Khurana was punching out loads of chaff as his aircraft streaked and weaved within the peaks below. The RWR audio warning was screeching continuously now as missiles were all over the sky. Unit coherence had been lost by both sides and now it was every pilot for himself until the missiles from both sides exhausted themselves or lost track of their targets.
In all the frantic seconds of flying he realized that he had lost track of the Chinese missiles behind him. There was no way to know amongst the chaos. He could see the odd Mig-29 dashing across the valleys just like him. There was no way to know even if his own missiles had claimed any Chinese Su-27s or not.
By now the threat level was reducing. Khurana suddenly remembered that he was still on afterburner.
Oh shit!
He pulled the throttle back and clicked it through the afterburner shutdown and felt the engine making lesser noise and becoming slower. Khurana also realized that he had been on afterburner for a long time now and the Mig-29 was not exactly a high endurance fighter. He checked the fuel indicator to show that he still had fuel left for re-entering combat. At least for a while.
It was time to do that now.
He pulled back on the control stick. The nose of the Mig-29 pitched up sharply and quickly brought him above the valleys and into the night sky above. He found himself south of the Karakoram peaks, still inside Indian Territory, but barely. He immediately checked the radar display to find the disposition of friendly and enemy fighters but there seemed to be a clutter all around.
He then heard a friendly tune in his ears:
“Claw-One, this is Eagle-Eye-One. Single bandit at bearing zero-three-zero. Relative. Range twenty clicks and closing. Out”
He was glad to see the Phalcon was still in control of the situational awareness. Something he had lost a few minutes ago. And it had given him his first new target: a Chinese Su-27 pilot like himself had also evaded missiles fired at him and had returned to the fight. More importantly, the Phalcon had warned Khurana about the Su-27. But the Su-27 pilot had no idea that Khurana was bearing down on him…
Khurana flipped his aircraft to the right and pulled back on the control stick to bring the rear of the Chinese Su-27 within the center of the HUD. The green square was immediately followed by a smaller diamond one and Khurana depressed the button that sent his third R-77 missile towards the enemy fighter. This time the initiative was with Khurana who detected no counter-attack by the Chinese pilot unaware of the threat behind him.
His R-77 slammed into the Su-27 from the rear and blotted the latter out of the sky in a ball of fire. He noticed that the small green square fluctuated for a few seconds before it disappeared from his view.
Score one!
It was at this time that Khurana’s eye caught hold of a massive flash of light directly above his cockpit. He jerked his head up and saw the flaming debris of a Mig-29 falling out of the sky. As he flipped his aircraft to the side and cleared away, he saw two other Mig-29s from his squadron busy in a within-visual-range dogfight with Su-27s a thousand feet above him.
It was time to enter the fray and assist his outnumbered colleagues…
Khurana pulled back on the stick but this time carefully pulled the aircraft as he entered the raging air battle from below, hoping to catch a Chinese pilot by surprise. He switched now to the short-range R-60 missiles that were cued to his helmet optics. The nature of the audio tune changed as the R-60 seekers looked for a target.
Khurana finally found the large silhouette of Sukhoi against the green moonlit sky behind. He headed for this Su-27 from behind and below. It was a classic position for a shot. A few seconds later the missile left the pylons and headed quickly towards its target before hitting the port engine from below. The R-60 had a very small warhead that wasn’t well equipped for taking down heavy fighters. And sure enough, the Su-27’s port engine flamed out even as metallic debris fell out through the exhaust nozzle.
Khurana’s eyebrows went up in surprise to see the Su-27 still flying. But the latter was now crippled and attempting to exit the area on one engine. He switched his weapon system to “GUNS” and moved in for the kill. As his aircraft jittered with burst fire from the cannon, the sky in front of him lit up with tracers. These slammed into the underside of Su-27 with shuddering hits before the aircraft was enveloped in a small ball of fire and dived out of the sky…
Khurana had to pull his aircraft frantically to avoid flying though the flaming debris. He barely managed to skim though the smoke at the side of the fireball and streaked back into the night sky above…
Score two!
Khurana wasn’t the only pilot who had switched to guns. As aircraft after aircraft on both sides ran out of missile stores, they began switching to guns. The skies were now lined with tracers, white-hot flares dropping out of the skies and corkscrewed smoke trails from expended missiles. Then there were the small smoke columns of burning debris falling against the skies. More than two dozen remaining Indian and Chinese fighters neared exhaustion in numbers, fuel and weapons…
As dozens of yellow tracers and cannon rounds shuddered past the cockpit above his head, Khurana missed a heartbeat and pulled his control stick to the right and dived to the side. Behind him a Su-27 did the same. Crews from both sides had seen their comrades blown to smithereens in this battle.
It was all personal now.
As Khurana was pulling his aircraft down into an accelerating dive towards the hills below, he was scanning two other potential dangers in front of him in addition to the enraged Su-27 driver diving in behind him, guns blazing. His HUD was showing that the fuel level was getting dangerously low. It was not all the way into the red yet, but it was getting there. The Mig-29 was not a high endurance fighter designed for extended combat. And it showed. Khurana realized that the Chinese guys in the Su-27s had no such worries.
Secondly, his HUD was indicating no remaining air-to-air missiles save for a single R-77 hanging off his port wing. Only a hundred odd rounds of gun ammo remained in his Mig-29 now. In comparison, Khurana had seen the half a dozen or more weapons still hanging from some of the Su-27s in the skies around him. The Sukhoi bird was much larger than the Mig-29 and carried a lot more weapons. Additionally, there were fewer Indian Mig-29s than there were Su-27s in the skies over Ladakh. It was now getting to the point that the Indians were in serious risk of being outgunned, outnumbered, out of ammo and then out of fuel. The battle could not go on for too much longer.
We cannot disengage either…
Khurana thought of options as he flipped his aircraft yet again to evade another slashing pass from the Su-27 behind him with the latter’s tracers streaking by the cockpit. He punched off another round of flares and realized that sooner or later they would empty too. Khurana was having difficulty losing his attacker who was clearly an experienced pilot and not a rookie like his earlier two kills…
“Claw-One, this is Talon-Seven! I have the bugger on your tail in my sights. Break left on my mark. Let’s see if I can shove an R-60 up this guy’s jet pipe.”
“Roger that! On your mark!” Khurana shouted back as he evaded another burst of cannon fire. A few long seconds later the radio squawked again:
“Break left, now!”
Khurana didn’t hesitate and flipped his aircraft to the left. The Su-27 pilot attempted the same before an R-60 missile slammed right into his port engine exhaust.