he was good, take a guess at the energy the Tomcat driver still had simply by
noting the position of his wings.
Coyote held the turn, wings spread wide, ignoring the vibration, while a
mile away the MiG completed its own turn and began lining up for another pass.
He knew what the Russian pilot was seeing–the ungainly, cruciform shape
of a wings-forward Tomcat in a low-energy turn, passing left to right across
his HUD targeting indicators, a tempting, slow target. Rather than trying to
drop onto the F-14’s tail, he would take the easy shot, locking on with
missiles or guns, knowing that the Tomcat simply did not have the airspeed for
an evasive maneuver.
As he watched the MiG swelling nose-on, seeming to plunge straight toward
his canopy, Coyote knew he’d guessed right.
He slapped the control that restored wing control to the computer and
felt the vibrations ease off as the wings slid back once more along the
Tomcat’s flanks. Opening the throttles and tightening his turn still more, he
watched as the MiG swung across his canopy and squarely into the center of his
HUD, dead ahead.
Nose-to-nose now, Tomcat and MiG thundered toward one another across a
space of half a mile. This time, Coyote was ready for the pass, his targeting
reticle already circling the edge-on shape of the MiG, his LCOS showing what
he already knew, that there was no need for pulling lead on the target. He
clamped down convulsively on the trigger, and the M61 Gatling shrieked.
The other plane was firing too. Coyote glimpsed the wink of its cannon
flickering at the root of its left wing, but he’d caught the Russian by
surprise, before he’d had a chance to lock his targeting laser on the Tomcat.
Coyote held the trigger down in a continuous volley that spewed a hundred
rounds each second, hurtling toward the Fulcrum behind that stream of lead,
then passing the other plane so closely that he felt the buffet of its jet
wash. He released the trigger. In a second and a half he’d hosed over 150
20-mm shells at the target and he’d been dead-on. He must have hit.. Yes! In
the last instant before he passed the MiG, he saw bits flaking away, debris
torn from one wing. As the MiG roared past, Coyote twisted in his ejection
seat, staring after it. A thin, hard stream of vapor trailed from one wing,
fuel spilling from a ruptured wing tank.
“You got him!” Teejay called. “He’s hit.. but he ain’t going down!”
“I’m on him.” He pulled into a hard turn. The MiG was swinging north,
trailing smoke. He was hurting, Coyote decided, hurting but still alive. “I
think he’s getting out of Dodge,” he said. “We’re on his six now. Almost got
him..”
“New target!” Teejay shouted. “Coming fast at three-five-three and on
the deck!”
Coyote’s eyes flicked between his VDI and through the canopy in the
indicated direction. During the wild maneuvers of the past few minutes,
they’d fallen far through clear, cold air. They were less than a mile now
above the dark waters of the fjord. He saw the target, a ramrod-straight
scratch of a contrail drawing itself across the landscape three thousand feet
below.
He recognized it immediately–the contrail of an antiship cruise missile
skimming the mountains, by chance or design aligned perfectly with Jefferson,
which was still moving sluggishly down the fjord to the sea.
“Lock it!” he snapped.
“Tracking! We have a lock!”
He snicked the selector switch. The F-14’s AWG-9 computer-controlled
pulse-doppler radar could look down on targets at lower altitudes, sorting
them from the clutter of the ground below. This look-down/shoot-down
capability gave the Tomcat the capability of shooting down cruise missiles in
flight.
If they could catch them in time. “Fox one!” An AIM-7 Sparrow streaked
from beneath the F-14’s wing, trailing smoke as it lanced down through the
sky. Coyote held the F-14 steady, letting it slide into a gradual, descending
turn to keep the incoming cruise missile within the cone of radar energy
emitted from the aircraft’s nose. Teejay kept the radar locked onto the
target, tracking it all the way to its collision with the diving Sparrow.