hours between each of the fifteen-minute readiness checks.
His ground crew were playing backgammon on the concrete floor below him,
and he could see them laughing and joshing each other. It made him
angrier than ever to see others happy.
Tubby! he barked into his microphone, and his voice was repeated by the
overhead loudspeakers. The plump, serious young man, who was chief
engineer for Lance squadron, climbed quickly up beside his cockpit and
peered anxiously through the canopy at him.
There is dirt on my screen, David snapped at him. How the hell do you
expect me to pick up a MIG, when I'm looking through a screen you ate
your bloody breakfast off?
The cause of David's distress was a speck of carbon that marred the
glistening perfection of his canopy.
Tubby himself had supervised the polishing and buffing of it, and the
carbon speck was wind-carried since then.
Carefully he removed the offending spot, and lovingly he polished the
place where it had been with a chamois leather.
The reprimand had been public and unfair, very unlike their top boy
Davey. However, they all made allowances for Red standby nerves, and
spots on a canopy played hell with a pilot's nerves. Every time it
caught his eye it looked exactly like a pouncing MIG.
That's better, David gruffed at him, fully aware that he had been
grossly unfair. Tubby grinned and gave him a high sign as he climbed
down.
At that moment there was a click and throb in his earphones and the
distinctive voice of the Brig.
Red Standby, Go! Go!
Under full reheat and with the driving thrust of the afterburners
hurling him aloft David called, Hello, Desert Flower, Bright Lance
airborne and climbing.
Hello, David, this is the Brig. We have a contact shaping up for
intrusion on our air space. It looks like another teaser from the
Syrians. They are closing our border at twenty-six thousand and should
be hostile in approximately three minutes. We are going to initiate
attack plan Gideon. Your new heading is 420 and I want you right down
on the deck.
David acked and immediately rotated the Mirage's nose downwards. Plan
Gideon called for a low-level stalk so that the ground clutter would
obscure the enemy radar and conceal their approach until such time as
they were in position to storm-climb up into an attack vector above and
behind the target.
They dropped to within feet of the ground, lifting and falling over the
undulating hills, so low that the herds of black Persian sheep scattered
beneath them as they shrieked eastwards towards the Jordan.
Hello, Bright Lance, this is Desert Flower, we are not tracking you.
Good, thought David, then neither is the enemy. Target is now hostile
in sector, the Brig gave the coordinates, Scan for your own contact.
Almost immediately Joe's voice came in. Leader, this is Two. I have a
contact. David dropped his eyes to his own radar screen and amputated
his scan as Joe called range and bearing. It was a dangerous
distraction when flying in the sticky phase of high subsonic drag at
zero feet, and his own screen was clear of contact.
They raced onwards for many more seconds before David picked up the
faint luminous fuzz at the extreme range of his set.
Contact firming. Range figures nine six nautical miles. Parallel
heading and track. Altitude 25, 5oo feett. David felt the first
familiar tingle and slither of his anger and hatred, like the cold of a
great snake uncoiling in his belly.
Beseder, Two. Lock to target and go to interception speed.
They went supersonic and David looked up ahead at the crests of the
thunderheads that reared up from the solid banks of cumulo nimbus lower
down. These mountainous upthrusts of silver and pale blue were
sculptured into wonderful shapes that teased the imagination towers and
turrets embattled and emblazoned, heroic human shapes standing proud or
hunched in the attitude of mourning, the rearing horsemen of the
chessboard, a great fleecy pack of wolves, and other animal shapes of
fantasy, with the deep crevasses between them bridged in splendour by
the rainbows. There were hundreds of these, great blazes of colour,
that turned and followed their progress across the sky, keeping majestic
station upon them. Above them, the sky was a dark unnatural blue,
dappled like a Windsor grey by the thin striation of the cirrocumulus,
and the sunlight poured down to shimmer upon the two speeding warplanes.
As yet there was no sight of the target. It was up there somewhere
amongst the cloud mountains. He looked back at his radar screen. He
had taken his radar out of scan and locked it into the target, and now
as they closed rapidly he could appraise their relative positions.
The target was flying parallel to them, twenty miles out on their
starboard side, and it was high above them and moving at a little more
than half their speed. The sun was beyond the target, just short of its
zenith, and David calculated his approach path to bring him into an
attack vector from above and into the target's starboard quarter.
Turning to starboard now, he warned Joe, and they came around together,
crossing the target's rear to put themselves in the sun. Joe was
calling the range and bearing, it showed a leisurely patrol pattern.
There was no indication as yet that the target was aware of the hunters
behind and far below.
Two, this is leader. Arm your circuits. Without taking his eyes from
the radar screen, David pressed the master switch on his weapon console.
He activated the two air-to-air sidewinder missiles that hung under each
wing-tip, and immediately heard the soft electronic tone cycling in his
earphones. That tone indicated that the missiles were dormant, they had
not yet detected an infra-red source to excite them. When they did they
would increase the volume and rate of cycle, growling with anticipation,
claniouring like hunting dogs on the leash. He turned them down so he
could no longer hear them.
Now he selected his cannon switch, readying the twin 30-men. weapons in
their pods just below his seat. The trigger flicked forward out of its
recess in the head of the joystick and he curled his forefinger about it
to familiarize himself with the feel of it.
Two, this is leader. I am commencing visual. It was a warning to
Joe to concentrate all his attention on the screen and feed David with
directional data.
Target is now ten o'clock high, range figures two seven nautical miles.
David searched carefully, raking the billowing walls of blinding white,
breaking off the search to look away at a ground point or a pinnacle of
cloud to prevent his eyes focusing short, and to sweep the blind spot
behind them, lest the hunters become the hunted.
Then he saw them. There were five of them, and they appeared suddenly
out of cloud high above and were immediately outlined against it like
tiny black fleas on a newly ironed bedsheet. just then Joe called the
range again.
Figures one three nautical miles, but the targets were outlined so
crisply against their background that David could make out the
delta-winged dart shape, and the high tail plane that identified them
beyond all doubt as IUG 2i J.
I have target visual, he told Joe. Five MIG 2i's J. His tone was flat
and neutral, but it was a lie, for now at last his anger had something
on which to fasten, and it changed its shape and colour, it was no
longer black and aching but cold and bright and keen as a rapier's