“Vampires, vampires!” It was Xav in the Electronic’s Pit. “Enemy fire control radars, identification Square Tie. That confirms it, Mike, Djinn-class FAC-M. They must be warming up to fire. Designating them now as Bandit-One and Bandit-Two. They’re reaching for us too, but their Pot Head radars don’t stand a chance. I’m jamming them anyway.”
“Eddie, shift to air mode, paint those targets. Get a pair of the Sparrows on line. If those Djinns fire, I want the missiles hit as soon as they leave the tube. Get ready to do anti-radar shots as well.” Kozlowski flipped channels. “Romeo-Quebec this is Marisol twenty eight.”
“Marisol this is Romeo-Quebec. Twelve. We’re closing fast on you. We have contacts to the east and ESM detection from that bearing. Are we hot to trot?”
Kozlowski checked the book. 28 plus 12 was forty. OK. Everybody was who they said they were. “Hold please Romeo-Quebec. We just have threatening radar emissions at this time. They tried to lock on us though and that is a terminal mistake.”
He wasn’t joking. It was one of SAC’s guiding principles, threaten a SAC aircraft and it would eliminate the threat, If that meant taking out the country the threat came from, so be it. The result was predictable, nobody sane threatened SAC aircraft.
“Boss, they’ve fired. One vampire airborne, targeted on Minerva” Korrina had already fired off a pair of Sparrow Ills, they was streaking down towards the anti-ship missile heading for the corvette. From the pilot’s seat, Kozlowski saw the gray-white trails heading down towards the black streak of the anti-ship missile. One explosion was a white ball on the sea surface, a miss. The other turned the black streak into an orange fireball. “OK Eddie confirm that, one Vampire down. We have missile fire Romeo Quebec. They’re all yours.”
Cockpit F4H-3 Phantom H “Tisiphone”
Colonel Scott Brim firewalled the throttles and the dark blue Phantom leapt across the water. Ahead he could see the black and orange fireball where the anti-ship missile had been shot down. There was a certain poetic justice about it he thought, an attempted act of murder being struck down by a bolt from above. The two hostile Djinns would be just behind that blast. The catch was he had to get in fast while the crews were still working out what had happened and getting another missile warmed up. If he timed it right, that missile would never get out of the tube. The Square lie tracking radar only had a very limited arc, the bows on the Djinn had to be pointing almost directly at the target. If he could force them to turn they couldn’t fire. Of course if he was really lucky, they’d open fire on him.
He could see them now, two glorified speedboats with the big, clumsy missile hangars perched on the stern. Behind him, the concussion wave from his passage was throwing up a wall of spray, there was no doubt that they’d seen him. Please, please let them open fire on me. Brim was actually praying.
As if in answer he saw a line of red blobs floating out from the bow of the lead Djinn, quickly followed by a second stream from the craft behind. The Djinn only carried a single gun mount, a triple 25 millimeter forward. ‘Thank you God,’ Brim thought, then poured in the reheat and swept Tisiphone up in a steep climbing turn. Obediently, the two streams of tracer followed him, just lagging behind that little bit.
Before the gunners could correct, Alecto was making her run. The gunfire drawn away, she could make this pass good and solid. Suddenly she seemed to erupt in flame, brilliant orange fire spreading along her wings and under her belly. Then, she also was making a climbing turn, leaving the massive salvo of unguided rockets to do its work.
The two Phantoms had the same load, 38-round packs of 2.75 inch rockets. Three packs under the belly, three on each inner wing station, two on each outer. A total of 494 rockets. The analysts had worked out that at a given range, there was only a limited area that a FAC could occupy in the time the rockets took to get to their target. So, the packs were designed to fill that area with rockets. In effect, Alecto had fired a giant shotgun at the lead Djinn. It really wasn’t fair.
Brim watched as the sea erupted in a boiling elliptical mass of white, green and orange-brown as the salvo swamped Bandit-One. Even as he did a wingover and curved down, it was subsiding and beneath it, there was .... nothing. Just a few oil stains and fragments of shattered debris. To the east, Djinn-Two had turned and was running for the coast. Brim let her go, the primary job was to protect the Italian corvette and the refugees. There was no guarantee a second pair of Djinns were not out there, already lining up for an attack. Anyway, Marisol was overhead and she could make Bandit-2 vanish in a very emphatic manner.
Alecto formed up again on Tisiphone’s wing and Brim lead them back over the Italian corvette. She was stopped now, alongside some crazy looking contraption crowded with people. As the two Marine Phantoms swept over, Brim thought the raft looked like the things he and his childhood friends had put together on summer afternoons by the lake. Those people down there hadn’t taken the contraption out to splash around in a local lake, they’d sailed it hundreds of miles across the open sea. What in the name of God could be happening that drove people to take such desperate risks?
The Italian corvette crew had nets over the side of their ship and were going into the water to pick up the refugees. Brim wished them well and took Tisiphone up to where she could watch over them
Aviano Italian Air Force Base, Italy
“And that was more or less it. We stayed up top watching over the situation until Tiger Lily relieved us and we came back. Advice? Make sure you have support ready and waiting, when the situation blows, it blows fast. Shiloh has birds waiting on the catapults to go, take advantage of them.
“I’m not so sure it was a good idea for us to come down, it improved radar coverage in terms of what we could pick up but it shrank our horizon and put us into an area where we could be intercepted.
“The Djinns are pretty much helpless against us, they have that triple 25 forward but its only useful against things that fly low, slow and close. I’d guess they have those shoulder-fired missiles as well but intel says they don’t work against anything more than 8,000 feet up.
“The Caliphate people can’t be dumb enough to keep sending them out unscreened though, after they’ve lost a few, they’ll start trying to act smart. Fighter cover will be the first thing they try. I don’t think the Caliphate has any real warships otherwise they might try operating FACs with proper ships.
“One other thing Pete. Buy those Italian Navy crewmen a drink when you get a chance. What they’re doing takes real big brass ones. It’s not just that they’re out there with those poor old corvettes but we watched them go into the water to help the refugees. You’ve heard of the human bombs the Caliphate loves so much. How long d’ya think it’s going to be before they start putting them in ‘refugee boats?’ And how much of a mess they’ll make of the rescue ships?”
Conference Room, White House, Washington
“Dean, what’s just happened in the Mediterranean? And why?”
“Mister President. One of our aircraft was flying a routine mission over the Eastern Mediterranean when it observed an Italian corvette rescuing a group of Egyptian refugees. They saw two Caliphate warships fire a missile at the Italian rescue ship so they shot down that missile and called in assistance from the Shiloh. Two Marine F4Hs arrived, did a run to see what was going on and one of the Caliphate warships opened fire on them. The F4Hs returned fire, sinking one of the Caliphate ships and forcing the other to disengage. The Italian corvette completed its rescue work safely and returned to port. That’s our story Mister President and we’re sticking to it.”