England Expects el-1

by Charles S. Jackson

  Sentry’s controllers were working on the assumption that whatever the unidentified jet might be, there was at least a slim possibility that it was still in the area of the downed Spitfire it had appeared out of nowhere to save. As they were unable to detect the jet itself and had no other information to go on, it seemed the only logical course of action that might possibly have a chance of interception, and thus the pair of black Flankers flew on, carefully avoiding any conventional warplanes still in the area as Churchill’s so-called Battle of Britain drew to a close for another day. With their colour schemes and speed they were all but invisible in the dying twilight save for the sound of their passing and the flare of their twin exhausts on afterburner.

  “We’re within fifty nautical miles of the landing site,” Hawk-1’s pilot observed as his eyes watched his displays for any sign of their enemy. “Ease it back to five hundred knots.” He killed his afterburner and dropped the aircraft below the speed of sound, his wingman following suit.

  “We’re probably on a wild goose chase,” the commander continued, speaking to his colleagues in the other jet, “but keep your eyes peeled and stay ‘black’: radar will be useless if this bastard is stealthy and it’ll only serve to warn him if he’s lurking about. With any luck we’ll catch him on the hop and put a couple of Archers up his arse before he knows what’s going on.” Although with no fucking radar and the coastline ahead in complete darkness, I don’t know what hope we have of finding him even if he is there… he added in sour silence, deciding it perhaps better to keep that thought to himself.

  He activated his air combat systems and armed a pair of R-73 short-range missiles beneath his wings. A luminous green diamond instantly appeared on his HUD, tracking aimlessly about the screen before him as it vainly searched for a suitable heat source to lock onto. The Vympel R-73, known colloquially in NATO circles as the AA-11 Archer, was an advanced short-range, heat-seeking missile that was extremely manoeuvrable and highly sensitive to the heat of a jet’s exhaust. Two of the missiles were mounted at wing-tip launcher rails on each of the aircraft, while another pair were slung beneath each jet’s wings outboard of a pair of huge fuel tanks.

  Mounted on the upper nose directly ahead of the windscreen of each aircraft was a small pod housing a powerful Infra-Red Search and Tracking module — often referred to simply as an IRST. In perfect conditions it could detect heat sources from enemy aircraft from a distance of up to eighty kilometres or more. Although these weren’t likely to be optimum circumstances, the men inside the pair of Su-30s could at least hope their sensors would give them a reasonable amount of advanced warning.

  “Be ready to turn onto three-six-zero on my mark,” he added. “If we do see him and he tries to run, herd him west and out to sea if you can — I don’t want to catch any bloody flak over England if I can avoid it!”

  “What the hell is this thing?” Trumbull asked finally, unable to keep quiet as his curiosity got the better of his poor temper. As he strapped himself into the rear seat he was stymied by the myriad of strange instruments and fittings surrounding him.

  “Put this on!” Thorne shouted, handing him a helmet much like the one he wore. As the RAF pilot removed his own headgear, the Australian leaned over the top of his own seat’s headrest to help him. As Trumbull slid the strange equipment over his head, Thorne plugged the helmet’s communications jacks into the correct sockets and Trumbull could suddenly hear the man quite clearly. He was speaking into a microphone set into the inside of the oxygen mask clipped beneath his own helmet — the mask now covering his entire face. The squadron leader copied the set-up and clipped up the mask he found by his own seat, instantly finding fresh air for his lungs to breathe once more and taking a deep breath as he repeated the question.

  Thorne paused for a moment, deciding it simpler to acknowledge the aircraft’s original ancestry rather than go into a range of details the man was in any case unlikely to understand. “It’s called a F-35 Lightning, squadron leader: she’s a new prototype from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in the United States.” Although a massive understatement, that was at least the truth in a very basic form. As it was, Trumbull’s family connections and personal knowledge of current fighter development was sufficient for him to pick out some immediate problems with Thorne’s initial statement.

  “I’ve seen pictures of Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning,” he shot back with a vaguely accusatory tone. “The RAF’s in discussions at the moment to purchase hundreds of them from the Yanks…and this thing looks nothing like it…”

  “Okay…okay…I’ll remember never to talk ‘down’ to you again,” Thorne chuckled, amused that he’d unexpectedly been caught out. “You’re right: this isn’t a P-38 Lightning. The full name of the aircraft you’re currently sitting in is a Lockheed Martin F-35E Lightning Two, and it’s a more advanced development of the Gloster E.28/39 turbojet design.” Another simplification and a gross understatement, but again basically the truth. It didn’t occur to Thorne, speaking from the standpoint of history as he was, that Frank Whittle’s jet fighter test aircraft might still be a classified experiment.

  “That turbine powered thing?” Trumbull was vaguely aware of the work Gloster had been carrying out with embryonic jet engines. The fact that his father was a very close friend of the Prime Minister meant he often picked up snippets of information often classed as ‘Top Secret’. “This is no Whittle design,” he stated with certainty. No fool, the man was well aware of what modern science could — and could not — do. “This aircraft obviously exists, but I find it hard to believe the technology to build it is possessed by Lockheed or anyone else, for that matter.”

  “You’re actually quite right, old chap…” Thorne muttered to himself, his thoughts mostly taken up with his instruments as he prepared for a hurried take off. “Not yet, anyway…” he continued under his breath before adding loudly: “Systems: engine restart…”

  The background humming of the jet’s APU increased instantly but was quickly overpowered by a deep, almost infrasonic rumble that built to a deafening howl as the main engine began to spool up once more in preparation for take off.

  “I’m Max Thorne, by the way, squadron leader, and I know it’s probably painfully obvious at the moment that something really unusual is going on here. This isn’t the time to discuss it however. For a start, there isn’t the slightest chance you’ll believe me; secondly, it’s almost certain that enemy fighters are vectoring in on us at this very moment, as I’ve already said. The most important thing to do right now is get to safety…” as an afterthought, Thorne then added, rather unhelpfully in Trumbull’s opinion, “…assuming of course the road I’ve just landed on here is flat enough and solid enough for me to make a take off run without ploughing the friggin’ nose into the ground…”

  The cockpit canopy lowered around them as Trumbull finished strapping himself in, and as he tilted his head to one side he could — barely — get a glimpse of what Thorne was doing with his controls. His left hand jammed a sliding lever forward that the RAF pilot could only assume was the throttle, based on the dramatic rise in engine thrust and noise that accompanied it. The entire airframe began to shudder under the increased power as Thorne deftly adjusted a smaller sliding control mounted to the left of some kind of small, flat TV screen set at the top of his instrument panel.

  Powerful landing lights flicked on once more, illuminating the lane for hundreds of metres ahead, while behind the aircraft its exhaust nozzle altered direction from its current 90º angle to instead point almost directly rearward as it would in normal flight.

  “What on earth could possibly threaten this thing?” Trumbull mused in delayed response to the other man’s earlier statement and considered what he’d seen as the F-35E had quickly despatched his two pursuers earlier.

  Hawk-1’s IRST pod picked up the F-35’s heat signature the moment they turned onto a northerly heading and powered in toward the English coastline. It was faint — incredibly faint for a combat aircraf
t in the pilot’s opinion — and seemed to be completely stationary, which didn’t make sense at all. At a range of little more than four kilometres it was clear enough though to gain a lock on, and the green diamond on his HUD immediately snapped across to the right edge of the screen and turned a bright red as it picked out the target. A growling sound in his headset advised him the seeker heads of his four armed R-73 missiles had all also found the target and were ready for launch.

  In that moment, the section of beach around the locked target suddenly became a bright beacon of light against the otherwise black coastline, and it instantly became apparent to the crew of Hawk-1 why the enemy appeared to be stationary: it had landed and was now preparing to take off once more.

  “I see him! I see him!” Hawk-2’s pilot howled over the radio excitedly as they hurtled along just five hundred metres above the surface of the Channel. “Landing lights up the beach to starboard, bearing zero-one-eight!”

  “Thank you for the ‘heads up’, Hawk-Two,” Hawk-1’s pilot snapped back with caustic sarcasm, “…but my IRST has got him already: with those landing lights I suspect any bastard within ten bloody kilometres can probably see him as well!” Returning to complete professionalism, he added: “Keep on my wing…I’m turning into attack now.” There was another pause as a new thought occurred to him. “He’s on the ground, so missiles will be out: switching to cannon. He’ll be heading west on his take off run, so watch for him and be ready to break if he makes it into the air.”

  As Hawk-2 dropped slightly behind and eased around onto his rear port quarter, Hawk-1’s pilot banked his own fighter gently around to the east to bring his cannon to bear on the landed enemy. Capable as it was, even the R-73 Archer had its limitations, and one of those was a minimum engagement altitude of no less than 300 metres. With the target on the ground there was nothing for it but to instead arm the 30mm cannon mounted in its starboard wing root, and as he switched his weapons systems over to ground attack mode, the red diamond of the missile lock disappeared, replaced instead with a small ‘dot-in-a-circle’ targeting marker known colloquially as a ‘pipper’.

  At the same time, the Sukhoi’s gun ranging radar activated out of the sheer necessity to provide the pilot with an accurate idea of his position in relation to the ground and, as a result, his cannon’s expected point of impact. The green pipper bobbed and wavered slightly as the jets cut through a minor buffet of low-level turbulence before steadying directly over the bright landing lights of their earth-bound target.

  Considering that the activation of the ranging radar had effectively given the game away and announced their presence to the world, the flight commander saw no point in remaining ‘black’ any longer and lit up his main targeting and search radars. The action confirmed what Sentry had already expected: that their target was indeed a stealth aircraft of some type, and even with gear down in a landed configuration, the radar return was insignificant to the point of almost being electronically invisible.

  “Oh shit!” Thorne observed, half-scared and half-excited as a warbling tone suddenly rose in both men’s helmets that even to the uninitiated was instantly recognisable as an alarm, and the pilot drew a sharp breath as he stared at information flickering across that wide, main LCD screen before him. There was a similar screen in front of Trumbull but he could make neither hide nor hair of what was displayed on it.

  “You asked what could threaten us…?” Thorne asked a second later in a dry, rhetoric tone. “Well we’re about to find out: EW just picked up radar emissions from two bogies coming in fast from the south, right on our hammer! Hang on, Sunshine — this is likely to get pretty bloody hairy!”

  Wheel brakes were released and the jet instantly began to trundle along the lane, quickly building speed for take off. Trumbull’s stomach lurched as Thorne jammed the throttle fully forward and the Lightning accelerated across the asphalt at an incredible rate. Within just a hundred metres or perhaps less, the aircraft leaped into the air ahead of a pillar of exhaust and flying debris and continued to accelerate as Thorne returned the controls completely to level flight and engaged the afterburner. That action produced a second, more powerful increase in thrust as they fought to gain valuable altitude and Trumbull scanned the dark horizon for their unseen attackers.

  The approaching Sukhois might’ve been invisible to the naked eye but they appeared clear as day on the Lightning’s EW systems and as both men stared off to the south, two small red squares appeared on the projection screens inside their helmet visors to indicate the exact position of the approaching jets. Tiny red subtitles beneath the target boxes listed the identity of the aircraft based on the type of radar emissions being received, each showing simply as “SU-30” with a range reading of ‘02135’ with kilometres displayed in the larger font and metres in the smaller.

  “My God…! There they are!” Trumbull breathed, terrified despite having only a pair of red target ‘boxes’ to go by and not actually being able to see what it was that was coming to attack them.

  “Hold on then, pal, ‘cause here we go!” The F-35E continued to accelerate and gain altitude as Thorne turned to port, the fingers of his right hand flicking about the buttons and switches mounted on his joystick so quickly it was almost a reflex action. Even as he armed his own weapons, the streaking pink flares of tracer reached out for them from the darkness and a single stream of cannon shells passed far too close astern for comfort.

  With a single, plaintive and indignant utterance of “Fuck…!”, Thorne hauled back on his stick to increase his rate of turn and climb, banking tightly to port toward the enemy as the flick of another switch released a cascade of bright, hissing decoy flares that spewed from dispensers hidden in the rear fuselage. Intended to make any prospective attempt to obtain an infra-red lock more difficult, they lit up the entire area around the climbing aircraft and fell away to the ground where several immediately ignited small grassfires in the fields below.

  Hawk-1 banked sharply to port, trying to ‘walk’ his cannon fire into the rising enemy, but the collective closing speed was far too high and Thorne’s turn in toward them made the angle that much tighter. The tracer fell away behind as both Su-30s thundered past the F-35E just two hundred metres astern, their exhausts flaring as afterburners kicked in and the pair split to port and starboard in an attempt to confuse their enemy.

  “Reuters’ fuckin’ Flankers…!” Thorne growled sourly to himself as he snapped his head from one side to the other and tried to keep both aircraft in sight, oblivious to the fact that Trumbull — devoid of the benefit of a G-suit — was too busy fighting unconsciousness and the desire to vomit to really take notice. “Talk about the ‘Red Carpet’ treatment!”

  The moment the pair passed behind him, he immediately reversed his course and switched back onto a tight turn to starboard as the F-35 passed through 1,000 metres. The Lightning’s nose was still pointing away from the turning jets at an angle of greater than ninety degrees, however the missiles he carried inside his weapons bays were a generation ahead of those of his opponents.

  The moment he was able to look over his right shoulder and see the nearest of the Sukhois, the targeting systems slaved to his HDMS picked up its heat source and ‘locked on’. The growling tone in his ear told him as much and he loosed a pair of his own heat seekers, both of the internal weapons bays in his lower fuselage opening just long enough to each eject one missile into the slipstream. The pair of AIM-9X Sidewinder AAMs dropped out of the openings and hissed away directly ahead for just a few metres before snapping sharply upward and away at an oblique angle to the north, immediately darting off in the direction of their target and locking onto the heat of its jet exhaust.

  The reaction within the cockpits of the two Flankers was immediate: within a second of their rearward threat receivers detecting the missiles, each pilot threw his jet into a series of wild manoeuvres, decoy flares now spraying from their tails in an attempt to escape.

  “Fuck! Watch your arse, Hawk-Two!” T
he flight commander called, catching sight of his wingman banking away to the west with the pair of Sidewinders in pursuit, his own decoy flares spewing from its tail in desperation. Although one of the deadly little missiles veered away at the last moment, distracted by a decoy flare, the other homed unerringly and hurtled on toward its target. As the Sidewinder drew to within a few dozen metres of the jet’s tail, Hawk-2’s pilot dumped another torrent of decoy flares and in a last, desperate attempt to break missile lock stood the aircraft on its tail and entered into a poststall manoeuvre instantly recognisable to all watching (save for Trumbull) as a ‘Cobra’.

  The manoeuvre was so named because as the pilot pulls back sharply on the stick, the performing aircraft almost immediately flips upward into an angle of attack of between 90-120 degrees accompanied by an almost complete loss of airspeed that causes the plane to appear as if it is standing motionless on its tail. Drag on the rear of the aircraft then creates torque that pitches the nose forward once more, at which time a return to full power allows the aircraft to return to normal flight. The pattern of the movements through all of this broadly simulates the head of a cobra while striking its prey, hence the nickname.

  Of limited real use in actual combat, the instinctive reaction by the Su-30’s pilot was in the vain hope that the combination of flares, the sudden change of angle and dramatic loss of speed might possibly either break the missiles targeting or at least cause it to overshoot. Unfortunately neither eventuated and the deadly little missile ploughed into the rear of the Sukhoi at two and a half times the speed of sound, its warhead detonating a microsecond later.

  Everything aft of the wings disintegrated into a thick cloud of smoke and fire in that moment as the stricken jet reached the apex of its climb and found itself suddenly and totally devoid of thrust. It hung for a moment, nose pointing toward the heavens, before stalling completely and slowly turning over into a final dive earthward.