Thinking fast, Coyote veered left, dropping his targeting pipper across
the closer of the two Flagons. His last missile’s IR warhead locked on
and he squeezed the trigger. “Fox two!”
Head-on shots with IR-homers were a lot riskier than sending one up the
tailpipe; such a shot would have been impossible with earlier models of
the Sidewinder, but the AIM-9M was an all-aspect heat-seeker, able to
lock on to and track the heat radiated from any part of a target
aircraft, front or rear.
With his last missile away, he broke to the left; at the same moment,
his first Sidewinder arrowed up the starboard engine exhaust of the
Badger and detonated. Ten pounds of high explosive did not make that
big of a bang.
There was a puff of white smoke and a scattering of debris, but the
Badger continued to fly, still turning gently away from the center of
the American fleet.
Coyote, meanwhile, dove for the deck, forcing the two Flagons to break
their climb in order to maintain their radar lock.
Standard operating procedure for the Su-21 was to fit it out with two
AA-3 “Anab” missiles, loading a heat-seeking version on the port side, a
SARH-guided version to starboard. By ripple-firing the two, the pilot
better than doubled his chances of a kill. The Sukhoi also carried
several smaller AA-8 “Aphids,” highly maneuverable dog-fighting missiles
for close-in work.
At a range of about a mile now, Coyote decided, the Flagons would
probably try to take him with Aphids. By going onto the deck and coming
up underneath or behind them, he would keep them from getting a solid
lock.
“Warning tone!” Cat yelled. “He’s going for a fox one!”
Damn! They’d opted for a radar lock rather than infrared … or else
they were going to try to nail them with both.
“Hang on to your lunch!” he warned Cat, and he kicked in the
afterburners.
Their second Sidewinder slammed into one of the Flagons; from Coyote’s
viewpoint, it looked as though the nine-foot missile had smashed
straight through the Sukhoi’s cockpit and detonated in a shattering
cascade of glittering fragments. At almost the same moment, first one,
then another missile blasted clear of the second Sukhoi, tracking on the
hurtling Tomcat.
The Badger had been circling to the left during those past few seconds,
smoke streaming from its damaged starboard engine. Coyote had been
cutting to the left as well and was now dropping toward the Badger on a
collision course.
There’d been no conscious planning on Coyote’s part, only the
instinctive and near-instantaneous reactions of a Top Gun-trained
aviator in combat. As the two Anab air-to-air missiles circled around
toward the fleeing F-14, Coyote slammed the Tomcat past the Badger so
close he felt the airframe shuddering as it carved through the bomber’s
slipstream. For a split second, he could look up and to the right,
seeing every detail of the Tu-16–the greenhouse-type canopies over
cockpit and nose, the deadly probe of a 23mm cannon extending from the
starboard side of its fuselage forward, the back-swept wings each tagged
by a bright, red star. Almost, he imagined, he could see the startled
faces of its pilot and crew.
Then he was beneath the Tupolev and past it, still shrieking toward the
sea. The Badger was firing at him with its twin 23mm tail guns–he
could see them twinkling–but without effect.
A moment later, the bomber exploded in a ball of flame.
“My God!” Cat said, and there was something like awe in her voice. “You
… you suckered that SARH into the Badger!”
Coyote twisted in his seat, looking back over his right shoulder. The
Badger was falling toward the sea, its fuselage a mass of flame that was
picked up and reflected by the water as a brilliant orange glow. Fire
and glow rushed to meet one another.
“If the Flagon had a radar lock on us,” he said, “we broke it by
slipping into the Badger’s shadow. The SARH lock transferred to the
Badger and the Flagon driver didn’t have a chance to break it … or
else he didn’t realize he’d started tracking the Badger.”
“You make it sound like you didn’t know what was going to happen,” Cat