Final Storm (26 page)

The F-15’s powerful radar enabled each pilot to target a separate MiG, and lock on with their big missiles. What’s more, the AMRAAM’s range had a slight edge over its counterpart, the Soviet AA-10.

Closing to the battle, the streaking Phantoms shot underneath the flight of F-15s. Two seconds later, the Eagle flight leader gave the order to fire.

“Fast Lane One,
launch
!” the lead F-15 pilot called out to his wing. “Break and engage at will!”

Still ten miles ahead, the Soviets were just breaking formation to pounce on the slower “Weasels” when their own threat warning radars went off, activated by the deadly AMRAAMs fired by the Eagle fighters.

For the moment, the Phantoms were ignored as the Soviet weapons officers tried desperately to jam the incoming missiles, relay evasive maneuver directions to the pilots, and engage the F-15s ahead of them instead of the escaping F-4 strike planes, all in the same thirty seconds. None of them succeeded in accomplishing all three before the missiles tore into their packed formation.

The lethal American rockets had closed the distance between the two groups of speeding fighters before most of the MiGs could react effectively. Like ducks in a gallery, four of the heavy Soviet fighters exploded into ugly black clouds. Two more of them collided in midair as they both swerved to avoid the attack, adding to the swirling confusion that stretched across the bleak skies above France.

A delayed-fired AMRAAM homed in relentlessly on the Soviet leader, as the pilot tried to jink his way out of the missile’s sophisticated seeking beam. But it was no use. The AMRAAM impacted on the big Foxhound near its left engine intake, the explosion horribly ripping the fuselage along one entire side. The airplane blew up just as the pilot ejected, sending the smoking jet plummeting to the ground below.

Once the wave of AMRAAMs had passed, the Soviets who had avoided the incoming missiles breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the respite didn’t last long. Ten seconds later, they were pounced on by the streaking Eagles as they descended on the scattering Foxhounds.

Hunter and the rest of the 16th were now close enough to join the swirling dogfight that was already in progress high above the French countryside. Several squadrons of MiG-29 Fulcrums had also joined the fray, as had a group of other NATO top-line fighters.

In seconds the sky was filled with roaring, diving, and twisting planes from both sides, dueling with cannons and missiles.

Hunter only saw the battle in a series of flashes. A British Tornado exploded as one of the Fulcrums unleashed a heat-seeking missile that disappeared into its hot exhaust nozzle. A Foxhound was blown up by cannon fire from an F-16. An F-15 went down. Then two more Foxhounds. He saw a smoking F-16 twist away from the scene. Then a Tornado and a Fulcrum collided head-on no more than a half mile in front of him.

Everywhere he looked there were crazily zig-zagging, jinking fighters, dozens of air-to-air missiles, lines of cannon tracers, some missing, some not, explosions, fire, smoke—all of it leaving an insane spider web of contrails across a fifty square mile chunk of French sky. Cockpits on both sides were filled with the incessant wail of radar warning systems. Target radar screens went white from the effects of hundreds of jamming signals and too many targets to process.

Radio procedure was abandoned in the heat of the airborne melee as pilots screamed warnings to each other:

“Dive and roll!”

“There’s two on your tail, Tango-Six!”

“Got ’em! Good kill!”

“Warning yellow, weapons hold …”

“Fox one … Fox one!”

“Tally two! Tally two!”

“Head’s up Delta-Four! Foxhounds coming down from upstairs!”

“Lock him up. Lock him up!”

“Break left and climb! Now!”

“Christ! I’m hit! I’m hit …”

Hunter had never experienced anything like it before. Nothing he’d ever done had even come close to it. Not the Thunderbird training. Not the simulations of Red Flag back in the States. Not even the hellish sorties he’d flown in the last few days.

It was a whole new ball game now.

Time seemed to slow as he tried to absorb the whole scope of the battle and yet block out the extraneous information pouring into his cockpit console and radio headphones. His head swiveled constantly around the small cockpit of the strangely all-white fighter as he tried to keep track of the expanding battle that had airplanes spinning through the sky like mad dervishes.

Suddenly a Fulcrum flashed in front of him. Purely on instinct he punched up his missile targeting system, and let go with a Sidewinder. There was a puff of smoke, a flash, an explosion and a cloud of debris. That quickly, one more enemy plane was destroyed. Hunter picked off another low-flying Fulcrum that happened in front of him with a long burst from his cannon.

Then he snap-rolled the F-16 to engage a speeding Foxhound above him. Locking another Sidewinder onto the Soviet jet, he stabbed the fire control button just as his own radar threat device was activated by an incoming air-to-air fired by an Su-27 Flanker that had just appeared on the scene.

Without missing a beat, Hunter mashed another button on his side-stick controller to release two decoy flares that shot off to his left. The Soviet missile took the high-intensity bait and veered off to explode when it met the flare. Executing a high-g vertical scissoring maneuver, Hunter drew the attacking Flanker high above the fray, twisting rapidly in the thin air.

When the eager Soviet pilot overshot the smaller F-16, Hunter lanced the big Flanker with a sustained cannon burst that gashed a wide wound in the Russian’s upper wing surface. Flame immediately appeared at the edges of the torn metal, igniting the spraying fuel that quickly engulfed the entire tail section. The stricken Flanker plunged down through the clouds, spinning out of control.

Hunter had no time to savor the kill or even catch his breath before diving down into the dogfight again. He spotted Jones’s fighter weaving through the crowded sky, unsuccessfully trying to shake a pair of Fulcrums that seemed to be locked onto his tail.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Hunter tipped the F-16 over in a screaming power dive to intercept the pursuing MiGs. Still a thousand feet above the Soviet planes, he poured on cannon fire as he deliberately spun his agile fighter in a tight barrel roll along the path of his steep dive. The maneuver sent the 30mm shells arcing into the wing roots of both Fulcrums from above, severing one of them completely. Both planes broke off the attack as they wobbled and rapidly lost altitude as a result of Hunter’s guns.

“Thank you, Captain,” Jones’s voice said over Hunter’s radio, calm as if Hunter had just bought him a drink.

Then Jones sent out a warning to all of TFW16. “Keep an eye on your fuel gauges,” he said. “We’ve got to make it back to the gas stations.”

“That’s a roger,” Hunter replied, keying his microphone as he instantly scanned the fuel supply information displayed in front of him on his Heads-Up-Display (HUD). He was getting near the safe return level needed to make it to the tanker rendezvous.

But still the sky was full of Soviet fighters.

“Estimate enough fuel for a few more passes, then it’s time to turn this tag team over to the next wave,” Hunter informed the general.

“Roger, Captain,” the general replied. “I suggest we screw them all up and do a burst and break at forty. Might draw some stray missiles.”

“Roger,” Hunter replied, knowing that Jones was calling for the old Starburst Thunderbird maneuver. “On you, break at forty.”

Hunter slammed his side-stick controller forward and the white fighter shot through the swirling dogfight, joined by Jones a split-second behind him.

The two F-16s rose as one in a straight vertical climb, belly to belly only a scant twenty feet apart. Several Soviet fighters aimed missiles at the speeding pair of jets that were tearing through the smoke of the battle.

With at least a trio of missiles racing them for the clouds, Hunter and Jones kept the throttles open until they reached forty-thousand feet. Then both F-16s chopped power to drop their pointed noses at the ground below, twisting in an interlocking spiral as they descended in a blur of wings and contrails. The Soviet missiles couldn’t make the nose-over with the F-16s, and they orbited harmlessly until their fuel was spent and they exploded.

The two pilots kept their spiral descent tight and fast until they both broke away to target separate MiGs in the cluster of fighters below them. Two Sidewinders flashed from Hunter’s wings and they found the hot exhausts of two Foxhounds. The big jets burst into ugly, flaming balls of jagged metal and disappeared in the confusion of the fur ball.

Weaving again through the tangled mass of aircraft and missile contrails in the pack, Hunter and Jones were joined by two more familiar F-16s on the 16th TFW. Ben Wa and JT Toomey were soon flying alongside in a tight formation. Together, the four planes cut a wide swath through the enemy fighters, meeting any challenge with a hail of cannon fire that ripped through the airspace ahead of them like four high-tech Grim Reapers cutting down corn stalks. Six more MiGs had fallen away in flames before the lethal flyby was complete.

Jones communicated with his squadron by a wing signal that it was time to vector off and withdraw to let the next wave come through. The F-15s and the Tornados were also withdrawing at this point. Their fuel situation would become critical very soon, and Jones didn’t want to risk losing any planes over the Pyrenees. He needed every one he could get. And then some.

“Let’s go, boys,” Jones said, warily eyeing his fuel data through the HUD. “Save some for the next crew.”

Hunter reluctantly broke off the attack and veered off to form up on Jones and the rest of the first wave of fighters. Several Soviet fighters began a spirited pursuit, but they, too, were low on fuel and didn’t chase the NATO planes much past the battle area.

Thus ended the first round of what would be the largest air-to-air battle of any war. Predictably, both sides called up reserves to cover for their spent first-echelon interceptors.

No sooner had the combined force of F-16s, F-15s, and Tornados left the area when the NATO second echelon line of aircraft arrived on the scene. So too just as the Soviet top-line fighters began retreating, their slightly slower, slightly less-sophisticated second-line fighter force showed up.

So far, the Soviets were following the script perfectly.

T
HE 16 TFW FALCONS
were 50 miles north of the French Riviera, when Hunter, Jones, and the others picked up a large flight of aircraft rising up from the Mediterranean and heading inland.

“Who the hell are these guys?” JT called out.

“I hope they’re on our side,” Wa added, as the large concentration of blips passed across his radar screen.

Jones knew they were.

“Let me put it this way,” Jones told his pilots. “Next time Army plays Navy, bet on the swabbies.”

Instantly, the F-16 pilots knew the large aerial force was made up of US carrier-based aircraft.

It was one ace in the hole that Jones had told no one about. For the past 36 hours he had pleaded with the Pentagon to assign him some Navy airplanes for the fighter sweep. He reminded the Washington desk jockies that not only did the Soviets have a big numerical advantage in ground-based fighters in Europe, but their replacements had only to fly from the Urals or Siberia to join the battle. This point was the whole idea behind the first sorties the 16th had flown in the war—that was, destroying some of the enemy’s key forward airbases, thus making it more difficult for them to receive and service their behind the lines fighters. Jones argued that Navy aircraft, while not plentiful enough to even out the odds in the West’s numerical disadvantage, would certainly help a bad situation from getting worse.

The resistance from Washington was immediate and Jones knew why. The Navy carrier groups had their hands full with battling the Soviets in the Atlantic as well as in spill-over battles around the Mediterranean, especially in the Balkans.

But before Jones had taken off, he had received a fairly optimistic message stating that there was a chance Navy aircraft could participate in one—and
only
one—mission of the on-going fighter sweep. Now, seeing the large force winging up from the western Med, the general knew that the Navy had come through.

Ten minutes later the two groups passed each other in the skies just over the French Riviera.

The Air Force pilots waggled their wings as a greeting to the Navy aviators as they thundered past, returning the salute. Despite a long-standing interservice rivalry, there were no insults exchanged as was usually the case when the friendly rivals met up. The pilots all knew that everyone was in it together now.

The final push.

Hunter’s sharp eyes scanned the naval attack force as it wheeled up toward the front. A dozen A-6 Intruder attack planes, slung with heavy STARMs—Standard Anti-Radar Missiles—were leading the wave. Hunter knew their function, on this mission anyway, was similar to that of the “Wild Weasel” Phantoms—to preemptively knock out the mobile SAMs that the Soviets would surely be moving up to replace their recent losses.

Although the sturdy Intruders had no guns or air-to-airs to defend itself, a sister plane flew in formation with them to jam both ground and airborne anti-aircraft guidance signals. This particular A-6, called the Prowler, carried an airborne jamming system like the EF-111 Raven. This would keep the enemy radar operators busy long enough to allow the lightly-armed Intruders to escape.

Soviet fighters facing the main naval attack force would more likely be tangling with the formidable F-14 Tomcats of two carrier wings. Although they were probably one of the most expensive aircraft in the US inventory, Hunter knew they had proven to be worth their price tags in combat situations. A truly superior acquisition and targeting radar allowed the weapons officer to track and fire on six targets independently, while the pilot burned through the air at Mach 2 plus. Hunter could see huge AIM-54 Phoenix missiles visible under the wings and fuselages of the Tomcats, ready to be targeted and fired on a Soviet plane while the F-14s were still almost a hundred miles away.