The AWACS aircraft the New Eagles had purchased anonymously from the Russian Air Force, via the Chechen mafia, was an original model A-50 that’d been state-of-the-art in the late 1970s. Forty years later however, it had long been replaced in Russian service by more advanced, upgraded models. Acquiring that aircraft had been difficult enough, and it had proven impossible to locate a later model as the New Eagles would’ve preferred. As a result, although the aircraft they knew of as ‘Sentry’ was more than capable of dealing with day to day operations for the Wehrmacht against conventional, contemporary enemies on a 1940s battlefield, its relative lack of advanced avionics by 21st century standards was to eventually lead to its demise — although Jack Davies and his interceptor themselves also played no small part.
Jack Davies had travelled almost three hundred kilometres in the ten minutes since the F-22 had lifted off from the runway at Scapa Flow. The Raptor was capable of ‘supercruise’, a feature that meant it was powerful enough to travel at supersonic speed without the use of afterburner, making it exceptionally fuel-efficient. The aircraft’s comprehensive sensor suite had detected and identified the radar emissions of the A-50 Mainstay within seconds of take off, and he’d turned onto an intercept course immediately. With support for the reconnaissance mission no longer required, the Beriev was heading home in a leisurely fashion at an altitude far lower than Davies, and as Thorne had suspected, the aircraft’s systems were indeed predominantly ‘looking down’ for any threats. Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been sufficient at the altitude they were flying. Unfortunately for the Beriev, the circumstances that night were far from normal.
Radar waves occasionally swept across the Raptor’s stealthy fuselage and wings, but the Raptor’s own avionics were able to tell Davies how likely (or unlikely) it’d be for any searching systems to detect the F-22 based on the strength of emissions and the angle at which they struck the aircraft. So far, nothing he was picking up even came close to returning a signal, and with both aircraft now just sixty kilometres apart, Davies cruised on at Mach 1.8, closing fast on the Mainstay at a rate of thirty kilometres per minute. The Raptor carried up to eight air-to-air missiles internally, six of which were radar-guided AIM-120 AMRAAMs. He could fire one or more of those from a range of 40-50 kilometres and be basically guaranteed a hit, but that’d mean going from passive to active radar tracking for a few moments while his missiles acquired their targets. If that happened, he’d be detected instantly and he wanted to retain the element of surprise in case one of the remaining Flankers came chasing after him.
His other option was to use one or both of the Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles he also carried, and as their tracking systems were entirely passive, he could lock them onto his prey without it ever knowing he was there. The only disadvantage was that he’d have to close to around fifteen kilometres of the Mainstay to launch…even closer to be certain of a kill. There was also some benefit however, in that the first warning the Mainstay would have was at the moment the missiles streaked his weapons bays, leaving just a few seconds to try to evade and to locate their target. Davies himself felt quite cool and calculating about the whole thing rather than feeling any tension or excitement. He was a fighter pilot, and had been for the entirety of his career: what he was doing was as simple and straight forward to him as any training mission.
As he drew to within twenty kilometres, his passive IR systems also picked up a second aircraft, one that wasn’t radiating any electronic emissions. At first, he thought it might be the second of the Flankers, but he soon dismissed that idea as the pair were flying in a formation far too close and slow for the newcomer to be a fighter jet. He could now also see distant operating lights on the dark horizon before him — a lot of them — and Davies couldn’t believe his good fortune as he realised what was going on. Ahead of him, the A-50 was carrying out an in-flight refuelling from an almost identical Ilyushin IL-78 tanker.
The IL-78 ‘Midas’ was another aircraft the New Eagles had picked up from the disorganised Russian Air Force via organised crime connections, and the pair of them together was a multiple target far too attractive to ignore, especially as the tanker aircraft was as strategically important as the Mainstay in what it could provide in terms of extending the range of the two remaining Su-30MKs. Without tanker support, the Sukhoi fighters would need to stage out of Norwegian bases rather than from Germany or France if they hoped to mount an attack against Scapa Flow, and even then they’d be at the extreme edge of their range and wouldn’t be able to carry as great a load of weapons.
The Raptor carried three separate internal weapons bays. The primary bay beneath its belly could carry 900kg of bombs or up to six AIM-120 AMRAAMs, while smaller bays mounted at the side of his air intakes carried a single AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range missile each. Davies launched both Sidewinders at a range of just six thousand metres as he entered into a shallow dive, his targets still flying at a substantially lower altitude. It was only as its side bay doors opened did the F-22 become visible to radar for perhaps a second or two, vanishing once more as the hatches snapped shut again and the integrity of the Raptor’s stealthy fuselage was once more intact. It would take the pair of missiles just eight seconds to span the distance between the two sets of approaching aircraft.
The A-50 Mainstay was a large aircraft with a length and wingspan of approximately fifty metres each, a maximum take off weight of 170 tonnes, and a crew of fifteen. It wasn’t a manoeuvrable aircraft at the best of times, and at that moment its pilot was having trouble just keeping it flying level. The Mainstay was a notoriously difficult creature to refuel and the buffeting created by turbulence from the huge radar rotodome on its back when flying in close formation with a tanker aircraft was severe in the extreme. The refuelling hose that stretched between the aircraft was now barely visible as a twinkling line between them, shining brightly in the multitude of operating lights mounted at the rear of the leading tanker and wandering lazily from side to side in its slipstream.
Inside the A-50, its systems operators were relaxed, bored and ready to stand down for the day. It took a few seconds even to register the sudden appearance of two missiles so close off their tail, accompanied by the equally sudden appearance and disappearance of a mysterious launch aircraft that refused to be identified. The remaining seconds that followed were barely enough to even cry a warning to the pilot to carry out evasive manoeuvres. It was nowhere near enough time to actually do anything about the deadly heat-seekers streaking toward them, yet almost by instinct, the flight commander followed procedure and ‘dumped’ the aircraft’s masses of stored information and a data signal transmitted instantly back to their home base at the speed of light in a coded, compressed burst.
The pair of Sidewinders flicked downward from above at the last moment, homing in on the heat of one of the lead aircraft’s four engines. Each detonated by proximity fuse in sequence, just five metres above the IL-78 tanker’s broad back and shoulder-mounted wings. Blast shockwaves and fragmentation ripped through the aircraft, devastating its upper wing surfaces and igniting the fuel within. A minor explosion severed that wing between the inboard and outboard engines and the amputated segment spiralling away as the mortally wounded tanker began to slowly roll in the opposite direction, out of control and pulling away from the A-50 behind it.