Moments later, Badger’s gray Tomcat approached, still trailing the bandit, wings folded back like those of a stooping eagle. Mickey had five more bandits on radar within twelve miles, closing fast, and plenty more within a thirty-mile radius. “Hey, Dixie!” he said. “We’ve got bandits all over the sky! I’m not sure I like these odds!”
“You wanna go to Phoenix, man?”
“Damn, I don’t know.” They had weapons free, but the big Phoenix missiles were long-range, standoff weapons, designed to knock down attackers threatening the battle group. The strategic situation was still murky; just who was attacking whom here?
“Hey, Mickey! You get a good look at that red bird we passed?”
“Sure did, Dixie. Mig two-seven, no bout a-doubt it.”
“Pass the word to ‘em back at the farm, will you? I don’t think they’ll believe me.”
“I think they’ll believe this one, Dixie. Only question is, was it a Russki or a Uke?”
“I couldn’t see a rounder or a star, could you?”
“Negative. He was going too fast.”
Damn. It was frustrating to be in combat with someone… and to not even know who it was you were fighting! The assumption back aboard Jefferson ? both in the briefings and in the bull sessions in the squadron ready room ? had been that the likely aggressors today, if indeed anybody came out to play, would be Ukrainians bent on jumping the gun on the Russians before Boychenko turned the Crimea over to the UN.
The aggressor aircraft appeared to be forming up in a loose-knit cloud to the west now, moving in a more or less northerly direction. As Dixie studied the pattern on his Vertical Display Indicator, he had the impression that he was looking at essentially a defensive formation, that the attacks he and Badger had endured had been launched by hostile barrier forces to keep them from breaking through to the main body.
“BARCAP Two! BARCAP Two! This is Dog House!”
“Yeah! Go ahead, Dog House!”
“We’re reading at least ten bogeys in your vicinity! Break off! Break off and RTB. Repeat, break off and RTB!”
“First sensible advice I’ve heard all day,” Dixie said over the tactical channel. “It’s gettin’ too damned crowded out here!”
“Roger that!” Badger’s voice came back.
A warbling tone sounded in his headset. Threat warning!
“Hey, Dixie!” Mickey called from the backseat. “They’ve got us painted!”
“I hear it.” That particular warning chirp ? and a red light winking on the threat display on his instrument panel indicated that a hostile aircraft had just established a radar lock on their Tomcat.
“Okay, Dixie,” Badger called. “The bandits’ve got missiles inbound at three-zero-two… looks like AA-9s. You got ‘em on your scope?”
“We have them,” Mickey replied. “Range… two-five miles.”
“Yeah, I think they just popped those things to scare us,” Red Burns said from Badger’s backseat.
“They’re doing a hell of a job,” Mickey said. “Let’s didi out of here, man!”
“I’m with you, brother.” Dixie brought the stick over again, swinging the Tomcat into a northeasterly course… back toward the Jefferson.
AA-9 Amos was the NATO designation for the Russian equivalent to the Navy’s AIM-54 Phoenix, a large missile with a range of at least eighty miles and active radar homing.
“What’s the range on the missiles, Mickey?”
“Nine miles.” The RIO sounded tight, and totally focused on his rear-seat console display. “Let’s go to burner.”
“Zone five, now!”
The Tomcat’s twin afterburners kicked Dixie hard in the back. The aircraft’s computer swung the wings all the way back as they passed Mach 1.5. Moments later they slipped past Mach 2; the Tomcat’s maximum speed at high altitude ? say, at forty thousand feet ? was Mach 2.34. At their current altitude of twelve thousand feet, the air was denser and sound traveled faster; Mach 2 was about the best that they could manage.
The AA-9 had a speed of about Mach 3.5, so there was no outrunning the thing in the short run. The long run was something else again, however. At Mach 3.5, the missile would cover nine miles in something like twelve seconds, but its speed relative to the Tomcat was only Mach 1.5 ? eleven hundred miles per hour, give or take a bit, at this altitude. At a closing speed of eleven hundred miles per hour, the missile would eat up that nine miles in about thirty seconds… a small eternity when it came to combat in the air.
“You got an idea about who they’re hunting?” Dixie asked. Likeliest, of course, was that one missile had been tossed at Tomcat 218, and another at 210.
“One’s definitely got our name on it,” Mickey said. “I think the other one’s tracking Badger.”
“Fun for everyone,” Badger said. “Fun the whole family can enjoy!”
“Yeah, well, it’s time to start partying,” Mickey said. “Dixie! On my call, break right hard! I’ll release the chaff!”
“Roger that.” He tightened his grip on the stick, trying to ignore the unsettling prickling sensation at the back of his neck. There was a terrible temptation to turn in his seat and try to see the incoming missile, but Mickey had a much clearer and surer picture of what was going on showing on his rear-seat display.
Range was down to one mile. Three seconds…
“Popping chaff!” Mickey yelled. “Break right.”
Chaff could be released both from the front seat and the back. Mickey was dumping clouds of aluminized mylar slivers to leave Dixie free to concentrate on the turn. Reacting at an almost instinctive level to Mickey’s call, Dixie hauled the stick right and kicked in the rudder, diving with the turn in order to pick up a critical bit of extra speed.
The G-forces piled on, crushing Dixie down against the hard back and bottom of his seat. For just a moment, his vision narrowed slightly, the only warning he was likely to get of the blackout he would suffer if he didn’t ease up a little. He held the turn as long as he could, willing the missile to miss them. By turning into the missile, he was using its greater speed to defeat it, since it could not turn at Mach 3.5 as sharply as he could turn at Mach 2. The chaff gave it a choice of radar-bright targets, enough to confuse its microchip brain and maybe give Dixie and Mickey an extra second or so to break out of the cone of its radar vision.
The explosion jolted Dixie as hard as kicking in the afterburners had, a solid thump from aft and left, accompanied by a piercing note, like the ricochet on a TV Western. For a moment, the controls went soft and he was afraid that they’d gone dead… but then he felt them biting the air again. He scanned his threat warning panel. No fires… no flameouts… no electrical failures. Christ, what had just happened?
“Mickey! You got any damage readouts?”
There was no answer from the backseat.
“Mickey! Yo! What’s happening back there?”
He checked the small rearview mirror, then twisted in his seat, trying to see aft, but the layout of the F-14 cockpit was such that it was almost impossible for the front-seat man to see his RIO, with his own ejection seat back and the RIO’s instrument panel between them. If Mickey was slumped down or forward…
“Mickey!”
Still no answer. He turned again in his seat, this time trying to check both wings and his stabilizers. Yeah… they’d taken some shrapnel, all right. The trailing edge of his left wing was showing some pretty bad damage; the inboard high lift flap was shredded, and there was damage both to the spoilers and the maneuver flaps as well. Three thin, smoky white streams from beneath the center of his wing were almost certainly avgas leaking from his port wing tank. He was conscious now of a shrill whistle, the sound that all combat aviators recognize at once as air escaping from their pressurized cockpit.
“Dixie, this is Badger! Do you copy?”
“Yeah.” He blinked behind his helmet visor. Things had happened so quickly that he was a little surprised to find that statement true. “Yeah, Badger, I’m here. I think we got a little shot up. And Mickey’s not answering.”
“Hang on. We’ll be there, in a sec.”
“What about the other missile?”
“It’s gone.” Dixie could hear the relief in Badger’s voice. “We outran the sucker.”
AA-9s packed enough solid fuel to give them a flight time of about two minutes. If the target aircraft could
