ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (32 page)

The German hillside flashed past and then he saw the
distant concrete column pointing heavenwards. The wings of Arndeker’s F-16 came
level and he checked his aircraft were still with him, they were and in
anticipation of a right turn to follow the old canal the five moved into an
echelon left formation.

Arndeker almost missed the canal, so choked with weed
was it that it almost merged with the undergrowth on the banks. He took the
flight around in a hard turn to starboard and settled down to just seventy-five
feet above it with four aircraft moving into trail behind him.

“Chain Gang lead, this is Lion Dog Zero Three?”

Lion Dog was the call sign of their controller for
this gig.

“Go, Dog.”

“Gang, you got Steel Talon, a flight of four
Gripens approaching from your 8 o’clock, fifteen miles out.
”

“Roger Dog, they’re late and there was supposed to be
two fights of three?”

“They got bounced, Gang.”

It was a very clinical way of stating the fifth and sixth
aircraft were spread across the countryside somewhere. “Roger Dog, have the
French guys adjusted to compensate?”

“Negative Gang, their timetable is not variable so
I suggest you continue as planned and on time, but it’s your call.”

The plan called for five different formations of
aircraft to arrive over the battlefield at designated times in order to carry
out a coordinated attack. The timing was important to maximise the shock effect
of the layered defences being stripped away and leaving the enemy armour open
to attack. First in were to be the Armee de l’air Mirage F-1s, engaging the Red
Air Force Top CAP to allow the Jaguars and Mirage 2000Ds to destroy or force
off the air the AAA radars, and by so doing opening the way for Arndeker’s
F-16s and the Gripen’s to carry out attacks with Rockeye’s and Gator’s. The
window of opportunity would be scarce minutes, in single figures, before the
Soviet’s recovered.

Arndeker didn’t want to delay until the Gripen’s
arrived and he didn’t want to leave the Swedish fliers to brave the Soviet’s
anger on their lonesome either. He informed his flight and the AWAC he was
switching frequencies.

“Steel Talon lead this is Chain Gang lead on TAC Six,
over?”

After a moment’s delay the Gripens flight leader
responded in accented English, and it took a second for Arndeker to realise he
had spoken with the owner of that voice only a few hours before.

“Gang this is Talon, sorry for the delay, begin
your run without us, we’ll be a couple of minutes late.”

“Talon this is Gang, we will hold for your arrival but
we can only make a single pass over the target.”

“Roger Gang, I appreciate that…however, my higher
has briefed us for a minimum of four passes.”

On his second radio Arndeker heard the French going
in, and they lost an aircraft to ground fire almost immediately.

“Hey Ulrika, I’m sure your higher had no idea you
would be delayed, but four passes is way beyond sensible…it’s a bad
neighbourhood we’re visiting so hold it down to two passes and we’ll stay with
you.”

Talon’s leader knew that the delay would give the
Soviet’s the recovery time necessary to concentrate their fire on whoever was
in the air, and it was better that their guns be divided up on nine targets
rather than four.

“Roger Gang, you got a deal…and again, we do appreciate
it
.”   Arndeker could hear
the smile in her voice and felt good about
himself
for
the first time in several days.

His F-16s passed through the final cleft in the hills
and he took them in a shallow turn to port, orbiting just above the treetops as
they waited for the Gripen’s.

Arndeker listened to the radio chatter; he couldn’t
speak French so he tried to judge from the tone of the pilot’s voices how it
was going for them.

“Chain Gang lead this is Lion Dog Zero Three, the
2000D’s and Jag’s are doing a first rate job. I’m watching radars going offline
all across the target area and I advise you to begin your run now, it doesn’t
get much better than this, Gang?”     

“Roger Dog, we’ll hold for Talon anyway.”

There was a hint of ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’ in
the AWAC controllers voice as he acknowledged Arndeker simply.

“Roger”
.

If all had gone as planned the Armee de l’Air aircraft
would still have been overhead when the Swedish and American aircraft went for
the tanks and APCs, but the French had expended all their anti-radar ordnance
and were already departing the area as the Gripen’s finally arrived. The two
leaders hurriedly agreed on a simple plan to replace the original, the Gripen’s
and the F-16s would make a north to south pass over the head of the column in
extended line, four hundred metres between aircraft, with the Swedes on the
left, they would then all swing left and make the second pass further down the
column before egressing to the north.

The American and Swedish aircraft hugged the contours
of the earth as they began their approach. Flying below electricity pylons and
between trees, they headed for the pillars of black smoke in the distance that
marked the positions of the victims of the French HARM missiles. On cue from
the AWAC they popped up to 500 feet and began looking for targets of their own
on the ground below.

The Wild Weasel sortie by the French had destroyed
more than half a dozen AAA vehicles and intimidated the remainder into shutting
down their radars, but it had not slowed the armoured advance. The scene that
met Lt Col Arndeker was of a countryside crawling with machines of war, and all
of them headed west. His first thought was that there were not enough munitions
in the armouries of the west to deal with even half of the fighting vehicles
spread out before him. Tracer began curling up towards him, travelling slowly
at first but seemingly heading right for him. The tracer grew larger as it
approached and suddenly seemed to accelerate, only to flash past harmlessly,
but Arndeker still hunched his shoulders and tried to make
himself
smaller. Each F-16 carried a pair of Rockeye II’s, slung in tandem down the
centreline hard points and a Gator mine dispenser on each of the inside wing
pylons. Arndeker touched the rudder to line up on a company’s worth of tank’s
advancing in line abreast and pickled off a single Rockeye. The weapon fell
clear of the aircraft before splitting open like a clamshell and releasing the
247 bomblets it contained, which fell like an ever expanding, elongated cloud.
He wasn’t aware of what effect the bomblets had, he saw a road crossing ahead
of him and selected the portside mine dispenser, leaving a trail of small
munitions across the road and the fields either side of it.

Either his sensor suite was malfunctioning or none of
the AAA vehicles within engagement range was emitting because the only sounds
coming from his earpieces were voices, one female and seven male as the other
pilots shouted to one another on the radio. Apart from the tracer there was little
in the way of nastiness being directed their way, but the urge to be far from
this place was very real. He pickled off his last mines in the path of a mass
of self-propelled artillery emerging from a wood, and held his breath until the
armoured spearhead had dropped away behind him and only open fields lay ahead.
A quick call on his radio confirmed that his wingmen had also emerged
unscathed, as had the Gripens, so he felt a lot more comfortable about the next
pass.

The nine aircraft turned in a line to the left and
then turned north once again, this time with the F-16s on the left. Arndeker
found
himself
flying toward a line of poplars, and
pulled back the side stick to clear the tops of the trees. Immediately a loud
warbling sound in his headset told him that
a SAM
radar was illuminating him, and he felt the vibration as his ECM suite
automatically punched out chaff. The warble changed, becoming a frantic
two-tone siren as the transmitter locked him up. More chaff was ejected and the
siren reverted to warble, and then cut out altogether. Arndeker was soaked in
sweat and his stomach rebelled, churning in reaction.

Exhaust trails from ground to air missiles
criss-crossed the sky, tracer from light, medium and heavy automatic weapons as
well as from 23mm cannon slashed in front, beside, and all around the attacking
aircraft. An aircraft hit the ground in a welter of fragments, careening
through a potato field before exploding, but Arndeker couldn’t tell if it had
been American or Swedish and his mouth went dry with the realisation that in
the space of mere seconds the hunters had become the hunted. The pilots were
shouting warnings to one another over the radio, spotting for one another the
deadly ZSUs and mobile SAM launchers, but if they were close enough to identify
the vehicles visually they were close enough to be engaged by them and the
voices carried a sense of panic.

“Smoke in the air!”

“Watch out for shoulder launchers by the farm!”

“Oh fuck…SAM’s!
SAM’s!”

“Zeus on the low hill, Zeus on the
low hill!”
 

“
I’m hit! I’m
hit! Jesus
Chri
….”

A warbling
returned to his headset and he ejected chaff himself, not waiting for the ECM
suite to do the job. He caught his breath as he saw a ZSU-23-4s turret tracking
him and kicked the rudder savagely whilst pushing the side stick forward enough
to avoid the four seemingly solid streams of 23mm cannon that would otherwise
have nailed him.

The warbling in his ears changed to a siren and then
became a monotone that turned his blood to ice. His HUD told him a pair of
SA-9s had been launched at him, and were guiding on his F-16 despite the chaff
and automatic track breakers engaging. To go up into the clouds would only be
to invite other launchers to attack as he entered their engagement envelopes,
his last manoeuvres had brought him down too low for him to engage in drastic
turns so the only direction left to him was downwards even more. Arndeker eased
the side stick forwards, and the F-16 sank earthwards until it barely cleared
the tops of hedgerows but the tone continued without missing a beat. The chaff
was still being discharged, but the bundles were breaking on contact with the
ground instead bursting apart in his aircrafts wake. The jet wash and his
slipstream did kick up strips and scatter them, the foil strips swirled about
before settling to the ground or snagging on branches of bushes and trees, but
they did not provide the degree of radar reflection their normal deployment
would have achieved. The fear was a physical force within his chest, squeezing
his heart and compressing his lungs whilst reaching up to grasp his throat. He
caught a brief glimpse of something fast moving that left a trail of dirty
white exhaust behind as it passed a few feet above his canopy without
exploding, and he looked about frantically for the second missile, where the
hell was it! The second missile had flown into a tree but Arndeker was unaware,
he never saw it, not a single visual clue as to its whereabouts, and then the
warning tone in his ears ceased as the SAM launcher lost radar lock.

Arndeker had heard stories about airmen whose deaths
had been so swift that they apparently never realised they were dead, and their
shades appeared before the commanders who had sent them to their deaths,
shocked and confused and asking for explanations. Arndeker took the flesh of
his right bicep between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, squeezing
it through the material of his G-suit until the pain made him wince. He let out
a gasp of breath in relief but realised three things, firstly his legs were
shaking uncontrollably, he had urinated without realising it, and thirdly he
was staring at a Soviet tank commander stood upright in a tanks turret and
gaping right back at him. It could only have been for the merest fraction of a
second but the moment seemed frozen in time. With a start Arndeker realised the
F-16 was still slowly losing height and he pulled back on the stick, rocketing
up and over the T-80. Arndeker let out a little laugh in relief, but even he
could hear the hysteria that edged it. Once back at 500 feet he pickled off his
last Rockeye above a mix of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, looking over
his shoulder as he did so and noting on the way the holes in his port wing.
When the hell had that happened?

He was about to head down again but instead he broke
hard left, avoiding by a hairs breadth a mid-air with a flaming comet that cut
right across his path. The pilot of the stricken aircraft had an open radio
channel, and over the roar of the flames could be clearly heard the pitiable
screams of intense pain, the screams of a trapped animal enduring unbelievable
searing agony. The burning aircraft wasn’t losing height, if anything it was
slowly gaining altitude and prolonging the suffering of its pilot, trapped and burning
alive in its cockpit.

Arndeker unplugged his headset, tearing the lead out
of its socket to cut off the awful cries before vomiting into his oxygen mask,
not just because a human being was being burnt to death, but also because that
human being was female. Something else struck his aircraft and this time he
felt it, the F-16 lurched with the impact and he snatched away the oxygen mask
to spit out the bilious remnants of his breakfast as he waited helplessly for
flaming fuel vapour to fill his cockpit too, but nothing happened and no master
warning lights flashed.