Just seconds after the plane broke ground, Chernov came out of burner to save fuel. Airborne, with the gear up and flaps in, Yan Chernov pointed the fighter southeast, down the Amur valley. He leveled at twenty thousand feet and retarded the throttles to cruise at.8 Mach. The afternoon was getting late. The rolling plain below looked golden in the summer haze, like something from a fairy tale. Here and there were clumps of trees, pioneers from the boreal forest to the north, trying to make it in low places on the prairie. Occasionally a road could be discerned through the haze, but no villages or towns. The haze hid them. Chernov turned on his handheld GPS, a battery-powered Bendix-King unit made in America and sold there for use in light civilian airplanes. Within seconds, his position came up on the unit. He keyed in the lat-long coordinates of the Svobodny airfield and waited for a direction and distance. There!
One hundred and twenty miles from Svobodny, Chernov’s ECM picked up the chirp of a Japanese search radar. He was probably too far out for the operator to receive an echo, which was good. Chernov turned ninety degrees to the left and began flying a circle with a 120-mile radius, with Svobodny at the center. The GPS made it easy.
Yan Chernov concentrated on searching the afternoon sky and listening intently to the ECM. Not another aircraft in sight. That was certainly not surprising. Acquiring another aircraft visually was difficult at best beyond a few miles. At the speeds at which modern aircraft flew, when you finally saw it, you might not even have enough time to avoid it. And in combat, the performance envelope of air-to-air missiles was so large that if you saw the enemy, either you or the other pilot had made a serious mistake, perhaps a fatal one. Still, Chernov kept his eyes moving back and forth, searching the sky in sectors, level with the horizon, above it, and below it. He was alone, which was not the way modern fighters are designed to fight. The radar that his GCI controller normally used was off the air. Perhaps it had been damaged by a Japanese beam-riding missile. Perhaps the power company had turned off the electricity. Maybe the GCI people had piled into trucks and fled west to escape the Japanese. No one was answering the telephone there, so who knew? Perhaps it didn’t matter much one way or the other. And this was an old plane, an obsolete fighter. Once, not many years ago, the Sukhoi-27 had been the best fighter in the world, bar none. But after the collapse of communism in ‘91, development of new fighters in the new Russia dried up from lack of money. The nation couldn’t even afford to buy fuel for the fighters it had; everything was tired, worn, not properly cared for. Amazingly, Japan had plenty of planes that performed equal to or better than this one. As Russia rusted, the Japanese built a highly capable aircraft industry. And here Chernov was, in an obsolete, worn-out plane that hadn’t flown — according to the logbook — in nine months and three days, hunting Japanese planes with his naked eyes. Out here asking for some Japanese fighter pilot to kill him quick. Begging for it. Kill me, kill me, kill me … According to an intel officer hiding in the city of Svobodny whom he had spoken to on the telephone that morning, the Japanese were flying supplies in from Khabarovsk and bases in Japan. He thought he saw a plane, and he changed his heading to check. No. Dirt on the canopy. He checked his fuel, checked the GPS … He wasn’t going to be able to stay out here for very long, not if he expected to get back to base flying this airplane.
He was coming up on the Bureya River when he saw it, a speck running high and conning. The guy must be 36,000 or 38,000 feet, headed northwest. Chernov turned to let the other plane pass off his right wing on a reciprocal heading. If it was a Japanese transport — and all the planes in these skies just now were Japanese — it must be going to Svobodny. Right heading, right altitude … If it was a transport going to Svobodny, there were fighters. The Russian major glanced at his ECM, listened intently. Not a peep, not a chirp or click. Well, damnit, there must be fighters, not using their radars. They must be below the transport, below the conning layer, and too small to be visible at this distance. Thank God he had his radar off, or they would have picked up the emissions and be setting a trap right this minute. His heart was pounding. Sweat stung his eyes, ran down his neck … He checked his switches — missiles selected, stations armed, master arm on. The transport was still eight or ten miles away when it went by Chernov’s right wingtip. He laid the Sukhoi into a sixty-degree angle of bank and stuffed the nose down while he lit the afterburners, shoved the throttles on through to stage four. The heavy jet slid through the sonic barrier and accelerated quickly: Mach 1.5, 1.7 … 1.9. Passing Mach 2 he raised the nose into a climb, kept the turn in. The AA-10 was a fire-and-forget missile with active radar homing. When its radar came on, the Japanese were going to get a heady surprise. So was Chernov if the Japanese had a couple of fighters fifteen miles in trail behind the transport. He looked left, then right, scanning the sky hurriedly. The sky looked empty. Which meant nothing. They could be there. The transport was just a dot, a flyspeck in the great va/s, still well above him and conning beautifully. About ten miles, he figured, but he couldn’t afford to turn on the radar to verify that. He was closing from fifteen degrees right of dead astern. He centered the dot in the gunsight, squeezed off a missile. It shot forward off the rail trailing smoke. He lowered the nose, aimed a little left, and fired a second missile. A hard right turn, fifteen degrees of heading change, and a third missile was in the air. Total elapsed time, about six seconds. If there were Japanese fighters there, the missiles would find them. The third missile had just disappeared into the haze when the ECM squealed in his ears. The AA light was flashing, and a red light on the instrument panel just below his gunsight: “Missile!”
Yan Chernov slammed the stick sideways and pulled. The plane flicked over on its side and he laid the G on. A target decoy was automatically kicked out by the countermeasures gear. Five … six…, seven G. A missile flashed over his right wing and detonated. A miss. The Missile warning light went out, but the ECM continued to chirp and flash direction lights. The Japanese were on the air now. Ten years ago nothing on the planet could turn with a Su- 27. It could still out-turn missiles, so Yan Chernov was still alive. He came out of burner, retarded the throttles as quickly as he dared — he certainly didn’t want to flame out just now — and let the G bleed off his airspeed. He got the nose up to the horizon. A Japanese fighter overshot above him. There might be two of them … His skin felt like ice as he slammed the stick right and rolled hard to reverse his turn. The ECM was singing. The Japanese pilot was turning left, beginning to roll back upright. Chernov pulled with all his might to raise the nose. As the enemy fighter streaked across from right to left, Chernov had his thumb on the 30-mm cannon, which vomited out a river of fire. The finger of God. The flaming river of shells passed through the wing of the Japanese fighter. Chernov rolled upside down, pulled as he lit his burners. There had to be someone else out there: the ECM was chirping madly. The earth filled the windscreen. Going straight down, accelerating … Only 23,000 feet, fool. He rolled the plane and scanned quickly. Nothing. Now the ECM was silent. He began to pull. Pull pull pull at seven G’s, fight to stay conscious. … The sweat stung his eyes, and his vision began to gray. He was screaming now, watching the yellow earth rushing up at him, trying to stay conscious. He was going to make it. Yes!
Relax the stick, drop to a hundred feet or two, just above the earth, and let the old girl accelerate. The ECM stayed silent. He twisted his head, looked behind. Right. Left. Nothing. Two planes falling way off the right. On fire — one of them large enough to appear as a black dot against the yellow cirrus layer.
When Yan Chernov taxied into the hard stand at Zeya, his flight suit and gear were soaked. The sweat was still running off him in rivulets, even though he had the canopy open. On the instrument panel, the needle on the G meter that recorded the maximum G pulled that flight rested on 9. Nine G’s with only a stomach-and-legs G suit. The wings might have come off under that much overstress. He would have to have the mechanics carefully inspect the plane. Chernov waited until the linemen had the chocks in place, then secured the engines. “Water,” he said. The senior NCO passed up a bottle. “How did it go, Major?” one of the junior pilots asked after he finished drinking. There were four of them standing there, gazing at the empty missile racks and the gun port with the tape shot away. “I got two, I think. Maybe three. One of them almost took my scalp.”
“Very good.”
“Luck. Pure luck. They just happened to come along, and I just happened to see them before they saw me.” He shook his head, filled with wonder that he was still alive. “They are good?”
“Good enough.” He tossed his helmet down, then climbed down from the cockpit. When he was on the ground, he drank more of the water. “Do you have another plane ready?”
“Yes, Major,” said the senior NCO. “Two?”
“Just one, sir. We hope to get three more flyable tonight by cannibalizing parts from the down birds. And the fueling takes forever.”
“Any word from Moscow?”
“No, sir. They haven’t called.”
“We will fly the planes west in the morning, as many as we have fuel for. As many as we can get started.”
Damn Moscow. With almost no fuel, no spare parts, little food, one-third of the mechanics the squadron was supposed to have, and an inoperative GCI site, he couldn’t do much more, even if Kalugin wrote the order in blood.
