Sidewinders and two AMRAAMs slung beneath the wings of his Tomcat.
Pushing his throttle forward, feeling the click of each detent as he
went all the way to zone-five afterburner, Coyote hurtled toward the
southeast. His F-14’s computer automatically slid the aircraft’s wings
back, adjusting drag and lift for maximum speed. A moment later they
slipped past the sound barrier with scarcely a shudder in the big
Tomcat’s airframe.
“That’s … a … kill!” Cat called from the back seat, her words and
breaths coming in short bursts as she labored against the transverse-Gs
pressing her back against her seat. “Splash … four!”
“Send it,” Coyote told her, cutting back the F-14’s power and dropping
below Mach 1 again. Ahead, the ragged gray coastline of Norway was
stretched along the sea at the horizon. Numerous threads of white
crisscrossed the blue sky, Phoenix contrails from a dozen F-14s.
“Mustang, where the hell are you?”
“Coyote, Mustang. I’m on your five at six miles. Going for Phoenix
launch!”
“Okay. Dump your load, then close up. I’m naked up here.”
“Roger that, Two-oh-one. Here we go. Lock and … fox three!”
Coyote switched to ICS. “Cat! Gimme a vector! Gimme something to
shoot at!”
“Shit, Coyote, take your pick. Ah … come right five. Looks like a
large target at angels ten, range four-two miles.”
He picked out the target on his own display. “Got it. We’ll take it
with AMRAA.M.”
The AIM-120A, also called the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile
or AMRAAM for short, had been a long, long time in coming. With Phoenix
to hit targets up to a hundred miles away, with the Sidewinder
heat-seeker to take on close targets out to ten miles or so, a
medium-range missile was needed to fill the gap between the two
extremes. Since the 1950s, the Navy’s medium-range missile had been the
AIM-7 Sparrow.
For the men who’d had to rely on them, the AIM-7 had never been entirely
satisfactory. They were SARH-guided–semiactive radar-homing–which
meant they homed on radar energy reflected off the target by the firing
aircraft.
That meant that the aviator who locked on to an enemy target and fired a
Sparrow at it had to keep his aircraft flying straight and level,
continuing to paint the target while his missile completed its
flight–as much as sixty-two miles in later versions of the AIM-7.
And while he was doing that, he was vulnerable, unable to maneuver
without breaking the radar lock and wasting his shot.
Coyote switched his heads-up display to medium-range-missile mode,
selecting an AIM-120. On his HUD, a small rectangle drifted across his
field of view, the target designator. To the left, beneath the vertical
line of his airspeed indicator, ARM M2 appeared, showing he had two
missiles ready, while to the right, just inside the altitude scale, a
vertical line gave the target’s closing speed and range. The target was
twenty-five nautical miles away now, closing at 512 knots.
Dragging his stick over, he merged the designator box with the target
pipper; the letters ACQ let him know that the target had been acquired
by the missile’s radar. There was a beat as computers calculated firing
conditions, angles, and probabilities … and then the rectangle
blinked to a circle embracing the letter m.
A tone shrilled in his ear. “Radar lock!” Cat called from the RIO’s
seat.
“Fox one!” Coyote answered, and he squeezed the firing trigger.
AMRAAM represented a whole new type of air-to-air missile, carrying its
own radar-guidance system as well as extremely sensitive infrared
sensors for terminal homing. Cost overruns and unexpected technical
difficulties had delayed the missile’s production for the better part of
a decade, and with the first production models going to the Air Force,
the new missile had been slow to reach Navy combat units.
With a roar, the AIM-120 detached itself from the Tomcat, boosting on a
trail of flame to Mach 4 in seconds. On Coyote’s HUD, beneath the
altitude scale, the characters IN RNG and 28 glowed in silent
affirmation. The AMRAAM would reach the target in another twenty-eight
seconds.
With the missile away, Coyote immediately brought his stick hard to the
right, dropping into a starboard turn away from the target that would