it all.
Now the Jaguar, forty-six miles away, invisible in cloud but a clear blip on the Flagon’s “Skip Spin” intercept long-range radar screen, was heading nor’nor’east — toward southwestern England. But this could well be a feint.
Leveling out, the Russian pilot saw a faint orange ball in the cloud. He banked fast left, until he realized the orange ball and the others like it were decoy flares the Jaguar was jettisoning as protection from heat seekers. The Russian pushed the select button for one of his two air-to-air Amos “actives,” flicked the cover, and fired, watching the missile streaking, at over a thousand meters a second, toward the Jaguar over thirty miles away, its radar- seeking head programmed to ignore infrared signatures, going instead for the enemy’s own radar pulse. Then the Russian pilot saw his own warning radar screen go to fuzz, the Jaguar obviously dropping chaff to jam the Amos’s radar guidance. The Russian fired both of his heat-seeking AA-3s.
Fernshaw saw his warning lights flashing frantically and heard the “Bogey” tone. His Jaguar perilously low on fuel, the Sukhoi engaging him with a three-hundred-miles-per-hour speed advantage, Fernshaw knew that unless he dropped his extra fuel pod to gain more speed, he would not escape. He released the external pod and shut off all radar, heading higher into cloud, noting his fuel consumption rapidly increasing in the thinner air, and the three Russian missiles closing.
Seeing the Jaguar’s drop tank tumbling, reflecting like foil in the sun, the Russian leader shut off his active radar in case the British pilot had tried to be clever, going high to fire off a radar seeker of his own. The Russian banked sharply to his left, ordering his wingman to stay with the Badger and both of them to go as low as possible to evade the western approaches’ long-range over-the-horizon radar. He then went to radio silence, leaving only his channel scanner turned on. Within a second his radio surged — the panic-stricken voice of the Badger’s observer — and in a flash he knew what had happened. The Jaguar had outfoxed him, shutting off its radar, doubling back in the cloud rather than running, while he, the Russian, had been looking for the Jaguar up ahead.
Immediately the Russian went into a tight turn and dove, his nose starting to bleed profusely in the G force, the Badger already under attack, the Jaguar passing on its forward right side four miles away and firing its remaining Exocet at the big, droning maritime reconnaissance plane.
With the extra speed afforded by the release of the fifteen-hundred-pound Exocet, the British fighter, its twenty-eight-foot six-inch wingspan six feet shorter than the Sukhoi’s, was in its classic tight turn, coming in fast behind the second Sukhoi, whose pilot was now breaking right and, in an effort to beat the Jaguar at its own game, fired a cluster of six 120-pound Aphid passive heat seekers, which would ignore all radar signals, homing in only on exhaust. At eight hundred miles per hour, the Aphids were twice as fast as the oncoming Exocet, but their best mode of attack, because they were heat seekers, was rear entry. They needed to do a U-turn, but it was too tight.
They missed the Exocet, but two of them had now locked on to the exhaust of the Jaguar itself as the British fighter, completing a turn in a sound barrel of rolling thunder, passed behind the Badger, the tracer from the Badger’s top turret ceasing for a split second as the Jaguar flashed past the airplane’s three-story-high tail. The 23 -millimeter cannon in the Badger’s radar-guided rear turret, however, was still firing even as the Exocet slammed into the plane’s starboard exhaust flange, the explosion blowing the plane in two, the tail assembly tumbling more slowly than the forward section, whose engines, or rather, the red-hot mass that had been the twin Mikulin turbojets, plummeted like a rock, the entire section upside down, cockpit intact as it slammed into the sea, disintegrating in spumes of steam and spray. Yet before it had gone down, the half-second burst from its radar control rear turret had strafed the Jaguar, the fighter’s cockpit now whistling, the splintered Perspex and metal fragments from the demolished HUD screen disintegrating in the hail of the Badger’s 23-millimeter cannon. The Jaguar was shuddering violently, yawing to the left. Fernshaw thought he must be hit but wasn’t, his double-ply flying suit and visor protecting him from the peppering of the instrument panel’s debris. But he couldn’t see for several seconds. At first he thought it must be his visor scratched to a fog, but then he could smell electrical fire, realizing that the fog was smoke. He fought for control, but too many of the fly-by-wire microcircuits were blown. He felt the plane’s nose drop suddenly, glanced at the altimeter but couldn’t see it through the smoke, guessing it had been shot out anyway. Elbows tucked in, he took hold of the yellow and black zebra-striped hand grips. The bolt release fired. Icy air was roaring about his helmet. He prayed he was at least five hundred feet above the ocean. Smoke gone, he could now see he was at least a thousand feet above a sharply inclined slab of white-veined blue that was the sea. He could spot only one of the Sukhois — a silver dot miles to the east. Then he thought he saw the second one, but it was only the hapless Hormone chopper several miles away hovering helplessly above the wreckage of the
CHAPTER TEN
Half a world away in Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor, the woman in the jeep coming out of the mist toward the howl of Lieutenant Alen’s Hercules was not the Wave Alen was expecting.
“Where’s Lana?” he asked the Wave sergeant.
“Lieutenant Brentwood can’t make it, sir.”
“She sick?”
“No, sir. She’s sorry, but Voice of America is doing a special report on the NATO front. She’s hoping to pick up some more news about where her brother’s division might be.”
“Oh—” said Alen, trying not to show his disappointment. “Well — thanks for coming out and telling me.” The Wave appeared not to hear him, or was she asking another question, one hand holding down her cap, the other cupped about her mouth against the howl of the Hercules’ four props.
“So?” yelled the copilot to Alen. “What d’you say?” Alen was looking blankly at him. In his disappointment he hadn’t been paying much attention to the Wave sergeant, and there was an awkward moment before he realized that she was asking if she could take the flight to Adak. Unconsciously Alen was letting his eye rove over her body. The Wave outfit was just about the sexiest uniform he’d seen on a woman — the snappy navy cap and the tunic that, whether or not the designer had intended it, had easily sailed through the sea changes of fashion, emphasizing the bust by trying to camouflage it.
“Sure,” said Alen. “O’Sullivan, isn’t it?”
“Reilley,” she corrected him. “Sergeant Mary Reilley.”
“It’s Irish anyhow.” Alen grinned. “Welcome aboard.”
The tall, gangly engineer in his midtwenties from Texas whom they called “the Turk” for a reason no one could figure out was asked to make sure that Sergeant Reilley was strapped in tight. The two-hourly weather adjustment was for millimaws and more of the fog that one minute would obliterate the brutal majesty of the far- flung volcanic islands and the next be blown asunder by a millimaw, replaced by driving rain, snow, and hail all at once.
As the Hercules took off — all by instruments because of the fog — Alen banked quickly, taking the C-130 E, with twenty-one tons of food and electronic supplies for Adak, well away from the hidden and towering mass of Makushin Volcano. The sixty-seven-hundred-foot-high mountain rising immediately west of Dutch Harbor on the northern end of Unalaska was now visible only on his radar. Mary Reilly was asking the engineer on her helmet’s flip mike whether or not it would be possible for them to “hop across” from Adak to Attu Island. She had been told a “horror story,” she said, of how in World War II over fifteen thousand poorly equipped American soldiers, trained for desert warfare, had been sent in against a smaller but much better-trained and dug-in garrison of three thousand Japanese troops. Turk said he didn’t know much about that war. “All I know, ma’am, is that the Japanese are our allies in this one.”
Reilley, voice straining against the background noise of the Hercules, was asking him another question, but she kept forgetting to depress the talk button. She couldn’t believe how much noise military planes made compared to civil aircraft. The Turk was just sitting there watching her lips move, which would have suited him nicely, but he didn’t want to be rude and pointed again to the talk button.
“Oh, yes, sorry,” said Reilley. “I heard they — I mean we — thought the Japanese would use the Aleutians as kind of — you know — stepping stones to the United States.”
