James Huston - Fallout

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.

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.