Final Storm (29 page)

“You
can’t
keep pushing like this,” Jones told him. “You can’t take on the whole fucking Soviet Air Force.

“
You can’t fight this war alone.
”

Hunter was silent for a moment, the sun visor still masking his eyes. But Jones could see the square jaw work back and forth underneath the impassive mirrored lenses.

It was a controlled Hawk Hunter who finally replied, “General, I’ll fight the whole fucking
world
if I have to.”

Jones shook his head, thought for a moment then reached into his flight jacket pocket. He pulled out a small, worn leatherette-covered box and dropped it on Hunter’s lap in the cockpit.

Hunter opened the battered box to find an old-style pair of sterling silver combat wings and a major’s oak leaf insignia devices. Turning them over in his hand, he read the inscription on the back:

“
Major James Hunter, USAF, 2-14-68
”

“Those belonged to your father,” Jones told him. “Right after Tet, he and I flew seventeen sorties against Charlie. Got four kills between us. I went down over Heni Bana up North—took a SAM in the tail and flamed out. And he stayed with me, orbiting around for an hour … strafing any of the NVA patrols that tried to approach my plane. Hung around until the Marines sent a chopper in for me. He used up so much fuel guarding me that he didn’t have enough to make it back, so he ditched in the sea and the Navy boys fished him out.”

Jones looked down at the son of the man he had flown with in Vietnam, recalling the bonds of brotherhood forged in the crucible of combat.

“A lot of guys said
he
was crazy, and maybe he was,” the senior officer continued. “But he was my best friend. And he was the best goddamn pilot I’d ever seen … Until now.”

Hunter flipped the reflective visor back up into the helmet and stared up at Jones. The fire in his eyes was still there, but it was suddenly tempered.

Jones put a strong hand on Hunter’s shoulder, pointing toward the silver insignia.

“He wanted you to have these,” Jones said. “He knew you’d earn them someday. Congratulations,
Major
Hunter.”

Hunter looked up at Jones, then back at the insignia.

Thank you, sir,” his ragged voice thickening with emotion. “This really means a lot to me….”

“I know,” Jones said, climbing down to the tarmac. He gave Hunter a crisp salute and walked away.

Two minutes later Hunter was rolling down the smoke-blackened runway again, gracefully lifting off into the murky winter skies over Spain.

S
OVIET AIR MARSHAL SERGEI
Vladimirovich Ilyushin looked at the stack of reports on his cluttered desk.

“How is it possible,” he thought, “to lose so many aircraft in such a short time.”

His data told him that more than fifteen hundred Warsaw Pact fighters had been consumed in the seemingly perpetual dogfight over France.

But the losses, though horrendous, were to be expected in a war such as this, he reasoned.

The question was: Why were the Americans forcing the titanic air battle?

The Americans and the other NATO ground troops hadn’t counterattacked the dug-in Soviet troops on the front lines. There had been no amphibious assaults further east on the European continent. No movement on any number of possible second fronts around the world, no indication that the war was about to go nuclear. All that was happening was this senseless airborne brawl that seemed never to end.

Ilyushin shook his head in puzzlement, his fingertips gently massaging the waxy scar tissue on his forehead—a reminder of his own flying days in the great patriotic war against the Germans. His American-made Lend-Lease P-39 AirCobra had been hit by ground fire and crashed over Kursk, putting him in the hospital with a fractured skull.

Now, for the first time in many years, the headaches had started again. What could the Americans possibly be up to? They had played a game of attrition with their expensive fighter planes, losing millions—no
billions
—of dollars in advanced technology to engage the relatively cheaper, lower-technology hordes of Soviet interceptors.

What could they possibly hope to gain?

Fifteen hundred airplanes,
the air chief thought again. Before it was over he knew he would probably lose more than two thousand airplanes in this meat grinder over Paris. His communications staff had been besieged with desperate pleas from his front line air commanders, to send more airplanes, more ammunition, more pilots. Already he had stripped the rear of all reserves—completely emptying some of their Warsaw Pact “allies’” air forces to throw into the fray.

When even that had not been enough, he had called up the Soviet Union’s own in-country air defense forces, sending as many of the new Foxhounds and the high-speed Foxbat interceptors as he dared. He could not afford to send them all—some had to stay to defend the Soviet borders themselves if the desperate Americans attempted a last-ditch nuclear strike with their B-1 and B-52 bombers.

Yet, he knew this was not likely. According to the latest intelligence reports, all the American SAC forces were at their home bases.

So why had the Americans pursued this apparently insane strategy?

It wouldn’t matter soon anyway, he thought. NATO’s crazy fighter sweep had drawn off the costly harassing attacks on the Red Army’s vital supply lines through Eastern Europe. Their trains would be rolling again in no time, bringing fresh troops and tanks and materiel for the final assault. They would punch through the stubborn NATO line and capture Paris. Then the rest of the continent would fall and this crazy, totally unexpected war would be won.

He picked up another ream of reports—details on the supplies and reinforcements soon to move up to the front. The Red Army supply pipeline was now chock full of every scrap of war materiel that the Soviet Union could muster. Almost a million reservists on troop trains. Thousands of tanks drawn from the vast reserves of the Chinese border units. Plus all the fuel, ammunition, SAMs, and equipment that could be spared.

The military might of the Soviet Empire was riding those steel rails to a great battle with destiny, Ilyushin thought proudly, and nothing he knew of could stop them.

But for some reason, Ilyushin’s thoughts turned back to a strange report he’d received from one of his wing commanders. It told of a mysterious all-white F-16 that had single-handedly destroyed two thirds of a pair of MiG-23 squadrons, forcing the remainder to return to their base.

A war tale, the air marshal thought. Already they are springing up! Even the Americans cannot have such a pilot or an airplane that could launch so many air-to-air missiles. And surely even if they did, he too would become a victim of the battle in the skies over France before the fight was over.

At least Ilyushin hoped so.

T
OOMEY HAD BEEN HANGING
in the tree for more than twelve hours.

He was cold, hungry and exhausted—but at least he was still alive and, as far as he could tell, he had no serious injuries.

That was more than he could say for the Soviet pilot who was also hanging from a parachute on the tree nearby. This man was quite dead—his broken, frozen body hanging like a grotesque, discarded marionette.

Toomey wasn’t sure if the dead pilot across from him was the same one who was flying the MiG he had collided with the night before. In fact, there wasn’t much Toomey remembered about how he came to be hanging from the massive tree that was located he believed somewhere in the Ardennes forest. All he knew was his parachute harness and straps were the only things preventing him from plunging the last 150 feet to the frozen ground below.

He had been on his twelfth sortie, reaching the outer limits of the two-day-old massive dogfight just as the sun was setting. He had greased a Foxbat almost immediately after joining the fray, but then, somehow, he collided with a MiG-29 Fulcrum, the Soviet jet clipping off his entire tail section. He hit the ejection button a mere two seconds later, and saw that the Soviet pilot had done the same thing. His F-16 had crashed about two miles from his present position.

The dead Soviet pilot was already hanging in the nearby tree when Toomey came floating down.

It was from this strange vantage point that Toomey bore eyewitness to a particularly bizarre chapter of the massive, never-ending aerial battle.

The night skies had been lit as bright as day as nightfighters from both sides clashed in fierce dogfighting, that was now visible from the rooftops of Paris. That in itself was chillingly spectacular, leaving even a veteran pilot like Toomey awestruck.

But it was the battle that commenced at dawn and continued into the morning that left Toomey with his mouth wide open in fascination.

At first sunlight, it was as if he was watching a scene from another era. For the most part, the skies were filled with NATO aircraft that were much older than Toomey himself. Challenging the NATO planes was an equally motley collection of Warsaw Pact jets, supplemented by a few newly arrived interceptors from the Soviet Air Defense Command.

Surprisingly, Toomey saw that the older planes in the NATO inventory were holding their own with fighters of similar vintage from the dregs of the Warsaw Pact aerodromes. He witnessed innumerable battles that went on right above him. In one particularly close battle, a British Lightning, an early supersonic interceptor, flashed across the crowded sky in hot pursuit of a Polish-built MiG-19 Farmer. The speedy Lightning quickly overtook the slower MiG and pumped a Firestreak air-to-air missile up the hapless Pole’s exhaust, exploding the MiG in a puff of orange and black.

Everywhere, the ubiquitous F-4 Phantoms painted with the markings of a half-dozen NATO nations were dueling with the even more ubiquitous MiG-21 Fishbeds of the Warsaw Pact. The two fighters were of similar vintage, but the Phantoms had been continually upgraded with avionics improvements and better radar systems, while the Soviets had been reluctant to make the same investment in the air forces of their East European satellites. The disparity was evident as the Phantoms clawed through the MiGs, firing Sidewinders, Sparrows, and cannon with deadly precision.

On it went—an East German Fishbed was flamed by a West German Luftwaffe Phantom in a particularly savage rolling scissors exchange of cannon fire, while a Czech MiG loosed a pair of AA-2 Atoll missiles at a National Guard Delta Dart. One of the lethal air-to-airs exploded near the F-106’s triangular wing, crumpling it and sending the plane spiraling downward in flames.

A squadron of Spanish A-4 Skyhawks was doing a number on the clumsier MiG-21s, but the Italian and Greek Starfighters in the fight had been jumped by a squadron of Floggers and had taken several losses before they joined the main battle. The diminutive G-91 interceptors were also taking a beating, dwindling the already-small Portuguese contribution.

In an eerie replay of the early days of the Korean conflict, a pair of Turkish Sabres tore into a flight of Romanian MiG-I5s, smoking several of the older planes.

In between watching the incredible air battles, Toomey was forced on several occasions to play dead as Soviet ground units passed right below him. The enemy troops paid no attention—to him or to their dead comrade dangling nearby. This told Toomey that the war had taken a particularly nasty turn—one in which the dead were not collected, simply because they now outnumbered the living.

As the day progressed, Toomey joined a million other combatants on both sides who caught themselves looking skyward once again.

Once the antique fighters had left the scene, a battle royal erupted at high altitudes between the newly returned F-16s and the swift Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat interceptors.

In the middle of it as usual was the crazy pilot in the white F-16.

Flying with his avionics turned back on, Hunter rolled out high above the dogfight to swoop down on a pair of the big Foxbats.

He knew the heavy MiGs were initially designed to intercept the US B-70 Valkyrie, a Mach 3 strategic bomber that was never built. Even after the American bomber was scrapped, the MiG was deployed as an air defense interceptor with incredibly high speed (Mach 3.2) and as an unarmed reconnaissance version.

The two MiGs below Hunter were not the recon versions, he soon found out.

The F-16’s nose cannon spat out a continuous tongue of flame as it sent shell after shell cascading down into the Soviet planes. One took several shells in the starboard fuel supply and burst into flames below the diving F-16, forcing Hunter to fly through the debris.

The second Foxbat, getting the hint when his partner exploded, had punched his afterburners and shot off toward the horizon in an incredibly fast, but wide turn. The Soviet pilot used his primitive but effective radar targeting system to pinpoint the F-16 that had just tried to blow him out of the sky, seeking to pump off one of his two large AA-6 Acrid missiles toward the speeding American.

When the smoke from his kill had cleared, Hunter found himself on the receiving end of the huge air-to-air missile fired by the fast Foxbat. With the shrill wail of the radar threat warning blasting his ears, The Wingman executed a complex series of rolls and dives, designed to break the missile’s radar lock on his plane. For extra security, he pumped his chaff dispenser release several times, and ejected two bright flares that shot far away from the F-16.

The big Acrid missile was designed to take out larger targets, like strategic bombers, and was confused by the combination of decoy flares, chaff and Hunter’s evasive action. Unable to reacquire a suitable target, the missile detonated itself.

All of Hunter’s concentration had been focused on evading the deadly airborne harpoon, and now he searched the skies—and his radar screen—for a glimpse of the Soviet pilot who fired it. He saw the incredibly fast blip enter the field of his radar screen just as the low-pitched warble of the threat warning system started emitting a radar detection alarm once again.

The lower pitch, Hunter knew, indicated that the Foxbat’s powerful but narrow-beam targeting radar was probing the skies for him with invisible pulses.