along the fuselage. It was a Tu-16 Badger, almost certainly the Badger-G missile-strike variant. Flying off each wing was a smaller aircraft, indistinguishable at this distance but almost certainly a fighter escort. Coyote edged his stick to port and pushed it forward, nudging the F-14 into a better firing position. The Badger grew rapidly behind the pale computer-graphic symbols and data lines on his HUD.
Its attendants, already breaking from their larger consort and swinging around to face him, were a pair of Sukhoi-21 interceptors, Flagon-Fs painted in a tactical green-and-brown camouflage scheme.
But Coyote glimpsed something else in that blurred instant of approach.
Beneath each wing of the Badger-G was the slim fuselage and pointed nose of an AS-6 'Kingfish' antiship missile. As he watched, locking his target designator onto the hot IR glow of the bomber's twin engines, first one, then the other of those sleek and deadly darts dropped from their hardpoints, igniting tails of orange flame and unraveling contrails of white smoke.
'Launch! Launch!' Coyote yelled into his radio. 'Hotspur, Gold Eagle One, I have confirmed launch of two Alfa-Sierra six…'
Two more cruise missiles were now streaking at Mach 3 toward the center of the fleet.
And they were now less than one hundred miles out.
CHAPTER 11
'Fox two!' Coyote yelled, and a Sidewinder whooshed off the rail beneath his starboard wing. Unlike Phoenix or AMRAAM, the AIM-9 Sidewinder was IR-guided, homing on the heat given off by the target, especially the heat thrown off by a jet engine.
Too late, he realized he probably should have retargeted on one of the Sukhois. Its warload dropped, the Badger-G was already clumsily turning to port, moving onto a heading that would take it back toward the Kola Peninsula.
The Flagon-Fs, however, were thundering up from the sea, their targeting radars already locking onto Coyote's Tomcat.
Thinking fast, Coyote veered left, dropping his targeting pipper across the closer of the two Flagons. His last missile's IR warhead locked on and he squeezed the trigger. 'Fox two!'
Head-on shots with IR-homers were a lot riskier than sending one up the tailpipe; such a shot would have been impossible with earlier models of the Sidewinder, but the AIM-9M was an all-aspect heat-seeker, able to lock on to and track the heat radiated from any part of a target aircraft, front or rear.
With his last missile away, he broke to the left; at the same moment, his first Sidewinder arrowed up the starboard engine exhaust of the Badger and detonated. Ten pounds of high explosive did not make that big of a bang.
There was a puff of white smoke and a scattering of debris, but the Badger continued to fly, still turning gently away from the center of the American fleet.
Coyote, meanwhile, dove for the deck, forcing the two Flagons to break their climb in order to maintain their radar lock.
Standard operating procedure for the Su-21 was to fit it out with two AA-3 'Anab' missiles, loading a heat- seeking version on the port side, a SARH-guided version to starboard. By ripple-firing the two, the pilot better than doubled his chances of a kill. The Sukhoi also carried several smaller AA-8 'Aphids,' highly maneuverable dog- fighting missiles for close-in work.
At a range of about a mile now, Coyote decided, the Flagons would probably try to take him with Aphids. By going onto the deck and coming up underneath or behind them, he would keep them from getting a solid lock.
'Warning tone!' Cat yelled. 'He's going for a fox one!'
Damn! They'd opted for a radar lock rather than infrared… or else they were going to try to nail them with both.
'Hang on to your lunch!' he warned Cat, and he kicked in the afterburners.
Their second Sidewinder slammed into one of the Flagons; from Coyote's viewpoint, it looked as though the nine-foot missile had smashed straight through the Sukhoi's cockpit and detonated in a shattering cascade of glittering fragments. At almost the same moment, first one, then another missile blasted clear of the second Sukhoi, tracking on the hurtling Tomcat.
The Badger had been circling to the left during those past few seconds, smoke streaming from its damaged starboard engine. Coyote had been cutting to the left as well and was now dropping toward the Badger on a collision course.
There'd been no conscious planning on Coyote's part, only the instinctive and near-instantaneous reactions of a Top Gun-trained aviator in combat. As the two Anab air-to-air missiles circled around toward the fleeing F-14, Coyote slammed the Tomcat past the Badger so close he felt the airframe shuddering as it carved through the bomber's slipstream. For a split second, he could look up and to the right, seeing every detail of the Tu-16 ? the greenhouse-type canopies over cockpit and nose, the deadly probe of a 23mm cannon extending from the starboard side of its fuselage forward, the back-swept wings each tagged by a bright, red star. Almost, he imagined, he could see the startled faces of its pilot and crew.
Then he was beneath the Tupolev and past it, still shrieking toward the sea. The Badger was firing at him with its twin 23mm tail guns ? he could see them twinkling ? but without effect.
A moment later, the bomber exploded in a ball of flame.
'My God!' Cat said, and there was something like awe in her voice. 'You… you suckered that SARH into the Badger!'
Coyote twisted in his seat, looking back over his right shoulder. The Badger was falling toward the sea, its fuselage a mass of flame that was picked up and reflected by the water as a brilliant orange glow. Fire and glow rushed to meet one another.
'If the Flagon had a radar lock on us,' he said, 'we broke it by slipping into the Badger's shadow. The SARH lock transferred to the Badger and the Flagon driver didn't have a chance to break it… or else he didn't realize he'd started tracking the Badger.'
'You make it sound like you didn't know what was going to happen,' Cat said. 'But I know better! That was sheer genius!'
'Coyote, this is Mustang!' a voice called over his headset. 'Did you see that Flagon score an own goal?'
'Rog,' Coyote replied.
'Looks like that last Flagon's called it quits. He's running.'
'What about those cruise missiles?' Cat asked.
'Nothing we can do about them now. That'll be Shiloh's headache.'
'Coyote, this is Mustang. Listen, Skipper, I'm down to fumes. Let's head for the farm. I think we're gonna need to find a Texaco before we start hunting for the Jeff.'
'I'm with you, pal. Let's do it!' The two Tomcats vectored back toward the fleet.
The battle group's cruisers, destroyers, and frigates had but a single purpose in life: to protect the CBG's carrier. To accomplish this, the surrounding area was divided into three distinct defensive zones.
The outermost zone, between one hundred and three hundred miles from the carrier, was patrolled by the air wing's interceptors ? F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets ? which with their look-down, shoot-down radar capability could take on any target from a Backfire bomber to a sea-skimming cruise missile. The middle zone, from ten to one hundred miles out, was covered by the frigates and destroyers, firing Standard missiles designed to lock on to incoming cruise missiles and take them down. The inner zone, out to ten miles from the carrier, was protected by surface ships firing both Standard missiles and short-ranged AIM-7 Sea Sparrows.
