Skeeter rolled into position, slightly above the missile's altitude, and toggled off two Sidewinders. "Fox three, Fox three," he chimed over tactical.
"201, say your intentions." The voice was as familiar to me as Gator's, and almost as important.
Great. Now the carrier was getting in on the act. That was all I needed at this point, one other voice babbling out good ideas and suggestions while I was in a ready fire mode.
"I'll get back to you." I said it fast enough to let the Operations Specialist 6n the other end of the circuit know I was pissed. But hell, it wasn't really his fault. Some surface-puke Tactical Action Officer was undoubtedly riding his ass, howling for intentions and indications. Like there was anything he could really do about it.
"Got it!" Skeeter crowed seconds before his lead Sidewinder intercepted the first missile. "Man, am I hot or what!"
"Not as hot as the E-2 is going to be if you don't get the second one," I reminded him. "You take that one ― I'll go for number three."
"Break right, descend to eight thousand feet," Gator ordered quietly from the backseat. "Recommend the Sidewinder for the first shot."
"You don't want to take a shot with the Sparrow?"
"No ― let's just do it right the first time."
I nodded. The Sparrow had a longer range, but the Sidewinder was considerably more accurate at this kind of angles fight. Plus, the Sidewinder was faster. Not that the ground-launched missile could outrun a Sparrow, but the Sidewinder just felt like the right weapon to use. For once, Gator and I agreed.
I selected a Sidewinder and waited for the tone. The distinctive warbling of a Sidewinder that had acquired a sufficient-heat target filled the cockpit. I toggled it off. My Tomcat rocked slightly as the weight left the wing, and I corrected us back into a level flight immediately.
The missile wheeled off, picking up speed rapidly and nosing around a bit in the air as it found its heat source.
"Looks good, looks good ― getting close now," Gator sang out, updating me on its progress on his radar. "Damn, Bird Dog, I think you've got it."
It looked like a diamond flashed in the sky somewhere, a brief flare of light that indicated a hit.
"Skeeter, talk to me," I demanded, leaving it to the backseaters to appreciate the damned fine shot. "Talk to me ― have you got it?"
"I think so ― it's a little too far north, so I'm ― damn."
"Damn what?"
"Right engine over temp. I'm pressing on anyway."
"Any signs of fire?"
"Negative. Probably just a faulty gauge. Ready for Fox three. Now!"
"Shit." Gator's verdict from the backseat was good enough for me. Despite his unwillingness sometimes to go along with what I deemed an adequate tactical maneuver, Gator had an almost psychic sense of when a missile would hit and when it wouldn't.
"We're on it," I said, goosing the fighter slightly. I wanted speed, lots of it, to close the gap between me and the missile before I took a shot at it. The Tomcat screamed and the G forces pushed me back in my seat. It was a healthy, pounding thunder of powerful jet engines ripping speed out of thin air.
Closer and closer, until I got both a good growl off the Sparrow and the high whine off the Sidewinder. Hell, go with what works. I toggled up another Sidewinder, glad it had only taken me one to nail the last missile.
The Tomcat felt markedly lighter now, more responsive and nimble under my fingertips. Not that anti-air missiles weigh that much, but the drag they place on a high-performance airframe is always a factor.
"It looks good, it looks good," Gator said. "Not certain yet, but it might be."
"I'm coming in for follow-up," Skeeter announced. "I've got two Sidewinders left."
"Back me up," I agreed, waiting for that final confident howl of glee from Gator that would tell me we were on the mark. Hell, it was just a surface-to-air missile ― I didn't need any help to nail one.
"Damn it, Bird Dog, it's dropping off!" Gator's voice held the note of confidence I'd been waiting to hear, but the words were wrong. All wrong.
"Shit, it fucked up?"
"Some sort of malfunction."
"Where's the fucking sun?" I swung my head around to see it. "No, not that. What the hell's got it distracted?"
"Maybe just a bad bird, Bird Dog."
I toggled off another missile, already feeling a sinking, twisting sensation in my gut that told me I was in a bad tail chase. Real bad. The geometry flashed through my mind, more instinct than an actual mathematical calculation, but often just as deadly accurate. Gator wasn't the only one who could predict a hit, and despite my wishes I was calling this a no-go.
"I'm there," Skeeter said. "Fox three, Fox three."
"You can't make it," Gator said, his voice panicked now.
"Bird Dog, get Snoopy down on the deck. She's gonna have to try to evade it."
An E-2 trying to evade a missile is like a snail trying to evade a fly-swatter. I had five seconds to watch, five seconds longer than any I've ever had in my life. Even flying nap of the earth over the Arctic hadn't curled my balls back up into my torso and made me want to puke with pain like this.
Five seconds. The E-2 started to move, pitching down and pointing her nose to the deck. She picked up speed immediately, trading altitude for airspeed.
Four seconds. The E-2 went into full nose-dive now, at an angle any experienced pilot would have been insane to try. Those airframes are sturdy but ancient, and the metal stress factors that play into extreme maneuvers like this are another thing to be worried about. I imagined what it was like in the cockpit of that bird, hearing the old structural members scream and complain, the ominous pops and cracks of an airframe exceeding her performance envelope.
Three seconds. The E-2 pilot was howling on tactical now, praying to every god he knew and damning the Vietnamese.
Two seconds. I heard it, those fatal last words that always echo over the airwaves, the ones that signify a pilot's final acknowledgment that he's really screwed the pooch this time. "Oh, shit."
One second. I had a visual on the missile now, so much smaller than the aircraft, streaming directly toward it with fire gouting out its ass.
The sky five miles away from me exploded into fire, violent, searing colors of orange and yellow. The black smoke followed, billowing around it like a shroud, then a secondary explosion, then nothing but black smoke and odd shards of metal cluttering the sky and Gator's radar scope.
"Chutes, any chutes?" Gator said urgently.
I tossed the Tomcat around in a tight curve, spiraling higher to avoid the black fireball now fouling the air. The sky was brilliant blue above, no trace of the fiery destruction down in my realm. Blue, innocent, and eternal. But that wasn't what I was interested in.
I spiraled down, staying well clear of the fireball that was now mostly smoke and a rain of shrapnel.
No chutes. No billowing arcs of silk white that would indicate any one of the four people on board had had time to punch out.
I dived lower, so close I could see the wave tops curling over and under, white-capped, covering deep sea fields of kelp. Just on the off chance that they made it out, had time to slip by me somehow undetected and make it to the safety of the ocean.
No luck. Not for me. Not for the E-2 crew.
"Let's get back to the boat," I said finally to Skeeter over tactical. "The helos are on their way ― they can do a better search at this altitude than we ever could. If there's anything there, they'll find it."
Two clicks acknowledged my transmission, nothing more. Skeeter had spent his own time at sea level looking for any trace of the survivors. Hoping against hope, we both knew it was not going to happen.