“Right. If I had any.” He’d selected a weapons load consisting primarily of Sidewinders, since carrying the five-hundred-pound bombs left little additional space on the wing hard points.
“Three minutes to Sparrow range,” Gator added.
“Short, go low. I’ll take high station,” Bird Dog ordered over tactical. He ascended another two thousand feet and watched as his wingman dropped down to angels seven.
The MiGs were visible now in the eastern sky, no longer simply black spots on the horizon but sharp-angled sleek fuselages and wings. And the wings dirty, he could tell even at this distance. What were they carrying? Probably a combination of short-and medium-range weapons, he decided. They’d known they were going to be in a dogfight, and wouldn’t have bothered to carry the Soviet equivalent of a longrange standoff Phoenix. And since they hadn’t had to carry five-hundred-pound bombs into target, they’d have more than enough weapons to spare, he figured. If they could catch the Tomcats, that is.
He watched the heads-up display adjust itself as radar homed in with the AWG-9 radar on the lead target, switching from search to tracking mode. A low growl sounded in his ears as a Sidewinder signaled that it had acquired a heat source sufficiently large to warrant its interest.
Bird Dog took a quick, reflexive check on the position of the sun. It was something you always watched for with a Sidewinder, that you weren’t taking a longrange shot at the sun with the short-range missile. No, it was still below the horizon. With all of his own aircraft safely behind him, he felt confident that anything the Sidewinder had acquired was a bad guy.
“Fox Three,” he said as he toggled the weapons selector switch over to the appropriate station. He slammed his eyes shut for a moment as the aircraft shuddered, trying to save his night vision from being destroyed by the phosphorous white fire of the missile’s ignition system. Even with his eyes closed he could see the red reflecting through his eyelids.
“Missile off the rail,” Gator said. “Looking good, looking good flares. Bird dog. He’s got flares. Your eyes ” The warning came too late. The lead MiG shot off three flares from an undercarriage slot and the white phosphorous orbs shattered the darkness. Bird Dog swore as his pupils contracted down “to pinpoints in reaction to it, effectively destroying his night vision.
The only consolation was that the MiG pilots would have been as blinded by the flares as he was.
Santana was concentrating on the radar picture and barely felt the flares shoot out from the undercarriage. The MiG-29, while a superbly engineered aircraft, had one major fault: It was a one-man operation.
In a high-threat environment with this many adversary aircraft inbound, he would have preferred to have an extra set of eyes in the backseat to keep watch on the other side. It was always a danger in a single-seater aircraft, losing sight of the big picture. He concentrated on the scope, his own source of data now that the Willie Pete shots had ruined his night vision, and vectored in.
Which one of those mongrels had had the audacity to fire on him?
There that was the one. He marked the radar symbol with a target designation. As often as he’d trained for ACM in practice. Colonel Santana had never actually faced hostile air. It was one thing to take on a small private aircraft mano a mano. No challenge, that like shooting ducks in a barrel, as the Americans said. He’d practiced this often enough that he felt comfortable with the tactics and fire doctrine, but there was still something intangibly different about the actual event. In practice, one could always call a time-out, pause and regroup, review one’s mistakes, and, most important, brag about one’s exploits afterward with the victim. Here, it was different.
The sudden, cold realization shook him. The air was no longer a friendly playground, something he’d earned the right to by virtue of his training, intelligence, and experience. It was a killing ground, and losing this battle meant more than having to put up with obnoxious bragging by the other side afterward.
And that aircraft, the one with the brilliant glowing red circle around it, was the one that had had the audacity to shoot at him. He felt a sense of relief, an easing of fear, as the threat to his existence became identifiable, distinct. No longer was it Death flying in the air around him, it was a single aircraft with a single pilot and a RIO behind him, he realized that threatened his existence. The odd conviction that if he could kill that one aircraft he would be safe overtook him. It made no sense, yet there it was.
Around him, he heard the rest of the flight calling out excitedly, each man claiming a particular target as his own.
The designation popped up on his screen as the other pilots did as he did, made the enemy personal and singular instead of massive and unreal.
Before, it had been a matter of tactics. Now, it was personal. And someone would pay for that.
“Asshole’s after us,” Bird Dog snarled. The MiG he’d shot at had turned and was headed directly toward him. With a closure rate of one thousand knots, it would be mere seconds before he would be within knife-fighting range of the other aircraft. Bird Dog had an advantage, though from what he could see, he had at least two thousand feet of altitude on the adversary. Altitude was safety, a fungible commodity in the air that he could trade for speed, for safety, or for any one of a number of critical flying factors.
He watched the MiG approaching, carefully calculating the angle between them. It would be a lead-lag situation in moments, particularly if the other pilot was not smart enough to avoid it. He wondered fleetingly how well the other pilots were trained. Not very, probably not if the Soviets had had a hand in it. If the other pilot misjudged the situation. Bird Dog would be able to climb slightly and drop in behind him, a perfect position for a Sidewinder shot.
The white-hot exhaust from the other aircraft’s engine would render any flare deceptions virtually useless.
“Hang on. Gator, time for some airspace.” Bird Dog slammed into afterburner again, tipped the Tomcat’s nose up, and shot almost vertically into the sky. The maneuver decreased his speed over ground radically, and would, he hoped, confuse the pilot below him.
As the altimeter spooled past fifteen thousand feet, he said, “Come on in, buddy. I’ve shot down MiGs before. You won’t be my first and I doubt you’ll be my last. If you think you’ve got what it takes, come on up and play with the big boys.”
Tombstone ran his hand lightly over the familiar controls of the Tomcat, marveling at how it all flashed back to him every time he took the controls. He could hear Tomboy murmuring to herself behind him, quietly walking through her own preflight checklist. They were sitting on the catapult, already affixed to the shuttle, steam pressure satisfactory, just waiting for the signal.
“All done. Ready to launch, Stoney.” Tomboy’s voice sounded as coldly professional as ever.
“Ready up here have been for hours.” He forced a chuckle. “That’s how it always is, isn’t it? The husband waiting for the wife to get ready?”
“You’re gonna pay for that one, big boy.”.
Tombstone’s retort was forestalled by approaching launch. He wiped his control surfaces, then signaled his readiness to the plane captain. He glanced at the Plexiglas board the man held in the air, instantly absorbing the figures noted there. Finally, he held out a thumbs-up.
The yellow shirt came to attention, snapped off a quick salute, then dropped to one knee and pointed dramatically forward toward the bow of the ship. Tombstone returned the salute, dropping his hand quickly to rest it on the throttles.