The cockpit canopy lowered around them as Trumbull finished strapping himself in, and as he tilted his head to one side he could — barely — get a glimpse of what Thorne was doing with his controls. His left hand jammed a sliding lever forward that the RAF pilot could only assume was the throttle, based on the dramatic rise in engine thrust and noise that accompanied it. The entire airframe began to shudder under the increased power as Thorne deftly adjusted a smaller sliding control mounted to the left of some kind of small, flat TV screen set at the top of his instrument panel.
Powerful landing lights flicked on once more, illuminating the lane for hundreds of metres ahead, while behind the aircraft its exhaust nozzle altered direction from its current 90º angle to instead point almost directly rearward as it would in normal flight.
“What on earth could possibly threaten this thing?” Trumbull mused in delayed response to the other man’s earlier statement and considered what he’d seen as the F-35E had quickly despatched his two pursuers earlier.
Hawk-1’s IRST pod picked up the F-35’s heat signature the moment they turned onto a northerly heading and powered in toward the English coastline. It was faint — incredibly faint for a combat aircraft in the pilot’s opinion — and seemed to be completely stationary, which didn’t make sense at all. At a range of little more than four kilometres it was clear enough though to gain a lock on, and the green diamond on his HUD immediately snapped across to the right edge of the screen and turned a bright red as it picked out the target. A growling sound in his headset advised him the seeker heads of his four armed R-73 missiles had all also found the target and were ready for launch.
In that moment, the section of beach around the locked target suddenly became a bright beacon of light against the otherwise black coastline, and it instantly became apparent to the crew of Hawk-1 why the enemy appeared to be stationary: it had landed and was now preparing to take off once more.
“I see him! I see him!” Hawk-2’s pilot howled over the radio excitedly as they hurtled along just five hundred metres above the surface of the Channel. “Landing lights up the beach to starboard, bearing zero-one-eight!”
“Thank you for the ‘heads up’, Hawk-Two,” Hawk-1’s pilot snapped back with caustic sarcasm, “…but my IRST has got him already: with those landing lights I suspect any bastard within ten bloody kilometres can probably see him as well!” Returning to complete professionalism, he added: “Keep on my wing…I’m turning into attack now.” There was another pause as a new thought occurred to him. “He’s on the ground, so missiles will be out: switching to cannon. He’ll be heading west on his take off run, so watch for him and be ready to break if he makes it into the air.”
As Hawk-2 dropped slightly behind and eased around onto his rear port quarter, Hawk-1’s pilot banked his own fighter gently around to the east to bring his cannon to bear on the landed enemy. Capable as it was, even the R-73 Archer had its limitations, and one of those was a minimum engagement altitude of no less than 300 metres. With the target on the ground there was nothing for it but to instead arm the 30mm cannon mounted in its starboard wing root, and as he switched his weapons systems over to ground attack mode, the red diamond of the missile lock disappeared, replaced instead with a small ‘dot-in-a-circle’ targeting marker known colloquially as a ‘pipper’.
At the same time, the Sukhoi’s gun ranging radar activated out of the sheer necessity to provide the pilot with an accurate idea of his position in relation to the ground and, as a result, his cannon’s expected point of impact. The green pipper bobbed and wavered slightly as the jets cut through a minor buffet of low-level turbulence before steadying directly over the bright landing lights of their earth-bound target.
Considering that the activation of the ranging radar had effectively given the game away and announced their presence to the world, the flight commander saw no point in remaining ‘black’ any longer and lit up his main targeting and search radars. The action confirmed what Sentry had already expected: that their target was indeed a stealth aircraft of some type, and even with gear down in a landed configuration, the radar return was insignificant to the point of almost being electronically invisible.
“Oh shit!” Thorne observed, half-scared and half-excited as a warbling tone suddenly rose in both men’s helmets that even to the uninitiated was instantly recognisable as an alarm, and the pilot drew a sharp breath as he stared at information flickering across that wide, main LCD screen before him. There was a similar screen in front of Trumbull but he could make neither hide nor hair of what was displayed on it.
“You asked what could threaten us…?” Thorne asked a second later in a dry, rhetoric tone. “Well we’re about to find out: EW just picked up radar emissions from two bogies coming in fast from the south, right on our hammer! Hang on, Sunshine — this is likely to get pretty bloody hairy!”
Wheel brakes were released and the jet instantly began to trundle along the lane, quickly building speed for take off. Trumbull’s stomach lurched as Thorne jammed the throttle fully forward and the Lightning accelerated across the asphalt at an incredible rate. Within just a hundred metres or perhaps less, the aircraft leaped into the air ahead of a pillar of exhaust and flying debris and continued to accelerate as Thorne returned the controls completely to level flight and engaged the afterburner. That action produced a second, more powerful increase in thrust as they fought to gain valuable altitude and Trumbull scanned the dark horizon for their unseen attackers.
The approaching Sukhois might’ve been invisible to the naked eye but they appeared clear as day on the Lightning’s EW systems and as both men stared off to the south, two small red squares appeared on the projection screens inside their helmet visors to indicate the exact position of the approaching jets. Tiny red subtitles beneath the target boxes listed the identity of the aircraft based on the type of radar emissions being received, each showing simply as “SU-30” with a range reading of ‘02135’ with kilometres displayed in the larger font and metres in the smaller.
“My God…! There they are!” Trumbull breathed, terrified despite having only a pair of red target ‘boxes’ to go by and not actually being able to see what it was that was coming to attack them.
“Hold on then, pal, ‘cause here we go!” The F-35E continued to accelerate and gain altitude as Thorne turned to port, the fingers of his right hand flicking about the buttons and switches mounted on his joystick so quickly it was almost a reflex action. Even as he armed his own weapons, the streaking pink flares of tracer reached out for them from the darkness and a single stream of cannon shells passed far too close astern for comfort.
With a single, plaintive and indignant utterance of “Fuck…!”, Thorne hauled back on his stick to increase his rate of turn and climb, banking tightly to port toward the enemy as the flick of another switch released a cascade of bright, hissing decoy flares that spewed from dispensers hidden in the rear fuselage. Intended to make any prospective attempt to obtain an infra-red lock more difficult, they lit up the entire area around the climbing aircraft and fell away to the ground where several immediately ignited small grassfires in the fields below.