Foxbat (30 page)

In the concrete bunker that served as the control position for the SA-3 anti-aircraft missile
system, one of the radar operators suddenly called out.

‘Two contacts bearing one eight seven degrees range four point six kilometres. Low
level, high speed, heading north. Contact now lost.’

‘Report all further contacts. Weapons free.’

The two SA-3 turrets on the south side of the Chiha-ri base hummed to life, the launcher
swinging the needle-nosed missiles to point south. Once the current location and height of the intruders had been established, and the Low Blow fire-control radar had computed their track,
the missiles could be fired.

The Harriers were less than two hundred feet apart as they roared over the waypoint and swept
into the next valley. Richter glanced down at the neat rows of buildings laid out in a grid pattern, almost like the suburbs of a small American town, then he focused ahead again.

‘Zeus is jamming I/D-band frequencies,’ Dick Long reported. ‘I see the missile
site. I’ll go left; you go right.’

‘Roger.’ Richter eased the control column slightly to the right to increase the
separation between the aircraft, and glanced ahead at the launch pads. From just over two miles away he could clearly see at least three Scud missiles standing erect on their TELs. The other
thing he could see was that the pads were too far apart for an explosion on one missile to have any effect on another.

‘We’ll have to use the CRVs as well,’ he said.

‘Affirmative, but fire the Mavericks first. They’re more certain kills.’

Richter clicked an acknowledgement and checked the Multi-Purpose Crystal Display. He aimed the
screen boresight – a large cross – at the
centre of the closest Scud missile and selected his starboard-wing Maverick. Immediately the missile boresight
– a smaller cross – appeared on the MPCD and within seconds the two crosses aligned, showing that the electro-optical guidance system was detecting sufficient contrast at the
point of aim for weapon release. The Harrier twitched slightly as the Maverick accelerated away, its solid-fuel motor propelling it in seconds to a speed of over seven hundred miles an
hour.

The Maverick is a ‘fire-and-forget’ missile, so immediately Richter aligned the
screen boresight with the second Scud.

The Zeus was doing its job well. Every radar screen in the SA-3 control bunker was flooded
with spikes, effectively blinding the operators. Without radar guidance, the SAM system was powerless to intercept the attacking aircraft.

But the North Korean troops manning two anti-aircraft gun emplacements on the south side of the
missile base didn’t need radar for their weapons to function. They could see their targets and immediately began pumping high-explosive shells across the valley towards the incoming
Harriers.

As Richter aligned the boresights, the first anti-aircraft shells detonated about a hundred
yards in front of, and slightly above, his Harrier. The sudden puffs of black seemed alarmingly close, and he inadvertently twitched at the very instant he released the second Maverick.

‘Keep low,’ Long radioed. ‘They probably can’t depress the barrels below
the horizontal.’

Richter was already uncomfortably close to the valley floor, but obediently pushed the control
column further forward. As he did so, his first Maverick exploded on contact with the Scud he’d targeted, and at
almost the same moment Long’s missile impacted
with a Scud on the left-hand side of the site.

Two down, four to go.

Fifteen miles north of Chiha-ri, Gennadi Malakov slowed his Foxbat down to subsonic speed. If
he stayed at Mach 2, the aircraft would overshoot the base and he’d probably never even see the British fighters, far less be able to engage them.

‘Radiate, and arm weapons,’ Malakov ordered, switched on his Saphir radar and
prepared his four R-40T infrared-guided missiles.

Ten seconds after the first two explosions, Richter’s second Maverick flew harmlessly
past its target and impacted a rocky outcrop just beyond the pad, the detonation impressive but totally ineffective.

‘Bugger.’ The Maverick has about an eighty-five-per-cent kill probability, but
because of the anti-aircraft fire he wasn’t certain that he’d got a proper lock-on with the weapon.

Long’s second missile scored a direct hit, but that still left three Scuds waiting on the
launch pads.

Richter pulled his Harrier round hard to the left, selected the port-wing CRV7 rocket pod and
immediately reversed direction. His S-shaped turn brought his aircraft around so that he was pointing almost directly at the second Scud on its TEL. The CRV7 Operational Pod contains nineteen
unguided rockets, and has a range of only just over two miles, so he needed to be absolutely sure of his target.

He ignored the anti-aircraft fire, getting steadily closer as the North Korean gunners tracked
him, and he stabilized the aircraft. He waited until he was perhaps a mile from the Scud, checked his aim carefully and fired the entire pod. Then he pulled the Harrier into a right turn and
pointed it down towards the valley floor, heading north to start a second attack run from that direction.

The CRV7s spread out as they approached the target, something like a blast from a shotgun.
Most missed, but six smashed into the TEL. More importantly, three hit the Scud itself, spearing through the thin aluminium skin of the missile and spraying liquid fuel across the concrete,
fuel that almost immediately ignited. In seconds, the launch pad was an inferno.

Four of the Scuds were destroyed, but that still left two missiles intact.

Inside the Chiha-ri command bunker it was noisy chaos. Orders were being shouted and ignored,
men were standing staring at their telemetry screens, telephones were ringing but nobody was answering them, and through the armoured-glass windows leaping flames were clearly visible as the
remains of the four destroyed Scuds were consumed by their own fuel.

But there were still two missiles left. The commanding officer, unable to make himself heard
over the cacophony, drew his pistol and fired two rounds into the wooden floor. Immediately the noise stopped.

‘Do your jobs,’ he screamed. ‘Launch the missiles.’

And with frequent fearful glances through the windows, the technicians bent to their tasks.

Malakov could see the Chiha-ri site from five miles away – the four raging fires were
obvious, plumes of thick black smoke rising into the air above them. But what he couldn’t see was any sign of the attacking aircraft. Perhaps, he wondered, they’d already made
their escape, but if they had they wouldn’t get far. He’d make sure their pilots never left North Korea alive.

‘We’ve got company,’ Dick Long said. ‘I’m detecting Fox Fire
radar from the north, which means the ‘bats are about to join the party, and we’ve got exactly one Sidewinder between us. This is probably going to get quite exciting.’

‘Roger that. Break. Alpha Three, what’s the range of those bandits?’

‘Inside six miles, now subsonic and in descent.’

Richter was just north of the firing complex, in a left turn to line up on one of the two
remaining Scuds. He glanced to his right and could clearly see some half a dozen aircraft heading directly towards him.

‘Visual the bandits,’ he called, then turned his attention back to the matter in
hand. His Harrier had only a single Sidewinder remaining, so engaging the MiG-25s in air-to-air combat would be a very uneven match. But destroying the Scuds had a much higher priority than
his personal survival, and he still had one CRV7 pod.

‘Zero Six, Chunghwa. Eight high-speed contacts approaching from bearing zero eight
zero. Range twenty miles, low level. Possibly American. Combat Group Two is heading to intercept, present range fifty-three miles.’

‘Acknowledged. Zero Six will deal with the aircraft attacking Chihari. Remainder of the
Combat Group, break off immediately and engage the Americans.’

Malakov glanced to his left and saw the other MiG-25s turning and accelerating away from him.
That made the contest more even: he could handle the two Harriers himself, once he found them.

And then he saw two fast-moving contacts on his radar, about five miles ahead. Obviously the
attacking aircraft were so low that they’d been lost in the ground clutter, or behind some of the surrounding hills.

But now he had them.

In the command bunker, the countdown for the first of the remaining two Scuds was down to the
last couple of seconds, and the missile was still standing unscathed on the TEL. The commanding officer alternated his gaze between the digital clock that showed the countdown progress and
the view of the missile through the window.

As the clock reached zero, he saw what he’d been fearing: one of the attacking aircraft
was sweeping in from the north, heading directly towards the launch pad.

Then two things happened simultaneously. The missile’s engine ignited with a roar, and the
Scud lifted smoothly off the launcher and accelerated into the sky. And a ripple of flame appeared below the right-hand wing of the grey-painted swept-wing aircraft. An instant later several
rockets smashed into the now-redundant TEL and the concrete launch pad, but none touched the Scud.

In his GR9, Richter knew the moment he fired the CRV7s that he was too late. Even as the
rockets streaked towards the launch pad, he could see the Scud climbing away. They’d failed to stop the launch – or more accurately,
he
had failed to stop the launch when he missed the second Scud with his Maverick. If that missile had hit, he’d have fired his CRV7s at
least one minute earlier, when the Scud was still sitting in its TEL.

His remaining Sidewinder was of no use against the missile, because it almost certainly
wouldn’t be fast enough to catch it: he guessed the Scud was already about three thousand feet off the ground, probably travelling at close to Mach 2 and still accelerating. The
‘winder had a maximum speed of Mach 2.5, and a fairly short range. The mathematics of an intercept were compelling and unarguable.

There was, he assessed, just one thing he could do that might work. It was a hell of a risk, but
it was the only possible way he could think
of that might bring down the Scud. He glanced to the north, but could only see one incoming Foxbat. Presumably the others had
spread out or climbed to high level. But one should be enough.

He opened the throttle fully and pulled the Harrier into a high-speed climb.

Gennadi Malakov checked his instruments and ensured that the first of his four R-40T
infrared-homing missiles had locked on to the British aircraft that was now climbing steeply above the Chiha-ri launch site.

‘Excellent,’ he murmured, and released the weapon. Then he turned his attention
back to the Saphir radar, looking for the second target. This really was just too easy.

‘Paul! Get to low level. You’ve an Acrid heading straight for you.’
‘Copied,’ Richter responded, concentrating on following the Scud in its climb. ‘It’s behind me so I can’t see it. Can you call ranges.’

‘For fuck’s sake, you can’t outrun it. It’s a Mach four
missile.’

‘I’m not going to try. Just call when it’s about a mile behind
me.’

Dick Long suddenly guessed what Richter might be intending. He turned his aircraft so that he
could see his wingman more clearly and, more crucially, track the massive Acrid missile that was closing on the Harrier at over four times the speed of sound.

Long just hoped Richter knew what he was doing.

In the Chiha-ri command bunker, the digital countdown for the last Scud passed five seconds
to go, and the missile was still untouched on the pad. Two out of six launches wouldn’t please Pyongyang, the commanding officer knew, but in the circumstances it was a far better
result than he had realistically expected. He looked out of the armoured window towards the TEL and nodded in satisfaction as, with a roar and sudden burst of flame, the last Scud leapt away
from the launcher.

‘Estimate two miles, Paul. Standby. Oh, shit. The last Scud’s just been
launched.’

‘Copied.’

‘Stand by for one mile point. Five, four, three, two, one. One mile now, now, now. Get the
fuck out of there.’

Gennadi Malakov’s attention was directed almost entirely towards locating and obtaining
a missile lock on the second Harrier. He was confident that his R-40T would destroy the first aircraft within seconds, as the idiot Englishman was actually making it easier for the
infrared-guided missile to kill him, because he was climbing almost straight up. If he’d dived down to low level there would have been a chance, albeit a small one, that he could have
got away.

Then he spotted his second target. The Harrier was in a gentle climb on the far side of the
missile base. Malakov pointed his MiG-25 directly towards it, selected his second R-40T and waited for the seeker head to lock on.

Only after the last Scud had lifted off its TEL did the commanding officer finally answer the
direct line from Chunghwa.

‘We’ve launched two missiles,’ he reported, ‘but the attacking aircraft
destroyed the other four.’

The brief silence from the Air Command headquarters spoke volumes. ‘We will discuss your
failure to obey the simplest of orders later, Colonel. Now, order your anti-aircraft guns and missile batteries to cease firing. We are sending in fighters to locate and destroy the British
intruders.’

Richter had done a very rough calculation in his head. If the Acrid was travelling at Mach 4,
that meant it was covering over half a mile every second. So from the one-mile distance, and with the Harrier flying at around four hundred miles an hour, the missile would hit him between
two and three seconds later. It was, he knew, going to be very tight.

He waited for a quick count of two after Dick Long’s call, then acted. He slammed the
nozzles into the fully-downward landing position, then chopped the throttle back. It felt as if he’d been kicked in the arse by an angry elephant, and the grey haze of g-loc swam in
front of his eyes for a second or two before the ‘speed jeans’ began squeezing the blood back up towards his brain.

The effect on the Harrier was immediate. The aircraft had been climbing almost vertically: the
change in nozzle angle stopped the climb and kicked the aircraft onto its back. When Richter cut the power, the GR9 completed the loop and began falling nose-first back towards the
ground.

And that was exactly what he had intended. The violent manoeuvre punched his aircraft away from
the flight-path of the Acrid. Cutting the power and instantly changing the Harrier’s direction of flight as he’d done – a manoeuvre no other aircraft was capable of
performing – virtually eliminated its infrared signature. But he’d had to leave it until the last possible moment, so that the Acrid wouldn’t be able to lock on to him
again. As the Harrier started descending, Richter looked ahead, down towards the ground, and saw the missile powering past him.

The moment the target’s infrared return vanished, the missile’s seeker head began
trying to reacquire the heat source. It didn’t detect the Harrier, but right in front of it was the massive exhaust bloom from the Scud missile, half a mile ahead. The Acrid’s
computer is a fairly basic device, and its target discrimination isn’t particularly sensitive, so it immediately began tracking the new contact.

The Scud was still accelerating, but the Acrid was travelling at close to its maximum speed of
Mach 4.5, and overhauled it rapidly. Less than three seconds after Richter kicked his Harrier into a dive, the
seventy-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation warhead of the
Acrid hit the rear of the Scud and detonated.

The result was spectacular. The remaining fuel in the Scud’s tanks exploded in a massive
fireball, blowing debris in all directions.

Malakov didn’t see the Acrid destroy the Scud. Though aware of the explosion, he
assumed it was just his missile bringing down the British aircraft. He was now waiting for his second R-40T to lock on to the other Harrier but, unlike the first one, this pilot wasn’t
making it easy. He’d stopped his climb almost as soon as Malakov identified him, presumably because his ECM fit had warned him he was being irradiated, and went back to low level where
the Saphir radar was finding it hard to detect him.

The Russian pilot overflew Chiha-ri, then banked left to retrace his route. The Harrier had to
be somewhere down below him. It was now just a matter of finding it.

Dick Long was looking for a way out, and a way past the Foxbat. The last Scud was already
about five thousand feet above the ground and accelerating. There was no way his Harrier could catch it and, even if he could, he had no weapons left that could bring it down. And if he did
climb up after it, the Foxbat would launch an Acrid and the Scud would be too high for Richter’s trick to work a second time.

That, he reflected sourly, was going to be the one that got away. Destroying five out of the six
– even if the fifth one had needed a little help from a Russian missile – was still a remarkably good result. But he doubted if the residents of Seoul would agree with him when
the sarin, or mustard gas, or botulinus toxin, or whatever the North Koreans had loaded inside the missile’s warhead exploded on the streets of the capital.

The Foxbat was the more immediate problem. The pilot was clearly looking for him, but by
flying fairly slowly at very low level, now less than two hundred feet above the ground, Long believed the MiG’s radar wouldn’t be able to detect him. But then getting away from
Chiha-ri clearly wasn’t going to be easy.

‘Cobra Two. You still here, Paul?’

‘Affirmative. I see the Scud, but where’s the Foxbat?’

‘Overhead Chiha-ri. I’m down in the weeds, south of the base, and he’s just
overflown me, turning onto north. The anti-aircraft guns have stopped firing, which probably means more fighters are on their way. It’s time we got the hell out of here.’

Then something totally unexpected happened. Richter was looking up through his canopy towards
the accelerating Scud when a streak of bright light shot across the sky from somewhere to the east of his position and smashed into the missile, which instantly exploded.

‘What the hell was that?’ he demanded.

‘That, my friend, was an alpha india mike one two zero, better known as AMRAAM. The new
voice on the Harriers’ discrete frequency was unmistakably American.

‘This is Cobra Leader. Identify yourself,’ Dick Long snapped.

‘This is Blade One, lead cab of eight Super Hornets from the Mobile Chernobyl. My
colleagues are having an exchange of views with some MiGs a few miles east, but I thought y’all could use some help over here, that’s if you don’t mind me joining the
party.’

‘Did you bring a bottle?’ Richter asked, levelling his Harrier three hundred feet
above the ground and turning onto north.

The explosion of the second Scud immediately attracted Malakov’s attention, and he
looked up sharply through his canopy. It could, he
supposed, have been some kind of a malfunction, though he knew the Scud was a generally reliable, if fairly inaccurate,
missile. But the Russian didn’t believe in convenient malfunctions. He thought the weapon was far more likely to have been brought down by an air-to-air missile, presumably fired by the
remaining Harrier. Or perhaps one of the Americans had done it.

‘Chunghwa, this is Zero Six. I’ve shot down one of the British fighters, but
I’ve just seen a Scud missile explode shortly after lift-off. Where are the American aircraft now?’

‘About fifteen miles to the east of Chiha-ri, Zero Six. Wait. No, we now hold three
contacts in your vicinity, two intermittent, probably at low level, and one solid.’

‘Three?’

‘Confirmed. The intermittent contacts are believed to be the British aircraft, so the
other may be one of the American intruders.’

That couldn’t be right. He
knew
he’d shot down one of the Harriers – he’d seen the explosion. Chunghwa must be wrong, and there must be two American fighters in the area. He returned his attention to the
radar display, and simultaneously began a right turn, back towards Chiha-ri. He still had three missiles, so he could handle two Yankees and the remaining Harrier, no problem.

But as he straightened up on north, his Sirena S-3M radar homing and warning system suddenly
alerted him. He checked the readout: an APG-79 I-band radar on a bearing of zero eight two. That, Malakov knew, meant an American F/A-18, a much more dangerous opponent than a Harrier. But he
also knew that on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War a MiG-25 had shot down an American Hornet – Iraq’s only air combat kill during the conflict.

He checked his weapons, engaged the ECM system, then pulled the Foxbat round in a right-hand
climbing turn onto east, looking for a target.

The Super Hornet’s APG-79 radar was suddenly flooded by spikes as the MiG-25’s
ECM equipment blotted out the picture, and simultaneously
the ALR-67 Radar Warning Receiver conveyed the unmistakable message that the aircraft was being irradiated by a
Fox Fire radar.

The pilot immediately engaged full counter-measures, but that didn’t seem to have any
effect. He’d heard about the sheer power of the Foxbat’s radar and its ability to ‘burn through’ any ECM system, but this was the first time he’d seen it in
action. And it frightened him, because he’d no clue where the Russian-built aircraft currently was. Without his radar, he was both blind and effectively unarmed.

‘Cobras, Blade One.’ The American’s voice was noticeably louder and sounded
more stressed than his previous transmissions. ‘I’m being irradiated and jammed by this guy, and I can’t get a lock on him. Turning away and streaming a decoy.’

He hauled his Super Hornet round in a tight left turn onto east and extended the
aircraft’s ALE-50 Towed Decoy System, a combat-proven protection against both air-to-air and surface-to-air weapons.

Gennadi Malakov’s Saphir radar was showing a solid contact twenty kilometres to the
east, but the target was already turning away.

The type ‘TD’ and ‘RD’ variants of the R-40 missile – the initial
‘D’ standing for
dorabotanaya
, the Russian word meaning ‘more elaborate’ – have a range of fifty
kilometres, but the earlier ‘R’ and ‘T’ types are effective at only just over half that distance. Malakov’s MiG-25 was carrying three R-40T weapons, so he knew
he had to get closer to be sure of a kill. He pushed the throttles forward to increase his speed, and aimed his Foxbat directly at the fleeing aircraft.

Richter looked left, and there, about three miles to the west, he saw the unmistakable shape
of a MiG-25 turning right onto an easterly heading. He glanced east, but the Super Hornet was too far away for him to see
it. Despite that, Richter had no doubt that the
Russian aircraft was now in pursuit of the American.

He also knew he himself was in an almost perfect position to intercept it. His Harrier was low
level, probably invisible to the enemy aircraft’s radar in the ground clutter, and he still had a single Sidewinder. And because the GR9 has no radar, and the ‘winder uses
infrared homing, the Foxbat pilot would have no way of detecting him, unless his Harrier painted on the MiG’s radar. Richter would just have to keep low and hope for the best.

He glanced again at the Foxbat, estimating its speed and heading, then turned right to match its
track. He selected the Sidewinder, checked that the broken circle symbol appeared on the HUD, and increased speed so that when he had to climb, he’d be able to gain height as quickly as
possible.

‘Two from One. Position and intentions?’

‘Just east of the missile site, low-level, tracking zero nine zero. I’m just going
to try and slip my last Sidewinder up that Foxbat’s tailpipe.’

‘You what? You
have
to be out of
your fucking tree. The Harrier’s no match for the MiG, and we’ve barely enough fuel now to get back across the DMZ. Let the Hornets handle him.’

‘Reality check, Dick. Even if we stay low-level, the moment we start heading south that
guy’s going to see us on radar and then we’re in real trouble. If we’re going to get out of here, we have to take him down first.’

‘And how do we do that?’ Long asked.

So Richter told him.

‘I hope you know what we’re doing,’ Long muttered, turned his Harrier east
and started climbing.

Malakov was waiting for his R-40T to lock on to the fleeing American aircraft, but he was
still very much aware that there were another two enemy fighters somewhere in the area.

His Saphir radar detected a contact in his right two o’clock position, less than four
miles away and climbing out from Chiha-ri. It had to be the second Harrier. Malakov instantly changed his priorities. He would pursue the American once he’d dealt with the British
aircraft.

He turned towards the new contact. The R-40T infrared seeker head-locked on almost at once and
Malakov fired the weapon.

Richter waited until the Foxbat was just ahead of him, then pulled up into a steep climb.
Almost immediately he heard the growl as the Sidewinder detected the MiG-25’s jet exhaust.

He saw the flare from the aircraft’s port wing as the pilot fired an Acrid at Dick
Long’s climbing GR9. At the moment of release, the Harrier was only about three miles from the Foxbat. The R-40T would cover that distance in roughly six seconds.

‘Missile fired!’ Richter called. ‘Stand by. Evasive action now, now,
now.’