James Huston - Fallout

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?”