degrees of heading change, he rolled left into a sixty-degree angle of bank. After 270 degrees of turn, he rolled out heading northwest, back toward the column of trucks. His wingman was still with him, out to the left. Both pilots selected targets as they raced once again toward the trucks, whose drivers were frantically trying to get them off the road on either side. Not that it mattered. With just the gentlest nudges of their rudders and caresses of their sticks, the pilots pointed their planes at targets chosen at random and squirted bursts from their internal GSH-30-1 guns. Four trucks exploded on that pass. One, which contained artillery ammunition, detonated with an earsplitting crash. The gun crew in the lead truck was still trying to get the restraining straps off the antiaircraft gun so they could point it when the Su-27’s swept overhead and disappeared into the brassy sky in the direction from whence they had come, northwest. It took the convoy commander an hour to get the undamaged trucks back on the road and rolling. Nine trucks had been destroyed or damaged too badly to continue. One of the nine had not been touched by the strafing aircraft; the panic-stricken driver had tried to drive over several large rocks, which shattered the transmission and tore the rear axle loose from the truck’s frame. Fourteen men were dead, ten wounded. One of the wounded was horribly burned; a sergeant shot him to put him out of his misery. The soldiers placed the dead men in a row near the road, amid the burned-out trucks. Someone else would have to bury them later. The officer in charge had his orders. The soldiers got back in the trucks and resumed their journey northwest.
On the third mission of the day, Major Yan Chernov led his wingman, Major Vasily Pervushin, back to the truck convoy on the river road from Khabarovsk. Chernov was the commander of the 556th Fighter Squadron based at Zeya. He and his wingman were flying the only two operational aircraft. The enlisted men had been laboring for days to drain the water from the fuel-storage tanks, then transfer the remaining fuel by hand into the planes. There was no electricity at the base, so the job was herculean, involving hand pumps, fifty-five-gallon drums, and lots of muscle. Chernov did not think there were any cluster bombs on the base, but while he was airborne on the first strike, his ordnance NCO found some in an ammo bunker that was supposed to be empty. The bombs were at least twenty years old. Still, they were all the Russians had for ground attack, so they were loaded on the planes. Just now, he and Pervushin, his second in command, raced southeast a hundred feet or so above the ground. Chernov was watching for vehicles off to the left, along the river road. The two Sukhois were indicating 525 knots, 85 Mach, which was about as fast as it was safe to carry the bombs — they were not supersonic shapes. The treeless plain raced under the Sukhois, almost as if the fighters were motionless in space and the earth was spinning madly beneath them. The illusion was very pleasant. There, at ten o’clock, on the horizon: a plume of dust. This morning they had made two passes over the target convoy, the first from the northwest, the second from the southeast. This time Chernov and Pervushin had planned to approach from the southeast and drop the bombs on the first pass. Since they had the ammo in the guns, they wanted to make a second pass, quickly, and the quickest way was a hard turn, then back down the trucks from the northwest to the southeast. Chernov pointed to the dust, made sure Pervushin nodded his understanding. This convoy was farther northwest than the one they had attacked that morning. The ECM gear was silent. Not a peep of an enemy radar. These Japanese, running truck convoys without air cover … There could be air cover, of course, running high with their radars off. Chernov glanced up into the afternoon haze, looking for tiny black spots against the high cloud. Nothing. Not seeing them didn’t mean they weren’t there. It simply meant you hadn’t seen them. The dust was passing behind his left wing when he motioned for Pervushin to drift out farther. Satisfied, he began a shallow turn. He wanted to be wings-level over the road for several miles before he reached the convoy to give himself and Pervushin time to pick out targets. Turn, watch the ground racing by just beneath the plane, keep the wings at no more than ten degrees of bank, and glance up occasionally, look for enemy fighters. Watch the nose attitude, Chernov! Don’t fly into the ground. He reached for the armament panel. Bombs selected. Fusing set. Interval set. Master armament switch on. Wings level, Pervushin was well out to the right, dropping aft. He would follow Chernov in a loose trail formation. Five hundred twenty-five knots … Chernov let his plane drift up until he was about three hundred feet above the ground. After the clamshell fuselage of the cluster bomb opened, the bomblets needed to fall far enough to disperse properly.
Trucks. A row of them. They appeared to be racing toward him, but he was the one in flight. As Tail-end Charlie disappeared under the nose, Chernov mashed the pickle button on the stick. He could feel the thumps as the bombs were kicked off, all six of them in about a second and a half. Chernov held the heading for another three seconds, then rolled into an eighty-degree angle of bank with G on and held it for ninety degrees of heading change. Now he rolled the other way and turned for 270 degrees. He watched the gyro swing, concentrated on keeping the nose above the horizon. With his left hand, he flipped switches on the armament panel, enabling the gun. Wings level again, the Russian pilot was almost lined up on the trucks, four of which were obviously on fire. He stabbed the rudder and jammed the stick forward, pointing the nose, then eased the stick back ever so slightly. Squeeze the trigger, squint against the muzzle flashes as the vibration reaches him through the seat and stick, walk the shells through the target truck. Then another. In four seconds his shooting pass was done, enough time to aim at two trucks; then Chernov was pulling G to get the nose above the horizon and rolling hard right to avoid ricochets. With a positive rate of climb, in a right turn, he raised the nose a smidgen more, twisted in his seat and glanced back over his right shoulder. Horror swept over him. A gun, on a truck, shooting, a death ray of tracers … Pervushin, on fire, rolling hard left, nose dropping … A tremendous explosion of yellow fire as Pervushin’s Sukhoi fighter flew into the ground. No parachute visible. Yan Chernov tore his eyes away and checked his nose attitude. He was still climbing. Damnation!
“Sir, where’s Major Pervushin?” the NCO asked Yan Chernov after he raised the canopy and shut down his engines at the Zeya Air Base. “Dead.”
“Fighters?”
“A gun. One gun. On a truck.”
“Could he have …”
“His wife is at Dispersal, sir. The trucks carrying the families won’t leave for a while, so she came here to wait for him.”
Chernov sat in the cockpit letting the wind dry his face and hair. He was exhausted. Finally he made himself look in the direction of the dispersal shack, a large one-room wooden-frame building on the edge of the concrete. She was standing outside, shading her eyes against the sun, looking this way. The wind was whipping at her dress. Chernov couldn’t do it. It was his duty, but he couldn’t. “Sergeant.”
“Yes, Major.”
“Go tell her.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Zero pulled hard to bring his nose around, setting up a head-on pass. Dixie Elitch horsed her airplane to meet him head-on, trying to minimize the separation and give her opponent as small an angle advantage as possible. Alas, the Japanese pilot’s nose lit up; cannon shells reached for her in a stream, as if they were squirted from a garden hose.
“These guys got fangs and will bite you good if you let them,” said the male voice in her earphones. That was Joe Malan, who was back there with the simulator operator, no doubt enjoying himself immensely.
Dixie put on the G to escape the shells. She fully intended to pull right into the vertical, but Malan read her mind. “If this guy follows you up, you’re going to give him another shot. You really don’t want to be out in front of one of these people. Are you suicidal?”
By the time he finished speaking, she had unloaded the plane and rolled it 270 degrees. Now she laid the G on. Smoothly back on the stick, right up to nine G’s on the HUD. In a real F-22, her full-body G suit would be fully inflated, but the simulator didn’t pull Go’s. It did roll and pitch in a sickeningly realistic manner, however, so the cockpit smelled faintly of stale vomit. So did real cockpits.
She came around hard, turning at thirty-two degrees per second with the help of vectored thrust. No other plane in the world could turn like that, even the Zero.
Unfortunately the Zero had not been standing still or plodding along straight while he waited for her to finish her turn. She craned her head, looking for it.
“No, damn it,” Malan said in her headphones. “Look at your displays. The infrared sensors are keeping track of this guy. What does your computer tell you?”
“He’s high and right. I’m in his left-rear quarter.”
“Pull up and shoot.”
Dixie kept the nose coming. The missile-capability circle came into view on the HUD. As the red dot centered in the circle, she heard a tone, almost a buzz, indicating the heat-seeking Sidewinder missile had locked on. She squeezed off the missile, which roared away from her right wingtip. A flash. “Got “im.”
