LITMIR.BIZ

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since got his confidence back after the double bolter, and four months of flying had made his decisions crisper. He was busy just then, but this was what he was trained for, no bullshit, just flying. “Masks on. Spy, get that fucking computer up and tell me what’s happening. Chaff and flare are armed.”

      Alan reached up and fired a chaff/flare sequence. The numbers counted down; three chaff, two flares down, plenty to go. “Chaff/flare checks good, Senior’s got a reinit.” Alan’s fingers flew. He input the vital data—targets and known SAM sites—while Senior struggled to restore the datalink. Alan had to reinput his hotlist of radar contacts. When he hit the input button he saw that Senior had the datalink back up—and the news was bad.

      Senior Chief Craw was drawling into the headset, “One bandit southeast nineteen NM and heading right at us. About 540 knots.”

      “Spy! What is it? MiG-29?”

      If it is we’re dead, he thought. Where the hell is our CAP? We had an F-14 out here ten minutes ago; his wingman had a hydraulics failure, but—

      Alan found their missing CAP just as Narc did. “Fucking REO!” Narc shouted. Their protection had done his job and made a run at the intruder, but a nervous NFO and an inexperienced pilot had ended in a missed intercept and a bad shot. Narc had their Fighter Common on his comm and was trying to get the Tomcat back.

      The intruder continued to bear down on them.

      Why didn’t he turn and engage the Tomcat? He didn’t even seem to know that the fighter was there. Alan looked at his datalink and got a radar cut that ran like a sword through the unid box. The cut was rare; in effect, it was unknown, not present in the laundry list of radars and attached planes flown by threat countries. His head, however, unlike the datalink, was stuffed with such unconsidered trifles: he knew what it was.

      “Chinese-built A-5 Fantan! Two Atoll AA missiles, shitty little radar. Rafe, get below eight hundred feet and he can’t get a tone with his birds.”

      Rafe liked knowledge. He also liked certainty, and Alan sounded absolutely certain. And it was better than nice that it was a third-world pilot in a first-generation piece of shit chasing him, not some Russian mere in a MiG-29—an F-18 in drag—looking for a score.

      “Okay, got it, we’re going through two thousand and I’d really like to know his stall speed and has he got a gun?”

      Alan had his kneeboard packet open and the A-5 card was glaring at him, printed for some reason on fluorescent orange card stock. “Two 20-millimeters. 165 knots clean. Worse for this guy, he’s got to have a drop.”

      He looked at the screen; Christ he’s close, Alan thought, and all hell broke loose.

      “Chaff flare!” shouted Narc, and he fired the sequence himself from the front. Narc’s RAW gear showed a launch somewhere behind him. Alan leaned forward against the power of the dive and tried to read their altitude. “Below 1000!” he said, and Rafe pulled hard to the right, worse than the hardest break Alan had ever seen, and moonlit sea reached up hungrily toward the Senior’s porthole to pull Christine down. The altimeter was now at two hundred feet: Christine did not believe in registering lower altitudes. Alan forced his arm up against the G force and put the chaff on automatic. He suddenly didn’t trust all the data ingested at intel school. Had anybody ever actually fought an A-5? Fuck, what if all the intelligence was bullshit? Wasn’t that the point Peretz had tried to make to him?

      Rafe rolled the plane 180 degrees and started a more comfortable turn. A flash went by Alan’s porthole. “Missiles timed out,” Alan said, mostly sure that he was right. Craw was shouting on Strike Common, but nobody was going to save them; they were too far from the strike package and too far from the ship. In five minutes, every Tomcat and Hornet in naval aviation would be crisscrossing this airspace in search of air medals, but five minutes is an age in aerial combat and this was now.

      “He’s on top of us,” Alan said.

      Christine bucked savagely. He felt a slap at his left elbow, and a star-edged hole appeared in the windscreen.

      They knew Christine had been hit by the 20-millimeter. They felt the rounds go into her and waited for disaster; at two hundred feet, any glitch and they were dead.

      Rafe tightened his turn and dumped more speed. Christine was such a peculiar bird, he muttered, that he swore she flew better with the damage. “Nice shooting, Tex,” Rafe murmured, and he eased off on the speed again and Christine was almost standing still in the air.

      The last chaff pod emptied with a clunk. Another round hit Christine’s wing and she started to leak fuel and pull to the right. The airspeed indicator registered 165. Rafe tilted the wings savagely and suddenly tightened his turn. His crew could not see the death’s-head grin that clutched his face, an expression of vengeance and anguished hope and a desperate anxiety that came from seeing the whitecaps, not so much below his window as next to it. He was muttering a fat-grape pilot’s prayer: Follow me, you mother, follow me, down and around and down and—

      A brief, violent flare lit the rearview mirror.

      The silence of the cockpit seemed so profound to Alan that the whistle of air through the hole in the canopy was somehow outside it. He saw Christine’s interior with unearthly clarity—Craw’s silhouette, the screens, the gleam of his thermos.

      Then he knew they had levelled off and were starting to climb.

      The radar cuts from the A-5’s gun were gone.

      Abruptly, Rafe punched his fist into the air over his head and gave a whoop. “Gotcha!”

      Then, calmly, into the mike, he drawled, “Guardian, this is Gatoraid 2, splash one bandit, over,” and he laughed. And laughed. “We got him. I mean, we fucking got him!” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

      Later, when he would tell this story to explain his Air Medal, he would lay his hand flat on the table and he would say, “You want to know how low I was? I was so low—I was so low that they had to scrape barnacles off Christine at the next maintenance check.” And he would pause, and smile, and a little of this same delighted laughter would burble out. “And you wanta know how low that A-5 Fantan was? On the bottom, ba-bee!”

      “That was beautiful!” Narc crowed. There was no fawning in his voice. “Fucking beautiful.”

      “What happened?” Senior Chief Craw asked. “Tomcat get him?”

      “Rafe fuckin’ dumped him in the water,” Narc said. Rafe had managed to stop laughing. “He just went lower and slower till the raghead stalled.”

      Rafe chuckled—not the release of tension any more, just amusement. “We got a kill,” he murmured. “An S-3 got a kill!”

      They all began to laugh. More, and louder, and then Alan was pounding on Craw’s shoulder, and he realized what they had done. Rafe’s flying, yes, but also his knowledge and Craw and Narc.

      Christine climbed the night, bullet holes whistling, content that she had killed again.

      2335 Zulu. The Gulf.

      Strike Common was a tangle of voices. Southern Iran was covered in a net of radar cuts, AAA, and SAM radars coming on and off. The IADS had done well for the first few minutes; Alan had missed the climax, when their AAA and SAMs came online; but the HARMs and the jamming were beating them now. He saw no more hostile aircraft; their leaker had been a loony or a lone night patrol.

      Millions of dollars were spent in seconds as he heard HARM shots called on Common and watched radar sites go off the air. Most of the strike package was still over the target, but some A-6s had already turned for home, and Alan found one only twenty miles southeast of them. He hooked it and found that it was limping along at only a thousand feet.

      “What’s happening out there?” Rafe asked. He and Narc had assessed their damage and decided they could still give gas. That they were

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