Fortunes of War (44 page)

Yes. The four F-22s appeared as if by magic.

“Five miles at your four-thirty position, Red One,” Jiro said into the radio as he locked up the closest F-22 and pushed the red button on his stick. The first missile roared away.

As he was locking up his second target, his wingman fired a missile.

They alternated, putting six missiles in the air.

Meanwhile, Colonel Nishimura turned hard right and his wingman turned hard left, pulling six G's each, trying to evade the missiles the Americans had just put into the air.

 

Bob Cassidy knew for certain he had been ambushed when his ECM indicators lit up. The strobe pointed back over his left shoulder; the aural warning began deedling; the warning light on the HUD labeled
“Missile” lit up, then seconds later began flashing. The Japanese planes behind him had just launched missiles.

Cassidy already had fired his first missile. As the targets in front of him separated, he squeezed off a second at the target turning right, Colonel Nishimura, although he didn't know who was in the plane.

Cassidy's chaff dispensers kicked out chaff bundles and the ECM tried electronically to fool the radars in the missiles aimed at him. All this was done automatically, without Cassidy's input.

Bob Cassidy was busily trying to turn a square corner to force any missiles chasing him to overshoot. He lit his afterburners and pulled smoothly back to eleven G's, two more than his airplane was designed to take. His vision narrowed, he screamed to stay conscious, and the two missiles behind him overshot.

Nishimura's wingman signed his own death warrant when he turned left, a flight path that carried him out in front of the Americans. Two Sidewinders were aimed at him, and they had no trouble zeroing in. The first went up his tailpipe and exploded; the second went off twelve inches above the main fuel tank, puncturing the tank with hundreds of bits of shrapnel and shredding it. The plane caught fire in a fraction of a second.

Without thinking, the pilot pulled the ejection handle. He died instantly when the ejection seat fired him from the protection of the cockpit. A sonic shock wave built up on his body and disemboweled him before he and his ejection seat could slow to subsonic speed.

Nishimura was lucky. Two of the missiles fired at him went for decoy flares that he had punched off. The other failed to hack his turn. Unfortunately, his flight path was taking him into the area directly downrange of the Americans.

 

Jiro Kimura's first missile smashed into Paul Scheer's airplane several feet forward of the tail. Scheer knew something was wrong when he lost control of the plane—it simply stopped responding to control inputs. Instinctively, he glanced at the annunciator panel, which told him of problems with the plane's health; he saw that every light there was lit.

What the lights and engine gauges could not tell him was that the plane had broken into two pieces. The tail was no longer attached to the main fuselage.

He glanced at the airspeed indicator. Still supersonic.

The nose was falling and the stick position had no effect. It was then that Scheer glanced in the rearview mirror and realized the tail was gone.

The attitude indicators showed the plane in a steepening dive. He retarded the throttle to idle and popped the speed brakes open. They came completely out and would probably have slowed the plane below Mach I had it not been going straight down.

Then the plane began to spin like a Frisbee.

Paul Scheer fought to stay conscious. He wanted to experience every second of life left to him.

 

Layton Robert Smith III never realized Japanese planes were behind the Americans, so the explosion that blew off half his left wing was a complete surprise.

He had managed to get one Sidewinder in the air and was preparing to launch another at Colonel Nishimura when the explosion occurred under his wing. He had his ECM gear on and the audio warnings properly adjusted, but in the adrenaline-drenched excitement of shooting missiles to kill people, he never heard the warnings or saw the flashing lights.

Shooting to kill
was
exciting. He had never felt so alive. He had never even
suspected
that the joy of killing another human being could be this sublime.

Then the Japanese warhead went off under his wing and his plane rolled uncontrollably, faster and faster and faster. He blacked out from the G, despite the best efforts of his full-body G suit. When the G meter indicated sixteen times the force of gravity, Layton Robert Smith III's heart stopped. He was dead.

The coffin of steel, titanium, and exotic metals containing his corpse smashed into the earth forty-two seconds later.

 

One of the missiles missed Bob Cassidy by such a wide distance that its proximity fuse failed to detonate the warhead. There was another radar target beyond Cassidy, one slowing to subsonic speed in a very hard turn. The missile might have missed it—the angle-off and speeds involved were beyond the missile's guidance capability—had not the target turned toward the oncoming missile—turned just enough.

The proximity fuse in the missile detonated this time. The shrapnel penetrated the cockpit canopy and decapitated Colonel Nishimura. The hit was a one-in-a-million fluke, a tragic accident.

 

Dixie Elitch somehow avoided the shower of missiles that killed Scheer and Smith. She had also turned a square corner, and now she found that she had a head-on shot developing with one of the Japanese planes far below, one of the two that had fired the missiles. Both these planes were now on her tac display. She locked up a Sidewinder and fired it, then another.

One of the missiles guided; the other went stupid.

Dixie didn't have time to watch. Her ECM was wailing, so she pulled straight back on the stick and lit her burners. She wanted to get well above this fur ball and pick her moment to come down.

 

Jiro Kimura knew that if he remained in this dogfight, the odds of being the last man left alive were slim. The Zeros had come to bomb Chita, not to shoot down American fighters. Kimura rolled over on his back and pulled his nose straight down. Going downhill, he came out of burner in case one of the Americans was squirting off Sidewinders.

He rotated his plane onto the course he wanted, 260 degrees, and began his pullout. He would get down on the deck and race for Chita while the Americans milled about with Nishimura and the others.

 

The last Japanese pilot in the fight was Hideo Nakagawa, who had the reputation as the best fledgling pilot in the Japanese Self-Defense Force. He came by it honestly. He was very, very good.

And he was lucky. The first Sidewinder Dixie Elitch triggered in his direction went stupid off the rail; the second lost its lock on his tailpipe and zagged away randomly after six seconds of flight.

The instant Nakagawa realized the second missile was not tracking, he pulled his plane around to target Bob Cassidy, who had come to the conclusion that both the Zeros in front of him were fatally damaged and so was completing his turn toward the threat in his rear quadrant.

Both pilots were in burner—Nakagawa in a slight climb, Cassidy in a gentle descent. And both were almost at Mach 2.

Nakagawa managed to get a lock on Cassidy, whom he saw only as
a radar target. He squeezed off the radar-guided missile, then pulled his infrared goggles down over his eyes to see if he could locate the American visually. There he was! At about five miles. Nakagawa switched to “Gun.”

Cassidy saw the flash of the missile's engine igniting under Nakagawa's wing or he would never have been able to avoid it. He pulled the stick aft into another square corner while he punched off decoy chaff and flares.

The missile maintained its radar lock on Cassidy's plane, but it couldn't hack the ten-G turn. It went under Cassidy and exploded harmlessly.

Nakagawa pulled with all his might to get a lead on Cassidy's rising plane. As the two fighters rocketed toward each other, he squeezed off a burst of cannon fire, then overshot into a vertical scissors.

Canopy-to-canopy, Bob Cassidy and Hideo Nakagawa went straight up, corkscrewing, each trying to fly slower than the other plane and fall in behind. The winner of this contest would get a shot; the loser would die.

Nakagawa dropped his landing gear.

When he saw Nakagawa's nosewheel come out of the well, Cassidy thought he had the stroke. Nakagawa drifted aft with authority.

Cassidy shot out in front. He jammed both throttles to the stops, lit the burners, and pulled until he felt the stall buffet, bringing the plane over on its back, all the while waiting for cannon shells to hit him between the shoulder blades.

Nakagawa had a problem. The designers of the Zero had placed a safety circuit in the gun system to prevent it from being accidentally fired with the airplane sitting on the ground. Only by manually shifting a switch in the nosewheel well could the cannon be fired with the gear extended. Another peculiarity of the Zero was the fact that the pilot must wait for the gear to extend completely before he reversed the cycle and raised them again. Nakagawa sat in his Zero, indicating 240 knots, waiting for the gear to come up while watching Bob Cassidy dive cleanly away. Furious, he screamed into his mask.

He stopped screaming when a Sidewinder missile went blazing by his aircraft, headed for Mother Earth. He looked up, keeping his left hand under the infrared goggles, just in time to see an F-22 turning in behind him.

Fortunately the gear-in-transit light was out, so he turned hard into his attacker.

The slow speed of Nakagawa's Zero caused Dixie Elitch to misjudge the lead necessary. Her first cannon burst smote air and nothing else.

She was going too fast. She overshot the accelerating, turning Zero. With engines at idle and speed brakes out, she pulled G to slow and stay with her corkscrewing opponent.

This guy was damned good! Amazingly, his nose was rising and he was somehow gaining an angular advantage.

The G's were awesome, smashing viciously at her. She fought to stay conscious, to keep the enemy fighter in sight.

He was canopy-to-canopy with her, descending through twenty thousand feet. He was close…too close. Somehow she had to get some maneuvering room.

She slammed the stick sideways, fed in forward stick. The other plane kept his position on her as she rolled. She stopped the roll and brought the stick back a little. Instantly, the enemy plane was closing, canopy-to-canopy…fifty feet between the planes. She looked straight into his cockpit, looked at his helmet tilted back, at him looking at her as they rolled around each other with engines at idle and speed brakes out. She saw the infrared goggles and in a flash realized what they were. So that is how he kept track of the invisible F-22!

What she failed to realize was that Nakagawa was trying to hold his helmet and goggles in position with his left hand while he flew with his right. What he needed was a third hand to operate the throttle.

Then he was above her, on his back…and too slow, out of control. He released the stick with his right hand and reached across his body to slam the throttle forward.

Dixie realized Nagagawa had stalled as his plane fell toward her. Before she could react, the two planes collided, canopy-to-canopy.

 

Bob Cassidy had pulled out far below and relit his burners to climb back into the fight. He was rocketing up toward the two corkscrewing fighters—two on his HUD, but he could only see the Zero. They were too close together to risk a shot.

Just as he caught a glimpse of the F-22 alongside the Zero, the two fighters embraced.

The planes bounced apart, then exploded.

Jesus!

Cassidy rolled and went under the fireball.

 

Jiro Kimura was on the deck, streaking toward Chita with both burners lit. His radar was off. His GPS gave him the bearing and distance: 266 degrees at 208 miles.

Using nuclear weapons was insanity, but Japan's lawful government made the decision and gave the order. Jiro Kimura had sworn to obey. He was going to do just that, even if it cost him his life.

Right now imminent death seemed a certainty: He was hurtling toward it at 1.6 times the speed of sound. The odds were excellent that more F-22s would intercept him very soon. They were probably maneuvering to intercept at this very second.

Even if he dropped the weapon successfully, he would not have the gas to get back to the tanker waiting over Khabarovsk. He was using that gas now to maximize his chances of getting to his drop point. He was going to be shot down or eject. If he ejected, the Siberian wilderness would kill him slowly. If by some miracle he lived, the nuclear burden would probably ruin him.

All this was in the back of his mind, but he wasn't really thinking about it; he was thinking how to get to the weapon-release point. He had F-22s behind and F-22s ahead, he believed. And at Chita, the Americans had those missiles that rode up his radar beam.

Jiro Kimura didn't think he was going to get much older.