He punched again. Whoom! A second Archer streaked upward, both missiles trailing plumes of fire and gray smoke.
For an instant he wished he could wait and see the missiles do their work. But his life would then be measured in seconds. He was a hunted animal surrounded by predators.
He flicked on the chaff dispenser and hauled the nose of the MiG over the top of the loop, back down toward the horizon. He punched his targeting radar off. No radar emissions, no electronic target.
His life lay in the effectiveness of his missiles. If the Archers killed the F-14s before they could launch their own missiles… if the chaff deflected the enemy’s radar-guided weapons… if he was not already targeted by other fighters…
The MiG was pointed in a vertical dive back to the earth, back to the cover of the radar-scattering terrain.
The earth was expanding in his windscreen like a zoom lens. Don’t fly into the ground, Al-Fasr told himself. He pulled hard again on the stick, coming out the dive within a terraced valley. On either side the walls of the valley passed in a brown-hued blur.
Through the clear glass in the top of the MiG’s canopy, he saw wreckage tumbling out of the sky: a dark shape, spewing debris and orange flame and smoke. A Tomcat? Or one of his MiG-29s?
He saw pieces separate from the wreckage. A parachute canopy blossomed. Then a second. Two white chutes floating down to the Yemeni hills.
Al-Fasr felt a warm glow of satisfaction. The only multiple-crew fighters in this engagement were the Tomcats. One of his Archers had struck home. A face-to-face shot. He won; they lost.
He wondered how Rittmann and Novotny were doing. Had they scored kills? Or were they dead?
Rittmann cursed himself. Why did he take the shot? He should have waited.
In his great haste to kill the lead Hornet, he had fired the missile too soon. He, of all people! Even though he had a steady kill tone in his headset, he knew that the Archer’s guidance unit was subject to false locks at this range, especially shooting upward into the sun.
The two Hornets were in a hard break to the left, spewing a trail of foil. The second section had broken to the right and were not a threat, at least not yet. Rittmann had a speed advantage, having converted his supersonic velocity over the surface into a vertical climb. He was closing on the first pair, who were in a high reversal turn to counter his attack.
Rittmann selected another Archer missile. The lead Hornet had gained enough angle off to be outside the Archer’s off-boresight limit. It didn’t matter. The wingman was still well within range.
He was getting a good acquisition tone from the seeker head. The IR rangefinder showed six thousand meters and closing — well within the envelope. This time he would do it right.
For another second Rittmann tracked the enemy fighter. He had a clear view of the Hornet’s aft quarter — the twin afterburners torching flame, canted vertical stabilizers, the pilot’s head visible through the back of the canopy. Wisps of vapor were coming off the wings, evidence of the heavy G-load the pilot was pulling.
Rittmann depressed the firing button. The AA-11 Archer missile rocketed ahead of the MiG, flying a curved track toward the hard-turning Hornet.
He saw what appeared to be — Was ist das? — balls of fire? No, he realized, flares. He had never seen them this close before. The Hornet pilot was ejecting flares to throw off the heat-seeking missile.
Too late.
Moving at three times the speed of sound, the Archer closed the distance between the fighters. For a second the missile veered toward the trail of flares. Then, like a trained hunting dog, the missile sensed the deception and swerved back to the real target.
The Hornet was in a vertical bank, making a maximum-G turn. With its tiny guidance fins, the stubby air-to-air missile was unable to match the tight turning radius. The Archer overshot, missing the Hornet’s tail by twenty feet.
But it was close enough. The missile’s proximity fuse detonated, and the metal-shredding shrapnel in the Archer’s warhead ripped through the tail section of the Hornet.
Fascinated, Rittmann watched the Hornet go into a skid, then straighten itself, coming out of the hard turn. Part of the right vertical stabilizer was gone. Pieces were spitting out of the right engine, and flames licked around the outside of the fuselage. For a second Rittmann considered finishing the job with the thirty-millimeter gun in the MiG’s left wing. Before the pilot could escape, Rittmann would convert him to chopped meat.
In the next instant, the Hornet erupted in a ball of fire. Instinctively, Rittmann threw the stick to the right and yanked hard, barely missing the fireball.
In clear sky, he took a deep breath. He had just killed his first real enemy. But the battle wasn’t over. There were many more out there waiting to —
The Sirena. The urgent, warbling noise of his radar warning receiver filled his cockpit. He was targeted.
It would be a max angle off-boresight shot, but Maxwell didn’t care. The MiG — this particular MiG — wasn’t getting away. He would take this guy out any way he could. He’d use the nose-mounted Gatling gun if necessary.
Never in his career had Maxwell felt so frustrated. It had happened so suddenly. Just as he was reaching the apex of his defensive turn, he glanced over his shoulder in time to witness the disintegration of B. J. Johnson’s Hornet.
That was when the MiG pilot made his mistake. He tarried too long behind the target after taking his shot. He was forced to make an evasive turn to the right, which gave Maxwell the opening he needed. Pirouetting his Hornet at the top of the arcing turn, he sliced the nose back downhill — toward the oncoming MiG.
Flash Gordon’s voice came over the frequency: “Yankee Three and Four engaged. Bandit locked twelve o’clock low.”
That explained what happened to his second section, Gordon and Jones. Coming off the target, they had made a hard break to the right to counter another low-flying MiG. That made two. Hadn’t AWACS reported three bandits?
“B.J. is down,” Maxwell said. “Anybody see a chute?”
“Yankee Three, negative,” said Gordon. “We saw a fireball, Brick. No chute.”
Maxwell struggled to control his emotions. You lost your wingman. If he had reacted quicker to the AWACS pop-up call… if he had made an immediate break into the threat sector…
He pushed the thoughts from his mind. Focus. Kill this guy.
The MiG was directly in front of him. The Sidewinder seeker circle in the HUD was superimposed on the sleek shape of the Fulcrum. The low growl of the missile’s seeker unit swelled in his earphones, telling him it was tracking.
Without his second section and now missing his wingman, he knew he was vulnerable to attack by the third bandit. He should get the hell out of there and stay defensive.
No. Take this sonofabitch out.
The MiG was in a hard left turn into him. Maxwell could see the mottled paint scheme, the twin torches of flame from the afterburners.
He squeezed the trigger. From the right wing tip a Sidewinder air-to-air missile streaked out in front of the Hornet.
“Fox two!” he called, signaling the launch of an AIM-9 heat-seeking missile.
He watched the missile go into an arcing left turn, pursuing the MiG like a wolf chasing an antelope. He kept the MiG centered in his HUD. He rocked his air-to-air armament selector back to GUN. If the Sidewinder missed, he would do it the old-fashioned way.
It took exactly four and one-half seconds.
The tail section of the Fulcrum disintegrated in a shower of fragments. The fighter slewed into a rolling, yawing tumble to the right.