Down in the darkened CIC space, everyone felt their weight shift in their seats as the carrier heeled to port. Stickney was heading the ship back into the wind so the Viking could recover.
Boyce studied his display. For the third time in fifteen minutes, he called the AWACS. “What’s the picture, Sea Witch?”
A pause followed. Boyce knew the controller — an Air Force captain named Tracey Barnett. She was sorting her own array of contacts. “Picture still clear,” she reported. “Yankees on second, Pirates headed for first, Dodgers up to bat.”
Boyce acknowledged. It corroborated what he saw on his own display. “Picture clear” confirmed that nothing hostile was showing — no MiGs, no SAMs, no target-tracking radars. The baseball team code meant that Maxwell’s flight — Yankee — was coming off target, while his second division — Pirate — was just rolling in. Behind them Dodger flight — the Bluetails — was smoking in low and fast.
Boyce knew from experience there was always a glitch. If the place was totally undefended, it meant that they had gotten inaccurate intel about the defenses. But what if the enemy had simply been caught with their pants down? It meant that any moment they would wake up to the fact that they were getting the shit bombed out of them. They would start shooting.
The only thing they couldn’t immediately assess was bomb damage. Not until they’d gotten reconnaissance footage obtained by a low-flying Tomcat with a TARP package — Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod — and from satellite imagery would they know for sure whether Al-Fasr had been put out of business.
The photo of the terrorist smiling back at him from the screen in the briefing room was still in Boyce’s mind. He hoped the grinning bastard had been nailed in his headquarters taking a nap. Or sipping one of those thick Arab coffees while he was —
“Pop-up! Pop-up bogeys, north bull’s-eye five miles!”
The controller’s call pierced Boyce’s thoughts like a knife. “Two targets! North bull’s-eye, four miles, closing fast!”
Boyce could hear the controller trying to keep her voice calm. “No!” she called. “Make that three targets!”
Boyce could see them on his own display, which was datalinked with the AWACS. Sure as hell, out of nowhere, three blips were there that weren’t there before. Converging with the strike fighters.
Pandemonium spilled out of the strike frequency. “Bandits, bandits, two o’clock low!”
“Who? Who’s got bandits—”
“Yankee One, bandits four o’clock low.”
“Dodger One, snap vector, two-six-zero, four miles.”
“Confirm bandits! Who’s got an ID?”
“Sea Witch confirms three bandits, north bull’s-eye, three miles.”
“Threat two-four-zero. Looks like Fulcrums.”
“Yankee Two spiked at seven o’clock!”
Maxwell could hear the urgency in B. J. Johnson’s voice. “Chaff!” he answered. He wanted her to dump a trail of radar-deflecting foil. “Break left now! Keep the chaff coming.”
He was getting the same warning on his RWR. They were both spiked by an enemy fighter’s radar. They were the targets. With their tails exposed to the low-flying bandits, radar-deflecting chaff was their only salvation.
Unless the guy was shooting infrared missiles. Heat seekers didn’t need radar. They could home on the IR — infrared — signature of your engines, or even the friction of the air over your jet’s skin.
Over his shoulder Maxwell could see the dark shape of the bandit down low, coming at them in a nearly vertical climb. He recognized the low-slung belly scoops, the twin vertical fins. A MiG-29. As he grunted under the strain of the six-G turn, he saw a flash beneath the MiG’s port wing root.
A missile. IR or radar? No change in the RWR. Had to be a heat seeker.
“Flares!” he called, toggling his own flare dispenser. “B.J., break left. Bandit, seven o’clock low. Missile in the air.”
Like chaff, the flares were decoys that were supposed to deceive the missile’s guidance unit. If the weapon was a heat seeker — and if they were lucky — the missile would lock onto the flares. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. The Russian-built Archer missile was smart enough to distinguish flares from tailpipes.
Pulling maximum G, grunting to keep from graying out as he kept his eyes on the fast-climbing Fulcrum fighter, Maxwell wondered how they got caught like this. Where did they come from?
How many were there? Why didn’t they get picked up by the AWACS?
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
In the lead Tomcat, Cmdr. Burner Crump listened to the urgent radio calls.
“Dodger One spiked at three o’clock!”
“Snap Vector, Pirate One, tactical, one-five-zero, five miles.”
“Yankee Two, no joy, no joy!”
The last call was a woman’s voice. The Roadrunner pilot, B. J. Johnson, was reporting that she couldn’t get a visual on the bandit that was targeting her.
Crump felt like pounding his fist in frustration. He and his Tomcats had been orbiting on their overhead CAP station waiting for nonexistent MiGs. The trouble was, the MiGs weren’t nonexistent, and they had somehow gotten down there to hose the bombers. The goddamn fight would be over before Crump and his shooters could get to them.
Maybe not. “Felix One, Sea Witch,” came the voice of the AWACS controller. “Snap vector one-three-five, fifteen miles, low. Buster.”
“Felix One copies,” Crump answered, shoving his throttles into the afterburner detent. “Buster.”
Here we go, thought Crump. Better late than never. The AWACS controller had just decided that maybe the Tomcats ought to join the furball. She was issuing the bearing and range to the targets. “Buster” was brevity code for maximum speed, which was a good clue that the Hornets were in deep shit.
Crump rolled to the new heading and dumped the nose of the Tomcat. Under full thrust of the F110-GE engines, the big fighter was accelerating like a bullet. In combat spread on the right, his wingman, Gordo Gray, was staying with him. The brown expanse of the Yemeni wasteland swelled in Crump’s windscreen.
“You got ’em sorted, Willie?” he asked the RIO in the backseat. He could hear Lt. Willie Martinez, the radar intercept officer, breathing heavily into his hot mike. Martinez was peering into his display, trying to separate cowboys from Indians.
“Hang on a sec. We got a customer… twelve o’clock… yeah, get ready, I’m getting a lock—” The sound of Martinez’s breathing abruptly stopped. “Shit, we’re spiked! He’s taking a shot!”
Al-Fasr grunted against the seven-G pull-up. The nose of his MiG-29 was pointed nearly vertical, climbing like a rocket from the energy of the supersonic dash over the surface. If his timing was correct, and if he was lucky…
Yes! They were directly above him. He flipped the radar to narrow scan and was rewarded with a target-acquisition symbol. Not one but two targets, diving toward him, probing with their own radars.
It would be a snap shot. Only a marginal chance for a kill, but he had no choice. They would merge in eight seconds, and long before that the enemy fighters — they had to be F- 14s — would have their own missiles in the air.
He would have preferred a radar-guided Alamo missile, but that meant he would have to remain locked on with his radar while the missile tracked. That was suicide.
It had to be a fire-and-forget heat seeker. Al-Fasr punched the fire control button on the stick. Whoom! An AA-11 Archer missile leaped from its rail beneath the right wing.