“Any sign of those fighters?”
“None.”
Stoica ripped off his oxygen mask in frustration. The one-hundred percent oxygen he was breathing to try to recover from his hangover was drying out his mouth and throat even faster. He knew, but didn’t want to concede, that pure oxygen really did nothing: only time was effective in recovering from the effects of too much alcohol. He had already drained both of his canteens of water on this flight, and they had been airborne less than an hour. His skin was starting to crawl, his hands were shaking, and if he moved his eyes too fast, all the gauges would start to pinwheel around the cockpit on him. He would never make it through an entire four-hour patrol. If he didn’t get down out of this plane and into bed in the next hour, he was going to pass out.
“Warm up the R-27s and give me a hot button,” Stoica ordered.
“Roger,” Yegorov said. A moment later: “R-27s ready. What’s your plan, Ion?”
“Simple — take them all out,” Stoica said. He got a lock-on tone in his headset and pressed the launch button. The first R-27 leapt off the starboard rail and disappeared into the night sky on a yellow line of fire. The sudden burst of light sent slivers of pain shooting through Stoica’s head. Seconds later, they saw a large, bright explosion off in the distance — the missile had found its target. “Splash one bomber. Line up the next one, Gennadi.”
“Radars are down, Ion,” Yegorov said. “All the other bombers shut down their search radars.” Without an enemy radar indication, the bombers assumed that their attacker had a home-on-radar guided missile — all they had to do was turn off their radars to take that capability away. That meant that the Tyenee had to turn on its radar to lock on to the bombers.
“Then fire up ours,” Stoica ordered. He turned slightly to the right. “We know he’s off our nose right now — radiate for five seconds and let’s go get him.”
“It’s too dangerous, Ion,” Yegorov said. “There’s still at least five enemy aircraft out there, and we don’t know where the fighters are. Let them reveal themselves. Don’t worry — we’ve got lots of fuel.”
Stoica bent his head down so his mouth was pointing directly down on the floor and so nothing in his stomach would hit his instruments, but it was only dry heaves. Those were definitely the worst. “I said, go to radiate on the radar and let’s nail those bombers,” Stoica ordered again. “We don’t have time to waste. They can begin their attack on the destroyer at any second.”
“But they’re not—”
“I said, turn the damned radar on, and do it now!” Stoica shouted, tasting and nearly retching again on bile in his throat.
“Radar on,” Yegorov finally reported. “Bandits at twelve and one o’clock, forty-five and sixty kilometers.”
“Got him,” Stoica said. “Keep the radar on.” He locked up the first bomber and shot their second R-27 missile.
“Enemy aircraft inbound!” Yegorov shouted. “Five o’clock, fifty kilometers and closing fast! Enemy fighters, probably F-16s!” Stoica started hard S turns around the axis of attack on his quarry, not willing to break radar lock and trying to confuse the inbound fighters. “Still closing, forty kilometers, intermediate lock growing to a solid lock. Ion, let’s get out of here!”
The two Metyor pilots could see beads of decoy flares ejecting into the night sky, their magnesium spheres bright enough to be seen for a hundred kilometers. They knew that the second bomber had detected the missile-steering uplink signal, which meant a missile was in the air, and it began ejecting chaff bundles to decoy the radar. Sure enough, Stoica could see his radar lock-on box remaining stationary, not following the string of decoy flares, then suddenly following, only to be decoyed off its target again.
“It missed, Ion!” Yegorov shouted. He realized they had stayed on virtually the same heading for too long, allowing the pursuing fighters to deploy in a wide spread-out pattern — no matter which way they turned, one of the fighters could begin a high-speed tail-chase on them. “Bandits at thirty kilometers! Let’s get out of here! Radar down!” The lock-on box disappeared, meaning Yegorov had shut off the attack radar. “Solid lock on us, Ion! They’ve got us!”
“Then we fight our way out,” Stoica said. “Radar to transmit. Warm up the R-60s.” Just then, they heard a DEEDLEDEEDLEDEEDLE! warning tone in their helmet headsets. “Missile launch radar! Chaff! Flares!” Yegorov ejected decoys while Stoica threw the Mt-179 into a hard right turn. “I said, radar to transmit!” he shouted.
Yegorov had to fight through the rapidly building g forces to turn on the attack radar and pre-arm all of the remaining R-60 missiles. “Your button is hot, Ion, R-60s external and internal. in sequence are ready.”
The nearest enemy fighter was just starting a hard climbing right turn, apparently after firing a radar-guided missile. Stoica quickly reversed direction, shoved in full afterburner power, and climbed after him. He saw and then felt a hard SLAM! underneath and just behind him — one of the enemy missiles had just missed by less than fifty meters. Seconds later, he got a “Lock” indication on his heads-up display and fired one R-60 heat-seeker. He knew he shouldn’t turn away from an enemy fighter above him — he had plenty of energy to turn back and pursue — but he was one versus at least four, and he had to keep moving. Besides, the guy above him was either defensive now, or he was dead.
Stoica immediately executed a hard-right diving turn to aim his radar back to where he thought the enemy fighters were. The fighter farthest to the west was turning after him, but another was still flying straight, crossing under and behind to cover his leader’s tail. Stoica tightened his turn even more to go after the wingman — but he received a stall warning buffet and felt his wings rumble in protest. “Airspeed!” Yegorov warned.
“Screw airspeed — this bastard’s mine!” Stoica growled. He kept the turn in. The turn bled off lots of speed, but the dive helped, and he was able to keep it just above stall speed. When he rolled out, the enemy fighter was almost in front of him, starting a turn to the east to cover, and Stoica fired an R-60 at him.
Another warning warble. “Missile launch!” Yegorov cried out. “Break left!”
Stoica threw the stealth fighter into a tight left turn. But that was a mistake. They had been just above stall speed for the past several moments, and the level break he had just made pushed him into a full stall — and with one wing down, the Mt-179 entered a snapping left spin. Stoica heard a loud WHACK! and a yelp, then a moan, then silence. “You all right, Gennadi?” No response, just another moan. What in hell happened? But Stoica had no time to check him out further — if he didn’t stop this spin quickly, they’d both be hurting.
Because of its forward swept-wing technology, the aerodynamic characteristics of the Metyor-179 stealth fighter were unlike those of any other aircraft. A stall-spin in an aircraft designed to be super-maneuverable was usually fatal, and stall recovery was not like any other aircraft. Rather than trying to counteract the spin with rudder, lower the nose, and level the wings as in a normal airplane, Stoica had to pull power, use flaps, the speed brake, and ailerons to slow down as much as possible, turn off the automatic flight-controls, match the control stick and rudder controls to the aircraft attitude, then reset the automatic flight control system. He had to do that as fast and as many times as necessary until the plane recovered itself. Sometimes it happened on the first try and the stall-spin lasted one or two turns; other times it lasted longer and he could lose a frightening amount of altitude in a hurry.