Dr. George felt something nudge his foot, and started to kick.
Tai Ling saw the fireball light up the dark waters below, and heard the radio chatter erupt from the two SU-27 pilots down at sea level. Their message was shocked and furious: One of the Americans had just taken an unprovoked missile shot at the PLA helicopter arriving to rescue the person in the water. The helo was down.
If that wasn’t the signal Tai had been waiting for, nothing was.
“Weapons free!” he cried over the tactical circuit, and reached for his own weapons selector switch. “All aircraft, weapons free!”
“Holy shit!” Handyman yelled, a vast expression of emotion for him. “What the hell — ”
Lobo had her back to the helo and Hot Rock, but she heard him signal the firing of a Sidewinder, and simultaneously saw the fiery reflection of an explosion reflecting from the inside of her canopy. Her response came long before thought: She slammed the throttle quadrant full forward, and as the afterburners gave their mule kick, she hauled back hard on the stick. In a heartbeat of time, the Tomcat went from cruise mode into a neck-snapping climb out.
Lobo cranked her head around, searching for the Flanker that had been roofing her. Gasped as it flashed past to the left, showing its belly in a hard bank that had to have been initiated simply to avoid a collision.
“Well,” Handyman drawled, his voice back to normal, “that worked.”
Lobo eased the stick forward an inch, putting the Tomcat into a marginally more relaxed, sustainable angle of climb. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where did he go?”
“Coming up behind us, babe.”
On her radar, Lobo saw the lozenge-shaped return of the Flanker coming around hard on her tail. A moment after that, she heard the warbling signal that indicated she was being painted with fire-control radar.
Radar or not, at this range the bogey was inside missile range; he’d be going to guns. Leaving the stick where it was, Lobo kicked the Tomcat over on one wingtip, rotated over like a gymnast doing a one-handed cartwheel, then dove back toward the deck. At the same time, the white-hot flare of tracers swept past her inboard wing.
The Flanker was right below her, from this angle nothing but a round fuselage, a couple of rectangular air intakes and the blazing flower of its cannon.
“Recommend guns,” Handyman said even as Lobo hit the trigger.
Her tracers ripped beneath the Flanker, a miss of only a few feet — but there was no room for a pull-up to bring the shells on target, not unless she wanted a certain head-on collision.
She jammed the stick forward instead, initiating the start of an inverted loop.
As her head filled with pressurized blood, she held her breath and grunted loudly, holding off unconsciousness as she mentally tracked the Flanker’s likely behavior. He should be rounding out of his vertical climb right about now, gleefully expecting to be right above her, in perfect position for a kill. Lobo snapped the stick to the right, then back, flipping the Tomcat right side up and simultaneously reversing its direction. Now the blood drained out of her head and she was struggling for consciousness against a different enemy. At the same time she found herself staring directly at the boiling patch of water where the helo had gone down… staring as it grew larger and larger, the Tomcat’s weight fighting her attempt to pull out, its engines fighting gravity and momentum, Lobo’s will fighting the same things… fighting…
And then she felt the wings grab air with authority and the surface of the South China Sea was blurring by beneath her.
“You just love this low-altitude shit, don’t you?” Handyman grunted.
“Man, did you ever screw up,” Thor said as he put his Hornet into a tight left turn. His scorn was not directed at the two Flankers left up here to fight him and Reedy; rather, it was aimed at whoever had ordered them to do so. Could anyone really be dipshitty enough to believe that a one-on-one ratio represented good odds for the Chinese pilots?
Not that things started out so hot for him and Reedy. The Flankers were a few thousand feet higher than the Hornets when the shooting started, and immediately came hurtling down, missiles streaking off their wings. That took some fancy flying to get out of. And Thor had to admit that at least some of the grim intel on these new birds was true; big as they were, the Flankers turned like plastic models tugged on a wire.
But Thor and Reedy flew in perfect harmony, using the high-low loose deuce formation, and the damned Chinese were overconfident; when they took the bait and converged on Reedy, Thor swooped over and in, crying “break right!” on his radio. Instantly Reedy’s Hornet showed the Flankers its belly. At the same moment Thor triggered a Sidewinder. Since the Flankers were displaying the most tailpipe, real sex to a Sidewinder, the missile selected the brighter of the two and drove itself home. Thor grinned to see a pillow-shaped eruption of smoke and flame. An ejection seat rocketed out of the mess, which pleased him even more. Personally, he loved to shoot down hardware, not software. “Splash one Flanker!” he cried.
Then he gasped as Reedy’s Hornet dissolved into fire and smoke.
He immediately compartmentalized his fury and did what he’d been trained to do: broke into a hard evasive turn and scanned his radar screen. Instantly, he knew what had happened. The descending Flankers had pulled a fast one. One of them split off from its fellows and returned to the high-altitude battle. The bastard had killed Reedy.
And at the same time, reversed the odds.
Bird Dog didn’t need to hear the radio signals from the Vipers to know that the dogfight had started in earnest. He could see it all over his radar screen as the various blobs and blips began to move in fast, devious directions. And one Marine had been splashed already.
He forced himself to relax. One advantage of coming in from a distance was that he’d already had the time to tag each bogey’s radar image with a targeting marker.
But that didn’t make his fellow aviators any less outnumbered. For a moment he felt unreasoning anger at the admiral and all the other boneheads who’d failed to be prepared for something like this… then he remembered that he was one of those boneheads.
He assessed the situation playing out over his radar screen. One Marine F/A-18s was still up high, tangling with a pair of bogeys. Down low, Lobo and Hot Rock were engaged with two Flankers — and in between, descending fast, were three more Flankers exchanging the high-altitude furball for the lower one. They were going to bounce Lobo and Hot Rock.
Not if Bird Dog Robinson could help it. “Phoenix,” he snapped, setting his weapons control switch accordingly. The Phoenix had the longest range of any missile in the American inventory. The downside was that as a radar-guided weapon, it required a nice steady course from the targeting plane to maintain radar lock. Also, it was rather easy to shake and had therefore earned a mediocre rep for successful kills; still, there was nothing like seeing a one-ton missile coming at you from over the horizon to make you rethink your attack strategy.
But before Bird Dog could hit the trigger, Catwoman said, “Uh, Birdy-boy, you might want to remember how close we are to one of the most populous city in the world.”
Bird Dog started to make a sharp retort, then realized what she was saying: The Phoenix had a range of over one hundred miles, and if it missed its target, it would simply fly until it ran out of fuel… or struck something else. Like a skyscraper. At this angle, that was likely.
“Oh, hell,” Bird Dog said. He considered the range. “Okay, Sparrows.” Although the current distance was at the outer limit for the Sparrow, at least the missile wouldn’t free-fly into Hong Kong if it got dodged.