"Christ! Imagine if it were full!" Dozer shouted above the noise.
There was another huge boom! and accompanying explosion off to their right.
Someone in the AA teams had hit a Flogger square on its fuel supply, obliterating it in mid-air.
Two more MiGs flashed in, hastily launched the Kerrys then quickly departed.
One of the air-to-surface missiles fell into the already burning hangars, the other plopped harmlessly into nearby Lake Erie. Then, suddenly, everything got quiet ...
322
The scream of jet engines faded and the AA fire quickly died down. The base air raid sirens which had been blasting throughout the attack were finally switched off. Within a minute the only sounds were of the crackling fires raging throughout the base.
But the worst was far from over.
In the confusion of the two aerial engagements and the air raid, the third wave of Circle attack planes-they being 12 Sukhoi Su-17 Fitters -had swung out over the lake and were now bearing down on the Erie base from the north.
Their commander-an East German mercenary named Mausser-could barely stop chuckling to himself. Their deception had worked perfectly. They had flown under strict radio silence and just barely 25 feet from the top of the water's surface. And they had timed their arrival to coincide with the conclusion of the first Circle attack-plus three minutes. Now he was certain he'd catch the United Americans off-guard and licking their wounds from the initial air raid by the Floggers.
Mausser pushed his microphone button twice, causing the other 11 pilots in his flight to hear a pair of static clicks-the pre-determined signal to arm their Kerry air-to-surface missiles. Each man did so and clicked three times in return. Just then the shoreline of Erie came into view.
"Voon-da-ba!" Mausser called out. They would soon be rich. He and his pilots were getting paid in gold for every target they could confirm as knocked out.
But suddenly, Mausser knew something was wrong. Deadly wrong . . .
Where there was once clear sky between him and the Erie coastline, now there was a new object. It was an
323
airplane-a jet fighter, so he thought. But it was so strange-looking. And the way it had instantly appeared! It was as if it materialized out of the lake mist ...
A seconed later, he had no throat left.
He had seen a quick flash of light spitting from the odd plane's nose a split-second before, and now realized that his canopy had shattered away and uniform from his neck down was soaked with blood.
Mausser never got a chance to counter-maneuver. He blacked-out immediately and his Fitter smashed into the lake, the armed Kerry missile exploding in the crash. The last thing the East German pilot saw was the red-white-and-blue fuselage of the arrowhead-shaped jet.
The F-16XL disappeared as quickly as it had materialized, the rest of the pilots in Mausser's flight watching as the airplane performed the seemingly impossible maneuver of staying level yet shooting straight up and disappearing high above.
At this point the Fitter pilots broke radio silence. Their leader gone, a South African pilot named Jooge took over command.
"Stay level!" he instructed the others, knowing that a successful air raid meant he'd get the departed Mausser's share of gold. "Continue in on the target . . ."
But suddenly the strange airplane was back again. It streaked through their formation from the east, traveling at terrific speed. Its nose was firing so many cannons it appeared as if it were on fire. First one, then two Fitters simply vaporized in the furious fusillade from the F-16XL. Once again, the jet roared off-this time disappearing over the western horizon.
The remaining Fitters were now just 90 seconds from landfall and under two minutes from their target. Yet a hot debate had erupted among the pilots.
324
"Did you see the speed of that plane!" one pilot asked, his voice filled with panic.
"It is not like anything I have ever seen . . ." another said.
"We must turn back!" a third cried. "It is this American Hunter in that airplane . . ."
"No . . ." Jooge said. "The man you refer to-this American Wingman-is dead. I know that for a fact. This is not him. We must continue the mission."
Two of the pilots didn't agree with Jooge; they simply dropped out of the formation and headed eastward.
"He was spotted during the air raid on Syracuse," one of the remaining pilots.
"This Wingman lives . . ."
"No!" Jooge shouted. "You have been listening to rumors and it is now affecting your performance as pilots. Keep in formation. We are going in . .
."
No sooner had the words left his lips when Jooge was suddenly aware of a dark shadow filling up his cockpit. He looked up and nearly vomited at the sight of the large arrowhead-shaped aircraft underbelly that was screeching along with him, no more than 10 feet above. There was a large W painted on it ...
Suddenly he felt something hit the rear of his airplane with a sharp bang. An instant later his Fitter was spinning out of control. He twisted around and saw that his starboard rear stabilizer and most of his tail wing were gone.
He couldn't turn the airplane left or right, nor could he dive out from under the frightening airplane above him. He reached for the ejection button, but knew that if he yanked it, it would be blown upward and smashed into the plane's underbelly.
He was helpless. . .
The others in the flight who were watching the in—
325
credible aerial encounter were shocked to see the arrowhead fighter force the Fitter right into the lake. As before, the fully-armed Kerry missile exploded, destroying the Soviet-built airplane and its pilot.
That was enough for the six remaining Fitters. As one, they jettisoned their missiles and banked eastward in an attempt to get away from the F-16XL. But five of them would not be so lucky. The Cranked Arrow pursued them, getting position on each of the slower airplanes' tail and blasting it to kingdom come with the awesome Vulcan Six-Pack.
Soon there was only one left. The F-16XL rode right up the pilot's ass, and closed to within firing range . . . But he didn't fire.
Instead, the fleeing pilot heard the F-16XL pilot come on his radio frequency.
"Do you speak English?" the voice demanded. "Yes," the pilot, an Austrian fascist, answered nervously. "Some . . ."
"Then return to your base and tell your comrades what happened here," the almost unearthly voice said. "Tell them what you saw. Tell them they will meet the same fate if they keep flying for The Circle . . ."
The enemy pilot was trembling so much, he could hardly push his radio button to transmit. "But who should I say was responsible?" he finally managed to ask the voice.
There was a burst of static. Then the voice said: "Tell them it was The Wingman . . ."
With that, the flying arrowhead suddenly rose, streaked right over his head, then turned and disappeared off to the west. The Austrian pilot wiped the sweat from his brow, vowed to give up flying altogether then quickly steered a course back to the Syracuse Aerodrome.
326
Three days later the ground attack on the Circle forces at Syracuse began . .
.
It started in the early morning hours when a fleet of lake barges and ferries commenced landing United American troops at the port of Oswego, just 40 miles north of Syracuse. The Americans crushed what little resistance the Circle-aligned troops guarding the city offered, and within two hours, 20,000
men were ashore and moving toward the enemy lines.
Meanwhile, another 8,000 men-most of them from units of the Pacific American Air Corps ground forces-had been moved through the night to a point just 22
miles west of the Syracuse Aerodrome. Their deployment was masked by another daring midnight air raid carried out by the UA A-7s on the Aerodrome itself.
Once again, 500-pound "Ironman" runway busting bombs had been used with great effectiveness. By the time the 20-minute air strike was over, three of the Aerodrome's five working runways had been knocked out.
The rest of the UA force, 2500 elite PAAC paratroopers, were waiting inside a variety of aircraft-327
from Texas C-141s Starlifters to PAAC C-130s-back in Erie.
The Circle Command Staff had been anticipating attacks from several directions and had deployed units around the city as well as the air base. Circle fighter jets were warmed and waiting alongside the Aerodrome's runways, waiting to launch and intercept any United American aircraft spotted on the Circle's still-operating radar net. Its few attack jets were also standing by, waiting to give ground support when the Circle troops went into action.
The first clash between the UA and Circle troops happened just outside of the small village of Ska-neateles, just 17 miles from Syracuse. A Circle artillery base was suddenly overrun by the advance unit of the PAAC 1st Infantry. The Americans, under the direct command of Captain "Bull" Dozer, kept right on going. Using a squadron of large PAAC Chinook helicopters-known as the "Crazy Eights"-the democratic troops leapfrogged up through Marcellus, through Navarino and across the Onondaga Indian Reservation. The Circle troops in their way collapsed under the weight of the attack. By the time the Americans stopped just before noon, they were sitting atop Hewlett Hill, a 600-foot cliff that overlooked the southwest side of Syracuse.
The Circle command dispatched six Fitter attack planes to bomb the Americans on the hill, but a combination of shoulder-launched SAMs and two prowling F-4
Phantoms chased away the Fitters. Within an hour, the Americans were raining artillery shells and rocket fire onto the city itself.
High above it all was Hunter . . . He hadn't slept or eaten in days, standard working conditions when he was on a combat buzz such as 328
this. But, like never before, he was taking out his misery-his deep-down hurt-on the enemy. He loved the F-16XL-the way it flew, the way it performed, the way it felt. And he had shared nothing but success with it since it arrived from the GD factory, the strange incident with the gold APC
notwithattanding.
But although the airplane had filled a certain need within him-and a selfish one at that-it still couldn't dissipate the emptiness inside him resulting from his meeting with Dominique. He knew that he could go anywhere, win any war, bed any woman-and he still / would never forget what he had lost in her.
His friends knew it, too. He was almost unapproachable around the Erie base most of the time. All business the rest. He wasn't mean and brusque-that would have been too out of character. He was just quiet, and giving out a lot of
"please-leave-me-alone" vibrations. Jones, Dozer, Fitzgerald and the others knew better than to go against his wishes.
Besides, there was a war to be fought . . .
So Hunter had loaded down his F-16XL with a gaggle of munitions and weapons and joined the fray. He carried six Sidewinders-two on each wing tip and two more close in under his fuselage. He carried two Paveway laser-guided bombs, one on each wing next to the fuel tanks, plus a Mk 117 750-pound bomb under his portside. To balance this out, he had installed a LAU rocket launcher under his starboard wing, and a AGM-45A Shrike anti-radar missile next to it.
To top it all off, he was lugging a AGM-109 MRASM cruise missile that was packing 2000 Ibs of high explosive, plus six Mk 82 500-pound general purpose bombs.
It all added up to 17,890 Ibs. of ordnance fixed to the 18 hard points on his arrowhead wing frame, not counting the six Avenger cannons in his snout.
329
The 750 bomb went first. American troops moving down from Oswego ran into a roadblock some 11 miles outside of the town. Some Circle troops had blocked the main highway, Route 481, with a movable iron pillbox being hauled on the back of a flatbed trailer, that was in turn being pulled by two souped up tractors.
The pillbox had effectively slowed down the Americans' advance as its controllers had placed it in a narrow pass on Route 481 around which there was no alternate route. The pillbox contained three Bofors 88-mm artillery pieces, phis a number of .50 caliber machine guns. Already it had chopped up the Americans' advance units and now, several Fitters were napalming the stalled force. Enter the Wingman . . .
He blasted both Fitters from the sky without warning, using his Six Pack and a quick vertical translation to give the illusion that he appeared out of nowhere. Then he flipped the XL over and came straight down the pike. Twisting and turning to avoid the pillbox's .50 caliber ground fire, he laid the 750-pounder right at the base of the flatbed. There was an earth-shaking explosion and when the smoke cleared, all that was left was a crater and a few pieces of burning scrap
metal.
The next obstacle was a line of Stalin Organs-mobile units which carried multiple rocket launchers-that the Circle had placed on one side of Route 481. Hunter came in low and hard and emptied the LAU rocket launcher into the eight vehicles, destroying five of them and damaging another. Mortar fire from the advancing Americans took out the remaining two launchers.
A line of captured M-l tanks provided Hunter's next target. Strategically placed on top of six rolling
330
hills just three miles from North Syracuse, Hunter made short work of the armor via his half dozen Mk 82 500-pound bombs.
Another 40 minutes of strafing followed and by two that afternoon, the American amphibious troops were within shelling range of the Aerodrome itself.
Only then did Hunter take a break and rendezvous with a KC-135 tanker to fill up with gas.
The second round of fighting started around three-thirty that afternoon.
United American sappers had blown a number of bridges around the city, thus preventing the Circle troops from half their means of easy escape. A combined A-7 and A-10 attack was launched against the Aerodrome around four, with the Football City F-20s shooting down three Fulcrums which had risen to challenge the slower attack planes. A single A-7 was lost in the raid.
At 4:30, Dozer's troops left Hewlett Hill and began fighting their way into the Syracuse city limits. Enemy troops began retreating back toward the former Syracuse University grounds and bitter house to house fighting ensued.