Acts of Vengeance

by Robert Gandt

  No fighters had appeared.

  “Ninety nine Gippers, check switches,” Maxwell transmitted, using the group-wide call sign. Glancing over his left shoulder, he saw that B.J. Johnson was in good position, a quarter mile abeam. Off his right wing was his second section, Flash Gordon and Leroi Jones, also in position.

  Each strike fighter was carrying a Paveway laser-guided bomb. Smart bombs were life insurance for fighter pilots. Besides being accurate enough to park on a doorstep, they could be released with the stand off distance to keep the pilot out of anti-aircraft gun range.

  Today it didn’t matter. There were no anti-aircraft guns.

  Behind Maxwell’s flight were two more four-plane divisions from the Bluetail squadron armed with Mark 20 Rockeye cluster bombs. The Bluetails were the mop-up crew. After the Paveway bombs had dealt with the buildings, the Bluetails would scour what was left with the cluster bombs.

  Overkill, Maxwell thought. The place looked like a ghost town.

  “Gipper Zero-one is in hot.” Maxwell rolled in on the target.

  In quick succession, each of the other three members of his flight reported rolling in on the target.

  Through the HUD, Maxwell saw the headquarters building, the largest structure in the complex. It was a big, hard-to-miss sitting duck.

  With his right thumb he slewed the laser designator over the target, stopping it on the gray tin roof. A couple of fine adjustments, positioning the designator exactly in the center. . . hold it a second. . . Release.

  He felt the jolt all the way through the airframe of the Super Hornet as the 2,000 pound bomb kicked free of its station.

  While the GBU-24 soared toward its target, Maxwell found himself wishing. It would be sweet justice if Al-Fasr was in the building. He delivered the order that took Josh Dunn’s life. And Tom Mellon’s. Today was payback time. Eight tons of armor-piercing, high explosive bombs in exchange for your wire-guided missile.

  This was the hard part. Waiting, letting the laser designator illuminate the target. Each of the other Hornets in his flight was doing the same, each lasing on a different optical frequency.

  The bombs were all in the air now, descending like a hail of death on the tin-roofed buildings. Anything left alive would be shredded by the Bluetails and their Rockeye cluster bombs.

  He sensed the bomb impact, without actually hearing it. The center of the roof opened like the lid of a can, sucking the building inward. An orange ball of flame roiled into the sky. The sides of the building burst apart.

  A micro-second later, the adjacent building erupted. Then another. Each of the tin roofed buildings was mushrooming into the morning sky.

  <>

  It was a lesson right out of Sun Tzu. Taunt your enemy, lure him into your territory, reveal to him your apparent weakness.

  A dozen times Al-Fasr had read the classic on guerilla warfare. Now he was executing the principles, not in medieval China but here in the milky sky of Yemen. When he commits to the attack, surprise him. And kill him.

  So it was happening.

  The three MiGs came blasting out of the underground revetments, taking off from the makeshift runway at the old BP complex, one behind the other in full afterburner. Staying low and accelerating to supersonic speed, they spread out in a loose line-abreast formation, separated from each other by half a kilometer.

  No radio transmissions, no air-to-air radar—not yet. Emit no signal that would reveal their presence to the enemy’s electronic surveillance gear.

  Ahead, beyond a low ridge, Al-Fasr could see plumes of black smoke. It meant the first bombs were already landing on the decoy compound. Against the backdrop of pallid sky, he could see the specks of two fighters climbing steeply up from the target. At any moment they would be detecting the unexpected presence of the MiGs.

  At this altitude, less than a hundred meters above the terrain, the earth was flashing by in a brownish blur. He glanced at the machmeter. The Cyrillic-lettered gauge was showing 1.06 mach, which at this altitude equated to 1300 kilometers per hour. Speed is life, went the fighter pilot’s mantra. The more the better.

  He glanced over his left shoulder. It took him a second to pick out the mottled paint scheme of Rittmann’s MiG, nearly invisible against the landscape. To the right was Novotny, the Czech pilot. Novotny was an able but unimaginative pilot, waiting always to be told what to do. He had no illusions about Novotny’s life expectancy in the coming battle.

  Rittmann was another matter. He was aggressive—too aggressive, perhaps. In their brief training exercises back in Chad, before deploying to Yemen, Rittmann had surprised Al-Fasr with his boldness, but it was an undisciplined boldness. The German would thrust himself into air-to-air engagements like a snarling attack dog. Rittmann needed a leash.

  Al-Fasr knew that any second now the American pilots would be receiving urgent warnings from their AWACS. He wished he could eavesdrop on their tactical frequency. It would make him laugh. The invincible American Navy pilots would be squealing like pigs about to be slaughtered.

  He checked the display on his inertial navigation system. Ten kilometers to go.

  “Radars active,” Al-Fasr called to his two wingmen, breaking their radio silence. “Acquire your targets.”

  He punched the mode control on his Sapfir radar display from standby to acquisition mode. Three sweeps later the display came alive, the screen filling with greenish, hash-marked target symbols.

  There they were, the two he had acquired visually as they climbed off target. Another pair was just pulling up. Behind them, approaching from the next quadrant, four more Hornets. Al-Fasr counted twelve in all. As he expected.

  The information from his informer was accurate.

  There would be more up high. The MiG’s Sapfir Doppler radar had a gimbal limit of sixty degrees up, not enough to paint any high CAP fighters, but it didn’t matter. If the assessment report continued to be accurate—and Al-Fasr was now sure of it—he knew exactly where they would be. He even knew how many—four F-14 Tomcats orbiting at twenty four thousand feet. Exactly the wrong place to counter the threat of low-flying MiGs.

  Another lesson from Sun Tzu: Learn your enemy’s strength; conceal your own.

  On his armament panel, Al-Fasr selected an AA-11 Archer missile. The low growl of the Archer’s heat-seeking head filled his earphones.

  <>

  Boyce’s eyes were glued to the tactical display screen. He hated this role, sitting here in CIC like a goddamn spectator at a ball game, watching his team play and not being a part of it. Shit! It had been his own paranoid decision to stay back here aboard ship. Him and his gut feelings. He should have swallowed his doubts and done what Air Wing Commanders were supposed to do—lead his people.

  Well, it was turning out okay. Better than okay, because Maxwell and his strikers were taking out the terrorist compound like it was an ant hill. Best of all, the ants weren’t shooting back.

  He could see Admiral Fletcher peering at his own tac display, while a young lieutenant explained the symbology on the screen to him. Boyce wondered again why a flag officer who didn’t know shit about tactical air operations was in command of this show.

  Then he remembered. Sitting next to Fletcher was Babcock, his chin in his hands, staring at the display.

  The only problem so far had been with the KS-3 Viking tankers. While on his refueling station, one of the tankers had called in with a hydraulic failure. Now Stickney and Commander Williams, the air boss, were preoccupied with getting him back aboard. Up on the flight deck, yellow shirts were scrambling to re-spot parked jets.

  Down in the darkened CIC space, everyone felt their weight shift in their seats as the carrier heeled to port. Stickney was heading the ship back into the wind so the Viking could recover.

  Boyce studied his display. For the third time in fifteen minutes, he called the AWACS. “What’s the picture, War Lord?”

  A pause followed. Boyce knew the controller—an Air Force captain named Tracey Barnett. She was
sorting her own array of contacts. “Picture still clear,” she reported. “Yankees on second, Pirates headed for first, Dodgers up to bat.”

  Boyce acknowledged. It corroborated what he saw on his own display. “Picture clear” confirmed that nothing hostile was showing—no MiGs, no SAMs, no target-tracking radars. The baseball team code meant that Maxwell’s flight—Yankee—was coming off target, while his second division—Pirate—was just rolling in. Behind them Dodger flight—the Bluetails—was smoking in low and fast.

  Boyce knew from experience there was always a glitch. If the place was totally undefended, it meant that they had gotten inaccurate intel about the defenses. But what if the enemy had simply been caught with their pants down? It meant that any moment they would wake up to the fact that they were getting the shit bombed out of them. They would start shooting.

  The only thing they couldn’t immediately assess was bomb damage. Not until they’d gotten reconnaissance footage obtained by a low-flying Tomcat with a TARP package—Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod—and from satellite imagery would they know for sure whether Al-Fasr had been put out of business.

  The photo of the terrorist smiling back at him from the screen in the briefing room was still in Boyce’s mind. He hoped the grinning bastard had been nailed in his headquarters taking a nap. Or sipping one of those thick Arab coffees while he was—

  “Pop up! Pop up targets, north bullseye five miles!”

  The controller’s call pierced Boyce’s thoughts like a knife. “Two targets! North bullseye, four miles, closing fast!”

  Boyce could hear the controller trying to keep her voice calm. “No!” she called. Make that three targets!”

  Boyce could see them on his own display, which was datalinked with the AWACS. Sure as hell, out of nowhere, three blips were there that weren’t there before. Converging with the strike fighters.

  Pandemonium spilled out of the strike frequency. “Bandits, bandits, two o’clock low!”

  “Who? Who’s got bandits—”

  “Yankee One, bandits four o’clock low.”

  “Dodger One, snap vector, two-six-zero, four miles.”

  “Confirm bandits! Who’s got an ID?”

  “Sea Lord confirms three bandits, north bullseye, three miles.”

  “Threat two-four-zero. Looks like Fulcrums.”

  <>

  “Yankee two spiked at seven o’clock!”

  Maxwell could hear the urgency in B.J. Johnson’s voice. “Chaff!” he answered. He wanted her to dump a trail of radar-deflecting foil. “Break left now! Keep the chaff coming.”

  He was getting the same warning on his RWR. They were both spiked by an enemy fighter’s radar. They were the targets. With their tails exposed to the low-flying bandits, radar-deflecting chaff was their only salvation.

  Unless the guy was shooting infra-red missiles. Heat-seekers didn’t need radar. They could home on the IR—infra-red—signature of your engines, or even the friction of the air over your jet’s skin.

  Over his shoulder Maxwell could see the dark shape of the bandit down low, coming at them in a nearly vertical climb. He recognized the lowslung belly scoops, the twin vertical fins. A MiG-29. As he grunted under the strain of the six-G turn, he saw a flash beneath the MiG’s port wing root.

  A missile. IR or radar? No change in the RWR. Had to be a heat seeker.

  “Flares!” he called, toggling his own flare dispenser. “B.J., break left. Bandit, seven o’clock low. Missile in the air.

  Like chaff, the flares were decoys that were supposed to deceive the missile’s guidance unit. If the weapon was a heat-seeker—and if they were lucky—the missile would lock onto the flares. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. The Russian-built Archer missile was smart enough to distinguish flares from tailpipes.

  Pulling maximum G, grunting to keep from graying out as he kept his eyes on the fast-climbing Fulcrum fighter, Maxwell wondered how they got caught like this. Where did they come from?

  How many were there? Why didn’t they get picked up by the AWACS?

  This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  <>

  In the lead Tomcat, Commander Burner Crump listened to the urgent radio calls.

  “Dodger One spiked at three o’clock!”

  “Snap Vector, Pirate One, tactical, one-five-zero, five miles.”

  “Yankee Two, no joy, no joy!”

  The last call was a woman’s voice. The Roadrunner pilot, B.J. Johnson, was reporting that she couldn’t get a visual on the bandit that was targeting her.

  Crump felt like pounding his fist in frustration. He and his Tomcats had been orbiting on their overhead CAP station waiting for non-existent MiGs. The trouble was, the MiGs weren’t non-existent, and they had somehow gotten down there to hose the bombers. The goddamn fight would be over before Crump and his shooters could get to them.

  Maybe not. “Felix One, Sea Lord,” came the voice of the AWACS controller. “Snap vector one-three-five, fifteen miles, low. Buster.”

  “Felix One copies,” Crump answered, shoving his throttles into the afterburner detent. “Buster.”

  Here we go, thought Crump. Better late than never. The AWACS controller had just decided that maybe the Tomcats ought to join the furball. She was issuing the bearing and range to the targets. “Buster” was brevity code for maximum speed, which was a good clue that the Hornets were in deep shit.

  Crump rolled to the new heading and dumped the nose of the Tomcat. Under full thrust of the G.E. engines, the big fighter was accelerating like a bullet. In combat spread on the right, his wingman, Gordo Gray, was staying with him. The brown expanse of the Yemeni wasteland swelled in Crump’s windscreen.

  “You got ‘em sorted, Willie?” he asked the RIO in the back seat. He could hear Lieutenant Willie Martinez, the radar intercept officer, breathing heavily into his hot mike. Martinez was peering into his display, trying to separate cowboys from Indians.

  “Hang on a sec. We got a customer. . . twelve o’clock. . . yeah, get ready, I’m getting a lock—” The sound of Martinez’s breathing abruptly stopped. “Shit, we’re spiked! He’s taking a shot!”

  <>

  Al-Fasr grunted against the seven-G pull up. The nose of his MiG-29 was pointed nearly vertical, climbing like a rocket from the energy of the supersonic dash over the surface. If his timing was correct, and if he was lucky—

  Yes! They were directly above him. He flipped the radar to narrow scan and was rewarded with a target acquisition symbol. Not one but two targets. Diving toward him, probing with their own radars.

  It would be a snap shot. Only a marginal chance for a kill, but he had no choice. They would merge in eight seconds, and long before that the enemy fighters—they had to be F-14s—would have their own missiles in the air.

  He would have preferred a radar-guided Alamo missile, but that meant he would have to remain locked on with his radar while the missile tracked. That was suicide.

  It had to be a fire-and-forget heatseeker. Al-Fasr punched the fire control button on the stick. Whoom! An AA-11 Archer missile leaped from its rail beneath the right wing.

  He punched again. Whoom! A second Archer streaked upward, both missiles trailing plumes of fire and gray smoke.

  For an instant he wished he could wait and see the missiles do their work. But his life would then be measured in seconds. He was a hunted animal surrounded by predators.

  He flicked on the chaff dispenser and hauled the nose of the MiG over the top of the loop, back down toward the horizon. He punched his targeting radar off. No radar emissions, no electronic target.

  His life lay in the effectiveness of his missiles. If the Archers killed the F-14s before they could launch their own missiles. . . if the chaff deflected the enemy’s radar-guided weapons. . . if he was not already targeted by other fighters. . .

  The MiG was pointed in a vertical dive back to the earth, back to the cover of the radar-scattering terrain.

  The earth was expanding in his windscr
een like a zoom lens. Don’t fly into the ground, Al-Fasr told himself. He pulled hard again on the stick, coming out the dive within a terraced valley. On either side the walls of the valley passed in a brown-hued blur.

  Through the clear glass in the top of the MiG’s canopy, he saw wreckage tumbling out of the sky. A dark shape, spewing debris and orange flame and smoke. A Tomcat? Or one of his MiG-29s?

  He saw pieces separate from the wreckage. A parachute canopy blossomed. Then a second. Two white chutes floating down to the Yemeni hills.

  Al-Fasr felt a warm glow of satisfaction. The only multiple-crew fighters in this engagement were the Tomcats. One of his Archers had struck home. A face-to-face shot. He won, they lost.

  He wondered how Rittmann and Novotny were doing. Had they scored kills? Or were they dead?

  <>

  Rittmann cursed himself. Why did he take the shot? He should have waited.

  In his great haste to kill the lead Hornet, he had fired the missile too soon. He, of all people! Even though he had a steady kill tone in his headset, he knew that the Archer’s guidance unit was subject to false locks at this range, especially shooting upward into the sun.

  The two Hornets were in a hard break to the left, spewing a trail of foil. The second section had broken to the right and were not a threat, at least not yet. Rittmann had a speed advantage, having converted his supersonic velocity over the surface into a vertical climb. He was closing on the first pair, who were in a high reversal turn to counter his attack.

  Rittmann selected another Archer missile. The lead Hornet had gained enough angle off to be outside the Archer’s off-boresight limit. It didn’t matter. The wingman was still well within range.

  He was getting a good acquisition tone from the seeker head. The IR rangefinder showed six thousand meters and closing—well within the envelope. This time he would do it right.

  For another second Rittmann tracked the enemy fighter. He had a clear view of the Hornet’s aft quarter—the twin afterburners torching flame, canted vertical stabilizers, the pilot’s head visible through the back of the canopy. Wisps of vapor were coming off the wings, evidence of the heavy G-load the pilot was pulling.