“What flag?”
“Armée d’Air. French Air Force. Check your offset, sir.”
Well, Hawke thought, there you have it. The bloody French had gone completely round the bend. Challenging the American no-fly zone was all the proof anyone needed that Bonaparte was wholly insane. Find out if they’ll shoot, Brick had said to Hawke. He was about to do just that.
“Roger, Archangel,” Hawke said, “Executing offset. Vertical offset minimum of five thousand, roger?”
“Affirmative. That’s a good number, sir. No more than that.”
“Maintain vertical offset at five thousand,” Hawke said, “Johnnie Black.”
For some reason, the Americans were giving whisky call signs to all Operation Deny Flight aircraft. He supposed the British whisky appellation he’d been given, “Johnnie Black,” was some kind of USAF humor. Hawke drank only rum, but Johnnie Walker Black was damn good whisky and if he had to have—Uh oh.
“Uh, Johnnie Black, climb and maintain three-five-oh, over.”
“Johnnie Black climb and maintain three-five-oh.”
Hawke had been so busy with radar, weapons systems, radio, and the vivid memory of his recently aborted career as a test pilot, he’d barely registered the AWACS warning. He got busy fast.
“Roger that,” Hawke said, scanning his canopy for shapes that might suddenly get much larger as he and the bogey converged. He knew he would see the guy going from not really moving in the canopy, to suddenly starting to shift. The F-16 was equipped with the most sophisticated weapons systems, avionics, navigation, and electronic countermeasures that money could buy. But any good fighter jock got a whole lot of information about a bogey’s speed and heading by carefully observing how the tiny target plane grew and shrank and moved against his canopy.
If the bogey got bigger and bigger without changing relative position, it meant you were about to experience the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of a midair collision.
But, if the other guy got bigger, and drifted from one area of the canopy to another, like this guy was doing, it meant he was in a turn. The secret to staying alive up here was the ability to instantly grasp the “picture” of the two combatants’ relative positions and react accordingly. Without thinking. Right now, the bogey was moving fast in the canopy, meaning the two jets were starting to pass each other.
“Turn right, Johnnie Black,” Hawke heard in his headset. He was already doing that. With his left hand, he hit the afterburner. Hawke was pulling nine g’s in the turn. Blood was trying to leave his head in a hurry and go to his feet, but he strained his muscles against the pressure suit so the red-out didn’t happen. The two jets were turning away from each other, each making a circle in the sky. It was a two-circle fight now. Each pilot was hoping to outrun the enemy plane and end up behind him. On his six, they called it. Sometimes referred to as “Position A.”
“Good work, Johnnie Black,” Archangel said suddenly. “Get your nose lower.”
“Roger.” Hawke eased his nose down. Making any turn going downhill added power, since gravity added to the plane’s energy. Hawke now turned toward the enemy plane, trying to make this a “one-circle” fight. He wanted to get inside the bogey’s turn circle so he could get off a quick shot from behind. He knew he was taking a chance. If you overshoot, the hunter ends up prey, out in front of the bogey. If you slow too quickly, you have only a fleeting shot and then you wind up on the defensive.
The two opposing aircraft were sliding, slipping, and zooming through the air. There are only two kinds of aircraft in the sky. Killers and targets. Johnnie Black and the French Mirage testing the American no-fly zone were in the deadly process of sorting out who was who.
“Uh, Johnnie Black,” Archangel said, “what exactly are your intentions, sir?”
“Roll out, get the burner cooking, go for turn circle energy,” Hawke replied.
“What speed?”
“Four hundred knots.”
“Okay, roger. Don’t get beyond five hundred knots, sir. We’re not trying to pick a fight here, sir. We, uh, we—we’re still setting up shop here.”
Hawke grinned. Not trying to pick a fight? Why the hell else would they be there? Hawke fired up his air-to-air radar and pinged the opposing fighter. As soon as the ping hit him, the Mirage went into violent defensive maneuvers and Hawke dove down after him. They were now both in a circling spin toward the ground. Each pilot was hoping to take advantage of a split-second mistake by the other guy. He was at twenty thousand feet and the whole of the Gulf of Oman lay below him. He caught his first glimpse of the Strait of Hormuz.
From this altitude, it wasn’t hard to grasp the strategic importance.
He had the bogey locked up, and a warning signal sounded in the cockpit as he armed his AMRAAM radar missiles. The new Aim-120s under his wings were the latest thing. Air-launched aerial intercept missiles employing active radar target tracking. They were capable of speeds of Mach 4 and provided capability against single and multiple targets in all environments. The bogey beneath him, now spinning earthward like a pinwheel, was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.
“Johnnie Black, veer off! Veer off!” Archangel shouted in his phones.
“Repeat?” Hawke said, his voice incredulous, his right hand poised in midair. “I have this bogey locked up! You want me to disengage?”
“Affirmative, affirmative. Disengage! Do not shoot! Veer off now, sir.”
“What the bloody hell is going on? Somebody want to tell me?” he said, letting anger and frustration creep into his voice.
“This is not a shooting war, Johnnie Black.”
“It isn’t? Then there’s some serious lack of—what the hell kind of war are you boys fighting?”
“Right now it’s strictly a pushing and shoving war, sir.”
“Pushing and shoving.”
“That’s affirmative. Until further orders.”
“Roger, Archangel,” Hawke said, simultaneously calming himself down and peeling away. “Seems to have been a serious lack of communication somewhere along the line, Archangel.”
“Roger that, Johnnie Black. We apologize, sir. We, uh—were not informed you were coming. We, uh, oh shit!”
There was a muffled boom below and Hawke flipped his plane left and saw what had caused it. The French Mirage F1 jet had augured into the side of a mountain. Licks of orange fire and thick black smoke were curling up from the crash site. The pilot’s evasive maneuver was sound but he’d gone too deep. Or rather, Hawke thought, he’d been pushed and shoved too deep. Another pilot who’d run out of luck and experience at precisely the same moment.
“Looks like the other guy blinked,” Hawke said. “Too bad.”
“Roger that, Johnnie Black. You’ve certainly made our day a helluva lot more interesting. Sorry about the misunderstanding. We’ll definitely make the evening news tonight. Have a lovely day, sir.”
“Johnnie Black proceeding to Seeb International, Oman.”
Hawke rolled the jet right and came to a new heading. He could see the capital city of Muscat dead ahead. Jim Beam floated up on his left side. Hedges looked over at him, shaking his head. He was sure the American AWACS pilot thought he was crazy for going after the Mirage as aggressively as he had. But the French pilot was testing the waters. And Kelly had asked him to be as realistic as possible when he tested the waters himself. If Langley wanted a realistic assessment of Operation Deny Flight’s performance, then by God he was going to give them one.
The CIA wanted to find out exactly what the French pilots would do if challenged. Now they knew. Maybe this wasn’t a shooting war, not yet anyway. But all that might change radically and soon. A lot depended on what Johnnie Black found on the ground in Oman.
So far, if you didn’t count the little contretemps in Cannes a few weeks ago, not a single shot had been fired in this war. But each side had now lost one airplane. Only one side had lost a pilot.