on following the Scud in its climb. ‘It’s behind me so I can’t see it. Can you call ranges.’
‘For fuck’s sake, you can’t outrun it. It’s a Mach four missile.’
‘I’m not going to try. Just call when it’s about a mile behind me.’
Dick Long suddenly guessed what Richter might be intending. He turned his aircraft so that he could see his wingman more clearly and, more crucially, track the massive Acrid missile that was closing on the Harrier at over four times the speed of sound.
Long just hoped Richter knew what he was doing.
In the Chiha-ri command bunker, the digital countdown for the last Scud passed five seconds to go, and the missile was still untouched on the pad. Two out of six launches wouldn’t please Pyongyang, the commanding officer knew, but in the circumstances it was a far better result than he had realistically expected. He looked out of the armoured window towards the TEL and nodded in satisfaction as, with a roar and sudden burst of flame, the last Scud leapt away from the launcher.
‘Estimate two miles, Paul. Standby. Oh, shit. The last Scud’s just been launched.’
‘Copied.’
‘Stand by for one mile point. Five, four, three, two, one. One mile now, now, now. Get the fuck out of there.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Monday
Gennadi Malakov’s attention was directed almost entirely towards locating and obtaining a missile lock on the second Harrier. He was confident that his R-40T would destroy the first aircraft within seconds, as the idiot Englishman was actually making it easier for the infrared-guided missile to kill him, because he was climbing almost straight up. If he’d dived down to low level there would have been a chance, albeit a small one, that he could have got away.
Then he spotted his second target. The Harrier was in a gentle climb on the far side of the missile base. Malakov pointed his MiG-25 directly towards it, selected his second R-40T and waited for the seeker head to lock on.
Only after the last Scud had lifted off its TEL did the commanding officer finally answer the direct line from Chunghwa.
‘We’ve launched two missiles,’ he reported, ‘but the attacking aircraft destroyed the other four.’
The brief silence from the Air Command headquarters spoke volumes. ‘We will discuss your failure to obey the simplest of orders later, Colonel. Now, order your anti-aircraft guns and missile batteries to cease firing. We are sending in fighters to locate and destroy the British intruders.’
Richter had done a very rough calculation in his head. If the Acrid was travelling at Mach 4, that meant it was covering over half a mile every second. So from the one-mile distance, and with the Harrier flying at around four hundred miles an hour, the missile would hit him between two and three seconds later. It was, he knew, going to be very tight.
He waited for a quick count of two after Dick Long’s call, then acted. He slammed the nozzles into the fully- downward landing position, then chopped the throttle back. It felt as if he’d been kicked in the arse by an angry elephant, and the grey haze of g-loc swam in front of his eyes for a second or two before the ‘speed jeans’ began squeezing the blood back up towards his brain.
The effect on the Harrier was immediate. The aircraft had been climbing almost vertically: the change in nozzle angle stopped the climb and kicked the aircraft onto its back. When Richter cut the power, the GR9 completed the loop and began falling nose-first back towards the ground.
And that was exactly what he had intended. The violent manoeuvre punched his aircraft away from the flight-path of the Acrid. Cutting the power and instantly changing the Harrier’s direction of flight as he’d done – a manoeuvre no other aircraft was capable of performing – virtually eliminated its infrared signature. But he’d had to leave it until the last possible moment, so that the Acrid wouldn’t be able to lock on to him again. As the Harrier started descending, Richter looked ahead, down towards the ground, and saw the missile powering past him.
The moment the target’s infrared return vanished, the missile’s seeker head began trying to reacquire the heat source. It didn’t detect the Harrier, but right in front of it was the massive exhaust bloom from the Scud missile, half a mile ahead. The Acrid’s computer is a fairly basic device, and its target discrimination isn’t particularly sensitive, so it immediately began tracking the new contact.
The Scud was still accelerating, but the Acrid was travelling at close to its maximum speed of Mach 4.5, and overhauled it rapidly. Less than three seconds after Richter kicked his Harrier into a dive, the seventy-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation warhead of the Acrid hit the rear of the Scud and detonated.
The result was spectacular. The remaining fuel in the Scud’s tanks exploded in a massive fireball, blowing debris in all directions.
Malakov didn’t see the Acrid destroy the Scud. Though aware of the explosion, he assumed it was just his missile bringing down the British aircraft. He was now waiting for his second R-40T to lock on to the other Harrier but, unlike the first one, this pilot wasn’t making it easy. He’d stopped his climb almost as soon as Malakov identified him, presumably because his ECM fit had warned him he was being irradiated, and went back to low level where the Saphir radar was finding it hard to detect him.
The Russian pilot overflew Chiha-ri, then banked left to retrace his route. The Harrier had to be somewhere down below him. It was now just a matter of finding it.
Dick Long was looking for a way out, and a way past the Foxbat. The last Scud was already about five thousand feet above the ground and accelerating. There was no way his Harrier could catch it and, even if he could, he had no weapons left that could bring it down. And if he did climb up after it, the Foxbat would launch an Acrid and the Scud would be too high for Richter’s trick to work a second time.
That, he reflected sourly, was going to be the one that got away. Destroying five out of the six – even if the fifth one had needed a little help from a Russian missile – was still a remarkably good result. But he doubted if the residents of Seoul would agree with him when the sarin, or mustard gas, or botulinus toxin, or whatever the North Koreans had loaded inside the missile’s warhead exploded on the streets of the capital.
The Foxbat was the more immediate problem. The pilot was clearly looking for him, but by flying fairly slowly at very low level, now less than two hundred feet above the ground, Long believed the MiG’s radar wouldn’t be able to detect him. But then getting away from Chiha-ri clearly wasn’t going to be easy.
‘Cobra Two. You still here, Paul?’
‘Affirmative. I see the Scud, but where’s the Foxbat?’
‘Overhead Chiha-ri. I’m down in the weeds, south of the base, and he’s just overflown me, turning onto
