Final Storm (28 page)

The cockpit of the F-100 exploded under a hail of cannon shells from the diving Flanker.

The Soviet pilot had no time to congratulate himself on the easy kill—in a second, Hunter was on him like a tiger, loosing a cannon barrage of his own that tore through the Soviet’s engines and engulfed the big fighter in a fireball.

Barely twenty seconds into the furball, and Hunter already claimed his first kill.

The fight was on thicker than ever. Even the F-16’s sophisticated acquisition radar system couldn’t possibly identify all the targets in its broad sweep, as hundreds of blips and IFF signals filled the screen in the cramped cockpit. Hunter quickly realized that it had never been this packed before, and he knew he had to make a choice that he hadn’t faced up until now.

If he tried to use his on-board computers to thread the needle through the tangle of enemy and friendly planes in front of him, the processing circuits, or the Sidewinder’s own sensors, would overload and cause the missiles to detonate prematurely. With twelve of the lethal airborne torpedoes hanging from his wings, that was a chance he didn’t want to take.

He took a deep breath from his mask, feeling the head rush that pure oxygen always gave him, then he switched the F-16’s weapons systems from AUTOMATIC to MANUAL. He used to do this on occasion while training pilots at Nellis, often challenging the best student in the class to a simulated combat against him—without the use of his radar, and acquisition computers and he had never lost.

But this was not simulated combat.

He had decided to rely totally on his instincts to fight, a decision that no other fighter pilot would dare to make. But no other fighter pilot had his extrasensory powers.

Seeking multiple targets for the Sidewinder clusters, he climbed sharply and scanned the eastern sky with his long-range inner sensors. He found his prey, flying in formation just beyond the horizon—two squadrons of MiG-23 Floggers.

With his radar shut down, he knew he wag less likely to be picked up by the crude acquisition systems aboard the Flogger interceptors. Their systems were designed to intercept American SAC bombers, and they relied heavily on ground-based radars and the AWACS-like Mainstay radar planes for their target vectors.

Hunter mentally fixed their position in his head then armed his missiles.

Except for their flight leader, the pilots of the MiG-23 flight were young reservists who had just been recalled to active duty for the first time since their training at one of the Soviets’ Siberian air defense bases.

Now, too intent on the upcoming fracas, they were barely watching their radar screens.

The veteran flight leader, Gregor Vladimirovitch Tumansky, was the only one in the bunch that had ever seen combat before and that was as an attack plane pilot in Afghanistan. However, he
was
intently watching his tiny radar screen, well aware that dangers lurked in every part of the compass in such a wide-ranging dogfight. He saw the flickering image of a single blip high above him, but it soon disappeared into the snowy edges of the screen as his balky radar set crackled with noise.

Taking the warning seriously, Tumansky ordered the young pilots behind him to stay in formation. There’s safety in numbers, he told them again. Besides, he thought, no single enemy plane would dare attack a whole squadron, much less two squadrons.

The pilots’ strained banter gave lie to their nervousness as they tightened up their positions, drawing together as if huddling from an unseen noise.

At the rear of the formation, Hunter was coming into range behind the last Flogger in line.

A sudden burst of speed from the F-16’s afterburner put Hunter in range, and he quickly fired a Sidewinder cluster.

A split second apart, the three missiles literally fell off the F-16’s wingtip as the special brackets released them. Since they were all jump-wired to the same targeting point, their flight path was similar. And since the bracket release created a half-second delay between missiles, they all acquired separate targets in the tight formation when the Sidewinders’ own guidance system took over, locating and sequentially locking in on the hottest sources available.

The three supersonic missiles were picked up by the Soviet pilot’s threat warning receivers, but they had only time to set off one alarm cycle before they plowed up the tails of three MiGs in the rear of the formation. Three huge explosions rocked the sky as the fully armed fighters burst into flames.

“Stay on course!” Tumansky bellowed into his radio after confirming the kills on his radar scope. “This could be a deception to draw us away from the fight!”

Slightly shaken, the Soviet colonel once again had seen the small blip on his target screen, and once again, it had quickly moved off the edge beyond his limited range. Suddenly another missile cluster was fired at the MiGs—this one from almost a ninety-degree angle to the formation, intersecting it in midair like a perfectly aimed torpedo spread fired at a wallowing convoy. Each of the missiles again selected different targets as three more planes took the flaming one-way plunge to the muddy earth four miles below.

But this flight of missiles’ deadly work was not yet through—debris from one of the luckless Floggers was sucked into the square side intakes of two following-in-line MiGs, causing them to flame out and spin down out of control.

His composure momentarily gone, Tumansky gasped aloud when five more of his planes disappeared from the screen, muttering to no one in particular, “How can such a thing happen? I saw only three missiles! Can this be the ‘Stealth’ the Yankees have?”

A chill ran up his spine. No wonder they couldn’t see it for more than a few seconds on radar. He was about to transmit the warning to the survivors of his squadron when the rapidly moving blip sped into his radar range again, appearing on the other side of the now-ragged Soviet formation. Now the Soviet flight leader was very confused. Whatever it was, the enemy jet was
not
invisible to radar. But the pilot seemed to know how to stay out of sight—and somehow, he was carrying many more air-to-air missiles than the Soviet officer thought was possible.

Reluctantly, Tumansky knew the mystery pilot would tear the MiG formation to shreds if they stayed in a rigid box.

Even before he could bring his jaw closed to give the order, the Soviet flight leader saw yet another spread of Sidewinder missiles come into view on his screen, from the
opposite
direction from where he last saw the phantom attacker! Three more deadly darts ended the flights of three more Floggers in flaming clouds of debris.

“Break formation, and attack at will!” Tumansky called out, his voice rising sharply. “Find that bastard,
now
!”

The eager young pilots under Tumansky’s command did not have the benefit of combat experience, and it showed in their amateurish pursuit of the elusive F-16.

Several times a MiG pilot thought he spotted the enemy plane near the edge of a cloud bank, and streaked off to engage without waiting for his partner to fly cover for him. Each pilot who found himself on the other side of the cloud discovered an angry Hunter on his tail, pumping round after round of cannon ammo into the hapless Soviet plane. After losing four more of his planes this way, the Soviet colonel ordered his surviving planes to pair off and
stay
paired off.

But the results were no different.

No longer content to play the Invisible Man, Hunter barrel-rolled through the MiG tag teams at high speed, almost daring the Soviets to fire their Atoll air-to-air missiles at him. When they did, the marauding ivory F-16 somehow managed to lure the speeding darts toward him while maneuvering
behind
another pair of Floggers. Incredibly, another four planes were downed by their comrades’ own missiles.

Hunter had rigged the last three Sidewinders for independent firing, and he proceeded to target them as he approached the front of the now-scattered Flogger formation. Head-on, the big Soviet jets looked like malevolent insects, their pointed noses and huge air intakes looming larger than life. The combined approach speed between the MiGs and Hunter was almost four times the speed of sound.

Deftly jinking and side-slipping the agile F-16, Hunter fired the last three missiles at the MiGs in front of the pack. Then, with all the speed his afterburner could muster, he shot the white fighter straight up into the air, climbing until he could see the blue edge of the stratosphere arching above his nose.

Tumansky heard his threat warning alarm sound, and he heard the frantic cries of the two planes on either side of him as the deadly missiles engulfed their Floggers in flaming mushrooms of destruction. He heard the clicks of their radios as the transmitters melted and died forever. He heard the frightened questions from his other pilots, wanting to know whether they should turn back. At the same instant, he saw the F-16 shoot by him and climb straight into the sun.

The plane looked so small, so graceful. Without its deadly load of air-to-air missiles, it seemed almost …
regal.
The shock wave left behind by the F-16’s supersonic climb brought the Soviet pilot out of his hypnotic trance.

He knew when he had had enough. His remaining pilots were so rattled, they would be worthless in the gigantic dogfight now only fifty miles away.

With one curt order, Tumansky regrouped his survivors and turned back toward his base.

B
ACK ON THE AUXILIARY
fueling strip at Rota, a dozen fighters lined up to be pumped full of JP-8.

Of the eight hundred planes that had thundered into the skies only forty-eight hours ago, less than two hundred were now operational. Forty or so were up at the battle front, another thirty had just taken off, and many others were limping back to the Spanish base. The rest had either been shot down, crashed en route or damaged beyond all hopes of repair.

Crippled aircraft of a half-dozen nation’s air forces were scattered around the auxiliary runway and in various hangars of the base’s sprawling repair facility. Here a Greek Mirage was getting a new wing section to replace a riddled chunk of metal sheeting. Next to it, an Italian Starfighter was propped on a huge steel jack stand, waiting for a new landing gear strut. On the far side of the field were the burned-out hulks of six or seven more fighters that had pancaked into the crowded runway and exploded.

General Seth Jones, commander of the dwindling NATO air forces, had just stubbed out the last bitter end of a cigar, grinding it into the hot tarmac of the base’s runway. More than five hundred airplanes lost or knocked out of operation. And that just from Rota alone … God knows how many of those pilots had been able to bail out and make it to safety. And he was the one responsible for sending them into the madness.

He shook his head, peeling off his flight helmet to run his hands through the trademark whiffle cut. He suddenly stopped, stifling a yawn, and looked hard at his hands. They trembled slightly, even after a concentrated effort to steady them. He shook his head again, cursing silently.

Almost a dozen sorties in the last two days. Grabbing a sandwich at the debriefing tables set up in the mess hall. A precious three hours of sleep while his plane’s radar was repaired was required. And all the while he was being fed new information about the progress of the other airborne operation—Rolling Thunder. It was the hinge of fate that determined whether the fighter sweep of Chain Lightning was a bold and desperate ploy or just another senseless waste of men and machinery.

In the midst of his dark thoughts about the war’s progress and the appalling losses, Jones’s thoughts turned back to one pilot. It was almost ludicrous to be concerned for a single man with all the death and destruction around him, but Jones knew this man was different—he was more than just another pilot.

He approached the white F-16 just as it finished taking on fuel. The pilot was looking over the side of the cockpit, checking the motion of his tail surfaces, when Jones clambered up the ladder and stepped across the wing.

“Greetings, Captain,” he shouted above the whine of the idling jet engine. “Good hunting?”

Jones was shocked when Hunter turned around to face him. The younger man’s face was pale and drawn, his chin carried the stubble of two days’ growth, and his flight suit looked like he hadn’t taken it off in weeks. But it was the eyes that startled Jones the most—two glowing embers, crackling with an eerie fire that seemed to make them burn like lasers from deep within his head.

Hunter barely acknowledged Jones’s presence and continued the preflight check, tapping several gauges on the F-16’s complex console.

“Haven’t seen you in debriefing, Captain,” Jones said flatly.

Hunter whispered in response, “No time, sir. Later.”

“What about food?” the senior officer asked.

Another whisper: “Not hungry.”

“And when was the last time you climbed out of that cockpit and got some sleep, Captain Hunter?”

The rising note of authority in Jones’s voice cracked out like the tip of a lash.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Hunter said in a reply that was an almost frightening monotone. With that, he snapped down the visor of his flight helmet as if to shut off the conversation.

Jones was aghast. Not three days ago Hunter had told him of his first combat kill—the Yak pilot from the
Brezhnev
, and how the taking of a human life had begun to haunt him. Was this now the same young man? Had the brutality of the front line air combat consumed Hunter so quickly, so completely, wiping out the last traces of humanity?

Jones knew Hunter had already shot down dozens of enemy aircraft, many times more than anyone else in the squadron. Yet what could be left after that amount of stress and anguish passed through the young man’s soul?

“How many sorties have you flown, Captain?” Jones asked, almost sadly.

This time, Hunter didn’t even shrug.

Jones was getting unnerved. Although Hunter’s actions were now bordering on insubordination, military manners were not foremost in his mind at that moment. Hunter’s mental condition was.