Hawk-3’s warning systems picked up the 57E6 instantly as it hissed from its launch tube and hurtled toward them.
“Missile launch…!” Hauser cried out a warning as he watched his screens. “Bearing two-nine-five and closing fast!” He rechecked his readings even as Schwarz began evasive manoeuvres and threw the Su-30 toward the safety of low level once more, flares and chaff cascading from the Flanker’s tail in an attempt to fool its automated pursuer. “Eight thousand metres’ range my arse…!”
With a flight time of just six seconds to target, the missile was already perilously close as Schwarz pushed the Sukhoi’s nose down and it bottomed out again just fifty metres above the ground, chaff and flares still pouring in torrents from the aircraft’s tail. Geography alone saved Hawk-3 in the end as it banked sharply to the south and momentarily slipped behind a group of low, rolling hills that blocked the path of the approaching missile.
With no active systems of its own and controlled by the launch vehicle’s radars, which still had a clear, clean lock on the Flanker, the 57E6 continued on its unwavering intercept course, unable to recognise that solid earth now lay directly between it and its intended target. It ploughed straight into the ground near the crest of one of the hills, just a hundred metres short of the Su-30 as the jet made good its narrow escape.
The missile exploded on impact, lighting up the sky and buffeting them with its shockwave as Schwarz kept to his southerly course. The Flanker finally left land behind seconds later and slipped out over the dark, fathomless waters of the North Sea once more, accelerating beyond the speed of sound as it returned to straight, level flight and again vanished from Hindsight’s search and tracking systems, this time for good.
“Did we get what we needed?” Schwarz enquired, breathless and tense.
“I…I think so…yes,” Hauser replied with growing certainty as he checked the readouts from the reconnaissance pod mounted below the aircraft’s belly.
“Well it’s all they’re going to get – that was close and it was as close as we’re getting unless they’re willing to let us shoot back!”
The Flanker swept across the featureless waters of Pentland Firth, south of Scapa Flow, and out across the Island of Stroma before making a wide, banking turn above the equally dark Scottish mainland. It was there they formed up once more with Hawk-4, the other remaining Su-30, which had been loitering to the east of the islands waiting for the opportunity to pounce in surprise upon any aircraft that might take off in pursuit of its colleague. They’d met with no success, and as the pair flew on across the blackness of the North Sea, they gave the Orkneys a wide berth before turning east once more and heading for the safety of the European Continent.
Jack Davies and Eileen Donelson were already approaching as the wail or air raid sirens began to wind down and Thorne and Trumbull climbed from the slit trench near the entrance to the Officer’s Mess in which they’d sought cover.
“Six-to-four, that was a recon flight…!” Davies snarled, out of breath as he reached Thorne’s side.
“Six-to-four on…!” Thorne replied, shaking his head. “No question at all. They just shot past at full throttle and fucked off again without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’. Christ, our advanced warning was shithouse: if that’d been an attack run we’d all be fuckin’ toasted by now!”
“Lucky us then...!” The American pilot was unimpressed to say the least. “They’ll know what we’ve got here, now!”
“Not yet they won’t: only way they could do a recce at this time of night is with infra red or image intensifying. They won’t have any real idea until they get that shit processed and researched by experts at the other end. That’ll take at least an hour after touch down, maybe two, and I’d give it another hour before anyone in charge like Reuters gets the disseminated information.”
“A lot of good that does us…!”
“Maybe – maybe not…” Thorne mused, going suddenly silent. Davies fixed him with an expectant stare: it wasn’t the reply the Texan had expected. Thorne purposefully made them wait for a moment as he thought things out before throwing a glance at Eileen.
“After the smacking Reuters got last night losing the first two Flankers, would you send another one this way without AWACS coverage?”
“Not likely…” Donelson replied in an instant. “No pilot with any common sense would be happy about going in blind: if I were that plane’s aircrew I’d want to be pretty certain we weren’t running BARCAP over the base prior to making any over flight. We haven’t had time to get our passive ELINT receivers properly calibrated yet, but I’d be willing to bet the systems on the fighters would be able to pick something up if they are out there.”
“My thinking too…” Thorne agreed. “I’ll give you any money you like, that Mainstay they picked up from the Ruskies is in the air right now and has this whole place under surveillance.” He turned his attention back to Davies. “The range of those ‘Vega’ systems is no better than 250 klicks – less than that if they want any kind of decent detail. What’s a Flanker’s operational radius?”
“‘Bout four hundred miles at low altitude, give or take…around 650 kilometres.” Davies answered after a moment’s thought. “They’ll probably be carrying extra tanks ‘though.”
“…And they’d have come in at full bore all the way! You know how much fuel those fuckers use on afterburner!” He indicated the Raptor parked on its distant hardstand with a cocked thumb. “Most people don’t have the benefit of ‘supercruise’! That Flanker would’ve been loaded with recon shit and missiles up to the eyeballs too if they had any sense, so I doubt those pricks will have much fuel left by the time they get back over the Channel, meaning...”
“...Meaning...” Davies continued, catching the gist of Thorne’s argument “...there might be an AWACS up there all on its lonesome…!”
Thorne gave a conspiratorial wink. “...And they won’t know what we’ve got here for at least two hours! That Mainstay they’re using is at least fifteen years old and it’ll be looking down. What do you give its chances of picking up a Raptor?” The question was close enough to rhetoric to not require any real answer, and Davies required no more incentive.
“I’m gone!” He stated, and turning he bellowed orders at the darkness in the direction of the F-22. “Duty sergeant: get that fuckin’ Raptor pre-flighted and fired up now!”
“You want me to run ‘de-fence’?” Thorne inquired excitedly as Davies began to move.
“No point, buddy…with two of us up there, we double the chance of being detected, and the moment they even sniff an enemy fighter headed their way they’ll hightail it back to Krautland so damn fast they’ll leave a hole in the air!” The Texan grinned, and Thorne saw the expected friendly insult coming. “Besides – you’d only slow me down! I’ve got ‘supercruise’, remember? Just get those runway lights on!”
“You got it!” Thorne snapped, breaking into a headlong run for the tower with Trumbull and the others in tow.
Toward the end of the Realtime 1970s, the Soviet Union developed an aircraft known as the Beriev A-50 Shmel (‘Bumblebee’, also known by the NATO reporting name ‘Mainstay’). This four-engined jet was an AWACS aircraft, the American-originated acronym meaning Airborne Warning And Control System. Based on the Ilyushin IL-76 ‘Candid’ commercial airframe, a huge rotodome nine metres in diameter containing a powerful radar transceiver was fitted to its back. Replacing the obsolete Tupolev Tu-126 ‘Moss’ in service it became, no pun intended, the mainstay of Russian airborne early warning for many years. Capable of controlling and maintaining surveillance over tens of thousands of square kilometres of battlefield and detecting aircraft at ranges up to 250 kilometres (dependent on the conditions), these A-50s were a huge benefit to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.
The AWACS aircraft the New Eagles had purchased anonymously from the Russian Air Force, via the Chechen mafia, was an original model A-50 that’d been state-of-the-art in the late 1970s. For
ty years later however, it had long been replaced in Russian service by more advanced, upgraded models. Acquiring that aircraft had been difficult enough, and it had proven impossible to locate a later model as the New Eagles would’ve preferred. As a result, although the aircraft they knew of as ‘Sentry’ was more than capable of dealing with day to day operations for the Wehrmacht against conventional, contemporary enemies on a 1940s battlefield, its relative lack of advanced avionics by 21st century standards was to eventually lead to its demise – although Jack Davies and his interceptor themselves also played no small part.
Jack Davies had travelled almost three hundred kilometres in the ten minutes since the F-22 had lifted off from the runway at Scapa Flow. The Raptor was capable of ‘supercruise’, a feature that meant it was powerful enough to travel at supersonic speed without the use of afterburner, making it exceptionally fuel-efficient. The aircraft’s comprehensive sensor suite had detected and identified the radar emissions of the A-50 Mainstay within seconds of take off, and he’d turned onto an intercept course immediately. With support for the reconnaissance mission no longer required, the Beriev was heading home in a leisurely fashion at an altitude far lower than Davies, and as Thorne had suspected, the aircraft’s systems were indeed predominantly ‘looking down’ for any threats. Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been sufficient at the altitude they were flying. Unfortunately for the Beriev, the circumstances that night were far from normal.
Radar waves occasionally swept across the Raptor’s stealthy fuselage and wings, but the Raptor’s own avionics were able to tell Davies how likely (or unlikely) it’d be for any searching systems to detect the F-22 based on the strength of emissions and the angle at which they struck the aircraft. So far, nothing he was picking up even came close to returning a signal, and with both aircraft now just sixty kilometres apart, Davies cruised on at Mach 1.8, closing fast on the Mainstay at a rate of thirty kilometres per minute. The Raptor carried up to eight air-to-air missiles internally, six of which were radar-guided AIM-120 AMRAAMs. He could fire one or more of those from a range of 40-50 kilometres and be basically guaranteed a hit, but that’d mean going from passive to active radar tracking for a few moments while his missiles acquired their targets. If that happened, he’d be detected instantly and he wanted to retain the element of surprise in case one of the remaining Flankers came chasing after him.
His other option was to use one or both of the Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles he also carried, and as their tracking systems were entirely passive, he could lock them onto his prey without it ever knowing he was there. The only disadvantage was that he’d have to close to around fifteen kilometres of the Mainstay to launch…even closer to be certain of a kill. There was also some benefit however, in that the first warning the Mainstay would have was at the moment the missiles streaked his weapons bays, leaving just a few seconds to try to evade and to locate their target. Davies himself felt quite cool and calculating about the whole thing rather than feeling any tension or excitement. He was a fighter pilot, and had been for the entirety of his career: what he was doing was as simple and straight forward to him as any training mission.
As he drew to within twenty kilometres, his passive IR systems also picked up a second aircraft, one that wasn’t radiating any electronic emissions. At first, he thought it might be the second of the Flankers, but he soon dismissed that idea as the pair were flying in a formation far too close and slow for the newcomer to be a fighter jet. He could now also see distant operating lights on the dark horizon before him – a lot of them – and Davies couldn’t believe his good fortune as he realised what was going on. Ahead of him, the A-50 was carrying out an in-flight refuelling from an almost identical Ilyushin IL-78 tanker.
The IL-78 ‘Midas’ was another aircraft the New Eagles had picked up from the disorganised Russian Air Force via organised crime connections, and the pair of them together was a multiple target far too attractive to ignore, especially as the tanker aircraft was as strategically important as the Mainstay in what it could provide in terms of extending the range of the two remaining Su-30MKs. Without tanker support, the Sukhoi fighters would need to stage out of Norwegian bases rather than from Germany or France if they hoped to mount an attack against Scapa Flow, and even then they’d be at the extreme edge of their range and wouldn’t be able to carry as great a load of weapons.
The Raptor carried three separate internal weapons bays. The primary bay beneath its belly could carry 900kg of bombs or up to six AIM-120 AMRAAMs, while smaller bays mounted at the side of his air intakes carried a single AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range missile each. Davies launched both Sidewinders at a range of just six thousand metres as he entered into a shallow dive, his targets still flying at a substantially lower altitude. It was only as its side bay doors opened did the F-22 become visible to radar for perhaps a second or two, vanishing once more as the hatches snapped shut again and the integrity of the Raptor’s stealthy fuselage was once more intact. It would take the pair of missiles just eight seconds to span the distance between the two sets of approaching aircraft.
The A-50 Mainstay was a large aircraft with a length and wingspan of approximately fifty metres each, a maximum take off weight of 170 tonnes, and a crew of fifteen. It wasn’t a manoeuvrable aircraft at the best of times, and at that moment its pilot was having trouble just keeping it flying level. The Mainstay was a notoriously difficult creature to refuel and the buffeting created by turbulence from the huge radar rotodome on its back when flying in close formation with a tanker aircraft was severe in the extreme. The refuelling hose that stretched between the aircraft was now barely visible as a twinkling line between them, shining brightly in the multitude of operating lights mounted at the rear of the leading tanker and wandering lazily from side to side in its slipstream.
Inside the A-50, its systems operators were relaxed, bored and ready to stand down for the day. It took a few seconds even to register the sudden appearance of two missiles so close off their tail, accompanied by the equally sudden appearance and disappearance of a mysterious launch aircraft that refused to be identified. The remaining seconds that followed were barely enough to even cry a warning to the pilot to carry out evasive manoeuvres. It was nowhere near enough time to actually do anything about the deadly heat-seekers streaking toward them, yet almost by instinct, the flight commander followed procedure and ‘dumped’ the aircraft’s masses of stored information and a data signal transmitted instantly back to their home base at the speed of light in a coded, compressed burst.
The pair of Sidewinders flicked downward from above at the last moment, homing in on the heat of one of the lead aircraft’s four engines. Each detonated by proximity fuse in sequence, just five metres above the IL-78 tanker’s broad back and shoulder-mounted wings. Blast shockwaves and fragmentation ripped through the aircraft, devastating its upper wing surfaces and igniting the fuel within. A minor explosion severed that wing between the inboard and outboard engines and the amputated segment spiralling away as the mortally wounded tanker began to slowly roll in the opposite direction, out of control and pulling away from the A-50 behind it.
Flame poured in torrents from the remnants of the shattered wing as the IL-78 turned onto its back and Jack Davies hurtled past just three thousand metres to starboard. In another moment it was all over and the entire aircraft became a fireball as the rest of its huge reserve of unused jet fuel detonated in a single huge, blinding explosion. There was no possibility of evading or surviving the blast for the crew of the A-50 Mainstay, following so close on the tanker’s tail as it was, and it too was engulfed in fire as thousands of litres of jet fuel went up in an instant.
Even for Davies, a veteran of 20 years service including several tours of Iraq, it was the largest single explosion he’d ever seen. People walking on the Scottish coast watched it from the other side of the North Sea and thought it to be a falling star, as did many in Belgium and Northern France. As the F-22 turned back toward the north-west, flam
ing lumps of wreckage that had a moment before been two aircraft holding two dozen human beings began their long fall to Earth and the water below.
“Eyrie, this is Phoenix-One…do you read, over?”
“We read you loud and clear, Phoenix-One…” Thorne’s voice came back through his helmet speakers in an instant. “How are things…over?”
“Splash one Mainstay and tanker, Ground Control. I repeat: splash one Mainstay and tanker support. On my way home now…I’ll keep an eye out for any gatecrashers…over and out.” Davies pushed the Raptor back into supercruise and began his flight back to Scapa Flow at almost twice the speed of sound as the burning wreckage continued to fall.
Standing by the table beside Reuters and Müller, it was Schiller who became the first of the men in that Amiens briefing room to receive news of the destruction of the A-50 and IL-78 tanker, the phone call coming direct from their group commander at Wuppertal Air Base in the moments following receipt of the Beriev’s final data burst-transmission. The usable data they’d received wasn’t much, but it was enough to confirm some of what they’d suspected regarding the composition of the force that had arrived at Scapa Flow.
As he lowered the phone and returned it to its cradle, Schiller was actually surprised he wasn’t more affected by the news. He’d been dreading a call of exactly that kind and was expecting at any moment, as were they all, to hear of the destruction of Hawk-3 over Scapa Flow. Yet the Flanker that had all but flown into the veritable jaws of the enemy and back was safe and on its way home to base, yet the AWACS aircraft they knew as Sentry, which had been hundreds of kilometres away from any danger – or so it had seemed – had instead been lost with all hands along with their vitally-important tanker.
The destruction of the Mainstay and Midas were far greater losses for New Eagles in a strategic sense, but it now somehow almost came as an anti-climax. Schiller felt the eyes of the others upon him as they watched in nervous silence: the expression on his face was enough to suggest he’d received news they didn’t want to hear.
England Expects (Empires Lost) Page 23