Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (84 page)

 
          
There
was a moment when the F-16 was dead in his sights on the radar scope,
perfectly
dead-center, and he felt an
almost overwhelming sense of victory—what some called the “hunter’s rush” or
the “hunter’s hard-on.” He also knew it was the time he was the most vulnerable
to mistakes Carefully the Cuchillo pilot checked his instruments and warned
himself this was no time to get sloppy.

 
          
He
was too close for a missile shot but just outside good cannon range. Patience,
patience, patience. The Cuchillo pilot knew that even though the F-16 had
enough power to accelerate in a vertical climb, in this case it would probably
eject chaff and flares to decoy any missile and descend to regain the airspeed
lost in its emergency climb. The Cuchillo pilot therefore rolled inverted,
waiting for the split-second when the F-16 would roll and pull over—its entire
profile would be visible then, a perfect aspect to fire on. He couldn’t see the
F-16 roll on radar—it was pitch black outside except for the occasional glimpse
of lights from the Keys that would catch and hold his attention—but the instant
the radar blip headed downward or when he saw a decoy flare ejected he would
pull downward as well, cut off the angle and start shooting. The F-16 would fly
right through his stream of bullets.

 
          
Just
as he expected the F-16 to make its move—as indicated by his own dramatic loss
of airspeed in the pursuit climb—suddenly the Cuchillo pilot felt a sharp,
hammering reverberate through his plane. At first he thought he had stalled his
fighter, but the engines were still running. Did he squeeze the trigger? It
felt as if his guns were firing—maybe he had squeezed the trigger without
realizing it. He checked the threat-warning receiver—it was silent. Not even a
peep from stray emissions from the F-16 in front of him . . .

 
          
Which
shouldn’t be the case. With the F-16 in so close he should be picking up
something
from his radar . . .

 
          
Then
he realized that he had shut off the threat-warning receiver. There was another
F-16 at his six, shooting at him . . .

 
          
Still
inverted, he pulled his nose down to the ground, rolled hard right, turned
ninety degrees off heading, then reversed course— anything to get out of the
F-16’s radar beam and escape into the darkness. But he had overlooked another
classic rule of engagement—don’t focus in on one machine for too long. He had
allowed the F-16’s wingman to get behind him. He reactivated his threatwarning
receiver but by now it was chirping continually and, unlike the F-16’s version,
the Mirage’s threat-warning system could not tell from what direction the threat
was coming.

 
          
Darkness,
low altitude—the entire engagement with the F-16 had all taken place below one
thousand meters—low speed, threat warnings everywhere, nothing on the radar
scope, no wingman, no real situational awareness ... it all meant only one
thing. Time to bug out. Extend, escape and live to fight another day. He rolled
wings-level, started a shallow descent to the relative safety of the dark sea
and pushed the throttles all the way to full afterburner. Once established
upright and heading south out to sea, he began searching the skies around him
for any sign of the enemy . . .

 
          
.
. . And he looked aft, behind his right wing, just in time to see an AIM-9L
Sidewinder missile streak out of the darkness and crash into his tailpipe. He
reached down to the ejection lever between his legs but the Mirage spun
end-over-end and crashed into the sea long before he could pull the
yellow-painted handle. He stayed alive long enough to the feel the impact and
experience the cool south Florida waters before they closed over him and
crushed him to death.

 
          
Aboard the Lead F-16 Fighter

 
          
“Your
tail’s clear, lead,” the pilot heard his wingman call out. “Splash one,
Hammerheads. Hey, he came outta
nowhere.
”

 
          
The
lead F-16 pilot rolled upright, then began a sharp climb when he realized he
was only a hundred feet above the water. Another moment’s hesitation and he’d
have been dead.

 
          
“Trap
flight, another target heading north, low altitude. Vector heading
zero-three-zero, take angels one, target eight miles, velocity six hundred
knots.”

 
          
The
lead pilot climbed to one thousand feet, thankful to be above the waves even if
it was only a thousand feet—his Falcon fought much better at ten-thousand or
twenty-thousand feet—and this time used the data-link signal from the Border
Security Force to run the intercept. He rolled in behind the target and began
increasing power to regain the speed he had lost escaping from the first
attacker

 
          
But
he had put the power back in too slowly, recovered too slowly—after all the
jinking he was
still
not fully caught
up with his air machine. It took him several seconds of watching the airspeed
meter slowly wind upward before realizing that his attack radar had locked onto
the target. “Trap two has a Judy,” he reported.

 
          
“Cleared
in hot, Trap two.”

 
          
He
began a slight climb to get above the target—all medium- or long-range
missiles, especially his AIM-7F, needed some altitude in order to glide in to
the target so their sort-pulse rocket motors wouldn’t be used just to maintain
the missile’s altitude. He got a flashing diamond on the heads-up display that
encircled the radar- target square, which told him that the Sparrow missile was
in launch parameters and ready to fire. The word “SHOOT” appeared just
underneath the aiming reticle. As soon as he reached two thousand feet he
rechecked his switch positions, called, “Trap two, fox one, fox one,” on the
radio to warn of the missile launches—and squeezed the launch button.

 
          
Aboard the Cuchillo Mirage F1C strike
Fighter-Bomber

 
          
The
Mirage had no fancy lasers or radio beacons to guide the bomb, no inertial
navigation set, no ring-laser gyros or satellite navigation system. The young
twenty-year-old pilot, who had joined the Cuchillos only a few months
after—unjustly, he felt—being washed out of a Cuban Revolutionary Air Force
fighter-bombing program, was tired, excited, and nervous all at once. This was
his first time that he was flying alone, with no instructor, no leader, no
wingmen, not even a ground controller watching over him.

 
          
But
bombing was in his blood, and he was able to swallow his nervousness and use
his excitement to help himself through this run. Being suddenly alone, without
the comforting curses and grunts coming through from his lead pilot on their
scrambled radio channel, at least made it easier for him to concentrate. For
him, the whole world was condensed down to his cockpit, his controls, and the
little yellow blips on his four-inch radar scope.

 
          
He
would have to rely on dead reckoning, depending on simple time and heading, to
get within twenty miles of the target until he could pick out any recognizable
landmarks on the radar, find the target visually or by using those landmarks,
adjust the aircraft’s course so the track line on the radar lay across the
target, then release the bomb sometime before flying over the target. If he
acquired the target visually, at six hundred knots groundspeed and three
hundred feet above ground, he would release the cluster-bomb unit when the end
of the air-data computer probe on the nose touched the target. If he was using
the radar only, he would release at one 500-meter tick on the radar back from
the target for every hundred feet he was flying above ground. It was imprecise,
but it still had a reliability to it, especially with a cluster-bomb unit that
could wipe out nearly a square-kilometer area in one pass.

 
          
The
fear and nervousness washed over him once again when the threat-warning signal
beeped insistently in his helmet—they had found him. Flying straight and level
like this, he was an easy target for an advanced fighter-interceptor like the
F-16. He knew he had only seconds to react. He couldn't see the target yet but
he knew he was on track and very close. If he tried zigzagging to escape the
fighters he’d be far off-course and would have to spend too much time getting
back on track.

 
          
He
pitched up hard, sending his Mirage fighter into a straight-up vertical climb.
After gaining almost two thousand meters he rolled inverted and pulled his
stick back, looping over the top and aiming his nose straight at the ground.

 
          
His
abrupt maneuver had saved his life—the lead F-16’s first two Sparrow missiles
missed and were unable to reacquire the target before running out of power and
self-destructing.

 
          
He
still couldn’t see the target, but what he could see was the entire shadowy
bulk of Cudjoe Key against the dark, reflective background of the sea. The
island was a little more than two kilometers long and a half-kilometer wide,
with buildings and docks along the north side, a wide paved road running south,
and the Border Security Force’s aerostat unit in the center of the island along
with four support trailers, a power generator and a helicopter landing pad all
in a five-hundred-meter-square fenced-off area. He aimed the nose of his Mirage
into the center of the island, made a few small corrections when he saw the
lights of the docks on the north side—and made a final correction when he saw
one tiny light, either from a porch or an open doorway, peek on. The aerostat
unit was the only structure in the interior of the island. That had to be it .
. .

 
          
He
pickled off the cluster-bomb unit, then selected the Kingfisher anti-ship
missile and launched it at the center of the island. With an F-16, maybe two,
on his tail he didn’t have the luxury of searching for targets of opportunity,
and without the added drag factor of the bombs, he might just have a chance to
escape. He leveled off at one hundred meters, selected full afterburner power
and raced south toward the open sea.

 
          
The
cluster-bomb unit, designed to be released from a high-speed horizontal laydown
delivery pass, was not supposed to be driven down into the ground like a
conventional bomb; the one hundred individual bomblets never had a chance to
scatter, and so the devastating effect of the weapon was minimized. But the
Cuchillo’s pilot’s instincts about where his target was were right on. The
cluster-bomb canister opened up at three hundred feet when the special sensors
in the canister detected the sharp deceleration after release and the automatic
timers wound down; the bomblets dispersed only slightly but most of them landed
between the aerostat recovery area and the power-generator building. There was
one large secondary explosion as several bomblets destroyed the generator and
exploded its diesel fuel tank, the concussion and fire reaching the
data-generation and transmission facility, which cut off communications between
the aerostat radar and Border Security Force headquarters.

 
          
Border Security Force Headquarters,
Aladdin
City

 
          
“Contact
lost with KEYSTONE, Annette,” Fjelmann said in a low voice. The command center
at
Aladdin
City
suddenly went very quiet—no tapping of
keyboards, no low voices, no footsteps. Fjelmann pounded his desktop in
frustration.

 
          
“Shake
it olf,” Fields said, trying to pump her voice with enthusiasm. “Reconfigure
and find those intruders. Those F-16s out there are waiting on you.”

 
          
“Switching
to Navy Key West and air traffic control radar data,” he acknowledged, punching
instructions to the computer to reconfigure his display to use FAA radar from
Key West
and
Miami
Center
. His screen went blank as the computers
raced to convert the data from the Navy and FAA’s radars; then, slowly, the
computers began to redisplay air targets, flight-information data blocks, and
even managed to draw in island outlines, obstruction data, airports and airport
traffic patterns. The data on sea targets was missing completely—none of the
radars in use could see ships as well as the aerostats—and all of the
computer’s sophisticated intercept, analysis, research and recording options
reported “UNAVAILABLE.”