Fallout (43 page)

He began to doubt himself even more when suddenly he had a strobe, a hint of an IR return on his screen, still to the left and down. Then a second, then a third hit. It had to be them. They were low, and less than ten miles away, still far to his left. If he hadn’t caught the initial return, they would already be past him. He would never have seen them.

He pulled into the targets in a descending left turn and accelerated. He tweaked the controls on the IR system to separate out the bogeys. He tried to remember the minimum safe altitude of the area to avoid flying into a hill or antenna tower, but couldn’t remember what it was.

Luke heard a buzz in his helmet—the sound of an F-16 radar on his radar-warning receiver. He had a strobe from his one o’clock position, just to the right of his nose. “I’m getting tickled,” he transmitted ominously to Vlad.

“So am I.”

“I’m going active.” Luke threw on the switch for his radar and turned the powerful MiG-29 radar toward the targets tearing across the Indian countryside. He quickly located them and locked up the lead to concentrate the radar’s total energy on that one airplane. He was doing 620 knots. Luke was stunned. The altitude readout showed “zero” feet, so low that the radar couldn’t tell they weren’t on the ground. Night-vision goggles, Luke concluded. That gave them a big advantage he hadn’t anticipated.

He broke lock on the radar and went into track-while-scan. He saw two other targets immediately, and then a third came up tentatively on the screen. Abruptly the third target started turning toward him and coming up after him. Luke hesitated as he suddenly realized that Khan had done the very thing Luke had told him not to do—he’d brought fighter escort. Two light F-16s, unencumbered with fuel tanks or bombs, peeled off Khan’s formation to come after Luke and Vlad.

They had speed, they had good position, and they had American forward-quarter-firing AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. Luke knew they had to act immediately or they would be dead. “Two free fighters coming up after us, Vlad. I’m going low.”

“Roger. I’m going up, then. Over,” Vlad responded quickly.

They extinguished their anticollision lights.

Luke pushed the nose of his MiG-29 over, to pass by the climbing F-16s and race toward Khan. The lead F-16 anticipated his move. Luke suddenly had an F-16 radar locked on him from the right side of his MiG. Luke had to turn into him to defend himself or he would never be able to intercept Khan. But if he did, Khan would slip away to his left. Luke had no choice.

He brought the Fulcrum around hard right and looked up through the windscreen with his helmet-mounted sight toward where the F-16 should be. He couldn’t see him in the pitch-black sky. Luke tried to get the Archer missile to search for it, to give him the growl he yearned to hear, but there was no sound at all from his heat-seeking missiles.

He strained against the high G forces as he continued around to the right. He slaved his radar to the right toward the F-16, but still nothing. He still had a hard strobe on his radar-warning indicator. The F-16 had him locked up. Luke dumped some chaff to try to break the radar lock but had no success. He was trapped. The F-16 was coming uphill at him. It had a radar lock and almost certainly a sweet infrared shot. Luke had nowhere to go. Suddenly he remembered to activate the electronic jammers in the hump of his MiG, the jammers designed and installed just to defeat American-built radars. He reached and quickly threw the switches. He waited for the flash of the AIM-9 missile coming off the rail, but so far he had seen nothing. Then the F-16 radar was gone, deceived by the electronics of the MiG. Luke grunted. Good old Russian engineering.

The two fighters raced toward each other at twelve hundred miles an hour, neither able to see the other, both following the vaguely remembered strobe of the F-16 radar, which had broken lock seconds before. Luke suddenly noticed a return on his infrared receiver and slaved the seekerhead of the Archer missile to it. The Archer missile picked up the heat signature of the F-16 as it climbed away from the land. The missile seekerhead growled in eager anticipation. Luke fired immediately, reduced his throttle to idle, and turned back hard to his left to stay on Khan’s trail.

He saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. The second F-16 had taken a shot at Vlad.

Vlad transmitted, “I’ve got one coming directly at me!”

Luke saw another flash to the right and behind him as Vlad fired a radar missile back at the F-16, which he almost certainly couldn’t see. Vlad made a hard left turn to follow behind Luke and went to afterburner and dropped several hot burning flares to draw off the Sidewinder missile.

Luke saw Vlad scream by in full throttle toward Khan and his wingman as they in turn headed toward the Indian nuclear power plant. The Sidewinder chasing Vlad slammed into one of the flares Vlad had dropped and blew it into a bright orb like the one at the end of a fireworks show.

Just then Luke’s Archer missile reached its target and flew into the engine intake. The invisible F-16 exploded in a ball of flames and tumbled toward the ground. Luke saw two bright plumes of afterburner ahead of him. It had to be Vlad—the F-16s had only one engine.

Luke wanted to kick himself. He had flown an intercept on the lead F-16 with fighters in cover behind. If one of his students had done that at NFWS, he would have given him a “down” for the flight. He stole a look toward the other F-16, or where it should be, but couldn’t see anything. It was like a knife fight in a dark closet.

Luke’s radar was on, as was his infrared search-and-track. His plan for a secret intercept of the F-16s to a nice rear-quarter Archer shot had gone up in missile smoke. He pulled back on his stick, deselected afterburner, and climbed to three thousand feet, well above the F-16s somewhere below him.

He was also now in the position of being to the side of the attacking F-16s with no ability to pick them out of the clutter of the ground. He raced toward his expected intercept point but was losing confidence with every second. “Did you get that bogey?” he asked, wondering if Vlad’s first missile had hit its target.

“I don’t know. Didn’t see impact,” Vlad replied.

Luke’s radar-warning receiver was clear. The F-16s had not reacquired him.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Vlad replied. “I’ve got them three miles ahead of me.”

“Hit your burner,” Luke said.

He saw a burst of two afterburners ahead, then darkness again. “Got you,” he said. Luke pulled hard left to get back on the F-16s’ course. Now he was chasing them from behind, but there was an F-16 somewhere behind him that probably hadn’t gotten shot down.

Suddenly the voice of Prekash, the Indian squadron commander, came on their frequency calmly. “Let us know if they get through.”

“Wilco,” Luke transmitted with supreme annoyance.

He glanced up at the moon to see which side of the airplane would be illuminated. He wanted to be up-moon of the F-16s so they would see only his shadow. Luke accelerated as he began searching the air in front of them with his radar. “Still have them?” Luke asked Vlad.

“Lost them. Too low!”

“Still searching,” Luke said.

“I’ve got them!” Vlad transmitted. “They are three miles ahead of me. On the deck. Heading 130.”

Luke pulled to his left, took up a position of combat spread off Vlad, and redirected his radar toward Khan. Luke’s track-while-scan radar picked up the targets quickly this time. They had a hundred knots of closure on the bogeys, not enough for Luke. “Push it up,” he said. They closed on the two F-16s. Luke glanced at the navigation aid they’d been using, then the chart on his kneeboard, and noted they were seventy-five miles from the nuclear plant. Fifty was their limit. If they didn’t get Khan stopped by fifty miles, Prekash would take over with the rest of his squadron. Luke was tempted to let them do it, to break off the chase and leave it to the Indians, where it belonged. But he wasn’t there to help India.

A red glow began to illuminate the horizon, and the rest of the countryside was now almost visible, even though still in mostly dark grays and black. Luke strained to see his enemy through the windscreen. He glanced down at his radar picture. “I’m showing them in tight formation,” Luke transmitted.

He had no doubt Khan knew they were there. He was certainly getting a radar strobe from the MiGs. But now Luke wanted Khan to know they were behind him. He wanted Khan to pull up, to do anything that would stop his progress toward the target. “Alamo!” Luke transmitted to Vlad as he pulled the trigger on the stick and the heavy radar missile dropped off his wing. One second later the rocket motor ignited, nearly blinding him with its intense yellow flame, as it headed for Khan’s flight of two jets.

Luke heard a buzz in his headset, the sound of a radar locked on to him. He glanced down to his radar-warning receiver screen and saw a strobe from directly behind him. Shit! That other F-16 had caught up with them. The missile launch had shown him where they were. “I’ve got one on my tail!” he transmitted.

Vlad immediately broke into a hard turn to cover Luke’s tail. “Looking.”

The radar-warning receiver couldn’t tell the range, only the direction. The strobe showed just that the bogey was directly behind him. It could be a mile back, or ten.

Luke’s eyes were fixed on the ball of fire ahead of him that was still heading toward Khan. Khan hadn’t jinked or moved up at all. He watched the missile hit the ground a full half mile before the fleeing jets. Luke yelled to himself, “Damn it!” as he smashed his fist into the canopy. “Stupid damned Russian missiles couldn’t hit the ocean if you dropped them off a pier!”

Vlad continued to pull hard left a thousand feet off the ground, with his radar searching for a target behind where he knew Luke must be. His radar was in auto-acquisition mode, and it locked onto a target a mile and a half behind Luke. He didn’t have any time at all. He slaved one of his Archer missiles to the radar to point in the direction of the bogey and fired before he even had a good tone or could see the bogey. He was looking into the black sky to the west, well aware he was presenting a nice silhouette for the bogey as the sun approached the horizon behind him. The Archer screamed off the rail, and Vlad squinted and turned back toward Luke.

The Archer wasn’t to be fooled. It angrily bore down on the bogey, hitting it directly on the tail, just forward of the exhaust. Then it exploded, cutting off the entire back half of the airplane. The pilot ejected as the F-16 slammed into the ground.

“Stay behind me and high. I’ve got to close on these guys.”

“Roger,” Vlad said as he pulled his Fulcrum up to five thousand feet and scanned the sky for any other Pakistani fighters. No more surprises.

“You need help?” Prekash transmitted.

Only Vlad heard it, as he was high enough to catch the transmission. He replied, “Negative. Will keep you posted. Splash two F-16s.”

“Roger. How many remaining?”

“We think two.”

“You need support?”

“Recommend you vector a flight of four out now, heading”—Vlad looked quickly at the chart with the nuclear plant marked—“290. If the F-16s are still airborne by there, we’ll need a lot of help.”

“Roger. Flight of four outbound.”

Luke heard Vlad’s transmission. He assumed that Vlad was talking to Prekash, who no doubt was watching a radar picture of two bombers inbound to his nuclear power plant with the two world-class fighter instructors chasing them from behind. Not how it was supposed to go.

Luke noticed that his fuel was lower than he’d hoped. He didn’t have much more time to complete this intercept. The F-16 had more fuel than the Fulcrum could ever hope to have; the F-16 had only one engine. He had to get Khan now, or he’d be out of gas. He went to full afterburner and accelerated toward Khan and the infrared signature he had. He again worked his radar onto Khan’s jet. He fired another Alamo, his last radar-guided missile. He didn’t have much faith in the large Russian missile by now. He had yet to see it hit anything, not at San Onofre, not here.

The morning air was clear and smooth as he started to see color in the landscape. It was the same patchy color as the camouflage scheme on his Indian MiG. He could make out a few trees or an occasional road as he raced across the countryside below him. He watched the Alamo speed toward Khan and knew that Khan was getting the radar-lock indication on his radar-warning gear.

Luke almost smiled, as he could see Khan’s face in his F-16 trying to decide whether he was safer by pulling up and doing a hard turn into the missile or staying low and fast and hoping the missile would hit the ground. He’d stayed low last time, and he might again. But it was going to be harder. Luke was closer, and Khan had to know that. It took a special coolness to take no evasive action when a missile was tearing up on you from behind.

Luke had closed to within a mile of Khan and could finally see the two F-16s as they danced over the Indian countryside. He could get only occasional glimpses of the airplanes, since they blended in with the darkness, but the missile had a very clear picture. It was getting radar return off the F-16s that guided it beautifully toward them. Luke saw small flashes on the underbellies of the two F-16s as they dropped chaff behind them to try to deceive the missile. The Alamo headed right toward them in a downward line like an arrow, when suddenly Luke’s radar broke lock.

Khan went even lower, literally at treetop level, still running for the nuclear power plant. As much as he would have loved to turn and fight the two Indian MiGs he was sure he could defeat, he was determined to get to the target.

“Shit!” Luke yelled inside the noisy Russian cockpit as he watched the Alamo fail. He had only one Archer missile left.

Luke closed to within three-quarters of a mile of the fleeing F-16s and reacquired them with his radar. He selected Archer, the fast, infallible, maneuverable missile that he’d taught everyone to fear. He slaved the seekerhead to the radar, heard that growl, and fired. The hungry heat-seeking missile went right at Khan. Its motor burned brightly in the morning, illuminating the white smoke trail it left from Luke to the bogey. Khan knew what was coming. Flares dropped from the F-16s like rain. They burned at different intensity from a jet engine, a different color. The Archer chose one of the flares and blew it to hell.