Dixie and Aaron Hudek were going out to the northwest of the base, Preacher Fain and Lee Foy to the southwest. They would come in when Cassidy called them.
Each plane carried eight Sidewinders and a full load of ammo for the gun. Cassidy had ordered the AMRAAMS left behind. He was betting that the Sky Eye data link would work. If it didn’t, this fight was going to be a disaster. He was also betting that the Japanese would avoid Chinese airspace and come in from the east, the most direct route from Khabarovsk after avoiding China. If the Zeros circled and came in from another direction, they might find a pair of F-22’s with their radar and drop them both. Every choice involves risks. Life involves risk. Breathing is a risk, Cassidy thought. He and his pilots needed some luck. If they got a little of the sweet stuff, they could smash the Zeros right here, today, once and for all. And if luck ran the wrong way…, well, you only had to die once. Cassidy stood in front of the blackboard. He already had all the freqs, altitudes, and call signs written there from the planning session. “Okay, people. They are on their way. They’ll hit the tankers and motor over our way, we hope. Let’s go over the whole thing one more time, then suit up. We’ll man up an hour and a half before they are expected, and take off an hour prior.”
No one asked a single question. Eyes kept straying to wrist watches. When the brief was over, Cassidy walked outside, went around behind the shack, and peed in the grass. Finally, he suited up, taking his time. He was standing outside the shack, looking at the airplanes, thinking about Sweet Sabrina and little Robbie and Jiro Kimura when he heard the satellite phone ring. Lee Foy answered. Fifteen seconds went by; then Foy shouted, “Sixteen Zeros. They’ve finished tanking and are on their way here. ETA is an hour and twenty-eight minutes from right now.”
“Let’s do it!”
“Let’s go.”
They grabbed gear and helmets and began jogging for their planes.
When the planes were level at altitude after tanking, Jiro Kimura slid away from the other flight of four Zeros that was assigned to the ground attack mission. He was wearing the night-vision helmet that he had borrowed from the helo pilots, but he didn’t have it turned on. He wanted to try that now. First, he checked his three charges, Ota, Miura, and Sasai. They were precisely in position, as if he had welded them there. They were good pilots, great comrades. Satisfied, Jiro engaged the autopilot and began fiddling with the helmet. Before takeoff-he had turned the gain setting to its lowest reading, as the helo pilot had advised. Now he lowered the hinged goggles down over his eyes. The battery was on, so the goggles were working, or should be. His eyes slowly adjusted to the reduced light levels. Oh yes, there was the other flight, out there to the right. He turned his head from side to side, taking in the view. The view to both sides was limited, and he couldn’t read the instruments on his panel, but in combat, he wouldn’t need to: he could find every dial and switch blindfolded. The real disadvantage to the helmet was weight. In a helicopter a twelve-pound helmet on a healthy man was no big deal if he didn’t have to wear it too long, but in a fighter, pulling G’s, the story would be much different. At five G’s, the darn thing would weigh sixty pounds, which would be a nice test of Jiro’s neck muscles. Ten G’s might be enough to snap his neck like a twig. It just stood to reason that if the Americans had figured out a way to cancel visible light waves, their airplanes still might be visible in the infrared portion of the spectrum. Giro’s oxygen mask was lying in his lap. The helo helmet had no fittings to accept the mask. The Zero’s cockpit was partially pressurized with a maximum three psi differential, so even though the plane was at 25,000 feet, the cockpit was only at 9,000. If the canopy was damaged or lost, Jiro would have to hold the mask to his face with his left hand while he flew with the other.
The F-22’s took off in pairs, Cassidy and Scheer first, then Dixie and Hudek, then Fain and Foy. The enlisted troops stood on the ramp watching the planes get airborne, basking in the thunder of the engines. As the wheels came into the wells, the pilots turned on their aircrafts’ smart skin. The noise of the engines continued to rumble for minutes after the planes disappeared from view. After the noise had faded, the senior NCO told the troops to get in the trenches, freshly dug by a backhoe that was sitting near the dispersal shack. They could safely stay out of the trenches for a while but the NCO was too keyed up to wait. Better safe than sorry.
The Zero symbols appeared on Bob Cassidy’s tactical display at a range of two hundred miles. He was fifty miles north of the base at twenty thousand feet, cruising at max conserve airspeed, about.72 Mach. Scheer was on his left wing, out about a hundred yards. The symbols were so bunched together, Cassidy couldn’t tell exactly how many bogeys were there.
The main problem with Sky Eye was that at long ranges the symbols were grossly compressed, and at short ranges they were unreliable. The gadget seemed to give the best presentation when the bogeys were from five to fifty miles away. Inside five miles, he would be forced to rely upon the F-22’s’ infrared sensors; the data from all the F-22’s was shared, so the computers could arrive at a fairly complete tactical picture.
At least he had dodged the first bullet today: the Zeros were coming in from the east, right up the threat axis.
Cassidy checked the position of the other two flights of F-22’s. He thought Preacher Fain was too close to the base.
“Preacher, this is Hoppy. A few more miles south, please.”
Preacher acknowledged.
Cassidy checked everything: the intensity of the HUD displays, master armament switch on, the proper displays on the proper MFDS, cabin altitude, engine gauges … He was ready.
Preacher Fain tightened his shoulder harness and ensured the inertial take-up reel was locked, so that he would not be thrown about the cockpit. He adjusted his oxygen mask, wiped a gloved hand across his dark helmet visor, and checked the armament panel.
Fain glanced at his tac display: Lee Foy was right where Fain wanted him, about five hundred feet out and completely behind his leader. With Foy well aft and off to one side, Fain was free to maneuver left, right, whatever, without worrying about a midair collision. And the wingman was free to follow the fight and keep the bad guys off Fain’s tail while the leader engaged.
The high Zeros were only forty miles from the base. The low ones were thirty miles out. Eight in each flight. Fain eyeballed the rate of progress of the top group and tightened his turn radius. He wanted to come slicing in behind them just after they got into the Sentinel zone, when they were certain to have their radars off. He wanted to knock as many down as possible in the first pass, then dive to engage the lower ones. The Zeros down low were going to be juicy, pinned against the deck as the invisible F-22’s came down on them from above. Oh boy!
The heart of the Sentinel missile system was its computer, which contained a sophisticated program designed to prevent an enemy from causing all the missiles in the battery to be launched by merely sweeping his radar once, shutting down, then repeating the cycle. The program required that the target radar sweep repeatedly and be progressing into the missile’s performance envelope at a rate of speed sufficient to enable it to get into range by the time the missile arrived. If these parameters were met, the computer would fire two missiles, one after the other, then sit inactive for a brief period of time before the system would again listen for the proper signals.
The guidance system in the missiles was more sophisticated than the computer in the battery. As the missile flew toward its target, the computer memorized the target’s relative position, course, and speed, so in the event the target radar ceased radiating, the computer could still issue guidance signals to the missile. Of course, the probability of a hit decreased dramatically the longer the target radar was off the air. If the target radiated again while the missile was still in flight, the computer would update the target’s trajectory and refine its directives to the guidance system.
The system worked best when the missile was fired at an airplane that was flying directly at the Sent
inel battery. Due to the geometry of the problem and the speeds of the target and missile, the missile’s performance became degraded if it wound up in a tail chase.
As Colonel Handa flew toward the Chita Air Base, he was flipping his radar from standby to transmit, then back again, over and over. He had instructed all the other pilots to leave their radars in the standby position — which meant the radar had power but was not transmitting — but he was scanning with his to see if he could detect any enemy planes aloft, or induce the Americans to fire one of their antiradiation missiles. Handa didn’t know that the missiles were fired from automated batteries; indeed, the possibility had never even occurred to him.
The eight strike airplanes had left the upper formation a hundred miles back. They were down on the deck now, five hundred feet above the treetops, flying at a bit over Mach 1.
Handa kept waiting for his ECM warning devices to indicate that he was being looked at by enemy radar, but the devices didn’t peep. There seemed to be no enemy radar on the air. Or, thought Handa ominously, no radar that his ECM devices could detect. Perhaps the Americans had taken another technological leap of faith and were using frequencies that this device could not receive. Or perhaps their radars were in a receive-only mode, merely picking up the beacon of his radar when it was on the air. If only he … He dropped that line of thought when the first Sentinel missile shot by his aircraft at a distance of no more than one hundred feet. The brilliant plume of the rocket motor made a streak on the retina of his eye. Handa’s heart went into overdrive.
As he scanned the sky for more missiles — the visibility was excel-lent — he forgot to flip the switch of his radar back to standby. That was when another Sentinel missile, launched automatically almost sixty seconds before, slammed into the nose cone of his fighter.
The thirty-pound missile was traveling at Mach 3 when it pierced the nose cone and target radar in a perfect bull’s-eye. Handa’s plane was traveling at Mach 1.28 in almost the opposite direction. The combined energy of the impact ripped the Zero fighter into something in excess of two million tiny pieces. The expanding cloud of pieces hit the wall as each individual fragment of metal, plastic, flesh, cloth, and shoe leather tried to penetrate its own shock wave, and failed.
The other Zeros continued on toward the Chita Air Base as the pieces of Handa’s fighter began to fall earthward at different rates, depending on their shape. The fuel droplets fell like rain in the cool summer sky, but the motes of metal and flesh behaved more like dust, or heavy snow.
After Colonel Handa’s Zero disintegrated, the other seven planes in his flight continued straight ahead. Several seconds elapsed before the remaining pilots realized what had happened. During that time, the planes traversed almost a mile of sky.
Without their radars, the pilots were essentially blind. At these speeds, they couldn’t see far enough with their eyes. At that very moment, Bob Cassidy and Paul Scheer were ten miles away, at two o’clock, on a collision course at Mach 2.15. The two American fighters were two hundred yards apart, abreast of each other, with Scheer on the left.
“We’ll shoot two each, Paul, then yo-yo high and come down behind them.”
“Gotcha, Hoppy.”
The seekers in Sidewinders had come a long way in the forty years the missile had been in service. The primary advantage of the missile was its passive nature: it didn’t radiate, so it didn’t advertise its presence. The short range of the weapon was more than compensated for by its head-on capability.
At five miles, Bob Cassidy got a growl and let the first missile go. He still had not acquired the Zeros visually, and of course the Zero pilots had not seen him. He fired the second missile two seconds later, at a range of three miles. With both missiles gone, Bob Cassidy pulled the nose of his fighter into an eighty-degree climb, half-rolled and came out of burner, then pulled the nose down hard as the plane decelerated. He finally saw the Zeros below him, going in the opposite direction, toward the base.
Scheer had fired two Sidewinders almost simultaneously and was also soaring toward heaven and pulling the nose around.
One of the American missiles missed its target due to the rapidly changing aspect angle. It passed the target aircraft too far away to trigger the proximity fuse.
The other three missiles were hits. One went down the left intake of a Zero and detonated in the compressor section of the engine, ripping the plane to bits. Another missed the target aircraft by six inches; its proximity fuse exploded adjacent to the cockpit and killed the pilot instantly.
The warhead of the fourth missile detonated above the left wing of the Zero it was homing on, puncturing the wing with a hundred small holes. Fuel boiled out into the atmosphere.
The pilot felt the strike, saw his flight leader’s airplane dissolving into a metal cloud, then saw fuel erupting from his own wing. He had not glimpsed an enemy aircraft and already two Zeros were destroyed, one was falling out of control, and he was badly damaged. He began a hard left turn to clear the area.
Cassidy saw this plane turning and shoved forward on his stick, which, since he was inverted, stopped his nose from coming down. He rolled right ninety degrees onto knife edge and let the nose fall.
The Zero below him continued its turn.
This was going to work out nicely — Cassidy was going to drop right onto the enemy pilot’s tail. Cassidy would use the gun.
Dropping in, rolling the wings level, he pushed the thumb button as the enemy plane slid into the gunsight. The plane vibrated, muzzle flashes appearing in front of the windscreen, and the Zero was on fire, with the left horizontal stabilator separating from the aircraft. Now Cassidy rolled into a ninety-degree bank and pulled smoothly right up to nine Go’s. He wanted to get around in a hurry to rejoin the fight. For the first time, he took a second to check his tac display for the position of the other five F-22’s. Only he and Scheer were still upstairs. The other two sections were descending in a curving arc.
Dixie Elitch and Aaron Hudek each fired a Sidewinder as they came roaring down on the flight of four Zeros from the northwest. The missiles tracked nicely. Dixie squeezed off another, and a third. Her first missile converted the target Zero to a fireball, and the second went into the fireball and exploded. Her third missile took out another Zero, just as the pilot flying the third plane, the one struck by Hudek’s first missile, ejected. She was less than two miles from the last Zero and trying to get a missile lock-on tone when Hudek sliced in front, his tailpipes just beyond her windscreen. Dixie pulled power and popped her boards to prevent a collision. Hudek didn’t bother with a missile. He intended to use his gun. He closed relentlessly on the sole remaining Zero of the flight of four.
Preacher Fain led Lee Foy down on Jiro Kimura’s flight. They squeezed off two Sidewinders, one each, and both missiles tracked. Still wearing the night-vision helmet, Kimura was craning his neck, trying to see what was happening. The Zeros exploding on his right certainly got his attention. He half-turned in his seat, using the handhold on the canopy bow to turn himself around. And he saw the F-22’s, coming down on the Zeros from behind at a thirty-degree angle. “Break left,” he screamed into his oxygen mask. He was holding the mask with his left hand. Now he dropped the mask and used that hand to hold the helmet steady as he used his right to slam the stick over and pull hard.
Fain’s missile couldn’t hack the turn. It went streaking into the ground. Miura wasn’t quick enough. Foy Sauce’s “winder went up his right tailpipe and exploded against the turbine section of that engine. Pieces of the engine were flung off as the compressorstturbine, now badly out of balance, continued to rotate at maximum rpm. Miura felt the explosion, saw the right engine temp gauge swing toward the peg, and knew he was in big trouble. He pulled both engines to idle cutoff as the right engine fire light illuminated and honked on five G’s to help slow down. As the plane dropped below five hundred knots, he pulled the ejection handle. Three seconds later the parachute opened, just as his jet exploded. At this point, the fight was
one minute old.
Holding the heavy night-vision helmet and goggles with his left hand, Jiro Kimura turned a square corner. Only he, of all the Japanese pilots, could see the American fighters descending upon them. At one point the G meter recorded eight G’s, and Kimura was not wearing a full-body G suit, as the Americans were. He was flexed to the max, screaming against the G to stay conscious, as he honked his mount around. It was then that Lee Foy made a fatal mistake. Perhaps he didn’t see Jiro turning, perhaps he had fixated on his intended next victim, Sasai, or perhaps he was checking the position of his wingman on his tac display. In any event, he didn’t react quickly enough to Jiro’s turn in his direction, and once Jiro triggered a Sidewinder at point-blank range, he had no more time. The American-designed, Japanese-made missile punctured the F-22’s fuselage just behind the cockpit and exploded in the main fuel cell, rupturing it by forcing fuel outward under tremendous pressure. When the fuel met oxygen, it ignited explosively. Lee Foy had just enough time to inhale deeply and scream into his radio microphone before he was cremated alive. Aaron Hudek saw the explosion out of the corner of his eye as he was dispatching the last of the Blue Flight Zeros with his cannon. He recognized Foy’s voice on the radio. “Sauce?”
Every F-22 pilot heard Hudek’s call. Jiro Kimura had already fired a second missile. While the first one was in the air, he got a growl on an F-22 four miles away, one turning hard after a Zero. He squeezed it off. Then he turned ten degrees toward an F-22 in burner that was coming at him head-on. This was Fur Ball Hudek. The F-22 was shooting. A river of fire, almost like a searchlight, was vomiting from the nose of the American fighter. The finger of God reached for him. just how he avoided it, Jiro could never explain. He slammed the stick over and smashed on the rudder and his plane slewed sideways, almost out of control. At that moment, he mashed his thumb down on the gun button. The shells poured from the cannon in his right wing root. He wiggled the rudder just as Hudek flashed through the steel stream with his gun still blazing. Aaron Hudek felt the hammer blows. His left engine fire light went on, the temp went into the red, and the rpm started dropping. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw fire streaming along the side of the plane. He started to reach for the ejection handle, but there was another Zero in front of him, this one flown by Jiro’s wingman, ta. At these speeds there was no time to think, but even if there had been, perhaps Aaron Hudek’s decision would have been the same. With a flick of his wrist he brought the two fighters together almost head-on.
Fortunes of War Page 31