Inside his headset he heard a loud electronic buzz indicating that his Sidewinder was searching for a suitable heat signature.
The buzz changed to the high-pitched lock tone as the J-10 passed by just three miles off Trash’s nose, indicating the AIM-9’s infrared homing system had found the hot engine of the Chinese aircraft and was tracking it.
Trash pressed the air-to-air launch button on his stick and fired the AIM-9 Sidewinder. It streaked away on a trail of smoke and homed in on the Super 10.
The missile was fire and forget, so Trash turned to the left to position himself behind the enemy fighter if the Sidewinder missed.
Quickly he found Cheese in the sky. Trash’s flight leader was banking hard to the south; behind him his automatic flares deployed out of both sides of his aircraft and arced to the earth.
The Chinese missile dove into the hot flares and exploded.
Trash looked back to his target and saw the J-10 launch his own flares as he banked hard to the left. “Get him, get him, get him,” Trash said aloud, urging his missile toward the flaming engine of the Chinese aircraft. But the Sidewinder was duped by the flares fired by the Super 10.
“Shit!”
Trash switched back to guns, but before he could get his pipper on his target, the enemy jet dove for the deck.
Trash followed him down, hoping to get behind him for another kill.
In his headset he heard, “Magic Two-One is engaging bandits approaching from the north. Fox three.”
Trash had not even had time to check what happened to the four other approaching aircraft, but clearly Cheese was firing radar-guided missiles at them from a distance.
“Cheese, I’m engaged, pushing this guy to the deck.”
“Roger, Trash, Navy Super Hornets two minutes out.”
Trash nodded, then focused intently on his enemy, the Chinese pilot and his aircraft.
“Fox three!” said Cheese as he fired another AIM-120 AMRAAM at the bandits approaching from the north.
Trash and the Super 10 he had engaged spent the next sixty seconds in a tight, wild chase, each pilot jockeying to get in position to fire on the other while, at the same time, doing everything in his power to prevent his enemy from getting position on him.
This was known, in the lexicon of air-to-air combat, as a “phone booth.” It was a small area to operate in, and getting smaller with the corrections both pilots made to jockey for advantage in the air.
Trash felt the bone-crushing pressure of high positive-g turns and the eye-popping, nausea-inducing dives of negative g’s.
A minute into the dogfight White slammed the stick to the right, following the enemy’s high-g turn above the water. Trash got his nose inside the turn slightly, but the PLAAF man reversed course suddenly and removed Trash’s advantage.
The sheer number of inputs entering Trash’s brain was unimaginable. His aircraft moved on three axes as he tried to remain in an offensive position against another aircraft moving on three axes. His mouth delivered information to his flight lead and the Hawkeye as he tracked the targets and the deck below, and both of his hands moved left, right, backward, and forward as his fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons on his throttle and stick. He read a dozen different readouts on his constantly moving HUD, and he occasionally brought his focus inside the cockpit to give quick glances to his navigational display to see where he and his lead were in relation to the centerline over the strait.
Sweat poured down the back of his neck and the muscles in his jaw quivered and spasmed from the tension of the moment.
“Can’t get a bite on him!” Trash announced into his mic.
“I’m engaged, Magic Two-Two. He’s yours.”
Cheese had fired a third missile at the inbound fighters, which he had determined to be Russian-built Su-33s. One of the three AMRAAMs hit its target, and Cheese announced, “Splash two.”
The PLAAF fighter banked left and right, spun upside down, and performed a high reverse-g maneuver that Trash replicated, causing his eyes to bulge and his head to fill with blood.
He tightened his core muscles, his abs and low back turned to rocks, and he “hooked” over and over.
He forced himself to lessen his turn angle, helping his body but causing him to lose his position behind the enemy.
“Don’t lose sight. Don’t lose sight,” he told himself as he tracked the J-10 through white puffy clouds.
The other pilot kept the bank going, however, and Trash craned his neck all the way behind him, then spun it back to check the mirrors high on the canopy.
The other jet was getting in behind him for a kill shot. Trash had lost his offensive advantage.
Not good.
The Chengdu J-10 pilot did make his way behind Trash and fired a short-range PL-9 missile at his tail, but Trash managed to defeat it with his automatic flare deployment and a seven-point-five-g bank that nearly knocked him out cold.
He needed his speed, but it was bleeding off on the turn. “Don’t bleed it! Don’t bleed it!” he shouted to himself between grunting through the g-forces.
The two planes were corkscrewing down through the sky. Seven thousand feet, six thousand, five thousand.
At just three thousand feet Trash reversed direction quickly, pulled himself into an eight-g turn, and switched to guns.
The Chinese aircraft did not recognize what happened, and he kept his downward spiral going for critical seconds while Trash prepared to meet him head-on.
Trash saw the Super 10 at one mile, and he used his rudders to line up for a gun shot. He slammed his feet down, left and right, all the way to the firewall to make the necessary corrections in the very short time he had before the Super 10 passed.
There. At two thousand feet separation and a closing speed of more than one thousand miles per hour, Trash slammed his right index finger down on the trigger on his stick.
A long burst of tracers from his Vulcan cannon reached out from the nose of his aircraft. He used the laserlike light to guide him toward the enemy.
At five hundred feet the Super 10 burst into a fireball. Trash disengaged, pulled up on the stick violently with a hook to avoid an air-to-air collision or an FOD flameout, because foreign-object damage from the explosion could easily get sucked into his plane and destroy one or both engines.
Once he was clear, he confirmed the kill by going inverted and looking up in the canopy.
Below him the J-10 was nothing but small pieces of black wreckage and burning, smoking debris, all falling toward the water. The pilot would be dead, but Trash’s elation at having survived trumped any sympathy he could possibly feel in this moment.
“Splash three,” he said.
The Super Hornets arrived in time and committed on the three remaining Su-33s attacking from over the centerline, but Magic Flight was not finished. To their south, one of the two Taiwanese Air Force jets under attack by the other pair of J-10s had already disappeared from radar.
Cheese said, “Magic Two-Two, heading two-four-zero, combat spread. Let’s help out that surviving ROC F-16 before it’s too late.”
“Roger that.”
Trash and Cheese raced to the southwest while the Navy Super Hornets chased the Su-33s back over the centerline and back to the Chinese coast.
A moment later, Trash got a radar lock on the J-10s, still forty miles away. He immediately fired an AMRAAM missile.
“Fox three.”
He doubted his missile would hit the Chinese fighter. The pilot of the enemy aircraft would have a hell of a lot of defensive tricks up his sleeve that he could deploy easily with such a distance between them, but he wanted to give the attacker something to focus on other than killing the Taiwanese F-16.
His AMRAAM might not knock the Chinese jet out of the sky, but it would screw with the pilot’s attack.