ANTARES commanded the AA-11 to launch. At the same time it made a tight right roll followed by a hard break, turning in a tight circle to align once again with Cheetah.
“Missile launch! Dead ahead!”
McLanahan hit the voice-command button. “Chaff. Flare.” As the radar and infrared decoys ejected off into space, he jerked the control stick right, descended a few hundred feet, then lit the afterburners and pulled up. But not fast enough. DreamStar’s AA-11 missile followed Cheetah’s turn and descent, then detonated its ninety-pound warhead just as McLanahan began to hard six-G pull. The missile detonated ten feet to the right and slightly aft of the right engine, piercing the engine case and sending showers of metal and compressor blades in all directions.
But at the same time ANTARES detected Cheetah’s second Scorpion missile still in flight — the two or three seconds it had taken to launch the jury-rigged Soviet missile gave the big, high-speed AIM-120 missile time to lock on and reach full speed. The all-aspect radar detected the missile still closing fast.
The radar range to Cheetah’s second missile turned into a high-pitched squeal of warning, transmitted directly to Maraklov’s already exhausted brain. ANTARES had no choice but to evade the missile — DreamStar’s jammers were ineffective against Cheetah’s radar or the Scorpion missile’s on-board radar — they had reprogrammed the AIM-120’s on-board radar to a different frequency outside DreamStar’s known jammer-range in anticipation of this fight — and DreamStar could not continue the right turn to pursue Cheetah with the missile closing in.
With Maraklov allowing ANTARES now to select the fighter’s maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, ANTARES reversed its direction of flight, went to full afterburner, and aimed its nose right at the missile, presenting its lowest radar cross-section. At the last possible moment DreamStar jinked upward hard … and the missile passed underneath.
“Engine fire on the right,” Preston called out. McLanahan yanked the right throttle to idle, lifted it out of its idle detent and moved it to cut-off, then hit the voice-command switch: “Right engine fire; execute.” The computer commanded the right-engine fuel valves and supply lines closed and fire retardant sprayed inside the engine compartment.
“I’m showing fuel cutoff and engine fire light out,” Preston said. She turned in her seat, scanning the area for damage. “We might have a fuel leak on the aft body tank. The smoke is clearing.”
“Where’s DreamStar? Is he behind us?”
Preston scanned the skies, expecting to see that unreal plane diving out of nowhere with guns blazing. But it was nowhere to be seen. “I can’t see him.”
“I’m getting some altitude. Power coming back to mil,” McLanahan said. With an engine fire and the potential of more damage in the left engine casing, the use of afterburner was unwise except in an emergency. “I’ve still got full flight control.” The engines were close enough together on the F-15 so that single-engine handling was not a problem, and the vectored-thrust nozzles, mission-adaptive wings, and canards would compensate for the loss of rudder control and the asymmetric thrust.
“Airspeed’s down below five hundred knots,” Preston said, continuing to search for DreamStar. “And you’re hardly climbing. We’ve had it; we don’t have the power to even consider dogfighting with him any more.”
“I’m not giving up. Listen, something’s happening here. If Maraklov was flying at one hundred percent we’d be dog meat by now. He’s not engaging, I think maybe he’s reached his limit …” Wishful thinking …? He began a turn back in the opposite direction and activated the air-to-air attack radar.
Immediately the computer reported, “Radar target, range twelve miles, bearing right.”
He hit the voice-command button: “Select radar missile. Launch missile. Launch missile.”
The pain that racked Maraklov’s body was constant now, rolling across every nerve ending like a brush fire out of control. The numbness in his left shoulder spread to his left arm and elbow — it was the first time in two years that Maraklov ever noticed anything about his appendages while flying under the neural-computer interface system. The sensory dichotomy created momentary confusion. He became aware of still more problems with his body — he was incredibly thirsty, weak as a kitten. He was aware of the taste of blood — he could even feel blood dripping down the side of his head and pooling inside his oxygen mask. Taste? Feel? These sensations were as foreign to him while under ANTARES as mental radar images had been when he first saw one.
At the same time, ANTARES was warning him about a hundred other things. Cheetah was in a left turn, heading back for him. Fuel state was critical — less than twenty minutes fuel left, without reserves. Oxygen was low. That last Scorpion missile’s miss was not altogether harmless — ANTARES was now reporting minor ventral fin actuator damage and a few sectors of the ventral superconducting radar arrays malfunctioning.
It was time to destroy Cheetah, once and for all.
But DreamStar had barely completed its turn back toward Cheetah when more missiles were detected in flight. And now they were in a head-on engagement, with one, then two missiles in flight. Maraklov began a series of high-speed random maneuvers, trying to make the missiles swing farther and farther away on each turn. At the same time he moved farther and farther from Cheetah, getting a few more yards of lateral separation, waiting for the moment to begin a lead turn into the F-15 to start his gun pass.
This time, Maraklov thought, he could not miss. McLanahan had become lazy — never go head-to-head with his DreamStar.
“Scorpion missile tracking … stay with him, Patrick, he’s getting outside you …”
McLanahan blinked beads of sweat out of his eyes as he nudged the control stick farther right toward Cheetah. He had a steady JOKER indication on the heads-up display — less than fifteen minutes of fuel remaining, enough to get him back to La Cieba or Puerto Lempira. If he continued to fight much longer the number of possible landing sites, itt Honduras or Panama, would steadily decrease to zero until he would be forced to put down somewhere in Costa Rica.
“Patrick, watch it,” Preston called out, “he’s turning in on you—”
He had let his mind drift off at the worst possible moment. That momentary lapse of concentration had allowed DreamStar to get the angle on him. Maraklov was now bearing in on Cheetah from the right side. A turn in either direction would expose himself even more to a cannon attack.
He lit the left afterburner and pulled Cheetah up into a hard climb. Preston hung from the handlebars in the back seat, straining against the G-forces as she tried to keep DreamStar in sight over her right shoulder.
“Warning, missile launch,” the computer threat-receiver blared. Then: “Warning, airspeed low. Stall warning. Stall warning.”
“He’s turned inside us. Missile launch. Get out of here.”
McLanahan hit the voice-command button: “Chaff … Flares,” he grunted, forcing the words out from the pressure against his lungs. He saw the decoys-eject indications on the heads-up display.
“Where is he?” he called out to Preston.
“Five o’clock low, climbing with us. He’s still coming …”