as Sergei Marchenko and fellow S-WP tank commanders quickly realized, the breakdown rate of the Soviet tanks was much higher than for those of the Allies. But though the British Chieftains were well served by their applique Chobham armor packs and first-rate crews, they could not overcome the Russians’ three-to-one superiority in tanks.
At Fulda Gap, where the Russians had been unable to use their jellied gas bombs, the latest British Challengers, German Leopard IIs and American M-1s lasted much longer in battles where foam-filled, self-sealing rubber fuel tanks took many direct hits from armor-piercing shots without exploding.
In the Bielefeld-Dortmund area, The Russian T-90s, built to accommodate the shortest Russian tank crews and so presenting the lowest silhouette of any main battle tank, swung out wide through the British Chieftains’ heavily laid white smoke screens and regrouped in ambush, isolating several Chieftains at a time. In the process, the smoke- and dust-filled battleground confused the pilots of the American Thunderbolts, who had to make split- second differentiation between Russian and British tanks — this becoming increasingly difficult in the dense smoke as the day wore on. It was, Delcorte thought, his F-16 leveling out high above the smoke, as terrible, or from the Russian point of view, as good, an example of using superior numbers as you could get, quite literally mugging the opposition with sheer brute force and size.
The only hope, Delcorte knew, was to keep going up, keep engaging them until the Juggernauts’ attack was blunted, when finally there would be so many tanks off tread, so many automatic shell extractors in the T-90s out of alignment due to overheating and crews’ fatigue, that the West’s overall superiority in technology, including more tank transports, would start to pay off. Delcorte took some hope from the fact that NATO’s Medevac and air crew rescue units were of uniform high quality. This was a crucial factor if NATO pilots were to fly and fight again. Delcorte and the other three F-16s in the finger four formation, resembling the spacing of a right hand’s four fingertips, the little finger farther back, entered heavy cloud. At six thousand, Delcorte was still in it, the other three pilots in the clear, the wingman on his left advising him there were “Bogeys — six of them at one o’clock. Seven thousand.”
“Keep going for the top,” Delcorte instructed, the prearranged ceiling having been ten thousand feet, from which they hoped they could dive down upon the funnel leading to the Fulda Gap.
“Bogeys below — nine o’clock,” came the next report.
“Go for the top,” Delcorte repeated evenly, though in fact he had a multiplicity of incoming messages and warning signals, all of them conflicting, during his effort to outclimb the Bogeys coming in from the east, ignoring those passing below en route to shoot up the withdrawing Americans of the Black Horse division.
It was tempting to Delcorte to break the four-plane formation and go into two fighting pairs, a leader and wingman, the latter watching the leader’s COV — cone of vulnerability. This would leave him, as the flight leader, free from blind side attack if he dove in to break up the enemy formation. He was also tempted to go to a fluid four formation, having two of the F-16s a thousand feet abreast in front, the other two, ten thousand feet apart behind. All these options sped through Delcorte’s head in a split second, then, seeing the Soviet fighters still climbing, trying to get an advantage over the Americans, he forgot Fulda Gap and decided to attack.
Once the combat began, the geometry of flight formations was lost, two Soviet Foxbats winking orange, then gone in cloud, the air-to-air Acrid missiles streaking toward the American Falcons in excess of fourteen hundred meters a second, the faster F-16s already breaking, their pilots hitting the superchargers, climbing fast, trying to expose only their cold side to the Foxbats to deny their afterburners’ exhaust to the heat-seeking Acrids. One American turned too late, and a dirty orange burst lit up inside a cloud, followed by broken thunder. The other three Falcons were on the northern flank of the Foxbats, who now had separated, three going ahead to Fulda Gap, three remaining to engage.
Watching his HUD — head-up display — afterburners on full, going air to air, Delcorte saw the green impact line on the HUD, where graphics condensed a thousand variables to a single display. The target vector was arcing right, cutting through three parallel lines. There was such a jumble of chatter, radio cuts from the Technicolor spread of the tank battles far below him, fragments of other NATO feed-ins, aerial and ground control, a smattering of Russian, that Delcorte, feeling he was ODing on noise, shut them all down except for that of his own formation. He rolled the Falcon, tried for a scissors, turning hard left, and was on a Foxbat’s tail. One hundredth of a second later, the HUD’s three green horizontals were cut by a green arc ending in a dot. Delcorte flicked the stick again. The dot moved toward center. The Foxbat banked hard left, Delcorte’s lines altered, the dot slipping below the line, Delcorte cursing, flicking the stick again, not worrying about sighting the Russian’s afterburner, sliding in with the cannon. He flicked one, twice more, but held his fire — at this angle the Foxbat could outrun his bullets. The green dot shifted, centered. He pressed the red, the.20-millimeter cannon sounding like a rip in the fuselage. He saw parts of the Foxbat breaking off, pulled away before any more came at him.
Three Foxbats had been destroyed by the three Falcons, but the NATO air force’s problem, here as elsewhere, was starkly evidenced by the encounter. The American Falcons had killed the three Russian MiGs, but with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact’s 3,000-plus fighters against NATO’s 2,070, not counting the Soviet fighters in Russia, the deadly equation was still there.
Since the first sortie at dawn, Delcorte had lost sixteen pounds, but now once more he, like the other three Americans, felt exhilarated by the kill as they now headed down to bomb and strafe the long supply columns stretching out across East Germany, the enemy’s breakout all along NATO’s front from Austria to the Baltic continuing unabated. Delcorte’s right wing-man fired a Sparrow from twenty miles at a Soviet swing wing. He ‘d mistaken a Flogger MiG-23, equipped with a “High Lark” fifty-mile range nose radar, for a Flogger D.
“Save the heavy stuff,” Delcorte cut in. “Only when we need it.” He was reminding the pilot, but not saying it on open channel, of what they’d been told in the ready room that morning — that NATO’s supply of all AA and AS missiles was dwindling until the convoys got through.
The MiG-23, at the end of the Sparrow’s maximum range, dropped a pod of flares, or “highballs,” as the Americans called them, the MiG rolling away at relatively low speed, reducing the temperature of its exhaust. While the MiG pilot hoped to
“I’m gonna get me a Phoenix,” complained the wingman in disappointment. “No evading that baby.”
Delcorte said nothing other than to tell the others to follow, peeling off to attack a goods train winding through the foothills of the eastern Harz Mountains. “Note for debriefing,” Delcorte told the others. It was the first train they’d seen moving in broad daylight so close to what had been the border between the two Germanys. Running trains in the daytime was dangerous in any war, even though, contrary to public belief, a rail link was extremely hard to put out of action for long, even with state-of-the-art jets. A daylight run might mean, however, that supplies at the front were running dangerously low. If this could be confirmed by Allied intelligence pilots in other sectors, it could be important for NATO to launch counterattacks with fewer NATO troops now rather than waiting later for a buildup. “Who’s got the Brownie?” asked Delcorte.
“I have,” answered his left wingman.
Delcorte knew he should have known who was on camera, but after three sorties today, five the day before, twelve — no, thirteen — planes down, the detail of who was designated “re-con” duty had escaped him. “Get a shot of that?”
“No problem.”
For a moment as they went below ten thousand for the attack run, Delcorte saw the humps of mountains where there was no evidence of fighting, even though he knew that on the other side of the range there was the beleaguered British Army of the Rhine, Dutch troops trapped with them. Farther down, more NATO divisions, primarily Americans and West Germans, were trying to hold ground on the central and southern front, so that to anyone west of the Harz, the whole planet must seem afire with war. Only here, high above, could one appreciate the fact that there were areas that the war had not yet touched.
On the first run in, the train, mostly boxcars, rounded fuel wagons interspersed with quads of antiaircraft guns, was going into a long, slow turn over a canal. “Bingo!” called one of the other pilots, signaling his fuel warning light was on and that he was breaking formation, heading back to base.
Delcorte centered his two five-hundred-pounders, released them, felt the plane buffeted by wind sheer as he climbed, the bombs bursting either side of the line but close enough that their craters tore out rail lengths. The train wobbled for a second.
“Beautiful, Colonel!” came another pilot’s congratulation as he, too, headed back to base.
