"We got four, heading our way from the East." The operator looked at the screen again. "Probably those tricked-up Flankers." He studied the radar signature analysis. "Yeah, four Flankers incoming."
"Are they after us or Eagle Flight?" Sharp demanded.
"They’re heading into the area Eagle Flight is going for. Uh oh!" The operator spoke quickly into his mike. "The Soviets just lit up their air intercept radars."
"Are they after our guys?"
The operator studied the screen intently. "They’re headed in that direction. No, wait a minute. I don’t think so. They seem to be after the same targets we are. The IL-76 must have picked them up just after we did."
Ozzie Sharp scowled mightily at the screen. All of a sudden the air over that God-forsaken patch of ocean was getting awfully crowded.
"Smitty, check your ten," Gilligan called to his wingman. "Do you see that?"
Off to their left and slightly below them, something dark was threading its way through a canyon between two banks of clouds.
"What the hell is it?" Smitty demanded a few seconds later.
"I don’t know. I don’t think it’s doing a hundred knots and it keeps ducking in and out of those clouds."
Gilligan touch-keyed his mike to transmit the report, but there was silence in the earphones.
He tried again. Still nothing. He switched radios. Nothing. He tried different frequencies, he checked the circuit breakers, he ran the radio checklist. Still nothing. He could get Smitty but that was all. Meanwhile the thing appeared out of another cloud.
"Smitty, can you raise anyone?"
"Negative, sir."
Gilligan considered for a minute. Whatever this jamming was it apparently wasn’t strong enough to block him from talking to his wingman, but there was no way to reach anyone else. It had been made crystal clear to him that one way or another the information he collected had to get back.
"Smitty, have you been getting this on tape?"
"Yessir."
"Then make sure you’ve got a good image and then split off. I’m going in for a closer look."
"The hell you say!"
"As soon as you’re sure you’ve got a good image, split off and get the hell out of here. That information has got to get back."
There was a long crackling silence on the radio.
"Am I supposed to say ’yes sir’?" Smitty said finally.
"You’re supposed to get that damn information back. Anything else is up to you. Now, have you got it?"
"On the tape."
"Then go. Remember. No matter what happens to me, you’ve got to get that data home."
Gilligan watched as his wingman broke off. Since his first day in flight school he had been drilled that a fighter never, ever, flies alone. Suddenly it was awfully lonely.
Well, the sooner I do this, the sooner it will be over. Reaching down, he activated his camera. Then just to be on the safe side he armed the two Sidewinders hanging under the fuselage. He left the Sparrows unarmed. That thing might have a fuzzbuster tuned to the targeting radar’s frequencies and he didn’t want to fight unless he absolutely had to. Finally he checked the status of his 20mm cannon.
One good pass, Gilligan told himself. One pass so close I can see the color of their eyes.
It was the sound that first alerted Patrol Two. The hissing roar that sliced through the eerie silence of the fog banks. The dragon rider had only a brief glimpse of something moving up behind and to the left. Something very, very fast and headed straight at them.
To a dragon rider that meant only one thing: Dragon attack! No time to turn into it and fight fire with fire. Patrol Two grabbed an iron seeker arrow out of the quiver and brought the bow up with the other hand. Twisting around in the saddle even as the arrow fitted into the bow and not waiting for the seeker to get a lock, Patrol Two got off one shot. Then the rider pressed flat against the beast’s back and yanked the reins to throw the dragon into violent evasive maneuvers. The dragon, unsettled by the roaring monster, responded enthusiastically and dropped into a writhing, spiraling dive into the fog.
The arrow’s spell wasn’t capable of making fine distinctions. It had been launched at a moving target and that was sufficient. The arrow flew straight to its mark and hit the plane’s right wing about halfway out toward the tip.
As soon as the point penetrated the thin aluminum skin the arrow’s death spell activated. It didn’t know it was trying to kill an inanimate object and it was as incapable of caring as it was of knowing.
Like most things magic, the spell didn’t work perfectly in this strange halfway world, but it worked well enough.
"What the fuck?" Mick Gilligan yelled, but there was no one to hear. His radios, like every other piece of electronic equipment in his Eagle had gone stone dead.
Unlike the F-16, an F-15 does not have to be flown by computers every second it is in the air. But everything from the fuel flow to the trim tabs is normally controlled by electronic devices.
As a result Major Mick Gilligan didn’t fall out of the sky instantly. But everything on the plane started going slowly and inexorably to hell.
One of the things that went was the automatic fuel control system. Normally the F-15 draws a few gallons at a time from each tank in the plane to keep everything in trim. When the electronics died, Major Gilligan’s plane was drawing from the outboard left wing tank. Rather than switching, it kept draining that tank, lightening the wing and putting the plane progressively more out of trim.
Gilligan didn’t notice. He was too busy dealing with the engines. Losing the electronics meant they were no longer automatically synchronized. Almost immediately the right engine was putting out more power than the left. By the time Gilligan had taken stock of the situation, the exhaust gas temperature on the right engine was climbing dangerously and the left engine was going into compressor stall.
He didn’t waste time cursing. He put both hands on the throttles and started jockeying the levers individually, trying to get more power out of his left engine and cut back the right before the temperature became critical.
It wasn’t easy. Without the electronic controls the throttles were sluggish and the engines unresponsive. Gilligan was like a man trying to take a shower when the hot water is boiling and the cold water is freezing. It’s painful and it takes a lot of fiddling to get things right. Gilligan was fiddling furiously.
Gilligan looked up and saw the windshield was opaque with dew. The windshield wipers had quit working along with everything else. He also saw by the ball indicator that the plane was banking right and descending. Instinctively he corrected and put the throttles forward to add power and get away from the water. The engines seemed to hesitate and then they caught with a burst of acceleration that pressed Gilligan back into his seat.
It almost worked. In fact it would have worked if Gilligan hadn’t forgotten one other automatic system. When the power came on, the Eagle’s nose came up. Too far up. The Boundary Layer Control System that is supposed to keep the F-15 from stalling at high angles of attack was also dead. The nose went up and then back down as the Eagle stalled and plummeted toward the ocean.