Off his left wing, the Java Sea glinted in the hot sunlight. Off his right, the verdant slopes of Madura’s central mountain range rose out of the island’s narrow coastal plain. Ahead and below, the pale surf-and-sand snake of the beach line writhed. Flying in the last slot of the four-plane stacked echelon formation, the rebel pilot was somewhat bored.
He took a degree of pleasure in that boredom as well.
He had no idea why his strike flight had been diverted to these village bombardment mission – the objectives were well away from the fighting lines and didn’t appear to be conventional military targets – but the decision had been made by higher-ranked heads than his.
The Indonesian flier was simply pleased that these new targets appeared to be more lightly defended than the Government columns his group had been hammering. The damn Americans were becoming far too generous in handing out their Stinger SAMs.
Not that these village strike missions were an entire walkover. They’d encountered furious small arms fire over the first village and his aircraft had come home with bullet holes in its skin.
For this go-round, they’d devised a crude stand-off tactic. Their BAC Hawk strike/trainers carried four-round HVAR rocket pods under their wings, four pods per aircraft, fully the equivalency of a field artillery barrage.
As they’d been given no specific targets, just the leveling of the village as a whole, they would roll in and launch their rocket salvos at long range, shotgunning the target with a dispersed fire pattern. After that, they could pitch out again before coming into the effective reach of small arms.
“A piece of cake,” as the Australian pilots would say.
Ahead, the coastline indented into a cove, and the click and hiss of a carrier
wave sounded in the rebel pilot’s helmet phones. The words of the flight leader were curt. “Rakshasa Flight. Target ahead. Arm and prepare to follow me in.”
The rebel pilot flipped his armament switches, heating up the HVAR pods. The captain was a man of few words: get in, get out and get back to base.
He could make out the target at two o’clock. A narrow crescent of huts and buildings following the apex of the cove. A number of piers and slipways extended across the beach and into the pale blue-green waters. The other village they had hit had possessed similar boat building facilities. Was that why rebel command was having them bombarded?
“Rakshasa flight. Engage!”
With the snapped command, the wingtip of the flight leader’s aircraft whipped up in a sharp right-hand break, the other Hawks peeling off after him at precise two-second intervals, diving in on the objective.
As his speed grew, the rebel pilot pushed his focus and awareness out ahead of his aircraft, selecting the launch point for his weapons. It would take a second or two for his pods to empty, so it had to be within the narrow range band that would allow his unguided rockets to reach the target but still allow him to evade the ground fire. As last man in he’d catch the worst of it.
He was wrong in that estimation.
He saw the lead aircraft fire its warloads, the smoke trails of the big five-inch HVARs snaking out toward the village. Then he had a split-second’s awareness of something odd. It was as if there were other smoke trails entwining with those of the flight leader’s weapons: trails streaming outward from the coast. Then his flight leader’s aircraft dissolved in a smear of black smoke and orange flame.
The pilot of number two started to scream a warning as he tried to pull out of his dive, but both acts were cut short by the vaporization of his own plane. The rebel pilot had no chance to see what happened to number three as he simultaneously chopped his throttle, cranked hard right and jettisoned his ordinance load, utilizing the third arm all aviators can grow in an emergency.
The gee load hammered him as his aircraft stood on its wingtip in a minimum radius turn. Looking down from his cockpit toward the sea, he saw two slender dark shapes flash past beneath him.
Helicopters! Black helicopters, moving faster than anything with rotors had any right to move! They were what had killed his flight leader and his wingman and, no doubt, they were going to try and kill him too. He had also caught the fragmentary flash of ominous white, beneath their bizarre, swept-back wings. Air-to air missiles! Sidewinders! From the way his flight mates had died, no doubt these were an advanced all-aspect homing variant.
Firewall the throttle! Arm cannon! Reverse the pitch out and try and drop in on their tail! His little British-built strike/trainer could be a vicious dogfighter when she had to be. She swapped wingtips and pivoted into a pursuit curve behind the mysterious interceptors. The cartwheel sight in his heads-up display brushed across the tail of the lead helicopter.
Before his finger could tighten on the stick trigger, his target’s nose snapped into the vertical. With the wingman holding precise station on the leader, the two helicopters screamed into a half-looping Immelmann reversal. With rotors flickering in inverted flight, the two weird intruders flashed over the top of his canopy.
The rebel pilot’s instinct was to dive for the sea and run for it – but his training made him haul around in another minimum radius turn. ‘Keep your nose pointed toward the enemy’ was one of the oldest but truest axioms of air warfare. To attempt to extend out and disengage would be an act of suicidal futility, especially given the reach of those Sidewinders and the way their launching platforms could writhe across the sky.
But maneuvering against those black monsters might be an act of futility as well. This wasn’t the distant cut and thrust of jet combat; this was the “knife fighting in a phone booth” of World War Two vintage air warfare and his Hawk wasn’t built for it. No jet was. He was bleeding energy in these steep turns faster than his engine could replace it. Another violent maneuver or two and he’d be running out of airspeed and life.
As he came about, he heard the other flight survivor yelling for help over the radio band.
The number three Hawk had tried to run, breaking away east along the coastline. The helicopters, still moving with that unnerving, unnatural speed, were now hooking in behind number three. He caught the flash and fire streak of the missile launches, the supersonic bolts reaching across the gap between the hunted and the hunters.
“Eject!” the rebel pilot screamed into his oxygen mask mike. “Eject!”
The targeted Hawk twisted madly, belching a fireball. Shedding its wings, it tumbled from the sky. Again there was no parachute.
But in his death, his last flight mate had given the rebel pilot his chance.
Once more he set up a pursuit curve, closing the range to engage the
helicopters. If only they remained distracted for a few seconds longer …
He swept in behind the dark copters, regaining his speed advantage as he brought his sights in on the leader. The enemy wingman must have spotted him coming in and panicked. He broke hard left, cutting behind his flight leader, passing through the rebel pilot’s crosshairs.
The Indonesian shifted to the closer target, tightening his turn to engage the new, more vulnerable enemy.
He had range!
The enemy copter dancing tantalizingly just outside of the targeting reticle, he strove to force the Hawk’s nose around those last few degrees to give him a firing solution.
Tracers suddenly streamed by the Hawk’s cockpit and a hideous racketing vibration tore through its airframe. The rebel pilot got a single, fragmentary glimpse in his rearview mirrors of the lead black copter riding his tail, spewing hellfire.
Then the stream of cannon shells walked up the spine of the Hawk and chewed their way into the cockpit.
*
Vince Arkady eased the SPEED Cobra’s bank and came back on his velocity controller, watching the dying Hawk roll
into the sea below. No kill like a gun’s kill!
“Strike lead To Strike wing. You okay, Pink?”
“Yeah, Roger that, Vince.” Pinkerton’s SPEED Cobra faded back and dropped into its wing slot. “Nice moves, skipper.”
“Roger D. Even after all these years, they’re still a sucker for that old Thatch Weave. Let’s go home, my man.”
*
