Constantine rose slowly his chair, all argument having left him and went back to stand before the window.
Sub Lieutenant Hawkins fought back the nausea he felt welling up as his lead, Lt Allenby came up on the air “Contact, contact, five Backfires, ten miles, three o’clock low!” He could feel the sweat break out on his forehead as he twisted around to look at the five dots 10,000’ below, he didn’t know how his leader had spotted them and he definitely wished he had not, but there they were. The contact report was repeated to the ships and he found himself praying that the Hawkeyes would keep on pumping out the interference, so they would not be able to engage.
“Standby to go active Two, the E2s are shutting off the noise… … we’ll engage from port quarter with Sidewinders and then switch to Slammers before they get out of range… snap right and low yo-yo, with me… . Standby, standby… go!”
In the few seconds that had elapsed from when they had first sighted them, the Russian bombers had closed considerably. The Sea Harriers rolled almost inverted at the start of their dive; radars still on standby and dropped toward the faster Russian aircraft.
As the seeker heads on the AIM-9 Sidewinders detected the engine exhausts of the Backfires, their warning growls sounded in Hawkins’ headset and he found to his surprise that his fear was giving way to excitement.
The Fleet Air Arm aircraft bottomed out of the dive and pickled off two Sidewinders apiece on the up-rise, Allenby’s at the aircraft in the centre of the formation, and Hawkins at the bomber at the extreme right.
Fortune favours the brave, the Hawkeyes ceased their interference at that moment, as the Bomber formation broke, their threat receivers already alerting them to the closing IR missiles and they pumped flares out of their wingtip dispensers.
Allenby switched his radar to active and immediately got tone on the centre Backfire, unaware that the crew had temporarily blacked out in performing the vertical jink that defeated both Sidewinders. The Backfire’s automated defence system registered the AMRAAMs lock-on and the launch, dutifully punching out chaff bundles. It is not sufficient to merely distract a smart missile, the trick is not to be there anymore once it has wised up to the ruse, and that involves pilot type stuff. Allenby loosed off one AIM-120L at the lead Backfire before stamping hard on his left rudder pedal to lock up another.
The first Slammer took all of 100th of a second to analyse the various velocities of the chaff clouds and ignore them, locking on once more to the fast moving target heading up in a 70’ climb with little deviation in course. The Backfires weapons officer, the youngest aboard, started to recover first and his brain recognised the screeching alarm just as the AMRAAM detonated four feet from the juncture of starboard wing and fuselage. The crew would owe their lives to the weapons officer’s youth; he was alert enough to activate the communal ejection system.
Hawkins’ first Sidewinder was decoyed by a flare but the second stayed with his target through its 6 gee turn to starboard, flying up the port engine intake and exploding the bomber.
Cheering aloud to himself he rolled left and was amazed to see the three survivors already diminishing in size, but he locked up two of them with AMRAAMs and sent a 335lb missile after each of them. The air-intercept missiles accelerated to Mach 4 and ate up the distance between shooter and target.
Like a punter at a race track Hawkins urged them on down the final straight, cheering louder as his second kill fell toward the sea in flames, and booing as the other Backfire merely trailed a thick black streamer of smoke behind it. Hawkins revelry was cut short by his lead’s shout of
“Break left Tommy!”
Training took over and Hawkins automatically altered the angle of vectored thrust with his left hand, whilst turning the aircraft hard left with his right. The airframe shuddered as a cannon shell passed through the tail plane without exploding, and shook again with the turbulence of a Flogger overshooting, taken by surprise by the drastic manoeuvre.
The odds against the two Brits was three to one and they were not fighting as a unit, not covering one another, having split up whilst trying to account for as many of the bombers as they could.
Admiral Bernard watched the air threat get closer to the area of ocean his ships occupied, and the digital symbols representing his aircraft diminish in number. A large screen covered the after bulkhead in CIC, aboard the French aircraft carrier. In just over fifteen minutes his own carrier’s inventory of combat aircraft had been reduced by over 30 %, thirteen of his Rafale M advanced strike fighters had fallen, along with three British and Spanish Harriers, but accounting for thirty-three of the enemy thus far.
The two tracks of the S37s that had survived showed that they were heading southeast, presumably back to the barn to refuel and rearm thought Bernard, however neither Golden Eagle would ever take to the air again, they had taken too much damage.
As he continued to watch, oblivious to the activity going on around him in CIC, he noticed two RN Sea Harriers disappear from the screen and the four Floggers that remained after that fight steer directly for his AWAC and JSTARS cover, which in turn moved away.
"Putain de merde!" he shouted at the screen before turning to his English speaking communications officer.
“Get them back on station, we need them!” His own E-2C Hawkeyes were not equipped with the advanced command and control suite that US Hawkeyes were blessed with, and if the E-3 Sentry left then his ships would have to reveal themselves in order to provide air defence.
The Floggers launched anti-radiation missiles at extreme range and both the large aircraft switched their systems to standby, diving toward the sea and leaving their F-16 bodyguards to deal with the Russians. Bernard howled at the now blank wall screen,
"Merde a la puissance treize!" His senior aides rolled their eyes and exchanged looks, whenever their admiral used the term ‘shit to the thirteenth power’ he was seriously pissed off.
“Warn all friendly aircraft not to approach within seventy kilometres of the outside pickets… all ships go active, Now!..weapons free with the exception of ships to the southwest, get the Etendards and Rafales now on deck, back in the air and departing to the southwest, then close that corridor. I want a 360’ free fire zone established for the ships in ten minutes time, so get the flight deck monkeys moving… .Now!”
Smoke rose in a tall column above the coastal town of Bodø and citizens joined with the fire brigade to help rescue patients from the Nordland Central Hospital.
First established in 1796, the oldest hospital in Scandinavia had been struck dead centre by a Flogger J fighter-bomber after its crew ejected from the crippled aircraft. Had it not already dropped its bomb load then the situation would have been even worse. High-octane aviation fuel fed the fire and exploding 23mm cannon ammunition cooking off in the flames made the fire fighters’ job even more hazardous.
RAF Hawks provided top cover whilst the Norwegian and Danish F-16s recovered to the single undamaged runway.
As a serious attempt to put the Norwegians out of the air force business, it had been a failure, as a diversion to prevent their reinforcing the blocking North Cape Task Force it had succeeded.
A quarter of the attackers had been destroyed and only Banak was out of commission, but the defenders now had to reconstitute before continuing combat operations. It would take an hour to turn around the undamaged airframes and get them heading north, but the issue up there would be decided in a third of that time.