system. Even with his eyes closed he could see the red reflecting
through his eyelids.
“Missile off the rail,” Gator said. “Looking good, looking
good flares. Bird dog. He’s got flares. Your eyes ” The warning came
too late. The lead MiG shot off three flares from an undercarriage
slot and the white phosphorous orbs shattered the darkness. Bird Dog
swore as his pupils contracted down “to pinpoints in reaction to it,
effectively destroying his night vision.
The only consolation was that the MiG pilots would have been as blinded
by the flares as he was.
0900 Local (+5 GMT) MiG 101
Santana was concentrating on the radar picture and barely felt the
flares shoot out from the undercarriage. The MiG-29, while a superbly
engineered aircraft, had one major fault: It was a one-man operation.
In a high-threat environment with this many adversary aircraft inbound,
he would have preferred to have an extra set of eyes in the backseat to
keep watch on the other side. It was always a danger in a
single-seater aircraft, losing sight of the big picture. He
concentrated on the scope, his own source of data now that the Willie
Pete shots had ruined his night vision, and vectored in.
Which one of those mongrels had had the audacity to fire on him?
There that was the one. He marked the radar symbol with a target
designation. As often as he’d trained for ACM in practice. Colonel
Santana had never actually faced hostile air. It was one thing to take
on a small private aircraft mano a mano. No challenge, that like
shooting ducks in a barrel, as the Americans said. He’d practiced this
often enough that he felt comfortable with the tactics and fire
doctrine, but there was still something intangibly different about the
actual event. In practice, one could always call a time-out, pause and
regroup, review one’s mistakes, and, most important, brag about one’s
exploits afterward with the victim. Here, it was different.
The sudden, cold realization shook him. The air was no longer a
friendly playground, something he’d earned the right to by virtue of
his training, intelligence, and experience. It was a killing ground,
and losing this battle meant more than having to put up with obnoxious
bragging by the other side afterward.
And that aircraft, the one with the brilliant glowing red circle around
it, was the one that had had the audacity to shoot at him. He felt a
sense of relief, an easing of fear, as the threat to his existence
became identifiable, distinct. No longer was it Death flying in the
air around him, it was a single aircraft with a single pilot and a RIO
behind him, he realized that threatened his existence. The odd
conviction that if he could kill that one aircraft he would be safe
overtook him. It made no sense, yet there it was.
Around him, he heard the rest of the flight calling out excitedly, each
man claiming a particular target as his own.
The designation popped up on his screen as the other pilots did as he
did, made the enemy personal and singular instead of massive and
unreal.
Before, it had been a matter of tactics. Now, it was personal. And
someone would pay for that.
0510 Local (+5 GMT) Tomcat 201
“Asshole’s after us,” Bird Dog snarled. The MiG he’d shot at had
turned and was headed directly toward him. With a closure rate of one
thousand knots, it would be mere seconds before he would be within
knife-fighting range of the other aircraft. Bird Dog had an advantage,
though from what he could see, he had at least two thousand feet of
altitude on the adversary. Altitude was safety, a fungible commodity
in the air that he could trade for speed, for safety, or for any one of
a number of critical flying factors.
He watched the MiG approaching, carefully calculating the angle between
them. It would be a lead-lag situation in moments, particularly if the
other pilot was not smart enough to avoid it. He wondered fleetingly
how well the other pilots were trained. Not very, probably not if the
Soviets had had a hand in it. If the other pilot misjudged the