'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  The Rafale Ms had an un-obscured view of the oncoming Soviet strike, right up until that point; there were a few Gallic grumbles as they switched from Mica, medium range radar guided missiles to their DEFA 791B 30-mm cannons for the first head-on pass. At their current closing speed, they risked damage to their own airframes from flying debris if they fired their Magic IIs at their maximum range of 7km.

  Forty French advanced strike fighters were about to engage over one hundred enemy aircraft a mere 157 miles from the maximum launch range of the enemy’s anti-ship missiles.

  The Russian S37s were not in the same restricted position as the Rafale Ms they carried the Vympel R-73E, known by its NATO code name as the AA-11 Archer. Its front and rear control fins are augmented with a thrust-vectoring system that deflects hot gases from the rocket motor, greatly enhancing turning performance and if that weren’t enough, it also outranged the AIM-9L Sidewinder and the Magic II by almost 30km.

  Rafale Ms found themselves locked-up and broke lock by jinking violently into the vertical and discharging flares, the Russian pilots did not attempt to re-establish lock; they merely locked up another Frenchman.

  Capitaine de Aéronavale Allaine Armand, the Charles De Gaulle’s CAG, leading Escadrille 24 immediately behind the leading squadron, Escadrille 15, barked at his pilots to hold their course and go to zone three afterburners even as his own threat receiver screeched in alarm. The increased thermal output in the Rafales' wakes, flares plus acceleration beat some of the AA-11 missiles that were loosed at them. Two of the advanced single seat carrier aircraft disintegrated in balls of fire and wreckage, a third lost its starboard engine but held its course, it failed however to beat the next Archer sent its way moments later.

  The seven survivors of Escadrille 24 loosed 30mm cannon fire at the Flogger Js before breaking, Allain Armand thumbed a half second burst into the Flogger heading straight for him, its own cannon firing back at him, before kicking his left rudder and rolling inverted. A mere six feet of air separated the two aircraft as they passed and shards of shattered cockpit canopy bounced off the Rafale’s fuselage. Armand had no opportunity to watch the Flogger nose over with a dead pilot at the controls, he was pulling five Gs in a hard, diving turn to the left in an attempt to engage a regiment of Backfires, their wings fully swept back, streaking west at wave top level.

  He got tone at maximum range and pickled off two Magic II missiles before breaking high right, to break another missile lock on his Rafale.

  Escadrille 24 and the S37s were now embroiled in a fur ball as the bulk of the Soviet strike raced by, and as advanced as they were, the French aircraft were outclassed in this dog fight.

  The as yet un-engaged Rafale squadrons, Escadrilles 17 and 23, dived after the low-level Backfire regiments, leaving the disarrayed Escadrille 15 to get its act together PDQ, and take on the high level Floggers in a tail chase.

  Two pairs of Spanish AV-8B Harriers remained on top CAP above the task force whilst the remainder from the Principe de Asturias and the British, Fleet Air Arm Sea Harriers from the French helicopter carrier Jeanne d'Arc, went east.

  Aboard the Charles De Gaulle, Contra Admiral Bernard, the rear admiral commanding the task force, was fairly confident that the enemy had no precise fix on his ships. From the reports coming from his aircraft, the enemy had divided into two forces that were flying divergent courses at the time of interception, which he correctly assumed as meaning that they intended to divide up the hunting ground. He surmised that in the enemy game plan whoever came across the task force would send the co-ordinates to the other strike force, however, in reality the other force would know where they were the instant that the Hawkeyes stopped radiating and the ships went active in order to engage. Unfortunately for NATO they had to make things much easier for the Soviets than that, the Harrier force, both AV-8B and Sea Harrier FA2, were not supersonic and relied on their AMRAAMs to take out a faster enemy. The jamming prevented the radar guided AMRAAMs from acquiring the enemy so all Admiral Bernard could do was wait until the last possible moment before ordering the Hawkeyes to cease and desist. The ships would stay on standby and rely on the data-link feed from the AWAC to tell them what was going on and control the ships' air-defence systems, with fingers crossed that the aerial platforms were not downed or driven away.

  His Super Etendard strike and the four Rafales that had ambushed the S37s earlier were now entering the pattern and would be turned around and sent off again, refuelled, and rearmed for air to air combat.

  The Backfires called for help to get the Rafales off their backs and half of the Flogger Js in each regiment dumped their C-601 anti-ship missiles and went after the Frenchmen. The leading Rafales launched on the Backfires before going defensive, the Rafale M had a maximum speed of 2125kph and the Backfire 2300kph, and it was a race the French would lose. The Floggers were outmatched but they tied up the Rafales and allowed those still carrying anti-ship ordnance to leak through.

  RAF Kinloss, Scotland: Same time.

  Pc Stokes sat outside the office that had been borrowed by Scott Tafler for the day. There was a tension in the air, increased by the last minute hold put on the mission, as the KC-135 tankers that were to be staged out of Andøya had been moved back to Kinloss, because of anticipated enemy activity of some kind over northern Norway, at least which was what Stokes had heard.

  The shouting from behind the office door had ceased about three minutes before and although Stokes was not privy to anything concerning the operational detail or objective, he knew from the shouting that Major Bedonavich was no longer going.

  Constantine stood at the window, looking out across the airfield but not looking at anything. His hands were thrust into his trouser pockets and he had his back turned to Scott, who sat with a fax message before him.

  “If you have quite done with the histrionics Major, I will explain the reason why you are no longer part of this operation…and why you may well have compromised operational security.”

  Constantine turned with a glare. “What rubbish are you talking Scott?”

  “The military attaché in Switzerland, Pyotr Cezechenko, was a classmate in the academy, was he not?”

  “Pyotr and I are good friends, he was the best man at my wedding and he saved my life once, in Chechnya.”

  “You telephoned him at his home in Geneva, from a payphone in Edinburgh…please do not deny it, Swiss intelligence sent us a tape to ID a voice, it was yours.”

  “Well then, if you heard the tape then you know what the conversation was.” Constantine sat on a grey painted, stackable tubular steel chair with brown plastic seat and backrest.

  “Pyotr agreed with me that this war is insanity, which we in the military have to do something to stop.”

  “Have you ever seen an encrypted Russian military message text, Con?” Scott enquired. “Of course you have,” he said, and tossed across a sheaf of papers.

  “The Swiss passed on the phone intercept and a batch of other stuff, a real flurry of encrypted traffic between the embassy and Moscow that day. It took a while for it to filter along to me.”

  Constantine picked them up and looked at the top page.

  “The first four biagrams identify the encryption settings,” Scott explained. “And the first triagram is the address group…in this case, LZV.”

  “It is the premier's personal address group.” Constantine muttered.

  “The second triagram identifies the sender, JHU…I am sure you recognise it too?” But Constantine said nothing; he kept his eyes on the page in front of him.

  “On the second line you will see another triagram…it recurs another four more times throughout the message.” Constantine was still silent. “FDW, that’s your identifier isn’t it Con?”

  “I told Pyotr that Svetlana was killed by the gunmen in the helicopter…what does the rest of the message say?”

  Scott reached across and retrieved the message from Constantine, returning it to the file.

  “I have no i
dea whatsoever, but as it was sent just forty minutes after you put the phone down in Edinburgh, I would say Pyotr made damn good time through the traffic to his office in order to send it. It mentions you five times Major so work it out for yourself. You told him you would be back in Moscow soon…worse still, you confirmed that you were still alive, and that Major, is why I scrubbed you.”

  “Svetlana will not be safe over there without me.” Constantine told him.

  “Yeah right, a whole militia with your picture and your lousy sense of judgement as regards the human character.”

  Constantine’s nostrils flared.

  “That is unfair of you Scott… a cheap shot, as you would say!”

  “Well forgive-the-shit-out-of-me Major…but you did not just endanger your own and Svetlana’s lives, one hell of a lot of other men and women are in this!”

  “I already told you Scott…they think she is dead!”

  “Oh, grow up, for Christ’s sake!” Scott shouted. “When they took you, and that’s when, not if…how long would it be before you gave her up to them…and the Nighthawk mission…the ancillary personnel…. one day, two…”

  “I would never betray her…or them!” Both men were on their feet, facing one another across the desk.

  “Never Con, never…your people wrote the book on interrogation. As brave and well-meaning as you are, you would tell them…you couldn’t help yourself.”

  Constantine rose slowly his chair, all argument having left him and went back to stand before the window.

  254 miles NNE of the North Cape Task Force: Same time

  Sub Lieutenant Hawkins fought back the nausea he felt welling up as his lead, Lt Allenby came up on the air “Contact, contact, five Backfires, ten miles, three o’clock low!” He could feel the sweat break out on his forehead as he twisted around to look at the five dots 10,000’ below, he didn’t know how his leader had spotted them and he definitely wished he had not, but there they were. The contact report was repeated to the ships and he found himself praying that the Hawkeyes would keep on pumping out the interference, so they would not be able to engage.

  “Standby to go active Two, the E2s are shutting off the noise… …we’ll engage from port quarter with Sidewinders and then switch to Slammers before they get out of range…snap right and low yo-yo, with me…. Standby, standby…go!”

  In the few seconds that had elapsed from when they had first sighted them, the Russian bombers had closed considerably. The Sea Harriers rolled almost inverted at the start of their dive; radars still on standby and dropped toward the faster Russian aircraft.

  As the seeker heads on the AIM-9 Sidewinders detected the engine exhausts of the Backfires, their warning growls sounded in Hawkins’ headset and he found to his surprise that his fear was giving way to excitement.

  The Fleet Air Arm aircraft bottomed out of the dive and pickled off two Sidewinders apiece on the up-rise, Allenby’s at the aircraft in the centre of the formation, and Hawkins at the bomber at the extreme right.

  Fortune favours the brave, the Hawkeyes ceased their interference at that moment, as the Bomber formation broke, their threat receivers already alerting them to the closing IR missiles and they pumped flares out of their wingtip dispensers.

  Allenby switched his radar to active and immediately got tone on the centre Backfire, unaware that the crew had temporarily blacked out in performing the vertical jink that defeated both Sidewinders. The Backfire’s automated defence system registered the AMRAAMs lock-on and the launch, dutifully punching out chaff bundles. It is not sufficient to merely distract a smart missile, the trick is not to be there anymore once it has wised up to the ruse, and that involves pilot type stuff. Allenby loosed off one AIM-120L at the lead Backfire before stamping hard on his left rudder pedal to lock up another.

  The first Slammer took all of 100th of a second to analyse the various velocities of the chaff clouds and ignore them, locking on once more to the fast moving target heading up in a 70’ climb with little deviation in course. The Backfires weapons officer, the youngest aboard, started to recover first and his brain recognised the screeching alarm just as the AMRAAM detonated four feet from the juncture of starboard wing and fuselage. The crew would owe their lives to the weapons officer’s youth; he was alert enough to activate the communal ejection system.

  Hawkins’ first Sidewinder was decoyed by a flare but the second stayed with his target through its 6 gee turn to starboard, flying up the port engine intake and exploding the bomber.

  Cheering aloud to himself he rolled left and was amazed to see the three survivors already diminishing in size, but he locked up two of them with AMRAAMs and sent a 335lb missile after each of them. The air-intercept missiles accelerated to Mach 4 and ate up the distance between shooter and target.

  Like a punter at a race track Hawkins urged them on down the final straight, cheering louder as his second kill fell toward the sea in flames, and booing as the other Backfire merely trailed a thick black streamer of smoke behind it. Hawkins revelry was cut short by his lead’s shout of

  “Break left Tommy!”

  Training took over and Hawkins automatically altered the angle of vectored thrust with his left hand, whilst turning the aircraft hard left with his right. The airframe shuddered as a cannon shell passed through the tail plane without exploding, and shook again with the turbulence of a Flogger overshooting, taken by surprise by the drastic manoeuvre.

  The odds against the two Brits was three to one and they were not fighting as a unit, not covering one another, having split up whilst trying to account for as many of the bombers as they could.

  Admiral Bernard watched the air threat get closer to the area of ocean his ships occupied, and the digital symbols representing his aircraft diminish in number. A large screen covered the after bulkhead in CIC, aboard the French aircraft carrier. In just over fifteen minutes his own carrier’s inventory of combat aircraft had been reduced by over 30%, thirteen of his Rafale M advanced strike fighters had fallen, along with three British and Spanish Harriers, but accounting for thirty-three of the enemy thus far.

  The two tracks of the S37s that had survived showed that they were heading southeast, presumably back to the barn to refuel and rearm thought Bernard, however neither Golden Eagle would ever take to the air again, they had taken too much damage.

  As he continued to watch, oblivious to the activity going on around him in CIC, he noticed two RN Sea Harriers disappear from the screen and the four Floggers that remained after that fight steer directly for his AWAC and JSTARS cover, which in turn moved away.

  "Putain de merde!" he shouted at the screen before turning to his English speaking communications officer.

  “Get them back on station, we need them!” His own E-2C Hawkeyes were not equipped with the advanced command and control suite that US Hawkeyes were blessed with, and if the E-3 Sentry left then his ships would have to reveal themselves in order to provide air defence.

  The Floggers launched anti-radiation missiles at extreme range and both the large aircraft switched their systems to standby, diving toward the sea and leaving their F-16 bodyguards to deal with the Russians. Bernard howled at the now blank wall screen,

  "Merde a la puissance treize!" His senior aides rolled their eyes and exchanged looks, whenever their admiral used the term ‘shit to the thirteenth power’ he was seriously pissed off.

  “Warn all friendly aircraft not to approach within seventy kilometres of the outside pickets…all ships go active, Now!…weapons free with the exception of ships to the southwest, get the Etendards and Rafales now on deck, back in the air and departing to the southwest, then close that corridor. I want a 360’ free fire zone established for the ships in ten minutes time, so get the flight deck monkeys moving….Now!”

  Smoke rose in a tall column above the coastal town of Bodø and citizens joined with the fire brigade to help rescue patients from the Nordland Central Hospital.

  First established in 1796, the oldest hospital in S
candinavia had been struck dead centre by a Flogger J fighter-bomber after its crew ejected from the crippled aircraft. Had it not already dropped its bomb load then the situation would have been even worse. High-octane aviation fuel fed the fire and exploding 23mm cannon ammunition cooking off in the flames made the fire fighters’ job even more hazardous.

  RAF Hawks provided top cover whilst the Norwegian and Danish F-16s recovered to the single undamaged runway.

  As a serious attempt to put the Norwegians out of the air force business, it had been a failure, as a diversion to prevent their reinforcing the blocking North Cape Task Force it had succeeded.

  A quarter of the attackers had been destroyed and only Banak was out of commission, but the defenders now had to reconstitute before continuing combat operations. It would take an hour to turn around the undamaged airframes and get them heading north, but the issue up there would be decided in a third of that time.

  Principe de Asturias, Charles De Gaulle and the Jeanne d'Arc occupied the centre of the task force whilst the outer rings comprised the escorts for what were in effect three carrier groups plus three Polish warships.

  The air defence destroyers Duquesne from France, and Spain's Almirante Juan de Borbon flanked the carriers. Seventeen frigates and corvettes provided two further layers of defence. Only two of the ships present were pure ASW configurations with no air defence missile capabilities, the ex-Perry class frigates General K. Pulaski and Naczelnik Tadeusz Kosciuszko, both under Polish colours, sat inside the picket lines.

  Aboard the remaining picket ships the lessons learnt from the USS John F Kennedy encounters with mass aircraft/missile swamping tactics had been heeded. The air defence capable hulls not only had full magazines; they had storerooms and cabins within easy reach of their weapon mountings, and these spaces were crammed with reloads for the SAM launchers. Contra Admiral Bernard was determined he was not going to lose hulls simply because they ran out of ammunition, as had happened on the other side of the world.