Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  Another glance at Rita, who was turning with him and closing.

  She’s a good stick. Don’t worry about her. Fly your own plane.

  When Rita was stabilized behind him and out to the right side, Jake began looking at the ground. The base was small by U.S. standards, the buildings grouped tightly together, probably to keep everything within walking distance. Surrounding it were miles of forests.

  There was the telephone line leading off, and there by the road intersection, wasn’t that some kind of junction box mounted on that pole?

  He reversed his turn, and when the plane stabilized, reached for the master armament switch. He lifted it. There was no locking collar like U.S. planes possessed. Now the gun switch.

  As he turned it on he felt a thud. That would be the gun charging. He hoped. Bombsight on, reticle lit. What had that Russian pilot said? Ten mils deflection for the gun? He twisted the adjustment knob.

  Now into a left turn, looking again for the road intersection. It was several miles away off the left wing, slightly behind it, so he turned steeply to get the nose around.

  More power in the turn, as the wings come level back off some. This will be a nice slow pass, plenty of time to aim.

  He was too fast. Throttles back more, nose down a smidgen and trim.

  He concentrated on finding the pole in the bombsight.

  Small target. Too goddamn small…

  There!

  Damn, he was too close. He slewed the nose a tad with rudder, adjusted the nose attitude with stick, then quickly centered the rudder and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun vibrated hard and he saw the muzzle flashes through the sight. At night the muzzle blast would be blinding.

  Now off the trigger and stick back smartly. With the nose well above the horizon he rolled the plane ninety degrees and looked. Careful, boy, you’re carrying a hell of a load low and slow!

  Pole and box down!

  Level the wings…raise the nose. More power. Safely away from the ground, let’s turn on course 130.

  He craned his neck. Rita was back there, stepped out and up. As he watched she eased in a little closer and gave him a thumbs up.

  Okay!

  Airborne and still alive. Okay!

  The two Su-25s soon left the last of the forest behind and found themselves over the steppe. Jake had descended to about two hundred feet above the rolling terrain, which meant that he was constantly jockeying the stick and adjusting the trim as the plane rose and fell with the land contours. Below them the grass spread from horizon to horizon, broken only by stands of wheat and an occasional dirt road.

  This broad valley of the Volga had been peopled since ancient times, yet now the fallout would deny it to future generations. The enormity of the Serdobsk tragedy intruded into Jake’s thoughts even as he worked on holding course and altitude.

  Farther south, below the radioactive fallout zone, stood the city of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, the city built in the 1920s and 1930s as a civic monument to the new Communist way of life. In the last half of 1942 it had been the site of the stupendous battle with the German army that marked the turning of the Nazi tide. The battle destroyed Stalin’s city, of course, and nearly everyone in it. When the Red Army counterattacked and trapped the German Sixth Army, Hitler sacrificed over a quarter million men rather than give up that pile of rubble. Stalingrad, that shattered monument to a generation sacrificed in a titanic struggle between two absolute despots, was rebuilt after the war. Soon the radioactive particles and mud carried by the Volga would make the city a deathtrap once again.

  He had loved this type of flying when he was younger. Racing low across open country, working the stick and throttles to make the airplane dance gracefully, sinuously, in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the land—this was flying as it ought to be, a harmonious mating of man, machine and nature.

  Today the magic of it never occurred to him. He was thinking of shattered dreams and tyrants and a people poisoned as his eyes scanned the terrain ahead and occasionally flicked across the instrument panel. On one of these instrument checks his eye was caught by a light, a small bulb that flicked on, then off, then on again.

  He looked carefully, identifying it. He was being painted by a fighter’s radar. Perhaps they had not located him yet, but the fighters were looking.

  Damn!

  He and Rita were flying two subsonic attack planes, and somewhere up there above the clouds fighters were stalking them. Oh, yes, they’re after us. Jake Grafton assumed the worst. That was the only way to stay alive. Automatically he tugged at the straps that held him to the ejection seat, tightening them still more.

  Without warning the warplanes crested a low rise and the great river lay before them, with clouds and swatches of blue sky reflecting on its wide, brown surface.

  The planes cleared a power line and then shot out over the water. The sky reflections on the water drew Jake Grafton’s eyes upward. He scanned, and saw contrails…two pairs. In seconds the eastern shore swept under the nose and Jake Grafton eased into a gentle climb to stay just above the rising land.

  Contrails in pairs…they could only be made by fighters in formation. Fighters. Looking for…?

  This eastern shore of the Volga was heavily eroded into corrugated ravines and streambeds. Jake Grafton picked a decently large creek and dropped into the valley it had cut flowing west toward the river.

  He was down here in the weeds hiding from radars that sat on the surface of the earth. These radars would provide vectors to the fighter-interceptors when they found him. If he stayed below their horizon, they couldn’t.

  But fighters aloft—the new generation of Soviet fighters possessed pulse Doppler radars that allowed them to look down and identify a moving target amid the ground clutter. And the new missiles would track a target in the ground clutter. “Look-down, shoot-down” the techno-speak guys called it.

  The light blinked on and off several more times.

  What’s the worst airplane that could be up there? The MiG-29? It was sure deadly enough, but no. The absolute worst plane that he could think of was another masterpiece from the design bureau of Pavel Sukhoi, the Su-27 Flanker. Designed in the mid-1980s to achieve air superiority against the best planes the West possessed, the Su-27 was thought by some Western analysts to be able to outfly the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18, plus every fighter the French, British and Germans have—all of them.

  If those were Flankers up there, they were probably carrying AA-10 “fire and forget” antiaircraft missiles with active radar seekers.

  And a missile could be on its way down right now.

  He lowered the nose and dropped to fifty feet above the rocky creek. Rita was still with him, in tighter now, only forty or so feet away and a little behind.

  The warning light was on steady.

  They’ve found us. Missile to follow. Or a lot of missiles.

  The land was a rough wilderness devoid of trees. Rock outcroppings, meandering creeks in rocky draws, sandy places—Jake Grafton was working hard holding the attack plane in the draw. Several times he couldn’t make a turn and lifted the plane across the rim with only several feet of clearance, then banked hard and slipped the plane back into the draw.

  Vaguely he was aware that Rita had slipped into trail behind him where she could ride just above his wash.

  “We have fighters above us,” he told her on the radio.

  No response. Radio silence meant radio silence to Rita Moravia. If she heard—

  A flash on his left. He glanced over and saw a rising cloud of dirt and debris as it swept aft out of his field of vision. A missile impact!

  “They’re shooting,” he announced over the radio.

  He lifted the nose of the plane and cleared the little valley, then dropped the left wing. Throttles to the stop, stick back—the Gs tugged him down into the seat.

  Another flash, this time on his right side.

  Jesus, each Flanker can carry up to eight missiles! How many hav
e they fired?

  When he had completed about ninety degrees of turn he rolled wings level, eased the nose back down. He was running only twenty feet above the high places in the lumpy ground, which gave him a tremendous sensation of speed. The warning light was blinking.

  A pulse Doppler radar identified moving targets by detecting their movement toward or away from the radar. If he could fly a course perpendicular to the searching fighter, its radar could not detect him. When it lost him the searching fighter would probably turn to alter the angles and try to acquire him again. Still…

  Trying to ensure he didn’t inadvertently feed in forward stick, he craned his head to see aft.

  The missiles will be coming at three or four times the speed of sound, fool! You’ll never see them. But you will kill yourself looking for them.

  He concentrated on the flying. After twenty seconds on this heading, he rolled into a right turn, then leveled the wings after ninety degrees of heading change. Back on his original course, southeast. The warning light went out.

  A small miracle. A temporary reprieve. Jake Grafton was under no illusions—he was flying a plane designed to destroy tanks and provide close-air support to friendly troops: those Sukhoi masterpieces above were designed to shoot down other airplanes. The Russians couldn’t make a decent razor or even an adequate toothbrush, but by God they could build great airplanes when they put their minds to it.

  He looked for Rita.

  Not there.

  Did they get her?

  How much fuel have those guys got? He and Rita were late getting off. Maybe the fighters were already airborne and are running out of fuel. There’s a maybe to pray for.

  The warning light was blinking again.

  He rolled into enough of a turn that he could look behind him. Visibility was truly terrible out of this Soviet jet! Clear right. He rolled left and twisted his body around. Uh-oh. Up there at the base of that cloud, coming down like an angel on his way to hell—a fighter!

  And Jake was still toting ten 250-kilogram bombs, about 5,500 pounds of absolutely dead weight. He was going to have to get rid of the bombs or he would be meat on the table for the fighters.

  He turned hard left to force the fighter into an overshoot, make him squirt out to the right side because he couldn’t hack the turn. As he did so, Jake worked the armament switches. In a strange plane he had to look to check each one, all the time pulling Gs and hoping the fighter was doing what he wanted him to do.

  He couldn’t just pickle off the bombs, not this close to the earth: they would hit the ground almost under him and might detonate. If they did the shrapnel and blast would destroy his aircraft, and him with it.

  When he had the switches set, he rolled hard right and stabilized in an eighty-degree bank, four-G turn. Then he pickled the bombs. The G tossed them out to the left. The instant the last one went he tightened the turn to six Gs.

  Where was that fighter?

  There—crossing over above in an overshoot.

  And Lord, there’s another one at eleven o’clock honking around hard.

  These guys weren’t first team—they came in too fast and scissored the wrong way. Pray that they don’t learn too fast!

  He checked the compass. He was headed southwest. He brought the nose more west and punched the nose down. He wanted to run right in the weeds until he found those ravines and valleys that led down to the Volga. If he could just hide in those…

  The fighter high on his left was pulling so hard vapor was condensing from the air passing over his wing—he was leaving a cloud behind each wing. Damn—it was an Su-27! He had to be in afterburner. That guy was aggressive enough, no question about that.

  And the other one—Jake twisted his body halfway around, risked flying into the ground just to get a glimpse—at six-thirty, thirty degrees angle off, nose already down, accelerating.

  How much fuel do these clowns have?

  The rough ground ahead was his only chance. These guys could go faster, accelerate faster, and probably out-maneuver him. A stand-up dogfight with two of them would be suicide.

  Jake was down to fifteen or twenty feet above the ground now, going flat-out with the throttles against the stops, doing maybe five hundred knots—the damn airspeed indicator was calibrated in kilometers and only God knew the conversion factor.

  He was too close to the ground to look behind him. In fact, he was too close to the ground—he was sure he had hit a rocky outcrop but somehow managed to avoid it by inches. To kiss the ground at this speed would be certain death, yet his only hope to stay alive was to fly lower than those two fighter pilots would or could.

  There—on the right! The ground dropped away into an eroded valley.

  Quick as thought he had the stick over and was skimming down into the valley. Turn hard—pull, pull, pull!—to keep from hitting the sides that rose steeply above him.

  Well into the winding valley, Jake Grafton eased over to the left side as he pulled the power levers back and deployed the speed brakes.

  His speed bled off quickly. If one of those guys came into the gorge after him…

  Cannon shells went zipping across the top of his right wing like orange pumpkins.

  The right wing fell without conscious thought. Speed brakes in. Throttle full forward.

  The fighter slid by on his right side, the pilot climbing and trying to slow.

  As the sleek fighter went in front Jake pulled up hard and squeezed the trigger on the 30mm cannon. No time to aim! Just point and shoot!

  The cannon throbbed and Jake hosed the shells in front of the twisting fighter, which flew into them. A piece came off the Su-27. Fuel venting aft. A flash.

  Jake released the trigger and rolled away as the fighter exploded.

  Where was the wingman?

  A blind turn to the right coming up. Jake pulled hard to make it and got the nose coming up. As he went around the turn he climbed the side of the little valley and popped out on top. He swiveled his head.

  There! Coming in from the left side, shooting.

  Nose down hard. Back toward the valley.

  The second fighter was going too fast and overshot. That’s the problem when you’ve got a really fast plane: you want to use all that speed the designers gave you and sometimes it works against you.

  This guy pulled Gs like he had a steel asshole. The fighter tried to turn a square corner, the down wing quit flying and the plane flipped inverted. In the blink of an eye the Su-27 hit the ground and exploded.

  Jake got into the valley, retarded his throttles to about 90 percent RPM and stayed there.

  He examined the electronic warfare panel. Goddamn light still blinking.

  He rammed his left fingers under his helmet visor and swabbed the sweat away from his eyes.

  They would find him again. How many more? He had seen four up there when he and Rita crossed the Volga a lifetime ago. Two were down, two still flying, perhaps off chasing Rita, perhaps now up there somewhere in the great sky above examining their track-while-scan radars and looking for him, perhaps calling on the radio to their comrades who would never answer again.

  Could they find him in this valley, which was fast ceasing to be a steep gorge and was spreading out as the creek flowed its last few miles to the Volga?

  There—on the left—another valley coming into this one. Jake dropped the left wing and pulled the plane around. He went back up the new valley, still seeking shelter as the EW light blinked intermittently.

  Jake Grafton had flown his first combat mission in Vietnam over twenty years ago. He knew the hard, inescapable truth: in aerial combat the first pilot to make a mistake is the one who dies. The two men who had died in the Sukhoi fighters had each made fatal mistakes. The first man pursued too fast, so he had overshot when his victim unexpectedly slowed down. The second was overanxious, had pulled too hard and departed controlled flight too close to the ground. He was dead a half-second later, probably before he even realized what was happening.

 
; The next time Jake might not be so lucky.

  He swabbed more sweat from his eyes as he examined the fuel gauge. Still plenty. Like the A-6, the engines of this Russian attack bird were easy on fuel and the plane carried a lot of it. That was the only advantage he possessed when compared to the fighters, which sacrificed fuel economy to gain speed and range to gain maneuverability.

  Where were the other two fighters? Chasing Rita?

  A flicker of concern for Rita crossed his mind, but he forced it away. Rita was a professional, she had been an F/A-18 Hornet instructor pilot for two years before she went to test pilot school—she could take care of herself.

  He hoped.

  No time to worry about her. If only he knew where she was…

  They came in shooting from the rear quarter on each side. His first inkling that they were there was the sight of glowing cannon shells passing just in front of the nose, from left to right. He rammed the stick forward and his peripheral vision picked up shells passing just above the canopy from right to left. Just streaks really, but he knew exactly what they were.

  The negative G lasted only for an instant before he had to jerk the stick back to avoid going into the ground. But it was enough. Even as he fought the positive G he saw the pair of fighters flash across above his head and arc tightly away for another pass.

  He wouldn’t survive another pass.

  Slamming the throttles full forward, he kept the nose coming up and topped the cliff on the right side of the valley, then ruddered the nose down. He pulled hard in a tight turn, trying to turn inside the faster fighter.

  And the fighter pilot wasn’t looking!

  The idiot had his head in the cockpit—he was worried about flying into the ground. That was a serious threat this close to the earth, the brown land whirling by at tremendous speed just scant feet below the right wingtip.

  The nose of Jake’s plane passed the fighter and he began to pull ahead. Range closing as the aspect angle changed. The fighter was turning into Jake. Angle off about seventy degrees, now eighty, ninety as the two planes flashed toward each other. Jake eased out some bank. A full deflection shot—

  Now!