rolled inverted and turned back toward the water.
Like a loop on a roller coaster, Trash rocketed in the direction of his enemy; in seconds he saw the Super 10 passing through a cloud below him. The pilot was using a split-S maneuver, trying to turn back toward the F/A-18 with a high-speed nose-low turn.
Trash thumbed a small trackball-like input on his flight stick and switched to his cannon. As soon as the aiming pipper appeared on his HUD, the J-10 descended right into it, just eight hundred yards away.
Trash fired one long and then two short bursts from his six-barreled Vulcan 20-millimeter cannon.
His long burst passed well in front of the Super 10; his second spray of cannon fire was closer but still ahead of the jet.
His last short burst, just a fraction of a second, nailed the enemy jet on the starboard wing. Bits of smoking aircraft broke free. The Chinese pilot broke hard to the right. Trash mimicked the maneuver just six hundred feet away, rolling toward dark smoke.
The Chinese plane dove for the water, and Trash fought to line up the pipper for another gun shot, “hooked” with the hard-jerking g-forces he put on the plane to position himself behind.
In front of him a flash moved his focus from his pipper to his target. Flame poured from the wing and the engine, and almost instantly he knew the plane in front of him was about to die.
The rear of the J-10B exploded and the doomed aircraft spun hard to the right, corkscrewing toward the sea below.
Trash broke off the attack, banked hard to the left to avoid the fireball, and then struggled to level his wings up above the water. He had no time to look for a chute from the pilot.
“That’s a kill. Splash one. Pos, Cheese?” “Pos” was a request for the other jet’s position.
Before his flight leader responded, Trash looked down at his DDI and saw he was heading toward Cheese. He looked up through several small clouds and saw the glint of sun off gray metal, as Magic Two-One, Cheese’s aircraft, shot from right to left.
Cheese’s voice came over the radio. “Defensive. He’s on my six, about two miles back. He’s got me locked. Get him off me, Trash!”
Trash’s eyes tracked quickly back to the north and saw the surviving Super 10 just as he launched a missile at Cheese’s jet exhaust.
“Break right, Two-One! Missile in the air!”
Trash did not watch the missile, nor did he look back over at Cheese. Instead he switched his weapons to select a Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missile. Trash had a “tally” on the Chinese Super 10, meaning that he could see him through his helmet-mounted sight.
Inside his headset he heard a loud electronic buzz indicating that his Sidewinder was searching for a suitable heat signature.
The buzz changed to the high-pitched lock tone as the J-10 passed by just three miles off Trash’s nose, indicating the AIM-9’s infrared homing system had found the hot engine of the Chinese aircraft and was tracking it.
Trash pressed the air-to-air launch button on his stick and fired the AIM-9 Sidewinder. It streaked away on a trail of smoke and homed in on the Super 10.
The missile was fire and forget, so Trash turned to the left to position himself behind the enemy fighter if the Sidewinder missed.
Quickly he found Cheese in the sky. Trash’s flight leader was banking hard to the south; behind him his automatic flares deployed out of both sides of his aircraft and arced to the earth.
The Chinese missile dove into the hot flares and exploded.
Trash looked back to his target and saw the J-10 launch his own flares as he banked hard to the left. “Get him, get him, get him,” Trash said aloud, urging his missile toward the flaming engine of the Chinese aircraft. But the Sidewinder was duped by the flares fired by the Super 10.
“Shit!”
Trash switched back to guns, but before he could get his pipper on his target, the enemy jet dove for the deck.
Trash followed him down, hoping to get behind him for another kill.
In his headset he heard, “Magic Two-One is engaging bandits approaching from the north. Fox three.”
Trash had not even had time to check what happened to the four other approaching aircraft, but clearly Cheese was firing radar-guided missiles at them from a distance.
“Cheese, I’m engaged, pushing this guy to the deck.”
“Roger, Trash, Navy Super Hornets two minutes out.”
Trash nodded, then focused intently on his enemy, the Chinese pilot and his aircraft.
“Fox three!” said Cheese as he fired another AIM-120 AMRAAM at the bandits approaching from the north.
Trash and the Super 10 he had engaged spent the next sixty seconds in a tight, wild chase, each pilot jockeying to get in position to fire on the other while, at the same time, doing everything in his power to prevent his enemy from getting position on him.
This was known, in the lexicon of air-to-air combat, as a “phone booth.” It was a small area to operate in, and getting smaller with the corrections both pilots made to jockey for advantage in the air.
Trash felt the bone-crushing pressure of high positive-g turns and the eye-popping, nausea-inducing dives of negative g’s.
A minute into the dogfight White slammed the stick to the right, following the enemy’s high-g turn above the water. Trash got his nose inside the turn slightly, but the PLAAF man reversed course suddenly and removed Trash’s advantage.
The sheer number of inputs entering Trash’s brain was unimaginable. His aircraft moved on three axes as he tried to remain in an offensive position against another aircraft moving on three axes. His mouth delivered information to his flight lead and the Hawkeye as he tracked the targets and the deck below, and both of his hands moved left, right, backward, and forward as his fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons on his throttle and stick. He read a dozen different readouts on his constantly moving HUD, and he occasionally brought his focus inside the cockpit to give quick glances to his navigational display to see where he and his lead were in relation to the centerline over the strait.
Sweat poured down the back of his neck and the muscles in his jaw quivered and spasmed from the tension of the moment.
“Can’t get a bite on him!” Trash announced into his mic.
“I’m engaged, Magic Two-Two. He’s yours.”
Cheese had fired a third missile at the inbound fighters, which he had determined to be Russian-built Su-33s. One of the three AMRAAMs hit its target, and Cheese announced, “Splash two.”
The PLAAF fighter banked left and right, spun upside down, and performed a high reverse-g maneuver that Trash replicated, causing his eyes to bulge and his head to fill with blood.
He tightened his core muscles, his abs and low back turned to rocks, and he “hooked” over and over.
He forced himself to lessen his turn angle, helping his body but causing him to lose his position behind the enemy.
“Don’t lose sight. Don’t lose sight,” he told himself as he tracked the J-10 through white puffy clouds.
The other pilot kept the bank going, however, and Trash craned his neck all the way behind him, then spun it back to check the mirrors high on the canopy.
The other jet was getting in behind him for a kill shot. Trash had lost his offensive advantage.
The Chengdu J-10 pilot did make his way behind Trash and fired a short-range PL-9 missile at his tail, but Trash managed to defeat it with his automatic flare deployment and a seven-point-five-g bank that nearly knocked him out cold.
He needed his speed, but it was bleeding off on the turn. “Don’t bleed it! Don’t bleed it!” he shouted to himself between grunting through the g-forces.
The two planes were corkscrewing down through the sky. Seven thousand feet, six thousand, five thousand.
