'Wait one…' She was checking her Tactical Information Display, the round screen centered on her NFO's console. 'Yeah! Got it. Bearing zero-nine-five, range four-two and closing… shit, Mach three point five.
Coyote, I think we've just picked up an Amos.'
'Stay on it. We'll let it get closer.'
'It's close enough for me right now.'
'Yeah, but if we break, it'll break with us. Stay frosty.'
'I'm so frosty I'm freezing to death.'
'Mustang! You there?'
'Right here, Coyote. Loose as a goose on your four.' Navy aviators tended to fly in widely spaced, flexible tactical formations, referred to as 'loose goose,' rather than the tight wing-and-wing approach used by most of their opponents.
'Rog. Let's go ballistic before that thing kicks us in the ass.' At this range, the incoming missile might be tracking either of them. There'd be no way to tell until it got a lot closer.
'Affirmative.'
'Going to zone five.' He rammed his throttle forward.
'Right with you.'
At their current altitude of just over twenty-thousand feet, the Tomcats could manage about Mach 2.3. The missile following them, now forty miles away, was traveling at Mach 3.5, which meant that even at their top speed it would continue to overhaul them with a closing rate of almost eight hundred miles per hour.
With luck, the air-to-air missile would run out of fuel before it reached them.
If it didn't, it would catch up to them in another three minutes.
The CICOs in the American line's E-2Cs reported thirty Amos air-to-air missiles incoming during the first few minutes of the exchange. EA-6B Prowlers, flying in their electronic-warfare/electronic-countermeasures role off both the Jefferson and the Eisenhower, targeted the missiles with intense bursts of radar energy designed to burn out their delicate SARH receivers.
Other AA-9s were decoyed by chaff or knocked out by RIOs using their Tomcats' own ECM assets.
In all, only eleven American aircraft were hit, and of those, four were only damaged by the detonation of the AA-9's radar proximity fuze and were able to make it back to their respective carriers.
Against such odds as they were facing now, however, the Americans could not afford to lose a single plane.
'It's coming fast, Coyote! Range five miles-'
'Mustang! When I give the word, break right. I'll go left.'
'… four miles…'
'Roger that, Coyote!'
'… three miles…'
'Now! Break!'
Coyote pulled the stick hard to the left and forward, going into a dive to pick up extra, crucial speed. Stealing a look back over his shoulder, he could see the onrushing missile now, a pinpoint trailing an endless thread of white scrawling across the eastern sky. As Mustang slipped off to the right, the missile tracked left.
It was after him and Cat.
He'd dropped out of afterburners to avoid guzzling up his remaining fuel, but he kicked them in once more, fighting for every possible extra measure of speed. The G-forces piled on top of his head and chest and gut, squeezing the air from his lungs, clawing at his eyeballs in their sockets.
'One… uh! mile still uh!… with us!' Cat was having to force each word out, punctuating them with savage grunts to literally force the air out of a diaphragm nearly paralyzed by almost nine Gs.
'Chaff!' Coyote yelled. Rapid-bloom chaff exploded from the Tomcat's tail, myriad slivers of aluminum-coated mylar cut to precise lengths blossoming in an expanding cloud astern. The missile, now a few hundred yards away, automatically tracked for the middle of its radar target as it traveled left to right, aiming at the so-called 'centroid of reflected radiation.'
When the radar image suddenly smeared into a far larger, longer target, the AA-9's aim shifted to the right…
… and then Coyote snap-rolled the F-14 into a hard, reverse turn, climbing now and breaking out of its turn. The missile flashed into the still-scattering cloud of chaff, its simple-minded proximity fuze decided that it had reached the target, and it detonated with a thunderous roar. Bits of metal pinged and clattered off the Tomcat's hull, but no warning lights winked on in response.
'Coyote, this is Mustang! Are you okay?'
'Copacetic, Mustang. Still here!' Coyote stared up through his canopy at that deep, impossibly blue sky, crisscrossed with the lacy weavings of aircraft and missile contrails. It struck him suddenly that he'd been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the past ten minutes, killing or damaging a probable total of six enemy planes and damned near getting killed himself.
And in all that time, he'd never been close enough to even once see a Russian aircraft.
'Mustang, Coyote,' he called. 'We're down to two AIM-9s and coming up on bingo fuel. I'd say it's time to RTB.'
'RTB' meant 'return to base.' Time to head back to the Jeff and rearm.
'That's a major roger, Skipper. Lead the way.'
Coyote switched his HUD back to NAV MODE and picked up Shiloh's directional beacon. With Jefferson off the air for the moment, he'd have to home on the Shiloh, then when he got in close enough, find the Jeff by Mark-One eyeball.
He was now less than 120 miles from the center of the battle group. He cut back on his throttle to take them down closer to the water and eased onto the new heading.
They should be in shouting distance of the Jefferson in another twelve minutes.
Russian naval tactics, like their tactics for land warfare, depended on saturating the enemy's defenses, piling on so much raw power in such huge numbers that sooner or later those defenses began to leak. Their bombers, the survivors of the Tomcats' Phoenix assault plus those that managed to get close enough to launch before being shot down, had managed to release a total of ninety-three ship-killers, most of them AS-5 'Keit' and AS-6 'Kingfish' antiship missiles. Over thirty feet long, weighing over five tons apiece, and traveling at better than Mach 3, these missiles hurtled across the Barents Sea at wave-skimming height. Some were programmed to go all the way in at low altitude; others were set to pop up during the last few miles of their approach, attacking the carrier group from almost straight overhead. The mix of approaches was designed, like the dive-bomber/torpedo-plane tactics of World War II, to confuse, divide, and overtax the target's defenses.
Coyote peered past his fighter's HUD, trying to pick out details against the sun-sparkle off the ultramarine sea. He was at five thousand feet now, but the bandit was below him, skimming at damn-near wave-top height on a direct course for the center of the battle group. His low altitude had provided excellent cover, masking him in the back-scatter from the surface of the sea. He was definitely a 'leaker,' a Russian bomber that had managed to slip unobserved deep inside the CBG's defenses.
'Range two miles,' Cat told him.
'Rog. I'm setting him up.'
They were close enough now that Coyote could recognize the back-swept wings, the twin turbojets set close
