by Robert Gandt
But this wasn’t a real fight. Fighter pilots didn’t settle personal accounts with forward-quarter radar missiles. By unspoken agreement, this would be an old-fashioned, kickass dogfight, each pilot trying to lock on to the other guy’s tail. Their only high-tech edge was the HUD—Head Up Display—that displayed radar range and a shoot cue and a little image of your inertial path through space.
In this kind of fight, you maneuvered behind your adversary’s tail to get a shot at him. It was that single, gut-squeezing, neck-wrenching skill that distinguished a fighter pilot from a button-pusher. The winner got to fly home with a video shot of the loser’s tailpipe.
Where the hell was the Viper? The two flights—Gates and his squadron skipper, Commander Brick Maxwell, Lebev and his own squadron commander, Colonel Lev Asher—had merged, passing nose-to-nose at a closing speed of over a thousand knots. They went into a high-G reversal, each converting energy into angles to lock on to the other’s six o’clock.
For the moment Gates had lost sight of his leader, a tactical sin for which he knew he’d catch hell from Maxwell. He’d worry about that later. His objective in life at this moment was to nail that snake-eyed little shit, Lebev.
Gates kept the turn in, peering over his shoulder, letting the Super Hornet’s flight control computer maintain its 7.5 G limit. Everyone knew that the Super Hornet couldn’t outrun or out-climb or out-accelerate a Viper. For pure, balls out, eyeball-flattening energy, nothing could touch a big-mouth, GE-engined F-16 Viper. The F-16 could accelerate going straight up, pull over the top, and shoot you in the face on the way back down.
But the Hornet had one thing going for it that made it deadly. It could turn. None of the hot fighters—not the F-14 Tomcat or the MiG-29 or the F-15 or even the F-16—could beat a Hornet in a turning fight. When the other guy was falling out of the sky trying to match your radius, the Hornet would still be there, pivoting, standing on its tail, pirouetting like a Hummingbird.
Of course, that was the tricky part—getting the other guy to play your game. Most U.S. Air Force F-16 pilots had already learned about the Hornet, and they played a different game, using their jet’s raw power to leave the fight, to re-enter with the numbers in their favor. But according to the air intel briefer, the Israeli Air Force didn’t have any real experience fighting Super Hornets. Pearly still didn’t believe that this Israeli jock—
Pearly saw him. Shit. The reason he hadn’t spotted the Viper through the back of the canopy was because the sonofabitch wasn’t there. He was high. Instead of trying to turn with Gates’s Hornet, he was going high, using the vertical plane to cut across the circle.
“Hard deck is ten thousand,” came the voice of Brick Maxwell. “Acknowledge.”
Maxwell was reminding him that the minimum altitude for the exercise was ten thousand feet. They had to knock it off if the engagement descended to the hard deck.
Pearly didn’t acknowledge. Lebev was still out there. Fuck the hard deck. He needed another half minute.
Maxwell called again. “Watch the hard deck. Answer up, Pearly.”
Pearly caught the hard edge in Maxwell’s voice. The skipper wasn’t going to cut him any slack. Gates thumbed his lower mike button. “Roger the hard deck.”
He glanced at the altimeter reading in the HUD—the Head Up Display. Uh oh. Running out of sky. The digital read out was clicking downward through 11,800. He guessed that Lebev was having a similar dialogue with his flight leader, Colonel Asher, on their own discrete frequency. The Israeli squadron commander was even more uptight about Rules Of Engagement than Maxwell.
The Viper was closing in. Damn. Another turn and he’d be in firing position. Maybe the F-16 couldn’t turn with the Hornet, but the sonofabitch could go up and down like a yo-yo.
“Hard deck, Runners,” came Maxwell’s voice. “Knock it off. Runner One-two knock-it-off.”
Saved by the bell, thought Pearly. Maxwell had just given the order to disengage. Pearly saw his digital altimeter clicking through 9,500 feet. At least he’d be spared the humiliation of getting schwacked again by that little prick, Lebev.
But Lebev wasn’t knocking it off. The Viper was still back there. Gates could see the slim, insect-like shape of the F-16 carving inside the turn.
In the kill zone.
Gates’s thumb was on the transmit button to acknowledge the disengage command when he heard Lebev’s voice on the radio.
“Fox Two!”
The call for a heat-seeking missile shot.
<>
Maxwell heard Lebev’s transmission. A second later, peering downward through his Plexiglas canopy, he spotted the two fighters. They were a couple thousand feet below, a few miles to the east, in the direction of the Dead Sea. Against the brown mat of the Negev desert, the two fighters looked like blurry mirages.
Yeah, the Viper definitely had gained the advantage on Gates’s Super Hornet. He was in the Hornet’s rear quarter. Lebev would have had a legitimate simulated kill if he hadn’t violated the hard deck. Now all he’d get out of it would be an ass-reaming from—
What was that? Maxwell squinted against the glare of the afternoon sun. Something down there, behind Gates’s jet. Something glimmering, zigzagging like a bat.
Maxwell felt a chill run through him.
In the next instant, he knew. The tail section of Pearly Gates’s jet erupted in an orange, roiling fireball. The Super Hornet was disintegrating, trailing black smoke and pieces of airframe and engine.
“Eject! Eject!” Maxwell yelled into his microphone, knowing that it was a useless call. If Pearly hadn’t already punched out, he was toast.
What the hell happened? Maxwell shoved the Hornet’s nose down toward the burning fighter. That sonofabitch Lebev fired a real missile. Why?
In his peripheral vision he glimpsed an F-16 off his right wing. It was Asher, still keeping his silence. Maxwell felt a wave of anger sweep over him. He resisted the impulse to tell him to stay the hell out of the way. He and his idiot wingman had done enough damage.
The flaming carcass of Gates’s F/A-18 Super Hornet was plunging toward the desert. Maxwell kept his eyes fixed on the descending debris field. Where was Pearly? Did he have time to grab the ejection lanyard when the missile hit him?
Yes. He saw it, a white puff, just beneath the cloud of swirling smoke and shattered airplane parts. At first glimpse it looked like a fluttering ribbon, then it swelled into the hemispherical shape of a parachute canopy. Beneath the chute dangled the tiny, doll-like figure of the pilot.
Maxwell lost sight of the parachute as he swept past. He hauled the nose of the Super Hornet up high, then back down for another pass. In his peripheral vision he was dimly aware of Asher’s Viper staying with him, high and to the outside of his turn.
Maxwell felt exposed. An Israeli fighter had just shot down one of his Super Hornets. Was he the next target?
“Runner Three and Four,” he called to Asher and Lebev, “set up a RESCAP and call for a rescue helo.” A RESCAP—Rescue Combat Air Patrol—was unnecessary, he reflected. They were over friendly territory.
Or were they? Why did Pearly Gates get shot down? The RESCAP would at least keep Asher and Lebev busy and out of the way.
He kept his eyes on Asher’s Viper. If he was going to take a shot—
“Already done,” answered Asher. “An SAR helicopter is on the way from Hazerim air base. Recommend we orbit above ten thousand.”
“You orbit above ten thousand. I’ll stay down here and cover my wingman.”
Though Maxwell was the official flight leader for the exercise, Asher, a full colonel in the IAF, outranked him. And this was his country.
Tough, decided Maxwell. He wanted the Israelis as far away as possible. Asher could go pound sand.
The joint air combat exercise had begun over the Negev desert, which blanketed the lower third of Israel and extended southward into the Sinai. The swirling dogfight had gradually drifted west.
Maybe too far west, Maxwell though
t. Beneath his left wing he could see the mottled checkerboard of the Gaza Strip. Once a possession of Egypt, Gaza was seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Since then the Strip had become a hotbed of the Palestinian insurgency.
Asher called again. “Runner One-one, are you picking up a locator beacon?”
“Negative. I had it for a few seconds, then it quit. He’s not transmitting on his survival radio.” The locator beacon was a homing device installed in the pilot’s ejection seat. The PRC-112 radio was a handheld device attached to the pilot. Maxwell didn’t expect Pearly to transmit until he was down.
The chute was almost on the ground. Maxwell saw that it was descending into a brush-covered wadi. The bottom of the wadi looked like an old stream bed, obscured by a stand of low scrub trees.
Maxwell lost sight of the chute again as he pulled up for another pass. The burning wreckage of the Super Hornet had already plunged into the desert, a mile away. A column of black smoke marked the impact site. Smaller pieces of debris were still raining into the brown earth.
Again Maxwell wondered what the hell had gone wrong. How did a simple one-vee-one air combat maneuvering exercise turn into a blue-on-blue—friendly versus friendly—shoot down?
He brought the nose of the F/A-18 back around, leveling at a thousand feet over the desert, trying to pick up the parachute. It should be on the ground, Maxwell thought. He peered downward, squinting against the glare. He could see the wadi, the stream bed with the scrub trees, the steep slope where he guessed that Pearly would land.
No chute.
Damn it. He’d flown right over the spot. He was sure of it. He stabbed the position hold button on his navigation display, locking the coordinates of the site in the computer’s memory. He pulled up, reversed course, swept back over the wadi.
Nothing. No parachute canopy on the ground. No Pearly Gates waving that he was okay. Still no signal on the emergency radio frequency.
He hauled the Super Hornet’s nose up and came back for another pass. Nothing. It was as if the desert had swallowed Pearly Gates, leaving not a trace.
Five minutes elapsed. He heard Asher call, “The SAR helo is here, Runner One-one. You can talk to him on guard frequency.”
Maxwell climbed to two thousand feet and entered an orbit to the south of the site. To the northeast he saw the distinctive low-snouted profile of the UH-60 Blackhawk skimming the desert, flanked by a pair of AH-1 Cobra gunships. They were coming from the direction of Beersheva and the Hazerim air base.
“Runner Lead, this is Rescue Four-zero on guard. I’m the Blackhawk at your four o’clock, three miles. Do you have a visual on the downed pilot?”
“Runner One-one, negative. I had a chute, but he’s no longer in sight. Stand by, I’ll give you the coordinates of where he should have landed.”
Maxwell retrieved the position he had frozen in his navigation display and passed it to the Israeli Blackhawk pilot. Five minutes later the Blackhawk was on the ground with the Cobras orbiting around it. Maxwell could see soldiers in battle gear picking their way through the scrub brush.
Another ten minutes passed. Maxwell had nearly reached bingo state—minimum fuel. He’d have to return and land.
The Blackhawk pilot radioed again. “Bad news, Runner One-one.”
“You found the pilot? Is he injured?”
“We don’t know.”
Maxwell felt a flash of irritation. These Israelis and their goddamn games were getting on his nerves. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean we don’t know. He’s not here.”
