“You make it sound like this is more fun than watching your alma mater score at homecoming.”
“More interesting, anyhow. Now if the gomers get about four missiles or so in the air at once, we’ll give them the Shrike we’ve set up. If they shut down they’l lose all the missiles, and if they don’t-” Jake Grafton drew a ragged breath. One avoided SAMs by trading altitude and airspeed for angle-off, as they had just done, thereby placing the missile in position where it could not make the turn required to intercept. If enough missiles were in the air, an aircraft could run out of altitude and airspeed before it had outmaneuvered all the missiles. Cole knew the facts of aerial life as well as he, probably better.
“Where’d you get all this confidence in my ability?” Jake asked.
“I had an uncle with a nose like yours.”
The Firecan went off the air now, leaving only the pulse of search radars to break the silence. A Fanson painted them for several seconds, then it too fell silent. Waiting is the toughest part, he thought. You wait for the brief, you wait for the cat shot, you wait to get shot at. It’s an old complaint, as old as the first warrior, but knowing that doesn’t make the waiting any easier.
The missile warning lit up again. Jake checked the strobe indicator on the detection gear, which told him the radar was at five o’clock. He swung hard maintaining his altitude, and searched the blackness. Two missiles were in flight, and a third lifted off as he watched.
The missile light hashed and the aura warning “Three SAMs up.” A warning wailed. A grunt was the only reply.
The pilot held the turn until the missiles were inbound at One o,clock, still low but climbing On the missile ignited and raced skyward.
“Point the plane at the radar and gimme fifteen degrees.” he said. As the pilot complied, the missiles nosed up, hidden by the nose of the plane, and disappeared from their view. “Hold it,” said Cole.
The falsetto screech of the missile warning made his heart beat wildly. Shoot Cole said, and the pilot squeezed the trigger with his finger and pushed the pickle button with his thumb. Cole told him to hold both buttons for a second-the time delay was a safety thing-and reduced the chances of an inadvertent firing.
An age later a white fireball erupted under the right wing with a “whoosh.” Jake saw the bombardier outlined in the brilliant light, which rocketed forward and faded to nothing in a fraction of a second.
“Split S,” Cole ordered when the pilot didn’t react as expected with sufficient speed. Blinded by the brilliance, Grafton instinctively jammed the stick to the left, spun the plane what he hoped was 180 degrees, then he blinked rapidly and pulled hard toward the earth because he had lost his night vision. “Chaff,” Cole reminded him. jake pumped the button.
His vision was coming back. He could make out the panel and the vdi.
Now he could read the vdi. The plane was seventy degrees nose down, inverted. The missile light still flashed.
Why hadn’t the gomers shut down? He shoved the stick forward, rolled upright, and pulled the nose up while he searched the sky for the incoming missiles.
He saw them strung out in a trail, the first one way high and arching down, but it would overshoot.
“More behind us,” Cole said. Jake dropped the left wing and clawed the plane around. He checked the indicator. The radar they had fired at had finally cease transmitting, but another radar behind them was now guiding missiles. He found the oncoming pinpoints of light and continued his turn, dropping the nose slightly to keep his airspeed from bleeding off. He wanted to dive more steeply to pick up speed as he was moving at only 300 knots, but he was down to 12,000 feet and if they launched another SAM when he was below 10,000, he might be forced to descend almost to the surface.
The missiles were at two o’clock and at his altitude when Jake leveled the wings and shoved the stick forward until he and Cole floated weightless against the restraining straps at zero G. The nose fell slowly as they flew the parabola, but the engines’ thrust was more effective without the induced drag from the wings-they weren’t making lift at zero G-and the airspeed quickly increased to more than 400 knots. The left missile appeared to be overshooting, but the trailer was correcting. The pilot squeezed chaff, rolled right, and yanked the stick hard.
Now! The second missile was also overshooting. The missile warnings ceased as the second SA2 detonated in a flash of white light about a thousand feet away.
Jake climbed and turned toward the northwest. His body trembled in the sudden hush. The aural warning was silent, the missile light was dark, but for how long? To the south, fifteen or twenty miles away, antiaircraft guns clefted the night. “Looks like our bomber friends have arrived,” said Jake over the ICS to Cole.
On the radio, Jake asked, “You up on this freq, Sammy?” With his gloved hand, he wiped the perspiration from his brow.
“Roger.” Lundeen’s voice.
“Five Oh Three?” he asked as he noticed another flak concentration a little farther north.
“We’re up,” Rabbit Wilson said.
Jake heard Cole key the mike. “Five Oh Six, how far from your target are you?”
“About forty miles out,” Lundeen replied.
“Pop up to fifteen hundred feet and stay there a bit,” Cole suggested.
“We’ll use you as bait.” Lundeen clicked his mike.
Well, Jake thought, weren’t they all bait?
“If they shoot at Lundeen out of Hanoi,” Cole said to Jake, “we’ll fire the Standard missile as soon as we see the first SAM. There’s a site there that has been peeping once in a while and I’ve slaved the STARM to his signal.” With luck, the STARM would be locked in on the Fansong even if it went off the air before the missile arrived. With luck.
Grafton reached 18,000 feet and reined in the power to ninety percent RPM. They had to save fuel somewhere. He pointed the nose toward Hanoi and let the airspeed decay as he climbed. Attitude could always be converted to airspeed simply by diving. “About five degrees nose-up, no more,” Cole advised him.
Flak sparking in the darkness below marked Sammy’s progress across the night sky. When would another SAM launch? Jake wiped his eyebrows again with a gloved finger. “Man, we’re having fun now,” he muttered.
Cole looked at him.
“Morgan liked to say that,” Jake explained.
Cole pointed. The pilot saw the tiny pinpoint at one o’clock.
This time he closed his eyes as he squeezed the buttons on the stick. He heard the whoosh as the missile ignited and felt the brightness of the STARM fireball behind his closed eyelids. perhaps three seconds had passed since the first SAM was launched.
“You have a SAM in the air and a STARM,” Cole told Lundeen. “Stay at fifteen hundred as long as you can.” By the time he had finished speaking a second SA2 had been launched and was following in the wake of the first.
“They’re guiding,” Cole informed Grafton as he consulted the gear on his panel.
Their own early warning system remained silent because the Fanson radar was not pointed in their direction.
“Stay up, baby,” Cole whispered over the ICS. Jake knew he was really whispering at the enemy radar operator who was sitting in a dark semitrailer van an watching the blip that was Devil 506. A few more seconds …
Jake’s attention was riveted on the place in the darkness from which the two SAMs had been launched. He forced himself to ignore the exhaust plumes of the enemy missiles streaking along parallel to the invisible earth, streaking toward Sammy and Marty Greve.
“I’ve been up here long enough,” Lundeen an announced over the radio.
“It’s off the air,” Cole said.
The STARM was invisible because it had exhausted its fuel just before it began homing in on the emission of the Fansong.
The pilot saw a faint flash. Grafton told Cole about it. The bombardier shrugged. “Maybe we got it.” He manipulated the switches on the armament panel to put the second STARM in readiness.
The pilot turned and let the nose slide down. He stabilized at 18,000 feet.
The search radars continued to paint them and a Firecan locked them up momentarily Jake saw the rippling twinkles that were Lundeen’s bombs, and a minute later, somewhat closer, a similar string of fireworks where the
