'It's closing!'
'Hang on, Malibu!' he yelled. 'Pop flares!'
But he already knew they weren't going to make it.
'There they are!' Taggart's RIO called. 'They're coming in behind us!'
'Hang on, Zig! I'm goosin' it!' He rammed the throttles full forward, cutting in the Tomcat's afterburners as he stood the aircraft on its tail. He heard Zig-Zag Ziegler grunt over the ICS as the acceleration slammed them into their ejection seats.
'We got two splittin' off!' Zig-Zag reported, his voice crackling over the ICS with excitement and tension. 'Two splittin' off! They're coming' after us, man!'
The Tomcat continued to climb, pursued now by a pair of Chinese-copied MiGs, while the two remaining MiGs stayed on the deck, streaking south.
Taggart caught a glimpse of sun flashing from silver wings, of arrowing white contrails in the humid air.
He pulled the stick over sharply, breaking out of his climb and dropping toward the jungle. If the MiGs going after Batman got too far ahead…
'Tone!' Ziegler yelled. 'Price! They got lock-on!'
He heard the warble of missile lock over his headphones. Someone was lining him up for a radar-targeted launch.
'Keep cool, Zig,' he yelled. 'They're messing with our minds. that's all!'
The MiG launched an instant later.
There was no time to think as the SAM clawed toward the Tomcat. Tactical doctrine claimed that it was easy to shake a Grail's infrared lock; often all that was necessary was to throttle back until its electronic concentration on the plane's engines was broken.
The problem was they were already flying low and slow. He'd have to goose it hard just to get enough speed for maneuver… and he was rapidly running out of sky.
He dropped the Tomcat's left wing, sharpening his turn. He could see the Grail's twisting white tail bending to follow. It was ignoring the flares, homing unerringly on the heat from the F-14's engines, and Batman remembered learning that Grails were fitted with filters which screened out decoy flares.
He had to pick up speed now.
Trading precious altitude for more speed, Batman plunged toward the jungle canopy, watching as the rapidly sweeping hands of his altimeter ticked off the feet. The missile followed.
Taggart pulled the Tomcat into a seven-G turn, standing on the port wing as he tried to outrace the missile. 'Chaff!' he yelled. 'Dump chaff!'
Packets of aluminum-coated mylar strips burst one after another from the Tomcat's tail, dispersing in a cloud behind and below the aircraft. Taggart caught a glimpse of the two MiGs following him, a tight-knit pair of specks low on the horizon. The radar-homer twisted toward him.
'Homeplate! Homeplate!' he called. 'This is Two-oh-three. We have launch. Repeat, confirm bandit launch!' Switching to the intercom again, he added, 'Arm missiles!'
'Hot and armed.'
The missile curved through the sky toward them…
Batman kicked in the Tomcat's afterburners, and six Gs molded him to the hard frame of his ejection seat. 'Keep… popping… flares…!' he grunted against the pressure. The treetops clutched at his left wingtip, seemingly only a few yards below as he hauled back on the stick. He glanced back over his shoulder as he pulled out of the dive, estimating the Grail's angle of attack. Adrenaline surged, sharpening every sense, every perception.
The missile flew up the F-14's port engine.
Batman both heard and felt the explosion, a solid whump which transmitted itself through the aircraft's frame. His instrument panel exploded with red warning lights. His left fuel pump was gone… trim control… left rudder… The engine fire warning lit up and Batman hurriedly shut down the fuel flow to the port engine and initiated a shutdown. God! They'd been savaged!
'Malibu! You still with me?'
'I'm okay! I'm not sure the plane is!'
Smoke boiled from the Tomcat's port engine. The left wing dropped low, and the aircraft began shuddering as Batman struggled to bring it under control. 'Mayday! Mayday!' He could hear Malibu in the backseat reciting the litany of an aircraft in distress. 'This is Tomcat Two-three-two declaring an emergency. We have been hit by hostile ground fire and are going down. Mayday! Mayday…'
Taggart kept the F-14 turning as the radar homer closed. The missile was visible as a minute flare of light on the end of a growing trail of white smoke as it came closer closer… then plunged through the invisible cloud of chaff and flashed past the Tomcat a hundred yards away.
'We did it!' Zig-Zag yelled. 'We're clear!'
The homer's radar lock was broken. 'Now let's give 'em one back!'
Taggart said. He brought the Tomcat around smoothly, pulling out of the turn above and behind the pair of MiGs which had fired at him. They were jinking now, aware that the American had escaped them, aware that he was closing in on their six.
In targeting mode now, he selected a target on his HUD display. The square graphic of the targeting pipper turned to a circle and he heard the growl of the Sidewinder in his headphones: lock-on!
He closed in for the kill.
'Batman!' Malibu called. 'I'm getting dead air on the radio. I don't think we're getting through!'
A chunk of shrapnel might have sheared an antenna lead. Batman checked his compass. They were on a bearing of three-four-nine… almost straight north, heading smack for the Burmese border if they hadn't crossed it already.
He tried to turn again and felt the Tomcat buck wildly in response. Damn!
That missile must have torn half the portside stabilizer away!
Using flaps and the aircraft's tendency to sag to the left as it hung from the starboard engine, he began working to bring the Tomcat around in a slow, sweeping turn. There was no way he was going to land this baby back at U Feng, but at least he might make it back over That territory. Batman had no desire to sample the hospitality of the current military regime in the Socialist Union of Burma.
'How bad is it?' Malibu called from the back seat.
'Bad… but we'll manage!' Batman replied. He checked the altimeter.
They were holding their own, anyway, still level at five hundred feet.
'Remember the briefings on the Grail? We still have a good chance of getting back.' In the '72 war in the Middle East, something like sixty percent of the Israeli warplanes hit by Grails had still managed to make it back to friendly airfields. The SA-7 was nasty because it was small, portable, cheap, and could be fielded in great numbers, but the warhead together with its fragmentation casing only weighed about four pounds… too small to do serious danger to an aircraft as heavy as the Tomcat.
More red lights came on. That warhead might be small, but it was vicious… and modern jet fighters were relatively fragile things, vulnerable to a high-velocity spray of shrapnel. They were losing hydraulic pressure now.
They still might make it, though, if…
