Ian Slater - World in Flames

The COMCO’s Cray computer had it in four seconds. “Return journey plus or minus one thousand miles, Captain. I say again ‘miles.’ “

As if reading Shirer’s mind, the officer had already computed the Fulcrum’s combat radius of plus or minus eleven hundred kilometers against the distance from Vladivostok, and the arithmetic projection was clear: The Fulcrums could make it to interdiction and back to Vladivostok, but it would leave them little time for the attack. Their wing commander must certainly have taken this into account. COMCO’s conclusion, quickly relayed to Shirer, was that the Fulcrums were probably hauling drop tanks for extended range.

Even so, Shirer knew that during an attack, the Bogeys would, at some point, have to jettison the drop tanks, even if they hadn’t used all of the fuel from them, in order to reduce weight and so engage the Tomcats at maximum speed. This would force the Russians’ fuel consumption to jump to eighteen times normal “suck-through” rate. In four minutes on full war power, each Fulcrum would guzzle more than thirty percent of its entire fuel load.

Shirer flicked on his mike. “Freedom One to Angel Leader. Do you read me?”

“Angel Leader,” acknowledged the Tomcat pilot. “Go ahead.”

“Fire Fox One at each Bogey. Repeat, fire Fox One at each Bogey.”

The RIO — radar intercept officer — behind the pilot in each Tomcat wondered what in hell Shirer was up to. Very soon each of their Fox One air-to-air radar-homing Sparrow missiles would be ready, the fast-closing Fulcrums within range, but why, they wondered, fire now — allowing the Bogeys to have at least ten to fifteen seconds to “jinx” their way out of it, particularly when the Fulcrum was so highly maneuverable?

But orders were orders, all three RIOs in the Tomcats going to “warning yellow, weapons hold” status, each of the RIOs straining to hear the tone alert — a low growl in their earpiece telling them the missile was fully armed and ready for launch.

Back in the general’s compartment, Col. Jim Norton was ill, the 747 continuing its hair-raising forty-degree dive, buffeted by so much turbulence, the whole plane seemed to be rattling to pieces, Norton convinced his stomach was now in his chest — or was it the other way around? — blocking his breathing. Glistening in the redded-out combat lighting of the aircraft, the droplets of sweat on his forehead looked like hundreds of tiny rubies.

“Now, don’t you worry about it, Jim,” Freeman assured him. “That boy up in front is gonna put this bird down in Seoul in no time.”

Norton couldn’t speak, unable even to articulate his terror, the veins in his hands standing out like dark strings as he clenched the armrests, eyes discombobulated, mouth parchment-dry, his heart thumping rapidly, doubly mortified at exhibiting such fright in front of Freeman, and painfully conscious again of the great and terrible divide between a civilian aircraft and a military one. Here the noise was at once thunderous and screaming as it fell through the blackness, the nausea, indescribable in its clammy dizziness, overtaking him in a suffocating net.

“Fix your eye on something middistance, Jim,” Freeman instructed him. “Helps keep your balance.”

It was the stupidest goddamn thing the colonel had ever heard Freeman utter — there wasn’t anything fixed! Everything was spinning out of control. Christ! He wished the general would just shut up and let him die.

In the Tomcats, the radar intercept officers got the tone alert.

“Master arm on,” announced the Tomcat leader. “Centering up the T. Bogeys twenty-one miles. Centering the dot… Fox One, Fox One!”

The next rush of conversation between the Angel pilots and their RIOs surged with static and was full of overlay so that it was difficult for Shirer to know exactly who was speaking. Battling with the yoke in heavy turbulence at ten thousand feet, he heard his copilot yelling, “There they go!” the exhaust of the 524-pound American missiles lighting the clouds nearby in a momentary and astonishingly beautiful peach glow, and then six seconds later, a fast, broken chorus of “Good kill! Good kill!… Shoot him!…”

“Haven’t got a fucking tone…”

“Shoot him… Shoot…!”

“Christ!” said Shirer’s copilot, seeing a blip on the Boeing’s radar screen disintegrating. “They got one of ours!”

Shirer was fighting to keep the Boeing in the steep dive, slipping farther away from the point of intercept, the babble of the Tomcats now interspersed with Russian: “ ‘Unichtozhit’!… ‘Unichtozhit’!”—”Finish him off! … Finish him off!”

“Lock him up! Lock him up!” a Tomcat pilot was yelling to his RIO. Then “Good kill! Good kill!” the RIO yelling, “Bogey missile… two o’clock high… two o’—”

“Jesus!…”

Behind Shirer, at the consoles, chaff and wide infrared-band flares were being jettisoned to confound the Fulcrum’s missile, which the COMCO saw wasn’t aimed at the Tomcats but was streaking toward the 747 at over twenty-one hundred miles an hour.

The console operator, his body at a down angle of thirty degrees, face bathed in perspiration, fought with everything he had to maintain control of the scrambler beam he was “coning” in on the incoming missile; any wider cone and he would interfere with the avionics in the Tomcats. The Russian missile, a quarter mile away, curled hard left and exploded, an amber blossom on the 747’s console screen. Seconds later the shock wave and debris hit the Boeing, and Shirer saw the warning light for the starboard two engine flashing, its intake fouled, temperature soaring. He shut it down but still kept diving, hard to port, down toward the sea. As long as there were Bogeys in the area, he wanted to get down low where the Boeing’s upward-looking radar could pinpoint the attackers for electronic countermeasures but where the Fulcrum’s downward-looking radar would be confounded in an electronic haze of sea scatter.

“Bogey contact!” Shirer heard from somewhere high above him in the night sky. “Judy at ten o’clock. Splash!” It told Shirer that one of the two remaining Fulcrums was down.

“One to go!” came an exhilarated cry.

“Angel Leader to Angel Two. That’s it. Break off… Let him go.”

“Aw, shit!”

“Let him go!” repeated the Tomcat leader. “Cover the big bird. That’s our job.”

“You see any eject?” asked the second Tomcat pilot.

“Negative.”

Sergei Marchenko didn’t know who the pilot of Freeman’s Boeing was, but whoever it had been, he knew his business. The Boeing was lost, and all that he was getting on his radar screen was the leaping “frying” static of sea clutter, like a television set gone haywire, and in the dogfight he’d used up so much fuel, he knew it was opasnoe delo —”touch and go”—as to whether he’d make it back to Vladivostok, let alone Khabarovsk. And he suspected that one of the Tomcat’s rotary-barreled twenty-millimeter cannons might have taken a chunk out of the fuselage covering his nose landing wheel. There was no warning light on, but air speed indicated there was a drag somewhere, and even if the hydraulics hadn’t been hit, the Tomcat’s short burst had made a hole somewhere — big enough to slow him down.

He punched in the coordinates for Vladivostok return, the computer telling him he’d be on empty fifty to a hundred miles before, depending on headwinds. He jettisoned his remaining 101 R Alamo air-to-air missile, which made him 350 pounds lighter. Fate willing, this might just do the trick. Alert, yet fatigued from the combat in which he had downed one of the F-14s, he thought for a moment of Alexsandra, of her long, dark hair, the slow way she unpinned it before they made love. If he got back, he was going to see her again — and to hell with Nefski. There was nothing gentle about his desire for her, no sense of protecting her from Nefski or himself, only the sheer drive, after having cheated death once more, to have her with all the force he could muster. But first he’d have to fill out a zayavlenie o poteryanom imushchestve —”lost-property report”—explaining, on the prosaic gray form, why he’d dumped millions of rubles’ worth of air-to-air radar-homing missile. Well, he asked himself, what did they want? A top ace in Far Eastern Command or an easily replaceable missile?