SAM-6
"Black Spider lead, why haven't you taken off?" The AWACS was on Sami's case.
"The runway is still being cleared. We'll be airborne any moment." Sami said, offhand.
"Don't give me that. I can see the runway is fine." Uhak cut in directly on the radio, going over the AWACS's head.
"Fine. We're launching now. We should catch up with you near the border."
Sami had his own calculations. He did not want to tail Griffin too closely. His mission was not escort, and if the Thunders stuck to the F-16As, the amount of time the JF-17s could loiter near the border would become a problem. Griffin's two pilots had been scrambled only an hour earlier. They had not had time to grasp the mission's real shape. They assumed the Thunders would follow them for a secondary escort or follow-on attack role, which suited Sami just fine: it meant they would draw Indian attention and Indian fire on themselves.
At four thousand metres, the lone pair of F-16As was drawing steadily closer to the border. The Indians seemed unaware of them. Squadron Leader Uhak knew the Indian Air Force was committing the bulk of its strength to the glacier sector up north, and that several F-16Cs had been shot down that morning. He also knew that No. 223 "Trident" Squadron, the unit that had killed one of Griffin's F-16As a few days earlier, was right on the other side of the border at Adampur, and the Tridents had not flown in two days. They were not sleeping.
"Lead, the target is supposed to be a barracks?" Uhak's wingman asked. He knew the coordinates, but not the specifics.
"Roughly. In a low-lying area, with a river in front of it. On one side of the town there's a cricket pitch." Uhak said.
The navigation was straightforward. Intelligence had identified the site as a command post by a crude method: anti-aircraft batteries sited near the building, combined with heavy radio traffic. Uhak knew the command post was probably a fake. The anti-aircraft batteries, however, were certainly real.
"Still no sign of the escort Thunders?" Harun Mahdi,1 the wingman, asked.
"Don't count on them. Bigger formations are easier for radar to find; they'd just drag us down. We go in quietly. Remember the attack sequence: anti-aircraft sites first. If enemy radar comes active, the priority shifts to the nearest radar."
"Why not just hit the command post directly? We could go around the AAA." The young lieutenant pressed.
"Because… I believe the command post is a fake. And I believe the people upstairs know it too."
Five minutes later, the F-16 pair began to descend. This was Pakistan's first cross-border counter-strike. Uhak knew the attack had some political value, but he did not understand why the planners had picked such a flat stretch of ground. It did not match previous bombing patterns. Over terrain like this the Indian early-warning radars had longer effective range, and premature detection would pull Adampur's Trident MiG-29s onto him. He very much wanted revenge for Lieutenant Isa, but he knew perfectly well that a bomb-loaded F-16A could not fight rested MiG-29s. If he had been planning the operation, the ideal solution would have been for Sami's Thunders to do the indiscriminate bombing, draw the enemy out, while he himself sat in ambush off to one side. It never once occurred to Uhak that today's plan had exactly the shape he was describing, except the main act was not his F-16s; it was four Thunders.
The F-16's electronic threat-warning system had been watching the Indian side continuously. Now it picked up a centimetre-wave source reappearing at regular intervals, the unmistakable signature of a long-range search radar rotating its main lobe through 360 degrees. Whether the Indians had seen the two F-16s yet was unclear. In Uhak's experience, Indian long-range search radars were not very efficient. A modest reduction in altitude would usually slip under them.
"I'll need to go lower. Where the hell are those Thunders? They should at least be drawing the enemy's attention." The major descended further.
"Griffin flight, Black Spider has launched and is inbound. Group Captain Sami recommends you gain a little altitude." The AWACS said. The suggestion put Uhak on alert at once. He suddenly felt that Sami was trying to expose him.
"Tell the group captain we cannot afford to fly high."
"Griffin lead, this area is packed with 11th Division AAA and SAM-7s.2 I recommend you do not fly too low." Sami's voice cut in on the radio directly, explaining himself to show he had no hidden motive.
"Group Captain, I believe you once said that surprise is the pilot's best friend."
"Fine, I did say that. But watch the ground. An AWACS cannot see a shoulder-launched missile coming up at you." Sami did not press. Uhak felt something was off with Sami today. Something furtive. He did not even know where the old man was hiding.
"Griffin lead, you have crossed the border. Target is ahead."
Uhak glanced at his navigation display. He had passed the penultimate waypoint. His route was unchanged from the brief. The plan was going well so far. The Indians were reacting as sluggishly as ever.
"I have a new emitter to the northeast. Looks like a SAM-6 search radar."3 Uhak said. The new detection meant a battalion-strength SAM site. Uhak knew the Indian air-defence order of battle well; the ratio of search to guidance radars in these units was typically one to three. Destroying a single search radar could cripple the whole battalion and its dozen-odd launcher vehicles. That was far more valuable than bombing a few huts in an infantry division's rear area.
"Griffin lead, we have a fix on the twelve-centimetre source. Mobile SAM-6 battery at seventy kilometres. Guidance radar not yet active."
"Requesting permission to attack this position first." Uhak said. His aircraft carried a single anti-radiation missile, and he wanted to get rid of the heavy thing early. He knew the flight envelope of this old SAM-6 variant well. If he came in low, he could launch the MAR-14 from outside the enemy's effective range. Probably safer than overflying the AAA site.
The AWACS paused, apparently consulting someone. After a few seconds it approved the request. The major immediately turned onto the new target.
Uhak powered up the missile. The seeker began its spool-up routine, a process that took some time. The sensitive head had to analyse and memorise the emitter's continuous-wave signature and bearing. Those SAM-6 launchers, mounted on tracked chassis, could disperse and move. But the remote E-band search radar might not escape quickly enough.
The MAR-1 release-cleared cue lit up. At the same instant, the enemy's guidance radar began painting the F-16. Both aircraft and missile battery were now at the edge of each other's envelopes. It was a contest of nerve, though the more agile party, the aircraft, had the advantage. According to known data on this Indian variant, its engagement range against a target at 500 metres altitude was short. But known data could be wrong. Now was the moment to test whether it was.
1. Harun Mahdi (哈伦马赫迪): Uhak's current wingman, replacing Lieutenant Isa who was killed by Captain Rawal's R-77 during the Tridents' ambush earlier in the war. His youth and inexperience ("young lieutenant") contrasts with Uhak's caution. ↩
2. SAM-7 (萨姆7): The Soviet 9K32 Strela-2 (NATO: SA-7 Grail), a first-generation shoulder-launched IR-homing missile. Widely proliferated and still in service with Indian army air-defence units. Against a low-flying F-16, a shoulder-launched SAM is extremely difficult for an AWACS to warn against, since it leaves no radar signature before launch. Sami's warning is legitimate, not a ruse. ↩
3. SAM-6 (萨姆6): The Soviet 2K12 Kub (NATO: SA-6 Gainful), a tracked mobile medium-range SAM system. A Kub battalion typically fields one 1S91 "Straight Flush" search-and-track radar supporting multiple TEL vehicles. The "one-to-three ratio" Uhak cites is roughly accurate. The Kub's engagement envelope against low-altitude targets is notoriously poor; Uhak's assessment that he can launch from outside it while at 500 metres is based on published data, but this was an airframe that shot down several Israeli aircraft in 1973 through unexpected envelope extensions. ↩
4. MAR-1 (MAR-1): The Mectron MAR-1 is a Brazilian passive-homing anti-radiation missile. In late 2008 Brazil approved a 108 million US dollar sale of one hundred missiles to the Pakistan Air Force, intended for integration on the JF-17 Thunder and upgraded Mirage III/V ROSE fighters. Published range estimates vary from twenty-five kilometres (launched at low altitude) up to sixty or a hundred kilometres for higher-altitude launches; Mectron has characterised early public figures as understated. The MAR-1's seeker is broadband passive and requires a spool-up period to classify the target emitter, which matches the sequence described in the chapter. The novel's placement of the weapon on a Griffin F-16A rather than a JF-17 is an authorial liberty, since historically the missile was only integrated on the JF-17 and the ROSE Mirages. ↩