“EAGLE, Boar, say BANDIT type, over.”
“Boar, we’re not sure, but probably Sierra-Uniform Two-Sevens by point of origin and flight profile, over.”
“Roger.” Okay, good, Winters thought. They thought the Su-27 was a pretty hot aircraft, and for a Russian-designed bird it was respectable. They put their best drivers into the Flanker, and they’d be the proud ones, the ones who thought they were as good as he was. Okay, Joe, let’s see how good you are. “Boar, Lead, come left to one-three-five.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” the flight acknowledged, and they all banked to the left. Winters took a look around to make sure he wasn’t leaving any contrails to give away his position. Then he checked his threat receiver. It was getting some chirps from Chinese search radar, but still below the theoretical detection threshold. That would change in twenty miles or so. But then they’d just be unknowns on the Chinese screens, and fuzzy ones at that. Maybe the ground controllers would radio a warning, but maybe they’d just peer at their screens and try to decide if they were real contacts or not. The robin’s-egg blue of the EAGLEs wasn’t all that easy to spot visually, especially when you had the sun behind you, which was the oldest trick in the fighter-pilot Bible, and one for which there was still no solution . . .
The Chinese passed to his right, thirty miles away, heading north and looking for Russian fighters to engage, because the Chinese would want to control the sky over the battlefield they’d just opened up. That meant that they’d be turning on their own search radars, and when that happened, they’d spend most of their time looking down at the scope instead of out at the sky, and that was dangerous. When he was south of them, Winters brought his flight right, west, and down to twenty thousand feet, well below Joe Chink’s cruising altitude, because fighter pilots might look back and up, but rarely back and down, because they’d been taught that height, like speed, was life. And so it was . . . most of the time. In another three minutes, they were due south of the enemy, and Winters increased power to maximum dry thrust so as to catch up. His flight of four split on command into two pairs. He went left, and then his eyes spotted them, dark flecks on the brightening blue sky. They were painted the same light gray the Russians liked—and that would be a real problem if Russian Flankers entered the area, because you didn’t often get close enough to see if the wings had red stars or white-blue-red flags painted on them.
The audio tone came next. His Sidewinders could see the heat bloom from the Lyul’ka turbofan engines, and that meant he was just about close enough. His wingman, a clever young lieutenant, was now about five hundred yards to his right, doing his job, which was covering his leader. Okay, Bronco Winters thought. He had a good hundred knots of overtake speed now.
“Boar, EAGLE, be advised these guys are heading directly for us at the moment.”
“Not for long, EAGLE,” Colonel Winters responded. They weren’t flecks anymore. Now they were twin-rudder fighter aircraft. Cruising north, tucked in nice and pretty. His left forefinger selected Sidewinder to start, and the tone in his earphones was nice and loud. He’d start with two shots, one at the left-most Flanker, and the other at the rightmost . . . right about. . .
“Fox-Two, Fox-Two with two birds away,” Bronco reported. The smoke trails diverged, just as he wanted them to, streaking in on their targets. His gunsight camera was operating, and the picture was being recorded on videotape, just as it had been over Saudi the previous year. He needed one kill to make ace—
—he got the first six seconds later, and the next half a second after that. Both Flankers tumbled right. The one on the left nearly collided with his wingman, but missed, and tumbled violently as pieces started coming off the airframe. The other one was rolling and then exploded into a nice white puffball. The first pilot ejected cleanly, but the second didn’t.
Tough luck, Joe, Winters thought. The remaining two Chinese fighters hesitated, but both then split and started maneuvering in diverging directions. Winters switched on his radar and followed the one to the left. He had radar lock and it was well within the launch parameters for his AMRAAM. His right forefinger squeezed the pickle switch.
“Fox-One, Fox-One, Slammer on guy to the west.” He watched the Slammer, as it was called, race in. Technically a fire-and-forget weapon like the Sidewinder, it accelerated almost instantly to mach-two-plus and rapidly ate up the three miles between them. It only took about ten seconds to close and explode a mere few feet over the fuselage of its target, and that Flanker disintegrated with no chute coming away from it.
Okay, three. This morning was really shaping up, but now the situation went back to World War I. He had to search for targets visually, and searching for jet fighters in a clear sky wasn’t…
. . . there . . .
“You with me, Skippy?” he called on the radio.
“Got you covered, Bronco,” his wingman replied. “BANDIT at your one o’clock, going left to right.”
“On him,” Winters replied, putting his nose on the distant spot in the sky. His radar spotted it, locked onto it, and the IFF transponder didn’t say friendly. He triggered off his second Slammer: “Fox-One on the south guy! EAGLE, Boar Lead, how we doing?”
“We show five kills to this point. BANDITs are heading east and diving. Razorback is coining in from your west with four, angels three-five at six hundred, now at your ten o’clock. Check your IFF, Boar Lead.” The controller was being careful, but that was okay.
“Boar, Lead, check IFF now!”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” they all chimed in. Before the last of them confirmed his IFF transponder was in the transmit setting, Ms second Slammer found its target, running his morning’s score to four. Well, damn, Winters thought, this morning is really shaping up nice.
“Bronco, Skippy is on one!” his wingman reported, and Winters took position behind, low, and left of his wingman. “Skippy” was First Lieutenant Mario Acosta, a red-haired infant from Wichita who was coming along nicely for a child with only two hundred hours in type. “Fox-Two with one,” Skippy called. His target had turned south, and was heading almost straight into the streaking missile. Winters saw the Sidewinder go right into his right-side intake, and the resulting explosion was pretty impressive.
“EAGLE, Boar Lead, give me a vector, over.”
“Boar Lead, come right at zero-nine-zero. I have a BANDIT at ten miles and low, angels ten, heading south at six-hundred-plus.”
Winters executed the turn and checked his radar display. “Got him!” And this one also was well within the Slammer envelope. “Fox-One with Slammer.” His fifth missile of the day leaped off the rail and rocketed east, angling down, and again Winters kept his nose on the target, ensuring that he’d get it on tape … yes! “That’s a splash. Bronco has a splash, I think that’s five.”
“Confirm five kills to Bronco,” EAGLE Two confirmed. “Nice going, buddy.”
“What else is around?”
“Boar Lead, the BANDITs are running south on burner, just went through Mach One. We show a total of nine kills plus one damage, with six BANDITs running back to the barn, over.”
“Roger, copy that, EAGLE. Anything else happening at the moment?”
“Ah, that’s a negative, Boar Lead.”
“Where’s the closest tanker?”
“You can tank from Oliver-Six, vector zero-zero-five, distance two hundred, over.”
“Roger that. Flight, this is Bronco. Let’s assemble and head off to tank. Form up on me.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four.”
“How we doing?”
“Skippy has one,” his wingman reported.
“Ducky has two,” the second element leader chimed in.
“Ghost Man has two and a scratch.”
It didn’t add up, Winters thought. Hell, maybe the AWACS guys got confused. That’s why they had videotape. All in all, not a bad morning. Best of all, they’d put a real dent in the ChiComm Flanker inventory, and probably punched a pinhole in the confidence of their Su-27 drivers. Shaking up a fighter jock’s confidence was almost as good as a kill, especially if they’d bagged the squadron commander. It would make the survivors mad, but it would make them question themselves, their doctrine, and their aircraft. And that was good.
“So?”
“The border defenses did about as well as one could reasonably expect,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “The good news is that most of our men escaped with their lives. Total dead is under twenty, with fifteen wounded.”
“What do they have across the river now?”
“Best guess, elements of three mechanized divisions. The Americans say that they now have six bridges completed and operating. So, we can expect that number to increase rapidly. Chinese reconnaissance elements are pushing forward. We’ve ambushed some of them, but no prisoners yet. Their direction of advance is exactly what we anticipated, as is their speed of advance to this point.”