Island Warriors c-18

by Keith Douglass

  “Take low, Archer. Watch my six — I’m going to try to shoo him back down toward you.”

  “Roger, sir. Take him out as soon as you can. Don’t worry about me.”

  Thor laughed out loud. “Oh, don’t worry about that — you’ll get your chance.” Thor kicked in the afterburner for a moment as well, getting a head start on his climb. It was important not to let the Fencer gain too much altitude on him. While the aircraft were relatively equally matched in terms of endurance and performance, there was no time for a long drawn-out game as each one sought the advantage. No, this needed to be fast and brutal. There were simply too many Chinese to waste time.

  As the Fencer headed for altitude, Thor backed off slightly and let him get ahead, then converted his upward motion into a sharp, gut-wrenching turn. Then he continued to ascend, staying on the outside of the Fencer’s path and waiting for the breakaway. “Go north of us, Archer,” Thor called out, already figuring out the geometries in his mind. “Cut him off if he tries to break out of this.”

  The old laws of gravity applied to fighters just as surely as they did to the apple that fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. What goes up, must come down, and an aircraft was no exception to the inevitable rule. Oh, sure, she might go up faster than usual, but coming down was going to be a bitch.

  “Thor, I got a Fitter on my ass — he’s got me locked.” Archer’s voice was a little higher than normal, betraying worries. “I’m heading back toward you. Pull him off if you can!”

  “Roger — I’ll keep an eye on his buddy as well.” Thor broadened the arc of his turn slightly, gained a visual on Archer, and saw the Fitter on his tail. As they closed range on him, he was immediately faced with a decision: wait for his designated contact to come back down within range or turn away from this engagement and chase the Fitter on Archer’s tale.

  There was a good chance that Archer could handle the other aircraft himself; it was simply a matter of driving him into the vertical game, then waiting for him to make a mistake. But if Thor broke off from his current target, there was every chance the Fencer would slide back in behind the MiG and reverse exactly the scenario Thor had had in mind for him.

  But I know what I’m doing. Archer’s the new kid on the block. I better buster down after him.

  “Let’s give him a little taste of metal to keep him honest,” Thor muttered. He designated the target, waited for tone, and toggled off a missile at it. He felt the Hornet jolt slightly as the massive weapons leaped off his wing and headed for altitude. “That’ll keep him busy for awhile.”

  As Thor shed some altitude, he kept a visual on Archer. His wingman’s situation was clearly becoming increasingly desperate. Archer was weaving and bobbing around in the sky, but the Fitter seemed to anticipate his every move. Archer had him slightly off angle now, and Thor knew that the other pilot was waiting for the perfect shot up Archer’s tailpipes. That was the advantage of having numbers in your favor — you could afford to wait to take the shot, gang up on a poor defenseless Hornet. Well, it wasn’t going to happen that way, not on Thor’s watch.

  Thor peeled off altitude quickly now, descending like a plummeting rock, the sleek, aerodynamic lines of the Hornet adding to his acceleration. He aimed directly for the Fitter, not wasting any time on the niceties of aerodynamics. To an outsider, it would look as though Thor intended to simply forget the missiles and ram the other aircraft out of the sky.

  “He’s got me, he’s got me,” Archer howled, his voice anguished. “Jesus, Thor, I can’t shake him.”

  “On my mark, break hard to the left,” Thor said. “Three seconds, now. Two, one, mark! Break left, break left!”

  Archer kicked his Hornet into a steep left turn, so hard and sudden it seemed that he would surely stall. He immediately dropped his nose down to allow the aircraft to gain speed. Thor engaged his nose gun, and stitched a line of rounds down the Fitter’s side. Fluid spurted immediately, whether from hydraulics lines or fuel tanks, Thor couldn’t tell. The Fitter departed controlled flight for a moment and lost the advantage of position he’d had on Archer. Archer whipped his Hornet over and around, falling neatly in behind the Fitter in a textbook demonstration of aerial combat tactics.

  “All yours, buddy,” Thor sang out as he pulled away from them and grabbed for altitude. “I got some unfinished business up above.”

  A short touch of afterburner quickly eased the Hornet’s objection to simultaneously turning, ascending and maintaining airspeed. The throaty roar sounded like the purr of a hungry lion.

  Just as the Hornet reached sixty degrees nose up, silver and black flashed below Thor, a streak of aircraft moving past him in afterburner. The Fencer, the one who’d evaded the trap he and Archer had in mind. As soon as the Fencer cleared Thor’s gun engagement range, it pulled up into a hard climb, darting ahead of Thor.

  “So you want it like that, huh?” Thor kicked the afterburner back in and executed a corkscrewing maneuver that danced the Hornet across the sky until it was directly below the climbing Fencer. He then converted all of his motion into a climb, and kept pace, watching for the Fencer to heel over at the top of his arc or to peel out of the climb and entice him into a horizontal game.

  “Splash one Fitter!” he heard Archer cry over tactical. “Hang on, Thor, I’m on my way!”

  “Roger.” What’s the big hurry, junior? I think I can manage to—

  Suddenly, Thor saw the reason for Archer’s concern. Three Fencers had broken away from the fur ball and had evidently decided that Thor’s Hornet would be their next project.

  Shit! I fell for it! The lead Fencer above him had been no more than a distracter, and while Thor’s attention was focused on it and Archer’s situation, the air immediately to his south had filled up with bogies. Above him, the lead Fencer, its diversionary role over, rolled out of the climb and streaked off to the north.

  “Got tone, got tone — break right!” Archer’s voice snapped. Without hesitating, Thor slammed his Hornet into a hard roll to the right, holding the roll as he lost altitude and tried to swing in high on Archer. Two AMRAAMS cluttered the air around him, and for one heart-stopping moment, Thor thought they’d locked on him. He was now at the same altitude as the pursuing Fencers, but descending, while the Fencers were just now rolling out to follow. Their orderly pursuit shattered into chaos as they realized that there were missiles inbound, and they muddied the air with chaff and flares.

  Too late. The AMRAAM knew better. After wild, last-ditch spirals in an attempt to shake the missiles’ locks, two of the Fencers exploded into flames.

  “That’s better,” Archer said, hot satisfaction in his voice. “That’s lots better.”

  “One on one,” Thor said. “Our friend in high station is headed back down.” The original Fencer seemed brighter on Thor’s HUD than any of the other targets. That bastard’s mine.

  “I’m on him!” Archer shouted, giving chase on the remaining Fencer. Archer snapped hard to the right and caught the last of the group of three with a short burst from his nose gun. The Fencer spouted long streamers of red hydraulic fluid and oil from the forward part of its fuselage. The volatile fluids snaked into the screaming turbines, and it was all over. They immediately ignited, and within moments, the aircraft exploded into shards of metal and gobbets of flesh.

  “Mine!” shouted Thor, and peeled off toward his target. The remaining Fencer evidently had reassessed his tactical position and had come to the same conclusion that Thor had: it sucked. Without the other three Fencers to provide a diversion and killing force, facing two pissed off Hornets, discretion was the better part of valor. The Fencer turned and tried to run.

  “Not so fast, you bastard!” Thor said. He tucked his Hornet in behind the now desperately weaving and bobbing Fencer. It was as though he could read the other pilot’s mind and anticipate his every move. It was an equal match of skill and capabilities, and for just a second Thor was tempted to let it play out, to harry the now-panicked Fencer like a cat playing with
a mouse.

  Too many other targets. Thor toggled off a Sidewinder and watched the heat-seeker slide up to kiss the Fencer’s exhaust. He cut hard to the left, just in time to clear the resulting explosion.

  As he turned back into the fray, waiting for his next target, Thor felt a momentary flash of… what? Embarrassment? Shame? There was no point in playing with another pilot who was as good as dead. It was Thor’s job to kill them, not to like killing them. He should take personal satisfaction in his own skill, not in the death of another. Because that’s what he hoped he’d get from a bogie if their positions were ever reversed: a quick kill.

  “Hornet one zero six, bogies at your three o’clock, high,” the AWACS rapped out, identifying Thor’s next targets. “Number, three. Engage at will.”

  Archer glided in to form up on Thor’s wing, and the two turned to meet their next set of foolhardy Fencers and Fitters who thought they could mess with the United States Marine Corps.

  Tomcat 203

  2301 local (GMT +8)

  Even though he would never admit it, Bird Dog’s greatest strength as a fighter pilot was his ability to do math. Not simple addition and subtraction, although Bird Dog himself would have pointed out that his sole purpose in life was to subtract enemy aircraft from the correlation of forces. And while that was indeed the end result, it was not what kept him alive.

  Bird Dog’s ability to do math had very little to do with numbers and everything to do with spatial relationships. Some part of his cerebrum was able to instantly calculate vectors, angles and even do the calculus necessary to determine exactly where a given aircraft with X amount of acceleration and Y amount of increasing drag would end up in relation to his own aircraft. It also measured with incredible precision the distance between objects, and that ability had allowed him to slide in between two objects — say, a rock and a hard place, or a cliff and another aircraft — when other pilots might have thought twice about it. Bird Dog’s mathematical ability was coupled directly to his eyes and bypassed his consciousness.

  Now, that part of Bird Dog’s mind was assessing the air in front of him and correlating it with his HUD as well as the actual count of enemy aircraft downed as tallied by the exultant cries of the other pilots over tactical. It processed the data, compared it with the briefing he’d had just as he launched, and came to an ominous conclusion: there was an aircraft missing. Not an American aircraft, no. He knew where all those were, and he didn’t question the fact that he did. No, the conclusion that surfaced in his mind, supported by a host of highly analytical processes that Bird Dog was never conscious of was that there was a Chinese aircraft missing from the tally.

  Could someone have splashed it and been squelched on tactical? No, he hadn’t heard a partial report cut off by static or any other indication that someone had gotten down and dirty and not been able to tell anyone about it.

  Maybe the missile barrage took out an additional aircraft early on and someone had screwed up the count? No. While he couldn’t have told anyone why he knew that was not so, he knew that was not the answer. He’d seen the distant specks of black that indicated an aircraft and a missile simultaneously trying to occupy the same airspace, and the registers in his mind had automatically toted up the numbers.

  But if there was one missing, where was it? Why wasn’t it on his radar? And why wasn’t anyone else worried about it?

  Bird Dog toggled his ICS. “Music, what were you saying about the count? You know, what the cruiser said and how many fireballs you saw?”

  “It’s off. Or at least I think it is. The cruiser reported thirteen kills and there — well, I could have been mistaken I guess.”

  “No. What?”

  “I only counted twelve fireballs.”

  Bird Dog thought for just a second, then said, “We gotta find that other aircraft, Music. It’s out there somewhere. I don’t know why nobody else sees it or is worried about it, but for whatever reason, we’re the only ones who know something’s wrong.”

  “Why don’t we see it?” Music asked, his words coming in hard grunts as Bird Dog kicked the Tomcat into a steep climb, ignoring the Hawkeye’s vector guidance. “They don’t have stealth, do they?”

  “Naw, not that we know about. They could, I guess. But then we wouldn’t have the original count right, would we?”

  “So where is it?”

  The answer to most problems and questions in the air is: altitude. Altitude buys a pilot time, time to sort out exactly what’s gone wrong, time to find some configuration of speed and control surfaces that will convince an aircraft to keep flying, and, in the very worst of circumstances, time to make sure somebody knows exactly where he’s punching out. So, faced with the problem of a missing enemy fighter, Bird Dog figured that altitude was the least likely thing to hurt him.

  “How can you lose a fighter?” Bird Dog asked, trying to list the options. “Outside of range, maybe. If it’s not stealth and nobody’s holding it, then where is it? Turned tail and gone home? No, we would have seen it depart the pattern. It can’t be out of range of every Tomcat and the Hawkeye. So it’s in range somewhere. If we were over land, it’d be behind a hill or something, but we’re—shit! Music, that’s it! It’s on the deck somewhere, down so low we’re losing it in the sea state! That’s got to be it!”

  “He’s crazy, then,” Music said flatly. “Not in sea state five.”

  “Yeah, crazy. Or very, very good.” Bird Dog flipped over to tactical. “U.S., you got a problem. You got a sea-skimming Fencer or Fitter inbound, somebody heading in for you just barely clearing the waves. You got anything that would correlate with that?”

  “Bird Dog, you gotta be kidding,” the Hawkeye broke in. “There’s nobody down that low.”

  “Yeah? Count it again, buddy. Add up what came in, what’s gone down, and what’s in the air now. Then you tell me.” Bird Dog waited impatiently for a few seconds, then rolled the Tomcat over inverted to get a better look at the surface of the ocean. “You watching for him, Music?”

  “I’m trying not to puke, Bird Dog.”

  “You puke on the canopy now and I’ll punch you out,” Bird Dog threatened. “I swear to god I will.”

  “Wait!” Music said, forgetting his nausea in the rush of adrenaline spiking through his veins. “There — your dot, Bird Dog!”

  “That ain’t a dot, that’s a—shit, there it is! U.S., I got a visual. Engaging. Fastball, you’re on your own for a few miles while I nail this Fencer playing hovercraft.”

  Rat spoke up then. “Bird Dog, we should take high station on you.”

  “Leave him alone,” Fastball snapped. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “I just think—”

  “Then don’t. Not about flying.”

  Music listened to the argument between pilot and RIO spill over the airwaves, desperately hoping that Rat would win this one. But Fastball had the ultimate veto authority over any plan about where the aircraft should go. It wasn’t like Rat had controls in the back seat.

  “Talley-ho!” Bird Dog shouted, putting the Tomcat into a steep dive, so steep that Music felt the gray creep in around the edges of his vision. “Come on, Music, let’s nail this bastard!”

  Tomcat 209

  2305 local (GMT +8)

  “He’s your lead, Fastball. You don’t let your lead wander off on his own,” Rat said coldly.

  “It ever occur to you that we’re a little outnumbered up here, Rat?” Fastball shot back. “Bird Dog knows what he’s doing. We can do more good up here, taking out a few more of these Fencers while he’s cleaning up that little mess down below. By the time he gets back up to altitude, we’ll probably have another six kills under our belt.”

  “Is that what this is about? Getting more kills than Bird Dog?”

  “No! That’s not it at all! What, you think you’re not good enough to get us six more kills with the gas we’ve got left?”

  “Bullshit. That’s not the point.”

  “He doesn’t want bac
kup,” Fastball snapped.

  “Like you don’t want an RIO?” she asked.

  There was a moment of silence. Rat listened to the progress of the air battle around them, to the other pilots calling out their kill counts, their next targets — and, occasionally, a curse, followed by a Mayday as an American was overwhelmed by the attackers. She knew Fastball wanted to be in the thick of it, knew how hard it was for him to turn away from the fun ball and do what was right. It was a choice she couldn’t force him to make.

  The aircraft suddenly dropped out from under her, throwing her hard against her ejection harness. “Okay, okay,” Fastball said. “He shouldn’t be going down on his own, should he? I know that, you know that. But it’s Bird Dog, Rat, and he’s going to be one pissed-off pilot when we get back to the boat, us heading down to back him up when he says he doesn’t need it. You know how he is.”

  “Yeah, I do. He’s a whole lot like you,” Rat said softly.

  Tomcat 203

  2310 local (GMT +8)

  “He’s only four miles from the carrier,” Music said, his face buried in the radar hood. If he could just get the right resolution, maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to get a radar lock on the target. Without radar contact, he had no way to target the missile.

  “A little more than that,” Bird Dog said, not really consciously marking off the miles, but knowing it was true anyway. “We got time.”

  “Not much.” Hell, where is he? He’s got to be in here somewhere. But it’s all static, all reflections off the waves — he must be suicidal to be that low in this sea state! But they all are, aren’t they? Their pilots, ours. Bird Dog’s going down there to find him, as much to prove that he can do anything a Fencer can do better, longer and harder than anything else. And I’m not going to like it one little bit — no, I’m not.

  As Music tried every trick he knew to pull the contact out of the clutter, he suddenly realized with a gut-wrenching sense of relief that this was his last combat flight. He knew how RIOs felt about pilots, how they all bitched about the maniacs sitting in the front seat, and he’d chimed in, trying to sound exactly like them, but knowing at some level that he was far more serious about it. RIOs bitched to let off steam, to hide the fear. But for Music, it went far deeper than that.