terrain.”
But what terrain? The answer flashed into his mind, wonderful in its brilliant simplicity and elegance.
The terrain here was empty air. Granted, there were different electromagnetic transmission zones. Peppering it like mountain ranges were the fur balls in progress, just as much terrain as a mountain has. If you could just… yes, there was an opportunity. It was a slim chance, but the only one he had.
The pilot cut back hard then kicked in his afterburners. He cut back immediately in the other direction, hoping to tighten his turn enough to come up behind the MiG — or at least force the MiG to conduct the same maneuver that he had on previous occasions.
Every time before, when he tried to circle back on the MiG, the MiG executed a wingover, almost a roll, and came in over him to get back in position. Every time, Bruce had responded with a hard turn to the right to shake the MiG.
But this time it would be different. He started to make his normal maneuver, and punched in the afterburners hard. Instead of coming around to try to close on the MiG again, the Tomcat shot straight up in the air, shoving the pilot and the RIO both back into the seat with a hard slam. Bruce felt his vision start to go gray, and he grunted and tensed his muscles in order to keep blood flowing to his brain.
And there it was, just ahead. A fur ball of two Tomcats and MiGs, both punching chaff and flares into the air like they had unlimited quantities, the Tomcats covering for each other as they broke off and headed for altitude.
Bruce zoomed in behind the MiGs, turning only slightly to stitch the wing assembly of one of them with gunfire and continuing on for altitude.
“Passing through angels thirty,” his RIO announced. “It’s going to be close.”
“Yeah, but not as close as it was before.”
“All clear except two,” the TAO announced, as his assistant counted down the seconds. Coyote nodded, mentally working through the time-distance problem. It would be close, too close. He felt a moment of intense pain as he contemplated the possibility that he might take out his own pilots. Blue on blue engagements — there was no more painful moment for any commander.
“I’m out of choices — we have to get this engagement back on track before the second wave reaches us,” he snapped. “On my mark — mark!”
The TAO relayed the information to the pilots, and watched the two laggards desperately claw for altitude.
“Mark!” Coyote’s voice came across the circuit clearly.
“Full auto,” the captain snapped. “Everything below angels thirty is a target. Now, let’s see if we can even up the odds.”
With the fire control system in full auto, the Aegis cruiser was capable of rippling off missiles in one-second intervals. The next thirty seconds, the deck under their feet rumbled and shook with deadly intensity as the missiles rippled out of their vertical launch cells. On the bridge, the crew turned away, the smoke and fire from the missile launch blinding them and burning their retinas with sharp afterimages.
Then, it was over. The light southern breeze cleared the smoke away from the cruiser. The missiles were still in flight.
“Incoming!” the RIO shouted, twisting around to watch behind them as long white telephone poles invaded the airspace they just left. “Approaching thirty-thousand feet — come on, we can do it. We can do it.”
The pilot felt a strange calm come over him. He had done everything he could, had fought his aircraft to the best of his ability. Now it was up to luck, chance, and whatever god watched over fighter pilots. A few hundred feet would make all the difference in the world to the flurry of missiles behind them. He just hoped that it would be enough.
Lieutenant Ackwurst floated his cursor between the two aircraft that were still within the Aegis firing envelope. He clicked on one, then the other, watching as the altitude figures on each rolled over, more quickly than normal, but far too slow for comfort. No, the missiles wouldn’t intentionally target friendly aircraft, but even smart missiles were pretty dumb. There was every chance that the two aircraft would be damaged in the fireballs or debris as the missiles found their true targets.
The lead aircraft kicked over 30,000 feet, and then only one remained. They watched, the altitude slowly increasing. As the aircraft reached 29,000 feet, the first standard missile found its target. Not that it was a particularly dramatic event by tactical data display — merely a blip, the change to a different symbol to indicate a kill, and a line of text rolling across the monitor: CONFIRMED KILL.
On the raw video and radar consoles, it was at least a bit more dramatic. The discrete green lozenge of the enemy aircraft and sharper image of the missile intersecting. The computer watched it, then re-evaluated its display, and the two sharp images dissolved into a myriad of spatters before the computer decided there was no longer a discrete target there.
A flurry of MiGs were behind the last Tomcat, the reason behind his desperate gyrations as he tried to prevent any one of them from dropping into perfect firing position. But then, modern missiles didn’t need perfect firing conditions. As the team watched, four antiair missiles sprang out from the Chinese horde and headed straight for the hapless American aircraft.
The captain had been holding the mike in his hand, his thumb hoisted over the key. He pressed down hard, and snapped, “Punch out! punch out!” shouting as he did so, knowing that the few microseconds the computer had taken to process data meant that he was already too late.
“Eject! eject!” the RIO shouted, his hand closing over the ejection handle. He’d seen the smoke and fire as the missiles were launched, even from almost a mile away.
But there was a reason the guy in front was a pilot, and that became quickly evident. His reflexes were faster, his motor skills honed to a lightning edge. He reached for the handle, jerked down, and pressed his back into the ejection seat. The canopy blasted off. Then the pilot, followed four seconds later by his RIO, punched out of the aircraft.
They shot out at a 45 degree angle from the doomed airframe, each one to a different side, the flames under their ejection seat from the rocket igniters the smaller cousins of their afterburner fire. The Tomcat spun in the air. It seemed to try to catch itself and continue on upward. But then, as they fell back down through 29,000 feet toward the ocean, three missiles caught the aircraft almost simultaneously.
The air above them exploded into an ugly orange mass, black smoke whirling implacably across the sky. The pilot shouted his protest, anger and frustration but also fear in his voice.
When they were well clear, the ejection seats separated from them, and their parachutes deployed. As the billowing fabric above them caught in the air, the pilot was jerked upward with a strong force. Not actually upward, but such a sudden decrease in his rate of descent that it felt as though he were being lifted up through the air.
The pilot saw his RIO’s chute, although he couldn’t tell if the man dangling underneath it was injured. And the Tomcats safely at altitude, they’d see the chutes — they’d let the carrier know.
For an aviator, the air around him was filthy. It seemed that every two hundred feet held another MiG. Most of the aircraft swerved away to avoid them, relying instinctively on international principles of military law, leaving them to descend in the clear blue sky alone.
But one didn’t. It circled around him, the jet wash blasting him sideways under the chute. For a moment, the pilot thought that the jet wash would spill the air out of his chute, sending him plummeting down to the sea like a rock. He touched his auxiliary chute, praying that whoever packed it had been damned good.
