Suddenly, just a few miles ahead, a streak of antiaircraft artillery fire lit up the sky. Streams of tracer bullets seared the darkness. Parsons unconsciously swung farther left to fly away from the tracers, and the bomber’s nose zoomed upward.
“Don’t turn left!” Mace shouted. “High terrain to the east!”
Parsons’ throat turned dry — he thought he could feel the jagged, frozen rocks scraping the bomber’s belly as they crested yet another ridgeline. The hard-ride TF autopilot yanked the bomber’s nose into the darkness of a crevasse so abruptly that both crewmembers felt light in their seats, as if they were momentarily weightless.
“Those tracers looked like they were firing well to the south of us,” Mace pointed out. “It must be the Raven beating the bushes for us. Those guys will never buy another beer in their lives as long as I’m around.” As the radar warning receiver scope cleared, Mace deselected the four jammer switchlights, shutting off the ECM system until the next threat.
The first half of the Torosular mountain range was one hundred nautical miles long, and at nine miles per minute it was the hairiest ten-minute ride of Mace’s life. The tops of the ridges were sometimes two thousand feet higher than the bomber’s flight level, and some mountain passes narrowed to less than twelve thousand feet wide or ended abruptly with a one-thousand-foot sheer wall of rock. Parsons had to go to zone 3 afterburner a few times to safely clear a ridgeline — losing an engine while climbing fifteen thousand feet per minute over a jagged ridge would mean certain death — and they knew that the bright afterburner plume only increased their chances of detection, even in these desolate mountains.
“Better step it up to one thousand feet,” Parsons said. “We’re safe for now in these mountains, and we can’t afford to use blowers to help us get over these ridges.”
“Amen to that,” Mace said, quickly resetting the TF ride switch to the higher clearance plane. As they inched higher above the rugged mountains, he could breathe a bit easier as the effective range of his radarscope expanded from just a few miles to almost twenty miles. “Got a three-hundred-foot FIXMAG on the last fix,” Mace said to Parsons. “System’s running pretty well.” The FIXMAG was the difference between the radar position fix and the computer’s position — a three-hundred-foot difference after thirty minutes of hard maneuvering was very good. With a new, accurate radar update in the system and the bomb-nav system running well, Mace could afford to take his mind off the navigation system for a while and concentrate on getting ready for the missile launch run — the most important one of his life.
Things were quiet in the cockpit at the moment, and they were at the higher clearance plane setting, so Parsons said, “Good. Station check, oxygen and switches.”
“Roger.” A station check was a quick but thorough and coordinated check of all the cockpit instruments and systems, and all the personal systems in use.
The entire check took about thirty seconds: “Checks over here,” Parsons said as he checked the autopilot and flight controls by “stirring the pot” with the control stick and jockeying the throttles.
Mace nodded and gave his partner a thumbs-up. “Everything looks—”
He never finished his short sentence. A loud, fast deedledeedledeedledeedledeedle erupted in the interphone, and a circle with a flashing “9” was centered in the middle of the RHAWS radar warning receiver. At the same time, bright-yellow MISSILE WARNING and MISSILE ALERT lights on the forward instrument panel illuminated.
TWO
“Jesus!” Mace shouted, “SA-9 missile launch!”
He reached up to the ECM panel with both hands, depressing the jammer switchlights; at the same time, he used three fingers of his right hand and hit the L CHAFF and R CHAFF and FLARE buttons, which would pop white-hot magnesium flares and bundles of tinsel-like strips of metal from the AN/ALE-28 dispensers to decoy radar- and heat-seeking missiles fired at them.
“Chaff! Flares!” Mace shouted. It was vital to make the SA-9’s “Dog Ear” surveillance radar break lock, because once the SA-9 missile launched it almost never missed. “Break! Accelerate! Descend! I’m ready on the TFs!”
“Two hundred hard ride!” Parsons shouted. As Mace twisted the TF clearance plane knob back to two hundred feet, Parsons swept the wings back to 72 degrees and cobbed the throttles to full military power, then into zone 5 afterburner. “Clear my turn!”
“Go right!” Mace shouted. Parsons threw the bomber into a 120-degree bank turn to the right and the bomber knifed downward. As the bank angle exceeded 45 degrees, the automatic safety fly-up feature of the terrain-following radar system commanded a full pitch-up maneuver, but because they were nearly upside down, the fly-up only helped to drag the nose earthward — Parsons used that fly-up to quickly lose altitude. He held that altitude for three full seconds, then abruptly rolled upright and pulled the throttles out of afterburner and back to military power.
“Chaff! Flares!” Parsons shouted, after he was sure the TFs were in control of the bomber’s altitude. When he saw Mace punch the ejector buttons, he made another hard bank, this time to the left, pulling on the control stick and letting the fly-up pull the nose left so hard that the bomber began to stall. When the stall-warning horn blared, Parsons relaxed the back pressure on the stick. “Find the missile!” he shouted.
Mace was practically climbing up the back of his ejection seat and onto the canopy, searching behind and to all sides for any sign of an SA-9 missile in flight. But the missile weighed only seventy pounds and was only six feet long, and unless you were very lucky it was impossible to acquire it visually. “Nothing!” Mace shouted. The blinking 9 and the MISSILE WARNING light were still going, so Parsons had to assume that the SA-9 missile was still in flight and still tracking them. He shouted for chaff and flares again, and threw the bomber into a gut-wrenching break to the right so hard that Mace’s head slammed against the center cockpit beam.
The flashing 9 was still on the radar warning receiver. “Radar’s still up!” Parsons shouted. “Check the trackbreakers!”
Mace ran his fingers across the ALQ-135 control switches and found two buttons had not been depressed. As soon as he pressed them in fully, their XMIT (transmit) lights came on, meaning that they had detected the SA-9’s tracking radar and were jamming it.
The 9 symbol in the radar warning receiver scope went out a second later — right in the nick of time. Mace saw the rapid flash of light above and to their left as the SA-9 missile careened past them and exploded harmlessly about fifty feet away. “Fuck! It just blew up to the left! One more second and we would’ve been toast.”
“Get ready for another launch!” Parsons said. “Those SA-9s got four rounds per unit.” He had just finished that sentence when the 9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light illuminated once again. Parsons pushed the throttles to zone 3 afterburner, yelled, “Chaff! Flares!” and made a hard jink to the right as Mace pressed the ejector buttons. He then checked the trackbreaker buttons and noticed the XMIT lights on, indicating that their jammers were working. Seconds later the MISSILE WARNING light and 9 symbol on the threat scope went out. “I think we lost it.”