Hawk-1 and -2 skimmed the English coast south of Dorset, thunderous sonic booms trailing in their wake as the surface of The Channel hurtled past just 200 metres below them. Their own radars had found nothing of the ‘phantom’ jet Sentry had detected, but they had picked up the RAF fighter it had saved momentarily before the stricken Spitfire had disappeared into ground clutter a few kilometres west of Weymouth. Sentry’s more powerful systems however had been easily able to pick out the point where it had crash landed and was able to vector the two German jets onto an interception course.
Sentry’s controllers were working on the assumption that whatever the unidentified jet might be, there was at least a slim possibility that it was still in the area of the downed Spitfire it had appeared out of nowhere to save. As they were unable to detect the jet itself and had no other information to go on, it seemed the only logical course of action that might possibly have a chance of interception, and thus the pair of black Flankers flew on, carefully avoiding any conventional warplanes still in the area as Churchill’s so-called Battle of Britain drew to a close for another day. With their colour schemes and speed they were all but invisible in the dying twilight save for the sound of their passing and the flare of their twin exhausts on afterburner.
“We’re within fifty nautical miles of the landing site,” Hawk-1’s pilot observed as his eyes watched his displays for any sign of their enemy. “Ease it back to five hundred knots.” He killed his afterburner and dropped the aircraft below the speed of sound, his wingman following suit.
“We’re probably on a wild goose chase,” the commander continued, speaking to his colleagues in the other jet, “but keep your eyes peeled and stay ‘black’: radar will be useless if this bastard is stealthy and it’ll only serve to warn him if he’s lurking about. With any luck we’ll catch him on the hop and put a couple of Archers up his arse before he knows what’s going on.” Although with no fucking radar and the coastline ahead in complete darkness, I don’t know what hope we have of finding him even if he is there… he added in sour silence, deciding it perhaps better to keep that thought to himself.
He activated his air combat systems and armed a pair of R-73 short-range missiles beneath his wings. A luminous green diamond instantly appeared on his HUD, tracking aimlessly about the screen before him as it vainly searched for a suitable heat source to lock onto. The Vympel R-73, known colloquially in NATO circles as the AA-11 Archer, was an advanced short-range, heat-seeking missile that was extremely manoeuvrable and highly sensitive to the heat of a jet’s exhaust. Two of the missiles were mounted at wing-tip launcher rails on each of the aircraft, while another pair were slung beneath each jet’s wings outboard of a pair of huge fuel tanks.
Mounted on the upper nose directly ahead of the windscreen of each aircraft was a small pod housing a powerful Infra-Red Search and Tracking module — often referred to simply as an IRST. In perfect conditions it could detect heat sources from enemy aircraft from a distance of up to eighty kilometres or more. Although these weren’t likely to be optimum circumstances, the men inside the pair of Su-30s could at least hope their sensors would give them a reasonable amount of advanced warning.
“Be ready to turn onto three-six-zero on my mark,” he added. “If we do see him and he tries to run, herd him west and out to sea if you can — I don’t want to catch any bloody flak over England if I can avoid it!”
“What the hell is this thing?” Trumbull asked finally, unable to keep quiet as his curiosity got the better of his poor temper. As he strapped himself into the rear seat he was stymied by the myriad of strange instruments and fittings surrounding him.
“Put this on!” Thorne shouted, handing him a helmet much like the one he wore. As the RAF pilot removed his own headgear, the Australian leaned over the top of his own seat’s headrest to help him. As Trumbull slid the strange equipment over his head, Thorne plugged the helmet’s communications jacks into the correct sockets and Trumbull could suddenly hear the man quite clearly. He was speaking into a microphone set into the inside of the oxygen mask clipped beneath his own helmet — the mask now covering his entire face. The squadron leader copied the set-up and clipped up the mask he found by his own seat, instantly finding fresh air for his lungs to breathe once more and taking a deep breath as he repeated the question.
Thorne paused for a moment, deciding it simpler to acknowledge the aircraft’s original ancestry rather than go into a range of details the man was in any case unlikely to understand. “It’s called a F-35 Lightning, squadron leader: she’s a new prototype from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in the United States.” Although a massive understatement, that was at least the truth in a very basic form. As it was, Trumbull’s family connections and personal knowledge of current fighter development was sufficient for him to pick out some immediate problems with Thorne’s initial statement.
“I’ve seen pictures of Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning,” he shot back with a vaguely accusatory tone. “The RAF’s in discussions at the moment to purchase hundreds of them from the Yanks…and this thing looks nothing like it…”
“Okay…okay…I’ll remember never to talk ‘down’ to you again,” Thorne chuckled, amused that he’d unexpectedly been caught out. “You’re right: this isn’t a P-38 Lightning. The full name of the aircraft you’re currently sitting in is a Lockheed Martin F-35E Lightning Two, and it’s a more advanced development of the Gloster E.28/39 turbojet design.” Another simplification and a gross understatement, but again basically the truth. It didn’t occur to Thorne, speaking from the standpoint of history as he was, that Frank Whittle’s jet fighter test aircraft might still be a classified experiment.
“That turbine powered thing?” Trumbull was vaguely aware of the work Gloster had been carrying out with embryonic jet engines. The fact that his father was a very close friend of the Prime Minister meant he often picked up snippets of information often classed as ‘Top Secret’. “This is no Whittle design,” he stated with certainty. No fool, the man was well aware of what modern science could — and could not — do. “This aircraft obviously exists, but I find it hard to believe the technology to build it is possessed by Lockheed or anyone else, for that matter.”
“You’re actually quite right, old chap…” Thorne muttered to himself, his thoughts mostly taken up with his instruments as he prepared for a hurried take off. “Not yet, anyway…” he continued under his breath before adding loudly: “Systems: engine restart…”
The background humming of the jet’s APU increased instantly but was quickly overpowered by a deep, almost infrasonic rumble that built to a deafening howl as the main engine began to spool up once more in preparation for take off.
“I’m Max Thorne, by the way, squadron leader, and I know it’s probably painfully obvious at the moment that something really unusual is going on here. This isn’t the time to discuss it however. For a start, there isn’t the slightest chance you’ll believe me; secondly, it’s almost certain that enemy fighters are vectoring in on us at this very moment, as I’ve already said. The most important thing to do right now is get to safety…” as an afterthought, Thorne then added, rather unhelpfully in Trumbull’s opinion, “…assuming of course the road I’ve just landed on here is flat enough and solid enough for me to make a take off run without ploughing the friggin’ nose into the ground…”