He held the F-14 in its starboard turn until it was again headed for the Jefferson.
0908 hours, 26 March IAF Jaguar 102
The threat warning sounded in his helmet, and an orange light flashed urgently on his console. Colonel Singh’s Jaguar had been targeted by an enemy missile. Death was on the way.
Singh searched the horizon ahead, then looked up in the sky. He’d been expecting his target to launch. The enemy’s computers would be set to trigger SAM fire as soon as a target approached widiin certain parameters of speed and altitude. There … a white contrail, arcing sharply down from the zenith. That would be the missile intended for him.
Still calm, the Indian pilot waited, watching the missile’s descent. At the last possible moment, he fired the Jaguar’s chaff dispenser, then rammed the throttle into full afterburner. The Jaguar, already traveling at Mach .9, slammed through the sonic barrier, the shock wave raising spray in a straight line across die ocean’s surface.
The American SAM fell. . . .
Decoyed by the expanding cloud of chaff, the ..missile smacked into the sea fifty meters behind Singh’s aircraft. He
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icr felt nor heard the blast. At the Jaguar’s maximum ^-altitude speed of Mach 1.1, he flashed across the sea yard his target, a ship visible now as a tiny black silhouette the horizon.
He’d studied that shape in recognition manuals often igh, the sharp-prowed hull, the twin, blunt towers housing vessel’s sophisticated radar and electronics. . . . vf; He pressed the missile release and felt the jolt as the Martel )ped from the Jaguar’s belly. Unarmed now save for a pc AAM mounted above each wingtip, Singh brought his ft up and banked toward the east.
i hours, 26 March 216
**Bandit! Bandit!” Malibu called. “Four o’clock, on the deck! ;’s launched!” Batman saw the Jaguar, a tiny, toy-plane shape just above
Vicksburg, now some twelve miles to the south. “What are gonna do?” Malibu asked. “Call Vicksburg!” Batman snapped. He pushed the stick
and dropped the F-14’s nose. “Warn them!” ‘Oh my God, you are going to ram!” .Batman didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer as he tried to line with the speeding missile. He could hear Malibu in the it, fiercely chanting a litany of warning. “Vicksburg, iburg, this is Tomcat Two-one-six. Emergency! Missile ;h! Launch!”
i hours, 26 March 102
banked right, angling toward the other Indian aircraft were already beginning to straggle back toward the north their home bases. As he glanced back over his shoulder in ^reflexive check of the sky around him, though, he saw the stinctive nose-on silhouette of a Tomcat plunging toward
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With no way of knowing dial the American carried neither missiles nor ammunition, he turned left, toward the east
To the east, however, lay the Jefferson, thirty kilometers from the Vicksburg and battling for her life against die Indian planes that continued to attack her at close quarters. Another ten kilometers to the northeast, the gukled-missik destroyer Lawrence Kearny was adding her firepower to that of die Jefferson, swatting down Indian planes as quickly as her weapons and Vicksburg’& Aegis controllers could identify diem.
Seconds after be was into the turn he saw mat he was not going to make it The silhouette of the Jefferson, looming huge on the horizon beneath the ghostly white traceries of Sea Sparrow contrails, was unmistakable. Singfa held his turn, angling toward die northeast as he pushed for more altitude. At better man Mach 1, his turn radius was impossibly large. He passed the Jefferson less man a mile off her bow.
Jefferson’s starboard-side forward Sparrow launcher swung about and fired, and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow slashed from its container in a shower of packaging fragments mingled with white smoke. The SARH-guided missile streaked skyward at Mach 3, slamming into the Jaguar’s tail two seconds later. Ninety pounds of high explosives detonated in a searing flash, igniting the Jaguar’s fuel in a blazing fireball.
A pair of Standard antiair missiles fired from the Kearny flashed into the expanding cloud of debris seconds later, adding their detonations to die fury. Very little recognizable as any part of an aircraft reached the water’s surface.