“Let’s give him a little taste of metal to keep him honest,” Thor muttered. He designated the target, waited for tone, and toggled off a missile at it. He felt the Hornet jolt slightly as the massive weapons leaped off his wing and headed for altitude. “That’ll keep him busy for awhile.”
As Thor shed some altitude, he kept a visual on Archer. His wingman’s situation was clearly becoming increasingly desperate. Archer was weaving and bobbing around in the sky, but the Fitter seemed to anticipate his every move. Archer had him slightly off angle now, and Thor knew that the other pilot was waiting for the perfect shot up Archer’s tailpipes. That was the advantage of having numbers in your favor — you could afford to wait to take the shot, gang up on a poor defenseless Hornet. Well, it wasn’t going to happen that way, not on Thor’s watch.
Thor peeled off altitude quickly now, descending like a plummeting rock, the sleek, aerodynamic lines of the Hornet adding to his acceleration. He aimed directly for the Fitter, not wasting any time on the niceties of aerodynamics. To an outsider, it would look as though Thor intended to simply forget the missiles and ram the other aircraft out of the sky.
“He’s got me, he’s got me,” Archer howled, his voice anguished. “Jesus, Thor, I can’t shake him.”
“On my mark, break hard to the left,” Thor said. “Three seconds, now. Two, one,
Archer kicked his Hornet into a steep left turn, so hard and sudden it seemed that he would surely stall. He immediately dropped his nose down to allow the aircraft to gain speed. Thor engaged his nose gun, and stitched a line of rounds down the Fitter’s side. Fluid spurted immediately, whether from hydraulics lines or fuel tanks, Thor couldn’t tell. The Fitter departed controlled flight for a moment and lost the advantage of position he’d had on Archer. Archer whipped his Hornet over and around, falling neatly in behind the Fitter in a textbook demonstration of aerial combat tactics.
“All yours, buddy,” Thor sang out as he pulled away from them and grabbed for altitude. “I got some unfinished business up above.”
A short touch of afterburner quickly eased the Hornet’s objection to simultaneously turning, ascending and maintaining airspeed. The throaty roar sounded like the purr of a hungry lion.
Just as the Hornet reached sixty degrees nose up, silver and black flashed below Thor, a streak of aircraft moving past him in afterburner. The Fencer, the one who’d evaded the trap he and Archer had in mind. As soon as the Fencer cleared Thor’s gun engagement range, it pulled up into a hard climb, darting ahead of Thor.
“So you want it like that, huh?” Thor kicked the afterburner back in and executed a corkscrewing maneuver that danced the Hornet across the sky until it was directly below the climbing Fencer. He then converted all of his motion into a climb, and kept pace, watching for the Fencer to heel over at the top of his arc or to peel out of the climb and entice him into a horizontal game.
“Splash one Fitter!” he heard Archer cry over tactical. “Hang on, Thor, I’m on my way!”
“Roger.”
Suddenly, Thor saw the reason for Archer’s concern. Three Fencers had broken away from the fur ball and had evidently decided that Thor’s Hornet would be their next project.
“Got tone, got tone — break right!” Archer’s voice snapped. Without hesitating, Thor slammed his Hornet into a hard roll to the right, holding the roll as he lost altitude and tried to swing in high on Archer. Two AMRAAMS cluttered the air around him, and for one heart-stopping moment, Thor thought they’d locked on him. He was now at the same altitude as the pursuing Fencers, but descending, while the Fencers were just now rolling out to follow. Their orderly pursuit shattered into chaos as they realized that there were missiles inbound, and they muddied the air with chaff and flares.
Too late. The AMRAAM knew better. After wild, last-ditch spirals in an attempt to shake the missiles’ locks, two of the Fencers exploded into flames.
“That’s better,” Archer said, hot satisfaction in his voice. “That’s
“One on one,” Thor said. “Our friend in high station is headed back down.” The original Fencer seemed brighter on Thor’s HUD than any of the other targets.
“I’m on him!” Archer shouted, giving chase on the remaining Fencer. Archer snapped hard to the right and caught the last of the group of three with a short burst from his nose gun. The Fencer spouted long streamers of red hydraulic fluid and oil from the forward part of its fuselage. The volatile fluids snaked into the screaming turbines, and it was all over. They immediately ignited, and within moments, the aircraft exploded into shards of metal and gobbets of flesh.
“Mine!” shouted Thor, and peeled off toward his target. The remaining Fencer evidently had reassessed his tactical position and had come to the same conclusion that Thor had: it sucked. Without the other three Fencers to provide a diversion and killing force, facing two pissed off Hornets, discretion was the better part of valor. The Fencer turned and tried to run.
“Not so fast, you bastard!” Thor said. He tucked his Hornet in behind the now desperately weaving and bobbing Fencer. It was as though he could read the other pilot’s mind and anticipate his every move. It was an equal match of skill and capabilities, and for just a second Thor was tempted to let it play out, to harry the now- panicked Fencer like a cat playing with a mouse.
As he turned back into the fray, waiting for his next target, Thor felt a momentary flash of… what? Embarrassment? Shame? There was no point in playing with another pilot who was as good as dead. It was Thor’s job to kill them, not to like killing them. He should take personal satisfaction in his own skill, not in the death of another. Because that’s what he hoped he’d get from a bogie if their positions were ever reversed: a quick kill.
“Hornet one zero six, bogies at your three o’clock, high,” the AWACS rapped out, identifying Thor’s next targets. “Number, three. Engage at will.”
Archer glided in to form up on Thor’s wing, and the two turned to meet their next set of foolhardy Fencers and Fitters who thought they could mess with the United States Marine Corps.
Even though he would never admit it, Bird Dog’s greatest strength as a fighter pilot was his ability to do math. Not simple addition and subtraction, although Bird Dog himself would have pointed out that his sole purpose in life was to subtract enemy aircraft from the correlation of forces. And while that was indeed the end result, it was not what kept him alive.
Bird Dog’s ability to do math had very little to do with numbers and everything to do with spatial relationships. Some part of his cerebrum was able to instantly calculate vectors, angles and even do the calculus necessary to determine exactly where a given aircraft with X amount of acceleration and Y amount of increasing drag would end up in relation to his own aircraft. It also measured with incredible precision the distance between objects, and that ability had allowed him to slide in between two objects — say, a rock and a hard place, or a cliff and another aircraft — when other pilots might have thought twice about it. Bird Dog’s mathematical ability was coupled directly to his eyes and bypassed his consciousness.
Now, that part of Bird Dog’s mind was assessing the air in front of him and correlating it with his HUD as well as the actual count of enemy aircraft downed as tallied by the exultant cries of the other pilots over tactical. It processed the data, compared it with the briefing he’d had just as he launched, and came to an ominous conclusion: there was an aircraft missing. Not an American aircraft, no. He knew where all those were, and he didn’t question the fact that he did. No, the conclusion that surfaced in his mind, supported by a host of highly analytical processes that Bird Dog was never conscious of was that there was a Chinese aircraft missing from the tally.
Could someone have splashed it and been squelched on tactical? No, he hadn’t heard a partial report cut off by static or any other indication that someone had gotten down and dirty and not been able to tell anyone about it.
