Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  Hell, no, Trash wanted those other pilots dead, and he would shoot every missile he had if that’s what it took, regardless of instructions from the Hawkeye ACO.

  But for right now, he had to stay alive long enough to shoot back.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Trash rocketed his Hornet toward the water, twelve thousand feet below him now but filling his windscreen quickly. Knowing the distance between himself and the J-10 when the other plane fired, the American was certain he was being chased down right now by a PL-12, a medium-range air-to-air radar-guided missile with a high-explosive warhead. Trash also knew that, with the missile’s top speed of Mach 4, he would not be outrunning this threat. And he was also well aware that with the missile’s ability to make a thirty-eight-g turn, he would not be outturning it, since his body could not pull more than nine g’s before G-LOC, g-induced loss of consciousness, knocked him out and ended any chance he had to get himself out of this mess.

  Instead Trash knew he’d have to use geometry as well as a few other tricks he had up his sleeve.

  At five thousand feet he yanked back on the stick, pulling his nose directly toward the oncoming threat. He could not see the missile; it was propelled by a rocket using smokeless fuel, and it raced through the sky nearly as fast as a bullet. But he kept his head through his maneuver and retained the situational awareness to know the direction from which the missile had been fired.

  Just coming out of the dive was a challenge for the twenty-eight-year-old captain. It was a seven-g turn, Trash knew this from his training, and to keep enough blood in his head for the high-g turn he used a hook maneuver. As he tightened every muscle in his core, he barked out a high-pitched “Hook!” that tightened his core even more.

  In his intercom he heard his own voice. “Hook! Hook! Hook!”

  Bitching Betty, the audio warning announcements delivered by a woman’s voice, too calm considering the news she delivered, came through Trash’s headset: “Altitude. Altitude.”

  Trash leveled out now, and he saw on his radar warning receiver that the threat was still locked on. He deployed chaff, a cloud of aluminum-coated glass fibers that dispersed via a pyrotechnic charge into a wide pattern around and behind the aircraft, hopefully decoying the radar of the incoming missile.

  Simultaneous with his deployment of chaff, Trash banked right, pulled back on the stick, and rocketed sideways only twenty-three hundred feet above the water.

  He deployed more chaff as he raced away, his right wing pointing to the water, his left wing pointing to the sun.

  The PL-12 missile took the bait. It fired into the floating aluminum and glass fiber, losing its lock on the radar signature of the F-18, and it slammed into the water moments later.

  Trash had beat the medium-range missile, but his maneuvers and his concentration on this threat had allowed the J-10 to get in behind him now. The Marine leveled his wings at eighteen hundred feet, looked around the sky on all sides of his cockpit, and he realized he’d lost sight of his enemy.

  “Where’s he at, Cheese?”

  “Unknown, Magic Two-Two! I’m defending!”

  So Cheese was in a fight for his life himself, Trash now realized. Neither man could help the other; they were both on their own until they either killed their enemy or were joined by the Navy Super Hornets, still several minutes away.

  Trash looked at the DDI above his left knee. The small screen showed him the top-down view of all the aircraft in the area. He saw Cheese to his north, and far to the south he saw the two ROC F-16s.

  He looked as far back over his left shoulder as he could, and now he saw the black silhouette of an aircraft bearing down on him at his seven-o’clock high, some two miles distant. The aircraft was far to the left of his HUD but he could still target it via his Jay-Macks visor.

  The J-10 turned in on Trash’s six o’clock, and Trash banked hard to the left, shoved his throttle forward, and dove toward the deck to pick up more speed, all to keep the enemy pilot from getting behind him.

  But the J-10 anticipated Trash’s move and worked his way to the Marine’s six, and closed to within a mile and a half.

  The Chinese pilot fired his twin-barreled 23-millimeter cannon. Glowing tracer rounds passed within a few feet of Trash’s canopy as he reversed his turn to the right and dropped down even lower. The rounds looked like long laser beams, and Trash watched them turn the blue-green water into geysers of foam ahead of him.

  Trash juked hard to the left and right, but he kept his nose flat now; he was only five hundred feet above the water, so he could not dive, and he did not want to lose airspeed by pulling up. In the cool jargon of combat aviation this was referred to as “guns-d” or “guns defensive,” but Trash and his fellow pilots called it “the funky chicken.” It was a desperate, ugly dance to stay out of the line of fire. Trash jacked his head up left and right as far as he could, straining his neck muscles to keep his enemy in sight behind him while he banked and yawed all over the sky. He caught a glimpse of the J-10 banking to follow his last evasive move, and Trash knew the Chinese pilot was almost in place for another shot.

  After another burst of cannon rounds went high, the Marine saw in the small mirror on the canopy next to the towel rack that the Super 10 had closed to under one mile, and he was perfectly lined up to take Trash out with his next volley.

  Trash did not hesitate; he had to act. He “got skinny” by turning his aircraft to show the smallest dimension, the side, and as the J-10 closed range, Trash pulled his nose up. His body was shoved down farther, both forward against the straps and deep into his seat. His lumbar spine ached from the maneuver, and his eyes lost focus as they bulged in their sockets.

  His last-ditch maneuver had increased the closure on the enemy fighter, not by slowing but by simply turning perpendicular to his line of flight at the perfect moment. He grunted and clenched his teeth, and then looked straight up through his canopy’s glass.

  The J-10B had been concentrating on his cannon, and he had not reacted to the maneuver in time. He shot past, just one hundred feet above Trash’s Hornet.

  The Chinese pilot was clearly doing his best to bleed off all his excess speed and to stay in the control zone, but even with his speed brakes on and his throttle back to idle he could not match Trash’s deceleration.

  As soon as the shadow of the Chinese fighter passed over Trash’s aircraft, the American tried to pull into the control zone behind his enemy for a guns solution, but his enemy was good, and he knew better than to make himself an easy target. The J-10 got its nose up and its engine generating thrust once again, and he came off his speed brakes and went vertical.

  Trash overshot his target low and instantly found himself in danger. To avoid having the J-10 get behind him, Trash shoved the throttle forward, past the detent and into afterburners, and his F/A-18 reared back like a mustang and launched toward the sun on two pillars of fire.

  Trash accelerated upward, gradually getting his nose up to seventy degrees, passing three thousand feet, four thousand, five thousand. He saw the J-10 above him in the sky, saw the enemy’s wingtips turning as the pilot tried to find the American plane somewhere below him.

  Trash reached ninety degrees of pitch—pure vertical—and shot upward at a speed of forty-five thousand feet a minute.

  In sixty seconds, he could be nine miles above the water.

  But Trash knew good and well he did not have sixty seconds. The J-10 was up here with him, and the enemy pilot was likely slamming his head all over his cockpit trying to find where the hell in the sky the Hornet had run off to.

  At ten thousand feet Captain White brought the throttle out of afterburner and tipped the nose of his jet over. He could tell that the enemy pilot still did not see him, a few thousand feet below and behind. The Chinese pilot rolled inverted and turned back toward the water.

  Like a loop on a roller co
aster, Trash rocketed in the direction of his enemy; in seconds he saw the Super 10 passing through a cloud below him. The pilot was using a split-S maneuver, trying to turn back toward the F/A-18 with a high-speed nose-low turn.

  Trash thumbed a small trackball-like input on his flight stick and switched to his cannon. As soon as the aiming pipper appeared on his HUD, the J-10 descended right into it, just eight hundred yards away.

  Trash fired one long and then two short bursts from his six-barreled Vulcan 20-millimeter cannon.

  His long burst passed well in front of the Super 10; his second spray of cannon fire was closer but still ahead of the jet.

  His last short burst, just a fraction of a second, nailed the enemy jet on the starboard wing. Bits of smoking aircraft broke free. The Chinese pilot broke hard to the right. Trash mimicked the maneuver just six hundred feet away, rolling toward dark smoke.

  The Chinese plane dove for the water, and Trash fought to line up the pipper for another gun shot, “hooked” with the hard-jerking g-forces he put on the plane to position himself behind.

  In front of him a flash moved his focus from his pipper to his target. Flame poured from the wing and the engine, and almost instantly he knew the plane in front of him was about to die.

  The rear of the J-10B exploded and the doomed aircraft spun hard to the right, corkscrewing toward the sea below.

  Trash broke off the attack, banked hard to the left to avoid the fireball, and then struggled to level his wings up above the water. He had no time to look for a chute from the pilot.

  “That’s a kill. Splash one. Pos, Cheese?” “Pos” was a request for the other jet’s position.

  Before his flight leader responded, Trash looked down at his DDI and saw he was heading toward Cheese. He looked up through several small clouds and saw the glint of sun off gray metal, as Magic Two-One, Cheese’s aircraft, shot from right to left.

  Cheese’s voice came over the radio. “Defensive. He’s on my six, about two miles back. He’s got me locked. Get him off me, Trash!”

  Trash’s eyes tracked quickly back to the north and saw the surviving Super 10 just as he launched a missile at Cheese’s jet exhaust.

  “Break right, Two-One! Missile in the air!”

  Trash did not watch the missile, nor did he look back over at Cheese. Instead he switched his weapons to select a Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missile. Trash had a “tally” on the Chinese Super 10, meaning that he could see him through his helmet-mounted sight.

  Inside his headset he heard a loud electronic buzz indicating that his Sidewinder was searching for a suitable heat signature.

  The buzz changed to the high-pitched lock tone as the J-10 passed by just three miles off Trash’s nose, indicating the AIM-9’s infrared homing system had found the hot engine of the Chinese aircraft and was tracking it.

  Trash pressed the air-to-air launch button on his stick and fired the AIM-9 Sidewinder. It streaked away on a trail of smoke and homed in on the Super 10.

  The missile was fire and forget, so Trash turned to the left to position himself behind the enemy fighter if the Sidewinder missed.

  Quickly he found Cheese in the sky. Trash’s flight leader was banking hard to the south; behind him his automatic flares deployed out of both sides of his aircraft and arced to the earth.

  The Chinese missile dove into the hot flares and exploded.

  Trash looked back to his target and saw the J-10 launch his own flares as he banked hard to the left. “Get him, get him, get him,” Trash said aloud, urging his missile toward the flaming engine of the Chinese aircraft. But the Sidewinder was duped by the flares fired by the Super 10.

  “Shit!”

  Trash switched back to guns, but before he could get his pipper on his target, the enemy jet dove for the deck.

  Trash followed him down, hoping to get behind him for another kill.

  In his headset he heard, “Magic Two-One is engaging bandits approaching from the north. Fox three.”

  Trash had not even had time to check what happened to the four other approaching aircraft, but clearly Cheese was firing radar-guided missiles at them from a distance.

  “Cheese, I’m engaged, pushing this guy to the deck.”

  “Roger, Trash, Navy Super Hornets two minutes out.”

  Trash nodded, then focused intently on his enemy, the Chinese pilot and his aircraft.

  “Fox three!” said Cheese as he fired another AIM-120 AMRAAM at the bandits approaching from the north.

  Trash and the Super 10 he had engaged spent the next sixty seconds in a tight, wild chase, each pilot jockeying to get in position to fire on the other while, at the same time, doing everything in his power to prevent his enemy from getting position on him.

  This was known, in the lexicon of air-to-air combat, as a “phone booth.” It was a small area to operate in, and getting smaller with the corrections both pilots made to jockey for advantage in the air.

  Trash felt the bone-crushing pressure of high positive-g turns and the eye-popping, nausea-inducing dives of negative g’s.

  A minute into the dogfight White slammed the stick to the right, following the enemy’s high-g turn above the water. Trash got his nose inside the turn slightly, but the PLAAF man reversed course suddenly and removed Trash’s advantage.

  The sheer number of inputs entering Trash’s brain was unimaginable. His aircraft moved on three axes as he tried to remain in an offensive position against another aircraft moving on three axes. His mouth delivered information to his flight lead and the Hawkeye as he tracked the targets and the deck below, and both of his hands moved left, right, backward, and forward as his fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons on his throttle and stick. He read a dozen different readouts on his constantly moving HUD, and he occasionally brought his focus inside the cockpit to give quick glances to his navigational display to see where he and his lead were in relation to the centerline over the strait.

  Sweat poured down the back of his neck and the muscles in his jaw quivered and spasmed from the tension of the moment.

  “Can’t get a bite on him!” Trash announced into his mic.

  “I’m engaged, Magic Two-Two. He’s yours.”

  Cheese had fired a third missile at the inbound fighters, which he had determined to be Russian-built Su-33s. One of the three AMRAAMs hit its target, and Cheese announced, “Splash two.”

  The PLAAF fighter banked left and right, spun upside down, and performed a high reverse-g maneuver that Trash replicated, causing his eyes to bulge and his head to fill with blood.

  He tightened his core muscles, his abs and low back turned to rocks, and he “hooked” over and over.

  He forced himself to lessen his turn angle, helping his body but causing him to lose his position behind the enemy.

  “Don’t lose sight. Don’t lose sight,” he told himself as he tracked the J-10 through white puffy clouds.

  The other pilot kept the bank going, however, and Trash craned his neck all the way behind him, then spun it back to check the mirrors high on the canopy.

  The other jet was getting in behind him for a kill shot. Trash had lost his offensive advantage.

  Not good.

  The Chengdu J-10 pilot did make his way behind Trash and fired a short-range PL-9 missile at his tail, but Trash managed to defeat it with his automatic flare deployment and a seven-point-five-g bank that nearly knocked him out cold.

  He needed his speed, but it was bleeding off on the turn. “Don’t bleed it! Don’t bleed it!” he shouted to himself between grunting through the g-forces.

  The two planes were corkscrewing down through the sky. Seven thousand feet, six thousand, five thousand.

  At just three thousand feet Trash reversed direction quickly, pulled himself into an eight-g turn, and switched to guns.
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br />   The Chinese aircraft did not recognize what happened, and he kept his downward spiral going for critical seconds while Trash prepared to meet him head-on.

  Trash saw the Super 10 at one mile, and he used his rudders to line up for a gun shot. He slammed his feet down, left and right, all the way to the firewall to make the necessary corrections in the very short time he had before the Super 10 passed.

  There. At two thousand feet separation and a closing speed of more than one thousand miles per hour, Trash slammed his right index finger down on the trigger on his stick.

  A long burst of tracers from his Vulcan cannon reached out from the nose of his aircraft. He used the laserlike light to guide him toward the enemy.

  At five hundred feet the Super 10 burst into a fireball. Trash disengaged, pulled up on the stick violently with a hook to avoid an air-to-air collision or an FOD flameout, because foreign-object damage from the explosion could easily get sucked into his plane and destroy one or both engines.

  Once he was clear, he confirmed the kill by going inverted and looking up in the canopy.

  Below him the J-10 was nothing but small pieces of black wreckage and burning, smoking debris, all falling toward the water. The pilot would be dead, but Trash’s elation at having survived trumped any sympathy he could possibly feel in this moment.

  “Splash three,” he said.

  —

  The Super Hornets arrived in time and committed on the three remaining Su-33s attacking from over the centerline, but Magic Flight was not finished. To their south, one of the two Taiwanese Air Force jets under attack by the other pair of J-10s had already disappeared from radar.

  Cheese said, “Magic Two-Two, heading two-four-zero, combat spread. Let’s help out that surviving ROC F-16 before it’s too late.”

  “Roger that.”

  Trash and Cheese raced to the southwest while the Navy Super Hornets chased the Su-33s back over the centerline and back to the Chinese coast.