Did this situation meet that standard?
If these guys couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, would any situation ever meet that standard?
Turk called in to the air controller aboard an AWACS over the Mediterranean. He was handed off immediately to his supervisor, the acting “air boss” for the allied command.
“Four hostile aircraft, they have fired,” said Turk. “Am I cleared to engage?”
“Cleared hot,” the controller replied. “We see the launch — you are in imminent danger.”
“Roger. Copy. Tigershark engaging.”
While keeping the missiles in mind, Turk cut west to begin his attack on the planes. The Mirages split into two groups, one staying close to the original course north and the other vectoring about thirty degrees farther east.
Turk told the controller that he was ready to fire. Before the man could answer, the Mirages suddenly accelerated and fired more missiles.
“No lock,” added the computer, telling him that the missiles had been fired. Turk guessed that the pilots in the Libyan jets had only a vague idea where he was, and were trying to bluff him away — a foolish strategy, though not entirely without precedent.
“Cleared hot to engage,” reiterated the controller, just in case Turk had any doubts.
He did — he’d never shot down a real plane before — but that concern was far from his mind. His training had taken hold.
“Lock targets Three and Four,” Turk told the computer. “Lock enemy missile one. Compute target course. Prepare to fire.”
“Targets are locked.” Red boxes closed in around each of the enemy aircraft depicted in his helmet. “Ready to fire.”
Lined up on Mirage Three, Turk pressed the trigger. Within a nanosecond the Tigershark’s rail gun threw a bolt at the lead Mirage.
The weapon emitted a high-pitched vwoop as it fired, and the aircraft shook like a platform when a high-speed train shot by. As soon as the shot was away, Turk moved the aircraft slightly, hitting the next mark lined up on his targeting screen, which was playing in the pseudo-HUD at the center of his helmet visor.
Vwoop!
He had to turn for the missile, but it was still an easy shot.
Vwoop!
All three shots were bull’s-eyes; the projectiles hit their targets with less than.0003 percent deviation.
The projectile fired by the gun was relatively small, with a mass of only.7 kilograms — approximately a pound and a half. But the gun accelerated it at something in excess of 5,000 meters per second, giving the tungsten slug an enormous amount of kinetic energy — more than enough, in fact, to whip through the armor of a main battle tank.
In a conventional air battle, the pilot of a targeted jet might have many seconds and even minutes to react to a missile shot. He might employ a range of evasive maneuvers and countermeasures to ward off the incoming blow. In a head-on encounter at high speed, he would have the added advantage of a wide margin of error — in other words, even luck would be on his side.
In this case, luck wasn’t part of the equation. The pilots had no warning that the weapon had been fired; there was no signal from the Tigershark or the missile for the Mirages to detect. Traveling at close to two miles per second, the projectile reached the closest plane in a little more than ten seconds.
In a conventional air fight, a pilot hit by a missile would generally have several seconds to react and eject; under the best circumstances, he might even have time to try and wrestle some sort of control over the aircraft. But the rail gun’s bullet took that away. Under optimum conditions, which these were, the targeting computer fired at the most sensitive part of the airplane — the pilot himself.
Turk’s first shot struck through the canopy, went through the pilot, his ejection seat, and the floor of the jet.
The second plane was dealt a similar blow. The missile was hit head-on as well, igniting it.
Turk had no time to celebrate, and in fact was only vaguely aware of the cues that showed his bullets had hit home. Aiming for the two surviving Mirages, he corrected his course twenty-eight degrees, following the dotted line marked on the display. This took him another eight seconds, an eternity in combat, but he knew from training that the key was to move as gently and deliberately as possible; rushing to the firing solution often made things take far longer.
He got a tone and saw the red boxes closing around the two Mirages. He was shooting these from behind, though the gun computer was still able to aim at the canopies and pilots because he had an altitude advantage.
“Lock targets One and Two,” he told the computer.
“Targets locked.”
He pushed his trigger for target One. The gun flashed. The rail gun generated enormous heat, and its dissipation presented a number of engineering problems for the men and women who had designed the Tigershark. These were complicated problems of math and physics, so complex that the solutions were still being refined and perfected — the rail gun could only be fired a limited number of times before it needed to be stripped down and overhauled.
Turk’s presence here was part of the shakedown process. As part of the safety protocol, he was only allowed to fire the weapon two dozen times within a five-minute interval, and the safety precautions built into the weapon overrode any commands he might give.
The protocols weren’t a problem now. He lined up for his second shot, and pressed the trigger.
Turk felt a twinge of regret for his opponents. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he assumed they were brave men and skilled pilots; they had no idea what kind of power and enemy they were facing. From their perspective, the sky ahead was clear. Then suddenly their companions exploded. Before they could react, their own worlds turned painfully black.
“All enemy aircraft destroyed.”
In the space of some forty-eight seconds, Turk had shot down four enemy planes, and a missile for good measure. Few if any pilots could make a claim even close.
Not bad for his first encounter with manned planes, ever.
He had a few seconds to savor the victory. Then three different voices began talking over one another in his radio, all asking essentially the same thing — what was the situation?
The voices belonged to the AWACS controller, the flight boss, and the French leader of an interceptor squadron charged with providing air cover for any airplanes in the sector.
The flight boss took precedence, though Turk in effect addressed them all, calmly giving his perspective on what had happened. The French flight, which had been vectored to meet the threat, changed course and flew toward the airfield the Mirages had launched from, just in case any other planes came up to avenge their comrades.
An Italian flight of Harrier jump jets was diverted from another mission farther west and tasked to bomb the control tower and hangars at the airfield, partly in retaliation and partly to make it more difficult for other jets to join the fray. Lastly, the controller ordered an American Predator and a British reconnaissance flight to attempt to locate any survivors of the planes Turk had just shot out of the sky.
Turk asked the AWACS controller if he knew why the Mirages had scrambled in the first place. The controller’s supervisor, an American squadron leader who had rotated into the position from the combat line, indicated that the aircraft might have been spotted visually as they came south, something that had happened often in the very first week of the war. It was also possible they had been seen by a radar at sea, or by a supposedly neutral ship — the Russians had several in the Mediterranean that weren’t really neutral at all.