going to be juicy, pinned against the deck as the invisible F-22’s came down on them from above. Oh boy!
The heart of the Sentinel missile system was its computer, which contained a sophisticated program designed to prevent an enemy from causing all the missiles in the battery to be launched by merely sweeping his radar once, shutting down, then repeating the cycle. The program required that the target radar sweep repeatedly and be progressing into the missile’s performance envelope at a rate of speed sufficient to enable it to get into range by the time the missile arrived. If these parameters were met, the computer would fire two missiles, one after the other, then sit inactive for a brief period of time before the system would again listen for the proper signals.
The guidance system in the missiles was more sophisticated than the computer in the battery. As the missile flew toward its target, the computer memorized the target’s relative position, course, and speed, so in the event the target radar ceased radiating, the computer could still issue guidance signals to the missile. Of course, the probability of a hit decreased dramatically the longer the target radar was off the air. If the target radiated again while the missile was still in flight, the computer would update the target’s trajectory and refine its directives to the guidance system.
The system worked best when the missile was fired at an airplane that was flying directly at the Sentinel battery. Due to the geometry of the problem and the speeds of the target and missile, the missile’s performance became degraded if it wound up in a tail chase.
As Colonel Handa flew toward the Chita Air Base, he was flipping his radar from standby to transmit, then back again, over and over. He had instructed all the other pilots to leave their radars in the standby position — which meant the radar had power but was not transmitting — but he was scanning with his to see if he could detect any enemy planes aloft, or induce the Americans to fire one of their antiradiation missiles. Handa didn’t know that the missiles were fired from automated batteries; indeed, the possibility had never even occurred to him.
The eight strike airplanes had left the upper formation a hundred miles back. They were down on the deck now, five hundred feet above the treetops, flying at a bit over Mach 1.
Handa kept waiting for his ECM warning devices to indicate that he was being looked at by enemy radar, but the devices didn’t peep. There seemed to be no enemy radar on the air. Or, thought Handa ominously, no radar that his ECM devices could detect. Perhaps the Americans had taken another technological leap of faith and were using frequencies that this device could not receive. Or perhaps their radars were in a receive-only mode, merely picking up the beacon of his radar when it was on the air. If only he … He dropped that line of thought when the first Sentinel missile shot by his aircraft at a distance of no more than one hundred feet. The brilliant plume of the rocket motor made a streak on the retina of his eye. Handa’s heart went into overdrive.
As he scanned the sky for more missiles — the visibility was excel-lent — he forgot to flip the switch of his radar back to standby. That was when another Sentinel missile, launched automatically almost sixty seconds before, slammed into the nose cone of his fighter.
The thirty-pound missile was traveling at Mach 3 when it pierced the nose cone and target radar in a perfect bull’s-eye. Handa’s plane was traveling at Mach 1.28 in almost the opposite direction. The combined energy of the impact ripped the Zero fighter into something in excess of two million tiny pieces. The expanding cloud of pieces hit the wall as each individual fragment of metal, plastic, flesh, cloth, and shoe leather tried to penetrate its own shock wave, and failed.
The other Zeros continued on toward the Chita Air Base as the pieces of Handa’s fighter began to fall earthward at different rates, depending on their shape. The fuel droplets fell like rain in the cool summer sky, but the motes of metal and flesh behaved more like dust, or heavy snow.
After Colonel Handa’s Zero disintegrated, the other seven planes in his flight continued straight ahead. Several seconds elapsed before the remaining pilots realized what had happened. During that time, the planes traversed almost a mile of sky.
Without their radars, the pilots were essentially blind. At these speeds, they couldn’t see far enough with their eyes. At that very moment, Bob Cassidy and Paul Scheer were ten miles away, at two o’clock, on a collision course at Mach 2.15. The two American fighters were two hundred yards apart, abreast of each other, with Scheer on the left.
“We’ll shoot two each, Paul, then yo-yo high and come down behind them.”
“Gotcha, Hoppy.”
The seekers in Sidewinders had come a long way in the forty years the missile had been in service. The primary advantage of the missile was its passive nature: it didn’t radiate, so it didn’t advertise its presence. The short range of the weapon was more than compensated for by its head-on capability.
At five miles, Bob Cassidy got a growl and let the first missile go. He still had not acquired the Zeros visually, and of course the Zero pilots had not seen him. He fired the second missile two seconds later, at a range of three miles. With both missiles gone, Bob Cassidy pulled the nose of his fighter into an eighty-degree climb, half-rolled and came out of burner, then pulled the nose down hard as the plane decelerated. He finally saw the Zeros below him, going in the opposite direction, toward the base.
Scheer had fired two Sidewinders almost simultaneously and was also soaring toward heaven and pulling the nose around.
One of the American missiles missed its target due to the rapidly changing aspect angle. It passed the target aircraft too far away to trigger the proximity fuse.
The other three missiles were hits. One went down the left intake of a Zero and detonated in the compressor section of the engine, ripping the plane to bits. Another missed the target aircraft by six inches; its proximity fuse exploded adjacent to the cockpit and killed the pilot instantly.
The warhead of the fourth missile detonated above the left wing of the Zero it was homing on, puncturing the wing with a hundred small holes. Fuel boiled out into the atmosphere.
The pilot felt the strike, saw his flight leader’s airplane dissolving into a metal cloud, then saw fuel erupting from his own wing. He had not glimpsed an enemy aircraft and already two Zeros were destroyed, one was falling out of control, and he was badly damaged. He began a hard left turn to clear the area.
Cassidy saw this plane turning and shoved forward on his stick, which, since he was inverted, stopped his nose from coming down. He rolled right ninety degrees onto knife edge and let the nose fall.
The Zero below him continued its turn.
This was going to work out nicely — Cassidy was going to drop right onto the enemy pilot’s tail. Cassidy would use the gun.
Dropping in, rolling the wings level, he pushed the thumb button as the enemy plane slid into the gunsight. The plane vibrated, muzzle flashes appearing in front of the windscreen, and the Zero was on fire, with the left horizontal stabilator separating from the aircraft. Now Cassidy rolled into a ninety-degree bank and pulled smoothly right up to nine Go’s. He wanted to get around in a hurry to rejoin the fight. For the first time, he took a second to check his tac display for the position of the other five F-22’s. Only he and Scheer were still upstairs. The other two sections were descending in a curving arc.
Dixie Elitch and Aaron Hudek each fired a Sidewinder as they came roaring down on the flight of four Zeros from the northwest. The missiles tracked nicely. Dixie squeezed off another, and a third. Her first missile converted the target Zero to a fireball, and the second went into the fireball and exploded. Her third missile took out another Zero, just as the pilot flying the third plane, the one struck by Hudek’s first missile, ejected. She was less than two miles from the last Zero and trying to get a missile lock-on tone when Hudek sliced in front, his tailpipes just beyond her windscreen. Dixie pulled power and popped her boards to prevent a collision. Hudek didn’t bother with a missile. He intended to use his gun. He closed relentlessly on the sole remaining Zero of the flight of four.
Preacher Fain led Lee Foy down on Jiro Kimura’s flight. They squeezed off two Sidewinders, one each, and both missiles tracked. Still wearing the night-vision helmet, Kimura was craning his neck, trying to see what was happening. The Zeros exploding on his right certainly got his attention. He half-turned in his seat, using the handhold on the canopy bow to turn himself around. And he saw the F-22’s, coming down on the Zeros from behind at a thirty-degree angle. “Break left,” he screamed into his oxygen mask. He was holding the mask with his left hand. Now he dropped the mask and used that hand to hold the helmet steady as he used his right to slam the stick over and pull hard.
Fain’s missile couldn’t hack the turn. It went streaking into the ground. Miura wasn’t quick enough. Foy Sauce’s “winder went up his right tailpipe and exploded against the turbine section of that engine. Pieces of the engine were flung off as the compressorstturbine, now badly out of balance, continued to rotate at maximum rpm.
