Top Gun

by T. E. Cruise

  Greene’s Sun-Wolf was armed with a 20MM cannon mounted in the right wing root, a pair of Sparrow medium-range, radar-guided AAMs nestled under the fuselage chin, and a quartet of short-range, heat-seeking Sidewinders riding the outerwing pylons.

  “Lonestar. Your bogies are still coming at you head-on. “Estimate intercept in…” There was a pause. “… one minute.”

  “Roger, Mother Hen,” Greene muttered. He glanced at his rectangular, glowing green radar display mounted high on the Sun-Wolf’s instrument panel, to the left of the Heads Up Display control board. “I’ve got them on my scope now. Three bogies, flying low but climbing. You copy?”

  “Affirmative, Lonestar. Time to slip a round under the hammer.”

  “Arming weapons systems,” Greene replied, flipping the toggle switch in the upper right-hand corner of the armament control panel. “Master arm on.” He set his HUD display to short-range AA missile mode. HUD superimposed on his windshield a bright-green computer-generated graphic that displayed vital information—airspeed, altitude, flight-path ladder, etcetera—and aided in target acquisition.

  “Lonestar, we’ve got those bogies coming at you now from less than twenty miles! Do you read?”

  “Roger, Mother Hen,” Greene drawled absently, his attention focused on the HUD view through his canopy, although he also regularly scanned the Sun-Wolf’s thirty-four dials and eighty-five control inputs. The F-12’s control panel was ghost gray with matte-black insets. The dials and controls themselves were white on black, here and there interspersed with garish yellow-and-black bumblebee-striped emergency controls. There were still more batteries of switches, buttons, and knobs bristling the control consoles on both sides of Greene’s tan and gray chair.

  “Lonestar, you are cleared to lock on and use your medium-range Sparrows!”

  “Negative.”

  Mother Hen sounded appalled. “But the book says your only chance in a situation like this is to score a couple of long-range kills, before the Fishbeds are close enough to use their Atolls!”

  “Negative,” Greene repeated. “The book don’t fly war-birds. People do.”

  “But the computer gives you only a thirty-three-percent probability of survival in a knife fight—”

  “A one out of three chance is better than the alternative,” Greene lightly responded. “You know as well as I do that a SARH utilization would be suicidal in a situation like this.”

  The medium-range Sparrow AA missile used a Semi-Active Radar Homing system that required the fighter pilot to continually illuminate the target with his nose radar during the missile’s duration of flight. This was realistic in a one-on-one confrontation when the pilot could lock onto his adversary’s tail, but self-defeating when flying head-on at multiple targets. “Mother Hen, you know that to guide home a SARH I’ve got to keep flying straight at those bogies. By the time the Sparrow hits, I’ll be close enough for the bogies to let loose with their heat-seeking Atolls. I’ll score a kill, but so will they, on me.”

  “Goddammit, Lonestar! You’re diverging from the program!”

  Greene smiled. “Hey, Mama Bird, this is war, ain’t it? There’s no rules in war. Just like Sinatra, I’ve got to do it my way.”

  “Lonestar—”

  Greene mashed his radio transmit button. “No more time to chat, cowboy. I’ve got tallyho.”

  The three MiG-21s were almost invisible specks in the sky arranged at one-, twelve-, and eleven-o’clock level. Greene knew his F-12, which dwarfed the MiGs, probably looked as big as a locomotive barreling at them. That was too bad: in a dogfight, small was beautiful. As Greene closed, he saw the MiGs execute a three-way defensive split, their tail pipes glowing as they went to afterburn. The MiGs were trying to surround him in the hope that one of them could lock onto his tail pipes and let loose a heat-seeker.

  Greene smiled. Small may be beautiful, but speed was king, and visibility was everything! The F-12 had almost twice the speed of the Fishbed, and its teardrop canopy had excellent rearward sightlines. The MiG-21s were notorious for their lack of view astern.

  Also, when the MiGs decided to dogfight instead of maintaining their three-on-one, head-butt game of chicken, the bogies handed Greene a tactical advantage. Greene could snap off his shots, because he had a sky full of targets. The MiGs would have to be careful—a heat-seeker will drill any tail pipe—lest they shoot down their own comrades. Greene would keep his speed high, using his warbird to execute slashing attacks, like an eagle plucking pigeons one by one out of the sky.

  Greene cobbed his own throttles, going to afterburn, watching the world leap toward him as the Sun-Wolf’s twin turbojets spat fire thanks to the rings of nozzles that sprayed fuel into the engines’ already superheated exhaust gases. The extra fuel, igniting, added thrust.

  The horizon in front of Greene tilted crazily as he used the Sun-Wolf s superior speed to run a wide half-circle around the MiGs. Greene prepared a Sidewinder as he rolled in behind and on top of one of the enemy planes. He was a little over two miles away when he lined up the fly-size speck of MiG in his HUD display. He waited until he heard the warbling tone that told him his target was acquired, and then fired off the heat-seeker. The Sidewinder dropped down from the Sun-Wolfs wing pylon and then sprinted forward on its thrashing tail of fire. Greene watched the Sidewinder dwindle in size until it was only a glowing speck chasing after the distant MiG.

  Any time now, Greene thought.

  “Bingo!” he cried out as the enemy warbird erupted into an orange fireball. The Sidewinder had found the MiG’s tail pipe. “Mother Hen, I’ve got a kill—”

  Greene paused abruptly, realizing that in his excitement he had committed a cardinal error: The beauty of the Sidewinder was that it was a “set it and forget it” type weapon; once it launched, it guided itself to its prey. But Greene had been so engrossed in waiting and watching for his kill that he had neglected to keep his eye on the other two MiGs—

  Which were now coming around on his tail. He could expect a heat-seeker up his ass at any moment. Wouldn’t that be cause for a bad day….

  Greene threw his F-12 into a gut-wrenching break to starboard, a hard turn in the direction of the attack intended to generate maxium angle-off to spoil the enemies’ aim. As long as Greene could stay on the outer boundaries of the lead MiG’s missile-launching envelope, he felt reasonably confident he could rely on the Sun-Wolf’s superior defensive capabilities to get him out of a jam.

  Greene resumed his radio transmission to ground control. “Mother Hen, I’ve got a kill.”

  “Roger, Lonestar,” Buzz replied. “Congrats, but what’s your situation?”

  “Two bandits on my tail,” Greene murmured, jinking the F-12 for all she was worth to try and throw off his pursuers. It wasn’t working. In order to line up his first kill, Greene had let his speed drop off. That was another bad mistake, which made two in a row. If he managed to get out of this with his skin intact, he would have his airplane’s superior performance to thank for it.

  But even a dream machine like the Sun-Wolf answered to the laws of physics. The Sun-Wolf had more brute power than the MiGs, but it took a while for that power to translate into sufficient energy to get the big airplane moving. Meanwhile, at medium speeds, the nimble little Russian fighters were more agile. Initially Greene had been an eagle preying on pigeons, but now he was a bull being tormented by a pair of hounds. There was no way the Sun-Wolf was going to outdance the MiGs in a close-in knife fight.

  “So the hell with it,” Greene murmured. He quit jinking, went to full ’burn, and climbed, subjecting his bird’s structural frame to maximum G-stress in order to gain altitude. His pursuers dropped back, but Greene knew that he was now perched dead-solid perfect within the lead Fishbed’s missile envelope.

  At 40,000 feet, with his fighter’s nose pointed toward the sky, Greene looked back in time to see the lead MiG fire off an Atoll heat-seeker. Greene thanked the Lord that his Sun-Wolf carried state-of-the-art countermeasure gear
as he waited for the Atoll to sufficiently close, and then fired off an IRCM infared countermeasure flare. The 40MM expendable was propelled away from the chaff/flare/jammer dispenser mounted on the Sun-Wolf’s stern, between her two afterburner nozzles. The IRCM ignited, burning bright, creating a heat source stronger than that of the aircraft for about three seconds. Greene, meanwhile, put the Sun-Wolf into a spiral dive.

  And prayed.

  The ploy worked! The Atoll shifted its lock-on to the flare, chasing it instead of the Sun-Wolf as Greene continued his steep, turning dive. The MiGs, meanwhile, followed his spiral. Greene waited until he was sure his pursuers had committed themselves to the chase, and then eased off on his throttles. As he’d hoped, the MiG drivers realized too late what he was up to and overshot him, coming around past and above him. The horizon whirled like a pinwheel as Greene executed a hard rolling reversal and pull-up, putting him behind and beneath his attackers at a range of less than a mile. The MiGs were flying in staggered lead and wing positions. Greene pushed the Sun-Wolf for all she was worth, further closing the gap. Greene was close enough to see the blood-red, white-outlined five-pointed stars on the MiGs’ dirty-gray aluminum wings and rear quarter fuselages when he locked onto the closest bogey and fired off a Sidewinder.

  The heat-seeker dropped away from the Sun-Wolf’s wing and then arced up on its cone of exhaust, flying a beeline toward the MiG’s tail pipe. At this point-blank range, there was no time for the Russian pilot to execute evasive maneuvers, and the Fishbed-J—the Soviets’ plain-vanilla version of a fighter—didn’t carry a flare dispenser. The Sidewinder found the MiG and blew it away. What remained of the tarnished silver airplane went cartwheeling across the blue sky trailing thick, black smoke, throwing off bits of flaming wreckage.

  “Mother Hen, Lonestar,” Greene radioed. “I’ve got kill number two.”

  He eyed the last MiG, which had broken off the engagement and was hightailing it out of the sector. Greene knew he could chase it with a medium-range, radar-guided Sparrow, but that would have been about as viscerally satisfying as mailing an enemy a letter bomb. So much of air combat today was accomplished by fucking remote control, when your enemy was nothing more than a blip on your radar screen, or a fucking black-and-white picture on a five-inch television set mounted on your instrument panel.

  That was the way of the world, Greene guessed. He certainly realized there was nothing he could do about it, but when he had a choice he would opt for the close-in kill. He was one sky warrior who happened to believe that there was no point in spilling another’s blood unless you could smell it, unless you could feel the heat.

  Greene again went to afterburn. The MiG had no chance in an out-and-out horse race with the Sun-Wolf: the enemy plane loomed in Greene’s windshield HUD display like a bird caught in a camera’s telescopic zoom lens.

  Greene throttled back so as not to overshoot the MiG as he entered into a gentle turn. He was now about 2,000 feet astern of his prey. He’d already shifted his HUD display to gun air-air mode, and armed his M61 cannon. The vertical-scale airspeed indicator on the left side of the HUD display told Greene his present speed: 525 knots. The readout just above the indicator scale told Greene he was pulling 1.5G. The HUD’s right-side altitude vertical scale read 22,235 feet. The computer-generated round aiming reticle in the center of the display indicated that he was closing on his target.

  The MiG tried to use its superior radius of turn to break away, but the Sun-Wolf’s superior speed translated to a superior rate of turn: the Sun-Wolf wasn’t as nimble, but a tight turn wasn’t essential just now because there was nobody chasing Greene, and because there was plenty of sky. The Sun-Wolf could cover a larger section of sky while making its wider turn faster than the MiG could cover a smaller section of sky while making its tight turn. This allowed Greene to hold his position relative to the MiG: the Sun-Wolf’s nose stayed angled at the enemy.

  Greene, peering through the HUD display, boxed the MiG in the small green square just to the right of the aiming reticle, letting his lead computing optical sight radar-track the MiG. Once he had the HUD’s round pipper corralling the MiG, he squeezed the gun trigger on his control stick. The M61 snarled like a buzz saw, its six revolving barrels spitting 20MM rounds at the rate of 100 per second. The orange tracers raised sparks off the MiG, which began jinking in agony as Greene stayed locked on his quarry. The Sun-Wolf’s gun magazine held 900 rounds, which translated into nine seconds of firing time. The ammo remaining was indicated by the fast-dwindling counter display in the lower left-hand corner of the HUD as Greene walked his rounds up the MiG’s spine, hosing the canopy, obilterating it in smoking shards of twinkling Plexiglass.

  The MiG dropped away, spinning out of control. Greene followed it down, watching as it plummeted to earth, exploding in a brilliant flash as it crashed into a pale-green pasture.

  “Mother Hen, this is Lonestar.” Greene put his Sun-Wolf into an exuberant victory roll across the cloud-rippled azure sky. “I’ve got kill number three, and have made the world safe for democracy….”

  “Congrats, Lonestar,” Buzz Blaisdale radioed. “Look beneath you and you’ll see a grateful, freedom-loving European populus launching fireworks in your honor.”

  Greene banked his wings in order to view the ground, laughing in delight as beneath him a bright and colorful display of pinwheel fireworks formed a carpet in the sky.

  “Is this your doing. Mother Hen?”

  “Roger, Lonestar.”

  “Don’t suppose you could conjure up a pretty li’l angel to give me a blow—”

  “Negative!” Buzz quickly cut in.

  Greene chuckled. “Well, you could at least telephone President Nixon and tell him for me that while I can’t help him out concerning that John Dean character, the Prez can at least rest easy on one point: the hammer and sickle will not—I repeat—will not be flying over Disneyland.”

  “I’m sure the President would have been glad to hear that,” Buzz Blaisdale said dryly. “Assuming, of course, that those three kills you just scored had been real—”

  The transmission ended, and the ever-present radio hiss vanished from Greene’s headphones as all around him the earth, sky, fireworks—the world—flickered like a faulty light bulb. Then the world went dark.

  “Well, get me out of here,” Greene muttered impatiently as the Sun-Wolf’s instrument panel next blinked out, and he was left in total pitch-black oblivion. Greene heard the hiss of pressure valves adjusting, and then the whine of hydraulic lifters kicking in. Greene unbuckled his oxygen mask and removed his helmet as the top half of the clamlike mechanism rose, revealing that all this time Greene had been sitting in the middle of a large, windowless, fluorescent-lit room surrounded by Air Force technicians wearing white lab coats and manning electronic gear. There were keyboard consoles equipped with various scopes and screens; a large glass operations board; lots of blinking lights, and endless rows of computers looking like refrigerator-size reel-to-reel tape recorders. Thick cables linked all this chirping, clattering, whirring gear to the big, matte-black, clamlike gizmo in which Greene was sitting in his mock-up of a Sun-wolf cockpit.

  This room was the core of the Flight Simulation Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio.

  Greene unlatched the phony cockpit’s canopy and pushed it up on its hinges. He unstrapped himself from his chair, hoisted himself up and out of the bottom half of the simulator. Buzz Blaisdale, wearing brown flight overalls, was seated at the nearby radio transmission console that served as ground control during the simulations.

  “Well, you had quite a ride,” Buzz remarked, smiling. He was in his mid-twenties, with wavy dark hair and light-brown eyes. “I don’t think anyone has ever beat the machine three against one before,” Buzz added.

  “It’s this machine that inspired me to do it,” Greene replied, shaking his head. “I just can’t get over this toy.”

  The Simulation Generator System-360 was the latest state-of-the-
art result of the Air Force’s ongoing effort to supply its fighter pilots with the opportunity to hone their air-combat skills and still live to profit by their mistakes. When a pilot climbed into that big black clamshell and settled into the cockpit, he “flew” against the computers, which could be programmed to present him with any number and variation of Warsaw Pact aircraft. The enemy aircraft behaved within the parameters of their individual specs as if they were being flown by real enemy pilots, because the bogies’ attack and defense ploys were drawn from the accumulated data on Red air tactics during the Korean and Vietnam wars, and on the intelligence evaluations garnered from electronic snooping of present-day Warsaw Pact air exercises.

  “The more I fly the SGS-360, the better it seems to get,” Greene continued. “The only thing missing is physical G-stress on the pilot. Other than that, it’s as good as being there. There’s little discernible lag time to the display, and the perspective and background detail is just incredible. I swear I could have almost counted the rivets in those MiGs.”

  “The SGS-360 is getting better,” one of the nearby computer technicians offered. “We’re constantly adding to the data banks. Pretty soon we expect to have the system configured to simulate dusk and night as well as day, and to operate in the air-to-ground weapons-delivery mode in addition to just air combat.”

  Greene said, “I’m waiting on the twin-tub version, when one real-life pilot will be able to fly against another.” He winked at Buzz. “That’s when I wax your ass once and for all.”

  “Tough talk from a guy almost took it up the tail pipe from a Fishbed,” Buzz pointed out.

  Greene blushed, thinking that Buzz was absolutely right. “Ah, I had him just where I wanted him,” he joked, a trifle lamely.

  “That reminds me,” the technician scowled. “You almost blew the circuits when you put the Sun-Wolf into that spiral dive.”