Fallout (44 page)

What? Luke thought. The Pakistanis have a flare that will beat the Archer? When did they get it? It suddenly occurred to him for the first time that he might not be able to get Khan. He had failed to shoot him down with the best maneuvering missile in the world. He was out of missiles and options. The Indians were going to have to take care of him themselves.

He suddenly heard the buzz of a radar that had him locked up. His heart jumped. He looked down at the radar-warning receiver. It was a MiG-29 radar. “Vlad, you’ve got me locked up!”

“Vlad!” he transmitted. “I’m Winchester. Get ahead of me and take a shot!” He continued to close on Khan, now only half a mile ahead. As he tore his eyes away from Khan to glance over his shoulder at Vlad, Luke noticed to his surprise that his thirty-millimeter gun was fully loaded. Bullets! But he’d never fired a Fulcrum gun. He wasn’t even sure how to interpret the gunsight. He slaved the IR system to the radar and saw the hot signature of the F-16s against the cool ground. He selected laser, and the laser range finder showed one thousand meters to the F-16. He selected the gun and wrapped his finger around the large trigger on the back of the stick. He studied the gunsight picture in the HUD. He had almost two hundred knots of closure. He pulled hard left and back to the right, to allow himself to pull lead on Khan and have a downward shooting angle. “Vlad, hold off! I’m going to guns.”

Again there was no reply.

Luke pulled back around hard to the right, with the buzz of Vlad’s radar ever-present in his mind. Luke was finally close enough to begin his gunnery run, although he was nearly supersonic—much faster than he wanted to be—but the F-16s weren’t slowing down for anything. Luke pointed his nose directly at the lead F-16 and watched the pipper—the aiming point—march toward the dark figure streaking across the ground.

The laser range finder and IR system were on target. Luke pulled the trigger, and the thirty-millimeter cannon spit the huge bullets out the front of the MiG. He watched the tracers arc toward Khan and fall just behind him. He pulled hard left to pull more lead on Khan.

Khan knew he had to move. If he continued straight ahead, he’d be dead. He pulled hard left as his wingman broke hard right, in a controlled, disciplined turn. They stayed low to the ground, not giving up the safety of their altitude.

Luke tried to pull lead, but the turn was too tight to saddle in, and too low. If he continued ahead, he would overshoot and fly into the ground. “Vlad, take the one in the right turn!” he transmitted with some difficulty through the seven-G turn. He leveled his wings and pulled up to avoid the overshoot. At least he’d gotten Khan to turn from his target, and he was burdened with whatever bomb he was carrying, not a help in a dogfight.

Khan continued to turn hard right next to the ground, making it almost impossible to get a shot on him as he waited for a chance to pull his nose up and take a snap shot at Luke.

It was a clever tactic, Luke acknowledged, but not clever enough. Luke had three dimensions within which to work, and Khan had two. Luke leveled his wings and pulled up away from the earth, the nose of his Fulcrum pointing anxiously into the purple darkness above. He looked over his shoulder to see if Khan was going to follow him up. Khan continued to fly in his tight circle until he saw Luke almost completely vertical, then turned back to his original heading and accelerated away. It was what Luke had been waiting for. He pulled the Fulcrum down and pointed the nose of the Russian fighter toward Khan’s F-16. As he plummeted toward the earth, he saw the flash of the missile out of the corner of his eye as Vlad fired.

Luke’s heart stopped. Vlad’s radar was still on Luke. He waited to see if the missile was heading toward him and saw it was going toward Khan’s wingman. Luke finally realized that Vlad was keeping Luke on his radar to make sure he didn’t shoot him. He’d fired an infrared missile and had slaved the missile seekerhead to the IR receiver instead of the radar. Leave it to Vlad to come up with that, Luke thought.

Luke pulled the trigger as soon as his pipper was near the F-16. It was a bad shot, but he wanted Khan to know he was still around and wasn’t going away. Khan would have to fight or go down. In his peripheral vision Luke saw Khan’s wingman coming back to support Khan. He was higher than Khan and in afterburner, trying to regain some of the speed he’d lost turning with Vlad. Vlad was behind him about a mile. Luke’s tracers arched in front of Khan again, daring him to keep flying straight.

Khan’s wingman never saw Vlad’s missile. It hit him in the canopy and spiked the F-16 into the ground like a tent peg.

Khan couldn’t take any more. He pulled up hard away from the earth toward Luke. Luke quickly selected radar and locked on to the climbing F-16. He placed Khan directly in the middle of his windscreen. The radar grabbed the reflected return from the metal airplane climbing away from the diminishing clutter and held on.

Khan pointed his nose directly at Luke. Khan’s bomb limited his ability to maneuver, especially nose up as he now was. Luke heard the buzz from an F-16 radar lock as Khan got his radar onto Luke, then fired one of the Sidewinder missiles on his wing rail at Luke.

“Low fuel, low fuel!” the Indian woman warned Luke.

Luke dropped several flares and headed toward the ground at the same time Vlad did. The Russian-made flares were calculated to defeat the known enemy of all Soviet-bloc airplanes, the AIM-9L Sidewinder. The version the United States had sold to Pakistan was the older model Sidewinder. The Russian-made flare was exactly the right infrared frequency and deceived the Sidewinder into thinking that it was a jet exhaust in afterburner. The Sidewinder slammed into the small burning flare, its warhead exploding two hundred feet from Luke’s MiG.

Luke and Vlad were both behind the fleeing Khan now, fifty miles from the nuclear plant. Vlad transmitted, “One left.”

Prekash replied, “Roger, break off your attack. We have you inbound at fifty miles. We have four fighters ten miles away. Repeat, break off your attack.”

“Stick, did you hear that? They want us to break off.”

“I need you down here, Vlad! We’ve almost got him.” “Emergency fuel! Emergency fuel! Land immediately!” the nice Indian woman told Luke in her inimitable voice. He longed for Glenda.

Vlad replied to Prekash. “Yes, roger that. Luke is closing on him. He is still with him, hold your fire!” he yelled as he rolled over and pulled toward the ground.

“Are you Winchester?” Luke asked Vlad.

“One Alamo left,” Vlad replied.

“Lock him up.”

“I’m on my way,” Vlad said, selecting afterburner and racing ahead toward Luke, whom he’d again locked up with his radar. Vlad broke the radar lock on Luke and searched for Khan. He rolled wings level. “Got him.”

“You got a good shot?” Luke demanded.

“Not very.”

“Shoot!” Luke insisted.

“Too low! You’re between us! It will never—”

“Shoot now! That’s an order!”

“Alamo!” Vlad said as he pulled the trigger, and the last missile of their flight dropped off the Fulcrum and tore through the cool morning air.

Luke saw the flash behind him in his rearview mirror and continued to hold Khan on his radar. He had only guessed where Vlad was behind him; he hadn’t really known. He’d taken a huge risk in ordering Vlad to shoot past him to Khan, but his method had its own madness. The Alamo flew by Luke’s Fulcrum on his right a quarter mile away. It headed directly toward Khan.

Khan could see it coming and went lower to try to cause the missile to hit the ground as all the others had. It was exactly what Luke had wanted. He stayed in afterburner and closed to gun range. If Khan stayed straight and level, Luke would have him. If he pulled up, the missile would get him.

Luke pulled lead and placed the gunsight pipper on the nose of the F-16. It danced around in the bumpy airstream, but Luke could hold on the nose of the bogey. The laser range finder instantly gave the MiG computer the firing solution it needed. He pulled the trigger, and the thirty-millimeter rounds pounded out of the cannon.

With the tracers in front of him, Khan knew he had to make an instant decision. He lowered the nose of his F-16 slightly and descended to the trees. The belly of his plane scraped the tallest trees, and the Alamo came up immediately behind him and tried to get him by going through the branches. One of them was too thick for the fiberglass radome of the radar missile. It shattered the nose of the missile and its radar guidance. The missile went stupid and guided left and down, away from Khan. But it had gotten close enough to Khan to know where he was. Like most airborne missiles, it had two fuses: an impact fuse and a proximity fuse. The proximity fuse measured the range to the target when it got to within a few hundred feet. When the decreasing range suddenly reversed and started increasing, the missile knew it was passing the target and triggered the warhead to explode instantly. It did.

Khan pulled up hard to avoid the tracers at the same time the warhead’s proximity fuse sent its message. The high-explosive warhead that sent shrapnel out at incredible speeds took off a foot of the left tail of the F-16. Khan’s hard pull-up lost much of its authority, and instead he drifted higher in an arcing left-hand climbing turn. He flew directly into Luke’s cannon fire. The first huge, high-explosive incendiary round cut through the center of the F-16. The second hit the back of the ejection seat in which Khan sat. The third shell passed through the fuel tank in the middle of the back of the F-16, and the airplane exploded as it pitched over and slammed into the ground.

Luke and Vlad both pulled up high into the sky as Vlad transmitted quickly on the radio, “Splash four F-16s.”

“You got them all?” Prekash asked.

Luke could now hear Prekash as his Fulcrum passed through five thousand feet with ease. “Got them all, Prekash. Four down, maybe one survivor,” Luke said in his studied casual tone.

“Well done. How’s your fuel?”

Luke checked his fuel gauge for the first time in ten minutes. His Fulcrum was out of gas. The Indian woman had apparently given up. She knew that her stupid pilot was going to kill her and had surrendered to the inevitable. The primary weakness of his favorite fighter had been vividly demonstrated. “I’m out of gas. Request vector to the nearest airfield.”

“There isn’t one within two hundred miles. Just put her down,” Prekash ordered.

“Say your fuel state, Vlad.”

“Zero.”

Luke leveled out at seven thousand feet and glanced down below him. There was a straight section of a highway five miles away. “I think I see our new auxiliary runway below us.”

“I’m right behind you,” Vlad said.

“We’re going to set down on the highway right below us. Do you have our position?” he asked Prekash.

“We’re looking. We’ll send a helicopter right away. Good shooting.”

Luke took off his oxygen mask and gasped for air. He rolled into a downwind leg approaching the highway as if it were a typical runway. He checked for power lines and traffic and saw neither. He relaxed, lowered his landing gear and flaps, and prepared to land. He lined up on the road, which now looked narrower than he’d thought. He slowed carefully, then flared and touched down on the road. He quickly deployed his drag chute and got on the brakes. He watched his speed drop below 120 knots, then below 100. The MiG was behaving beautifully.

Something to his left caught his eye. He suddenly realized it was Vlad’s MiG, in a steep nose-down descent. “Vlad!” he yelled. He pushed the transmit button on his radio, “Pull up! Pull up!”

There was no response. The MiG plunged into the ground and burst into flames.

“Look at this,” Cindy said as she gave Morrissey the final report. Morrissey was so tired he knew he’d never read a report right now. “I don’t have time to read it. What does it say?”

“I think you need to read it. It’s the final conclusions of Naval Intelligence on the submarine angle.”

“Let me guess,” he said, sitting back and rubbing his eyes. “They don’t know what kind of submarine it was, and the reason is that the people who saw it couldn’t tell them. And the reason they couldn’t find the submarine, in spite of trillions of dollars spent on antisubmarine warfare in the last decades, is that nobody told them soon enough to get assets in place in time. And because of all of that, they have no idea what kind of submarine it was, and therefore their report can go into the shit can.” He looked over at her. “Pretty close?”

“Not even. They think they do know whose sub it was.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Who?”

Cindy knew better than to deliver that kind of news to her boss. She’d seen too many messengers shot in her days at the Agency. “See for yourself.”

Morrissey took the report and began reading it quickly. His eyes grew large, and he stopped breathing. He flipped to the last page and read the conclusion. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’ve got to go to Nevada. Get Helen Li on the phone for me. Tell her to pick me up. Get Lane to meet me at the airport. I want him to go over this report with me.” He stood and grabbed his briefcase. “If this report is right, we’ve been had.”

Luke stopped his MiG on the highway and broadcast on his radio. “Mayday! Mayday! We have an airplane down. Vlad has gone down. Request immediate SAR assistance! Prekash, do you copy?”

“Affirmative. We’ll get someone over there. State your position.”

“We’re near a road, about thirty miles west of position Lima on our charts.”

“Roger. On the way.”

Luke felt horrible. Vlad had fought bravely, valiantly. He’d shown what he was made of. Luke set the parking brake. He shut down the engines and opened the canopy. He realized he didn’t have a ladder to get down. He didn’t care. He undid his harness and stood on the seat. He threw his left leg over the side, then his right, and held on to the canopy rail with his hands. He lowered himself as far as he could, then dropped the last four feet to the ground. He stumbled and fell but stood again, uninjured. He removed his helmet and his other flight gear and began running toward the burning hulk of Vlad’s MiG a half mile away. As he closed on the fire, he saw a figure walking toward him, dragging a parachute behind him.