Though she sat on solid ground and felt the comforting caress of the cool ocean breeze, her stomach knotted up and a thin sheen of perspiration coated her skin as she strained against the virtual G-forces. She felt the tension in her neck as she looked over her shoulder to maintain sight of the enemy fighter, struggling to believe he had found her.
Where did he come from?
She had worried something like this might happen but didn’t think the Americans could have reacted fast enough to launch a counter-air mission. She thought she would at least have enough time to launch the two Joint Strike Missiles and complete the mission before the carrier launched its fighters to intercept her. That it had happened so early into the flight, before even turning south to begin her attack run, meant that the Americans were expecting her.
But how?
He couldn’t have found me on radar, she thought hopefully, though it was impossible to ignore the reality. Besides, it didn’t really matter anymore. For whatever reason, the Americans had been expecting her, and they sent another jet to stop her.
But she still had the advantage. She still had control over the jet and still had an air-to-air missile she could use to maintain her advantage. All she needed to do was shoot down the pursuing jet and continue with her mission.
“Let’s see what you’re made of,” she whispered.
Colt watched Jug’s jet break into him and had a moment of panic before his training kicked in. He banked to oppose the other jet’s nose and kept his helmet against the head box as he strained against the growing G-forces to keep sight of the attacking Joint Strike Fighter as he maneuvered to the merge.
“What’s going on, Jug?”
“Left-to-left… I think.”
Colt pointed his nose to the right, and they passed each other with less than one hundred feet of separation. He checked across Jug’s tail and watched the other jet giving up angles and pulling up into the vertical with cold lift vector placement.
That was a mistake, Colt thought.
He processed the myriad of tactical errors and capitalized on each by rolling inverted and pulling pure nose low to counter the other jet’s nose high, but he kept the top of his helmet pointed right at his opponent. As his nose came up, he watched the other’s come down, setting up for a classic low-to-high merge that gave Colt the distinct advantage. A good pilot would have tried flattening out the merge, but Colt knew his opponent wasn’t that.
As they neared the second merge, this time in the vertical plane, Colt rolled his left vector ninety degrees and pulled back on the stick to early turn his opponent. His timing might have been off by a few tenths of a second, but he saw the other JSF reenter his field of view right where he expected. He added rudder and spiraled his jet down into Jug’s control zone.
“Talk to me, Jug,” Colt said.
“The pull’s coming on…”
He watched Jug’s nose slowly coming up to the horizon, but before it got there, the jet rolled onto its back in an ill-timed ditch maneuver. Colt shook his head, knowing that if it had been executed properly, it could have given him a closure problem to contend with.
“I think I just ditched…”
“Poorly,” Colt replied.
A pilot with less experience might have overshot anyway and given up his offensive advantage, but there was nowhere Colt felt more comfortable than at the controls of a fighter. He quickly pulled his nose up to slow his closure and increase his vertical separation, waiting until he had passed over the top of the other F-35 before rolling inverted and pulling his nose down to follow.
The stick and rudder skills were easy, but this kind of fight wasn’t something they had ever trained him for. He knew how to fight another jet and had trained against adversary pilots who were skilled in replicating all manner of threat aircraft, but he had never had to fight a pilot who wasn’t in the jet. Or fight a jet without a pilot.
Except there is a pilot, and he’s your friend.
Colt’s nose was stuck in lag, behind the other jet, and he looked through the top of his canopy as the possessed JSF banked right to complicate him gaining a weapon’s solution. Colt rolled left to preserve weapons separation and again avoided a costly overshoot that would put him on the defensive.
Acting on a honed instinct drilled into him over hundreds of hours of training, Colt put his jet into air-to-air mode and selected one of the two AIM-120D AMRAAM missiles. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot down his friend, but if the fight went from offensive to neutral, he would have no choice. There was no way he could risk losing this fight and allow the other jet to continue its mission and launch its Joint Strike Missiles at the unsuspecting aircraft carrier.
“I’m jamming you, Colt!” Jug said. Then, after realizing what that meant, added, “Wait… are you trying to shoot me?”
He glanced down at his radar display and saw indications that the other aircraft was indeed disrupting his attempt to maintain a lock. But his radar had its own built-in anti-jamming capabilities, and it was an even fight as to who would win — the most advanced radar in the fleet or the most advanced jammer.
“I don’t want to!” he replied.
Hope it’s the radar, he thought.
He banked right and descended in trail of the other JSF as it went into afterburner and extended, trying to race for the hapless carrier floating in the waters south of San Clemente. He shoved his own throttle forward, dumping fuel into the hot exhaust as his own afterburner shoved him back into the seat.
47
Beth stood tall at the center of the bridge, hiding her fear from the sailors around her as they performed the individual tasks required of them to keep the warship afloat. She marveled at how the Navy had taken kids from diverse backgrounds and trained each of them in specific skill sets, then placed them into positions of responsibility. She didn’t know them all by name yet, but she knew they would all perform their jobs with flawless precision. “All ahead flank three,” she ordered.
“All ahead flank three, aye, ma’am.”
The lee helmsman at the central control station advanced the throttles slowly, tapping into all eighty-thousand-shaft horsepower available from the four gas turbines. Beth leaned forward onto the balls of her feet to counter the momentum of the ship surging forward under her, glowering behind her mask of indifference. In the days of her grandfather’s Navy, the movement of the throttles was accomplished in the engine room after receiving a corresponding signal from the engine order telegraph, also known as a Chadburn. But in the modern Navy, the lee helmsman had a direct linkage to the engines. Even the advanced Arleigh Burke—class destroyers had reverted from touchscreen helm and throttle controls to more tactile mechanical connections. Sometimes, technology wasn’t the asset ship designers thought it to be.
“Range to target,” she said, staring through the windows at the darkness beyond the bow.
The sailor standing at the Mk-20 console fired a laser to update their distance from the former Bonhomme Richard as it bobbed in the water behind them, awaiting its fate in Davey Jones’s Locker. “Eight point six nautical miles and opening, ma’am.”