Desperate Escape
"No. Don't follow close. Stay behind me and keep the wingman off my back." The group captain said.
Song Ning realised Sami was not charging in blindly. His plan was a high-low pincer using the data link: Sami's 01 would seize altitude and attack from above while Song Ning's 02 hung back outside weapons range, tracking targets and dividing the enemy's attention. On the surface, one could say the group captain was being considerate by keeping Song Ning out of danger. One could also say the old man intended to hog every kill. Song Ning had not known Sami long, but he knew that across decades of service in multiple squadrons, every wingman who had ever flown with the group captain had a lifetime score of zero. For Song Ning this was no hardship; discipline demanded he stay out of it, and he was happy to watch from a distance. His only worry now was that aircraft 01 might come to grief.
"Zero-two, copy. Don't be reckless." Song Ning replied and immediately bled off speed. The key to this tactic was maintaining seven or eight kilometres' separation. If pressed, he could fire a BVR missile to bail Sami out, but even that was probably more than the group captain wanted.
Song Ning had already assessed the odds. The enemy was deep inside hostile territory and rattled. They would most likely bolt for the border rather than fight. That was genuinely an opportunity, provided the group captain had the skill to exploit it.
On Matanga's HUD, Sami's rapidly climbing aircraft was a small, fast-moving dot. His radar had lost lock several times; the opponent was climbing too fast and still jamming. Matanga was dealing with a veteran.
"Tiger Two, this one's experienced. Stay low and search due east. I suspect there's more than one."
"Copy."
When the Mirage wingman's radar swept east, Song Ning was in a turn. He flickered across the Mirage's screen and vanished.
"Lead, one more contact at twenty kilometres east. Breaking away. Signature looks like an F-16."
"Tiger Two, he's not breaking away. He's setting up for a BVR shot." Matanga knew the tactic. When the enemy's lead aircraft had enough altitude, it would roll in from above; the wingman with the BVR missiles would then swing its nose around. The only counter was to kill the lead quickly.
Sami had reached 5,000 metres. He nosed over and swept the space below. The enemy was well below him now, exactly as predicted; the Mirage's engine could not match his climb rate. But the formation had not broken. Even hundreds of kilometres inside Pakistan, they were not panicking. Their counterattack was methodical. The wingman, in particular, had disappeared.
Aircraft 01's radar automatically entered track-while-scan. Range roughly ten kilometres. The two aircraft would merge head-on in seconds. The moment the lock-on cue appeared, Sami fired before the enemy could; he had one missile left. He had never fully trusted an IR missile's head-on kill probability; he had personally dodged head-on shots more than once. But if the enemy dived to evade, Sami would have the positional advantage he wanted.
"Zero-two, where are you?" Sami called. He needed Song Ning's position, but the radio was dead. The Mirage 2000H's ECM suite was a self-contained broadband jammer that, at close range, could blanket every communications frequency. The fight was rich in dramatic irony: over Pakistani soil, in a Chinese-built aircraft, the group captain's French-made adversary was cutting off his comms with his own wingman. He told himself Song Ning would work out what to do once he turned back.
On the HUD, the enemy did not dive and run. Perhaps the Mirage pilot had not yet seen the missile, or perhaps this flight leader was unusually cool under pressure. Sami saw, about a kilometre beyond his own missile's exhaust trail, another flash: the enemy had fired back. He had no choice. At 1,000 kilometres per hour he hauled the nose skyward. The g-meter spiked to 8.5 and the target vanished again. As he rolled out, he traced the twisting contrail of his own missile. It appeared to have pulled hard, but there was no explosion. The enemy's missile had likewise gone somewhere unknown.
"Group Captain, you missed. The enemy is below you." Thank God; comms had come back. Song Ning's voice.
Sami glanced at the vertical display. The data link was live again. Song Ning's radar data showed one Mirage turning at his two o'clock, roughly 3,500 metres altitude, eight kilometres away, apparently disoriented. A second contact was heading for Song Ning. If the Chinese pilot kept dithering about courts martial, he would soon find himself in a one-on-one knife fight.
The group captain rolled inverted and looked down in the general direction. Nothing visible. From experience, if he could not see a target at this distance it was probably hiding in cloud. And sure enough, a thick bank of cumulus sat at his two o'clock.
"Zero-two, fire immediately. Shoot down the wingman." Sami said. He had one missile left. A three-for-zero sweep was no longer realistic. He wanted Song Ning to take the wingman while he crept up on the disoriented lead below, using the IRST to ambush it from behind. The data-link advantage gave him roughly twice the situational awareness of his opponent. He shut off the radar and switched to IRST tracking. Using infrared in cloud was unreliable, but stealth was in his nature.
Eight kilometres away, Matanga had just survived the missile with a 9g diving turn and then lost his target again. The contact twenty kilometres east, the one that looked like an F-16, had never fired. Perhaps it was only there to watch; perhaps it had no BVR missiles at all. The captain wanted to climb and search for the enemy lead above him, but a fuel warning had appeared on the MFD. He had burned through more than half his fuel; an inevitable consequence of jettisoning two 1,700-litre drop tanks and the thousand-odd litres still inside them. He had no appetite for climbing back into the clouds to spar with that cunning old predator. The only thing to do was run for the border, get within range of MiG-21s scrambled from Bhatinda1 to cover his withdrawal. At least, once he climbed above 4,000 metres, VHF contact with headquarters was restored.
"Tiger calling Tiger's Den. Current position eighty kilometres east of Sargodha. Heading 090. Crossing Punjab. Request fighter escort."
"Tiger lead, report heading continuously. We will send aircraft to cover you."
Song Ning had been hovering at the edge of the fight, never firing. He had had many opportunities, but discipline weighed on him. Yet the situation was shifting. As the battle drifted eastward, he was growing increasingly worried about something else entirely: stumbling into Pakistani ground-fire. His RWR was intermittently painting radar scans from several directions. He knew that every metre eastward brought him closer to the front line, and the Pakistani IFF system could not identify his aircraft.
1. Bhatinda (贝西亚纳): Bhatianda/Bathinda Air Force Station in Punjab, India. The IAF maintains fighter assets there; MiG-21s scrambled from Bathinda could cover the Mirages' withdrawal across the border. Matanga's strategy is to run east until friendly fighters can reach him. ↩