As Drummer used all the capabilities his avionics would provide, breaking fast to nine G’s and dropping chaff in the hope that the cloud of frequency-length cut aluminum strips would confuse the ChiComs’ radar-homing missile, he saw it closing. Eight seconds to impact. The sweet lady’s warning voice would kick in at five seconds.
“Bogey’s mileage?” he shouted.
“Thirty, twenty-five, twenty.” The RIO could see its contrail streaking toward them in the mirror. It was almost on them. His G-suit was sticking like Saran Wrap, perspiration pouring down his face, steaming up his visor. Then suddenly Drummer went straight up on afterburner, the cat on its tail, then into a loop, the missile passing below unable to turn as acutely, its envelope of air swallowed in the Tomcat’s turbulence.
“Nice job, Drum. Nice job. Son of a bitch! You ran his clock out.”
Drummer knew it was fifty percent damn good flying and fifty percent good luck that he’d managed to twist and turn enough for the missile to use up its thirty-one-mile range. “Son of a bitch has bought time for the Flankers, though,” he answered, sounding utterly drained, as was his RIO. “Let’s go help the Hornets.”
It had been the same all over, in and out of the blue-gray sky, Tomcats and Hornets defending themselves from AA missile attack, the Fulcrums, though outnumbered, losing three. The ChiComs pilots were brave, and their MiG-29s were among the fastest birds in the world, but the overwhelming superiority of the American fighter pilots lay in their number of hours aloft, five to ten times the number of sorties flown by their opponents. And the ChiComs were still making the switch from dominant ground control to individual initiative.
The Flankers, however, hotly pursued by the Hornets, had not yet been caught because of the necessity of Johnny Reisman’s aviators to first protect themselves from the Fulcrums that had dived wildly into their midst. Two Flankers had gone down, but ten were approaching Penghu Island. The Flanker fighter-bombers’ specific target was postulated by McCain’s SSES to be Makung City on the island’s west coast and Lintou Beach to the southeast. As a target, Makung, with only sixty thousand people and virtually no industry other than tourism and fishing, seemed to have been selected simply to terrorize the Penghu Islanders into not resisting the oncoming ChiCom invasion. Lintou Beach, however, as Reisman’s RIO was able to call up on his compact target location file, made more military sense. In Makung, the ROC had stationed two battalions, about two thousand soldiers in all. The regular army’s 1st Battalion and the 2nd Battalion’s reservists manned batteries of U.S.-made M-48 Chaparral SAM missiles.
“Afterburners!” ordered Reisman, wanting to catch and keep the Flankers from bombing the island. He was aware that his Hornet’s fuel consumption would put them beyond the point of no return, unable to return to the McCain without refueling from the S-3B Viking, which would be a high-risk proposition, given the swarm of MiG-29s still battling Drummer’s Tomcats in the wild free-for-all. Switching off his afterburners, Reisman immediately felt the reduction in G forces, and was encouraged by his RIO advising him that a pair of Tomcats, having broken out of the supersonic killing zone, were hustling to assist the Hornets.
At twenty-six miles from Penghu, Drummer was about to go in at Mach 2.1 to attack the Flankers when he saw one of them break formation, coming at him nose-to-nose.
“Master arm on!” confirmed his RIO, fear and adrenaline marrying in the rush of excitement. “Am centering the T. Bandits jinxed sixteen miles. Centering dot. Fox one. Fox one.” The Tomcat’s AIM-7 Sparrow missile’s detachment from the Tomcat, powered by its boost-sustained solid-fuel propellant, left its hard point in a sudden hiss, the sleek, twelve-foot-long Sparrow reaching Mach 4.2 only seconds after it shot out from its glove pylon. Drummer’s RIO made sure the missile was receiving constant illumination from the Tomcat’s fire-control triad of signal processor, radar, and updated responses computer.
“Eight miles!” cut in another Tomcat. “Fox one, Fox one.” Then another, “Two for Lennox. Tally two! Tally two!” meaning Lennox had a visual of the red-eyed exhausts from a duo of Flankers. These two Sukhoi-30s with insufficient Fulcrum fighter cover had obviously decided they’d better take time to kill this Tomcat on their tail in order to have a successful bomb run on Makung and Lintou Beach.
“Five miles,” said the Tomcat’s RIO. “Select Fox Two.” Then, “Four miles … Lock ’im up … lock ’im up…. Shoot Fox Two. Fox Two.”
“Good kill! Good kill!” It was Lennox or some Tomcat pilot shouting his congratulations as they saw Drummer’s Sparrow missile hit its target, or more accurately, when the Sparrow’s big proximity-fused fragmentation warhead exploded several meters behind the Flanker, producing a massive shotgun effect, the Flanker’s kerosene fuel tank vaporizing in an enormous orange-white bloom of fire. Two seconds before Drummer’s kill shot, however, the Flanker’s pilot had fired one of his R73s, or Russian-made A-11 Archer close-combat heat seekers, its contrail lost in a wisp of stratus, getting out of harm’s way before Drummer’s Sparrow struck the Flanker. The Archer missile was now tracking Aviator Lennox’s Tomcat, which, at eleven thousand feet, had just fired its Sidewinder at the second of the two Flankers Lennox had spotted earlier.
Lennox’s wingman, a short, wiry twenty-three-year-old from Waco, Texas, suddenly found himself the pursued. His Tomcat — glove vanes on the leading edges of the fixed wings extended to reduce the more than Mach 1 strain on the fighter’s tail planes — made a tight right turn inside the Flanker’s defensive right break. And so, in classic Red Baron style, Lennox was now immediately behind and in the Flanker’s cone of vulnerability. When he saw the lime-green arc formed by his gun’s computer impact line and gun sight’s green circle move to the middle of his HUD image of the Flanker, he fired. The long stream of his Tomcat’s six-barreled 20mm Vulcan, spewing out ninety rounds in less than a second, chopped up the Flanker’s turbofans and right tail plane. A collision warning sounded in the Texan’s cockpit, and he instinctively broke in the opposite direction, but didn’t climb fast enough to avoid the wake of “dirty air” from the disintegration of the ChiCom fighter-bomber. The supersonic swarm of debris that had been the Flanker’s nose radar and other white-hot debris thudded into the Tomcat’s nacelle housing and was sucked into the huge, canted intakes of the F-14’s left turbofan. The engine shut down immediately, and the Tomcat’s cockpit was so badly pitted by blades from the Flanker’s engines that Lennox’s wingman lost all frontal vision through the HUD, the fighter’s right intake struck by a piece of the Flanker’s heavy and unexploded ordnance.
“Right engine’s gone!” shouted his RIO.
“Eject,” ordered the Texan.
“Roger!”
Plummeting seaward, their bird tumbling out of control, the Texan and his RIO, ever faithful to the aviator’s code, still had full confidence in the efficacy of their plane’s design, specifically in the reputation of the Martin-Baker seats. They had been so meticulously made that with the aircraft parked upon a tarmac, the zero-zero system would still eject the pilots high enough to have their chutes open and bring them safely down. Now, fighting the punishing G forces exerted on the tumbling Tomcat, the two men nevertheless managed to reach and pull their snakes. In a split second the explosive bolts fired, releasing the seat.
Both men’s necks snapped like twigs, the canopy’s fairing having been severely dented and thus locked by the impact of the Flanker’s supersonic debris.
Lennox glimpsed the tumbling dot of the Tomcat on his green monitor, saw it swell into sudden luminescence as it smashed into the sea. But his attention was quickly hijacked by the tadpole shape streaking in on his radar, a missile fired from eight miles behind. Normally it would have taken the missile.8 seconds to reach him, but thanks to Typhoon Jane’s headwinds, it took 1.2 seconds, time enough for Lennox’s RIO to drop chaff and pop flares, hoping to confuse both the Archer’s radar and infrared. The American ruse failed, however, the agility and maneuverability of the Russian-made missile so acute that despite Lennox’s and his RIO’s countermeasures, the ten-foot Archer was able to lock on via the ChiCom pilot’s helmet-mounted sight, a full forty-two degrees off bore sight.