Firefox mg-1
Page 29
The mind retreated from the sudden pain, leaving the clarity of the body that he needed. Then the plane kicked in response to his hand on the column and there was a wild shuddering through its length.
* * *
He was in a flat spin, the nose of the plane pitching fifteen degrees and more above and below the horizon. There was a moment of relief as the Anab was left targetless high above him — then alarm spread as the G-pressure mounted on the meter, through 8G, towards 9-G. His airspeed plummeted towards the 100 knot marker.
There was a clicking in his headphones as the automatic igniters worked madly to prevent a flame-out in the huge turbines behind him. The disturbed airflow of the spin was dousing the engines like a liquid, and they were being relit every half second. His eyes flicked to the rpm gauges, and saw that they were down to sixty per cent and the needles flickering. Before he realised it, he had tumbled through eight thousand feet, the altimeter unwinding madly….
* * *
He lost all sight of the Russian aircraft, but Tretsov had watched him, and thrust his own aircraft into a dive. The American was a sitting target.
Gant went through the SOP for a flat spin, pushing the column forward. Nothing happened. The Firefox did not respond. Now, the Russian above him and no doubt following him down had no existence or reality. Now he was fighting the plane itself as it plunged out of control towards the sea. He moved the column back and forth, jockeyed the throttles to get the nose down and to give him better airflow over the elevators. He was trying to put the plane into a more nose-down attitude in order to pick up speed and regain control.
For perhaps two seconds, nothing happened, except the continued chatter of the auto-ignition and the unwinding of the altimeter. Already he was down to thirty thousand feet, and still falling like a leaden leaf. In desperation, he reached his hand for the controls, and dumped the undercarriage to provide a sudden shock of drag on the plane — something the body remembered from a conversation, a story long before. The tail lifted with a twitch, and the nose dipped suddenly and the spin steepened. He applied opposite rudder, and opened the throttles. He was twenty thousand feet up, the altimeter still unwinding but he was back in control. He exerted pressure on the column to level out, and retracted the undercarriage. He pulled the column steadily towards him, and eased the throttles further open. The plane began to level out. The body breathed, its first dragging inhalation since the spin had begun.
Then he saw with an icy shock that the Russian was a bright glow on the screen. The pilot had followed him down, battening on him as he recovered from the spin. The speed of his approach, Gant calculated, was in excess of Mach 1.6. The Russian knew he could kill, that he could get close enough to finish Gant. There was to be no margin for error, no slight gap through which brilliance or luck might slip.
Gant saw him in the mirror, an image leaping at him. The mind cracked open, gibbering in the moment of its death. The orange globules that sprang out of the puffs of mist at the wing edges chased him at a frightening speed, overhauling him. He flung the plane aside, as if trying to avoid some charging animal, and saw in the mirror the Russian turning to follow him, turning, inside Gant's heat-cone, jockeying for the optimum position with one missile left.
There was a false relief that he knew was vapid and unreal even as he felt it; to have escaped the cannon fire was meaningless, a prolongation of seconds.
The body, struggling to master the crying mind, fought to regain control. His hand opened the throttles and he eased the column back and to the right. The mind cried out for something to fire at the tailing Russian, something that would operate on an enemy behind.
The mind's imperative overrode the body. It was a command the body would never have considered. The mind screamed the order to the thought-guidance system, and the last of the decoys in the Rearward Defence Pod was jettisoned. There was a blinding light in the rear mirror that burned eyesight as the decoy heat-source, the incandescent ball, detached itself and hung for a moment in the air. Then the mirror erupted in burning light, brighter than the ball. The body, stunned by its own apparent inactivity, sensed the shock-wave.
Gant held the Firefox in the tight turn. As he steadied the aircraft, there was nothing within the circle he was describing in the air except a pall of black, oily smoke, lit from within by livid, orange flame. Glistening fragments of metal tumbled down from the smoke-pall, like metal leaves turning in the sunlight.
He understood what had happened. While the mind spewed its relief, its incoherent sense of escape and victory, it realised that the incandescent ball of fire released from the tail of the Firefox had been greedily swallowed by one of the huge intakes of the Russian Firefox and it had exploded instantaneously.
Gant wanted to throw up. He choked on his vomit, preventing it from filling the face-mask and suffocating him. The mind invaded the body, and he realised that he was shaking all over.
While he remained capable of effort, he switched in the auto-pilot and then punched in, hesitantly and with a vast effort of memory, the coordinates of his course. The Firefox banked round, steadied, and headed for Finland, while he lay back in the couch, weak, empty, shaking.
Eventually he knew he would recover. Then he would take over the manual control of the plane. But not yet, not just yet…
The Mig-31, NATO codenamed Firefox, and the single, priceless example of its type, cruised at 80,000 feet, at a speed of Mach 3.7, towards the hidden coast of Finland.
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Document creation date: 5.1.2013
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