Larry Bond - Vortex

He swept his eyes back and forth across the sky, looking for the telltale enemy missile trails and trying hard to remember the important pieces of dozens of intelligence briefings. Angolan MiG-23s carried Soviet-made

AA-7 Apex missiles. They were only fair performers, and the intel boys said that they were susceptible to a combination of chaff and a high-9 turn.

Hopefully, Stegman’s own speed, plus that of the missile, would make for such a high closing rate that the missile couldn’t react fast enough to a last-second turn. Add some slivers of metallized plastic that would give false radar returns and the missile should break lock every time.

Or so they said.

There! He could see white smoke trails now, coming in fast from below.

His finger was already resting on the chaff button, and he started pressing it at half-second intervals. At the same time, he threw the

Mirage into a series of weaving turns, always starting and finishing each turn with the smoke trails at a wide angle off his nose.

He glanced over his shoulder to check de Vert and was relieved to see his wingman spewing chaff and corkscrewing all over the sky.

High g forces on each turn pressed him down into his seat,

forcing him to fight to hold the incoming missiles in view. He could see four trails now. Two aimed at him.

Stegman yanked the Mirage into another turn, even tighter than his first series. Come on! Miss, damn you. One missile failed to follow him and flashed past-heading nowhere.

But the second smoke trail visibly bent and curved in around toward his plane. Shit. Only seconds left. He pressed the chaff button again and turned again, pulling six or seven g’s, almost hearing the wings creak with the stress. He lost the missile and in that moment thought he was dead.

A rattling explosion behind him. But no accompanying shock wave, fire, or blinking red warning lights. Thank God! The missile must have been decoyed away at the last moment. Stegman breathed out and leveled off, glancing to either side for de Vert’s plane. Nothing above or to port.

Then he saw it. A ball of orange-red flame tumbling end over end out of control toward the ground. De Vert hadn’t been lucky. And now he was dead.

Stegman didn’t waste time in grief. That could come later. Right now he’d have trouble just saving his own life.

He started looking for the enemy, tracing back along the wispy, dissipating smoke trails left by their missiles. The bandits should be in visual range … he’d covered a lot of distance during those few seconds on afterburner.

There they were. Stegman spotted the small specks-faint gray against a faint blue sky-there were his enemies, ahead and to the left. There were four of them, breaking in pairs to the left and right, crossing over each other.

He smiled thinly. That was a mistake. He wasn’t going to panic just because he was outnumbered four to one. Instead, he’d even the odds by concentrating on a single aircraft. And with four planes swerving all over the sky, he’d have a much easier time finding an enemy vulnerable to attack.

Stegman pushed the nose down a little to unload the wings, then yanked the Mirage over hard, into a high-g port turn. He noticed something strange about the bandits as he turned toward them. MiG-23 Floggers were bullet-shaped, single tailed swing-wing fighters. In combat position, a

Flogger’s wings should have been tucked back against its fuselage like those of a falcon making an attack. These aircraft looked totally different. They had wide, flattish fuselages, twin tails, and clipped swept wings.

The near pair was turning away from him, probably trying to lure him into a squeeze play. Fat chance.

He stayed in his turn for a few seconds more, using his helmet sight to line up a Kukri shot. The bandit slid inside his aiming reticle and into the path of the Kukri’s infrared seeker.

Tone! As soon as he heard the missile’s seeker head warble, Stegman pulled the trigger on his stick and then broke hard right. A jolt signaled that the Kukri had successfully dropped off its rail and was on its way.

The two farthest fighters were swinging in on him fast, and he saw flame sprout from under the lead jet’s starboard wing. Jesus. He turned toward them and barrel-rolled, spiraling across the sky to break the lock of the incoming missile, whatever it was.

A fiery streak flashed past his cockpit and vanished.

Racing toward one another at a combined speed of more than twelve hundred knots, the three adversaries zipped by in an eye blink-giving Stegman his first clear view of his opponents. MiG-29 Fulcrums! But even more interesting were the markings. They had gray air-superiority camouflage and carried a blue-and-red roundel. Angolan aircraft were usually sand and green colored, and their insignia was black and red. What the hell was going on?

He rolled right and dove, hoping to be harder to see against the desert landscape so he could gain a few seconds to select another target. A gray-white ball of smoke and orange flame appeared off to one side, with a spreading line of smoke leading to it. His Kukri shot had hit! Scratch one MiG. One for de Vert.

Stegman kept his eyes moving, roving back and forth across the sky.

In fastmoving fighter combat, a pilot’s most important asset is “situational awareness—the ability to visualize his

own plane, those of his allies, and those of his opponents in three-dimensional space, their paths and their possibilities, while using that knowledge to kill the enemy.

He knew two of the MiG-29s were curving around behind him, and he could see the third just visible to his left and rear. He snarled. Having one opponent behind you in air combat was dangerous enough, but three was big trouble. As if to confirm his evaluation, his radar warning receiver sounded again-signaling another long-range missile inbound.

Stegman yanked the stick right, rolling the aircraft so that it was inverted, then pulled up hard. The nose of the Mirage pointed straight down, toward the ground, air speed increasing dramatically as both its jet engine and gravity worked together. As the Mirage maneuvered, he released still more chaff, as a precaution.

He was trading altitude for speed, applying the old fighter dictum that “speed is life.” At the same time, he rolled the Mirage, trying to locate the enemy.

He found them, first a single dot and then two more, with fuzzy white trails from the pair that seemed to go straight for a while before wandering aimlessly about the sky. The signs of radar-guided missiles that had missed-confused by his sudden dive into ground clutter. All three MiGs were about four thousand meters above him.

Stegman felt pain in his ears and yawned to equalize the pressure. He’d lost a lot of altitude, and he had to decide in a single instant how to spend his remaining energy. Fight or flee?

He wanted to go back and send the three MiGs crashing to the earth one by one. But it just wasn’t on. The enemy pilots weren’t making enough mistakes. They still outnumbered him. No, it was time to be discreet.

Stegman rolled his aircraft a few more degrees, so that its clear plastic canopy pointed southeast, and started to pull out of his turn. G forces pinned him to his seat, but he forced his head up against the extra weight so that he could watch the altimeter. Three thousand meters. Two thousand.

Fifteen “

hundred. The spinning needle’s progress slowed, and he leveled off at a thousand meters-flying southeast at more than a thousand kilometers per hour.

He glanced over his shoulder, watching for signs of pursuit. If the MiGs wanted to catch him now, they’d have to increase their own throttle settings, burning more fuel, and all the time moving farther from their base.

Stegman throttled back to cruise and looked at his own fuel gauges. He scowled. The verdomde MiGs may get another kill after all, he thought.