“Sitrep, Five?”
“I’m doing things I can’t believe I’m doing without being there, Andy,” Zimmerman said. “Loops and rolls. Showed ’em my tail for a few seconds without planning it. The image on the screen is crazy. I don’t know if I’m up or down. I lost feedback on the airspeed indie…”
“Five?”
“I think I’m dead. Everything went blank and zero.”
“Six?”
Jordan reported. “I’m inverted at five hundred AGL. I think I’ve dodged about six hundred missiles. Upright, now, pulling for altitude. Oh, shit! Threat warning on IR missiles. Maybe two of them. Rolling.”
“Wizard Three, report!” Wyatt ordered.
“Three,” Vrdla said from the Here. “All my blips have gone crazy. I think that’s Five spinning in. Gone. Okay, showing five bogies. That must be Yucca Six near the ground. Missiles all over hell, but they’re blinking out. Yeah, Six go hard right and climb.”
“Going hard right,” Jordan called. “Hell, I’m losing airspeed bad. Got to put the nose down.”
“Hard left.”
“Left. Stalling out.”
“Their formation is a shambles.” Vrdla reported. “They’re all over the sky. I see you at two-zero from contact, Yucca One.”
“I got it back, I think,” Jordan said. “Airspeed coming up.”
Wyatt said, “Three, lose the drop tanks.”
“Roger.”
He hit the external tank jettison and felt the slight rise of lift through the stick as the tanks fell away.
Wyatt pulled back on the stick and the nose leapt upward. He shoved in the throttles, checked to his right.
Hackley was right with him.
The adrenaline was pumping. His eyesight seemed sharper. The clarity of everything, in and out of the cockpit, was amazing. The airplane moved with his thoughts. They were one being, and he hadn’t felt that in a long time.
“Yucca One, Wizard Three. I’ve got another bandit just off the runway at Marada, and I’m reading eleven aircraft on the ground.”
“Those are the ones we want,” Wyatt said.
“Should we take these out first?” Hackley asked. “Why not?”
Wyatt felt like anything was possible.
Ramad monitored the action of Ta Flight on the radio as he rolled out on a heading of 194 and urged the MiG into supersonic flight with the afterburners.
He switched in his search radar and found five blips immediately. Four of them were converging on one from different angles.
He attempted to shove the throttles forward, but they were already end-stopped. He had broken the sonic barrier, and the airspeed indicator revealed Mach 1.8.
“One unknown destroyed,” Ta Leader reported.
Ramad thought that atrocious. One airplane downed after firing eight missiles, all of them AA-7s judging by the distance involved when they were ignited.
One of Ta Flight’s pilots shouted, “Son of a goat!” as his missile apparently missed its target.
Ramad was fifty kilometres from the engagement. He armed his AA-7 missiles.
Then glanced again at the screen.
There were suddenly two new targets to be seen, coming from the southwest and vectoring on the dogfight. They had been flying low and were now gaining altitude rapidly.
He was about to alert Ta Lead when Marada Air Base broke in. “Vulture, Marada. We have radar contact with an unknown aircraft emitting radar energy two-two-zero kilometres, your bearing 178 degrees, altitude ten thousand meters.”
Involuntarily, he looked at the screen, but the target would be beyond his radar range.
He would ignore it for the moment.
“Ta Flight, Vulture. You have two unknowns attacking from your bearing two-six-zero,” he reported. “Disengage and meet the threat. I will assume your present target.”
“But…” Ta Leader complained.
“Now!” Ramad ordered.
He was closing fast on the target, and his radar screen showed him Ta Flight peeling away from it. He selected an AA-7, armed it, then rolled right to centre the target on the screen.
The missile’s warhead began to hum in his earphones as the infrared seeker attempted to lock-on to the target. He was approaching it broadside, and was not yet close enough to obtain a strong heat source.
And then he noted two more blips appear on his screen. They were to the north heading almost directly east.
Toward the chemical factory.
Almighty Allah! They come from everywhere!
In the back of his mind, he was counting. There were now seven unidentified aircraft.
Where Ghazi had said there would be six.
Something was wrong.
This was a massive invasion. There would be more, appearing from all points of the compass.
Switching to the secondary tactical channel, he called the squadron overflying the transports. “Orange Squadron, Vulture. Return to base immediately!”
“Uh, Vulture, we cannot. We must first refuel.”
Ramad cursed under his breath. “Refuel en route. Do it now!”
Back on the tactical one channel, he told Marada Air Control, “Recall Alif Flight.”
“At once, Vulture.”
The high-toned pitch in his earphones told him the missile had locked-on to the target.
He triggered it, and the missile leapt from its rails, a bright, hot exhaust almost blinding him.
He pulled the nose up and began to climb, so as to avoid the debris when his missile struck.
“Yucca One, eight miles to target,” Vrdla said. “They’re at angels seven and climbing.”
“Roger, Wizard.”
Wyatt cut in his search radar and scanned the HUD. Altitude 12,500 feet AGL. Speed Mach 1.1. Heading 086.
He put the nose down.
The desert rolled through his HUD, speeding quickly beneath him. He could see six targets in the immediate path of his search radar. Four, in apparent disarray, were closing on him from widely scattered positions. The fifth was apparently Yucca Six on an eastern course, attempting to gain altitude. The sixth was streaking across the screen on a perpendicular course to the north at almost double Mach. He saw the missile launch.
“One coming at you, Six.”
“Roger,” Jordan said. “I’m cutting throttle.”
Jordan would attempt to fool the missile attacking the RPV by reducing the heat source, then turning into the missile to get his hot tail pipe out of its infrared vision.
“Jesus!” Jordan said. “I can see the damned thing on camera.”
Wyatt blanked out Jordan’s voice as he concentrated on the four targets coming at them.
“I’ve got the left two, Yucca Three.”
“Roger, One. Taking the two on the right.”
He expected to hear his missile threat warning sound off at any moment. The MiGs were two thousand feet below them, climbing, six miles away.
He guessed they had used their medium-range Apexs on the RPVs and were now left with the short-range Aphids.
Which meant that his and Barr’s tactics were paying off. The RPVs’ primary role was to draw the long-and medium-range weapons. Beyond that, if they survived, anything they accomplished was icing.
He had a solid lock-on tone from the first Sidewinder. The words “LOCK-ON” appeared on the HUD.
And now the targets were visual, black dots against the terrain.
“Tally ho, Three!”
“I see ’em,” Hackley said.
They were taking on the enemy aircraft head-on, which wasn’t the most effective configuration for heat-seeking missiles, which preferred a hotter energy source. The Super Sidewinders, though, were being operated at a longer wavelength of 10.6 microns, and they “saw” whole targets whose skin was heated by the friction generated from passing through the atmosphere.