Final Storm

by Maloney, Mack;

  Timing is everything, he thought.

  Hunter looked through the HUD at the sky in front of him, barely able to pick out the enemy missiles from the surrounding cloud base. His radar had no such trouble, however, and was blaring out its warning with fierce urgency.

  Surely Jones wasn’t going to wait much longer …

  Suddenly the general’s voice came on the line: “Falcon Flight, commence Left Jab! Repeat, commence Left Jab! Gloves off now!”

  Jones was making his move, his voice crackling through the radio speaker with the command the F-16 pilots had been anxiously awaiting.

  They all breathed a collective sigh of relief into their oxygen masks, then silently hoped that the general had not waited too long.

  Hunter’s quick hands had reached for the transponder switch even before Jones’s order had been concluded. The yellow LED blinked off as he punched the switch down and simultaneously jammed his control stick forward to put the F-16 into a gut-churning power dive. Using full afterburners to charge under the incoming missiles, the extreme maneuver immediately served to close the gap with the Soviet fighters that had launched them.

  Hunter didn’t look around until the F-16 had leveled after the dizzying plunge from the thin air of 47,000 feet where they’d flown, trying to imitate the high-flying B-52 Stratofortresses. Now at 35,000 feet, the g-forces relaxed their enveloping fingers from his body. He swiveled his head to see the Soviet missiles pass above and behind him.

  Their radar homing signals abruptly cut off, the Soviet AA-10s lost their guidance fix and began looping randomly, unable to re-establish a solid radar contact. Some collided, exploding in midair, and the rest sped off into the clouds or fell to the earth harmlessly.

  Except for one …

  Hunter was surprised and dismayed to see a single F-16 still flying at a dangerously higher altitude.

  It was DuPont …

  Hadn’t he gotten the word to switch off the transponder and dive? Was something the matter with his radio? Or had something gone wrong with the radar emitter?

  “DuPont! Gloves off!” Hunter bellowed into his oxygen mask microphone. Throw the switch, guy, and acknowledge!”

  “I cant … I tried … It must be jammed …” DuPont replied anxiously.

  He had punched the heat-sensitive switch on and off half a dozen times with no effect. The yellow light still glowed on his console like a panic button. A single power switching transistor had failed short, bypassing the console switch and keeping the radar signal beaming out from the F-16’s wing pod.

  In his frantic efforts to kill the signal, DuPont had delayed his dive with the rest of the squadron by a critical few seconds. Now, as he was in mid-plunge, one of the Soviet missiles was hungrily homing in on him.

  “Jettison the pod, DuPont …” Hunter called to the stricken pilot.

  He would never know if the man heard him or not.

  The Soviet AA-10 slammed into the F-16 just forward of the right wing root, roughly the position of the transponder pod. The resulting explosion ripped the small fighter in two, disintegrating the right wing and forward fuselage section.

  The shredded wreck hung in the thin air for an agonizing moment before it spun down in an ever-increasing spiral on its left wing, until that too, was torn off by the force of the free-fall. The shattered nose of the Falcon plunged straight downward toward the earth, a blunted, broken arrow.

  Hunter felt paralyzed, watching the stricken F-16 fall, powerless to help the young pilot who had the misfortune to be stuck with the faulty transponder switch.

  Why? Why had DuPont been the one? What cosmic crapshoot had rolled his unlucky number that particular day? It could have been any one of them, Hunter thought. But why DuPont?

  Suddenly, Jones’s voice brought Hunter out of his brief stupor.

  “Falcon Flight,” the voice crackled over the cockpit radio. “We’ve got bogies dead ahead at twenty-seven thousand. Read sixteen Flankers in formation and closing fast. Engage on first pass only.

  “Repeat, engage on first pass only … Over.”

  Hunter could see the Flankers below him now, streaking toward the squadron of F-16s. With no small amount of anger welling up inside him, he armed both his cannon and Sidewinders and took aim at the rapidly approaching enemy fighters. If he only had one pass, he was sure as hell going to make it count …

  At first, Wing Commander Gorshkov was stunned, not wanting to believe his own radar.

  Although better than most of the Soviet systems, the Flanker’s radar was still quite susceptible to sudden, unexplained failure. But this glitch was very bizarre. The blips from the big B-52s they had been tracking had vanished just moments after he and his flight fired their long-range missiles at them. Certainly the missiles couldn’t have reached the targets and destroyed every one of them so quickly.

  He immediately radioed his wingman to confirm the loss of contact. His scope too showed no blips.

  It was then that an awful fear began to creep up on Gorshkov. Had the Americans fooled them?

  A moment later his wingman called and informed him that he was getting readings indicating that one enemy target was hit.

  Gorshkov quickly pushed the Reset button on his target acquisition radar and confirmed what his wingman had reported.

  At least they’d hit something. But just what it was he had to find out.

  Gorshkov punched in his afterburner and brought the Su-27 interceptor up to full speed. Suddenly three pilots in his flight were urgently calling him and reporting new targets were appearing on their radar screens. Within seconds, Gorshkov saw them too—smaller, speedier blips were popping up all over his screen.

  “Fighters …” he whispered, suddenly putting the pieces of the puzzle together and realizing his worst fear had come true. The Americans and their gadget-happy Air Force had tricked them, using fighters to decoy them, thus leaving their main base back in East Germany virtually unprotected.

  He looked up through his plexiglas canopy to see the large group of enemy fighters cruising high above them. He could tell immediately by the enemy planes’ small profile that they were F-16s.

  Suddenly his pilots were radioing him for orders. Were they to engage the enemy, or return to base? Like good Soviet pilots, they wouldn’t proceed without his authorization.

  He mentally reviewed his own orders—to engage and destroy the enemy bombers before they could launch their cruise missiles. But there were no bombers … And he knew the F-16s carried no cruise missiles—they were flying too fast.

  But he could not return to his base with this blunder hanging over him. No—if his radar said the planes above him were bombers, then he would shoot them down as bombers.

  “Engage!” he called out to his flight. “Bogies are ten or more F-16s! Keep high and watch your fuel consumption!”

  At the same moment he was giving the orders, Gorshkov knew that his twin engine plane would use a lot of fuel dog-fighting the swift Falcons.

  But it was too late to worry about that now. All that mattered to him now was shooting down at least some of the Americans to make up for the colossal mistake of having been lured halfway across Germany with a false radar signal.

  He armed his cannon while he coaxed more speed out of the big engines, angrily rising to meet the F-16s above him.

  Chapter 16

  HUNTER SAW THE BIG Flankers climbing up toward the rapidly descending Falcon squadron.

  Instantly he sized up the impending engagement. The smaller F-16s had the advantage of speed because they were power diving. But the quickly shortening distance between the opposing forces would make it impossible to use their Sidewinders against the Soviets—the missiles would have to make too tight a turn.

  However, Hunter knew their angle on the larger Flankers provided the F-16s with a big target for their powerful 20mm Vulcan rapid-fire cannons in their noses, a thought that Jones confirmed a second later.

  “This will be a gunfight,” he called out to the Falcon
flight as now barely a mile separated the two forces. “One pass and back to the ranch.”

  Seconds later, staccato bursts of cannon flame thundered out as the two formations of fighter planes collided in the German skies.

  Hunter deliberately held off firing until the range was so close he could see the Russian pilots’ helmets in their forward-perched canopies.

  Coming down from a steep angle, he targeted one of the Flankers in the second wing of the Soviet squadron. As enemy tracers whizzed by on either side of his canopy, he sighted through the HUD, then squeezed the trigger in three sharp bursts.

  Hunter’s first burst tore into the flat topside of the third Flanker’s midsection, walking cannon shells back toward the twin tails, shattering the right engine and neatly slicing off the right rudder and stabilizer.

  The fatally wounded Soviet plane yawed crazily across the sky before plummeting earthward in a death dive.

  Just behind and to Hunter’s left, Rico was furiously pumping cannon shells into another Flanker’s cockpit. The big Soviet interceptor exploded in flames and Rico had to spin out to avoid flying through the debris that scattered through the formation.

  Further to his right, Jones had made short work of another Soviet fighter, nearly carving it in two with successive bursts of cannon fire.

  “Okay, flight, form up and withdraw,” Jones called into the radio as most of the diving F-16s leveled off and regrouped up on his wing. The sharp, quick engagement had been picture perfect from the Americans’ point of view. Jones knew that they didn’t have to fight this batch of Soviet airplanes any longer—with the Flankers’ fuel reserves all but gone, and their being way beyond their bingo point for return to their base in East Germany, the Soviet planes were as good as shot down already.

  As one, the Falcon flight turned and were headed south-southwest at better than Mach 2, and Jones was waggling his wings at the frustrated Soviets, daring them to follow.

  “See you later, suckers,” he thought.

  Wing Commander Gorshkov was nearly choking with rage.

  He’d been caught too low, and the American fighters had torn through his squadron like wildcats, flaming three of his pilots without taking a single hit themselves. The Flanker’s speed and size advantage was nullified by the steep climb they were forced to make to intercept the F-16s, and the smaller Falcons had accelerated right through and past them, streaking off to safety.

  The fact that his own plane had been hit, and that he was losing fuel from his left wing tank was almost secondary. There was no way he and the others could return to their base anyway. He checked his other gauges, did some rapid mental calculations, and grimly made his decision.

  Ordering the rest of the fighter wing to turn east and try to bail out over their own lines, he pointed his plane at the disappearing Americans and kicked both engines to full afterburner, rocketing through the skies toward the F-16s, his left wing trailing a steady vaporous wisp of raw fuel.

  Within a minute he had caught up with the Americans. Sighting one of the F-16s trailing the main formation, Gorshkov tightened his grip on the stick and edged his finger around to the fire control button of his cannon. Another half mile, and he’d tear the American right out of the sky. His radar acquisition signal started chirping, flashing the information he needed to complete the attack.

  Just a few more seconds …

  It was his special intuition that had kept Hunter from rejoining the F-16 flight right away.

  And now he knew why.

  He had sensed the danger seconds before his radar beeped out the warning of one of the Flanker’s relentless pursuit. Now, he was already pulling up and around to get a clean shot at the Soviet before he had a chance to fire at the trailing F-16.

  Hunter watched the big Soviet jet close the distance until the F-16 pilot—Hunter thought it was Samuels—finally snap-rolled his airplane out of harm’s way and back under his attacker.

  As the Flanker tried to make the turn with the Falcon, Hunter saw the radar target-finder light up through his HUD. It flashed twice and glowed steadily. Quickly he armed a Sidewinder. This was his one and only shot—if he waited too long, the dogfighting planes in front of him would be too close and the ’Winder’s infrared seeker might select either one of the speeding planes’ hot exhausts.

  Hunter took a gulp of oxygen and squeezed the missile release. Instantly, the AIM-9 roared off his wingtip toward the Flanker’s tail, covering the distance in less than five seconds.

  The Soviet pilot had just opened fire when Hunter’s missile disappeared up into his left engine exhaust and exploded. The left side of the plane erupted in a blinding flash and poured out black smoke as flame devoured the entire left wing, spreading fire from the leaking fuel back along the length of the Flanker’s fuselage.

  The stricken Soviet shuddered, pushed through the sky by the billowing clouds of black smoke and flame behind it. Then it fell off on its left wing, spinning downward in a near-vertical dive.

  Gorshkov had hit his eject button just in time. Propelled by small explosive bolts under his seat, the Soviet pilot was literally blown out of the Ranker’s shattered cockpit. Spinning violently through the air, he was surprised his chute deployed at all.

  Just barely conscious, the next sound Gorshkov heard as he floated to earth was the thunderclap of the impact as his plane buried itself in a German soybean field and burst into flames.

  With his luck, the Soviet pilot thought, he would land right in the middle of the raging fire his downed aircraft had created.

  Far below and circling around the black column of smoke that rose up from the burning Flanker, Hunter heard Jones report to the mission coordinator back in Belgium.

  “Ringside, Ringside, this is Falcon leader,” Jones intoned. “Left Jab is concluded. Repeat … Left Jab concluded. Confirm three—no, four kills. One friendly down. Bandits heading east, but we believe they are past their bingos.”

  “Roger, Falcon flight,” came the clipped reply.

  “Please advise appropriate elements to commence Roundhouse,” Jones continued. “Repeat, cue Roundhouse! Advise results on completion. Falcon Flight leader returning to base. Over and out.”

  Hunter had joined the F-16 formation just as Jones had finished his report. Taking up his usual position on the general’s wing, they led the victorious Falcons back toward Rota.

  Chapter 17

  THE US AIR FORCE FB-111s were already circling over friendly airspace in West Germany when the order from Ringside came through on the designated channel.

  Cranking their tapered wings in toward their narrow fuselages, the big tactical bombers dashed across the East German border, their powerful turbofan engines pouring out more than 50,000 pounds of thrust and moving plane, pilots, and pay-loads at Mach 2.5 toward their destination.

  A truly schizophrenic aircraft, the F-111 was either a very big combat fighter or a very small heavy bomber, designed to do both jobs for the Air Force in the late ’60’s. The first of several swing-wing supersonic planes, some pilots swore by it while others swore at it. The complex variable-sweep wings gave it enormous flexibility in its combat mission capabilities: With wings spread out it had the lift necessary for take-offs, landings, and low-level bombing runs. With the wings swept back, it could penetrate enemy airspace at high levels doing more than twice the speed of sound to deliver a nuclear payload.

  But the “Aardvark,” as it was called with varying degrees of affection, was also a tough plane to handle in spite of the tons of sophisticated flight control computers that assisted the pilot.

  A complex terrain-avoidance radar system would keep the plane down on the deck—usually at an altitude of 200 feet or lower—automatically maintaining a constant height over mountains, trees, hedgerows and buildings. A pilot could kick in the terrain-avoidance gear and be treated to a dizzying roller coaster ride through the treetops—very effective for coming in under an enemy’s radar defenses. Not so diligent in settling one’s stomach.

&
nbsp; The FB-111s streaking toward Soviet Air Wing headquarters at Neurippin were the tactical bomber variants, carrying a massive dual payload of special runway-cratering blockbusters and incendiary cluster bombs on their wing points.

  Crossing the East German border, the Aardvarks switched over to their terrain-following radar flight control and dropped to the terrifyingly low altitude of 200 feet, still doing Mach 2. Their high speed and tree-top level would bring them in low and fast enough to avoid Soviet fighters.

  But there was another threat to be wary of: there was a possibility that the Soviets might have already rushed in mobile anti-aircraft radar units to replace the SAM launchers destroyed by the Wild Weasels. To counter this threat, a specially configured EF-111A “Raven” flew slightly ahead of the main flight of F-111s. Bulging at the seams with radar detection and suppression equipment, should the Soviets light up their active search radars, the Raven’s powerful jammers would fill the enemy’s screens with a blizzard of electronic “snow,” thus giving the bomber flight a clear shot at the target.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet base commander at Neurippen was facing a tough decision.

  He had long ago lost all contact with the flight of Flankers that had been launched to stop what had been thought of at the time to be a massive force of cruise-missile-toting B-52s. The last of the surviving Flankers had gone down 150 miles short of the base, empty of fuel, its pilot reporting the Americans’ masking deception before ejecting. The base commander cursed that there were no Soviet in-flight refueling aircraft available to him to save the Flankers, although he knew that these airplanes were a rare commodity even in the best of times.

  Now, the commander had two critical points to consider. Another flight of Flankers—these belonging to the Polish Air Force—were coming in from a rear base near Warsaw and were due to land at his base within minutes. Meanwhile, he had sixteen aircraft of his own lined up on the runway, ready to take off for an aggressive patrol just west of the demarcation line between the Germanys. This flight, originally scheduled for earlier in the morning, had been delayed by the American F-4 attack.