“Fantoms! Missiles inbound.” Tzubya called in an emotionless voice. One, two… five… he quickly counted five drones and near twice as many missiles headed for his formation. The American aircraft were nearly 30 miles out, hiding down low in the wave clutter. One of the returns on his tracking screen suddenly turned solid and quicker than he could think himself, a K-77M missile leaped off his rails toward the target. A second missile was fired by one of his wingmen but his systems were showing heavy jamming and the Russian missiles lost their lock almost immediately. He had to get within optical guidance range!
At least two incoming missiles appeared to be targeting his aircraft. Damn, damn, damn. He looked to his right and saw he still had a wingman with him. Then he saw a flash of fire, the white cloud of a missile impact beside him and he rolled instinctively away from the explosion as his wingman detonated in a ball of flying metal.
No, not a missile. The US missiles were still closing, two seconds to impact. A glint caught his eye and looking to port he saw a lone Fantom pull out of a screaming dive above the water and climb away, trying to regain altitude. Ignoring the missile warnings, he flung his own machine onto its wing and tried to lock the US aircraft up. He had to override his combat AI as it fired countermeasures and tried to assert control in the face of imminent destruction from the incoming US missiles, but he grunted in satisfaction as he turned inside the fast-moving Cudas and both detonated harmlessly behind him. As the enemy aircraft reached the top of its zoom climb he got an optical lock on the US fighter that had taken his wingman out with its guns. He got a firing tone. His thumb reached for the missile release…
As he was about to jab down on the button, tracer flashed over his wing. One of the damned winged hell-hounds had gotten behind him! Cursing, he broke hard left and dived for the sea.
“Oak 4 to Birch leader, we are engaged over target,” he said, wrenching his machine into a flick roll to avoid a line of tracer fire from the drone behind him. The missile warning screaming in his ears stopped. The inferior American missiles had lost their lock. He stopped his roll, reversed it, and pulled his machine into a screaming starboard climbing turn. He had little chance of out-maneuvering the American drone, but his Mig had a trick up its sleeve that set it apart from 5th Gen fighters like the Su-57 or Fantom. If he lived long enough to use it. More tracer fire flashed over his canopy as he jinked. “How far out are you?” he called to the Su-57 pilot shepherding the Okhotniks to the target.
“Birch leader Oak 4, we are at ingress waypoint, twenty miles out,” the voice of the commander of the Okhotnik flight replied. “We have Poplar squadron with us, ten minutes from release point.”
“Spruce flight is down, Oak leader is down, Oak flight of three remaining, I am lead,” Tzubya said. “We’ll occupy the American CAP,” he said, rolling his machine on its axis and pulling it into a power climb. “I authorize ingress of Birch aircraft.”
“Roger Spruce 4,” the Birch flight leader said. “We are merging. I am showing two to four bogeys over the target, confirm?”
In any other aircraft, pulling up into a spiraling climb with an enemy on his six would have been suicidal. He felt his airspeed bleeding away despite his powerplant being at full thrust. In his rear aspect camera view he saw the US Fantom closing, firing in short controlled bursts. But at that moment a laser tone sounded in his ears. The anti-missile laser mounted in the rear of his Mig had finally got a lock on the Fantom behind him. As soon as it locked it fired automatically, a noiseless, recoilless pulse of focused energy that burned through the nose of the pursuing drone, melted vital components to slag, and sent it spinning out of control toward the sea.
“Splash one! Estimate four to six remaining,” Tzubya said. As he tried to digest the data on his tactical display he heard a scream over the radio and saw another Russian icon disappear. He brought his machine around and tried to get a lock on another American aircraft, knowing in his guts that the approaching Sukhois would not arrive in time.
In her trailer, Bunny saw she now only had four birds in the air — three with Cudas, one guns only electronic-warfare machine. She had accounted for five Migs. Between the S-FADs and her Fantoms that gave about 19 US kills for three losses. The threat board showed a large Russian force of air and ground attack aircraft moving in. It was time to get her babies to safety. But there was one Mig in range and she still had ordnance. She had to save some missiles for the ingress to Nome in case the drones were intercepted on their way home but she issued a command to her remaining A2A armed fighters to volley half their ordnance and then head for the deck and bug out for Nome.
Igor Tzubya heard the alert and saw eight missiles on his heads-up display threat display, four vectored on him. His AI wrenched his machine into a tight banking turn, firing chaff and flares automatically.
But Tzubya took his hands from his stick and throttle and closed his eyes. He knew Death had finally come for him. Goddamn robots.
With her Fantoms out of Russian missile range and on their way to Nome, Bunny ran from the trailer, “Ground attack aircraft inbound!!” she yelled. Rodriguez looked over from the flight deck. “We have about five minutes!” She ran up beside Rodriguez and grabbed her arm. “Forget that!”
Rodriguez did the math. Five minutes until the Russian attack aircraft were in position to launch missiles at the cave. One minute for their missiles to run. That was six. But it would take her two to boot the Fantom, two to run the emergency take-off routine, two to spool up the Scimitar engines, one to launch.
They were out of time.
Bondarev looked over the sea to the south and watched in anger as the last of his Migs was skewered by several missiles at once. The Mig-41 disintegrated instantly, scattering into a thousand parts, several of which were his pilot. Further out, a formation of US Fantoms wheeled in the sky and headed northeast.
They were withdrawing?
Despair turned to hope and he stood and cheered as nine Sukhois in tight formation appeared on the horizon, with no sign of pursuit. In seconds they were flashing overhead. Which meant his Okhotniks must be…
Sure enough, moving in just above sea level, he spotted a flock of small dark delta shapes spearing in toward Little Diomede. If he had a radio he would have yelled at them to divide their fire between the cave mouth and the small window in the rock high and to the left. But some well-placed munitions in the maw of the cave might be enough.
Sitting in their trailers in Anadyr, the pilots and systems operators of the Okhotniks had AI enhanced, HD magnified, simulated real-time vision of the cliff face ahead. They had lost true real-time control of their drones when they lost their airborne control link but the remaining satellite links were good enough for them to identify the low mouth of the cave as a cold dark smudge above the water, and place the targeting crosshairs of their KH-31F missiles right in the middle of it. To do it they had to designate the target manually, because it was actually an absence of something, not an object in itself. But with no enemy aircraft to worry about, it didn’t matter that they didn’t have real-time control of their drones.
A further complication was that the half to one second of lag caused by sending their targeting commands via satellite meant a difference between what their pilots were seeing as the aircraft position and status, and what its real position and status was. To allow for that margin of error, they had committed more than the usual number of aircraft to the attack and the Okhotnik drivers were taking no chances they would miss. They let the drones close to two miles out before Bondarev saw the tell-tale flash under their bellies as missiles dropped out of their weapon bays. Lines of smoke traced a path from the aircraft toward the island. Despite himself, he crouched lower. He tried quickly to count the contrails but they were moving too fast. As they disappeared from view under the lip of the cliff he lowered his head to his arm and waited.