Plan of Attack

When she rolled out of her turn, she couldn’t believe what she saw: radar targets everywhere. She thought she had a radar malfunction, so she turned her radar to STBY, then back to RADIATE — and the targets were still there. Maybe two dozen targets, all at different altitudes.

“Ho-lee shit,” she muttered to herself. Frantically, she switched back to the command channel on the primary radio. Through a haze of static, she radioed, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Four, ‘gorilla,’ I say again, ‘gorilla,’ northwest two-four bull’s-eye.” “Gorilla” was the brevity code for a large formation of unidentified planes in indeterminate numbers. Forman gave the target’s position relative to an imaginary point that changed on every patrol. She couldn’t give the targets’ altitude, speed, or any more precise information because there were so many of them out there.

“Say again, Hunter.” There was a loud squeal in the radios that the frequency-hopping communications system couldn’t eliminate. “Be advised, Hunter, our status is ‘bent,’ repeat, ‘bent.’ Keep us advised.”

Jamming — someone was jamming them! Forman switched to her secondary radio and found it hopelessly jammed. The squealing was drowning out all recognizable sound even before she keyed the mike. Maybe whoever was jamming her radios was jamming the North Warning System radar, too — the “bent” code meant that the ground radar was inoperative. So now she was all alone up here with a huge number of planes bearing down on her, with no way to contact anyone.

The only thing she had left were her orders and her tactical doctrine: Any unidentified aircraft entering the Air Defense Identification Zone had to be identified, and if they acted in a hostile manner, they were to be shot down immediately, as quickly as possible before reaching U.S. airspace. She was to continue the interdiction mission until she reached “bingo” fuel, which gave her the minimum fuel state over the intended recovery base only.

Forman thumbed her stick controls and designated the lead aircraft in the lead formation, placed the radar pipper just to the left and below center in her heads-up display, and headed toward it. This guy was screaming for the deck, descending at fifteen thousand feet per minute. Too late, pal, she thought — I got you….

* * *

The radar-warning receiver blared again — but this time, instead of a steady electronic tone, they heard a fast, high-pitched, raspy sound. “Fighter has locked on,” the electronic-warfare officer said. “Eleven o’clock…moving into lethal range.”

Leborov couldn’t believe the speed of that thing — it seemed only seconds ago that they first got the warning. “What the hell should I do?” he shouted.

“Turn left, head into him!” the EWO shouted. “That’ll increase his closure rate, and he’ll be forced to maneuver.” That wasn’t necessarily so with an F-16—they could shoot Sidewinder missiles directly into your face all day long — but he had to give the pilot something to do until they got low. “All jammers on and operating…chaff and flares ready.”

“Passing two thousand for five hundred,” the navigator said.

“Screw that, nav — we’re going to one hundred meters,” Leborov said. “If he wants to come down and play, let’s get way down into the weeds!” Bravado? Maybe, but he wasn’t going to get shot down without a fight, and there was one place the Tupolev-95 liked to fly, and that was down low.

* * *

Thirty miles…twenty miles…the plane was still heading down, passing five thousand feet and descending fast. She was at ten thousand feet, not real anxious to chase this guy down until she started rolling in behind him for an ID. He turned slightly into her, so they were going nose to nose now. She configured her cockpit switches for low-light operations and lowered her PVS-9 night-vision goggles. The view was matte green and with very little contrast, but now she could see a horizon, the shoreline far behind her, details of the outside of her jet — and a spattering of bright dots in the distance: the unidentified aircraft. There were so many that it looked like a cluster of stars.

Forman thought about trying to contact the plane on the international emergency “GUARD” frequency, but the jamming was too heavy and getting stronger as she closed in. Was that considered a “hostile act” right there? Probably so. Fifteen…ten…

Suddenly one of the other myriad radar targets on her heads-up display scooted across the scope to her right, traveling…Shit, the guy was supersonic. She immediately pulled up, jammed her throttle to zone-five afterburner, and turned hard right to pursue. The first guy never went above four hundred knots, even in a screaming-ass dive, but this newcomer was going twice as fast! He would reach the coastline way before these others — if she didn’t catch him first.

Again she tried to radio Knifepoint and her wingman of the new contact — but the jamming was still too heavy. Each one of those incoming planes must have enormous jammers to take out digital radios and even the North Warning System radars at this range! Even her APG-68 radar was getting spiked, and it had plenty of antijam modes.

The fast newcomer was at forty-three thousand feet, traveling just over the speed of sound, heading east- southeast. Forman locked him up on radar easily after getting behind him and tried to interrogate his Identification Friend or Foe system. Negative IFF — he was a bandit, all right. Supersonic, no modes and codes, flying way off transpolar flight routes through a curtain of electronic jamming — unless it was some Concorde pilot hot-dogging it for his rich passengers, he was a bad guy.

The bandit was passing Mach 1.1, the speed limit for her F-16 Fighting Falcon’s external fuel tanks. No Alaska fighter pilot ever wanted to punch off external fuel tanks, especially if there was a tanker anywhere in the area, but she would never catch him otherwise, so, reluctantly, off they went. As soon as this guy was ID’d and the Nineteenth showed up, she was done for the evening — even with a tanker on the way, no fighter pilot played very long up in Alaska without plenty of extra fuel.

It was funny the things you thought about at a time like this, Kelly mused to herself. Here she was chasing down a bandit, in the midst of hostile jamming, and all she could think was that someone was going to have to pay for a couple 370-gallon fuel tanks.

She tried the IFF interrogate switch a couple more times — still negative — then hit her MASTER ARM switch and selected her twenty-millimeter cannon instead of her radar- or infrared-guided missiles. This guy definitely met all the criteria of being a bad guy, she thought, but she had enough gas right now to try to do a visual ID. At Mach 1, he was still fifteen minutes from reaching the Canadian coast. She had forty-five minutes to bingo fuel — a number that was dropping rapidly every minute she spent in zone-five afterburner — so she decided to go in close for a visual.

She kept the power up and was starting to get into visual range in just under five minutes when suddenly her radar-warning receiver emitted a high-pitched, fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone. An enemy fire-control radar had locked on to her! The heads-up display categorized it as an “unknown,” position directly ahead of her. But there were no other aircraft except the guy in front of her….

A tail gun! That’s the only thing it could be! The damned bandit had locked on to her with a tail-mounted fire-control radar.

And sure as hell, moments later she saw winks of light coming from the still-dark silhouette of the bandit in front of her. The bastard was firing a tail gun at her! She immediately punched out radar-decoying chaff and flares and broke hard right to get away. She heard a couple hammer taps somewhere on the fuselage, but there were no warning messages.

Kelly was not scared — she was incensed! She’d been shot at by Iraqi surface-to- air missiles while doing patrols for Operation Southern Watch, and she’d taken on plenty of simulated surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, and every kind of air-to-air missile possible in training — but she’d never been shot at by a tail gunner. She didn’t even know that any planes had tail gunners anymore! Furious, she flipped her arming switch from the cannon to her Sidewinder missiles and tightened her turn, getting ready to line up on the bandit.

No question any longer — the guy was a hostile. She wished she could tell her wingman or the Nineteenth about the other bogeys heading in, fearing they all might have tail gunners, but the jamming was still too heavy. No matter — this guy was going down.

But as she lined up for her first shot, her night-vision goggles blanked out a tremendous burst of light coming from the bandit. It was a missile launch — but the missile was huge, hundreds of times larger than an air-to-air missile. The tail of fire had to be two hundred feet long! The missile shot straight ahead for a mile or two, then pulled up abruptly. A few moments later, she heard a sonic boom, followed by a large flash of