Ormack's head banged against the right cockpit window bi he pulled himself upright and scanned as far behind the bomber as he could "Pereira, five o'clock.one and a half miles, twenty degrees high and comin' down. Nail him.
Yuri had the shot lined up perfectly.a textbook gun-pass. He had just squeezed the trigger on his control stick, squeezed off a hundred precious rounds.before realizing that the B-52 wasn't in his sights.
It had moved. He tried to rudder-drag his sight around to the right but it wasn't enough and he was force to yank off power and roll with the B-52 to reacquire it.
He was almost aligned again when a sharp white flash popped off his left side not a hundred meters away. He yanked his MiG into a hard right turn and accelerated away, saw another white flash and a cloud of sparkling shards of metal exploding above him. The B-52 was shooting at him, and that was no machine-gun round-the intruder had tail-firing rockets Yuri expertly rolled out of his turn, perpendicular to the bomber's flight path and out of range of the strange fl.
missiles.
A blinking warning light caught his attention.e was no, on emergency fuel-less than ten minutes time left and with no reserve. He didn't even have the time to set up another gun pass. He rearmed his last two remaining AA-8 missiles rechecked his infrared spotting scope and checked the location of the bomber.
Time for one last pass.and it had to be perfect. At least lAA-8s had to have greater range than those tiny missiles. He would roll back in directly behind the B-52 and fire at maximum range when the AA-8s locked onto the bomber's engine-exhaust.
He made a diving left-turn, staying about twelve kilometers behind the bomber. His infrared target-spotting scope with large supercooled eye locked onto the B-52 immediately and sent aiming information to the AA-8 missiles. The B-52 was making no evasive maneuvers. Slowly.the distance decreased to The American bomber, Yuri noted.had maneuvered itse onto a flat plateau just above Anadyr Airbase, heading east toward the Bering Strait. It had nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade. Yuri hoped it wouldn't smash into Anadyr. On the other hand, what better place to deposit the evidence of his victory?
His vindication?
The range continued to decrease. Yuri could see the B-52's tail now, and the missile-firing cannon, still pointing up and to the right, jammed in position. Yuri put his finger on the launch trigger, ready.
A high-pitched beep sounded in his helmet-the AA-8's seeker heads had locked onto the B-52.Yuri checked his target once more, waited a few more seconds to close the distance fired. The green LOCK light stayed on STEADY as the two Mach-two missiles streaked from their rails..
.
Ormack searched the skies from the cockpit window. "I can't see him, I lost him.
"Angie, can you see him?"
"No, my radar's jammed. I can't see anything."
4 The plateau dropped away into a wide frozen plain, Anadyr Airbase centered within the snow-covered valley McLanahan did not wait for the terrain-avoidance system to take the Old Dog down. He grabbed onto the yoke and pushed the Old Dog's nose down, then shoved all six operating engine throttles to full power.
The Old Dog had only dropped about a hundred feet down into the valley when McLanahan suddenly realized the implications of what he was doing and used every ounce of strength left to pull back on the control column.
"Patrick, what the hell are you doing?" Ormack shouted.
"He's behind us," McLanahan told him. "He's gotta be behind us. If we dive into that valley we're dead meat."
Shattered fibersteel from the Old Dog's damaged fuselage screamed in protest but somehow stayed together. The stall warning horn blared, but McLanahan still held the yoke back, forcing the Old Dog's nose skyward at a drastic angle.
The AA-8 missiles, only a few hundred meters from impact, lost their lock-on to the engine's hot exhaust when the Old Dog nosed upward. The missiles then immediately reacquired a warm heat-source and readjusted to a new target-the base operation building and the vehicles parked near it at Anadyr Airbase, which was now manned by several squads of the Anadyr constabulary. Surrounded by a meter of unplowed snow in all directions, the halftracks and jeeps were the only hot objects for miles.
Chief Constable Vjarelskiv, who had run from the hangar area to the flightline to watch the chase unfolding in the skies above Anadyr Airbase, now watched in horror as the missiles screamed directly at him.
Before he could shout a warning, the missiles hitplowing into the wooden base operations building, the one finding an unoccupied truck with its hood open because of an overheated radiator. The twin explosions scattered troops in all directions.
Properly enraged, Vjarelskiv pulled his nine-millimeter pistol from his holster and raised it toward the American B-52, then stopped, realizing how absurd he must look.
Yuri had expected the American bomber to try to duck into the valley.
Well, it would do him no good — actually it would improve the intruder's heat-signature.
What he never expected was a climb… the B-52 appeared out of nowhere from behind the ridge, streaking skyward, its nose pointed straight up in the air.
No missile, not even the new AA-8s, could follow that.
Yuri flicked on his cannon and managed a half-second burst, but his overtake speed was too great and he was forced to climb on the B-52.
The huge black bomber had disappeared beneath him.
He could only keep his throttles at max afterburner, try to come around and align himself once more for another cannon run before his fuel ran out.
McLanahan was now fiercely pushing the control column, fighting the lumbering Old Dog. Its airspeed had bled off below two hundred knots.
Over the blare of the stall-warn horn Ormack shouted to him that they had stalled and to get the nose down…
McLanahan somehow did it. He had just leveled the Dog's nose on the horizon when a blur and a roar erupted outside his left window.
The fighter had rushed past, its twin afterburners glowin.
It was so close McLanahan felt the heat of its engines through broken glass and bullet holes. Then it began a shallow climb, arcing gracefully up and to the left.
Ignoring the blaring stall-warning horn, McLanahan pulled back on the control column and pointed the Old Dog's nose skyward once again.
But with the number-eight throttle at full power, the Old Dog began to slide to the left, its nose reaching a forty-degree angle, knifing skyward.
"Patrick, release the controls, now McLanahan ignored Ormack's order, waited, bone-tired, wrestling with a hundred tons of near-uncontrollable machine.
Then seconds before the MiG disappeared from sight, he ordered: "Angie, right pylon missile-FIRE."
It took a few seconds, but with a screech and a long plume of fire the Scorpion missile sped free of its pylon rail and in the cold semi-darkness of the long Siberian night, with two bright turbofans in full afterburner dead-ahead, there was only one possible target.
The missile plunged into the fighter, detonating as the hot afterburner exhaust hit the propellant. The entire aft section of the fighter + the twin-tailed MiG broke apart, shredding the nearly empty fuel tanks and adding thousands of cubic feet of fumes to the fury of the explosion.
McLanahan watched the fireball fly on for several moments in a wide bright arc, before plunging into the snowy peaks of the Koraksko e Mountains below.
Silence. No cheers. No gloating. And then the Old Dog turned eastward toward the Bering Strait-and home.
SEWARD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, NOME, ALASKA
The hospital rooms were small and cold, the beds hard and narrow, and the food was just edible-but for the past week the crew of the Old Dog had felt like they had died and gone to heaven.
For the first time since their arrival, and by accident, they were all together. When she was notified by a nurse General Elliott was accepting visitors, Angelina Pereira, only one of the crew not seriously injured, walked through frozen streets of the Nome Airport to the Air National Guard infirmary and General Elliott's guarded room.