this range, the incoming missile might be tracking either of them.
There’d be no way to tell until it got a lot closer.
“Affirmative.”
“Going to zone five.” He rammed his throttle forward.
“Right with you.”
At their current altitude of just over twenty-thousand feet, the Tomcats
could manage about Mach 2.3. The missile following them, now forty
miles away, was traveling at Mach 3.5, which meant that even at their
top speed it would continue to overhaul them with a closing rate of
almost eight hundred miles per hour.
With luck, the air-to-air missile would run out of fuel before it
reached them.
If it didn’t, it would catch up to them in another three minutes.
0719 hours
Off North Cape
The CICOs in the American line’s E-2Cs reported thirty Amos air-to-air
missiles incoming during the first few minutes of the exchange. EA-6B
Prowlers, flying in their electronic-warfare/electronic-countermeasures
role off both the Jefferson and the Eisenhower, targeted the missiles
with intense bursts of radar energy designed to burn out their delicate
SARH receivers.
Other AA-9s were decoyed by chaff or knocked out by RIOs using their
Tomcats’ own ECM assets.
In all, only eleven American aircraft were hit, and of those, four were
only damaged by the detonation of the AA-9’s radar proximity fuze and
were able to make it back to their respective carriers.
Against such odds as they were facing now, however, the Americans could
not afford to lose a single plane.
0722 hours
Tomcat 201
Over the Barents Sea
“It’s coming fast, Coyote! Range five miles-”
“Mustang! When I give the word, break right. I’ll go left.”
” … four miles …”
“Roger that, Coyote!”
” … three miles …”
“Now! Break!”
Coyote pulled the stick hard to the left and forward, going into a dive
to pick up extra, crucial speed. Stealing a look back over his
shoulder, he could see the onrushing missile now, a pinpoint trailing an
endless thread of white scrawling across the eastern sky. As Mustang
slipped off to the right, the missile tracked left.
It was after him and Cat.
He’d dropped out of afterburners to avoid guzzling up his remaining
fuel, but he kicked them in once more, fighting for every possible extra
measure of speed. The G-forces piled on top of his head and chest and
gut, squeezing the air from his lungs, clawing at his eyeballs in their
sockets.
“One … uh! mile still uh! … with us!” Cat was having to force
each word out, punctuating them with savage grunts to literally force
the air out of a diaphragm nearly paralyzed by almost nine Gs.
“Chaff!” Coyote yelled. Rapid-bloom chaff exploded from the Tomcat’s
tail, myriad slivers of aluminum-coated mylar cut to precise lengths
blossoming in an expanding cloud astern. The missile, now a few hundred
yards away, automatically tracked for the middle of its radar target as
it traveled left to right, aiming at the so-called “centroid of
reflected radiation.”
When the radar image suddenly smeared into a far larger, longer target,
the AA-9’s aim shifted to the right …
… and then Coyote snap-rolled the F-14 into a hard, reverse turn,
climbing now and breaking out of its turn. The missile flashed into the
still-scattering cloud of chaff, its simple-minded proximity fuze
decided that it had reached the target, and it detonated with a
thunderous roar. Bits of metal pinged and clattered off the Tomcat’s
hull, but no warning lights winked on in response.
“Coyote, this is Mustang! Are you okay?”
“Copacetic, Mustang. Still here!” Coyote stared up through his canopy
at that deep, impossibly blue sky, crisscrossed with the lacy weavings
of aircraft and missile contrails. It struck him suddenly that he’d
been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the past ten minutes,
killing or damaging a probable total of six enemy planes and damned near
getting killed himself.
And in all that time, he’d never been close enough to even once see a
Russian aircraft.
“Mustang, Coyote,” he called. “We’re down to two AIM-9s and coming up
on bingo fuel. I’d say it’s time to RTB.”
“RTB” meant “return to base.” Time to head back to the Jeff and rearm.
“That’s a major roger, Skipper. Lead the way.”