Rage of Battle

CHAPTER NINE

Coming in at eight hundred miles an hour on the vector given him when he left Cornwall, the sea a wrinkled bluish slate racing backward beneath him, Roger Fernshaw altered trim, heard the Jaguar’s target-lock-on tone, and fired one of his two Exocets.

The Yumashev’s radar saw the blip of the Jaguar’s Exocet but lost it thereafter in sea clutter echo. Fernshaw, monitoring the head-up display, itself monitoring the side-scan and umbrella radar feed, glanced at the sky above — white cumulus and breaking. A Russian pilot’s radar that, technically speaking, might pick him up wasn’t Fernshaw’s major concern, however, for he was flying so low, trained in the dangerous twisting and turning low-level runs through the glens of Scotland, that he was initially “on the deck,” forty feet above the waves, where the Jaguar’s image would hopefully be lost in the sea clutter blanketing any active radar signals beamed his way.

Firing the second missile fifteen seconds and forty miles after the first, Fernshaw was still safely beyond the Russian cruiser’s best thirty-mile-range Goblet surface-to-air missiles. As he began his turn, doing visual as well as instrument checks, needing height to complete the maneuver, he momentarily took himself out of the clutter. He saw a wink of red against the cobalt-blue sea, most likely the first Goblet leaving the cruiser. For a moment he was struck by the perverse fact that if the twenty-foot-long Russian missile had been upgraded with boosters for a fifty- or even forty-five-mile range, he would be, as his American colleagues in Cornwall were fond of saying, “up Shit Creek without a paddle.” The count for the Exocet missile was now down to thirty-one seconds, and while his radar lit up with Goblet and other AA ordnance opening up at him, the Exocet feed stayed live. At seven seconds Fernshaw saw an orange wink on the horizon blossom, then fade, and on his channel scanner he was picking up excited Russian chatter, presumably radio traffic emanating from the cruiser itself. He didn’t see his second missile hit the cruiser, and scribbled “P/D” on his knee pad, indicating a “probable” or “dud.” He also noted that the seven- second gap between the time the Exocet should have impacted the cruiser and the time it actually did suggested the Jaguar’s ground crew should do a computer overhaul of the fire control system as soon as he returned.

The Exocet hit the Yumashev abaft the starboard beam and below the head-net C radar aerial, the second missile’s explosion gulped by the inferno of the first, though striking farther back in the deck housing below the headlights’ radar, which only minutes earlier had been tracking the incoming Jaguar. The damage to the cruiser’s superstructure would have been much worse had the missiles been better spaced, for much of the second missile’s impact was in an area already hit. Even so, the Exocet’s explosion, on the waterline, well below the head-net aerial, effectively gutted the cruiser, sailors suddenly sucked out from what only moments before had been warm, watertight compartments, their bodies, like so much flotsam, pouring like stunned fish into the ice-cold Atlantic. Only a few of those in the water showed any signs of life as their comrades in the rescue squads threw out the tethered Malvinsky raft-drums, the halves of each container opening in the shape of an ugly mouth into tent rafts whose blossoming was like enormous orange flowers on the heaving surface of the sea.

Forty miles to the northeast, the two Soviet Sukhoi Flagon-Fs accompanying the long-range Badger dispatched by Admiral Brodsky had seen the blue line of the Jaguar’s Exocet as it streaked at deck level toward the sub-chaser Yumashev, but the Sukhois did not leave the Badger. Although capable of a dual role, as a medium bomber and maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the Tupolev-16 Badger, with a maximum speed of 615 miles per hour, was ill suited to go it alone in any seek-and-destroy mission against the reported American Sea Wolf. It badly needed the “in-flight refueled” Sukhois to guard its flanks, and its captain knew that whether or not the two escorting Russian fighters would be called upon to fire their weapons would depend entirely on the pilot of the Jaguar. With the NATO fighter almost certainly approaching the end of its fuel-pod-extended radius of one thousand miles, the Badger’s six-man crew were making wagers as to whether the Allied pilot would engage them in an effort to take out the Badger’s twenty-thousand-pound load of sub-detecting air-launched sonobuoys, MAD-magnetic anomaly detection — gear, and its free-fall ordnance of air-launched depth charges and torpedoes.

For Pilot Officer Fernshaw, however, seeing three Russian aircraft on his radar screen, a decision about whether or not he would attack them was more difficult than they could imagine. The problem was the fighting in Europe. It was going badly for the Western Allies, the half million British, American, and German troops trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket surrounded by a steel ring of six hundred T-90s pounding away at them with laser- guided 135-millimeter armor-piercing and high-explosive shells. In the air of sustained crisis in the Allied camp, the decisions being forced upon Whitehall for all British combatants as far down the chain as individual pilots like Fernshaw were often as confused as they were urgent. SACEUR — Supreme Allied Commander in Europe — headquarters, Brussels, was now reporting to England that if all available NATO air cover was not marshaled in defense of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, then NATO’s shriveling central front would cease to be and trip off full- scale collapse all along the German front from the North Sea to Switzerland.

Accordingly, in Whitehall, the minister of war, bearing what Washington called the “big picture” in mind, advised the headquarters of all United Kingdom air forces, in Wycombe, and Royal Navy Commander, Western Approaches, that if a pilot was confronted with the choice of running low on fuel in pressing an attack, thereby risking the loss of his aircraft, he was to exercise “discretion.” What this meant to Fernshaw and others like him in the “Highways Department,” as the STOL — short takeoff and landing — Jaguar arm was referred to, was that if Whitehall, the Admiralty, or the Royal Air Force didn’t like the decision you made, you would be up another creek — and smartly at that. At the same time, the Admiralty was arguing, “wherever possible,” attacks to protect the SSBN/SNs must be pressed home “at all costs.” And Fernshaw knew their reasoning was sound, for if Germany was lost, France would fall, and with it the vitally needed ports for NATO, making resupply from America impossible. Then the SSBN/SNs and the relatively few Stealth bombers would be left as a mobile deterrent. On the other hand, a single Jaguar, its superb fly-by-wire avionics making it one of NATO’s best ground- hugging, close-support fighters, could knock out ten times its number in tanks.

Normally Fernshaw, his plane entering thick stratus, wouldn’t have found the decision a difficult one to make, but like so many of the other outnumbered Allied pilots called upon day after day, night after rain-sodden night, to rise from carrier England and stem the “surge” tactics of the Russian air forces, Fernshaw was exhausted. Fatigued from having lost twelve pounds in a week due to the wrenching G forces, he wasn’t sure that the decision whether or not to engage the Badger and its outriders was a case of weighing military priorities or a plain old-fashioned matter of funk versus guts. He headed for cloud.

Both the Russian leader, front right of the Badger, and the second Sukhoi to the Badger’s left rear and higher, covering his leader’s konus ranimosti—”cone of vulnerability”— spotted the Jaguar climbing fast, forty-three miles ahead. The Russians’ confidence with the two-to-one advantage was further boosted by the fact that their Sukhoi Flagon-Fs’ speed — up to 2.5 Mach should they go as high as thirty-six thousand feet — was much faster than the Jaguar’s 1.6 Mach. The sun was also behind them, and no matter how sophisticated the electronics of the Anglo-French plane’s fire control and weapon-aiming computer were, the sun in your visor was still a distinct disadvantage. In the millisecond world of fighters so fast they could outstrip some of their missiles, direct sunlight, Polaroid visors notwithstanding, could produce oslepitel ‘nost’— “glare-out”—on the dials.

The Jaguar was climbing hard and fast into high-piled cumulus, the Russian leader glimpsing the Jaguar’s round-chisel-shaped nose, telling him he was up against a state-of-the-art British-Ferranti weapon-aiming system. But he had no clue as to whether the British pilot was going for “high ground” in cloud cover to attack or to escape. The Russian pilot, knowing that radio silence had been broken earlier by the cruiser’s transmission to Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters, switched on, instructing his wingman, “Stay with Mother. I’ll sbiyu— ’knock off’—our friend in Heaven.”

With the wingman acknowledging, the leader’s Flagon, now approaching the same height as the Jaguar 40.1 miles away, hit the Turmansky afterburner. In straight vertical climb, the wings’ flash in sunlight gave the fighter beauty as well as the aspect of pure power as it rocketed five thousand feet in less than ninety seconds, giving the Russian a ceiling of eleven thousand should the Jaguar be contemplating an attack after all. If the NATO fighter was carrying a second Exocet on one of its hard points, then the Badger and the two Sukhois would now be within range. Everyone, except pilots, the Russian pilot knew, thought electronic warfare had made modern aerial combat little more than a superfast computer game. The fact, however, was that there were so many variables, from sunlight and weight of ordnance to a bird looking like a fighter for a fraction of a second, that machines couldn’t do