Tad pushed the nose down once again, taking his plane from a hundred meters high to twenty. The radar warning signal went away. Whether they’d shut down or simply lost him, he didn’t know. He was now masked by the surrounding terrain, which was the only reason any sane pilot would want to fly this low. He stayed low, holding his breath but glad to have it.
Skimming over plowed fields, he shot through a gap in the treeline praying that there weren’t any power lines strung in front of him. Still, he’d risk running into wires rather than exposing his plane to SAMs or flak. Now Tad ignored the landscape in front of the Eagle. Even throttled back, all he could see was a streaked blur. Instead, he gauged his height by looking out to the side, where his eyes could fix on objects in the near and middle distance.
Trees, houses, and fields flashed past and vanished astern. Flying this low was somehow exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Not even the wildest roller-coaster ride could compare. Although he tried to look at the steering cues on his HUD occasionally, he dared not risk a look at the map display. Instead, he relied on memorized landmarks and mental calculations to plan ahead. Things were going to start happening very quickly.
Suddenly a cluster of buildings at a crossroads passed underneath and he was at the IP — the initial point for his bomb run. Gladly shedding the hair-raising safety of nap-of-the-earth flight, he throttled to full military and climbed, turning slightly to line up with the road ahead. He set the chaff and flare dispenser to automatic.
His F-15’s nose had barely come up when the warning receiver lit up again, every light and warning buzzer sounding one right after the other. The EurCon air defenses were ready and waiting for him. He ignored the sounds, instead concentrating on the motion of the aircraft and his carefully planned attack maneuver.
As the fighter’s nose popped up, it blocked his view of the target area. Tad gently pressed the stick to the right and rolled his airplane inverted, so that the terrain was laid out in front of and over him.
He easily spotted the Cicha Woda River and the A4 Motorway running east to west, crossing it. The wreckage of a concrete span lay to one side, and he could see the gray-green pontoon bridge next to it, with raw cuts in the earth embankment on either end where heavy engineering vehicles had bulldozed and scraped ramps down to the river.
The bridge and the road west were lined with trucks, personnel carriers, tanks, and every kind of military transportation. Tad could see soldiers jumping from truck cabs and scattering in all directions, but tracers were still rising from all along the road. Every vehicle with a machine gun was firing at him.
More tracers floated toward him from a flak battery deployed on the south side of the highway. Oddly enough, the enemy ground fire didn’t seem to be bothering him too much, either. Combat had taught him to spend more time worrying about the dangers he could control, evade, or defeat. Flak was too random. If one of those glowing balls arcing skyward had his number on it, so be it. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
His HUD said he was high enough, and pulling the stick hard to the left, Tad quickly rolled wings level and a little nose-down. The F-15 straightened out at two hundred meters high — just above minimum safe height for his cluster bombs. He felt his speed building up.
His concentration was completely fixed on lining up on the mass of enemy matériel in front of him. He noted the ground fire, gray puffs and tracers more intense than before. Now it was starting to worry him, and fractions of a second passed like years as symbols crawled across his HUD and the ground rippled past beneath him. He had to hold a steady course. If he jinked, he’d miss.
The bomb line shortened to a dot in the center of his windscreen and Wojcik pressed the weapons release. Cluster bombs dropped from the ejector racks at quarter-second intervals, fell a hundred meters, then split apart, showering the enemy with five-pound antitank bomblets. Over five hundred of the deadly spheres rained down onto a box fifty meters wide and three-quarters of a kilometer long.
The area below him erupted in small explosions. Dust kicked up by each blast quickly obscured his view. Small red flashes lit the inside of the dust cloud. While the bomblets were relatively small, each one could destroy a tank or any other vehicle it landed on. Each explosion also sent deadly fragments slicing in all directions.
The stores panel showed the last bomb gone, and the Eagle accelerated again, freed of their drag and three-ton weight. The road ahead of him was still full of German and French equipment, though. Deviating from the attack plan, Tad lowered the F-15’s nose and pressed the gun trigger, hammering the stalled column with 20mm fire. He had to slow the enemy down, to kill as many of them as humanly possible. He held the run as long as he could, but finally had to break off as his altitude dropped dangerously low.
He banked hard right and kept his nose on the horizon. Although it was a dangerous companion, the cluttered landscape was turning into a familiar friend. Automatically he reset the gunsight and computer from air-to-ground to air-to-air mode, selecting Sidewinder. He was now ready to defend himself, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to.
He ran north at high speed, then angled to the northeast, over flat farmland and small villages. Occasionally he saw a burned patch on the ground or a cluster of vehicles where none should be.
The HUD cues changed, and he throttled back to cruise, turning carefully to the southeast. A minute’s run at afterburner had put him twenty-five kilometers away from the scene of his attack, and hopefully his victims had reported him fleeing to the north. Now his turn toward base should evade any pursuers. He eased up to the relatively safe altitude of one hundred meters. At economical cruise, he was only a few minutes from Wroclaw.
The symbols on the HUD were just stabilizing when the right side of the instrument panel lit up again. Sparing a glance down from the blurred landscape ahead, Tad saw two bearings on his radar warning receiver, with the legend “RDX/Rafale” next to each one. Almost as soon as they appeared, they changed, with the track warning light illuminated. Two of EurCon’s most advanced fighters were in the air and they knew right where he was.
His chest tightened, and almost without thinking he accelerated to full afterburner, pointing the F-15’s nose straight at the fighters. He energized his own radar, not really expecting to see anything, and was rewarded with little more than a few flickering echoes across the scope. The Rafale was not a “full stealth” design, but it had a reduced radar cross section. Even if anyone was lucky enough to get a lock on one, its powerful radar jammer could easily break the tenuous hold.
But Tad had expected that. Ever since that first embarrassing mock dogfight with a Rafale, he’d put a lot of mental energy into developing the tactics he’d need to take them on and win. Lining his aircraft’s nose up on the enemy fighters, he also angled it down, back toward the ground. With the speed of long practice, he set up his weapons panel.
He watched the HUD cues carefully, smoothly trading altitude for airspeed. Tad knew his maximum speed in this load configuration, and he also knew the range of the French Mica missile, about fifty kilometers. He counted the seconds, hoping that the French radars would have trouble sorting him out of the ground clutter. The French pilots, not feeling threatened, might take a few extra moments to set up their attack. After all, they might reason that a plane on the deck, running fast, was probably trying to evade — its pilot too busy and too frightened to strike back effectively.