“Two Flankers have him covered,” the backseater muttered. “He won’t be back.”
“Good.” One Tomcat alone would be easy prey. Easier, anyway. The numbers were in the Chinese’s favor, at least until the Americans could get the rest of their aircraft off the deck.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Bird Dog muttered. The radar contact was approaching at five hundred knots, slightly slower than a Tomcat’s max speed at this altitude. “You might want a nice look at my ass, you pervert, but I’m onto you!” He pulled the Tomcat into a tight bank, cutting across the path of the Flanker.
“Jesus, Bird Dog!” Gator yelled. “You want to give him a great beam shot or what?” As if in response, the high-pitched warble of the missile lock tone wailed in their headsets.
“Worked once, will work again. Chaff!” Bird Dog ordered. He put the Tomcat in a steep, circling climb, pulling in behind the Flanker again.
“It’s still got us! Chaff away again!” Gator shouted.
“Hang on! We’re going to show this fellow what a real fighter can do!”
“Go, go, go,” Mein Low chanted, watching the missile pip approach the American fighter. The Tomcat was above and behind him again, rapidly approaching perfect firing position for the Sidewinder. He banked hard to the right and nosed up into a steep climb, putting his aircraft between the sun and the American.
“Missile!” his backseater screamed.
“Sidewinder,” he grunted against the G-forces pounding him into the seat. “Flares, chaff, more flares!” The gentle thumps were barely perceptible over the screaming engines and the high-G-force vibrations.
A wash of turbulence shook the jet, and a few sharp metallic noises bit through the roar of the engines. “It went for it,” his backseater announced, relief evident in his voice.
“Now for him,” he replied, dropping the jet’s nose down. The Tomcat was now below him, afterburners screaming across the infrared spectrum. He toggled off a heatseeker, then climbed again.
“It went for the flare, Bird Dog,” Gator said. “One Sidewinder left. Missile lock!”
“You’d figure. Let’s see if their missiles are any smarter than ours. Flares!”
Gator popped two flares. Bird Dog wrapped the Tomcat into a ball, turning more sharply than he’d ever tried before, standing the jet on its tail.
“Guess not,” he said a few moments later as the Chinese heatseeker exploded into the middle of the flare grouping. “Let’s make this last one count!”
Bird Dog popped the speed brakes, losing fifty knots of airspeed almost immediately. The Chinese fighter quickly overshot them. “Fox three!” Another Sidewinder darted forward off the wing.
“You’re inside minimum range!” Gator said.
“By the book, I am. Wanna bet that the firing doctrine has a safety factor built into it?”
“You can’t count on-” The explosion two miles in front of him cut him off. “-that every time,” Gator finished. “Damn it, Bird Dog, those safety factors are there for a reason. See?”
Bird Dog stared at the fireball in front of him. The missile had detonated beyond the enemy fighter. The aircraft turned to meet him, putting him within gun range.
“All we got is one Phoenix and one Sparrow. No more knife fights, Bird Dog.”
“And guns. Don’t forget the guns.”
Bird Dog slewed the Tomcat to the left, turning head-on to the other fighter, and pointed the Tomcat’s nose slightly ahead of the other aircraft’s course. He carefully led the enemy fighter’s maneuver and squeezed off his gun. Six thousand rounds per minute streamed out of the six-barrel Vulcan 20-mm gatling-gun, stitching a ragged line down the side of the other aircraft. Bird Dog came close enough to see the windscreen shatter and chunks of the hardened Plexiglas spray out away from the airframe.
Smoke streamed from the right side of the aircraft, which was rapidly losing altitude. A punctured fuel tank, probably, he thought. At any rate, he was hurt badly enough to be out of the air battle raging above him.
Bird Dog turned the Tomcat back toward the aerial fur ball behind him. “Where’s Batman?” he demanded.
“Nine o’clock, six miles. He took out one Flanker, but he can’t shake the one on their tail.”
“Think they’d like a little help?”
“Might come in handy. Course, Tomboy’ll swear later that she could handle it alone.” The RIO grinned. “It’d be nice to pull her tail out of the fire for a change.”
“Tallyho!” Bird Dog said a few minutes later. “Looks like she’s in trouble to me!”
Batman’s Tomcat was heading for the deck, just finishing off a high altitude maneuver designed to give him tactical height and position on his opponent. It hadn’t worked. The smaller, more maneuverable Flanker had cut inside his turn. The JAST Tomcat was jinking like crazy, trying to screw up the shot. The maneuvers bled off airspeed and reduced the speed advantage the JAST Tomcat had over the Flanker.
“Batman, pull up and break right!” Bird Dog ordered. Without waiting for a reply, he screamed in on the pursuing Flanker and toggled the stick back to select a Sidewinder. As soon as the Sidewinder growled its acquisition signal and Batman had cleared the field of fire, Bird Dog shouted, “Fox three!” and shot his last close- range missile.
Seconds later, the Chinese Flanker exploded into a fireball. Shards of metal pinged sharply off the skin of the Tomcat.
Bird Dog got a quick acknowledgment of no damage from Tomboy and then grabbed for altitude, heading for the next engagement.
“You only got the Phoenix, Bird Dog,” Gator reminded him. “Too close quarters for another shot.”
“Still got the guns.”
“But not much ammo. Face it, Bird Dog, it’s time for us to be out of here. Let’s get up high, look down, and see if there’s anything we can do from there.”
Bird Dog reluctantly acknowledged the wisdom of Gator’s advice. Two minutes later, Batman and Tomboy joined them, the wings of their Tomcat clean and vulnerable. At fifteen thousand feet, they circled for the next ten minutes, listening to the tactical chatter, calls for assistance, and victory screams gradually subside. Finally, the last of the adversary air had either fled or fallen into the ocean.
The rest of the Tomcat squadron joined them at altitude. Most still had Phoenixes hanging under their wings. The Tomcats turned back toward the carrier while the Hornets lined up behind the two KA-6 refueling birds, eager to replenish their tanks before attempting a landing.
Less than half an hour after they’d met the American fighters, the remaining Chinese fighters turned west to head back to their base in Vietnam. Only twenty-five of the fifty Chinese aircraft survived the brief but furious ACM after being deserted by their supposed Vietnamese allies.
The aircraft straggled into a loose formation and watched in stunned silence as the Americans broke off the attack. Had the Chinese had the Americans’ tactical advantages, they would have pursued the retreating enemy. Burning airframes out of the sky was a good method of ensuring there would be no counterattack.
Ten miles from the coast, the Chinese flight leader — the senior pilot left alive — began to understand why the Americans had not come after them.
CHAPTER 27
