“Scimitar Leader to Viper Leader,” Bird Dog said over tactical. “We’re fifty mikes out. Copy?”
“Copy, Scimitar Leader. Don’t hurry on our account. I’ve always wanted to get a nice, long, close-up look at a Flanker. Or two.”
“We’re buster, Lobo. Just hang in there.”
“Copy.” Her damned voice was all business. “By the way, the inbound PLA helo is going to get here in less than a mike. You’re the War College brain; what do you advise if it makes a play for the survivor?”
“Just do what you did the other night,” he said. “Those are our orders: Just let the helo know you’re there. Make life uncomfortable for it. Shiloh advises two Seahawks are en route, ETA fifteen mikes.”
“Um, Mr. Dog, it seems to me that if I run interference on this helo like you say, the Chinese could make a pretty good case that the USA is interfering in a benevolent SAR attempt.”
“Not after what happened to Lady of Leisure,” Bird Dog said.
Two sharp clicks indicated acknowledgment of the message. Then the ICS came on. “I don’t think she liked your advice, boss,” Catwoman said.
I didn’t either, Bird Dog thought, but didn’t say. How could anyone justify risking the lives of American pilots, not to mention a damned expensive aircraft costing, in order to guard a chunk of water in which a person might or might not be floating around alive?
But then he remembered how he’d felt as he drifted helplessly in the warm Atlantic, waiting to see who was going to pick him up first — the Cubans or his own people. Remembered that, and was glad he’d kept his lip zipped for a change.
But his imagination was a different matter. When he visualized Lobo flying around out there at suicidally low altitudes, doing a job better suited to prop planes or helos, his anger and frustration surged up again, and he thought, Hang on, Lobo, just hang on….
1247 local (-8 GMT)
Tomcat 302
There was nothing worse than flying this low in a fighter plane. Lobo ached for altitude, for the superior speed and maneuverability that altitude conferred.
Right now the two SU-27s were living up to their NATO nickname, flanking her and Hot Rock throughout their long, constant turn, as if escorting the American planes. The Flankers were large craft, with twin vertical stabilizers and graceful, recurved fuselages… in fact, they looked disturbingly like Tomcats. She mentally reviewed what she knew about their capabilities: Twin afterburning Lyul’ka AL-21 turbofans each providing almost thirty thousand pounds of thrust — compared to the 27,000 pounds available to the Tomcats — which gave the Chinese planes a top speed of Mach 2.35 as compared to Mach 1.88 for the Tomcat. The SU-27 had a better ceiling, too.
According to the latest intel, the Flankers also turned tighter than Tomcats, and had radar equipped with look-down, shoot-down capability.
And these were the old models. The SU-35s and SU-37 up above had, reportedly, even higher performance numbers.
In other words, for the first time since early in the Vietnam war, it was possible the American aircraft in any given air battle were not intrinsically superior. It was actually possible that the Tomcat was outmatched, not only in turn radius but in pure, brute power.
On top of that, Homeplate had warned them to be on the lookout for an “unidentified fighter aircraft of unknown abilities.” Whatever that meant.
Not that Lobo was frightened by either the known statistics or the unknown variables of the situation. Regardless of how swell a pilot’s hardware was, the plane was no better than the pilot. And that was where nobody could touch the United States Navy.
Still… there was no denying that this situation sucked.
She looked over her right shoulder, gazing down at the water on the inside of her steady turn. There was a small red-and-white dot floating on the water. The survivor, presumably, although there had been no more flares. She wondered what the poor schmuck thought about this private air show. Assuming he or she was still alive.
“Lobo,” Handyman said, “I’ve got a visual on that Chinese helo. I hate to ask awkward questions, but what are we supposed to do if it ignores us? Shoot it down?”
“I wish,” Lobo said.
Hornet 108
“Let’s get horizontal,” Thor said into his oxygen mask. Toggling the radio, he reported to Homeplate that he and Reedy had arrived on site, at an altitude of fifty-two thousand feet — all they could manage, but still below the ceiling of the Russian planes. He and Reedy started circling well outside the orbit of the six bogeys, trying to look innocent.
But Thor could see the enemy, the dying light of day flaring silver-gold off the lower surfaces of wings and canards as the Flankers circled. Six of them, not to mention the two older models far down below, dancing with Lobo and Hot Rock just above the water.
Bad position. And a bad fuel situation for him and Reedy.
Who cares?
Thor ran his thumb over the weapons selector switch and waited for something to happen.
Tomcat 302
“Viper 304, Viper 302,” Lobo said. “Hot Rock, we’d better make things a little rough for that helo before it gets any closer. We’re going to need to spread out some.”
“What?”
“If we’re going to keep that chopper off the survivor, we’ve got to put up a wall. I go past it, then you go past it, then I go, like that. Constant circles. Rip up the air. No gap big enough for him to slip through. You’re such a hot stick, you think you can handle that?”
A pause, then, “You’re the boss.”
“Then let’s do it.”
Tomcat 304
“How much farther?” Bird Dog snapped over ICS. “How much farther?”
“You sound like a little kid in the back of a station wagon,” Catwoman said. “Five mikes. Keep your shirt on — sir. What can happen in the next five minutes?”
Tomcat 306
“They didn’t teach this in flight school,” Hot Rock muttered as he eased back on the throttles, letting the distance between his Tomcat and Lobo’s lengthen. At the same time, both planes were descending. Hot Rock rarely saw the ocean this close except during launches and landings — the two most dangerous times to be a Naval aviator.
But he wasn’t worried about the water; he was too busy keeping an eye on the two escorting Flankers. For a few moments they seemed uncertain what to do; then they both rose up and took up new position, one behind each of the Tomcats. Overall, the formation was odd. Hot Rock had a clear belly-shot at the Flanker following Lobo, but at the same time he was dead in the sights of the Flanker on his own six o’clock. A Mexican standoff.
“No need to hit the deck.” Lobo’s voice was flat but intense in his hears. “Use your wingtip vortices. Got that?”
Hot Rock clicked his mike twice. Lobo was talking about taking advantage of what was usually an annoying feature of fixed-wing aerodynamics — the tilted hurricanes of air that formed at the outer ends of a wing, where compressed air from the underside met low-pressure air from above. The resulting braids of turbulence were a major source of drag, as well as a potential hazard to other air traffic because they could linger for minutes in the air, invisible and tenacious, like horizontal tornadoes.
In this case, though, Lobo was advocating using the vortices as blunt instruments to make the Chinese helo think twice about approaching the survivor in the water. Painting the air with turbulence that way would require some fine flying, and Hot Rock felt himself relaxing just thinking about it.
Ahead of him, Lobo was making her first turn toward the helo, which was a slick-looking Z-9 with retractable landing gear and a shark-fin fairing around its tail rotor. The helo was flying low enough to create a gray shimmer on the water.
Lobo increased her angle of bank, slipping down as she crossed the path of the helo. Her Chinese escort, Hot Rock noted, remained at his own higher altitude. Lobo roared past the helo, well above and in front of it, but plainly within the pilot’s sight. This was obvious because the helo immedi
ately raised its nose in a hard braking action and swiveled partly to its left as it halted.
Hot Rock felt an electrical prickle on the back of his neck. What Lobo had just done could, arguably, be interpreted as a highly aggressive act. He waited to hear the sharp warbling tone in his helmet that would indicate a fire-control radar lock on his aircraft… but it didn’t happen. So far, everything was still cool.
Hot Rock increased his own angle of bank and let the Tomcat slip down along the same path Lobo had taken. He felt the slight bumping of disrupted air where her plane had been, although the harsher turbulence of its wingtip vortices were well below him, hammering down on the water.
He was beginning to level out for his close pass on the helo when he heard Two Tone shout: “Hot Rock! He’s going guns! Going guns! Gunfire in the water!”
Later, Hot Rock would review that moment over and over again in his mind. The helo was dead ahead, its tail pivoted somewhat toward him, but not at such an oblique angle that Hot Rock couldn’t see the open side hatch and the machine gun mounted there. He was sure, later, that he’d seen those things. He also plainly saw gouts of orange flame ripping into the air. That wasn’t just his imagination, or an illusion caused by sunlight flaring off passing swells. No way.
In fact, the sight of the flames was so startling he hesitated a moment, as if he wanted to convince himself it wasn’t real.
“Hot Rock!” Two Tone’s voice, sharp, so much like an older man’s voice. Disappointed, commanding. “Get on it!”
Hot Rock flicked his weapons selector switch to the Sidewinder position. “Fox Three,” he said.
South China Sea
From water level, everything that had been happening so dreadfully slowly suddenly accelerated to unbelievable speed. For what seemed like hours, Dr. George had been switching his attention between the circling jets, the approaching Chinese helicopter — and the water beneath his feet. The tiger shark kept disappearing and then coming back again, moving with increasing speed on each pass, as if making up its mind about something. Once it came so close George actually kicked it, after which it became more wary. But it was still around, or maybe there were more than one of them. It was hard to tell. The setting sun no longer cut its light into the water, showing him what lurked below. Soon he wouldn’t be able to see his legs at all.
The sharks would be under no such restrictions.
So, let the Chinese pick him up. He didn’t care anymore. He just wanted to be warm and dry and safe.
The helicopter was perhaps a hundred yards away when it halted. The jets continued to circle overhead, so low now that George could see the shapes of the pilots’ heads through the canopies. Two American jets, and two Chinese, cruising around together in a big, roaring circle. What the hell was going on?
Just then there was a brilliant flash from one of the American jets, and a sound like high-pressure water shooting from a hose. A rope of white smoke abruptly connected the American jet to the helicopter. The helicopter exploded. It broke in half like an egg, but the bright-yellow yolk rose up and up instead of falling. The shells of the fuselage dropped. Spinning rotor blades hit the water and broke free, skipping across the surface for some distance before vanishing in sheets of spray.
Where the fuselage vanished into the water, a roiling dome of bubbles and smoke boiled up, hissing and crackling.
Dr. George felt something nudge his foot, and started to kick.
Flanker 67
Tai Ling saw the fireball light up the dark waters below, and heard the radio chatter erupt from the two SU-27 pilots down at sea level. Their message was shocked and furious: One of the Americans had just taken an unprovoked missile shot at the PLA helicopter arriving to rescue the person in the water. The helo was down.
If that wasn’t the signal Tai had been waiting for, nothing was.
“Weapons free!” he cried over the tactical circuit, and reached for his own weapons selector switch. “All aircraft, weapons free!”
Tomcat 302
“Holy shit!” Handyman yelled, a vast expression of emotion for him. “What the hell — ”
Lobo had her back to the helo and Hot Rock, but she heard him signal the firing of a Sidewinder, and simultaneously saw the fiery reflection of an explosion reflecting from the inside of her canopy. Her response came long before thought: She slammed the throttle quadrant full forward, and as the afterburners gave their mule kick, she hauled back hard on the stick. In a heartbeat of time, the Tomcat went from cruise mode into a neck-snapping climb out.
Lobo cranked her head around, searching for the Flanker that had been roofing her. Gasped as it flashed past to the left, showing its belly in a hard bank that had to have been initiated simply to avoid a collision.
“Well,” Handyman drawled, his voice back to normal, “that worked.”
Lobo eased the stick forward an inch, putting the Tomcat into a marginally more relaxed, sustainable angle of climb. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where did he go?”
“Coming up behind us, babe.”
On her radar, Lobo saw the lozenge-shaped return of the Flanker coming around hard on her tail. A moment after that, she heard the warbling signal that indicated she was being painted with fire-control radar.
Radar or not, at this range the bogey was inside missile range; he’d be going to guns. Leaving the stick where it was, Lobo kicked the Tomcat over on one wingtip, rotated over like a gymnast doing a one-handed cartwheel, then dove back toward the deck. At the same time, the white-hot flare of tracers swept past her inboard wing.
The Flanker was right below her, from this angle nothing but a round fuselage, a couple of rectangular air intakes and the blazing flower of its cannon.
“Recommend guns,” Handyman said even as Lobo hit the trigger.
Her tracers ripped beneath the Flanker, a miss of only a few feet — but there was no room for a pull-up to bring the shells on target, not unless she wanted a certain head-on collision.
She jammed the stick forward instead, initiating the start of an inverted loop.
As her head filled with pressurized blood, she held her breath and grunted loudly, holding off unconsciousness as she mentally tracked the Flanker’s likely behavior. He should be rounding out of his vertical climb right about now, gleefully expecting to be right above her, in perfect position for a kill. Lobo snapped the stick to the right, then back, flipping the Tomcat right side up and simultaneously reversing its direction. Now the blood drained out of her head and she was struggling for consciousness against a different enemy. At the same time she found herself staring directly at the boiling patch of water where the helo had gone down… staring as it grew larger and larger, the Tomcat’s weight fighting her attempt to pull out, its engines fighting gravity and momentum, Lobo’s will fighting the same things… fighting…
And then she felt the wings grab air with authority and the surface of the South China Sea was blurring by beneath her.
“You just love this low-altitude shit, don’t you?” Handyman grunted.
Hornet 108
“Man, did you ever screw up,” Thor said as he put his Hornet into a tight left turn. His scorn was not directed at the two Flankers left up here to fight him and Reedy; rather, it was aimed at whoever had ordered them to do so. Could anyone really be dipshitty enough to believe that a one-on-one ratio represented good odds for the Chinese pilots?
Not that things started out so hot for him and Reedy. The Flankers were a few thousand feet higher than the Hornets when the shooting started, and immediately came hurtling down, missiles streaking off their wings. That took some fancy flying to get out of. And Thor had to admit that at least some of the grim intel on these new birds was true; big as they were, the Flankers turned like plastic models tugged on a wire.
But Thor and Reedy flew in perfect harmony, using the high-low loose deuce formation, and the damned Chinese were overconfident; when they took the bait and converged on Reedy, Thor swooped over and in, crying “break right!” o
n his radio. Instantly Reedy’s Hornet showed the Flankers its belly. At the same moment Thor triggered a Sidewinder. Since the Flankers were displaying the most tailpipe, real sex to a Sidewinder, the missile selected the brighter of the two and drove itself home. Thor grinned to see a pillow-shaped eruption of smoke and flame. An ejection seat rocketed out of the mess, which pleased him even more. Personally, he loved to shoot down hardware, not software. “Splash one Flanker!” he cried.
Then he gasped as Reedy’s Hornet dissolved into fire and smoke.
He immediately compartmentalized his fury and did what he’d been trained to do: broke into a hard evasive turn and scanned his radar screen. Instantly, he knew what had happened. The descending Flankers had pulled a fast one. One of them split off from its fellows and returned to the high-altitude battle. The bastard had killed Reedy.
And at the same time, reversed the odds.
Tomcat 304
Bird Dog didn’t need to hear the radio signals from the Vipers to know that the dogfight had started in earnest. He could see it all over his radar screen as the various blobs and blips began to move in fast, devious directions. And one Marine had been splashed already.
He forced himself to relax. One advantage of coming in from a distance was that he’d already had the time to tag each bogey’s radar image with a targeting marker.
But that didn’t make his fellow aviators any less outnumbered. For a moment he felt unreasoning anger at the admiral and all the other boneheads who’d failed to be prepared for something like this… then he remembered that he was one of those boneheads.
He assessed the situation playing out over his radar screen. One Marine F/A-18s was still up high, tangling with a pair of bogeys. Down low, Lobo and Hot Rock were engaged with two Flankers — and in between, descending fast, were three more Flankers exchanging the high-altitude furball for the lower one. They were going to bounce Lobo and Hot Rock.
Not if Bird Dog Robinson could help it. “Phoenix,” he snapped, setting his weapons control switch accordingly. The Phoenix had the longest range of any missile in the American inventory. The downside was that as a radar-guided weapon, it required a nice steady course from the targeting plane to maintain radar lock. Also, it was rather easy to shake and had therefore earned a mediocre rep for successful kills; still, there was nothing like seeing a one-ton missile coming at you from over the horizon to make you rethink your attack strategy.
Typhoon Season c-14 Page 13