“Not so fast, buddy,” Tombstone murmured. He was concentrating on the attack geometry between the MiG and the Tomcat, seeing in three dimensions the advantage that the MiG was trying to obtain. “If you’re like the other MiG pilots I’ve been up against, you have a much better idea of what your aircraft will do than mine, although my former squadron may have given you just a little refresher course on it very recently. Still, I’m betting that you’re a lot more familiar with MiGs than you are with Tomcats. Let’s just see, shall we?” Tombstone kicked on the afterburners again and watched the fuel gauge spiral down. The Tomcat seemed to stop in midair, ceasing all forward movement to turn into a flaming arrow launched toward the sun. “Can you match that rate of climb? I don’t think so not with your low thrust-to-weight ratio. You may have the maneuverability, but I’ve got the power.”
At least until I run out of gas. He winced to see how far to the left the arrow pointed. There wasn’t going to be time to try this twice it would be a close-in-knife fight, first punch-wins engagement. And after that … well, he’d try to make it to the tanker, and if not.
.
.
well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d ditched an aircraft.
He radioed Batman and asked that the tanker be brought in as close as feasibly possible. “Already on it,” Batman said. “And he’s got two fighters buster with him, just aching to get a piece of a MiG.”
“Not a chance. This one’s mine.” Tombstone brought the Tomcat into level flight, now at thirty-five thousand feet.
His fuel consumption rate was much lower this high, but not sufficiently economical to make up for the gas he’d sucked up on afterburners. Still, the MiG probably didn’t know that.
He watched the MiG ascend, climbing at a shallower angle, but still impressive. He vectored toward it, intending to cut him off before he reached Tombstone’s altitude. One of the purposes of gaining altitude was to force the MiG into playing Tombstone’s game, into trying to match the Tomcat’s rate of speed. He couldn’t all the MiG could do would be to gain altitude while-losing speed. With any luck, he’d be going too slow to maneuver quickly out of Tombstone’s way.
The second reason for taking the MiG now was to avoid an angles fight.
It was a battle that the Tomcat pilots were trained to avoid at all costs. Never play the adversary’s game make him play yours. The key to successful fighter tactics was an aggressive, heads-up attitude, exploiting the adversary’s weaknesses while playing to your own strengths.
For the Tomcat, that strength was power. The MiG had the corresponding weakness.
Tombstone flipped the Tomcat over to watch the MiG ascend, then nosed down still inverted to meet him. He heard the low growl of a Sidewinder insisting it had acquired an interesting target. Tombstone was headed east, right into the rising sun. Did the Sidewinder have the MiG or was it going to begin one of its famous solar attacks, veering off in the atmosphere toward the rising sun until it ran out of fuel? There was no way to tell, not with the angle as it was between the two aircraft. He would either have to let the MiG proceed up a bit farther and gain some separation from the sun, or take a chance on losing the missile.
What the hell he had two. In fact, in relative terms, he had more missiles than gas. Tombstone toggled off a Sidewinder, crying “Fox Three, Fox Three” into the ICS.
Santana glared suspiciously at the Tomcat loitering above him, inverted in the air. When it nosed down to point at him, still inverted, he slewed the MiG around to put the Tomcat directly on his nose. Too far away for guns, but the Tomcat pilot might not know that. At any rate, seeing the tracers might distract him. He fired off two quick bursts.
A missile leaped off the Tomcat’s rails, headed almost directly for him. Almost Santana watched with something that approached amusement as the missile vectored determinedly away from his aircraft and toward the rising sun.
His confidence slowly returned. Perhaps he’d overestimated the Americans even he knew better than to take an eastern shot at the sunrise with the Sidewinder. He glanced down at the airspeed indicator, saw the MiG was still struggling to ascend. He swore quietly. Soon he’d have to either pull out of the climb or resign himself to ambling through the sky like a wounded turkey. At any lower speed, he’d be too easy a target for the Tomcat. He’d lose maneuverability, and his low speed vector would be no problem for the Tomcat to overcome.
He reached a decision, dropped nose down, and plummeted one thousand feet within seconds. His airspeed picked up satisfyingly, and he quickly rolled back around to face the Tomcat.
He was on the Tomcat’s six now, with a beautiful view of the Tomcat’s glowing tailpipes. He toggled off his own missile, another heat-seeker, satisfied that the angle might be almost sufficient to distinguish between the aircraft and the sun. Had the American made that same assumption, he wondered, studying the Tomcat’s undercarriage.
Three more Sidewinders hung there, more than enough to waste one shot as the pilot had done earlier. Suddenly, he wasn’t quite so certain that the Tomcat pilot had been foolish.
Tombstone heard the shriek of the missile indicator before Tomboy’s voice cut through the ICS, warning of it. He swore, slewed the Tomcat around to virtually pivot in midair, and pointed nose down at the MiG.
The heat-seeker came on, clearly fixed on the Tomcat rather than the sun.
The Cuban pilot had taken the same chance he had, with better results.
Fortunately, he hadn’t touched his countermeasures so far.
The Tomcat shook lightly as three packets of flares were ejected from the undercarriage. They burst into brilliant white phosphorescent fire, easily outshining both the sun and the heat signature of Tombstone’s exhaust. Later generation heat-seekers were trained to ignore targets that were too good, thus correcting for the tendency to vector on a flare rather than an exhaust and reducing the probability of its racing off toward the sun. Tombstone was betting that the Cubans used an earlier version of the missile, given to them by their Soviet master or their new friends, the Libyans.
“Got it acquiring the flare,” Tomboy said. ‘Tombstone, he’s coming around.”
“I’ve got him. I’ve still got altitude on himhe’s not going to like this.”
Santana was already setting up for his next shot as his first heat-seeking missile exploded harmlessly into a flare. He hardly spared it a thought-he was too busy trying to coax the Tomcat into descending into an angles fight. He could understand the other pilot’s refusal to take the bait, but he was determined not to fight it out in a wild yo-yo of shifting altitudes that would inevitably provide the Tomcat with a marked advantage.
Now what the he watched as the Tomcat nosed over and headed down toward him, surprised to see the pilot descending. Would he actually do that?
Enter a horizontal battlefield, knowing that it would put him at a disadvantage?
Well, he’d seen the pilot make one mistake. Perhaps it had been a mistake, and not a calculated chance. At any rate, this was the battle that a MiG excelled at. And if it was a mistake, it would be his adversary’s last.
“Stoney,” Tomboy gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”
“The only thing I have time to do before we run out of fuel,” Tombstone said grimly. “Start the pre ejection checklist. If this doesn’t work, we’re going for a swim.”