CARRIER 3: ARMAGEDDON MODE

beyond the reach of the line of glowing tracers arcing past his

wing.

“Damn,” Tombstone muttered, “This guy can fly!”

The MiG-29 danced away, its pilot using his aircraft’s

superb maneuverability to best advantage. Tombstone cut back

hard on his throttles as he tried to follow, putting the Tomcat

into a hard, skidding turn to the right. He could see before he was halfway into the turn that the

MiG was outperforming him, circling inside the best turn

radius he could manage. Unwilling to finish the maneuver on

ARMAGEDDON MODE

247

the other guy’s terms, Tombstone punched in the throttles and .pulled the stick hard left, slamming the F-14 into a split-S that carried him past the MiG’s tail and off in the other direction. • “What’s … he … doing . . . ?” He had to force each word out explosively through clenched teeth. The G-readout hit seven Gs. He felt his head growing fuzzy, saw blackness closing in at the periphery of his vision.

“Lost . . . uhl Lost him!” Hitman replied.

The compass reading swung around until Tombstone knew he was heading back toward where his opponent had vanished daring the last pass. Damn it, were was he?

“On our six!” Hitman warned as Tombstone broke out of ihe turn. “Coming fast!”

Tombstone pulled up, twisting the F-14 into a short, fast-sjpinning Immelmann designed to bring him over the other gtfane and down on his tail. Looking “up” through his canopy as ne went over the top, Tombstone caught a glimpse of the Other plane between him and the ocean, already going into a break to counter the maneuver.

Another target loomed ahead as Tombstone righted the Iplane, a wingtip-to-wingtip pair of Jaguars, steady on course toward the southwest.

The Fulcrum pilot was one of the best Tombstone had ever gone up against With so many bandits coming through the line, he was better off not wasting time jousting with the Fulcrum driver.

So he dropped on the Jaguars from behind and above, lining up die left-hand aircraft before he’d completed the rollout, squeezing off a burst from his cannon at a range of less than five hundred yards. It was a snap shot from a difficult angle, but he saw pieces flaking from the target plane as he dropped through its slipstream.

Then the Jaguars were behind him. More aircraft were scattered across the sky ahead and he dropped into position behind yet another strike plane, an ancient BAC Canberra. Lining up on the junction of the broad, almost triangular unswept wings, he opened fire from eight hundred yards and watched as his stream of tracer rounds drifted into the Indian bomber. The port engine began smoking, and the Canberra’s wing dropped sharply. The aircraft slipped into a steeply falling

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turn, its engine ablaze. Three parachutes appeared in the falling bomber’s wake.

“Hey! Just like fish in a barrel, Tombstone,” Hitman said.

Tombstone didn’t answer. Canberras had been hailed as a match for any fighter in the air when they’d first made their appearance with the RAF in 1951, but they were virtually helpless in a match with a modem F-14.

But there was no other way. The Indian attack planes were breaking through toward the American ships.

0852 hours, 26 March Tomcat 204

Coyote had launched all four of his Sparrows within the first few minutes of the approach. Now he was switching to Sidewinders as a pair of Indian interceptors streaked toward him from the north. From two black specks in the sky, side by side, they grew with astonishing swiftness into sleek, delta-winged jets that flashed past his F-14 to port at a range of less than half a mile. In the instant’s glimpse he had, he recognized them: Dassault-Breguet Mirage-2000Hs, a French design, though these particular aircraft were probably built in India under license. They were excellent aircraft, capable of bettering Mach 2 and mounting Magic AAMs for close-in fighting.

“Tally-ho!” he called over the tactical frequency. “Two Mirage two-triple-ohs. Two-oh-four is on them!”

“Roger, Two-oh-four,” the Hawkeye controller said. “Stay on the strikers, over.”

Stay on the strikers. The 2000H was an interceptor, a jet designed to kill jets. The people watching this fight from the bird farm would be concerned about strike aircraft, planes carrying anti-ship missiles and bombs. Obviously, it was better to shoot down a plane carrying several Exocets before it had a chance to release its payload , . . and complicate the electronic musings of Jefferson’s point defense system.

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