master. But now those controls came as naturally as twirling the wax into his Bismarck mustache, his one non- standard affectation, which he’d modeled on Robin Olds, a legend in the American fighter community, an instinctive pilot and a thinking-and therefore a very dangerous-tactician. An ace in World War II, an ace in Korea, and also an ace over North Vietnam, Olds was one of the best who’d ever strapped a fighter plane to his back, and one whose mustache had made Otto von Bismarck himself look like a pussy.
Colonel Winters wasn’t thinking about that now. The thoughts were there even so, as much a part of his character as his situational awareness, the part of his brain that kept constant track of the three-dimensional reality around him at all times. Flying came as naturally to him as it did to the gyrfalcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. And so did hunting, and now he was hunting. His aircraft had instrumentation that downloaded the take from the AWACS aircraft a hundred fifty miles to his rear, and he divided his eye time equally between the sky around him and the display three feet from his 20–10 brown eyes …
… there … two hundred miles, bearing one-seven-two, four bandits heading north. Then four more, and another flight of four. Joe Chink was coming up to play, and the pigs were hungry.
“Boar Lead, this is Eagle Two.” They were using encrypted burst-transmission radios that were very difficult to detect, and impossible to listen in on.
“Boar Lead.” But he kept his transmission short anyway. Why spoil the surprise?
“Boar Lead, we have sixteen bandits, one-seven-zero your position at angels thirty, coming due north at five hundred knots.”
“Got ’em.”
“They’re still south of the border, but not for long,” the young controller on the E-3B advised. “Boar, you are weapons-free at this time.”
“Copy weapons-free,” Colonel Winters acknowledged, and his left hand flipped a button to activate his systems. A quick look down to his weapons-status display showed that everything was ready to fire. He didn’t have his tracking/targeting radar on, though it was in standby mode. The F-15 had essentially been designed as an appendage to the monstrous radar in its nose-a design consideration that had defined the size of the fighter from the first sketch on paper-but over the years the pilots had gradually stopped using it, because it could warn an enemy with the right sort of threat receiver, telling him that there was an Eagle in the neighborhood with open eyes and sharp claws. Instead he could now cross-load the radar information from the AWACS, whose radar signals were unwelcome, but nothing an enemy could do anything about, and not directly threatening. The Chinese would be directed and controlled by ground radar, and the Boars were just at the fuzzy edge of that, maybe spotted, maybe not. Somewhere to his rear, a Rivet Joint EC-135 was monitoring both the radar and the radios used by the Chinese ground controllers, and would cross-load any warnings to the AWACS. But so far none of that. So, Joe Chink was coming north.
“Eagle, Boar, say bandit type, over.”
“Boar, we’re not sure, but probably Sierra-Uniform Two-Sevens by point of origin and flight profile, over.”
“Roger.” Okay, good, Winters thought. They thought the Su-27 was a pretty hot aircraft, and for a Russian- designed bird it was respectable. They put their best drivers into the Flanker, and they’d be the proud ones, the ones who thought they were as good as he was.
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” the flight acknowledged, and they all banked to the left. Winters took a look around to make sure he wasn’t leaving any contrails to give away his position. Then he checked his threat receiver. It was getting some chirps from Chinese search radar, but still below the theoretical detection threshold. That would change in twenty miles or so. But then they’d just be unknowns on the Chinese screens, and fuzzy ones at that. Maybe the ground controllers would radio a warning, but maybe they’d just peer at their screens and try to decide if they were real contacts or not. The robin’s-egg blue of the Eagles wasn’t all that easy to spot visually, especially when you had the sun behind you, which was the oldest trick in the fighter-pilot bible, and one for which there was still no solution …
The Chinese passed to his right, thirty miles away, heading north and looking for Russian fighters to engage, because the Chinese would want to control the sky over the battlefield they’d just opened up. That meant that they’d be turning on their own search radars, and when that happened, they’d spend most of their time looking down at the scope instead of out at the sky, and that was dangerous. When he was south of them, Winters brought his flight right, west, and down to twenty thousand feet, well below Joe Chink’s cruising altitude, because fighter pilots might look back and up, but rarely back and down, because they’d been taught that height, like speed, was life. And so it was … most of the time. In another three minutes, they were due south of the enemy, and Winters increased power to maximum dry thrust so as to catch up. His flight of four split on command into two pairs. He went left, and then his eyes spotted them, dark flecks on the brightening blue sky. They were painted the same light gray the Russians liked-and that would be a real problem if Russian Flankers entered the area, because you didn’t often get close enough to see if the wings had red stars or white-blue-red flags painted on them.
The audio tone came next. His Sidewinders could see the heat bloom from the Lyul’ka turbofan engines, and that meant he was just about close enough. His wingman, a clever young lieutenant, was now about five hundred yards to his right, doing his job, which was covering his leader.
“Boar, Eagle, be advised these guys are heading directly for us at the moment.”
“Not for long, Eagle,” Colonel Winters responded. They weren’t flecks anymore. Now they were twin-rudder fighter aircraft. Cruising north, tucked in nice and pretty. His left forefinger selected Sidewinder to start, and the tone in his earphones was nice and loud. He’d start with two shots, one at the left-most Flanker, and the other at the right-most … right about …
“Fox-Two, Fox-Two with two birds away,” Bronco reported. The smoke trails diverged, just as he wanted them to, streaking in on their targets. His gunsight camera was operating, and the picture was being recorded on videotape, just as it had been over Saudi the previous year. He needed one kill to make ace-
— he got the first six seconds later, and the next half a second after that. Both Flankers tumbled right. The one on the left nearly collided with his wingman, but missed, and tumbled violently as pieces started coming off the airframe. The other one was rolling and then exploded into a nice white puffball. The first pilot ejected cleanly, but the second didn’t.
“Fox-One, Fox-One, Slammer on guy to the west.” He watched the Slammer, as it was called, race in. Technically a fire-and-forget weapon like the Sidewinder, it accelerated almost instantly to mach-two-plus and rapidly ate up the three miles between them. It only took about ten seconds to close and explode a mere few feet over the fuselage of its target, and that Flanker disintegrated with no chute coming away from it.
… there …
“You with me, Skippy?” he called on the radio.
“Got you covered, Bronco,” his wingman replied. “Bandit at your one o’clock, going left to right.”
“On him,” Winters replied, putting his nose on the distant spot in the sky. His radar spotted it, locked onto it, and the IFF transponder didn’t say friendly. He triggered off his second Slammer: “Fox-One on the south guy! Eagle, Boar Lead, how we doing?”
“We show five kills to this point. Bandits are heading east and diving. Razorback is coming in from your west with four, angels three-five at six hundred, now at your ten o’clock. Check your IFF, Boar Lead.” The controller was being careful, but that was okay.
“Boar, Lead, check IFF now!”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” they all chimed in. Before the last of them confirmed his IFF transponder was in the transmit setting, his second Slammer found its target, running his morning’s score to four.
