by Dale Brown
When she rolled out of her turn, she couldn’t believe what she saw: radar targets everywhere. She thought she had a radar malfunction, so she turned her radar to STBY, then back to RADIATE — and the targets were still there. Maybe two dozen targets, all at different altitudes.
“Ho-lee shit,” she muttered to herself. Frantically, she switched back to the command channel on the primary radio. Through a haze of static, she radioed, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Four, ‘gorilla,’ I say again, ‘gorilla,’ northwest two-four bull’s-eye.” “Gorilla” was the brevity code for a large formation of unidentified planes in indeterminate numbers. Forman gave the target’s position relative to an imaginary point that changed on every patrol. She couldn’t give the targets’ altitude, speed, or any more precise information because there were so many of them out there.
“Say again, Hunter.” There was a loud squeal in the radios that the frequency-hopping communications system couldn’t eliminate. “Be advised, Hunter, our status is ‘bent,’ repeat, ‘bent.’ Keep us advised.”
Jamming — someone was jamming them! Forman switched to her secondary radio and found it hopelessly jammed. The squealing was drowning out all recognizable sound even before she keyed the mike. Maybe whoever was jamming her radios was jamming the North Warning System radar, too — the “bent” code meant that the ground radar was inoperative. So now she was all alone up here with a huge number of planes bearing down on her, with no way to contact anyone.
The only thing she had left were her orders and her tactical doctrine: Any unidentified aircraft entering the Air Defense Identification Zone had to be identified, and if they acted in a hostile manner, they were to be shot down immediately, as quickly as possible before reaching U.S. airspace. She was to continue the interdiction mission until she reached “bingo” fuel, which gave her the minimum fuel state over the intended recovery base only.
Forman thumbed her stick controls and designated the lead aircraft in the lead formation, placed the radar pipper just to the left and below center in her heads-up display, and headed toward it. This guy was screaming for the deck, descending at fifteen thousand feet per minute. Too late, pal, she thought — I got you….
* * *
The radar-warning receiver blared again — but this time, instead of a steady electronic tone, they heard a fast, high-pitched, raspy sound. “Fighter has locked on,” the electronic-warfare officer said. “Eleven o’clock…moving into lethal range.”
Leborov couldn’t believe the speed of that thing — it seemed only seconds ago that they first got the warning. “What the hell should I do?” he shouted.
“Turn left, head into him!” the EWO shouted. “That’ll increase his closure rate, and he’ll be forced to maneuver.” That wasn’t necessarily so with an F-16—they could shoot Sidewinder missiles directly into your face all day long — but he had to give the pilot something to do until they got low. “All jammers on and operating…chaff and flares ready.”
“Passing two thousand for five hundred,” the navigator said.
“Screw that, nav — we’re going to one hundred meters,” Leborov said. “If he wants to come down and play, let’s get way down into the weeds!” Bravado? Maybe, but he wasn’t going to get shot down without a fight, and there was one place the Tupolev-95 liked to fly, and that was down low.
* * *
Thirty miles…twenty miles…the plane was still heading down, passing five thousand feet and descending fast. She was at ten thousand feet, not real anxious to chase this guy down until she started rolling in behind him for an ID. He turned slightly into her, so they were going nose to nose now. She configured her cockpit switches for low-light operations and lowered her PVS-9 night-vision goggles. The view was matte green and with very little contrast, but now she could see a horizon, the shoreline far behind her, details of the outside of her jet — and a spattering of bright dots in the distance: the unidentified aircraft. There were so many that it looked like a cluster of stars.
Forman thought about trying to contact the plane on the international emergency “GUARD” frequency, but the jamming was too heavy and getting stronger as she closed in. Was that considered a “hostile act” right there? Probably so. Fifteen…ten…
Suddenly one of the other myriad radar targets on her heads-up display scooted across the scope to her right, traveling…Shit, the guy was supersonic. She immediately pulled up, jammed her throttle to zone-five afterburner, and turned hard right to pursue. The first guy never went above four hundred knots, even in a screaming-ass dive, but this newcomer was going twice as fast! He would reach the coastline way before these others — if she didn’t catch him first.
Again she tried to radio Knifepoint and her wingman of the new contact — but the jamming was still too heavy. Each one of those incoming planes must have enormous jammers to take out digital radios and even the North Warning System radars at this range! Even her APG-68 radar was getting spiked, and it had plenty of antijam modes.
The fast newcomer was at forty-three thousand feet, traveling just over the speed of sound, heading east-southeast. Forman locked him up on radar easily after getting behind him and tried to interrogate his Identification Friend or Foe system. Negative IFF — he was a bandit, all right. Supersonic, no modes and codes, flying way off transpolar flight routes through a curtain of electronic jamming — unless it was some Concorde pilot hot-dogging it for his rich passengers, he was a bad guy.
The bandit was passing Mach 1.1, the speed limit for her F-16 Fighting Falcon’s external fuel tanks. No Alaska fighter pilot ever wanted to punch off external fuel tanks, especially if there was a tanker anywhere in the area, but she would never catch him otherwise, so, reluctantly, off they went. As soon as this guy was ID’d and the Nineteenth showed up, she was done for the evening — even with a tanker on the way, no fighter pilot played very long up in Alaska without plenty of extra fuel.
It was funny the things you thought about at a time like this, Kelly mused to herself. Here she was chasing down a bandit, in the midst of hostile jamming, and all she could think was that someone was going to have to pay for a couple 370-gallon fuel tanks.
She tried the IFF interrogate switch a couple more times — still negative — then hit her MASTER ARM switch and selected her twenty-millimeter cannon instead of her radar- or infrared-guided missiles. This guy definitely met all the criteria of being a bad guy, she thought, but she had enough gas right now to try to do a visual ID. At Mach 1, he was still fifteen minutes from reaching the Canadian coast. She had forty-five minutes to bingo fuel — a number that was dropping rapidly every minute she spent in zone-five afterburner — so she decided to go in close for a visual.
She kept the power up and was starting to get into visual range in just under five minutes when suddenly her radar-warning receiver emitted a high-pitched, fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone. An enemy fire-control radar had locked on to her! The heads-up display categorized it as an “unknown,” position directly ahead of her. But there were no other aircraft except the guy in front of her….
A tail gun! That’s the only thing it could be! The damned bandit had locked on to her with a tail-mounted fire-control radar.
And sure as hell, moments later she saw winks of light coming from the still-dark silhouette of the bandit in front of her. The bastard was firing a tail gun at her! She immediately punched out radar-decoying chaff and flares and broke hard right to get away. She heard a couple hammer taps somewhere on the fuselage, but there were no warning messages.
Kelly was not scared — she was incensed! She’d been shot at by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles while doing patrols for Operation Southern Watch, and she’d taken on plenty of simulated surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, and every kind of air-to-air missile possible in training — but she’d never been shot at by a tail gunner. She didn’t even know that any planes had tail gunners anymore! Furious, she flipped her arming switch from the cannon to her Sidewinder missiles and t
ightened her turn, getting ready to line up on the bandit.
No question any longer — the guy was a hostile. She wished she could tell her wingman or the Nineteenth about the other bogeys heading in, fearing they all might have tail gunners, but the jamming was still too heavy. No matter — this guy was going down.
But as she lined up for her first shot, her night-vision goggles blanked out a tremendous burst of light coming from the bandit. It was a missile launch — but the missile was huge, hundreds of times larger than an air-to-air missile. The tail of fire had to be two hundred feet long! The missile shot straight ahead for a mile or two, then pulled up abruptly. A few moments later, she heard a sonic boom, followed by a large flash of light, and the missile accelerated and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Oh, Christ, Forman thought, he’s firing attack missiles toward Canada. They were too fast to be cruise missiles. They looked like…like…
Like air-launched ballistic missiles.
As soon as Kelly got a lock indication, she fired a Sidewinder. Seconds later another big missile launched from the bomber. “Oh, my God,” she muttered, and she fired her last Sidewinder. The first Sidewinder veered from the attack plane and went after the second missile, but it accelerated off too quickly. The Sidewinder couldn’t reacquire the plane and fell harmlessly away until it exploded. Just milliseconds before the second Sidewinder hit, the bandit launched a third big missile.
Her second Sidewinder hit the enemy aircraft directly in its right engine. The bandit veered right, stabilized, veered right again, started to turn left, then made a slower, steadier right turn, crossing directly in front of her. Forman closed in for the kill. At four miles, as the bandit made its turn, she recognized it as a Russian Tupolev-22M bomber, nicknamed “Backfire,” its variable-geometry wings slowly swiveling forward. It had two large external fuel tanks beside the fuselage on each side. Smoke and fire were trailing from the right engine, getting heavier each second. She switched to her cannon, zoomed down on him, and opened fire. Shells peppered the fuselage and left wing, and now through her night-vision goggles she could see puffs of fire coming from the lef tengine. The Backfire aimed right for the Canadian coast, still over a hundred miles away. She doubted if it would stay aloft for—
Her attention was drawn to a bright streak of fire above and to her left. She realized with horror it was another one of those huge air-to-surface missiles. In her desperation to shoot this guy down, she forgot she was single-ship, that there might be more bombers out there — and that she was responsible for them all until help arrived! That was probably why this Backfire turned right instead of left — to distract her enough so the wingmen could launch their missiles.
Forman turned sharply left and started a climb, selected her AMRAAM missiles, and quickly locked on to the second bandit just as it launched a second big air-to-ground missile — but then her radar-warning receiver screeched again, and this time the hammer blows and shudders she’d felt before came back twice as hard. In her drive to hose the first Backfire and then diverting her attention to the second bandit, she’d flown too close to the tail end of the first Backfire and gotten into its kill zone.
The engine instruments were still okay, but she could feel a vibration in her control stick and rudder pedals — and then she noticed it, the right-wing fuel gauge dipping well below the level of the left. She immediately started transferring fuel from the right wing to the fuselage and left-wing tanks, but there was probably no room in the other tanks for the right-wing fuel — she was going to end up losing it. Fuel was life up here in the Arctic.
And as she fretted about her fuel state, the second bandit launched a third missile, then started to do a one-eighty. Now she assumed that each Backfire carried three of those big honking missiles, and she assumed that there were more up here, so instead of pursuing the second bandit, she searched farther west and south for more high-flying fast-movers. Sure enough, two more supersonic bogeys appeared.
She quickly verified that they were not transmitting any friendly IFF codes — they were not. She had to fly west a few minutes to get within range, which was not the direction she needed to be flying. Kelly didn’t have to check the nav computer to know that if she didn’t turn around now, she might not make it back to base. Even though Alaska had the best search-and-rescue units in the world, there was no way you wanted to eject over northern Alaska — and sure as heck not over the Beaufort Sea. She had to turn back….
But the Backfire she didn’t attack might be the one that launched a missile and destroyed Eielson, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Elmendorf, or Washington, D.C. — and there was no friggin’ way she was going to let that happen! She started a gradual climb and turned westward to get within position to attack with whatever ammunition she had left.
As quickly as she could, she maneuvered and locked up both Backfires, interrogated for friendly IFF codes once again, received a negative reply, then fired one AMRAAM missile at each. Both Backfires immediately started ejecting chaff and flare decoys, but she was close enough for the decoys to have no effect and the missiles to stay on target. The first Backfire was hit on the left side of the fuselage and started to spin almost straight down into the Beaufort Sea. The second was hit in the belly, and the hit must’ve detonated the missile in its belly, because the Backfire blew apart in a spectacular cloud of fire. The explosion then ignited the two external missiles, adding their destruction to the tremendous fury of that blast. Forman had to peel off to the north to stay away from that massive blast — she swore she could feel the heat right through her bubble canopy and winter-weight flight gear. Kelly repeated the attack with two more supersonic targets. One AMRAAM missed; she scored another hit on a Backfire but couldn’t see what happened to it because she had removed her night-vision goggles due to the longer ranges involved. Next…
“Warning, fuel low,” the computerized “copilot,” nicknamed “Bitching Betty,” intoned. One more glance at her fuel gauges: The right wing was almost empty, and the left wing and fuselage tanks were less than half full. Crap. She was right at emergency fuel level — sixty minutes of fuel, sixty minutes’ flying time to Eielson. But the tanker was on its way, and there was one emergency airfield at Fort Yukon that she might be able to use. She still had plenty of ammo in the cannon. Time to get busy.
Forman lowered her night-vision goggles and did strafing runs on two more Backfires, scoring hits on both but unsure if she’d done any damage. She then turned farther to the west to look for more targets — and there they were. As she saw it, there were several waves of attackers — multiple levels of slower-moving planes, most of them descending to low altitude, and another wave of high-speed attackers at higher altitude that appeared to be blowing past the slow-movers and launching huge hypersonic missiles, perhaps to pave the way for the slow-movers.
“Warning, fuel emergency,” Bitching Betty chimed in. In her drive to get as many enemy planes as possible, Kelly had ignored her fuel state. She knew that her wingman was coming, but he was still at least twenty minutes away. She was almost out of ammunition — admittedly having been a little excitable and trigger-happy on her first gun pass, but being more frugal as her supply got lower and lower. She tried the radios again — still jammed. The datalink hadn’t activated yet, meaning that the AWACS plane from Elmendorf hadn’t arrived yet. There was no indication that her wingman was anywhere in the area, so she couldn’t even lead him to the bandits.
With the sky full of enemy planes all around her, she came to the horrifying realization that she was done for the day — she had no fuel and no weapons. The enemy aircraft were heading farther to the southeast, within visual range of the Canadian coastline by now. They were heading away from Eielson, so she couldn’t pursue. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she had no choice except to break off and head for home.
And then she saw them: more missiles flying overhead. The Backfires that she couldn’t down were launching their missiles! And she was powerless to stop them.
As she slowed to her best-range power setting, the vibration in her stick and rudder pedals got worse. She couldn’t go below three hundred knots without the fighter’s shaking so violently that she thought she could lose control at any second. That was not good. It meant that air refueling was probably out of the question.
“Hunter Four, this is Hunter Eight on company, how do you read?”
Thank God the jamming had subsided enough to hear human voices, she told herself. “Two by, Eight,” she responded. “How me?”
“Weak and barely readable,” her wingman said. “We tried to raise you earlier, but no response. I have you tied on, three-zero at one-two bull’s-eye, base plus eleven. What’s your state?”
“Eight, I engaged seven, repeat, seven bandits,” Forman said breathlessly. “Do you copy?”
“You engaged seven bandits? Did you make visual contact?”
“Affirmative. Russian Backfire bombers. Two of them launched what appeared to be very large air-to-surface missiles. I got six of the bandits. There were several groups of bandits, the Backfires up high and slower-movers that descended to low altitude. They were headed southeast. I have been unable to contact Knifepoint. Can you try? Over.” Hunter Eight was farther south, away from the Russian planes that were jamming them — she hoped he’d have better luck.
Now Forman’s wingman sounded as breathless as she did. “Stand by,” he said. On the primary radio, she heard, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight.” It took several tries to reach the NORAD controller. “Hunter Four has engaged large hostile attacking bomber force.” He gave the approximate position and direction of flight.
