Final Storm (15 page)

Of course, once they made visual contact, the Soviets would know that they’d been fooled by an F-16 squadron. What would happen then?

They’d know the answer soon enough.

Suddenly, the NATO forward radar station reported a squadron of Soviet interceptors was heading toward the F-16s at Mach 2 plus. Hunter took a deep breath and looked across the wide expanse of sky in front of him, searching for the Soviet fighters.

Wing Commander Gorshkov was scanning the skies in front of his squadron also, searching in vain for the multiple contrails that the American bombers would leave in the sky.

Where were they?

He could still pick them up on radar, maintaining their high-altitude formations. Hadn’t they spotted the Soviets yet? Surely the B-52s’ powerful search radars could identify them by now. Either the Americans were more foolish than he thought, or something was wrong. Very wrong.

Still his instruments told him the American bombers were continuing on course. The Soviet interceptors were closing the distance at better than Mach 2, trying to reach the flight of high-flying aircraft before they could launch their Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The Su-27s were equipped with the new AA-10 air-to-air missiles, perfect for launching from medium range at bulky airborne targets like the B-S2. All Gorshkov and his pilots would have to do is to get close enough to give the missiles a radar lock, then it would be as simple as flipping a switch.

Now they were well inside West German airspace. Suddenly a light came on in the center of Gorshkov’s cockpit weapons console, turning the glass cover lens a brilliant blue.

He waited until the blue light began blinking. Then a low beeping tone began to fill the cockpit.

Gorshkov instantly barked a command at the rest of his squadron as he reached down for the missiles’ arming switches. He pressed the launch button on his control stick and watched his four AA-10s streak off his wings toward the bomber formations, their own radar guidance systems locking on and tracking the signals they received from the planes ahead.

More than sixty deadly airborne torpedoes raced through the sky, searching for their targets.

Hunter was the first to acquire the AA-10s visually.

The F-16s’ threat warning radars had shown the missile separation from the Flankers, each big radar blip giving birth to four speeding, lethal baby blips. In all the F-16s’ cockpits, radar warnings sang their piercing, one-note songs of alarm, reminding the increasingly uncomfortable pilots of their unaccustomed role as bait.

The F-16 was not accustomed to being the hunted, he thought metaphorically. Usually, the warning signal meant instantaneous evasive action—diving, climbing, jinking, turning—anything to avoid the relentless pursuit of the deadly missile.

But on orders from Jones, the planes of the 16th were holding course, transponders broadcasting a homing beacon for the Soviet missiles. It was a nerve-wracking game of chicken, and more than one pilot looked down at the small yellow dot that glowed remorselessly on their consoles, wanting to reach out and squelch the signal, breaking away.

But none did. Sweating and tense, they waited for Jones.

The general felt the pressure, too, and more. The lives of his pilots and the weight of command was riding with him in the F-16’s small cockpit. Like all aspects of the operation, he had to time this exactly right. If he gave the order too soon, the Soviets would realize what was happening. Yet, if he waited too long, he’d lose most of his squadron to the oncoming missiles.

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.

H
UNTER 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.