The Hawkeye announced belatedly, “Magic flight, you are cleared to engage.”
At this stage of the game Trash didn’t give a rat’s ass if someone safe over the horizon line gave him the authorization to shoot back. This was life and death, and Trash had no intention of doing peaceful lazy-eights out here until he was blown out of the sky.
Hell, no, Trash wanted those other pilots dead, and he would shoot every missile he had if that’s what it took, regardless of instructions from the Hawkeye ACO.
But for right now, he had to stay alive long enough to shoot back.
FORTY-FIVE
Trash rocketed his Hornet toward the water, twelve thousand feet below him now but filling his windscreen quickly. Knowing the distance between himself and the J-10 when the other plane fired, the American was certain he was being chased down right now by a PL-12, a medium-range air-to-air radar-guided missile with a high- explosive warhead. Trash also knew that, with the missile’s top speed of Mach 4, he would not be outrunning this threat. And he was also well aware that with the missile’s ability to make a thirty-eight-g turn, he would not be outturning it, since his body could not pull more than nine g’s before G-LOC, g-induced loss of consciousness, knocked him out and ended any chance he had to get himself out of this mess.
Instead Trash knew he’d have to use geometry as well as a few other tricks he had up his sleeve.
At five thousand feet he yanked back on the stick, pulling his nose directly toward the oncoming threat. He could not see the missile; it was propelled by a rocket using smokeless fuel, and it raced through the sky nearly as fast as a bullet. But he kept his head through his maneuver and retained the situational awareness to know the direction from which the missile had been fired.
Just coming out of the dive was a challenge for the twenty-eight-year-old captain. It was a seven-g turn, Trash knew this from his training, and to keep enough blood in his head for the high-g turn he used a hook maneuver. As he tightened every muscle in his core, he barked out a high-pitched “Hook!” that tightened his core even more.
In his intercom he heard his own voice. “Hook! Hook! Hook!”
Bitching Betty, the audio warning announcements delivered by a woman’s voice, too calm considering the news she delivered, came through Trash’s headset: “Altitude. Altitude.”
Trash leveled out now, and he saw on his radar warning receiver that the threat was still locked on. He deployed chaff, a cloud of aluminum-coated glass fibers that dispersed via a pyrotechnic charge into a wide pattern around and behind the aircraft, hopefully decoying the radar of the incoming missile.
Simultaneous with his deployment of chaff, Trash banked right, pulled back on the stick, and rocketed sideways only twenty-three hundred feet above the water.
He deployed more chaff as he raced away, his right wing pointing to the water, his left wing pointing to the sun.
The PL-12 missile took the bait. It fired into the floating aluminum and glass fiber, losing its lock on the radar signature of the F-18, and it slammed into the water moments later.
Trash had beat the medium-range missile, but his maneuvers and his concentration on this threat had allowed the J-10 to get in behind him now. The Marine leveled his wings at eighteen hundred feet, looked around the sky on all sides of his cockpit, and he realized he’d lost sight of his enemy.
“Where’s he at, Cheese?”
“Unknown, Magic Two-Two! I’m defending!”
So Cheese was in a fight for his life himself, Trash now realized. Neither man could help the other; they were both on their own until they either killed their enemy or were joined by the Navy Super Hornets, still several minutes away.
Trash looked at the DDI above his left knee. The small screen showed him the top-down view of all the aircraft in the area. He saw Cheese to his north, and far to the south he saw the two ROC F-16s.
He looked as far back over his left shoulder as he could, and now he saw the black silhouette of an aircraft bearing down on him at his seven-o’clock high, some two miles distant. The aircraft was far to the left of his HUD but he could still target it via his Jay-Macks visor.
The J-10 turned in on Trash’s six o’clock, and Trash banked hard to the left, shoved his throttle forward, and dove toward the deck to pick up more speed, all to keep the enemy pilot from getting behind him.
But the J-10 anticipated Trash’s move and worked his way to the Marine’s six, and closed to within a mile and a half.
The Chinese pilot fired his twin-barreled 23-millimeter cannon. Glowing tracer rounds passed within a few feet of Trash’s canopy as he reversed his turn to the right and dropped down even lower. The rounds looked like long laser beams, and Trash watched them turn the blue-green water into geysers of foam ahead of him.
Trash juked hard to the left and right, but he kept his nose flat now; he was only five hundred feet above the water, so he could not dive, and he did not want to lose airspeed by pulling up. In the cool jargon of combat aviation this was referred to as “guns-d” or “guns defensive,” but Trash and his fellow pilots called it “the funky chicken.” It was a desperate, ugly dance to stay out of the line of fire. Trash jacked his head up left and right as far as he could, straining his neck muscles to keep his enemy in sight behind him while he banked and yawed all over the sky. He caught a glimpse of the J-10 banking to follow his last evasive move, and Trash knew the Chinese pilot was almost in place for another shot.
After another burst of cannon rounds went high, the Marine saw in the small mirror on the canopy next to the towel rack that the Super 10 had closed to under one mile, and he was perfectly lined up to take Trash out with his next volley.
Trash did not hesitate; he had to act. He “got skinny” by turning his aircraft to show the smallest dimension, the side, and as the J-10 closed range, Trash pulled his nose up. His body was shoved down farther, both forward against the straps and deep into his seat. His lumbar spine ached from the maneuver, and his eyes lost focus as they bulged in their sockets.
His last-ditch maneuver had increased the closure on the enemy fighter, not by slowing but by simply turning perpendicular to his line of flight at the perfect moment. He grunted and clenched his teeth, and then looked straight up through his canopy’s glass.
The J-10B had been concentrating on his cannon, and he had not reacted to the maneuver in time. He shot past, just one hundred feet above Trash’s Hornet.
The Chinese pilot was clearly doing his best to bleed off all his excess speed and to stay in the control zone, but even with his speed brakes on and his throttle back to idle he could not match Trash’s deceleration.
As soon as the shadow of the Chinese fighter passed over Trash’s aircraft, the American tried to pull into the control zone behind his enemy for a guns solution, but his enemy was good, and he knew better than to make himself an easy target. The J-10 got its nose up and its engine generating thrust once again, and he came off his speed brakes and went vertical.
Trash overshot his target low and instantly found himself in danger. To avoid having the J-10 get behind him, Trash shoved the throttle forward, past the detent and into afterburners, and his F/A-18 reared back like a mustang and launched toward the sun on two pillars of fire.
Trash accelerated upward, gradually getting his nose up to seventy degrees, passing three thousand feet, four thousand, five thousand. He saw the J-10 above him in the sky, saw the enemy’s wingtips turning as the pilot tried to find the American plane somewhere below him.
Trash reached ninety degrees of pitch — pure vertical — and shot upward at a speed of forty-five thousand feet a minute.
In sixty seconds, he could be nine miles above the water.
But Trash knew good and well he did not have sixty seconds. The J-10 was up here with him, and the enemy pilot was likely slamming his head all over his cockpit trying to find where the hell in the sky the Hornet had run off to.
At ten thousand feet Captain White brought the throttle out of afterburner and tipped the nose of his jet over. He could tell that the enemy pilot still did not see him, a few thousand feet below and behind. The Chinese pilot
