19
Jake’s aircraft didn‘t want to come unstuck from the runway. With the engines at full power it was accelerating nicely, but the nose wheel remained firmly planted. He tugged experimentally on the stick.
The trim! He had guessed at the takeoff setting. He blipped the trim button on the stick with his thumb and eased the stick back. Now the nose came up. And the mains were off. He was flying. The wings rocked and he overcontrolled with flaperons as he reached for the gear handle.
It wouldn’t move. He pushed it in, then pulled it out. Now it moved. Had to be pulled.
Trimming nose down, airspeed increasing. Gear indicates up. When he felt comfortable he looked for the flap handle, then moved it to the up position. Here they come…
At a thousand feet he retarded the throttles some, lowered the nose a little and dropped the left wing about fifteen degrees. The plane stabilized in a level left turn. No warning lights, no gauges with pegged needles. He hit the switch to segment the hydraulic system.
He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of Rita’s plane.
His aircraft was decelerating. Not enough power. He added a little, readjusted his nose attitude, cursed himself for being so far behind the plane.
His oxygen mask didn’t fit right. It was leaking oxygen around his cheeks, making flatulent noises that he could hear above the background roar of the engines. He tried to tighten the retaining straps with his left hand, and finally gave up.
Another glance at Rita, who was turning with him and closing.
She’s a good stick. Don’t worry about her. Fly your own plane.
When Rita was stabilized behind him and out to the right side, Jake began looking at the ground. The base was small by U.S. standards, the buildings grouped tightly together, probably to keep everything within walking distance. Surrounding it were miles of forests.
There was the telephone line leading off, and there by the road intersection, wasn’t that some kind of junction box mounted on that pole?
He reversed his turn, and when the plane stabilized, reached for the master armament switch. He lifted it. There was no locking collar like U.S. planes possessed. Now the gun switch.
As he turned it on he felt a thud. That would be the gun charging. He hoped. Bombsight on, reticle lit. What had that Russian pilot said? Ten mils deflection for the gun? He twisted the adjustment knob.
Now into a left turn, looking again for the road intersection. It was several miles away off the left wing, slightly behind it, so he turned steeply to get the nose around.
More power in the turn, as the wings come level back off some. This will be a nice slow pass, plenty of time to aim.
He was too fast. Throttles back more, nose down a smidgen and trim.
He concentrated on finding the pole in the bombsight.
Small target. Too goddamn small…
There!
Damn, he was too close. He slewed the nose a tad with rudder, adjusted the nose attitude with stick, then quickly centered the rudder and squeezed the trigger.
The gun vibrated hard and he saw the muzzle flashes through the sight. At night the muzzle blast would be blinding.
Now off the trigger and stick back smartly. With the nose well above the horizon he rolled the plane ninety degrees and looked. Careful, boy, you’re carrying a hell of a load low and slow!
Pole and box down!
Level the wings…raise the nose. More power. Safely away from the ground, let’s turn on course 130.
He craned his neck. Rita was back there, stepped out and up. As he watched she eased in a little closer and gave him a thumbs up.
Okay!
Airborne and still alive. Okay!
The two Su-25s soon left the last of the forest behind and found themselves over the steppe. Jake had descended to about two hundred feet above the rolling terrain, which meant that he was constantly jockeying the stick and adjusting the trim as the plane rose and fell with the land contours. Below them the grass spread from horizon to horizon, broken only by stands of wheat and an occasional dirt road.
This broad valley of the Volga had been peopled since ancient times, yet now the fallout would deny it to future generations. The enormity of the Serdobsk tragedy intruded into Jake’s thoughts even as he worked on holding course and altitude.
Farther south, below the radioactive fallout zone, stood the city of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, the city built in the 1920s and 1930s as a civic monument to the new Communist way of life. In the last half of 1942 it had been the site of the stupendous battle with the German army that marked the turning of the Nazi tide. The battle destroyed Stalin’s city, of course, and nearly everyone in it. When the Red Army counterattacked and trapped the German Sixth Army, Hitler sacrificed over a quarter million men rather than give up that pile of rubble. Stalingrad, that shattered monument to a generation sacrificed in a titanic struggle between two absolute despots, was rebuilt after the war. Soon the radioactive particles and mud carried by the Volga would make the city a deathtrap once again.
He had loved this type of flying when he was younger. Racing low across open country, working the stick and throttles to make the airplane dance gracefully, sinuously, in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the land — this was flying as it ought to be, a harmonious mating of man, machine and nature.
Today the magic of it never occurred to him. He was thinking of shattered dreams and tyrants and a people poisoned as his eyes scanned the terrain ahead and occasionally flicked across the instrument panel. On one of these instrument checks his eye was caught by a light, a small bulb that flicked on, then off, then on again.
He looked carefully, identifying it. He was being painted by a fighter’s radar. Perhaps they had not located him yet, but the fighters were looking.
Damn!
He and Rita were flying two subsonic attack planes, and somewhere up there above the clouds fighters were stalking them. Oh, yes, they’re after us. Jake Grafton assumed the worst. That was the only way to stay alive. Automatically he tugged at the straps that held him to the ejection seat, tightening them still more.
Without warning the warplanes crested a low rise and the great river lay before them, with clouds and swatches of blue sky reflecting on its wide, brown surface.
The planes cleared a power line and then shot out over the water. The sky reflections on the water drew Jake Grafton’s eyes upward. He scanned, and saw contrails…two pairs. In seconds the eastern shore swept under the nose and Jake Grafton eased into a gentle climb to stay just above the rising land.
Contrails in pairs…they could only be made by fighters in formation. Fighters. Looking for…?
This eastern shore of the Volga was heavily eroded into corrugated ravines and streambeds. Jake Grafton picked a decently large creek and dropped into the valley it had cut flowing west toward the river.
He was down here in the weeds hiding from radars that sat on the surface of the earth. These radars would provide vectors to the fighter-interceptors when they found him. If he stayed below their horizon, they couldn’t.
But fighters aloft — the new generation of Soviet fighters possessed pulse Doppler radars that allowed them to look down and identify a moving target amid the ground clutter. And the new missiles would track a target in the ground clutter. “Look-down, shoot-down” the techno-speak guys called it.
The light blinked on and off several more times.
What’s the worst airplane that could be up there? The MiG-29? It was sure deadly enough, but no. The absolute worst plane that he could think of was another masterpiece from the design bureau of Pavel Sukhoi, the Su-27 Flanker. Designed in the mid-1980s to achieve air superiority against the best planes the West possessed, the Su-27 was thought by some Western analysts to be able to outfly the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18, plus every fighter the French, British and Germans have — all of them.