side of the Tomcat, and if any part of my skin had been exposed, I know it would have frozen to the metal immediately.
I slid into my seat, wincing slightly as the cold plastic of it seeped in through my butt. My nuts drew up close to my body, frantic to escape the icy temperatures. The Russian technician who followed me in was thoroughly professional, checking the ejection harness and removing the safety cotter pins from the ejection seat. I kept my hands carefully clear of the ejection handle ? surviving an inadvertent ejection while on the ground was only slightly more probable than living through an ejection over the frigid Northern Sea.
Off to my right, I saw Admiral Ilanovich undergoing a similar procedure in his aircraft. He ran through his checklist, and I heard the metallic grumble of his engines start up before we were ready. Gator and I paced through the required items on our NATOPS thoroughly, following the book letter by letter. Finally, we, too, were ready. The air inside the cockpit was starting to warm up from our combined body heat, and a huffer was standing by in case we needed its auxiliary compressed air to get a clean start on the engine.
At the signal from the yellow shirt, I engaged the engines, letting them idle and warm up for a few minutes before applying any additional power. Start-up had to be done carefully in these climates, since uneven heating as the engine turned could warp the micro-millimeter clearances in our powerful engines. There was a little roughness in the beginning, nothing out of ordinary, and then the turbofans settled into their voracious, all-encompassing roar. I double-checked our radio circuits, got clearance from the tower, and then commenced the taxi. I let the admiral precede us into the air, waited until the turbulence he'd started up on the strip had dissipated, then eased the Tomcat forward.
We picked up speed quickly, and I luxuriated in the expanse of runway before me. Ever since I cleared the training pipeline, most of my takeoffs in a Tomcat had been off an aircraft carrier. Now there was no catapult to worry about, no jam-packed acceleration and quick leap into the air. I eased the Tomcat up off the runway, rotated smartly, and started climbing.
Following directions from the air traffic controller, radar still in a standby mode, I proceeded to our assigned patch of air to orbit and wait for the signal to commence. It came quickly, and I could hear Skeeter in the background in the control tower monitoring everything that went on.
Gator flipped the radar into search mode, and the picture sprang to life in my heads-up display. A few seconds of noise, which quickly dissipated into normal clutter and one solid, sharply outlined target.
'Tally-ho,' I said. Gator clicked his mike once in acknowledgment. I put the Tomcat in a turn to the right, vectoring in on the admiral's position. I slammed the throttles forward, edging into afterburner zone, but refrained from kicking it in just yet. While Admiral Ilanovich was right about having made some excuses for extra stick time during the last month, I knew that I was still not at my best.
I'd been better, during the days that I was flying every day, launching in all sorts of weather and seeking out the elusive three wire under the worst imaginable conditions. Better to let it come back slow, get back in the saddle, and to squeeze every bit of enjoyment I could out of this hop. I hoped the admiral in the other aircraft was doing the same.
As though by telepathy, we settled in for a gentle game of angles, maintaining altitude and whipping our aircraft around in increasingly tight turns without varying altitude. I let the admiral sneak in behind me, gave him two seconds to set up for a shot, then cut hard away. He stayed on my tail easily, dropping back a bit so he could cut inside my turning radius if he wanted to. He didn't, but the way he handled his aircraft let me know that he could if he wanted to.
Good, so far he was abiding by the rules. The private ones we'd set up between ourselves, not the ones for public consumption.
I heard Gator scratching some notes in the back, recording his impressions of the MiG's maneuverability while I did the flying.
Admiral Ilanovich broke away suddenly, putting the MiG into a steep climb. I gave him a head start, then tipped the Tomcat's nose up and kicked in the afterburners. In the backseat, Gator grunted, performing what we call the M1 maneuver. It's a series of tensing gut muscles and exhaling and grunting, intended to force blood to keep circulating in the brain during high G operations.
The Tomcat quickly overtook the MiG, easily catching her and passing her in a matter of seconds. Under normal combat circumstances, I would have eased off, slid in behind him, and gone for the killing shot up the tailpipe. As I passed him, the admiral waggled his wings, indicating by our private code that he would have initiated chafe and flares at that point to distract the Sidewinder. Even odds in my mind as to whether or not the decoys would have worked.
'Watch the sun,' Gator warned.
'I've got it, I've got it,' I said. And indeed I did ? keeping an eye on the sun was an essential part of fighter tactics, particularly when you like to use a Sidewinder or IR seeking missile. The dumber shots get decoyed by the heat source and can sail off toward outer space, trying to home in on the sun.
But there was little way I could miss it now, since it was glaring through the windscreen at me, bouncing hard and brilliant off every metal surface around me. The heads-up display looked slightly washed out, and I turned the Tomcat slightly to clear up the image.
We were leading the MiG now, still widening the gap between us and demonstrating the superior weight-to- power factor inherent in the Tomcat's design. I stayed well inside the edge of our envelope, not wanting to give away any more tactical information than I had to. Undoubtedly the Russian admiral knew a whole lot about Tomcats ? but there was no point in confirming anything that might still be theoretical at this point.
We fell into a series of gentle yo-yos, the same maneuver that had trapped Skeeter the day earlier. Admiral Ilanovich repeatedly cut out of the pattern and rolled back in on my tail, while I hope I surprised him a couple of times by pulling up well short of where he thought I was going to be and circling in behind him. This wasn't a dogfight ? it was more like two cats playing with a mouse. Each stalking and pouncing at the other without really intending to kill.
The sheer joy of flying carried me up on a wave of euphoria, giving me a feeling of sheer exhilaration and joy. This is what I had joined the Navy for, this all-encompassing and engrossing business of bonding with a piece of metal and putting it through its paces in the air. Who would have thought twenty years ago that I would be soaring out under the frigid northern sun, twisting and maneuvering in the air against a Russian MiG without one of us dying?
In the last fifteen minutes of the engagement, as we'd agreed upon, we both got down to business. We were still in a rolling scissors, when Admiral Ilanovich cut sharply in behind me, turning the formerly gentle banks and turns into a hard, braking reversal. Before I knew it, he'd come around and was climbing up my ass. Gator's AILR-67 gear spouted off a quick series of beeps, indicating that he had us targeted.
I activated countermeasures, spewing out flares and chaff over the frozen ground below. Just as they departed the fuselage, I jammed the Tomcat's nose down, increasing the altitude separation between us to almost two hundred feet. He may have been dogging it on his turn characteristics, but I had a trick up my sleeve as well. It was one that he'd no doubt read about, had probably even studied, but I hoped he was as lulled into the rhythm of our aerial maneuverings as I had been. We drew ahead of the MiG, and the tempo of the beeping increased. Just as I was sure Ilanovich was about to launch, I popped the wings out of their swept-back design, overriding the automatic configuration control. I also popped the speed brakes.
The effect was like stomping on the brake of a moving car. The Tomcat lost speed dramatically, immediately, quickly slowing to almost stall speed. Within a second, the MiG overshot us, and I jammed the throttles back forward to full afterburner and restored the swept-wing configuration of the aircraft. Now we were on his tail, our radar in targeting mode and IR seeking missiles at the ready.
'Fox two, fox two,' I said over tactical, indicating that I'd launched a heat seeker at the MiG. I rolled out of the pursuit, rolled away from his line of travel, pitched the nose of the Tomcat up, and started gaining altitude as fast as I could. Ilanovich saw me, pulled off one of those amazingly tight turns that I now knew he was capable of, and started following me into the air. There was no way he could catch me, but as soon as he steadied up on a course behind me, I cut to the right and broke out of the turn, circling back around to go head-on-head with him. 'Fox three,' I called, claiming a Sparrow launch.
Even as the words left my mouth, I saw the MiG jink violently, curving around underneath me and coming up behind in an attempt to break the missile lock. I heard the seeker head warble, then die out, indicating we'd lost lock.
