Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (48 page)

           
“Bullet, Bullet Two flight of two is
engaging the other two bandits,” the AWACS controller reported. “I show you two
minutes to bingo. You’ve got two, possibly four more bandits northwest of your
position at Blue plus forty, closing at six hundred knots.”

           
That was all Povik was waiting for.
“Copy, Basket. I’m not getting any radar warning signals from these guys—they
just might be sitting on us.” Povik’s older, less capable ALR- 45 threat
warning receiver was little more than a glorified fuzz-buster that could tell
him that there was a threat out there but not reliably tell where or what.
“We’re bugging out of here. Bullet Five, I’m coming left first. I’ll take
anybody who tries to get behind you.”

           
“Two,” came the usual wingman’s
reply.

           
Povik had just started his hard left
turn when he heard his wingman scream, “Missile launch! Hitman, missile on you!”

           
“Shit,” Povik cursed at himself, not
one squawk from his threat-warning receivers—sometimes they were useless pieces
of garbage. “Gimme chaff and flares, Bear. Find the missile!”

           
“I can’t see it!” Blevin shouted.
His oxygen mask was flattened against the right side of the canopy as Povik
tightened up his left turn and the G-forces increased. “I can’t see it!” He
continued to hit the chaff-and-flare buttons; he could see each flare cartridge
flying into the darkness, burning as bright as a welder’s torch, but not the
enemy missile. His F-14 was equipped with one ALE-29 pod loaded with thirty
infrared missile-decoy flares and one ALE-39 box loaded with sixty chaff
cartridges to decoy radar-guided missiles. The pods were supposed to be slaved
to the AAR-47 IR warning sensor and the ALR-45 radar threat-warning receiver so
cartridges would eject automatically, but the system had so many false alarms
that the decoy dispensers were left on manual all the time.

           
“Hitman!” his wingman shouted. “On
your left! Missile turning inside you! Hit your burners!” Blevin fought the
G-forces and stared out the left side. He saw the missile immediately—a tiny
yellow phosphorescent dot, growing larger as it spiraled in on them.

           
Povik didn’t hesitate—he jammed both
throttles to max afterburner and felt the satisfying kick as eight gallons of
raw fuel a second were dumped into the burner cans, creating a flame a hundred
feet long behind the Tomcat. It was a last-ditch move to defeat a heat-seeking
missile that was locked onto your aircraft instead of on a decoy flare—light
the afterburners and hope the long flame steered the missile away in time . . .

           
Blevin cried out, “Jesus, oh Jesus
...” But just as he expected the missile to hit, he could see it veer to the
right and pass behind them. “It’s turning away! Burners off, increase left
break!” Blevin was thrown against his shoulder straps as Povik yanked the
throttles out of afterburner and into 80-percent power, and he continued to hit
the flare eject button until the Chinese missile was lost from sight.
Thankfully, the missile did not explode after sensing it had missed—it had
passed close enough that its warhead would have done considerable damage. “God
damn!
It’s past us ... I can’t see any
more.” He searched both sides of his Tomcat to make sure it wasn’t circling to
re-attack.

           
“That damn thing was locked onto
us,
not just our tailpipe,” Povik said.
When he spoke, he noticed his chest heaving as strongly as though he’d finished
a wind sprint. So
this
is what real
combat felt like. ... He remembered their intel briefings, which told them that
the Chinese did not yet have infrared guided missiles with a sensitive enough
seeker to lock onto an aircraft fuselage. The Tomcat’s AIM-9R Sidewinder
missiles were advanced enough to seek a fighter’s hot wing leading edges, but
the
Chinese
PL
-2
and PL-7 Pen Lung missiles were supposed to be only capable of locking onto a
hot exhaust dot. Bullshit. “We got some
bad
intel, I think . . .”

           
“Bullet Four, bandits turning right
away from you, range eleven miles,” the AWACS controller reported. “Bullet
Five, bandit moving across your nose at six miles . . . Four is well clear at
your
five o’clock
position low.”

           
“Bullet Five, fox two,” Povik’s
wingman cried out. He looked up just as an eerie streak of light flashed out
above them. A second streak lashed out—Povik’s wingman was going for the
jugular, not just to scare anyone off. The heat-seeking AIM-9R Sidewinder
missiles curled to the right and dipped lower, chasing the fighters. Seconds
later there were two explosions; the second explosion was much larger and more
sustained as the damaged Chinese fighter began to cartwheel to the ocean. They
caught the Chinese fighter in a perfect pincer maneuver, with the bandit so
intent on killing the guy in front of him that he forgot about the second
Tomcat slashing in from above. Luckily, the second Chinese bandit didn’t try
his own pincer move—it might have worked, because Povik’s wingman was
definitely tunnel-visioned in on his own quarry, and Povik’s Tomcat was on the
wrong side of the energy curve and probably didn’t have the speed to defend.

           
“Bullet Five, splash one,” the AWACS
controller reported. “Second bandit at your
two o’clock
position, high, looks like he might be
extending. Heading zero-two-five to intercept. Additional bandits now at your
eleven o’clock
position, high, Blue plus thirty miles. Be
advised, bandit number two heading northwest now, decelerating and descending
rapidly, looks like he might be CAPing for his buddy.” The second Chinese fighter
was apparently going to set up an orbit over his damaged wingman to help out in
a search and rescue effort—he was out of the fight for now. “Will advise if he
tries to re-engage. Bullet flight, say bingo.”

           
That reminded Povik to check his own
fuel state, and it was worse than he figured—even those few seconds in
afterburner sucked up a lot of precious fuel. He was two thousand pounds below
his bingo fuel level—he would be in emergency fuel levels in just a few
minutes. They were in big trouble even without four more bad guys on their
tail. “Bullet Four is bingo, give me a vector to home plate.”

           
“Bullet Five is three minutes to
bingo,” Povik’s wingman added..“I can take a vector to Bullet Two flight if
they need help.”

           
“Don’t think that’ll be necessary,
Bullet Five,” the AWACS controller said. “Bullet Two flight is engaging, Bullet
Six flight is airborne, and Bullet Eight flight is reporting ready. Home plate
wants you to RTB. Heading one-three- two, stand by for your approach
controller.”

           
“Copy, Basket,” Povik replied. That
was perfectly fine with him, Povik thought. There was a time to fight and a
time to run, and there was nothing ignoble about running now.

Aboard Bullet Two

           
“Take the shot, Banger!” Lieutenant
Commander Carl Roberts shouted. “Take the damned shot!”

           
Chasing down the four Chinese
fighters—they still did not know what kind of fighters they were dealing
with—was getting deadly serious. While continuing warning messages on the Guard
channel, the four Chinese fighters continued barreling straight for the RC-135,
not bothering to perform any diversionary jinks or heading changes. Although
the four aircraft had split into two groups, with one group going high and the
others a few thousand feet lower, they were just barreling in on the four
Tomcats, not trying to maneuver or jink around at all. They were simply going
balls to the wall— the higher group nearly at five hundred and fifty knots, the
lower jets about five hundred knots.

           
The threat to the Air Force plane
was obvious to Carl Roberts, the radar intercept officer on Bullet Two. He had
locked up the bandits on radar immediately, hoping that the squeal of the AWG-9
radar on the Chinese fighter’s threat warning receivers might make them turn
away. No such luck. The Chinese fighters kept coming. “You got no choice,
Banger,” Roberts shouted again to his pilot, Lieutenant James Douglas. VThese
guys will blow past us unless we slow ’em down, and a missile launch is the
only way.”

           
Douglas
was only on his second cruise as an F-14
aviator after spending several years in “mud pounders” like A-7s and A-6
bombers. Air-to-mud guys, Roberts thought, were much different than fighter
pilots. Bomb runs took discipline, timing, strict adherence to the
plan—qualities that were probably big minuses in fighter pilots. Real fighter
jocks used the ROE as a guideline, but relied on their wits to defeat an
enemy—you never went into a fight with the whole thing worked out in your mind
ahead of time. Unfortunately,
Douglas
always did. “The ROE says . . .”

           
“Screw the ROE, Banger,” Roberts
said. “You gotta attack.
Ranger's
declared an air-defense emergency, and the bubble’s out to two hundred miles
now. These guys are too close already. Take the shot . . .”

           
“Bullet, bandit at
twelve o’clock
, twenty miles,” the AWACS controller
reported. “Range to Flashlight, forty miles. Range to home plate, Blue plus
seventy . . .” The controller kept on rattling off an endless stream of numbers
at
Douglas
; the young pilot turned the litany out of
his mind. They had the intercept, that’s all that mattered now . . . “A head-on
shot will miss. It’s low percentage . . .”

           
“So what? If he jinks away from the
Sparrow, we mix it up with him. Take the shot...”

           
“Gimme a few seconds to get an angle
on ’em . . .”

           
“We don’t have time for that,
Banger—those bozos might even hit each other. Either way, we keep them from
driving right into the recon plane. Take the damned shot . . .”

           
“A nose-to-nose Sparrow shot won’t
do shit,” Douglas said—Roberts knew he was really confused when his young pilot
used first names instead of his call sign. “We gotta try something else.” On
interplane frequency,
Douglas
said, “Lead’s going vertical. Take spacing
and watch my tail.” “Two.”

           
“Hang on,” he said to Roberts. “I’ll
try a vertical jink; maybe these guys will break off and go for me.” Roberts
was going to protest, but Douglas wasn’t ready to listen: he pulled his F-14
Tomcat up into a 45-degree climb, a radical move but well within the 65-degree
maximum-depression angle for the AWG-9 radar—losing a lock-on with the Chinese
fighters would be disastrous right now—waited a few seconds for about a hundred
knots of airspeed to bleed off, then began to level off. The radar remained
locked on with the range now closing to fifteen miles.

           
“Shit. Nothing’s happening . . .”

           
“You gotta take a shot, Banger.
These guys won’t stop.” “Lead, this is Two. No dice. The Chinks aren’t moving. I’m
well clear.”
Douglas
’ wingman was prompting him to take a
missile shot as well.

           
Just then they heard on their AWACS
controller’s frequency, “Bullet flight, home plate sends code Zulu-Red- Seven,
repeat, Zulu-Red-Seven, proceed immediately. Acknowledge.”

           
“Jesus, Banger, get the sonofabitch
...” Roberts knew they had screwed up. While
Douglas
was trying to decide whether or not to
shoot, the Chinese fighters were about to blast within the one-hundred-mile
“bubble” surrounding
Ranger
and her
escorts, which were demarcated by the Indonesian
island
of
Talaud
. Now the fighters were a clear threat not
only to the Air Force reconnaissance planes but to the carrier itself, and the
role of the Tomcats changed as well; now their job was to protect the five
thousand men on
Ranger
and the other
ships in its battle group.
Ranger
was
ordering the Tomcats to engage and defend the carrier at all costs. The RC-135
and the EC might have to be sacrificed. . . .

           
“Bullet Six has a judy,” the third
flight of Tomcats reported. “Clear Poppa.” The third and probably the fourth
flights of Tomcats were armed with AIM-54 Phoenix missiles, which were designed
to kill enemy aircraft from ranges of over eighty nautical miles—as soon as the
RIO
locked onto a target, a
Phoenix
missile could probably hit it. But a
Phoenix
usually shot into a “basket,” a section of
airspace near the enemy fighter, and then the missile homed in on illumination
signals from the launch aircraft—that made it very dangerous for any nearby
fighters who might be in or near the missile’s basket. Bullet Six could not
engage as long as Bullet Two was in the area.