Such inflight emergencies ran through Coursey’s mind, but he was able to dismiss them for now … his engine was running, his wings were still attached and personally he was undamaged except for his pride. The one overriding thought that stuck in his mind was that the Russians had gotten a shot off at him and had hurt his Falcon. They’d pay for that.
Coursey executed a nine-G turn to the right to pursue the MiGs that had passed behind him. They were in loose route formation, the double-leader formation that was very effective in covering each other, and they were both going after Douglas again. Douglas tried some hard horizontal moves but the MiGs matched him every time.
“Go over the top, Doug,” Coursey told him. “Hard as you can. Now.”
Dragon Five-Six suddenly heeled, pointing itself straight up in the air in a sharp Immelmann maneuver, held it there for seconds, then rolled inverted and began a sharp descent.
“I’m right under you, Doug,” Coursey said as he approached the area where Five-Six had begun his climb. “Roll out.” Five-Six rolled upright a thousand feet above Coursey and sped away behind his leader. Coursey selected his M61 cannon and fired as the descending MiGs came into view.
A head-on gunpass was not exactly a high-percentage attack, but for sheer visual impact it was hard to beat — and this time Coursey got a bonus. As the second MiG banked away from him, he could see dark bits of material peel off the upper surface of the lead MiG’s wings. It seemed a few of the F-16’s twenty-millimeter shells might have caught the MiG’s extended spoilers or speedbrakes and chopped them off …
This was turning into a battle of attrition, and Coursey knew at this rate he was going to lose it. These fighters had undoubtedly refueled off their Il-76 tanker before the fight began and had enough fuel for hours of dogfighting — Douglas in Dragon Five-Six had to be down to minimums for recovery at Georgetown, and Coursey was in danger of flaming out any minute. Something drastic was in order …
Coursey saw it immediately, far below him and to the left — the Ilyushin-76 AWACS-tanker-transport plane. For some reason the Il-76 pilot had driven right into the middle of the dogfight. Coursey selected a radar-guided Scorpion missile and activated his attack radar as he went over the top and aimed right for the forward cabin of the Russian AWACS.
His intentions were noted. Both MiGs broke off their attac
against Douglas and changed directions, climbing to line up o Dragon Five-Four. Coursey could see the Ilyushin disgorge bun dies of radar-reflecting chaff and infrared decoy flares as the Falcon’s APG-88 radar locked onto the aircraft less than two miles away. The radar-lock tone was intermittent from the Ilyushin’s self-protection jamming, but the instant it steadied out Coursey hit the weapon-release button on the control stick, rolled and turned away from a murderous gun-pass by one of the MiG-29s. But the Scorpion was a “launch-and-leave” missile — it needed no guidance from the carrier aircraft after launch.
The missile hit the forward edge of the radome, chewing a large piece out of the circular device. The wind blast immediately lifted the broken, jagged edge and ripped the forty-foot-diameter radome off its support legs and back into the Il-76’s T-tail stabilizer. The entire horizontal portion and half of the thirty-foot vertical stabilizer broke free of the aircraft and tumbled away. The Ilyushin transport skidded violently several times, heeling over so sharply that it appeared to be heading into a spin at any moment, but somehow its pilot managed to bring the one-hundred-seventy-ton aircraft under control. The transport made a wobbly turn and headed south, trailing a long line of thick black smoke from its aft section.
Coursey watched as the huge aircraft swerved southward. But as he was searching the skies for the two MiGs, a warning beeped in his helmet. He was down to less than fifteen minutes of fuel, and with a fuel-tank leak, probably much less than that.
“Barrier, Dragon Five-Four is bingo,” he radioed as he started a turn to the right. “I’m heading north toward the margaritas. Don’t forget to send someone to pick me up.”
“Roger, Five-Four,” the controller said. “Use channel Bravo for rescue. We will—”
Coursey never heard the end of the transmission. The damaged MiG had missed his shot at Coursey during the attack on the Russian AWACS, but his wingman did not miss. The AA-11 Archer missile detonated on target, igniting the fuel vapors in the nearly empty tanks and creating a massive fireball in the crystal-blue Caribbean skies.
There was one thing that was hard to teach new pilots and even harder to reinforce in older pilots, Maraklov thought — discipline. The two young MiG pilots on the Ilyushin’s wing forgot it, and they got themselves splashed. The second two, more experienced pilots flanking the XF-34 underneath the Ilyushin, also forgot it, and it cost them the effective use of the Ilyushin.
Maraklov considered himself very damn lucky to be alive. The impact of the missile on the Ilyushin’s radar dome had forced the transport’s nose down several meters; only his computer-fast reactions saved him from crashing into the Ilyushin’s belly. He had dodged aside just in time to avoid the wild seesawing action of the transport as the pilot fought for control. Now he was tucked back on the Ilyushin’s left wing, relaying damage reports to Sebaco Airbase via satellite transceiver and kicking himself for not finding his own way out of Nicaragua.
He activated his radar and picked up the two remaining MiG29s and the one F-16 Falcon still in the fight. They were widely separated from each other, neither side anxious to mix it up again. He deactivated his radar, activated the tactical data-link, which gave him an image of what the E-5 AWACS was transmitting to the F-16s. The AWACS was still tracking all the Soviet aircraft but had not paired any fighters with them. The data-link was rescrambled in random periods, and without the scrambler’s seed code it took a lengthy frequency-scan to reacquire it once it was lost, but when ANTARES was tied into the data-link it provided an excellent means to eavesdrop on the Americans and use their own radar plane to find them.
“Escort Three and Four, this is Zavtra,” Maraklov transmitted on the convoy’s command-frequency in ANTARES’s computerized voice, using the Russian word for “tomorrow” as DreamStar’s call sign. “Join on the transport immediately.”
“We will engage the last American fighter,” Escort Three replied. He was the one with flight control damage, anxious to settle the score. A real fool.
“I gave you an order; join on the transport!”
“But the American fighter is retreating; we can catch him—”
“He’s trying to trap you,” Maraklov said. Too bad ANTARES only transmitted his voice at one volume and one tone, because mentally he was screaming at the two Soviet pilots. “They have two American fighters waiting to bushwhack you. Join on the transport’s wing.” It was only a guess — the data-link picked up only the lone F-16 Falcon heading north toward Georgetown — but the American AWACS must have called in for more air cover as soon as they discovered the MiGs. Those fighters would be arriving any minute. Finally the warning sunk in, and a few minutes later Maraklov detected the two Soviet MiGs in tight fingertip formation just above and aft of the transport.
“Escort Three, stay with the transport,” Maraklov ordered. “Check your flight controls and fuel. Escort Four, you’re useless staying in tight formation. This isn’t a damn air show. Take a position low and to the left, into the sun so you can watch the formation and we can watch you.” These Soviet pilots were like rookies, Maraklov thought as the fighters deployed themselves. Lucky for them, their machines mostly made up for their carelessness.
“We can make it, Colonel,” one of the MiG pilots said. “We could have broken you free past the Americans—”