“Bandit at our four o’clock, five miles … four miles,” Yegorov said. “I think he locked on. He’s pursuing. He’s … shit, he’s got a trailer. Bandit Two, three o’clock, twelve miles and closing. I think he—”
“Attention, attention, unknown rider, unknown rider,” they heard on the UHF GUARD channel, the international emergency frequency, “flying north off the Samsun three-five-zero degree radial, one hundred ten miles, this is the Republic of Turkey Air Force, please respond with your call sign, type, and destination, squawk normal and ident.”
“We’re outside his airspace!” Yegorov said. “He can’t bother us, can he? He can’t shoot us down out here! We’re in international airspace!”
“No, but if he gets a look at us and reports us, our cover will be blown,” Stoica replied grimly. Well, if he wants to get a look at us, by all means, let’s oblige him, he thought. “Get the R-60s powered up and ready for launch.”
“Wait a minute, Ion,” Yegorov said. “All we have are internal missiles. We shouldn’t launch them unless it’s an absolute emergency.”
“You want this Turkish prick to get a look at us?” Stoica asked angrily. “Give me the R-60s right now!”
Yegorov reluctantly powered up the weapon systems. They still had all four of their wingroot-launched R-60 heat-seeking missiles ready to go. “Missiles ready … muzzle shutter open. Bandit one is six o’clock, nine miles, bandit two four o’clock, seventeen miles. Give me a target.”
“Here we go.” Stoica pulled the Metyor-179 into a steep climb, went inverted, then rolled out aiming right for the lead F-16. In seconds, they had closed the distance between them. “Locked on!” Yegorov shouted. “Shoot!” He fired two R-60 missiles as soon as they were within range.
It all unfolded in the blink of an eye, so fast that the Turkish flight leader did not notice — the rapid change in altitude, the rapid decrease in relative speed and distance, followed suddenly by an even faster decrease in relative distance and two bright flashes of light. “Missile attack!” he shouted. “Evasive action! We’re under attack!” The flight leader immediately popped decoy chaff and flares — before realizing he didn’t have any chaff or flares — then shoved in full afterburner power, went to ninety degrees left bank, pulled on the control stick until he heard the stall-warning horn, then rolled out and yanked the throttle to idle.
It was a last-ditch defensive effort, hoping against hope that the missile would lock onto the afterburner plume and then lose track completely when he shut off the burner, and the Turkish F-16 flight leader knew it. He knew he was toast long before the R-60 missiles plowed into his tailpipe and exploded, blowing his fighter into a huge cloud of flying metal and flaming jet fuel.
“Control, Control, aman allahim, bombok, Zodyak One has been hit! Zodyak One has been hit by two missiles!” the young pilot aboard Zodyak Two screamed on the command channel. “I do not have a radar lock! I am completely defensive! Do you have radar contact on the bandit?”
“Negative, Zodyak Two, negative!” the ground radar controller responded. “Negative radar contact! Recommend vector heading one-niner-zero, descend to base plus zero, maximum speed. Get out of there now! Cekic flight is inbound, ETA eight minutes, base plus twenty.”
The wingman thought momentarily about avenging his leader: searching the skies with radar and eyeballs and with sheer luck, then finding the pic that had shot his friend and teacher down. But what he did was turn around back toward land and plug in full afterburner power. As much as he wanted to fight, he knew he had nothing but anger with which to do it, and that would do him no good at all.
“He’s turning! He’s bugging out!” Yegorov crowed. “Full afterburner power — running scared at Mach One. So long, great Turkish warrior.” But his celebration was short-lived, because he had fault indicator lights on both missile launch tubes, and they would not clear. The missiles’ rocket motors had obviously damaged the titanium launch tube shutters, leaving them partly open or jammed inside the tubes.
Stoica immediately turned eastbound once again, descending at idle power to keep his heat signature as low as possible and to try to hide in the radar clutter of the Black Sea until they were out of maximum radar detection range. “Don’t laugh too hard, Gennadi,” Stoica said. “That was very nearly us crashing to the Black Sea. Now we have to pray we have enough fuel to make it to base — we could end up at the bottom of the Black Sea if we’re not careful.”
They were very lucky — one engine flamed out shortly after landing, and they barely had enough fuel to taxi off the runway and to the parking ramp before ‘the second engine flamed out. The ground support crews had to frantically get a towbar and tug and pull the Metyor-179 into its hangar before anyone spotted the plane. The fuel. tanks were literally bone-dry.
The attack was a complete success-but neither Stoic nor Yegorov felt like celebrating anything except their own survival.
SEVEN
KFOR Headquarters, Camp Bondsteel,
Pristina, Kosovo
“The situation is unraveling before our eyes, gentlemen,” General Sir Edmund Willoughby, commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Kosovo Force (NATO KFOR), exclaimed. “I have the unfortunate task of advising everyone here this morning that the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia has just declared war on the Republic of Albania, and vice versa.”
The conference theater, once a motion picture screening theater, erupted into a hubbub of shock and anguish. Willoughby was presiding over an early-morning strategy session of all of the KFOR commanders at Camp Bondsteel, the headquarters for all NATO and United Nations peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, set up at a motion picture production studio near Pristina Airport in Kosovo. Also in attendance at Camp Bondsteel was the United Nations Special Envoy of the United Nations Preventative Diplomacy Mission, or UNPREDEP, Ambassador Sune Joelson of Sweden. UNPREDEP was the military-civilian command that had taken over for the United Nations Protection Force in Macedonia in 1995 to try to restore law and order between Albania and Macedonia when border clashes had threatened to escalate to all-out war.
“Have we any information on what touched off this incident?” Oberst (Colonel) Rudolph Messier, the German KFOR commander, asked.
“Nothing,” Willoughby responded. “Eyewitnesses claim that Macedonian artillery units opened fire and destroyed several Albanian observation posts. Macedonia denies this, but claimed that those observation posts were really target spotting units, and they say they intercepted several coded messages broadcast from those posts that they believed were target grid reports.”
“That does not sound like sufficient provocation to open fire,” Colonel Misha Simorov, the Russian KFOR commander who had taken over Colonel Kazakov’s post, said.
“Exactly — and that goes double for Albania,” Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Timothy Greer, the American KFOR commander, interjected. “Over one hundred and sixty confirmed deaths in Struga so far. Albania hit several historical locations, too.”
“I am sure this was a knee-jerk response to the Macedonian attack against Kukes,” Simorov said. “Two to three times as many died there.”