She banked the aircraft around, heading for Germany; the Tempest felt almost disappointed to be taken away from a possible encounter with the enemy. The German countryside was dark and almost completely unlighted; the only bursts of light were explosions as Russian bombers prowled, looking for targets that they could drop heavy bombs on. What they lacked in precision they made up for in enthusiasm; they dropped very heavy bombs without wringing their hands over the civilians who got caught up in the blasts. If those civilians had demanded a real defence capability…
Ping! The moment of lock-on was a complete shock to her; she banked the Tempest without thinking about it. The Russian Mainstay had somehow gotten a sniff of her and was bringing up more search radars, hunting for her… and three of its friends were also bringing up their own radars. They had to suspect that she was a stealth aircraft — a non-stealth aircraft would have been detected well before — and would be sharing data; the green sweeps of their radar waves passed across the Tempest… and locked on. The sheer power was burning through her coating and ECM; the scattered bursts of radar energy would force them to triangulate her position, but they could do it. No… they would do it; she had no doubt at all that they would succeed.
“Lock-on,” the flight computer warned. It had the voice of her father, something that she had considered funny at times, but now it just seemed sick joke. If only the lawsuits forbidden the use of voices without permission hadn’t gone through… “Alert; Russian radars have locked on…”
“Tell me something I don’t fucking know,” Cindy snapped. The Mainstays might carry some anti-aircraft weapons themselves — the Russians were paranoid, with reason — about their AWACS — but she was well out of their missile range and there was no way that such an aircraft could intercept her themselves. No, they would send in the fighters, unless through sheer ill luck they had set up a passive ZSU system below her. “Find me their fighters…”
“Alert; enemy fighters detected,” the flight computer said. “Three fighters; flight characteristics suggest MIG-41 Flatpack aircraft. Suggest evasive action.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Cindy snapped, remembering the one time she had sworn as a teenager in front of her father. He had forced her to wash her mouth out with soap. Enemy radars were coming on all over the area and the Russians would have a fair chance at getting a shot at her, even if she fled at once. She checked the weapons the Tempest carried; she might well have to fight her way through the Russians if they attempted to engage her. “Order; prepare data dump.”
Everything that the Tempest had recorded had been saved firmly in its computers. If she believed that escape was impossible, she would have triggered the transmission and sent everything back to the AWACS orbiting far over the North Sea, betraying her presence in one burst of radio activity. As she turned the aircraft and hit the afterburners, the Russians closed in, while their radars kept a firm track on her flight path. They didn’t look as if they were going to be reasonable about it and let her go.
“Bastards,” she muttered, as the flight computer reported missile locks from the Russian fighters. She jinked rapidly, breaking the locks, and threw the Tempest into a long dive and turn, coming up facing the Russian fighters. She uncovered the firing key and depressed it, trusting in the ASRAAM missile to achieve a more permanent lock-on using its own systems. A Russian fired at the same time and she dodged the Russian missile, even as her missile scored a direct hit and blew the Russian aircraft out of the sky. The third Russian aircraft achieved lock-on and fired; she evaded through a series of daring and desperate manoeuvres, feeling her body ache as the gravity forces pulled at her. “Real bastards!”
Her flight computer was screaming at her; the fight was inching out over the North Sea and they had to make their meeting with the tanker, or else they would run out of fuel and fall out of the sky. The Tempest was so classified that she couldn’t allow it to fall into Russian hands; the MOD had ensured that the aircraft had a self-destruct linked to the ejection seat. She glared down at her threat board, finding a Russian fighter trying to lock on to her, and launched her second missile at it. The Russian fighter jock threw his aircraft into a crazy dive and avoided the missile with ease. She forced herself to think; how many missiles did the Flatpack carry? She couldn’t remember…
The Russian fighters broke off. For a moment, she wondered if it was a trick of some kind, or if they had run out of missiles and she hadn’t noticed, and then she saw the three Eurofighter Typhoons flashing towards her position. They had been escorting the AWACS; the controller had vectored them towards her, just to save her from the Russians. It had been a risk, but none of the remaining RAF fighter pilots would leave a comrade in trouble; they had too few pilots to lose one when she could have been saved.
“It’s good to see you,” Cindy said sincerely, as the Typhoons fell into escort formation around her. She would be running on vapours by the time they met the tanker, but she was certain, now, that she would escape the Russians. There would be other chances to even the score a little, before the close of play. “That was a tight spot there.”
“Tight as a virgin’s cunt,” her rescuer agreed. Cindy laughed bitterly. “At least you managed to hurt the bastards. We don’t even get to do that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two: Backs to the Wall
Here is the answer that I will give to President Roosevelt: We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire… Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
London, United Kingdom
The map on the wall showed Britain’s death throes.
“Explain it to me again,” Langford said, as calmly as he could. He felt slightly better, even though he had reprimanded Erica for ordering Sara to slip him a sedative with his coffee; there might have been something that only he could deal with. “Why are we having problems?”
Rolf Lommerde flinched. He had problems with soldiers, particularly armed soldiers; he had reacted as through the soldiers who had guarded the small building were wolves, with him cast in the role of the sheep. He had been on the verge of ivory-tower status, but unlike many academics, he had real experience in handling problems; he had coordinated some of the relief efforts that had taken place in England following the flooding of 2020.
“It’s complicated,” he said. The government had never appointed a military supervisor to Lommerde’s headquarters during the flooding; he had been able to pretend that the soldiers working on the relief effort didn’t exist, or were just policemen in funny uniforms. “It would take a long time to explain…”
“I’m a smart guy and I have time until my staff decides that it’s time for me to be briefed,” Langford snapped. He knew how to delegate and he had a good staff who had actually prepared for country-wide emergencies, but there were just too many fires that needed to be put out. “Explain it to me in layman’s terms!”