With a flight time of just six seconds to target, the missile was already perilously close as Schwarz pushed the Sukhoi’s nose down and it bottomed out again just fifty metres above the ground, chaff and flares still pouring in torrents from the aircraft’s tail. Geography alone saved Hawk-3 in the end as it banked sharply to the south and momentarily slipped behind a group of low, rolling hills that blocked the path of the approaching missile.
With no active systems of its own and controlled by the launch vehicle’s radars, which still had a clear, clean lock on the Flanker, the 57E6 continued on its unwavering intercept course, unable to recognise that solid earth now lay directly between it and its intended target. It ploughed straight into the ground near the crest of one of the hills, just a hundred metres short of the Su-30 as the jet made good its narrow escape.
The missile exploded on impact, lighting up the sky and buffeting them with its shockwave as Schwarz kept to his southerly course. The Flanker finally left land behind seconds later and slipped out over the dark, fathomless waters of the North Sea once more, accelerating beyond the speed of sound as it returned to straight, level flight and again vanished from Hindsight’s search and tracking systems, this time for good.
“Did we get what we needed?” Schwarz enquired, breathless and tense.
“I…I think so…yes,” Hauser replied with growing certainty as he checked the readouts from the reconnaissance pod mounted below the aircraft’s belly.
“Well it’s all they’re going to get — that was close and it was as close as we’re getting unless they’re willing to let us shoot back!”
The Flanker swept across the featureless waters of Pentland Firth, south of Scapa Flow, and out across the Island of Stroma before making a wide, banking turn above the equally dark Scottish mainland. It was there they formed up once more with Hawk-4, the other remaining Su-30, which had been loitering to the east of the islands waiting for the opportunity to pounce in surprise upon any aircraft that might take off in pursuit of its colleague. They’d met with no success, and as the pair flew on across the blackness of the North Sea, they gave the Orkneys a wide berth before turning east once more and heading for the safety of the European Continent.
Jack Davies and Eileen Donelson were already approaching as the wail or air raid sirens began to wind down and Thorne and Trumbull climbed from the slit trench near the entrance to the Officer’s Mess in which they’d sought cover.
“Six-to-four, that was a recon flight…!” Davies snarled, out of breath as he reached Thorne’s side.
“Six-to-four on…!” Thorne replied, shaking his head. “No question at all. They just shot past at full throttle and fucked off again without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’. Christ, our advanced warning was shithouse: if that’d been an attack run we’d all be fuckin’ toasted by now!”
“Lucky us then…!” The American pilot was unimpressed to say the least. “They’ll know what we’ve got here, now!”
“Not yet they won’t: only way they could do a recce at this time of night is with infra red or image intensifying. They won’t have any real idea until they get that shit processed and researched by experts at the other end. That’ll take at least an hour after touch down, maybe two, and I’d give it another hour before anyone in charge like Reuters gets the disseminated information.”
“A lot of good that does us…!”
“Maybe — maybe not…” Thorne mused, going suddenly silent. Davies fixed him with an expectant stare: it wasn’t the reply the Texan had expected. Thorne purposefully made them wait for a moment as he thought things out before throwing a glance at Eileen.
“After the smacking Reuters got last night losing the first two Flankers, would you send another one this way without AWACS coverage?”
“Not likely…” Donelson replied in an instant. “No pilot with any common sense would be happy about going in blind: if I were that plane’s aircrew I’d want to be pretty certain we weren’t running BARCAP over the base prior to making any over flight. We haven’t had time to get our passive ELINT receivers properly calibrated yet, but I’d be willing to bet the systems on the fighters would be able to pick something up if they are out there.”
“My thinking too…” Thorne agreed. “I’ll give you any money you like, that Mainstay they picked up from the Ruskies is in the air right now and has this whole place under surveillance.” He turned his attention back to Davies. “The range of those ‘Vega’ systems is no better than 250 klicks — less than that if they want any kind of decent detail. What’s a Flanker’s operational radius?”
“‘Bout four hundred miles at low altitude, give or take…around 650 kilometres.” Davies answered after a moment’s thought. “They’ll probably be carrying extra tanks ‘though.”
“…And they’d have come in at full bore all the way! You know how much fuel those fuckers use on afterburner!” He indicated the Raptor parked on its distant hardstand with a cocked thumb. “Most people don’t have the benefit of ‘supercruise’! That Flanker would’ve been loaded with recon shit and missiles up to the eyeballs too if they had any sense, so I doubt those pricks will have much fuel left by the time they get back over the Channel, meaning…”
“…Meaning…” Davies continued, catching the gist of Thorne’s argument “…there might be an AWACS up there all on its lonesome…!”
Thorne gave a conspiratorial wink. “…And they won’t know what we’ve got here for at least two hours! That Mainstay they’re using is at least fifteen years old and it’ll be looking down. What do you give its chances of picking up a Raptor?” The question was close enough to rhetoric to not require any real answer, and Davies required no more incentive.
“I’m gone!” He stated, and turning he bellowed orders at the darkness in the direction of the F-22. “Duty sergeant: get that fuckin’ Raptor pre-flighted and fired up now!”
“You want me to run ‘de-fence’?” Thorne inquired excitedly as Davies began to move.
“No point, buddy…with two of us up there, we double the chance of being detected, and the moment they even sniff an enemy fighter headed their way they’ll hightail it back to Krautland so damn fast they’ll leave a hole in the air!” The Texan grinned, and Thorne saw the expected friendly insult coming. “Besides — you’d only slow me down! I’ve got ‘supercruise’, remember? Just get those runway lights on!”
“You got it!” Thorne snapped, breaking into a headlong run for the tower with Trumbull and the others in tow.
Toward the end of the Realtime 1970s, the Soviet Union developed an aircraft known as the Beriev A-50 Shmel (‘Bumblebee’, also known by the NATO reporting name ‘Mainstay’). This four-engined jet was an AWACS aircraft, the American-originated acronym meaning Airborne Warning And Control System. Based on the Ilyushin IL-76 ‘Candid’ commercial airframe, a huge rotodome nine metres in diameter containing a powerful radar transceiver was fitted to its back. Replacing the obsolete Tupolev Tu-126 ‘Moss’ in service it became, no pun intended, the mainstay of Russian airborne early warning for many years. Capable of controlling and maintaining surveillance over tens of thousands of square kilometres of battlefield and detecting aircraft at ranges up to 250 kilometres (dependent on the conditions), these A-50s were a huge benefit to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.