Somehow the follow-up reports never managed to carry the exultation of
air-to-air combat. Or the terror. “Break left, Army!” Taggart called.
“Roger. Left.”
“Watch out, Tombstone!” Dixie called. “Twelve o’clock! We got two
taking us head-to-head!”
Tombstone saw the MiGs streaking toward his plane dead ahead. “Rog! Let
’em come!” In an instant they swelled from specks in the distance to
aircraft flashing past. The combined speeds of MiGs and Tomcat amounted
to better than Mach 2.
One of the strange effects of combat which Tombstone had noted before
was the almost surreal slowing of time. At Mach 2 there was no way for
an aviator to see any detail at all in the other aircraft … yet as he
turned his head to follow the passing MiGs it felt as though he could
count every rivet. He could see the J-7s’ mid-fuselage delta wings,
could see the arrow-slim heads of their Aphid and Atoll missile loads,
could actually see into the cockpits and see two red-helmeted heads with
the black sun visors canted up, looking back at him.
Then they were gone, vanishing into the blue distance behind him.
“Eagle Leader,” he called. He pulled back on the stick and the Tomcat
climbed. “I’m on them. Going for a vertical reverse.”
“You want to let me off at the next stop?” Dixie asked.
“Just keep your eye on those MiGs,” Tombstone replied. The F-14 was
climbing straight up now, but Tombstone kept the afterburners off. The
plane was losing speed. “Where are they?”
“Going into a turn, Tombstone. Range one mile.”
The vertical reverse was the modern equivalent of the stall turn
sometimes employed by fighter pilots in the age of prop planes. The
aircraft climbed straight up, losing speed until it threatened to stall
out completely, then turned toward the ground. The plane’s low speed
made it possible to turn in an extremely tight radius, but there was a
very large risk that the fighter would lose control.
Tombstone brought the Tomcat’s swept-back wings forward and engaged the
flaps. The F-14 bucked, stress vibrating through the hull, but the
airspeed indicator showed less than one hundred and forty knots as he
kicked in the rudder and brought the stick over. For one shuddering
moment, the F-14 fought and bucked, and the stall warning light on his
caution/ advisory panel flashed once.
Then they were arrowing toward the ground once more. Tombstone cut the
flaps and brought the wings back to full sweep, trading altitude for
speed in an all-out dive for the deck. Two miles away, the MiGs were
halfway into their turn, barely visible as a pair of black specks almost
touching one another as they broke left in unison.
He pulled the F-14 out of its dive and hurtled toward the MiGs at almost
five hundred knots. He selected the targeting display for his HUD and
saw the small box symbols appear over the specks as the plane’s computer
identified potential targets. “We’ll go for a Sidewinder launch,” he
told his RIO. He brought the targeting pipper on his HUD across one of
the specks, saw the square flash into a circle with the computer graphic
“M” for missile displayed.
His fingers closed on the firing button, and an AIM-9J Sidewinder slid
clear of its rail. “Fox two!” Tombstone called, warning of a
heat-seeker launch. “Fox two!”
The MiGs held their turn as the all-aspect heat-seeker arrowed toward
the left-hand target. Both J-7s began popping flares, bright orange
pinpoints of light which arced away from their hulls like Roman candles,
trailing smoke.
“Two more bandits,” Dixie warned. “Coming on our six. Range three
miles.”
“Let ’em come.” Tombstone pulled the stick left, turning inside the
MiGs ahead, hoping to line up a shot at the second plane. He saw the
contrail brush the MiG. There was a flash, and the J-7’s wings folded
toward one another, the fuselage disintegrating in white flame.
Secondary explosions ate their way through the burning wreckage as fuel
and munitions exploded.
Burning debris scattered smoking trails into the jungle below.
“Splash one MiG!” Dixie called. “Chalk one for Tombstone!”
Tombstone began lining up for his second shot. The target was weaving
and jinking now, aware that the American was closing fast inside his