“Assault team has an ETA of minus thirty minutes,” she said. “We’d like to recover the aircraft if possible. If not, destroy it.”
Before Howe could acknowledge, Timmy shouted a warning.
“Missiles in the air! Missiles in the air! Those crazy Russian fucks are gunning for us.”
“Can you assess the situation on the ground?” Gorman asked, unable to monitor the communications between the two Velociraptors.
“We’re under fire,” said Howe, dishing chaff and taking evasive action.
“From the Russians?”
Howe was too busy jinking to make any of the dozen or so retorts that occurred to him.
Chapter 14
The dust felt like heavy sackcloth, covering her face. Megan choked as she tried to get up, rubbing her eyes to clear enough grit away so she could get her bearings. She saw her three crewmen collapse behind her, falling as the helicopter made another pass.
Definitely a Russian. The bastards had figured it out somehow — as she had predicted.
“Rogers, blow up the plane,” she yelled to her copilot, who was lying next to her. When he didn’t move, she pulled at the pocket of his pant leg where the radio detonator was. “Do it! Do it!”
“I can’t,” he said. “Segrest told me not to blow the plane.”
“What?” She didn’t believe him, taking the radio device out anyway and pressing it. Nothing happened.
“He wants the laser,” said Rogers. “The detonator’s not rigged.”
“You bastard, these are Russian helicopters. This is Segrest?”
“No,” said Rogers. “I don’t think so.”
“Fuck, come on.”
“Where?”
“We can’t let them get the plane. We have to blow it up.”
“The detonator’s not set.”
“So help me set it.”
As she started to run, something popped in the air a few feet away. There was a roar and a rush of air. Megan felt herself pushed to the ground. One of the helicopters passed somewhere behind her, the ground shaking. Megan scratched forward a few feet, then got up and started to run again. She could hear the crackle of small-arms fire, felt her body becoming wet. She pressed the button on the detonator again and again as Rogers fell on top of her and rolled off, howling in pain, then awfully silent.
Luksha steadied his AK-74 automatic rifle at the fallen figure as he ran. It was the pilot. He had something in his hand, a radio no doubt. The pilot fumbled with it, trying to turn it in his hand.
Luksha kicked it under the jet, then pulled the man away, back to the side of the runway.
Not a man: a woman. The pilot was a woman.
Just like the Americans.
Luksha’s men swarmed over the aircraft. There was more gunfire, some shouts; for a moment he feared that more troops had been hiding on the island and they were about to be overwhelmed. The drumming of the helicopters rose and the wind swirled around him.
Then the chaos began to recede. There were no other troops, and there had been only four crewmen, three of whom were now dead. Only the woman remained alive.
Success. All of his planning, the decision to wait until the aircraft took off and returned from another flight — it had all paid off. They were his, considerably more easily than he had hoped.
“Call in the transports and technical crew,” Luksha told his communications specialist. He turned to his sergeant, who’d just run up next to him and was hunched over, collecting his breath. “Secure this woman. She is our prisoner, and a very valuable one.”
Chapter 15
Howe had little trouble ducking the Russian’s Alamo missile, a semiactive radar home that had been launched from outside its optimum range. But his defensive maneuvering took up time and forced him to turn to the east; before he could recover and sort out the situation, four more Russian fighters, all MiG-29s, had appeared over the horizon. They had their pedals to the metal as they came to help out the two Super-Flankers that had launched the attack.
Howe’s computer buzzed as Timmy fired an AMRAAM at one of the nearby Russians, the missile track dotted in the HUD hologram.
“I have the bandit at the south,” Howe told his wingman, starting a turn to cut toward its tail. “Watch out for the four Johnny-come-latelies.”
“Oh yeah, copy that. Bring those suckers on,” said the wingman. “Got your back.”
Howe and the Sukhoi were separated by about five miles, just outside of a good Sidewinder shot. Howe went for more power, needing to accelerate but wary, anticipating that the enemy fighter would try to pull him into a quick turn. He blew a wad of air into his mask. His hand curled tightly on the stick, waiting for the sensor in the missile head to growl at him, indicating that it was ready. Howe told himself to ease off, to relax, to just follow. The missile got a good strong scent of the enemy plane and began screaming at him, telling him to fire. Howe waited a few more seconds, confident now he had him, confident he was gaining sufficiently on the enemy jet.
“Fire,” he told the computer.
The missile ripped out from the side bay of the Velociraptor, plunging downward momentarily and then pushing its nose too far to the left as the Sukhoi pilot came hard right. But the circuitry in the all-aspect Sidewinder, refined after generations of dogfights, quickly corrected, driving the missile back toward the big Russian jet and its hot tailpipe. The Sukhoi started to jink east just as the warhead exploded; shrapnel ripped through the left engine and severed the controls to the tailfin, leaving the pilot no option but to bail.
By that time Howe was already turning northward to meet the newcomers.
Timmy swept into the battle eagerly, his hand gripping the stick with the sort of gentle firmness he’d use to guide a date to bed. The encounter shaped up as an almost textbook four-on-two dustup, with the Russian MiG-29s blustering forward, seemingly oblivious to the approaching F/A-22Vs. The two Velociraptors were at fifteen thousand feet, a good five thousand below the MiGs, but that was their only disadvantage; they had an intercept from the east, and even thirty miles away the Russians seemed not to know where they were.
“I’m going to save one of my AMRAAMs in case the laser plane gets off,” Howe told him. “I have that lead one on the left.”
“Yeah, roger that. I have number two.”
Timmy’s HUD hologram had the target plane boxed and tied with a bow. He fired about a half-second after Howe, sliding around to get into position for a tailpipe shot on the last two MiGs in the formation. Belatedly, the MiGs began throwing chaff and hitting ECMs.
“Yours on the right,” said Howe as the bandits divided.
Timmy started to follow but quickly lost his Russian, who’d taken out a hammer and nailed his throttle on the last stop, burning through his relatively limited store of fuel in his bid to get back home in one piece. Timmy pulled off, circling to the south and looking for Howe.
The Velociraptor’s radar system was light-years beyond the primitive scopes that fighter pilots of old had to decipher as they rode their steeds into battle; the unit could select its own modes, interpret its contacts, fight off electronic countermeasures, and paint a three-dimensional picture of the battlefield, all with minimal input from the pilot. But no gee-whiz technology could eliminate the effects of high-g turns, mission fatigue, and what planners referred to as the fog of war. The pilot’s instincts and his ability to think clearly under stress were far more important than the convenient cues projected in glorious 3-D on his HUD, or the melodious warning tones of his RWR. Timmy pushed left; then, for some reason he couldn’t have explained, he jerked his stick and threw the Velociraptor the other way. The maneuver put him four miles behind one of the MiGs.