Circling
In the week since this latest round of the India–Pakistan conflict had begun, hostilities had remained limited to ground forces exchanging artillery fire, with the occasional tactical aircraft venturing over the other side's forward positions to drop conventional bombs on infiltrating troops. Not a single aircraft had yet been shot down. Now the moment belonged to Rakhshina Goyal, the country boy from Parbhani.1 The flying officer could not afford to piss it away.
He settled on Plan A: dispatch the trailing aircraft first, cleanly. He was confident that no Pakistani fighter — not even an F-16D2 from the vaunted No. 5 (Falcons) Squadron — could take him in a one-on-one fight. Besides, the lead aircraft, still indistinct ahead, was most likely just another Mirage III. Pakistani ambush tactics commonly paired the lighter, more agile Mirage III as pathfinder with the heavier Mirage V3 fighter-bomber. Predictably, once the lead pilot saw his wingman go down, he would dive for the deck in a panic. He might even fly into the mountainside.
The flying officer4 held his breath. When the last wisp of cloud cleared from his sight, he pressed the laser ranging button again. The IRST's coaxial laser rangefinder sent out a beam invisible to the enemy. This time it returned a range. Moments later the R-73's infrared seeker acquired the target, and the lock tone began to pulse in his ears. The kill was all but certain.
"It's all up to you now," Jafar said.
Goyal pressed the single-shot release. One missile left pylon eight, tracing a shallow arc toward the unsuspecting enemy. His hand was already on the fire-control radar switch. Whatever happened next, his job was to get the radar scanning.
The enemy made no evasive move. He flew on straight and level, oblivious to his own death closing in behind him. The R-73 trailed a white ribbon of vapour. All the Pakistani pilot had to do was turn his head and he would have seen it, but he did not. Perhaps he checked his six once or twice a minute — the trailing man in a tactical formation usually does — or perhaps the snow-covered mountains on either side had absorbed most of his attention. Whatever the reason, he had let his guard down.
Goyal willed his opponent not to look back. He wanted the god of war at his shoulder, wanted the enemy to sense nothing. Time seemed to freeze. In the distance, the missile's exhaust flame crept toward the Mirage with agonising slowness — and then, exactly as expected, the Mirage became a fireball and began to fall.
"God protect us,"5 the flying officer cried aloud. His first real kill. Even having broken the prohibition on close-range engagement, the Wing Commander would have to let it slide. But it was too early to celebrate. He switched on the fire-control radar, selected vertical scan mode, and set the pulse repetition frequency to medium.6 The other enemy could be just a few kilometres ahead in the cloud. This was the optimal search configuration.
Jafar found the contact on the vertical situation display almost at once. But it was not a single return. It was a stuttering chain of them. The enemy was deploying radar jamming, and he had done it almost the instant Goyal's radar went active.
"Not so fast, you bastard."
Goyal stamped on the rudder pedal and banked hard right, plunging into a steep dive that brought him down to 1,500 metres above ground. His opponent, he reckoned, had to be in a state of blind panic. At this range, if the geometry was right, the phased-array radar7 could burn through the jamming and discriminate the real aircraft from the chaff. After that it would be simple: one remaining dogfight missile or a pair of R-27s, and the man would be meeting Allah within minutes.
What happened next defied the flying officer's expectations. As the Su-30 bore down, the target faded from the multifunction display along with the drifting chaff, dissolving into nothing. Goyal had always considered himself a veteran, yet at this moment he had no contingency for what was unfolding. It should not have been possible. He had never once laid eyes on this quarry; all he could do was assume it was another Mirage. And if he could not see his opponent, the worst possibility was that he would blunder right past it.
"Impossible. He must have hit a mountain." Jafar began scanning the ridgelines on either side. All he could see was a single burning wreck strewn across a snow-covered slope — the Mirage they had already killed.
"We've lost him. He must have pulled some kind of trick. Dropped lower, maybe." Even Goyal could scarcely believe his own assessment. Even at very low altitude, the target should not have escaped radar detection — not when he himself was already below a thousand metres.
"Could he be turning back on us?" Jafar said.
"No chance. If he turns, he has to gain altitude. I'd see him. He must have ducked behind—"
Goyal saw it: a small dot punching out of the cloud on one flank of the snow-covered ridge, growing rapidly. The enemy had come around the far side of the mountain. What the flying officer could not believe was not the 6 g turn itself, but that his opponent had not run. He was coming head-on, fighting to cut across to Goyal's nine o'clock. If he crossed that position and reversed, there would be trouble.
"Damn it — ten o'clock, bandit!" Jafar shouted. The contact was roughly three to four kilometres out, sliding rapidly aft across the canopy glass, clearly manoeuvring to cut inside the turn circle for a missile shot. It was an agile aircraft. It did not move like an underpowered Mirage III.
Pulling the nose up would gain nothing; the opponent's turn rate appeared comparable. Goyal shoved the nose down and hauled into a 7 g turn — harder than anything he had ever pulled in training — straining to tighten the radius. After ten-odd seconds he began to gain the lead angle. But the situation shifted again: the enemy calmly bled off speed and drifted upward, until Goyal had to crane his neck to keep the small shape in sight. With a jolt he realised what was happening. His opponent was waiting for him to make a mistake; waiting for him to overshoot on the aggressive side of this turn.
"Cunning bastard."
Seeing through the ploy, the flying officer rolled with it, hauling up slightly. He lost some speed and still could not bring the nose to bear, but at least he had not been suckered by a light fighter. The enemy lingered in the upper right quadrant of his canopy, never committing to full acceleration. Goyal drew a deep breath. In a scissors8 like this, he told himself, the impatient one takes the bait.
"You underestimate me, you little shit," the flying officer muttered.
He knew that if he made no errors he would grind his way to advantage. The sustained high-alpha9 turns had bled speed from both aircraft, but Goyal was confident: this unidentified enemy was at most a single-engine light fighter, and no light fighter could match a Su-30 indefinitely. Another few dozen seconds and his opponent would either run out of turn rate and become a sitting target, or run out of altitude and hit the ground. And besides, the flying officer still had one trump card he had not yet played.10
It unfolded as Goyal had calculated. Both aircraft bled speed, the turn radii tightened, the distance between them shrank. Jafar could now make out the pilot in the opposing cockpit. He estimated the range at roughly one and a half kilometres.
"Look, it's a—" Jafar's voice cut off. He could not, for the moment, place the aircraft. He wanted to say it looked like a Mirage F1,11 but in his memory the Mirage F1's turning circle at this altitude was far wider, because the type was notoriously sluggish.
1. Parbhani (普尔巴尼): A city in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra, roughly 500 km east of Mumbai. Goyal comes from a relatively modest, semi-rural background in central India rather than from one of the traditional military recruiting grounds of Punjab or Rajasthan. ↩
2. F-16D (F16D形): The two-seat variant of the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The D indicates the two-seat model, which No. 5 Squadron flies alongside single-seat C models. See C1N10 for further details on No. 5 Squadron. ↩
3. Mirage V (幻影VI): The original Chinese text writes "幻影VI," a clear typographical error for "幻影V" (Mirage V); the trailing "I" appears to be an artefact of sloppy input. See C2N13 for the Mirage V in Pakistani service. ↩
4. Flying Officer (中尉 / 上尉): The original text alternates between 中尉 (Flying Officer) and 上尉 (Flight Lieutenant, one rank higher) when referring to Goyal within this chapter. In previous chapters and most of those following, he is consistently 中尉. This is almost certainly an authorial inconsistency rather than a mid-chapter promotion; I have rendered his rank uniformly as Flying Officer throughout. See C1N5. ↩
5. "God protect us" (天神护佑): Literally "heavenly god(s) protect and bless." The phrasing is generic and does not map onto any single Hindi or Sanskrit invocation. Given Goyal's likely Hindu background (Goyal is a Baniya surname) and his Maharashtrian origins, a plausible equivalent might be "Jai Bhagwan" or "Har Har Mahadev," but the author wrote in Chinese without specifying, so the translation is deliberately neutral. ↩
6. Pulse repetition frequency, medium (脉冲重复率调整到"中"): In pulse-Doppler radar, the PRF determines how the radar discriminates between targets and clutter. Medium PRF is a compromise mode providing reasonable performance in both range and velocity measurement, well suited for detecting manoeuvring targets in a mountainous environment with severe ground clutter. ↩
7. Phased-array radar (相控阵雷达): The Su-30MKI's N011M Bars is a passive electronically scanned array (PESA), though the Chinese 相控阵 is used generically for any phased array. Its ability to "burn through" jamming at close range is broadly consistent with published characteristics. ↩
8. Scissors (剪刀追逐): A classic aerial combat manoeuvre in which two fighters execute a series of reversing turns, each attempting to force the other to overshoot and end up in front. Fundamentally a contest of patience and energy management: the pilot who commits too early overshoots and becomes the defender. ↩
9. High alpha (高攻角): High angle of attack; flight at extreme nose-up attitudes relative to the direction of travel. The Su-30MKI, equipped with canards and AL-31FP thrust-vectoring engines, is specifically designed for controlled flight at very high angles of attack, giving it a significant advantage in slow-speed engagements. ↩
10. Trump card (杀手锏): The Chinese 杀手锏, literally "assassin's mace," is a term from Chinese strategic vocabulary referring to a concealed weapon of last resort. In context, Goyal's unplayed advantage is almost certainly the Su-30MKI's Sura-K helmet-mounted sight, which can cue an R-73 to targets up to 60° off-boresight simply by the pilot turning his head. In a slow-speed scissors where neither pilot can bring the nose to bear, the ability to fire well off-axis would be decisive. The Su-30MKI's thrust-vectoring nozzles are another possibility, but the narrative has so far emphasised weapons employment over aerobatics. ↩
11. Mirage F1 (幻影F1): The Dassault Mirage F1, a swept-wing fighter quite distinct from the delta-winged Mirage III/V family. The Pakistan Air Force has never operated the Mirage F1; the type was exported to Iraq, Libya, South Africa, Morocco, and others, but not Pakistan. Jafar's instinctive identification followed by his own doubt is the author's way of signalling that the mystery opponent is flying something outside the known PAF order of battle. Whatever this aircraft is, it is performing well beyond the F1's capabilities at this altitude. ↩