him, surprised to see the pilot descending. Would he actually do
that?
Enter a horizontal battlefield, knowing that it would put him at a
disadvantage?
Well, he’d seen the pilot make one mistake. Perhaps it had been a
mistake, and not a calculated chance. At any rate, this was the battle
that a MiG excelled at. And if it was a mistake, it would be his
adversary’s last.
0727 Local (+5 GMT) Tomcat 202
“Stoney,” Tomboy gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”
“The only thing I have time to do before we run out of fuel,” Tombstone
said grimly. “Start the pre ejection checklist. If this doesn’t work,
we’re going for a swim.”
0728 Local (+5 GMT) Fulcrum 101
The Tomcat was indeed descending to his level. Santana smirked. It
was as he’d thought Americans were not nearly as well trained and
proficient as they pretended to the rest of the world to be. Here, in
the sky, mono a mono, there was no disguising their foolishness. He
swung the MiG around, calculated the intercept, and bore in for the
kill. In the last twenty minutes, he’d discovered a real taste for
knife fights.
0739 Local (+5 GMT) Tomcat 202
“I see what you’re up to, buddy,” Tombstone said. “It worked on that
youngster you splashed, but I’ve been around guys like you too often.
Your kind always does like the close-in fight. That’s because you
treat those funny little things hanging on your wings like your balls,
protecting them and not using them like you should. Well, if you want
to learn some knife fighting, I’m not above teaching it to you.” He
watched the MiG bore on in until he was almost within range. The Cuban
pilot would be running the geometry through his mind, calculating the
exact intercept.
To encourage him to continue thinking the American had made a
mistake.
Tombstone toggled off another Sidewinder.
He knew it was well inside the minimum range for shooting one, but he
hoped the Cuban would think he didn’t.
It seemed to work. The Cuban MiG didn’t even flinch from its course,
continuing to bore on in toward him.
Tombstone felt his eyes go squinty and a muscle in the side of his jaw
start to jump. One more kill, one last kill that would be it.
Just as the vectors approached range and optimum angle for firing.
Tombstone did three things simultaneously. First, he swept the wings
of the Tomcat forward, overriding the automatic angle configuration
that selected appropriate sweep angle for speed. Moving the wings
forward decreased his lift, rendering the Tomcat slightly more ungainly
in the air, but from this angle was also an almost imperceptible way of
draining off airspeed without the other pilot’s noticing. Second, in
one quick motion, he popped the speed brakes and dropped his landing
gear. Dirtying up all of his airflow surfaces peeled one hundred knots
off his airspeed almost instantaneously. Instead of a graceful,
powerful fighter, the Tomcat was now a lumbering aircraft configured
for landing.
An ugly turkey in the air with a MiG right in its sights.
Third, Tombstone switched the selector over to guns, pressed the
buttons, and heard the delicate beelike hum of the gun in his port wing
firing. It was almost anticlimactic at first, watching the delicate
line of bullets trace their way down the fuselage. He jinked the
Tomcat slightly to the right, watching the tracery elevate up and
penetrate the other aircraft’s canopy. An explosion of glass and body,
followed shortly by a fireball.
“Fuel,” Tomboy insisted, for all the world sounding as though she’d
completely ignored the knife fight going on in front of her. “Stoney,
vector three-two-zero. Now!”
Tombstone did as ordered, then said, “No comment?
Aren’t you going to congratulate me on that last kill?”
“If it is your last kill, you idiot,” she snapped. “The next one will
be us if you don’t get some fuel into this bird.”
The tanker was waiting only one mile away. Tombstone vectored straight
in on it, and pulled off the most remarkable plug of his entire
aviation career. The probe slid in smoothly, as if the basket had been
coated in Vaseline. Two other fighters hung nervously off his port and