glowing balls arcing skyward had his number on it, so be it. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
His HUD said he was high enough, and pulling the stick hard to the left, Tad quickly rolled wings level and a little nose-down. The F-15 straightened out at two hundred meters high — just above minimum safe height for his cluster bombs. He felt his speed building up.
His concentration was completely fixed on lining up on the mass of enemy materiel in front of him. He noted the ground fire, gray puffs and tracers more intense than before. Now it was starting to worry him, and fractions of a second passed like years as symbols crawled across his HUD and the ground rippled past beneath him. He had to hold a steady course. If he jinked, he’d miss.
The bomb line shortened to a dot in the center of his windscreen and Wojcik pressed the weapons release. Cluster bombs dropped from the ejector racks at quarter-second intervals, fell a hundred meters, then split apart, showering the enemy with five-pound antitank bomblets. Over five hundred of the deadly spheres rained down onto a box fifty meters wide and three-quarters of a kilometer long.
The area below him erupted in small explosions. Dust kicked up by each blast quickly obscured his view. Small red flashes lit the inside of the dust cloud. While the bomblets were relatively small, each one could destroy a tank or any other vehicle it landed on. Each explosion also sent deadly fragments slicing in all directions.
The stores panel showed the last bomb gone, and the Eagle accelerated again, freed of their drag and three- ton weight. The road ahead of him was still full of German and French equipment, though. Deviating from the attack plan, Tad lowered the F-15’s nose and pressed the gun trigger, hammering the stalled column with 20mm fire. He had to slow the enemy down, to kill as many of them as humanly possible. He held the run as long as he could, but finally had to break off as his altitude dropped dangerously low.
He banked hard right and kept his nose on the horizon. Although it was a dangerous companion, the cluttered landscape was turning into a familiar friend. Automatically he reset the gunsight and computer from air-to-ground to air-to-air mode, selecting Sidewinder. He was now ready to defend himself, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to.
He ran north at high speed, then angled to the northeast, over flat farmland and small villages. Occasionally he saw a burned patch on the ground or a cluster of vehicles where none should be.
The HUD cues changed, and he throttled back to cruise, turning carefully to the southeast. A minute’s run at afterburner had put him twenty-five kilometers away from the scene of his attack, and hopefully his victims had reported him fleeing to the north. Now his turn toward base should evade any pursuers. He eased up to the relatively safe altitude of one hundred meters. At economical cruise, he was only a few minutes from Wroclaw.
The symbols on the HUD were just stabilizing when the right side of the instrument panel lit up again. Sparing a glance down from the blurred landscape ahead, Tad saw two bearings on his radar warning receiver, with the legend “RDX/Rafale” next to each one. Almost as soon as they appeared, they changed, with the track warning light illuminated. Two of EurCon’s most advanced fighters were in the air and they knew right where he was.
His chest tightened, and almost without thinking he accelerated to full afterburner, pointing the F-15’s nose straight at the fighters. He energized his own radar, not really expecting to see anything, and was rewarded with little more than a few flickering echoes across the scope. The Rafale was not a “full stealth” design, but it had a reduced radar cross section. Even if anyone was lucky enough to get a lock on one, its powerful radar jammer could easily break the tenuous hold.
But Tad had expected that. Ever since that first embarrassing mock dogfight with a Rafale, he’d put a lot of mental energy into developing the tactics he’d need to take them on and win. Lining his aircraft’s nose up on the enemy fighters, he also angled it down, back toward the ground. With the speed of long practice, he set up his weapons panel.
He watched the HUD cues carefully, smoothly trading altitude for airspeed. Tad knew his maximum speed in this load configuration, and he also knew the range of the French Mica missile, about fifty kilometers. He counted the seconds, hoping that the French radars would have trouble sorting him out of the ground clutter. The French pilots, not feeling threatened, might take a few extra moments to set up their attack. After all, they might reason that a plane on the deck, running fast, was probably trying to evade — its pilot too busy and too frightened to strike back effectively.
Tad was forced to divide his time between the HUD, the threat warning display, and the earth racing by below him. The track warning was still illuminated, the missile light still dark. Wojcik pressed the chaff release twice, although he was pretty sure it wouldn’t help. It didn’t. The French radars stayed locked on.
Now! Tad pulled back on the stick, hard. He was braced for the g-forces, but the crushing sensation grew and grew until the edges of his vision grayed out and his breathing was no more than a shallow pant. His HUD danced with squiggling lines and symbols. The g-meter showed seven point something.
A glowing box suddenly appeared on the glass in front of him. He eased off on the stick and guided the plane’s nose up until the box was inside a large circle — the vulnerability cone, a visual cue showing the area where his missiles were most effective. He was now going almost straight up, using the raw power of the Eagle’s big turbofans to maneuver vertically as well as horizontally. The Rafale’s largest radar cross section was from above or below, and his radar had finally found enough return at that angle to get a lock.
The instant the cueing box passed into the circle, Tad pressed the trigger, and was rewarded with a roar and a plume of smoke in front of him as a Sparrow missile raced skyward, almost straight up.
Even as the instruments confirmed a valid launch, Tad thumbed the weapons selector button on his stick. Lettering on the lower left corner of his HUD changed from “AIM-7” to “AIM-9” and without waiting for a tone, he fired a Sidewinder. His radar was still guiding the Sparrow as it accelerated to almost Mach 4. It wouldn’t be long now.
He climbed through the expanding trails of the two missiles, searching for the enemy fighters. The smoke billowed across his canopy, sometimes blocking the area in the sky enclosed by the HUD box. He concentrated on keeping it at the center of his windscreen, and risked a glance down at the radar. The two fighters were high, almost twelve thousand meters. Still, the Sparrow should be there in a few more seconds. Just a few more…
The box disappeared. Maneuvers, jamming, chaff, it didn’t matter how the French fighter had shaken off his radar lock, but without it the chance of a Sparrow hit went way down. Tad shifted to boresight mode, centering the radar antenna and pouring radiation into the space in front of the F-15’s nose. Nothing. The Rafales had vanished. He peered into the windscreen. Where were they? Had they split up? If they’d moved too far to one side…
The launch warning light on the threat display commanded his attention, and Tad craned his neck right. A white spear sped from his four o’clock straight for him. Shit!
Banking hard left, Tad abandoned the Sparrow. Split seconds counted now. Breathing in pants to fight the g- forces, he put the incoming enemy missile at his eleven o’clock, triggered more chaff, and sent the Eagle into a corkscrew maneuver designed to eat up the missile’s energy in a series of last-minute course corrections.
The world spun around Tad’s canopy, and the shifting g-forces pushed him around the cockpit. Out the corner of one eye, he saw two white lines drawn against the blue sky. One, his Sparrow from the size of the trail, went straight up until it faded from sight, but the other ended in a dirty-gray puff of smoke, with smaller trails extending downward from it.
In the midst of his jinking, Tad smiled grimly. The Sparrow had missed, but the Sidewinder he’d fired had locked onto the Rafale’s engines when it maneuvered to avoid the first weapon.
A shattering explosion rocked the Eagle, almost stunning him. Tad’s head rang, and a sharp pain behind his eyes made him afraid his neck had been broken. It sounded like someone was throwing rocks against the side of the plane. He’d been hit! Already violently maneuvering, the sudden shock threw his fighter out of controlled flight, tumbling toward the earth.
Fighting to keep control of the aircraft, he felt it fall out of the right bank onto its back and start to spin. Desperately Tad throttled back and tried to right the plane, unsure if his controls even functioned. The cockpit was a mass of red lights and flickering numbers. His vision blurred, and the jarring ride sent flashes of pain into his head.
Either by accident or as a result of his efforts, Tad found himself with the sky above and the ground beneath him. Quickly, lest the opportunity pass, he stomped hard on the right rudder pedal and pushed the stick forward, hoping he still had enough altitude to recover.
Wincing at the pain, he craned his neck up and back, searching for the surviving Rafale. The sky seemed clear, and his threat display was empty. Maybe the Frenchman had a more pressing engagement elsewhere. Or more likely the enemy pilot had seen the Polish F-15 spinning out of control and assumed his missile hit was a
