Trash had beat the medium-range missile, but his maneuvers and his concentration on this threat had allowed the J-10 to get in behind him now. The Marine leveled his wings at eighteen hundred feet, looked around the sky on all sides of his cockpit, and he realized he’d lost sight of his enemy.
“Where’s he at, Cheese?”
“Unknown, Magic Two-Two! I’m defending!”
So Cheese was in a fight for his life himself, Trash now realized. Neither man could help the other; they were both on their own until they either killed their enemy or were joined by the Navy Super Hornets, still several minutes away.
Trash looked at the DDI above his left knee. The small screen showed him the top-down view of all the aircraft in the area. He saw Cheese to his north, and far to the south he saw the two ROC F-16s.
He looked as far back over his left shoulder as he could, and now he saw the black silhouette of an aircraft bearing down on him at his seven-o’clock high, some two miles distant. The aircraft was far to the left of his HUD but he could still target it via his Jay-Macks visor.
The J-10 turned in on Trash’s six o’clock, and Trash banked hard to the left, shoved his throttle forward, and dove toward the deck to pick up more speed, all to keep the enemy pilot from getting behind him.
But the J-10 anticipated Trash’s move and worked his way to the Marine’s six, and closed to within a mile and a half.
The Chinese pilot fired his twin-barreled 23-millimeter cannon. Glowing tracer rounds passed within a few feet of Trash’s canopy as he reversed his turn to the right and dropped down even lower. The rounds looked like long laser beams, and Trash watched them turn the blue-green water into geysers of foam ahead of him.
Trash juked hard to the left and right, but he kept his nose flat now; he was only five hundred feet above the water, so he could not dive, and he did not want to lose airspeed by pulling up. In the cool jargon of combat aviation this was referred to as “guns-d” or “guns defensive,” but Trash and his fellow pilots called it “the funky chicken.” It was a desperate, ugly dance to stay out of the line of fire. Trash jacked his head up left and right as far as he could, straining his neck muscles to keep his enemy in sight behind him while he banked and yawed all over the sky. He caught a glimpse of the J-10 banking to follow his last evasive move, and Trash knew the Chinese pilot was almost in place for another shot.
After another burst of cannon rounds went high, the Marine saw in the small mirror on the canopy next to the towel rack that the Super 10 had closed to under one mile, and he was perfectly lined up to take Trash out with his next volley.
Trash did not hesitate; he had to act. He “got skinny” by turning his aircraft to show the smallest dimension, the side, and as the J-10 closed range, Trash pulled his nose up. His body was shoved down farther, both forward against the straps and deep into his seat. His lumbar spine ached from the maneuver, and his eyes lost focus as they bulged in their sockets.
His last-ditch maneuver had increased the closure on the enemy fighter, not by slowing but by simply turning perpendicular to his line of flight at the perfect moment. He grunted and clenched his teeth, and then looked straight up through his canopy’s glass.
The J-10B had been concentrating on his cannon, and he had not reacted to the maneuver in time. He shot past, just one hundred feet above Trash’s Hornet.
The Chinese pilot was clearly doing his best to bleed off all his excess speed and to stay in the control zone, but even with his speed brakes on and his throttle back to idle he could not match Trash’s deceleration.
As soon as the shadow of the Chinese fighter passed over Trash’s aircraft, the American tried to pull into the control zone behind his enemy for a guns solution, but his enemy was good, and he knew better than to make himself an easy target. The J-10 got its nose up and its engine generating thrust once again, and he came off his speed brakes and went vertical.
Trash overshot his target low and instantly found himself in danger. To avoid having the J-10 get behind him, Trash shoved the throttle forward, past the detent and into afterburners, and his F/A-18 reared back like a mustang and launched toward the sun on two pillars of fire.
Trash accelerated upward, gradually getting his nose up to seventy degrees, passing three thousand feet, four thousand, five thousand. He saw the J-10 above him in the sky, saw the enemy’s wingtips turning as the pilot tried to find the American plane somewhere below him.
Trash reached ninety degrees of pitch — pure vertical — and shot upward at a speed of forty-five thousand feet a minute.
In sixty seconds, he could be nine miles above the water.
But Trash knew good and well he did not have sixty seconds. The J-10 was up here with him, and the enemy pilot was likely slamming his head all over his cockpit trying to find where the hell in the sky the Hornet had run off to.
At ten thousand feet Captain White brought the throttle out of afterburner and tipped the nose of his jet over. He could tell that the enemy pilot still did not see him, a few thousand feet below and behind. The Chinese pilot rolled inverted and turned back toward the water.
Like a loop on a roller coaster, Trash rocketed in the direction of his enemy; in seconds he saw the Super 10 passing through a cloud below him. The pilot was using a split-S maneuver, trying to turn back toward the F/A-18 with a high-speed nose-low turn.
Trash thumbed a small trackball-like input on his flight stick and switched to his cannon. As soon as the aiming pipper appeared on his HUD, the J-10 descended right into it, just eight hundred yards away.
Trash fired one long and then two short bursts from his six-barreled Vulcan 20-millimeter cannon.
His long burst passed well in front of the Super 10; his second spray of cannon fire was closer but still ahead of the jet.
His last short burst, just a fraction of a second, nailed the enemy jet on the starboard wing. Bits of smoking aircraft broke free. The Chinese pilot broke hard to the right. Trash mimicked the maneuver just six hundred feet away, rolling toward dark smoke.
The Chinese plane dove for the water, and Trash fought to line up the pipper for another gun shot, “hooked” with the hard-jerking g-forces he put on the plane to position himself behind.
In front of him a flash moved his focus from his pipper to his target. Flame poured from the wing and the engine, and almost instantly he knew the plane in front of him was about to die.
The rear of the J-10B exploded and the doomed aircraft spun hard to the right, corkscrewing toward the sea below.
Trash broke off the attack, banked hard to the left to avoid the fireball, and then struggled to level his wings up above the water. He had no time to look for a chute from the pilot.
“That’s a kill. Splash one. Pos, Cheese?” “Pos” was a request for the other jet’s position.
Before his flight leader responded, Trash looked down at his DDI and saw he was heading toward Cheese. He looked up through several small clouds and saw the glint of sun off gray metal, as Magic Two-One, Cheese’s aircraft, shot from right to left.
Cheese’s voice came over the radio. “Defensive. He’s on my six, about two miles back. He’s got me locked. Get him off me, Trash!”
Trash’s eyes tracked quickly back to the north and saw the surviving Super 10 just as he launched a missile at Cheese’s jet exhaust.
“Break right, Two-One! Missile in the air!”
Trash did not watch the missile, nor did he look back over at Cheese. Instead he switched his weapons to select a Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missile. Trash had a “tally” on the Chinese Super 10, meaning that he could see him through his helmet-mounted sight.