The other aircraft joined us and we aligned in a wall formation spread at two-mile intervals across the sky. The night was dry, but a patchy overcast obscured the crescent moon. The ground below us was almost uniformly black. When night flying in Europe there were always the oranges, yellows and whites of house and street lights, and the dazzling glare of the massed lights of towns and cities.
Here there was not a light to be seen. The base was in darkness and none of the farms or settlements was lit. Lakes and creeks, plains and mountains were all invisible. We were flying blind, relying almost entirely on radar and data link. Only the instruments glowing a faint green in my cockpit told me which way up we were flying.
As we sped out towards the edge of the Exclusion Zone, information relayed by Fortress began to appear on my screen. Although the targets were still well outside our own radar coverage, I could see two sets of contacts, just crossing the jagged line of the Argentine mainland. Fortress had already designated them as hostile and instead of the usual letters they showed as arrowheads with a line projecting from them to show their vector.
‘Keep the channels clear,’ Noel said. ‘No chat.’
A message indicator flashed on the screen. Jane interrogated the system. ‘Contacts hostile, clear engage.’
‘No shit,’ I said. ‘Gate, gate, go!’ I shoved the throttles forward to the stops, feeling the instant response as the engine noise redoubled and the airspeed began to climb.
The radar on Byron Heights was scanning far out beyond the islands, west towards Argentina. Everything it could see was sent by Fortress over the data link. The two sets of images on the screen marched inexorably towards each other.
‘Update on contacts, Jane?’
‘We’re getting them now. Seventy miles, on the nose, still high-level.’
As our own radar picked them up, each contact was automatically entered into the Tempest’s computers and assigned an identification letter. Jane’s fingers worked overtime on the data system. ‘Raid resolution shows two formations, four aircraft each, all air defenders. There must be more of them out there somewhere.’
‘There are only two possibilities,’ I said. ‘Either they’re trying to wear us down and improve the odds for a dawn attack or—’
I was interrupted as the system flashed up another incoming message. ‘Texaco on station at 390123, for refuelling.’
‘Shit, that’s close,’ Jane said. ‘I didn’t think they’d risk Hercs this far out.’
‘They’ve got no choice. It’s shit or bust now. They’ve got to risk the lot to protect the airfield.’
We flew on in silence. ‘So what was the other possibility?’ she said.
‘That the Migs are either a diversion or top cover for a low-level attack – either bombers or more assault troops.’
‘If so, then where the hell are they?’
‘I wish I knew.’
The radio crackled again and Noel began the sort, giving each of us our priority targets.
The radar warner chimed. ‘Trace,’ Jane said. An Argentine jet was painting us with its radar, the prelude to a missile lock. Even as it was doing so, we were completing our own attack sequence.
The missile lock was made simultaneously by all five aircraft. A ‘T’ was superimposed on each hostile symbol as our jets locked to their designated targets. As the last ‘T’ appeared, I pulled the trigger. ‘Fox One. Fox One.’ The calls from the other jets, an echo of mine, came a split second later.
I imagined the sirens screaming in the Argentine jets as their radar warners picked up the lock. The missile leapt from the rail, its exhaust flaring across the sky. It shrank to a pinpoint and then vanished altogether as it accelerated to four times the speed of sound.
Almost at the same moment, our own radar warner began to shriek. ‘Spike, Spike,’ Jane yelled.
I had two choices. Our missile was away a few seconds before the Argentine countershot. I could hold the lock and maintain my present course. If the Mig was destroyed, the Argentine missile would lose its lock. It would fly on harmlessly until it ran out of propellant and crashed into the sea. But if our missile failed, or if a different Mig had targeted us, we would be dead in a matter of seconds.
I jerked the stick and turned tail in a blaze of afterburners. Even if the enemy missile held its lock, it would run out of fuel before it had closed the distance between us. It looked like running away, but holding the line when a missile was heading towards you was Russian roulette with a two-chamber gun. If the first bullet didn’t kill you, the second would.
Both sets of fighters began a danse macabre, advancing to fire a missile, then retreating before the counterpunch. Each time the two lines moved a little closer to each other. In daylight we would have moved rapidly from the long-range exchanges of radar-guided missiles to the close-quarter stuff: heat-seeking Sidewinders and guns.
At night that was impossible. Even if we’d been wearing night vision goggles, we couldn’t have made out the shapes of enemy – or our own – aircraft fast enough to take evasive action. The most likely consequence of a night dogfight was a mid-air collision.
I swung out in a wide arc to the south and climbed another five thousand feet through a cloud bank. As we advanced again, there was nothing from the warner as I sorted and locked my target, then sent another missile tearing across the sky. In the confusion of their own sort, the Argentines had either mis-targeted us or lost the radar picture altogether.
The range was too great to see the missile’s ferocious impact. The death of the Argentine jet – and probably its crew – was no more than a flicker on Jane’s radar screen. ‘Fox One the Fulcrum,’ she said. ‘One down, seven to go.’
A moment later I heard Shark’s voice shouting in triumph over the radio. The odds were now almost even, six against five. Then the Argentinians picked us up at last and the radar warner clamoured again. We were now dangerously close to the Migs; barely ten miles, a few seconds’ flying time at our closing speed of one thousand and four hundred miles an hour.
I threw the jet into another sharp turn, washing off some of our speed in the process. I pointed the nose down, grimacing with the effort of pushing against the G-force, to set us diving back through the cloud bank to regain speed and put some distance between ourselves and the enemy. At the bottom of the dive, I had to grind my teeth, fighting the greyout, and heard Jane grunting with the effort of doing the same. As I began to level the wings, the G-force dropped from me like a lead weight and the clamour of the radar warner began to fade.
We turned and advanced to fire another missile. With only one Skyflash remaining, it would be our last shot in the battle before returning to base to reload. I fired, held course for a couple of seconds, then turned as the radar warner began to shriek again.
I banked right to put the missile in my eleven o’clock, then as Jane triggered a fresh burst of chaff, I set the Tempest spiralling downwards in a series of tight, corkscrewing manoeuvres, trying to burn off the enemy missile’s energy in a series of course corrections.
Suddenly Jane’s voice cut through the clamour. ‘New contacts, on the deck, in battle formation. Thirty miles heading zero-eight-zero, slow.’
For the moment, I had no time to think of anything but the track of the missile flaring across the sky. It flashed towards us, swerving violently with repeated changes of course, then it ran out of gas and fell away towards the sea.
There was not even a second’s respite. I flicked the intercom switch. ‘How slow?’
‘About two hundred and forty knots. No ID coming up yet, might be bombers.’
‘I doubt it. They’re way too slow. They must be Hercs. That’s why they haven’t cratered the runway. They’re trying to land on it.’ I punched the radio button. ‘Fortress, this is Falcon Three. Low-level contacts. Thirty miles, three-zero-zero, intercept?’
‘Roger, Falcon Three. They’re confirmed hostile. Clear engage.’
The Hercs were at minimum height, trying to lose thems
elves among the radar clutter of the wave tops. They would be easy targets, as long as we could keep the Migs off our backs and strike before they reached the coastline, where they could disappear into any one of a hundred different valleys. We would then be radar blind until the moment they popped over the last ridge before the airfield, either rising high enough to drop paratroopers or, more likely, hugging the ground to make a rolling troop landing on the runway.
There was one other problem: we each had only one radar missile left and there were four Hercs. If even two managed to land, it would be more than enough to overwhelm our small, already depleted garrison.
I shot a look at the fuel gauge, wishing we had time for a mid-air refuel. We had more than enough for a subsonic intercept on the lumbering Hercs, but if the Migs gave chase… I pushed the thought away. We had no choice.
I thumbed the radio button. ‘Falcon Five?’
Shark replied instantly. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Let’s fake another advance on the Migs, but a couple of miles in trail of the others and down five thousand feet. We can start the turn south, but then bug out right, one-five-zero, low-level. We can get down in the weeds below Mount Adam and follow the valley floor out through Port North. If the Hercs hold their present course they should be in our one o’clock, good odds to get in among them.’
‘Sounds good to me. Let’s do it.’
The other three jets went back into combat power, streaking away from us as Shark took up loose formation. We began our own run-in towards the enemy, holding the power at eighty per cent.
A couple of miles out of range of the Migs’ missiles we began to turn south away from them and the Hercs moving steadily in from the west-north-west. Then I rammed the throttles into full combat power and pulled the stick hard right in a diving turn that pushed me to the edge of blacking out. The altimeter unwound from twenty thousand to two thousand feet as we flashed over the wilds of West Falkland.
The radar warner began to scream. Jane’s alert came half a second later. ‘Spike. Spike.’
I strained my eyes into the darkness ahead. A black wall loomed in front of me, blotting out the faint starlight. I pulled back the throttles and thumbed the radio. ‘Tango, Tango.’ I flicked on the autopilot and the Terrain-Following Radar.
The Tempest dropped with a sickening lurch as the autopilot cut in, obeying the commands of the TFR in the nose. The ridge loomed ahead, and I could not stop my right hand twitching towards the stick, though it was now useless in my hands. Then the jet soared upwards, clearing the ridge, and plummeted down the slopes of the valley beyond.
The shriek of the warner ceased as we dropped into the radar shadow of the ridge. The jet jolted and shuddered in the pressure wave close to the ground. By peering into the tiny E-scope I could get a couple of seconds’ advance warning of the ground ahead, and brace myself for the next lurch. There were a series of thuds, curses and grunts from the back seat as the jet twisted, climbed and dropped without warning, following the dictates of the TFR.
I knew Shark was somewhere just to the rear of us, invisible in the darkness.
‘I’ve lost the Hercs,’ Jane said. ‘The link’s—’ The rest of her sentence was lost as the jet bucked to clear an outcrop then dropped again in a sickening freefall. There was a final burst of turbulence that set the wings flexing like a bird’s, then the sharp green contour lines on the E-scope faded into a shimmering mass.
We were clear of the coast, racing out over the ocean. I switched off the TFR and the autopilot, and the stick came alive again in my hand. I eased the nose up a fraction and immediately heard Jane’s shout of triumph. ‘Got them. Four contacts, box formation, fourteen miles in your two o’clock.’
‘Shark, I’ll take the left pair. You take the right.’
Our calls were near instantaneous. ‘Sorted. Locked. Fox One, Fox One.’
The missiles blasted from the jets in unison, barely five seconds after we had made radar contact with the Hercs. I held altitude to maintain the lock, even though I knew I was exposing us to the Migs. Heart in mouth I watched as the computer counted down the seconds to impact. There was a faint glow on the horizon and a microsecond later, Jane called the strike. ‘Two hits.’
There was no time to celebrate. I dropped back towards the sea and began a turn to bring us close to the six o’clock of one of the remaining enemy aircraft.
‘They’ve split and widened,’ Jane said. Even though they were out of radar view, our display was being updated by one of the other Tempests, tracking the Hercs from higher level. ‘Six miles in your three… Now seven miles in your two.’
The range had to increase as we made the turn while the Herc kept in straight and level flight, and each extra mile we had to close put the Argentine aircraft a fraction nearer to the cover of the coastline.
‘Eight miles, in your two o’clock.’ The turn complete, we were overhauling the Herc again, covering three miles for every one it could manage.
‘Contact again.’
‘Arming weapons.’
I flicked the Sidewinder switch and heard the growl as the seeker head began to search for the heat of a target. I could only stare blind into the night as Jane shouted course corrections to me, sending us twisting and turning after our prey as it ran for the safety of a valley.
‘Six miles… on your nose. Five, come left a fraction… Four, on your nose again. Locking on.’
‘Got him!’ The target appeared in my head-up display, a jinking dot, framed by the target designator. As the L-shaped walls came together to enclose the target, the Sidewinder’s growl changed to a strident beeping as the weapons computer showed we were in range.
I pulled the trigger. ‘Fox Two. Fox Two.’ The Sidewinder’s fiery trail carved a series of sinuous curves through the night, sweeping arcs towards the burning exhaust of the Herc’s engines.
Ahead, the coast was a dark line ruled across the faint grey sheen of the sea. The Sidewinder would strike home at any second. Suddenly the radar lost the lock and the target disappeared from the HUD. A fraction of a second later there was an explosion in the darkness ahead of us. I waited for Jane’s confirmation, even though I already knew it had missed. The Herc had disappeared behind a screening ridgeline the instant before the Sidewinder could blast it apart.
‘Lost the lock. No hit,’ she said.
The beeping of the Sidewinder had barely been silenced before the radar warner kicked in again. ‘Spike. Spike.’
The hunter was now the hunted. ‘Shit!’ I shook the Tempest left and right, then we were over the coast and running for the foothills.
I aimed the nose into the mountains and then flicked the TFR and autopilot again. The enemy’s radar lock on us held for an agonising three seconds before the jet plunged into black radar darkness. The threat from the Migs had been neutralised for the moment, but somewhere ahead of us in the darkness were still two Hercs. We had less than five minutes to find and destroy them before they swept in on Mount Pleasant airfield.
‘You’ll need to take it back, Sean.’ Jane’s teeth rattled in her head as the jet soared and plunged over unseen obstacles. ‘There’s a Rapier site on Mount Rosalie, we’re going to pass right over it on this course.’
In theory, the Rapier system should have identified friendly aircraft by electronically interrogating them. In the confusion of battle, it was not a chance I wanted to take.
As we flipped up over the next ridgeline, I shifted the heading bug on the autopilot. The jet turned on to the corrected heading towards the south-east, away from the danger. Almost before we had cleared the shadow of the ridge, the radar warner was shrieking once more.
I swore and sent us plummeting downwards again, flicking the switches to let the TFR and autopilot take us down to two hundred feet. In those few seconds our kit had been updated by Fortress and I could see the two Hercules on the screen, in roughly parallel track separated by the central mountain range of West Falkland. They were almost out over the Sound. I let a beat
of silence elapse after the radar warner had faded, then retook control of the jet and climbed to clear the two thousand foot peaks near the east coast of the island.
I could see Shark’s position on my screen. ‘Falcon Five.’
His reply was instant, though almost broken up by static.
‘Steer zero-two-zero, Shark, we’ll try and push them further north of their present heading and give the Rapiers on Bodie and Cantera a shot.’
‘Roger, Sean. We’ll give it our best shot, but we’re fuel critical. This will have to be our last crack before refuelling.’
As I acknowledged, I glanced at my own fuel gauge. We had fuel for around five more minutes.
The Hercs were wave scraping as they crossed the coast of West Falkland and skimmed the open water of the Sound. As our radar painted them, they jinked to the north, trying to open some distance on us.
I set the Sidewinder growling again, even though we were side-on and stretching the range for a successful shot. The head found a target and began to beep. I fired the missile, more in hope than expectation. It lost the lock almost as soon as it left the rail. I saw it whipping from side to side, searching vainly for a target, before disappearing into the wilderness of ocean due north of us, as the Hercs ploughed on towards the east.
I used up a few seconds of precious fuel trying to close enough for another shot on the nearest Herc, but the two blips crossed the coast of East Falkland, and disappeared back into the valleys before I could get another lock with a Sidewinder.
The indicator of Shark’s jet on my screen streaked away towards the south-east to rendezvous with the tanker for refuelling, but I knew that by the time he returned to the fray, the battle would already be over. If the Hercs reached the base unscathed, the troops they were carrying would already have deployed, scattering from the aircraft as they rumbled down the runway.
I pulled away to the south of the mountains. ‘We can’t follow them in there. We’re going to have to fly a track from south-west to north-west of the base and try to intercept them as they clear Pleasant Peak.’
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