“No contact,” Watanabe called out. “Last bearing was off our rear port quarter, heading east. He may be abeam us.” He had the INEWS (Integrated Electronic Warfare System) threat-warning receiver on his primary multifunction display — which indicated all radars in the vicinity — show the location of missiles fired at them, and even pinpoint and jam a targeting laser illuminating the aircraft. INEWS would send a different tone for every kind of threat jt detected — radar, infrared, or laser — through the interphone system, and Fell would change directions, however momentarily to turn his engine exhausts downward, and dive for trees when he heard the warning receiver bleep. Watanabe also had control of the Stinger missile system — it was he who downed the Sukhoi-17, so he and Fell each had one enemy kill since joining MADCAP MAGICIAN — and could take control of the Chain Gun pod for attacking ground threats that might appear.
“Heads up on the portside,” Fell said on interphone. “Find that damn fighter. Jose!”
“Go,” replied Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Jose Lobato, the COBRA VENOM team leader.
“You give any more thought to the idea of hotfooting it the rest of the way?” Fell asked.
“I told you, sir, we’re staying,” Lobato said. “Me and the boys don’t like the idea of slogging through fifty miles of Indian country. We paid for the plane ticket and we’re staying.”
“It’s your funeral.” He started a hard left turn and said, “Clear my left turn and find a clearing. We’ve got to—”
“Contact!” one of the Marines shouted on interphone. “Portside, high, about eight o’clock position, range three miles!”
Watanabe, sitting on the left side of the cockpit, saw the MiG-27 immediately. “Contact on the bandit. Break left, Hank!”
As he gave that command, he saw a flash of light from the MiG’s left wingtip, and the INEWS threat-warning receiver blared out a warning — it must have been blanked during the hard left turn and didn’t spot the radar-silent MiG-27 as it slipped within infrared-detection range.
“Missile launch!” Watanabe shouted.
INEWS had automatically activated its infrared jamming system, which modulated the head energy of the CV-22’s engine exhaust to cause the heat-seeking missile to break lock, and it ejected an electronic ARIES (Advanced Radar! Infrared Expendable System) decoy from a right-side ejector chute. The ARIES decoy was actually a small glider that transmitted RF energy throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, making it much more effective than standard flares or bundles of chaff — ARIES could jam an enemy fighter radar for several minutes, and it could even attract missiles from long distances or attract a missile that had missed its target and was turning to re-attack.
ARIES worked perfectly on the first missile. Flight Lieutenant Doleckis could only watch, first with astonishment and then in absolute helplessness, as his R-50 heat-seeking missile gracefully arced to the right into empty space and detonated nearly a full kilometer away from the American aircraft. Although he saw no bright flare, his missile was obviously chasing a decoy; the R-50 was an older model (the Byelorussian military rarely received top-of-the-line Commonwealth weapons — they were reserved for the Russians) and very susceptible to decoys. When he tried to turn left and lock his last R-50 on the CV-22, the missile’s seeker refused to stay locked on, even though he was less than four kilometers away from the target and right behind him. His radar-warning receiver was beeping at him, which meant the CV-22 was transmitting tracking or jamming signals.
Doleckis tried one last shot at a lock-on. At minimum range of about three kilometers, the last R-50 reported locked-on, and he fired. He immediately activated his radar in air-to-air mode, reset his heads-up display for aerial gunnery, and switched to his 30-millimeter cannon. Although his cannon had three hundred rounds, it usually jammed after one or two hundred were fired — but at close range, just a few of the sausage-sized rounds were deadly. Anticipating the CV-22’s next move, Doleckis used a bit of right rudder to point his nose slightly right to get a lead point on the target, placing his aiming reticle at the point he thought the aircraft would turn in just a few seconds.
The CV-22 banked sharply right, as Doleckis knew it would. The last R-50 wobbled a bit in flight, as if it were trying to go after another decoy launched to the left, but it stayed locked on. But apparently it momentarily locked on to the sun, a glint off the river below, or the first decoy launched by the CV-22, because the R-50 careened right over the CV-22, not attracted to its engines at all, and flew for several dozen meters before exploding.
The fwooosh! of the R-50 flying over the cockpit made Martin Watanabe duck and turn away instinctively, just as driving in a parking garage with really low ceilings made him hunch his shoulders, so he was protected from the brunt of the explosion as the missile screamed over the canopy. Hank Fell actually watched the thing pass by, so he was looking right at it when the missile exploded just a few yards away. The explosion shattered the right-side cockpit windows and right-front windscreen, showering the pilots with shards of Lexan. Fell felt the acrylic windscreen bite into his head, then felt the heat and pressure of the explosion slam into him — then he felt nothing as the concussion nearly blew him out of his seat.
Watanabe screamed and grabbed for the controls. The left engine had immediately gone to full power; when the explosion of the R-50’s fourteen-pound warhead destroyed the right engine, the computerized flight-control system of the CV-22 automatically applied full power to the good engine. The crossover linkage tried to apply power from the left engine to the right rotor, and when that did not respond, it unfeathered the right rotor and immediately began switching the flight controls from airplane to helicopter mode for a landing.
Watanabe had his hands on the controls, but he was not fully in control. The blast that had killed Fell and torn most of his face away had badly hurt the CV-22’s copilot. He had just enough time to consciously keep the wings level and the nose up when the CV-22 hit the trees. It flipped up onto its nose and threatened to cartwheel, but after hanging tail-up for several moments it settled back to earth right-side up. The right engine smoked and burst into flames, and one Stinger missile popped out of its launch canister and cooked off along the ground, but the automatic fire-extinguishing system kept the fire from spreading to the wing fuel tanks.
“Target down! Flight seven-one-one, target down!” Doleckis crowed victoriously on the command-post frequency. Damn, he thought. My first kill! He was breathing so hard that he felt he couldn’t draw enough air through his oxygen mask, and he whipped it off. God, was this exciting! Doleckis used to hunt deer and pheasant with his father and uncles in the Ruzhany forests of western Belarus, and he remembered the nearly overwhelming rush of excitement when he got his first kill, but this was a million times more exciting. All that heavy iron going down, all those souls on board screaming their last breath. He felt no remorse for them at all, only sheer happiness and elation that they had died by his hand. His persistence and patience had defeated America’s best technology.