mysterious bogies of group Bravo were still on course, crossing the line from
land to sea now as they continued to home on the American carrier.
He was going to have to do some hard flying to make good on their mistake
now.
“Hey, I don’t think the man sounds too pleased with us, Coyote,” John-Boy
said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have broken off, huh?”
“Can it,” Coyote snapped savagely. He opened the radio link to the
Jefferson. “Camelot, Icewall. Pursuing contact Bravo. Stand by.”
“Roger, Icewall. Be advised that Alert Five aircraft, call sign
Backstop, are airborne and on intercept course with Bravo.”
Climbing on flaring afterburners, Coyote took the Tomcat higher, hurtling
west. It was difficult to maintain a fix on the targets. Three of them
appeared to be fairly solid returns, like fighters … but the fourth was
different, difficult to interpret on his screen.
And fast. Those aircraft were really traveling, hitting Mach 2.
Coyote was worried about their velocity. He’d been assuming that his
targets were Backfire bombers, big Tu-22Ms able to hit Mach 1.8 at this
altitude.
He felt an unpleasant crawling sensation pricking at his spine and the
back of his neck. This was something new.
Burning fuel at a prodigious rate, Coyote climbed to twenty-eight
thousand feet, pushing Mach 2.3. Fortunately, he was well south of the
targets’ line of flight, which meant that he wasn’t in a stern chase. He was
able to lead the enemy aircraft and rapidly close the gap. Dun mountains and
green forest flashed astern of the Tomcat, replaced by the ragged white of
surf, then by the impossibly intense azure of the sea.
“Feet wet,” he called. “John-Boy! Can you get a lock yet?”
“I’m … I’m trying, Coyote. They don’t read as being very large. Damn!
I keep losing them. ECM …”
“ECM won’t stop Sidewinders,” Coyote growled. “Or a 20-mm cannon. Let’s
close to knife-fighting range with these bastards and see what they are.”
The range narrowed, mile by mile, John-Boy ticking off the distance.
Coyote strained his eyes, scanning the horizon ahead and below. They ought to
be visible.
He saw them first on the television display of his Tomcat’s TXX-1
Television Camera Set, a system tied into a telephoto lens mounted in a
blister beneath the F-14’s nose. By locking the TCS into the radar data, he
could acquire the enemy aircraft visually before they were in eyeball range.
There were four of them, specks swelling steadily on the TV display. In
seconds, he could see them with his naked eyes. As he’d suspected, three were
fighters, Fulcrums already breaking away from their larger consort as they
swung to face him.
But Coyote had eyes only for the aircraft that the Fulcrums were
escorting. It looked like nothing so much as an enormous, dull-gray
arrowhead, sharp-nosed, sharp-tailed, with slender, backswept wings.
Comparing its size to the Fulcrums, Coyote estimated the aircraft’s length at
over one hundred fifty feet, its wingspan at better than a hundred feet,
larger than an American B-1 B bomber, which, in many ways, it closely
resembled. The Russian plane had the same large, paired engines at the root
of each wing, the same smooth and sleekly streamlined configuration designed
to cut down on the aircraft’s radar cross section.
Coyote knew that shape, had been seeing it in recognition manuals and
charts for years, but never had he seen one live: the Tupolev long-range
bomber and missile platform dubbed Blackjack by the West.
Blackjack was a direct Soviet response to the American B-1, though
painfully little was known about the Russian bomber’s capabilities even after
ten years. Clearly, like the B-1, it had some stealth characteristics, though
these were not carried to the extremes of the American B-2 and stealth
fighter. The smooth design of the fuselage, the absence of bulges or sharply
radar-reflecting surfaces, gave it a radar profile far smaller than its actual
size might have suggested. Its slender wings could swing in and out like the
Tomcat’s; at low speeds, when extra lift was necessary, those wings would
extend almost straight out from the fuselage. Now, in supersonic flight, they
were laid back along the bomber’s flanks, transforming it into sleek and