Top Gun (4 page)

“Goddammit, Lonestar! You’re diverging from the program!”

Greene smiled. “Hey, Mama Bird, this is war, ain’t it? There’s no rules in war. Just like Sinatra, I’ve got to do it my way.”

“Lonestar—”

Greene mashed his radio transmit button. “No more time to chat, cowboy. I’ve got tallyho.”

The three MiG-21s were almost invisible specks in the sky arranged at one-, twelve-, and eleven-o’clock level. Greene knew
his F-12, which dwarfed the MiGs, probably looked as big as a locomotive barreling at them. That was too bad: in a dogfight,
small was beautiful. As Greene closed, he saw the MiGs execute a three-way defensive split, their tail pipes glowing as they
went to afterburn. The MiGs were trying to surround him in the hope that one of them could lock onto his tail pipes and let
loose a heat-seeker.

Greene smiled. Small may be beautiful, but
speed
was king, and
visibility
was everything! The F-12 had almost twice the speed of the Fishbed, and its teardrop canopy had excellent rearward sightlines.
The MiG-21s were notorious for their lack of view astern.

Also, when the MiGs decided to dogfight instead of maintaining their three-on-one, head-butt game of chicken, the bogies handed
Greene a tactical advantage. Greene could snap off his shots, because he had a sky full of targets. The MiGs would have to
be careful—a heat-seeker will drill any tail pipe—lest they shoot down their own comrades. Greene would keep his speed high,
using his warbird to execute slashing attacks, like an eagle plucking pigeons one by one out of the sky.

Greene cobbed his own throttles, going to afterburn, watching the world leap toward him as the Sun-Wolf’s twin turbojets spat
fire thanks to the rings of nozzles that sprayed fuel into the engines’ already superheated exhaust gases. The extra fuel,
igniting, added thrust.

The horizon in front of Greene tilted crazily as he used the Sun-Wolf s superior speed to run a wide half-circle around the
MiGs. Greene prepared a Sidewinder as he rolled in behind and on top of one of the enemy planes. He was a little over two
miles away when he lined up the fly-size speck of MiG in his HUD display. He waited until he heard the warbling tone that
told him his target was acquired, and then fired off the heat-seeker. The Sidewinder dropped down from the Sun-Wolfs wing
pylon and then sprinted forward on its thrashing tail of fire. Greene watched the Sidewinder dwindle in size until it was
only a glowing speck chasing after the distant MiG.

Any time now,
Greene thought.

“Bingo!” he cried out as the enemy warbird erupted into an orange fireball. The Sidewinder had found the MiG’s tail pipe.
“Mother Hen, I’ve got a kill—”

Greene paused abruptly, realizing that in his excitement he had committed a cardinal error: The beauty of the Sidewinder was
that it was a “set it and forget it” type weapon; once it launched, it guided itself to its prey. But Greene had been so engrossed
in waiting and watching for his kill that he had neglected to keep his eye on the other two MiGs—

Which were now coming around on his tail. He could expect a heat-seeker up his ass at any moment. Wouldn’t
that
be cause for a bad day….

Greene threw his F-12 into a gut-wrenching break to starboard, a hard turn in the direction of the attack intended to generate
maxium angle-off to spoil the enemies’ aim. As long as Greene could stay on the outer boundaries of the lead MiG’s missile-launching
envelope, he felt reasonably confident he could rely on the Sun-Wolf’s superior defensive capabilities to get him out of a
jam.

Greene resumed his radio transmission to ground control. “Mother Hen, I’ve got a kill.”

“Roger, Lonestar,” Buzz replied. “Congrats, but what’s your situation?”

“Two bandits on my tail,” Greene murmured, jinking the F-12 for all she was worth to try and throw off his pursuers. It wasn’t
working. In order to line up his first kill, Greene had let his speed drop off. That was another bad mistake, which made two
in a row. If he managed to get out of this with his skin intact, he would have his airplane’s superior performance to thank
for it.

But even a dream machine like the Sun-Wolf answered to the laws of physics. The Sun-Wolf had more brute power than the MiGs,
but it took a while for that power to translate into sufficient energy to get the big airplane moving. Meanwhile, at medium
speeds, the nimble little Russian fighters were more agile. Initially Greene had been an eagle preying on pigeons, but now
he was a bull being tormented by a pair of hounds. There was no way the Sun-Wolf was going to outdance the MiGs in a close-in
knife fight.

“So the hell with it,” Greene murmured. He quit jinking, went to full ’burn, and climbed, subjecting his bird’s structural
frame to maximum G-stress in order to gain altitude. His pursuers dropped back, but Greene knew that he was now perched dead-solid
perfect within the lead Fishbed’s missile envelope.

At 40,000 feet, with his fighter’s nose pointed toward the sky, Greene looked back in time to see the lead MiG fire off an
Atoll heat-seeker. Greene thanked the Lord that his Sun-Wolf carried state-of-the-art countermeasure gear as he waited for
the Atoll to sufficiently close, and then fired off an IRCM infared countermeasure flare. The 40
MM
expendable was propelled away from the chaff/flare/jammer dispenser mounted on the Sun-Wolf’s stern, between her two afterburner
nozzles. The IRCM ignited, burning bright, creating a heat source stronger than that of the aircraft for about three seconds.
Greene, meanwhile, put the Sun-Wolf into a spiral dive.

And prayed.

The ploy worked! The Atoll shifted its lock-on to the flare, chasing it instead of the Sun-Wolf as Greene continued his steep,
turning dive. The MiGs, meanwhile, followed his spiral. Greene waited until he was sure his pursuers had committed themselves
to the chase, and then eased off on his throttles. As he’d hoped, the MiG drivers realized too late what he was up to and
overshot him, coming around past and above him. The horizon whirled like a pinwheel as Greene executed a hard rolling reversal
and pull-up, putting him behind and beneath his attackers at a range of less than a mile. The MiGs were flying in staggered
lead and wing positions. Greene pushed the Sun-Wolf for all she was worth, further closing the gap. Greene was close enough
to see the blood-red, white-outlined five-pointed stars on the MiGs’ dirty-gray aluminum wings and rear quarter fuselages
when he locked onto the closest bogey and fired off a Sidewinder.

The heat-seeker dropped away from the Sun-Wolf’s wing and then arced up on its cone of exhaust, flying a beeline toward the
MiG’s tail pipe. At this point-blank range, there was no time for the Russian pilot to execute evasive maneuvers, and the
Fishbed-J—the Soviets’ plain-vanilla version of a fighter—didn’t carry a flare dispenser. The Sidewinder found the MiG and
blew it away. What remained of the tarnished silver airplane went cartwheeling across the blue sky trailing thick, black smoke,
throwing off bits of flaming wreckage.

“Mother Hen, Lonestar,” Greene radioed. “I’ve got kill number two.”

He eyed the last MiG, which had broken off the engagement and was hightailing it out of the sector. Greene knew he could chase
it with a medium-range, radar-guided Sparrow, but that would have been about as viscerally satisfying as mailing an enemy
a letter bomb. So much of air combat today was accomplished by fucking remote control, when your enemy was nothing more than
a blip on your radar screen, or a fucking black-and-white picture on a five-inch television set mounted on your instrument
panel.

That was the way of the world, Greene guessed. He certainly realized there was nothing he could do about it, but when he had
a choice he would opt for the close-in kill. He was one sky warrior who happened to believe that there was no point in spilling
another’s blood unless you could smell it, unless you could
feel
the
heat.

Greene again went to afterburn. The MiG had no chance in an out-and-out horse race with the Sun-Wolf: the enemy plane loomed
in Greene’s windshield HUD display like a bird caught in a camera’s telescopic zoom lens.

Greene throttled back so as not to overshoot the MiG as he entered into a gentle turn. He was now about 2,000 feet astern
of his prey. He’d already shifted his HUD display to gun air-air mode, and armed his M61 cannon. The vertical-scale airspeed
indicator on the left side of the HUD display told Greene his present speed: 525 knots. The readout just above the indicator
scale told Greene he was pulling 1.5G. The HUD’s right-side altitude vertical scale read 22,235 feet. The computer-generated
round aiming reticle in the center of the display indicated that he was closing on his target.

The MiG tried to use its superior radius of turn to break away, but the Sun-Wolf’s superior speed translated to a superior
rate
of turn: the Sun-Wolf wasn’t as nimble, but a tight turn wasn’t essential just now because there was nobody chasing Greene,
and because there was plenty of sky. The Sun-Wolf could cover a larger section of sky while making its wider turn faster than
the MiG could cover a smaller section of sky while making its tight turn. This allowed Greene to hold his position relative
to the MiG: the Sun-Wolf’s nose stayed angled at the enemy.

Greene, peering through the HUD display, boxed the MiG in the small green square just to the right of the aiming reticle,
letting his lead computing optical sight radar-track the MiG. Once he had the HUD’s round pipper corralling the MiG, he squeezed
the gun trigger on his control stick. The M61 snarled like a buzz saw, its six revolving barrels spitting 20
MM
rounds at the rate of 100 per second. The orange tracers raised sparks off the MiG, which began jinking in agony as Greene
stayed locked on his quarry. The Sun-Wolf’s gun magazine held 900 rounds, which translated into nine seconds of firing time.
The ammo remaining was indicated by the fast-dwindling counter display in the lower left-hand corner of the HUD as Greene
walked his rounds up the MiG’s spine, hosing the canopy, obilterating it in smoking shards of twinkling Plexiglass.

The MiG dropped away, spinning out of control. Greene followed it down, watching as it plummeted to earth, exploding in a
brilliant flash as it crashed into a pale-green pasture.

“Mother Hen, this is Lonestar.” Greene put his Sun-Wolf into an exuberant victory roll across the cloud-rippled azure sky.
“I’ve got kill number three, and have made the world safe for democracy….”

“Congrats, Lonestar,” Buzz Blaisdale radioed. “Look beneath you and you’ll see a grateful, freedom-loving European populus
launching fireworks in your honor.”

Greene banked his wings in order to view the ground, laughing in delight as beneath him a bright and colorful display of pinwheel
fireworks formed a carpet in the sky.

“Is this your doing. Mother Hen?”

“Roger, Lonestar.”

“Don’t suppose you could conjure up a pretty li’l angel to give me a blow—”

“Negative!” Buzz quickly cut in.

Greene chuckled. “Well, you could at least telephone President Nixon and tell him for me that while I can’t help him out concerning
that John Dean character, the Prez can at least rest easy on one point: the hammer and sickle will not—I repeat—
will not
be flying over Disneyland.”

“I’m sure the President would have been glad to hear that,” Buzz Blaisdale said dryly. “Assuming, of course, that those three
kills you just scored had been
real
—”

The transmission ended, and the ever-present radio hiss vanished from Greene’s headphones as all around him the earth, sky,
fireworks—
the world
—flickered like a faulty light bulb. Then the world went dark.

“Well, get me out of here,” Greene muttered impatiently as the Sun-Wolf’s instrument panel next blinked out, and he was left
in total pitch-black oblivion. Greene heard the hiss of pressure valves adjusting, and then the whine of hydraulic lifters
kicking in. Greene unbuckled his oxygen mask and removed his helmet as the top half of the clamlike mechanism rose, revealing
that all this time Greene had been sitting in the middle of a large, windowless, fluorescent-lit room surrounded by Air Force
technicians wearing white lab coats and manning electronic gear. There were keyboard consoles equipped with various scopes
and screens; a large glass operations board; lots of blinking lights, and endless rows of computers looking like refrigerator-size
reel-to-reel tape recorders. Thick cables linked all this chirping, clattering, whirring gear to the big, matte-black, clamlike
gizmo in which Greene was sitting in his mock-up of a Sun-wolf cockpit.

This room was the core of the Flight Simulation Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio.

Greene unlatched the phony cockpit’s canopy and pushed it up on its hinges. He unstrapped himself from his chair, hoisted
himself up and out of the bottom half of the simulator. Buzz Blaisdale, wearing brown flight overalls, was seated at the nearby
radio transmission console that served as ground control during the simulations.

“Well, you had quite a ride,” Buzz remarked, smiling. He was in his mid-twenties, with wavy dark hair and light-brown eyes.
“I don’t think anyone has ever beat the machine three against one before,” Buzz added.

“It’s this machine that inspired me to do it,” Greene replied, shaking his head. “I just can’t get over this toy.”

The Simulation Generator System-360 was the latest state-of-the-art result of the Air Force’s ongoing effort to supply its
fighter pilots with the opportunity to hone their air-combat skills and still live to profit by their mistakes. When a pilot
climbed into that big black clamshell and settled into the cockpit, he “flew” against the computers, which could be programmed
to present him with any number and variation of Warsaw Pact aircraft. The enemy aircraft behaved within the parameters of
their individual specs as if they were being flown by real enemy pilots, because the bogies’ attack and defense ploys were
drawn from the accumulated data on Red air tactics during the Korean and Vietnam wars, and on the intelligence evaluations
garnered from electronic snooping of present-day Warsaw Pact air exercises.