavier. He corrected automatically, keeping the probe centered in the basket while the sun rose behind him.
Fifteen minutes later, they’d topped off enough to make a run on the boat. Tombstone thanked the tanker crew, then peeled away from the formation.
“Now about that last kill …,” he said casually. “Not bad for an old guy, huh?”
Tomboy was silent for a moment, then said, “It was brilliant for any pilot. And that it was you just makes it that much better.”
A grin crept across Tombstone’s face. Nothing like having your new bride admiring your latest kill.
Four minutes later, he dipped quickly into the starboard marshal, then was vectored in toward the ass end of the carrier to make his approach.
The trap went smoothly, as professionally done as anything he’d ever executed in his life. He followed the
