Plan of Attack

light, and the missile accelerated and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Oh, Christ, Forman thought, he’s firing attack missiles toward Canada. They were too fast to be cruise missiles. They looked like…like…

Like air-launched ballistic missiles.

As soon as Kelly got a lock indication, she fired a Sidewinder. Seconds later another big missile launched from the bomber. “Oh, my God,” she muttered, and she fired her last Sidewinder. The first Sidewinder veered from the attack plane and went after the second missile, but it accelerated off too quickly. The Sidewinder couldn’t reacquire the plane and fell harmlessly away until it exploded. Just milliseconds before the second Sidewinder hit, the bandit launched a third big missile.

Her second Sidewinder hit the enemy aircraft directly in its right engine. The bandit veered right, stabilized, veered right again, started to turn left, then made a slower, steadier right turn, crossing directly in front of her. Forman closed in for the kill. At four miles, as the bandit made its turn, she recognized it as a Russian Tupolev-22M bomber, nicknamed “Backfire,” its variable-geometry wings slowly swiveling forward. It had two large external fuel tanks beside the fuselage on each side. Smoke and fire were trailing from the right engine, getting heavier each second. She switched to her cannon, zoomed down on him, and opened fire. Shells peppered the fuselage and left wing, and now through her night-vision goggles she could see puffs of fire coming from the lef tengine. The Backfire aimed right for the Canadian coast, still over a hundred miles away. She doubted if it would stay aloft for—

Her attention was drawn to a bright streak of fire above and to her left. She realized with horror it was another one of those huge air-to-surface missiles. In her desperation to shoot this guy down, she forgot she was single-ship, that there might be more bombers out there — and that she was responsible for them all until help arrived! That was probably why this Backfire turned right instead of left — to distract her enough so the wingmen could launch their missiles.

Forman turned sharply left and started a climb, selected her AMRAAM missiles, and quickly locked on to the second bandit just as it launched a second big air-to-ground missile — but then her radar-warning receiver screeched again, and this time the hammer blows and shudders she’d felt before came back twice as hard. In her drive to hose the first Backfire and then diverting her attention to the second bandit, she’d flown too close to the tail end of the first Backfire and gotten into its kill zone.

The engine instruments were still okay, but she could feel a vibration in her control stick and rudder pedals — and then she noticed it, the right-wing fuel gauge dipping well below the level of the left. She immediately started transferring fuel from the right wing to the fuselage and left-wing tanks, but there was probably no room in the other tanks for the right-wing fuel — she was going to end up losing it. Fuel was life up here in the Arctic.

And as she fretted about her fuel state, the second bandit launched a third missile, then started to do a one-eighty. Now she assumed that each Backfire carried three of those big honking missiles, and she assumed that there were more up here, so instead of pursuing the second bandit, she searched farther west and south for more high-flying fast-movers. Sure enough, two more supersonic bogeys appeared.

She quickly verified that they were not transmitting any friendly IFF codes — they were not. She had to fly west a few minutes to get within range, which was not the direction she needed to be flying. Kelly didn’t have to check the nav computer to know that if she didn’t turn around now, she might not make it back to base. Even though Alaska had the best search-and-rescue units in the world, there was no way you wanted to eject over northern Alaska — and sure as heck not over the Beaufort Sea. She had to turn back….

But the Backfire she didn’t attack might be the one that launched a missile and destroyed Eielson, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Elmendorf, or Washington, D.C. — and there was no friggin’ way she was going to let that happen! She started a gradual climb and turned westward to get within position to attack with whatever ammunition she had left.

As quickly as she could, she maneuvered and locked up both Backfires, interrogated for friendly IFF codes once again, received a negative reply, then fired one AMRAAM missile at each. Both Backfires immediately started ejecting chaff and flare decoys, but she was close enough for the decoys to have no effect and the missiles to stay on target. The first Backfire was hit on the left side of the fuselage and started to spin almost straight down into the Beaufort Sea. The second was hit in the belly, and the hit must’ve detonated the missile in its belly, because the Backfire blew apart in a spectacular cloud of fire. The explosion then ignited the two external missiles, adding their destruction to the tremendous fury of that blast. Forman had to peel off to the north to stay away from that massive blast — she swore she could feel the heat right through her bubble canopy and winter-weight flight gear. Kelly repeated the attack with two more supersonic targets. One AMRAAM missed; she scored another hit on a Backfire but couldn’t see what happened to it because she had removed her night-vision goggles due to the longer ranges involved. Next…

“Warning, fuel low,” the computerized “copilot,” nicknamed “Bitching Betty,” intoned. One more glance at her fuel gauges: The right wing was almost empty, and the left wing and fuselage tanks were less than half full. Crap. She was right at emergency fuel level — sixty minutes of fuel, sixty minutes’ flying time to Eielson. But the tanker was on its way, and there was one emergency airfield at Fort Yukon that she might be able to use. She still had plenty of ammo in the cannon. Time to get busy.

Forman lowered her night-vision goggles and did strafing runs on two more Backfires, scoring hits on both but unsure if she’d done any damage. She then turned farther to the west to look for more targets — and there they were. As she saw it, there were several waves of attackers — multiple levels of slower-moving planes, most of them descending to low altitude, and another wave of high-speed attackers at higher altitude that appeared to be blowing past the slow-movers and launching huge hypersonic missiles, perhaps to pave the way for the slow- movers.

“Warning, fuel emergency,” Bitching Betty chimed in. In her drive to get as many enemy planes as possible, Kelly had ignored her fuel state. She knew that her wingman was coming, but he was still at least twenty minutes away. She was almost out of ammunition — admittedly having been a little excitable and trigger-happy on her first gun pass, but being more frugal as her supply got lower and lower. She tried the radios again — still jammed. The datalink hadn’t activated yet, meaning that the AWACS plane from Elmendorf hadn’t arrived yet. There was no indication that her wingman was anywhere in the area, so she couldn’t even lead him to the bandits.

With the sky full of enemy planes all around her, she came to the horrifying realization that she was done for the day — she had no fuel and no weapons. The enemy aircraft were heading farther to the southeast, within visual range of the Canadian coastline by now. They were heading away from Eielson, so she couldn’t pursue. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she had no choice except to break off and head for home.

And then she saw them: more missiles flying overhead. The Backfires that she couldn’t down were launching their missiles! And she was powerless to stop them.

Forman pointed her F-16’s nose toward Eielson, entered the emergency beacon code into her transponder, and throttled back to max-range power. On radar she could see even the slow-movers down low passing her easily. Her radar tracked twelve bandits cruising on their way toward North America, and it detected even more missile launches. She kept trying her radios, but it would be no use until every one of the bandits had disappeared from radar.

As she slowed to her best-range power setting, the vibration in her stick and rudder pedals got worse. She couldn’t go below three hundred knots without the fighter’s shaking so violently that she thought she could lose control at any second. That was not good. It meant that air refueling was probably out of the question.

“Hunter Four, this is Hunter Eight on company, how do you read?”

Thank God the jamming had subsided enough to hear human voices, she told herself. “Two by, Eight,” she responded. “How me?”

“Weak and barely readable,” her wingman said. “We tried to raise you earlier, but no response. I have you tied on, three-zero at one-two bull’s-eye, base plus eleven. What’s your state?”

“Eight, I engaged seven, repeat, seven bandits,” Forman said breathlessly. “Do you copy?”

“You engaged seven bandits? Did you make visual contact?”

“Affirmative. Russian Backfire bombers. Two of them launched what appeared to be very large air-to-surface missiles. I got six of the bandits. There were several groups of bandits, the Backfires up high and slower-movers that descended to low altitude. They were headed southeast. I have been unable to contact Knifepoint. Can you try? Over.” Hunter Eight was farther south, away from the Russian planes that were jamming them — she hoped he’d have better luck.

Now Forman’s wingman sounded as breathless as she did. “Stand by,” he said. On the primary radio, she