bandits were fighters.
He checked his radar warning screen again and noted that the enemy radar pulses were gone. Interesting. Either the bandits had turned off their radars or they’d gone home.
Stegman hoped they hadn’t gone home. He wanted more kills.
The South African thumbed his radio mike, switching frequencies.
“Springbok, this is Panther Lead.”
A fighter controller sitting eight hundred kilometers south at Upington Air
Base answered promptly.
Stegman sketched the situation in a couple of terse phrases and acknowledged Upington’s promise that two more fighters would be launched as backup. The promise was nice, but meaningless. They were more than fifty minutes’ flight time out of Upington. He and de Vert were on their own.
He decided against closing at high speed. Fuel was too precious, and his duty was to cover Windhoek. This could be some sort of diversion, designed to pull them away from the airfield long enough for still-undetected cargo planes to land or take off.
There. Four glowing points of light appeared on his radar screen. Enemy aircraft. He squinted at the screen, trying to extract more information from the tiny blips. The bandits seemed to be flying at lower altitude, and they were moving fast. Damned fast. Even with his relatively low cruising speed, they were closing at over two thousand kilometers per hour! Then he realized the bandits must be coming in on afterburner.
“Closing to engage. Drop tanks!” Stegman shoved his own throttle forward and locked his radar onto the lead aircraft. As the Mirage’s engine noise increased, he thumbed a button on the throttle-jettisoning the empty drop tanks attached to his wings. Normally the empty tanks were saved for reuse at base, but their size and weight slowed down a fighter. Going into combat with the tanks still attached would be like fighting a boxing match wearing a ball and chain.
He checked his armament switches and selected his outer portside Kukri missile-a heat-seeker optimized for dogfighting, not for long range. He’d have to get close to use it. The Mirage carried four of them, plus an internal 30mm cannon.
His radar warning receiver warbled again. The bandits had switched their radars back on. Since they’d probably detected him earlier, the radars were almost certainly on this time for one thing only-a long-range missile launch.
Time to warn de Vert.
“Windmill! Evading!”
Stegman took a quick, deep breath and jammed the throttle forward all the way to afterburner. Windmill was the code for incoming missiles. He felt a mule kick through his seat back and heard a thundering roar behind him as raw fuel poured into the jet’s exhaust and exploded. His own speed quickly increased to over twelve hundred kilometers per hour while his fuel gauge spun down almost as fast.
He swept his eyes back and forth across the sky, looking for the telltale enemy missile trails and trying hard to remember the important pieces of dozens of intelligence briefings. Angolan MiG-23s carried Soviet-made
AA-7 Apex missiles. They were only fair performers, and the intel boys said that they were susceptible to a combination of chaff and a high-9 turn.
Hopefully, Stegman’s own speed, plus that of the missile, would make for such a high closing rate that the missile couldn’t react fast enough to a last-second turn. Add some slivers of metallized plastic that would give false radar returns and the missile should break lock every time.
Or so they said.
There! He could see white smoke trails now, coming in fast from below.
His finger was already resting on the chaff button, and he started pressing it at half-second intervals. At the same time, he threw the
Mirage into a series of weaving turns, always starting and finishing each turn with the smoke trails at a wide angle off his nose.
He glanced over his shoulder to check de Vert and was relieved to see his wingman spewing chaff and corkscrewing all over the sky.
High g forces on each turn pressed him down into his seat,
forcing him to fight to hold the incoming missiles in view. He could see four trails now. Two aimed at him.
Stegman yanked the Mirage into another turn, even tighter than his first series. Come on! Miss, damn you. One missile failed to follow him and flashed past-heading nowhere.
But the second smoke trail visibly bent and curved in around toward his plane. Shit. Only seconds left. He pressed the chaff button again and turned again, pulling six or seven g’s, almost hearing the wings creak with the stress. He lost the missile and in that moment thought he was dead.
A rattling explosion behind him. But no accompanying shock wave, fire, or blinking red warning lights. Thank God! The missile must have been decoyed away at the last moment. Stegman breathed out and leveled off, glancing to either side for de Vert’s plane. Nothing above or to port.
Then he saw it. A ball of orange-red flame tumbling end over end out of control toward the ground. De Vert hadn’t been lucky. And now he was dead.
Stegman didn’t waste time in grief. That could come later. Right now he’d have trouble just saving his own life.
He started looking for the enemy, tracing back along the wispy, dissipating smoke trails left by their missiles. The bandits should be in visual range … he’d covered a lot of distance during those few seconds on afterburner.
There they were. Stegman spotted the small specks-faint gray against a faint blue sky-there were his enemies, ahead and to the left. There were four of them, breaking in pairs to the left and right, crossing over each other.
He smiled thinly. That was a mistake. He wasn’t going to panic just because he was outnumbered four to one. Instead, he’d even the odds by concentrating on a single aircraft. And with four planes swerving all over the sky, he’d have a much easier time finding an enemy vulnerable to attack.
Stegman pushed the nose down a little to unload the wings, then yanked the Mirage over hard, into a high-g port turn. He noticed something strange about the bandits as he turned toward them. MiG-23 Floggers were bullet- shaped, single tailed swing-wing fighters. In combat position, a
Flogger’s wings should have been tucked back against its fuselage like those of a falcon making an attack. These aircraft looked totally different. They had wide, flattish fuselages, twin tails, and clipped swept wings.
The near pair was turning away from him, probably trying to lure him into a squeeze play. Fat chance.
He stayed in his turn for a few seconds more, using his helmet sight to line up a Kukri shot. The bandit slid inside his aiming reticle and into the path of the Kukri’s infrared seeker.
Tone! As soon as he heard the missile’s seeker head warble, Stegman pulled the trigger on his stick and then broke hard right. A jolt signaled that the Kukri had successfully dropped off its rail and was on its way.
The two farthest fighters were swinging in on him fast, and he saw flame sprout from under the lead jet’s starboard wing. Jesus. He turned toward them and barrel-rolled, spiraling across the sky to break the lock of the incoming missile, whatever it was.
A fiery streak flashed past his cockpit and vanished.
Racing toward one another at a combined speed of more than twelve hundred knots, the three adversaries zipped by in an eye blink-giving Stegman his first clear view of his opponents. MiG-29 Fulcrums! But even more interesting were the markings. They had gray air-superiority camouflage and carried a blue-and-red roundel. Angolan aircraft were usually sand and green colored, and their insignia was black and red. What the hell was going on?
He rolled right and dove, hoping to be harder to see against the desert landscape so he could gain a few seconds to select another target. A gray-white ball of smoke and orange flame appeared off to one side, with a spreading line of smoke leading to it. His Kukri shot had hit! Scratch one MiG. One for de Vert.
Stegman kept his eyes moving, roving back and forth across the sky.
In fastmoving fighter combat, a pilot’s most important asset is “situational awareness—the ability to visualize his
