than for the Raven. The F-16 does not have the advantage, like the Raven, of the heat signature of its exhaust duct being shielded. Therefore, evasive action must be very evasive.
Troy banked into a roll, rolled into a dive, and dove into a diving turn — all in an effort to outmaneuver the missile from which he could not hide.
Jenna had kept pace as she watched Troy chasing the Raven across the sky in a fast-paced pursuit, flying above and behind the two aircraft as they raced through Maryland airspace.
They were above the clouds, with no view of the ground, so Jenna had no bearings on how close or how far they were in relation to Camp David. They may have failed in their efforts to keep Harris too low to fly his strike mission — they were now above fifteen thousand feet — but at least they were keeping him from his primary mission.
Jenna watched the two aircraft scissoring across the sky, silently urging Troy to take a shot and knowing that he was the type to take it the moment he could.
However, suddenly, it was the F-16 that was in the lead.
The hunter was the hunted.
As she watched Harris launch an AMRAAM, and as she saw Troy roll out and dive, Jenna seized the initiative and swung in behind Harris.
She could sense by the way that he rolled his wedge-shaped aircraft that Harris heard the pinging of her lock-on.
She fired.
Another hunter had become the hunted.
Three warplanes.
Two missiles.
Crowded skies.
Dangerous skies.
Harris's AIM-120 Slammer was gaining on a desperate Troy Loensch, while the electronic brain of Jenna's AIM-9 Sidewinder sought to maintain its lock-on to Raymond Harris and the Raven.
Troy had one chance, and that was to use the Slammer's speed against it. He would allow it to follow him into a turn, then turn abruptly in the opposite direction, knowing — or at least hoping — that its speed would restrict it from so tight a turn.
Troy rolled into a hard left, and prepared to turn right.
That was when he saw it.
Just a quarter of a mile away, and on the same heading as Troy, was a US Airways Airbus A321-200, on approach to Baltimore-Washington Airport with about 170 passengers aboard.
Crowded skies.
Dangerous skies.
As Troy turned, the AMRAAM lost its lock-on for a split second — a desired effect.
As it is programmed to do, the AMRAAM sought to reacquire the broken lock-on.
It did.
However, the lock-on was not now to the F-16's F110 turbofan, but to the larger, hotter CFM56-5 turbofan engine hanging beneath the starboard wing of the US Airways jetliner — very much not an effect that Troy had desired.
Jenna watched her own Sidewinder chase the Raven, knowing that she had denied Raymond Harris the luxury of watching his AMRAAM chase Troy's F-16.
She did not notice the Airbus A321-200 until she glanced away from Harris for a second to watch the AMRAAM's contrail coiling across the sky toward Troy.
She saw Troy's F-16 slip out of the trajectory of the AMRAAM and the trajectories of the two separate. It was not until that moment that she saw the red and blue tail of the jetliner.
The crew on the flight deck may have seen the AMRAAM, although it was approaching from behind. They certainly had seen it on their radarscopes, and they were probably calling a mayday to the Baltimore tower.
They banked the aircraft slightly but were unable to muster serious evasive action.
Jenna saw the white contrail streak into the engine and watched helplessly as the right wing dissolved in a dirty orange fireball.
The force of the blast tossed the one-winged jetliner into a roll, and soon it was tumbling uncontrollably across the sky. Pity the passengers who had not been knocked unconscious by their being thrown into a five-G spin.
Chapter 56
Raymond Harris was startled, even saddened, by the sight of the jetliner — slammed by his own Slammer — cartwheeling across the sky. For the man who was prepared to drop a nuclear weapon on the president of the United States, it was a rather paradoxical reaction.
Was it that the sight of 170 innocent people dying a frightening death was more real than the abstract notion of a thermonuclear blast?
It didn't take long for him to snap out of it and to place his mind back in the moment.
How many missiles had been fired?
He had dodged three. That left just one missile left between the two F-16s.
He had fired two. As the Raven carried no gun, he was depleted of defensive armament — but the F-16s need not know that.
Where were they now?
He saw one — and then the other F-16.
The nearest one, flying about two thousand feet beneath him, had bare wingtips. It was unarmed.
Jenna had little time to process the sight of the aluminum coffin with its 170 screaming souls before it disappeared into a cloud.
Meanwhile, her own Sidewinder had missed hitting anything. The unstoppable Raven was still in the air. Damn those people at HAWX who had invented this machine.
She had no way of knowing that the pinging she heard, that of the Raven locking on to her F-16, was a lock- on with missiles that did not exist.
'Falcon Two, this is Falcon Three. I got your back.' Maybe Falcon Three could distract Harris long enough for Jenna to escape.
As Jenna dove toward the clouds, preparing to evade the imaginary AMRAAM, Troy was diving from above to try to save her.
Troy expected to see the contrail of an AMRAAM at any moment as he accelerated toward the Raven.
Suddenly, he saw nothing. First Jenna, then Harris, fell into the boiling cumulus.
On his radarscope, they were just tumbling green specks, like a pair of fireflies on methedrine.
Harris pushed his charade as he pushed the fleeing F-16—down, down, down.
One moment, they were falling through the clouds, the next they were beneath them. At last, having reached nine thousand feet, he broke off his pursuit and checked his GPS coordinates. Somewhere out there, and he could now see exactly where, was Camp David.
Aron Arnold should have arrived by now. He had gone to Camp David, briefed with orders to stall. Harris had instructed him to linger as long as necessary to give Albert Bacon Fachearon two — not just one — opportunities to consider Harris's demand for capitulation. Arnold would also have arrived bearing a GK356a4 high-power,
