Chan pushed the thoughts away as he pressed the firing trigger. It was dangerous to be distracted, even with easy targets such as this. Although the sky around him was clear, there was still the American aircraft carrier to contend with. Traveling at speeds in excess of Mach one, well over six hundred miles an hour, an American fighter could be in the game at any time. Any time.
Get it over now. Do it. He felt a surge of sympathy for his American civilian counterpart, then pressed the trigger.
The missile leaped off of his wing, arrowing straight for a moment before it curved off to the right. He heard the tone in his headset telling him it knew where it was going, had activated its own radar seeker head, and was hungry for prey. Chan avoided the temptation to become fixated on his own missile’s exhaust, and instead kept up a scan of both cockpit and sky.
His ESM warning gear caught the first sign of trouble, and its strident, insistent beeping soon confirmed his worst fears. He glanced at the signal parameters display, and agreed with the classification that the system had assigned it — it was an AWG-9, the tracking and targeting radar associated with the F-14.
And how far away? He resisted the urge to scan the sky around him, and instead kept his gaze fixed on the heads-up display. The computers onboard were capable of detecting and classifying the targets far more quickly than he could.
Two seconds later, he saw it. It popped up on his display, already labeled with a track number and a hostile symbol. Chan banked his aircraft away from the airliner. The missile was on its own now, a fire-and-forget weapon that require no further guidance.
The American pilots normally fought in a loose deuce position, one high, the other low and forward. The formation had proven its worth in countless battles, enabling the high position to keep a close eye on the overall picture and back up the low aircraft as necessary.
In aerial combat, altitude was safety. As the situation warranted, he could quickly exchange altitude for speed, and sometimes that was all it took to make the difference between life and death.
So where was the second Tomcat? He pointed the nose of his MiG back toward the American, hoping to increase radar coverage slightly. It should be somewhere along the same line of bearing.
There. Another blip, another warning from the ESM. The pulses were coming tighter now as the Tomcat switched from search to tracking and targeting mode.
Where was the rest of his squadron? The last thing he wanted to do now was take on two Tomcats by himself. Although the MiG 33 was lighter and more maneuverable than the Tomcat, more like a Hornet in performance characteristics, the Tomcat was a formidable foe.
He could see them now, two silver blurs flashing against the sky. He took his eyes off them for a moment to glance down, and was horrified to see how far out over the ocean he was. How could he have been so careless? They had briefed safety precaution endlessly, and certainly the range of his missile had not required him to move in so close to the civilian airliner.
What had he done? Professional suicide, or some deeper need to actually have a strong visual on the civilian aircraft he was about to destroy?
A new tone beat in the cockpit, and simultaneously a missile symbol flashed up on his heads-up display. AMRAAM — the new, long-range replacement for the Phoenix. A fire-and-forget weapon, one with an improved secret head.
He thought he could see figures inside the black canopy of the American airliner. There was a pale oval as the pilot turned to watch him, and Chan even imagined that he could see the man’s mouth open slightly as though in protest. Against the bulk of the airliner, the missile seemed minuscule, a mere sliver of metal that posed no threat to the complicated airframe it was tracking.
Chan knew better. And, he suspected, so did the airliner pilot.
For the merest second, the missile was a bright white lozenge against the side of the silvery body. Then it penetrated the fuselage and it was all over.
Captain Mitchell saw the white contrail crawl across the sky toward him and knew immediately what it meant. He jammed the yoke forward, putting the airliner into a steep dive. The airframe shuddered, protesting against G-forces it had not experienced since the days of its final acceptance trials. Loose gear in the cockpit slammed forward against the windows, virtually obliterating his view.
The needle on the altimeter unwound at a furious rate. Auto-alarms and indicators howled their warnings. The only thing silent in the cockpit was his copilot, who knew as well as Mitchell did just how close they were to dying.
They had no chance, absent divine intervention or serious mechanical malfunction in the missile. Even if it didn’t detonate, it would surely crack open the fuselage and spill both cargo and passengers into the thin air. Mitchell could see in Nevins’s pale face a full acknowledgement of that fact, and he saw Nevins’s lips moving silently as though in prayer. He hoped his copilot offered up one for him as well, and he hoped whatever God Nevins prayed to would understand just why Mitchell was a little too busy right now to ask for help himself.
Even with no possibility of survival, though, he had to try. Had to challenge the fate that was looming up in front of him, blocking out any possibility of a future. His wife, his children — they flashed through his mind for a split second, and then he concentrated on watching the altimeter and the alarms. If the wing nuts held, if he kept power and hydraulics for just a few seconds more — now.
He stamped down on the controls, throwing the airliner into a hard, breaking turn to the right. For just a moment, he thought he’d overdone it, and that she’d go into a wingover. But the control surfaces bit into the air and hauled her around in an impossibly tight turn. The debris that had crowded his windscreen now pelted Nevins.
Descending again, with no spare time to try to catch a glimpse of the missile headed their way. Heat-seeking? Would it find the jet exhaust or would it impact the fuselage? For some reason, it seemed important to know that.
As the ocean rushed up to meet them, Mitchell pulled up hard, manhandling the airliner out of both the turn and the dive simultaneously. Air speed peeled off at an alarming rate, and he caught the look from Nevins that warned him to avoid a stall. They were three thousand feet above the ocean, still descending as they waited for a miracle.
In the last few seconds, a strange peace swept over the captain. He looked up at the voice recorder microphone mounted high on the cabin and said, “I love my wife, my children, and my country. God bless us all.” Perhaps, he thought, the message would be of some small comfort to them in the days that would come.
Nevins started to speak, but too late, far too late. A sharp crack interrupted him, followed immediately by the whooshing as the air spilled out of the cabin. The airliner slued around in mid-air, pivoting on its center of gravity. The aft section spiraled off to the left, the forward part to the right. Whatever message Nevins had wanted to leave was lost in the fiery incandescence of the explosion that followed.
SIX
Hot Rock stared in horror at the picture unfolding on his heads-up display. The MiG, the civilian airliner, the missile — a simple, uncluttered geometry, entirely too elegant to result in the death of almost four hundred civilian passengers.
He could see in the first instant that he was too late to stop it. Too far away, too out of position — even if he had wanted to drive his Tomcat into the path of the missile, take the hit to save innocent lives, he couldn’t have. The inexorable equation of time, speed and distance wouldn’t allow it.