THIRTY-SIX
The other four RF-111G Vampire bombers had hit the Novorossiysk carrier battle group from two sides, cutting in from the southwest and from the east in a supersonic pincer. Captain Frank Kelly and Lieutenant Colonel Larry Tobias in Thunder One-Three, the most experienced team in the attack, killed the Russian destroyer Burnyy with a salvo of three HARM missiles, but their fourth HARM refused to power up or take any commands. The frigate Revnostnyy was hit by two HARMs fired by Major Clark Vest and First Lieutenant Lynn Ogden. After that, all the Russian ships refused to turn on any radars even with decoys flying everywhere — Captain Joe Johnson and Major Harold Rota, firing TALDs for Kelly and Tobias, even fired a decoy directly at a frigate, coming within a few hundred yards of hitting it, and the vessel refused to even activate a radar for its close-in weapon system.
Once Russian fighters started showing up, the Vampires were effectively out of the fight — but to the Russian “Mainstay” AWACS radar controller’s surprise, the four RF-111Gs turned south only twenty miles south of the Novorossiysk and began a climb, with radars and radios blaring. The American bombers climbed right on up to twelve thousand feet, well within lethal range of the cruiser’s SA-N-3B and SA-N-7 missile systems. But with the destruction of the Burnyy by the Vampires, the aviation cruiser wasn’t going to risk a sneak attack by the other two Vampires that they knew were operating farther west. After all, they had a full complement of twelve Yak-38 fighters, sixteen helicopters, and over 1,600 sailors on board. So they never fired another shot. It was going to be up to the Russian fighters now.
The Vampires were tempting targets for the Russian fighters operating over the Black Sea in support of the naval task force and now howling south to take up the chase. Deployed to bases on the Crimean Peninsula, only 120 miles to the north, were several wings of MiG-29 and Sukhoi-27 fighters, mostly providing air cover for the Russian radar plane. When the Vampires were first detected by the Mainstay radar plane, the fighter wings at Sevastopol and Yevpatoriya were placed on full alert, and when the attack began on the ships south of the Crimea, the airspace over the Black Sea was filled with over sixty fighters, the maximum the controllers aboard the A-50 Mainstay radar plane could safely handle. Spread out on both sides of the Novorossiysk carrier battle group so as to not interfere with the ship’s self-defense capabilities, the Russian fighters fanned out to hunt down the fast, low-flying American bombers. Twenty fighters deployed west to cover the Marshal Ustinov group, ten stayed with the Mainstay radar plane, and thirty fighters pursued the four Vampire bombers retreating toward Turkey. It seemed as if the RF-111G aircraft were unaware that they were being pursued — the Russians knew the Americans had an AWACS radar plane of their own up, but the Vampires were still flying at a high, very vulnerable altitude.
They were too vulnerable, too tempting a target — and it was designed that way. As the Russian fighter sweep moved south, eighty MiG-23 fighters from the Ukrainian Air Force swept up from the south. The Russian pursuers suddenly found themselves the pursued — what was just a few seconds earlier an easy thirty-on-four advantage had turned into an eighty-on-thirty disadvantage. The Vampires were soon forgotten, and all four escaped to the safety of the Turkish coastal highlands.
The single-engine Ukrainian MiG-23 Flogger, however, was no match for a Russian MiG-29 or Su-27 fighter. Even at night, the more advanced fighters were capable of killing many times their numbers of the older, much less sophisticated Ukrainian fighters, especially with an A-50 radar plane directing them. But they never got the chance — as soon as the Russian fighters started pairing up against their former Soviet brothers from Ukrayina, the MiG-23s turned southbound and ran at full military power without firing one missile. It was a planned retreat — they never had any intention of trying to mix it up with the advanced fighters …
… and the reason soon became apparent. As the bulk of the Russian fighter coverage moved toward Turkey’s north coast chasing the Ukrainian fighters, a flight of ten Ukrainian MiG-27 and ten Sukhoi-17 fighter-bombers swept in from the east at supersonic speed. The Mainstay’s radar controllers were swamped with so many planes on the scope that they didn’t see the low-flying newcomers until they were only sixty miles from the remaining five ships of the Novorossiysk carrier battle group. The Russian fighters were far out of position and had to use precious fuel to turn and engage the large number of bombers streaking in from the east. The Ukrainian tactical bombers were lightly loaded with extended-range fuel tanks — they had to fly three hundred miles farther than their MiG-23 brothers in order to outflank the Russians and successfully sneak up on the aircraft cruiser group — and they carried only one weapon, so they were very fast.
That one weapon — the Kh-59 missile — was the most devastating weapon in Ukrayina’s air arsenal. Called the AS-13 Kingpost by NATO and nicknamed the SLAMski because of its resemblance to the U.S. Navy’s AGM-84E SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile), the Kingpost was a TV-guided subsonic 2,000-pound rocket-powered missile with a 300-pound high-explosive warhead. The MiG-27 and Su-17 bombers fired their missiles at a range of about thirty-five miles from the warships, then turned back to the east. The missiles first climbed rapidly to thirty thousand feet, then began a steep descent down toward the Russian warships. The last twenty seconds of their flight would be controlled by the Ukrainian pilots via a television and steering datalink back to their fighters.
Once the Kh-59 missiles made their climb, however, they were sitting ducks for the Russian fighters — the A-50 Mainstay radar plane could easily track each of the twenty missiles fired at the Russian warships. Since most of the fighters were still too far south to chase down the cruise missiles, the Mainstay directed all but two of its own fighter escorts to try to shoot down the missiles. Eight Sukhoi-27 fighters broke out of their combat air patrols and sped eastbound, locking up the big one-ton missiles on radar and maneuvering to intercept. The radio datalink between missile and fighter was used as a beacon to locate each missile, and the sophisticated track-while-scan radar of the eight Su-27s allowed almost the entire complement of Kh-59 missiles to be targeted …
… which sealed the fate of the Russian Mainstay radar plane, which was the joint U.S./Turkish/Ukrainian task force’s main target all along. While the main bulk of the Russian fighters was turning northeast to intercept the Ukrainian strike aircraft, and all but two of the Mainstay’s escorts were trying to intercept the Kh-59 cruise missiles, ten MiG-23 fighters blasted in from the southwest at forty thousand feet.
They were led by Colonel Pavlo Tychina himself.
Like the strike birds, they carried fuel tanks and only one weapon each — an R-33 long-range air-to-air missile with the NATO reporting name AA-9 Amos. The R-33 was one of the largest air-to-air missiles in the world, weighing almost 1,000 pounds, but it was one of the most sophisticated. It had a range of ninety miles when launched from high altitude, a top speed of Mach-three, and a 225-pound warhead. It used three types of guidance: semiactive radar homing, where it homed in on reflected radar energy from its launch aircraft; active radar homing, where a small radar unit in its nose cone steered it toward its target; and passive radar homing, where the missile could home in on radar energy transmitted by other aircraft — especially the big rotodome of the A-50 Mainstay radar plane.