Thunder and Lightning
During their time at TACDE,1 Goyal and Jafar had sparred several times against the more advanced Mirage 2000-5,2 a formidable opponent. In the early engagements, the powerful Su-30 could gain no advantage. Gradually, though, they discovered that the Mirage 2000 could not sustain its turn rate. Its instantaneous turning ability was impressive, but sustained low-altitude turning had never been the Mirage family's strength. Eventually they worked out a formula: drag the fight down low, keep turning at military power without lighting the afterburners, and in time even TACDE's senior instructors would lose.
But this opponent's agility exceeded anything Goyal had anticipated. The rolling series of pursuit turns continued, each aircraft straining for position. For most of the engagement they had held one another at the three-nine line,3 and the chase had descended to a few hundred metres above the ground, where neither aircraft had enough altitude to haul into an aggressive turn and bring the nose to bear. The Su-30's thrust-vectoring nozzles offered no advantage; Goyal knew that the excess fuel in the airframe and the six cumbersome semi-active radar-guided missiles under the wings were preventing him from executing any post-stall manoeuvre. He had to mind the throttle constantly to avoid blundering ahead of his opponent.
"Can't keep bleeding like this. Time to make him hurt."
The flying officer's left hand pressed the helmet-mounted sight button on the throttle quadrant4, wondering why it was there. His eyes left the HUD. He eased off the g, rolling into a shallow bank, and watched the enemy creep forward on his right, edging past and then beyond the nine o'clock position. But this was the flying officer's trap: by letting the bandit slide forward, he ensured that the enemy could not dive away into the blind spot below and escape the aiming reticle in the lower left of his visor. The reticle was now locked squarely onto the target. His hand rested on the launch button. A few seconds more and the lock would be complete. He waited in silence for it to happen. The cunning opponent seemed to sense the danger instantly. He broke into an anomalous vertical climb, abandoning the dominant position he had all but secured. The flying officer's eyes tracked him upward. The quarry was within reach. Then, in a flash, the glare of the sun blanked out the optical display on the helmet-mounted sight. A killing stroke of bad luck.
"Fucking pig!" Goyal swore. He could not tell whether the opponent's freakish evasion had been accidental or the product of godlike judgement. A tenth of a second before the lock indication appeared, the flying officer pressed the launch button on what was almost pure reflex. The last precious R-73 left its rail and pulled a huge off-boresight turn toward the target, the tightest radius the missile could manage. It was obviously not going to hit.
The enemy immediately rolled into a dive to build speed, simultaneously dispensing a rapid string of flares.5 The sky erupted in billowing white smoke and fire. By the time the R-73 acquired the target and hauled into a turn exceeding 35 g to bring its seeker to bear, it had already overshot the optimal angle for attacking the aircraft's tail. It missed. The missile flew blindly out of the arena. Goyal had lost his trump card. The remaining R-27s could not be cued by the helmet-mounted sight and were useless in a close-range fight.
The enemy was now well outside the weapons envelope. With a clean, economical sideslip he swept around to Goyal's seven o'clock. He nearly clipped the mountainside doing it, but the tables had turned at last. The Su-30's radar warning receiver remained silent throughout; no tracking beam had locked onto him. That was to be expected: the opponent probably intended to use an infrared missile.
"Stand by chaff and flares," the flying officer shouted. It was the first time in his life he had been this rattled.
Goyal began a standard series of evasive breaks, but his situation was dire. He had no altitude. His speed was barely above 400 kilometres per hour, and acceleration would take an agonising half-minute or more. The trailing enemy was lower and slower still, but the miserable fact was that he could now shoot. The Su-30 had fallen into something very close to a no-escape zone, if the aircraft behind him chose to fire. Strangely, the seasoned Pakistani pilot held his hand.
"What's he playing at?" Goyal thought. In an exercise, this geometry would already have been called a kill. He jammed the throttles into full afterburner and held them there for a gruelling ten-plus seconds, clawing for every knot he could get, but speed was not something you conjured on demand. He hoped the man behind him would show a little more mercy and give him a few seconds longer, enough to build the airspeed for a high-g break against a tail-aspect missile. Without speed, any turn would be limp.
Jafar had been twisting left and right in his seat, watching the trailing opponent and the missiles under its wings. He could see them clearly: two glinting missiles on the pylons.
"He's accelerating and cutting inside, five o'clock low," Jafar called. Privately, he thought the Pakistani pilot's brain had short-circuited.
The enemy was applying afterburner and cutting to the inside. Another puzzling move. He was forcing a lead turn, the kind of manoeuvre a pilot makes before employing the gun, pulling ahead of the target so that the shells arrive with the correct deflection.
"His missiles must have malfunctioned." The realisation struck Goyal in a flash. The man had pressed the launch button and nothing had come off the rail. So now he was going to try to gun down a Su-30. "You've got to be fucking kidding me."
The flying officer reversed the stick and began a weaving jink to spoil the enemy's tracking solution. It would not take long to pull clear of gun range. Soon enough, driven by its two powerful engines, the Su-30 climbed to 900 metres and the airspeed crept toward 700 kilometres per hour. The separation between the two aircraft began to open markedly. Jafar estimated it at over two kilometres by eye. The enemy had never pushed to full afterburner in pursuit. The flying officer was confident he was now beyond gun range. When he looked back, the aircraft behind had given up the chase and reversed sharply, slipping away westward into the mountains.
"He's running?" Jafar could not believe his eyes. He watched the enemy spiral downward and disappear.
"He's out of fuel. Has to be." Goyal's nerves were beginning to settle, and with them a renewed confidence surged back. He ran a quick scan of the primary flight instruments and reversed hard. Within minutes he had transformed from quarry back into hunter. The gods, he reflected, had done him an immense favour this time; but there was nothing to be embarrassed about. War had only ever cared about results.
The picture was clear. The low-altitude ambush followed by the protracted low-level manoeuvring had drained the unidentified Pakistani fighter dry. Combined with its malfunctioning weapons, this was the moment to finish him off in one stroke.
The aircraft was one Jafar had never seen before. Clean, spare lines. Painted in the standard air force light grey. It was not any French-built Mirage. The flying officer resolved to pursue even if it meant crossing the border. He had a premonition: if he let this pilot live, the man would be a problem for the Indian Air Force down the road.
"Look, from behind it's just like an F-16," Jafar exclaimed.
"No. It's a… I think it's a Thunder."6 It came back to Goyal all at once. The Air Force had never required its pilots to memorise enemy aircraft recognition charts. In the air, an aircraft's attitude never quite matched the drawings on paper, and in any case the PAF's fighter inventory had always been limited enough that identification was not a concern. But today was different. The flying officer was looking at a new type, one that had never appeared on the front line.
"How is it harder to fight than an F-16?" Goyal said, half in wonder. His radar aperture had now boxed the fleeing opponent. The fire-control system was transitioning from search to track; it would be ready to launch shortly. "Have I really got this won?" He could scarcely believe it, because the enemy aircraft was flying with no sign of alarm, making no effort to accelerate. Its RWR7 did not seem to be telling it that death was closing in.
At this critical juncture, Goyal could not take his eyes off the HUD. He relied on Jafar's periodic warnings. Since crossing the border, the radar warning receiver had been picking up intermittent sweeps from enemy radars at various bearings; some were long-range surface-to-air systems. But Goyal reckoned that at the low altitude where his Su-30 was now flying, he was probably still outside their engagement envelopes. He could not let this chance slip away.
"We can't go too deep across their border," Jafar warned.
"Where are we now?"
"Five kilometres past the border. Heading almost due west."
"Give me a few more minutes. I'll knock him down."
The flying officer eased the aircraft down to a dangerous altitude. He could have fired the R-27s in a look-down/shoot-down profile, but he knew that in such a geometry the missile's hit probability would suffer from ground clutter.8 In the end his altitude dropped again to under 600 metres.9 He brought himself onto the same plane as the enemy. The aircraft ahead flickered in and out of sight, hugging the ridgeline, apparently making no effort to break away at full power.
"Why doesn't he accelerate?"
"Probably just low on fuel, isn't he? If he wanted to play tricks, he wouldn't fly like this, would he?" Goyal told himself. In truth, he was deeply uneasy.
The shoot cue appeared. The flying officer selected a two-round salvo of R-27s and pressed the fire button. The fighter shuddered slightly. Two missiles left the rails one and a half seconds apart.
1. TACDE (TACDE): The Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment, the IAF's advanced combat training unit based at Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. Both Su-30MKI and Mirage 2000 are operated there, making the dissimilar combat training described here consistent with real practice. ↩
2. Mirage 2000-5 (幻影2000-5): An upgraded multirole variant of the Dassault Mirage 2000 with RDY radar and MICA missiles. India operates upgraded Mirage 2000s at Gwalior alongside TACDE. The author's assessment of the type's turning characteristics is broadly accurate: the delta wing provides excellent instantaneous turn rate, but sustained turn rate suffers from the high induced drag inherent to the planform, particularly at low altitude. ↩
3. Three-nine line (3/9点钟位置): An imaginary line running through an aircraft from three o'clock to nine o'clock, perpendicular to heading. When two fighters hold each other on the three-nine line, neither has a positional advantage; the geometry is neutral. Breaking past it into the opponent's rear hemisphere is the objective of most turning engagements. ↩
4. Helmet-mounted sight button on the throttle (节流阀上的头盔瞄准器按钮): The Su-30MKI's Sura-K helmet-mounted sight is activated via a HOTAS button on the throttle quadrant; see C3N10 for the system's capabilities. ↩
5. Flares (曳光弹): The Chinese 曳光弹 literally means "tracer rounds." In context, the description of "white smoke and fire" dispensed against an infrared missile is unmistakably that of decoy flares. The author uses the correct term 闪光干扰弹 later in the chapter; this is a terminological slip. ↩
6. Thunder (雷电): The Chinese 雷电 ("thunder and lightning") is the standard Chinese name for the JF-17 Thunder, known in China as the FC-1 Xiaolong (枭龙). A single-engine lightweight multirole fighter jointly developed by Chengdu Aircraft Corporation and the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, inducted by the PAF from 2007. From the rear, its single-engine layout and side-mounted intakes give it a passing resemblance to the F-16, explaining Jafar's misidentification. Its appearance on the front line is a surprise to both aircrew, consistent with the novel's timeline placing the conflict shortly after the type's operational introduction. ↩
7. RWR: See C2N15. The enemy pilot's apparent lack of reaction is narratively significant: either his RWR has been damaged in the engagement, or he is deliberately holding course. ↩
8. Ground clutter (地面反射的干扰): In a look-down/shoot-down engagement at very low altitude, radar returns from the ground create false targets that degrade the missile's hit probability. This is a well-documented limitation of semi-active radar-guided missiles, and the R-27R (see C2N11) in particular. Goyal's decision to descend to the enemy's altitude reflects sound tactical judgement, even though it places him closer to Pakistani air defences. ↩
9. Under 600 metres (不足600米): The author notes this is relative altitude measured by radio altimeter above the terrain, not above sea level. Northern Kashmir terrain commonly sits at 3,000–5,000 metres MSL, so true altitude could exceed 3,500 metres despite the altimeter reading. The original text attributes the distinction to the area's "high latitude" (纬度很高), a geographical error; the author means "high elevation" (海拔很高). Northern Kashmir at 34–35°N is not notably high in latitude. I have corrected this silently. ↩