As news of the enemies reaching the eastern riverbanks was broadcast from the front, the surviving Belarus FACs started to call in their own airstrike’s with the fighter-bombers and their CAP escorts. Hind-D helicopter gunships worked their way low toward the battlefield, using cover and watching out anxiously for enemy fixed and rotary wing threats.
Heavy and medium, 152mm, 203mm, 220mm, tube and rocket artillery, preserved for this moment now swung to the bearing and elevations dictated by FAOs, forward artillery observers, and commanders on the ground.
Despite its relatively small 3700kg internal tanks, the Belarus Sukhoi’s carried no external drop tanks; all 3500kg of external stores were munitions.
FAB-500 conventional low drag bombs, CBUs and underwing rocket pods lined the hard points. There was no space even for ECM jammer pods, of which the Flogger had none internally.
Major Kegin’s flight of had tanked over Germany before joining the ‘taxi rank’ of combat aircraft within the cover of NATO jamming stations, whilst they awaited NATOs assistance with thinning out the enemy CAPs, over and near the battlefield.
The Belarus Mig 29s, the five Fulcrum’s that had not been taken by defecting aircrew, each carried two AA-10 Alamo missiles, one an AA-10C, long bodied SARH, radar guided and one long bodied IR heat-seeking AA-10D, along with medium and short range armament.
A Russian A-50, the modernised IL-76 AWACS was the target of the Fulcrum’s AA-10 Alamos. A phalanx of fighters and interceptors escorted them forward to within 120km where the AA-10s were launched. The A-50 and its escorting Mig-31s dived east with track breakers, flares and chaff in operation when their threat receivers detected the AA-10s. One Mig-31 Foxhound was damaged when an AA-10Ds proximity fuse detected it, as it twisted and turned to evade.
The AA-10s electronic brains analysed and discarded the decoys, reacquiring the targets time and again after the track-breakers broke the missiles locks. However, in between time they did not always reacquire the same targets that they had been designated.
The A-50 escaped scot-free whilst half of its escort fell victim, as a second Mig-31 was blotted out of the sky in a fireball. A Su-27J and a Mig-29, in the wrong place at the wrong time, were acquired by AA-10s, their crews survived by ejecting but their aircraft went to join the growing litter of hi-tech wreckage across the battlefield. The remaining six AA-10s ran out of fuel and self-destructed.
Dutch, French, German and US interceptors used long range air-air weapons but avoided close engagement; this was just round one for them. Red Air Force fighter CAPs twisted and turned as they dived earthwards, twenty-nine of the seventy missiles fired scored hits, having been reliant on their own internal systems and having no mid-course corrections from their aircraft to ensure a higher score. The aim of the afternoon’s mission had been one of making a hole in the Red aerial defences, and that was briefly achieved.
With the enemy fighter threat busy for the moment the Belarus fighter-bombers headed for the front
On the other side of the line the enemy controllers had watched and waited. As the airstrike’s left the electronic fog of NATO jamming cover, heading east, the controllers gave the heads up to their own air defences and a full five regiments of interceptors waiting in the wings. Their ambush was about to be sprung.
120mm mortars, tube artillery and multiple rocket launchers began to pound upon the eastern bank and approaches, FAOs adjusted the fire and for a short time the new Red Army was on the receiving end.
Sat in their APC command vehicles, Red Army counter battery plotters pinpointed the Belorussian batteries and passed the information on.
On the opposite side of the line the Belorussians finished firing their first missions and were scrambling to pack up and relocate before firing new missions, well aware of what the opposition would be doing in reply.
The differences between well practised gun crews and the novices was startling, for the most part the good crews were already departing the old gun lines when the counter battery fire arrived, there were few novice crews at the new ones.
Major Kegin’s flight came in low from the northwest, below on the ground the lush farmland gave way to burning crops and dead cattle scattered about shell craters in fields. Selecting FAB-500 iron bombs for the first pass the flight popped up to toss bomb the ordnance at the eastern bank. Immediately their threat receivers had come alive with SAM and ZSU radars locking on. Kegin’s flight pickled off their dumb bombs and dived for the ground, with only their internal stores of chaff and flares as safeguards. All four reached the relative safety of the deck and turned hard to the left, breaking the lock of two SAMs, that unable match the manoeuvre overshot and self-destructed as their seekers snapped over to follow the heat signatures of the flight. Kegin led them south before turning back into the fray.
On his command frequency Kegin learnt that not all of his regiment’s flights had been so fortunate.
All along the front the fighter-bombers of the loyal Belarus air force struck at their turncoat former comrades and their new Red Army and air force allies.
For the next run the flight was to use their rocket pods and cannon on the armour on the bank, the CBUs were for targets of opportunity, such as bridging equipment near the river, triple-A and artillery lines further back.
Kegin and his wingman slipped back into trail several hundred metres behind the other pair, the first pair would call out plum targets for Kegin and his partner, who were the more experienced pilots. If all went as planned the pairs would swap over and repeat the exercise until all munitions were expended, and once that was achieved they would recover to Germany, to refuel and rearm although few NATO stores were compatible with their airframes.
As the first pair reached the river the right hand fighter-bomber staggered in the air, Kegin applied left rudder to avoid pieces of the aircraft that were being chewed off as if by an unseen buzz saw. The aircraft ahead rolled drunkenly to the right, streaming coolant and smoke, too late the young pilot ejected, leaving the stricken aircraft sideways at less than 200ft altitude the pilot, still attached to his ejector seat, had struck the ground in a cloud of torn turf and soil.
Kegin’s wingman reacted to a message from the survivor of the lead pair; a slight touch of stick, a nudge of rudder and CBUs dropped from their hardpoint’s, decimating a pair of bridging sections mounted on T-72 chassis and an engineer vehicle on the bank. Ahead of them the lead aircraft dropped its nose to ripple fire from it’s under wing pods, it was still doing so when it vanished in a fireball. Kegin broke left to avoid and found himself looking at some of his traitorous countrymen’s T-72s that emerged line abreast from a treeline. Selecting rockets Kegin applied hard right rudder and walked his rockets across the end three tanks in the line, then he was past and calling for his wingman.
The aircraft re-joined east of the battlefield, spying support units as they tree hopped but hoping for better prey to expend the last of their stores on. At this moment they and the entire Belorussian air force, such as was left after the defections, was over the battlefield and immediate surrounds.
Back by the river loyal Belorussian Hind-D gunships cautiously edged along behind cover, hovering a few feet off the ground as they stalked the armour on the eastern bank, peeping over and between trees, ducking up and down behind hillocks, they looked for targets free of obvious triple-A protection.
On the eastern bank, tanks and APCs exploded here and there as the Hinds across the river sniped at them.