The entire world seemed to erupt into fire at that very moment. An R-73A heat-seeking missile fired from another attacking Russian MiG-29 fighter missed Tychina’s right engine by less than a meter, flew over the fuselage until it was several meters away, then detonated its fourteen-kilogram warhead. The top and top front portion of Tychina’s canopy shattered, sending hundreds of razor-sharp shards of glass into the young pilot’s head and upper torso. Tychina’s helmet was nearly sliced away from his head by the force of the explosion, by the sudden cockpit decompression, and then by the supersonic windblast. Incredibly, the majority of the cockpit canopy stayed intact.
To his own amazement, he was alive and still conscious. The windblast pounded away at his body, but he could no longer hear the thunderous roar. He was protected from the direct supersonic windblast by what remained of his canopy. The subzero air was somewhat soothing, freezing the blood vessels in his nose and face shut and preventing any serious blood loss.
And, more importantly, his jet was still flying, the controls still responded, the engines were still turning — and when he pressed the launch button on the control stick, an R-23 radar-guided missile leaped from its rail on the left underwing pylon. It wobbled frantically as it tried to stabilize itself — now Tychina understood why there was a speed limit on the missile — but just as he thought it was going to spin off out of control, it steadied out and tracked the radar beam. He had to keep his nose aimed at the Tu-95 Bear bomber so the missile could track, but he was rewarded several seconds later with a large flash of light, then darkness, then a stream of fire off in the distance.
His gloved fingers were moving as soon as he saw the hit. He was at eighteen kilometers when he fired his last R-23 missile at another bomber, then immediately switched to the heat-seeking R-60 missiles and started searching for a new target. A second bomber exploded, scratching a blazing meteor in the night sky right down to the frozen earth. All of the Tu-95 bombers started ejecting chaff and flares, but mysteriously stayed on course, and the streams of flares were like large lighted arrows pointing right at them.
Tychina had forgotten all about his wingmen and about everyone and everything else except what Golovko had said before he died: go in fast, shoot at the leaders, and get out.
The infrared search and track system was effective at about ten kilometers, and the bombers appeared as tiny dots on a semicircular indicator in his cockpit. Tychina shut off the attack radar at that point — no use in broadcasting his position any longer than necessary — lined up the seeker boresight reticle on one of the dots, and activated his first of two R-60 missiles. He could no longer hear the telltale growling sound as the missile’s seeker detected the hot glow of the Tu-95’s huge Kuznetsov turboprops, but he gauged the distance from the readout on his IRSTS indicator and fired the first missile at five kilometers, the missile’s maximum range.
Too early. It had not locked on to an engine, but a decoy flare. At Mach-1.22, he was traveling almost a half a kilometer per second, and he barely had enough time to select and fire another missile. The impact of the missile on a third bomber was almost instantaneous, and he could feel chunks of metal from the explosion pepper his plane. Tychina ignored the impacts.
He tried to select another missile, but he carried only two. Damn, what a time to run out of missiles! Tychina switched to his 23-millimeter GSh-23L belly gun pack and fired off a full one-second burst, passing close enough to a fourth Tupolev-95’s counterrotating propellers to feel the incredible rhythmic beating of the huge props against his fighter’s fuselage. The stream of cannon rounds sliced across the bomber’s fuselage, right engine nacelles, and right wing. Tychina cleared for a right turn, saw a Tupolev-95 banking hard right above him with the ventral gun turret aimed at him, and instead threw his MiG-23 into a hard left bank.
When he cleared left after a full 180-degree turn, he nearly yelled in surprise: not one, but two Tupolev-95s were going down. The bomber he hit with cannon fire must’ve turned right into the path of another bomber, because there were two blobs of fire spiraling to earth. He couldn’t see the rest of the bomber formation, but another radar sweep told the story — the bombers were heading north again. He had done it! The attack was over! He had—
Tychina saw the missile in its last one-fifth-of-a-second of flight, with a large plume of yellow fire encircling a small black dot, just before the small R-73A missile fired from the pursuing Russian MiG-29 fighter plowed into his MiG-23 and tore off his entire right wing. His head hit the right rear side of the cockpit, finally rendering him unconscious, as the fighter swung wildly to the left and started a lazy spin to the earth.
But luck, even a last bit of good luck, was on his side. The loss of the canopy after the first missile’s near-hit had fired all but the last few ejection-seat squib charges and armed the seat. When the fuselage fuel tanks ruptured and exploded from the hit, the shock and vibration caused the ejection seat to fire Tychina’s unconscious body clear of the stricken fighter. The seat was automatic and worked properly. Tychina continued in free-fall until about four thousand meters’ altitude, when the automatic baro timers fired, releasing his seat harness and tightening a strap along the inside of the seat that snap-launched him from his seat. That action automatically pulled the parachute ripcord, and Tychina was under a full parachute canopy by the time he reached two thousand meters.
Unable to steer himself clear, Tychina landed in a stand of poplar trees that mercilessly raked his face and chest like a wild animal.
Townspeople and firemen from the village of Myzovo cut him down several minutes later and found him still alive, nearly conscious, and amazingly unhurt, except for his face and torso, which were horribly disfigured by the trees and by his last seconds in the cockpit of his plane.
But he would live to fly and fight another day.
His victory over the Russian invaders that night would turn out to be the rallying cry for a nation.
ELEVEN
“Valentin Sen’kov hit the nail right on the head,” the President said. He was meeting with his National Security Council staff in the Cabinet Room of the White House, next door to the Oval Office. Unlike the rest of them, the President was dressed casually in slacks and a sweatshirt — even the First Lady, who was sitting on the President’s right beside the Vice President, was dressed in business attire. “He predicted that Velichko would go after the Ukraine, and he did it.”
That got a very demonstrative reaction from General Philip Freeman, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Excuse me, sir, but Secretary Scheer and I briefed you on the need to provide support for our NATO allies against an obviously bold and provocative Russia. Now, I never would have expected Velichko to go so far as to invade a fellow Commonwealth country, especially the Ukraine, but the handwriting’s been on the wall.”
“I hardly think dismissing Mr. Sen’kov’s observations in favor of your own is constructive here, General,” the First Lady admonished, glaring at him. “I think what’s needed here are a few ideas on how to deal with this event.”
What Freeman wanted to say was, Why don’t you ask your pal Valentin Sen’kov? What he did say was, “Very well, ma’am, I and Mr. Scheer do have some recommendations.”
“We feel it’s essential to pledge full support to our NATO allies, Mr. President,” Scheer said. “We need to show them in no uncertain terms that we will not allow Russia to intimidate them. President Dalon of Turkey has requested some assistance, mostly in defensive armament and aircraft, and I recommend we authorize that aid.”