Final Storm (21 page)

Remembering the training program at Nellis, he quickly tightened the shoulder straps of the harness that held him to his seat. Then he reached down to his left-hand side and pulled the ejection seat release handle, instantly firing the charge that blew off the canopy, sending it flying backward into the plane’s slipstream.

The wind buffeted his facemask and helmet visor for the longest second he’d ever lived through. Then the main explosive charge fired under his seat, rockets propelling him straight up and away from the smoking, out-of-control fighter. As the seat’s trajectory neared its peak, the spent rockets and seat platform fell away and his pilot chute deployed.

The small parachute stabilized Christman’s fall rate and used the wind’s energy to pull the main parachute out of its carefully folded resting place.

The big nylon circle bloomed in the sky, its spiderweb of lines cradling the dazed F-16 pilot, still shaken by the force of the ejection blast. The cold wind and shock of the chute’s opening brought him around, and his vision had just started to re-focus when he saw his plane spinning crazily below him, several miles away.

The swirling dogfight was still going on above, and Christman found himself strangely fascinated at being so close an eyewitness to the battle.

This is why he didn’t see the Fulcrum closing on his drifting parachute until it was too late.

Not content with shooting the plane down, the Soviet was going to try and kill the helpless pilot. Christman turned and immediately went into shock as he watched the MiG’s nose cannon open up. Hearing and feeling the heavy cannon shells whizzing through the air around him, he was powerless to defend himself against the cowardly attack—an attack that had long been condemned by flying men of every air force in every war.

Hunter saw the Soviet bearing down on Christman, but it was too late.

Three rounds tore through the thin nylon chute and sliced several of the control lines. Then one cannon shell struck the dangling pilot full in the chest. The heavy shell tore through his torso, destroying several vital organs before exiting Christman’s lower back. The stricken pilot grasped the chute lines in one last desperate act, then fell limp as his bullet-ridden parachute descended rapidly.

In a final gesture of contempt, the Fulcrum pilot passed close by the chute, near enough to fully collapse it with the powerful jet wash. Hopelessly entangled in its own rigging, the chute fell in on itself, wrapping around the lifeless form of Christman and carrying it down the several miles to the earth.

A blind rage consumed Hunter as he pushed the throttle forward to pursue the malicious Soviet pilot. Shooting down planes was all part of the horrible game of war. But gunning down a helpless pilot after he’d bailed out was just plain cowardly murder.

The anger which burned inside him like a piece of hot metal, radiated its heat in short pulses up into Hunter’s brain. The fire indelibly branded a mark on Hunter’s senses.

War was war. But senseless killings had to be avenged.

The Wingman had swooped in on the twin-tailed Fulcrum and fired his cannon from close range. But his raw anger had interrupted his usual concentration and the tracer shells went wide, just past the Soviet’s canopy. Hunter cursed as the MiG dove away.

The MiG pilot realized the close call he’d just had, and he knew he had to get this American off his tail and fast. His best defense would be a strong offense, he thought, diving away in a fast loop.

In seconds, the agile Fulcrum was able to twist around and rise slightly, its pilot attempting to maneuver behind and beneath Hunter’s F-16. At the same time, another MiG was drawing in close to Wa’s Falcon in a separate action nearby. Thinking quickly, Hunter swerved and fired his cannon straight into the guts of the MiG keying in on Wa, ripping away the enemy’s right wheel undercarriage and perforating its mid-fuselage fuel tank.

No sooner had he fired when Hunter felt the hair on the back of his head stand straight up. Purely on instinct he yanked back on the F-16’s controls, putting the fighter into a steep near-vertical climb. Almost immediately he was surrounded by green-yellow tracers streaming past his canopy from below. The first Fulcrum was beneath him and only his extra-sensory sixth sense had saved him from taking the entire burst right in his belly. As it was, he felt two dull thuds on the underside of his plane, small explosions that staggered the Falcon as Hunter slammed the throttle forward. In saving Ben, Hunter had been caught by the other Soviet pilot, and now he only had one way out.

No matter what the risk, he was going to take it.

Hunter picked up speed as the Fulcrum’s cannon volley ceased, and he nosed the F-16 over at full speed to pull a full outside loop. With an inside loop, the pilot and plane are
inside
the imaginary circle drawn in the sky, and centrifugal force presses down, sometimes inducing the pilot blackout by forcing blood from his brain.

An outside loop, however, puts the plane and pilot
outside
that circle, and causes a “red-out” by pumping
too
much blood to the pilot’s brain. In extreme cases, the resulting g-forces can actually burst a pilot’s eyes and cause bleeding from his ears.

Hunter knew all this, but he also knew he needed to get behind the Fulcrum. He wouldn’t have time to twist around for a normal loop—the nimble MiG would be able to get away while he maneuvered.

So he had to do it the hard way. Hunter felt the pressure building as the F-16 strained to complete the loop, wings flexing. He was committed to the move now—there was no flipping out of it at this point. He was directly upside down, at the bottom of the loop, and he could see the red veil start to rise behind his vision as the blood pressed against his retinas.

Now his ears were popping, warning him of the pressure building inside his head. His feet and lower legs were tingling, deprived of the blood they needed. His vision became narrower, a small tunnel surrounded by a sea of crimson. He tasted blood in his mouth as a small amount oozed through his gums around his back teeth. He felt himself straining against the g-forces, desperately trying not to pass out before he completed the loop.

It was near the breaking point for him, and the loop might have killed an average pilot.

But Hawk Hunter was no average fighter pilot …

He swept through the bottom of the loop, his vision still a reddish haze as the F-16 rose on the outside edge of the invisible circle. The pressure began to subside, and his head started to clear. He had done it … He was flying upright now, and he was above and behind the homicidal Fulcrum pilot.

For his part, the MiG pilot was nothing less than bewildered. Moments before he saw the American nose over, and thought he dived away from the battle, or turned off in a wide bank to circle around. But then there was no sign of him in the sky below or to the sides.

Where had he gone?

His answer came from behind as Hunter laced the Fulcrum’s tail section with cannon fire from point-blank range. A relentless stream of 20mm shells poured into the wide, flat valley between the Soviet fighter’s rudders, igniting both engines and severing most of the tail section. Instantly half the Soviet airplane was engulfed in flames. It began breaking up and started to fall out of the sky in a ragged, fiery spiral.

Hunter watched the pilot fumble for his ejection mechanism, and the rage burned hot within him. He changed his angle on the Russian slightly, re-aiming and firing his cannon so that the shells traced a straight path across the Fulcrum’s right wingroot, amputating the flat appendage like a surgeon’s scalpel.

Deprived of more than half its lift, the stricken MiG fell off on its now-wingless right side in a tight spin. The rapidly increasing g-forces pinned the Russian pilot’s arms at his sides, as they suddenly became too heavy to move.

Unable to reach his ejection handle, he realized his doom in a silent scream that lasted all the way down to the hard-packed ground, three miles below.

Hunter followed the MiG’s wreckage down, making sure the Soviet pilot was truly finished. There was no parachute, and Hunter allowed himself a split second of unrewarding satisfaction as he watched the MiG impact into the side of a small mountain.

The feeling of revenge didn’t last long, however. Hunter knew the Soviet pilot’s death wouldn’t bring Christman back.

That was the problem
, he thought. In war, eventually everyone loses …

With that, he climbed back up, hoping to join the air battle that was still raging above.

By this time, JT had doubled back to join the dogfight, assured that the B-52G was safely out of harm’s way. Working together, he and Jones had just picked off a Fulcrum that had tried to latch on to Ben Wa’s tail, as the Hawaiian was in turn flaming another MiG with his cannon.

The surviving Russians broke off their attack at this point and headed for home, unwilling to stay and provide more ducks for the 16th’s shooting gallery.

Hunter, still seething at the cold-blooded murder of Christman, was game to pursue the MiGs. He moved to engage his afterburner.

But then, he suddenly stopped.

He had never quite felt the eerie sensation on the back of his neck before, but in a split-second he knew what it meant.

Something was wrong with the F-16.

He quickly scanned the gauges and displays in the cockpit, searching their mute, numbered faces for a clue to the nature of the problem. A blinking red LED light confirmed Hunter’s suspicion: his airplane was about to experience a major electrical system failure.

While loss of power was a serious problem in any aircraft, it was especially critical in the fly-by-electrical-wire F-16. He had a redundant flight control system and back-up computer, but it would now require his full attention and strength to bring the plane back home.

Jones pulled alongside Hunter’s cruising fighter, sensing Hunter’s problem. He looked at the young pilot through the canopy and keyed his microphone.

“What’s the problem, Hawk?” The words were casual, but there was an underlying tension to the voice. Jones knew only too well the many of things that could bring a plane down.

“Not certain, sir,” Hunter answered calmly. “I’m getting an electrical failure indication. I thought I felt some iron in my tail. Can you take a look?”

Swooping low to scan the plane’s underside for damage, Jones immediately saw the source of the trouble.

Indeed, the MiG had nailed Hunter’s airplane with at least one cannon round, blowing a large, jagged hole in the underside of his fuselage toward the tail. Jones let out an involuntary gasp, sucking in air through his oxygen mask, and glad his microphone was still not keyed.

“Where did he get me?” Hunter asked.

“Let me put it this way, Hawker, old boy,” Jones replied. “If your plane was a bird, it would never have chicks again….”

With that, Jones relayed a damage report in full. The bottom line was that the aircraft was still intact, but the afterburner and the stabilizer controls were heavily damaged.

“Lucky you didn’t punch in your AB,” Jones told Hunter. “You’d be flying a pair of angel wings instead of a ruptured duck.”

Hunter closed his eyes and sent a big
thanks
out to the ethers, grateful that his own internal warning system had prevented him from lighting out full afterburner after the fleeing Soviet fighters.

Meanwhile, Jones ordered JT and Wa to head back to Rota as quickly as possible. After initial protests, both pilots reluctantly agreed. Because of their extra mileage action before the Fulcrum dogfight, both were low on fuel. Escorting Hunter’s stricken fighter back, at such a slow speed and low altitude, would burn their reserves and possibly cause them to crash as well.

Instead, Jones would stick by the damaged F-16.

Hunter watched as the two F-16s roared off, their outlines growing smaller until they disappeared into high cloud cover toward the south. His own F-16 was acting very sluggish, plowing through the air instead of slicing it: he had to coax it to maintain altitude and level flight. Without stabilizers, every odd gust of wind threatened to buck the airplane over. He was lucky the stabilizers had been jammed in the straight position—if they were up or down, he would never have been able to control the airplane.

And so the two F-16s flew on, Jones dropping altitude periodically to check the underside of Hunter’s plane, and Hunter wrestling with the heavy controls of his damaged fighter. The two pilots didn’t speak, except to exchange airspeed and altitude information, or indicate fuel status. It would be tight, but they would have enough to make it back to Rota.

What was of more concern to Hunter was the landing gear controls.

His cockpit instrument panel showed his landing gear as inoperative, and he didn’t dare test it while still en route. If by some miracle of electronics it did engage and lower his wheels, he might not be able to raise them again, and the plane couldn’t stand the extra drag with the critical fuel situation.

Of course, if the landing gear couldn’t be lowered at all, … well, he’d worry about that when he got back to the base.

If
he got back to the base …

A
S WAS USUALLY THE CASE
when a stricken airplane was coming in, activity at the airbase at Rota slowed to almost a standstill.

Aircraft that could were diverted to other fields. Emergency vehicles—foam-spreading tankers and fire trucks—were lined up along the edge of the runway. All the other base aircraft were moved into their hardstands, or taxied to the opposite side of the field. No one liked to think about it, but they had to protect the remaining planes from any crash that might result from the damaged plane skidding out of control.

Further behind were the ambulances, grimly dubbed “the meatwagons.” Their second-place status was a concession to fatalistic reality—pilots rarely survived unsuccessful crash landings. If a plane augured into the field and there was a fire, the best they could hope for was to remove the body parts after the flames were out.

The rescue crews stood by nervously, waiting for the signal. The 16th’s ground crew chief, a Louisiana Cajun named Blue, was out on the tarmac also, clad in an asbestos fire suit and gloves. The heavy hood was pushed back to accommodate the binoculars he was using to search the deepening shadows in the northern sky.