An Overwhelming Advantage
"The enemy pair is still accelerating. I'm certain it's F-16s." Captain Rawal pushed the throttle into afterburner. He was worried about fuel, but the enemy was within weapons range. After a few seconds' hesitation, he pushed past the sound barrier. Now was the moment to run them down. The captain knew well that the MiG-29 had one fatal weakness: poor rearward visibility, which made it vulnerable to a sneak attack from behind. He placed number three four kilometres in trail to watch the aft quadrant. The arrangement, he thought, was foolproof.
Meanwhile, cued by the AWACS, Sami's flight was closing on the Indian formation from behind, completely unnoticed. Sami knew the Tridents' MiG-29Bs1 were nothing to write home about. Their scheduled modernisation had never been completed. The new Zhuk radar had not been delivered, thanks to the war. The old pulse-Doppler set rendered the aircraft essentially incapable of a look-down-shoot-down kill beyond visual range. But at close quarters, the MiG-29 was formidable. The Thunder shared an engine family with it. The difference: the MiG-29B had two, the Thunder had one. Sami had no personal experience against MiG-29s. He guessed it would hold a slight edge in the climb, and that in the high-subsonic turn the Thunder would not gain much on it either.
"Listen. Their trick is to slave an R-73 with the helmet-mounted sight and fire.2 Watch them constantly. If they try it, don't freeze. Manoeuvre immediately, any direction. Against an aircraft that moves, the hit probability is close to zero." Sami said over the radio. He had said this to his pilots before, more than once. He had always understood that, given the limited field of view of an infrared missile, helmet-cueing was a crude form of lock; the seeker itself had actually seen nothing. The pilot had merely measured the target's bearing, and the missile flew a preset trajectory toward that point. If the target held its heading, the method could still reliably kill a bandit at four or ten o'clock.
"Stay glued to their tails. Do not let them turn around. Four against two. We hold an overwhelming advantage." (Sami's arithmetic: the MiG-29 lagging at the rear could be picked off by stealth and was therefore not counted as part of the dogfight.)
"Lead, will Griffin turn back to help us?"
"Uhaq won't dare come back. He knows I'm not to be trifled with." Sami said, deliberately letting the words travel so Uhaq would hear. He did not want the Griffins folding back in and making the picture messier, and, on the other hand, he did not want them snatching credit from No. 26.
"Black Spider lead, if you're going to do something, don't drag your feet. Thanks be to God we've held on this long. Their fire-control radar has been on us the whole way." Uhaq called back, pleading. He had never imagined Sami was still worrying about petty internal rivalry at a moment like this. The shock was genuine.
Black Spider completed its turn. The trailing MiG-29 was now dead ahead, not yet visible, but on the MFD Sami could see the aircraft accelerating ten kilometres out at around Mach 0.9. All of this he owed to the Erieye orbiting 270 kilometres to the rear, and to a home-grown Pakistani data link modelled on Link 16. The group captain could leave his own radar off; a radar emission would betray him immediately. He could close from the rear in his preferred manner. In terms of information asymmetry, Captain Rawal was already in a lost position. In the entire history of modern air combat, few pilots have recovered from so adverse a starting point. A fighter's radar, in range and in angular coverage, cannot be spoken of in the same breath as an AWACS. Rawal had blundered eyes-closed into a carefully prepared trap.
The four Thunders held four thousand metres in line abreast, five hundred metres apart, scanning visually. Sami soon picked out the MiG-29's contrail at the same altitude. Then Flight Lieutenant Abbas,3 on the outboard side, caught the sun glinting off the MiG's canopy eight or nine kilometres out. On the group captain's order the flight accelerated. With fuel in hand, they pushed to Mach 1.5, and within a short time had closed to a few kilometres behind the MiG-29. To be safe, the group captain tightened the formation, so that if the enemy pilot happened to glance back he would not take in the whole flight at once.
Sami decided against fire-control radar. At this geometry it was not necessary. He powered up the missile seeker and let the PL-5E's head acquire the target on its own.4
He steadied the aircraft, waited for the artificial horizon on the HUD to stop drifting, then worked the target into the HUD's centre. It took time to bring the MiG onto the velocity vector mark. The mark was not a gunsight, but in straight-and-level flight it sat roughly along the aircraft's longitudinal axis, aligned with the nose. There was no fixed forward-pointing cross symbol on the HUD centre, so when the velocity vector held in the middle, the group captain could be reasonably confident the missile's ±2° seeker field of view was on the target. Ten-odd seconds later the seeker tone sounded. The missile had the target. He eyeballed the range: two or three kilometres, close to the AWACS's reading. The MiG-29 simply presented a larger aspect; he had once tried to use a PL-5 head directly against a MiG-21 and acquisition had come only at about a kilometre.
He pressed the release without hesitation. In the two-salvo mode he had set, the two missiles left the rails in sequence and accelerated toward an enemy who still had no idea anything was wrong.
The first missile struck one of the vertical fins. The second detonated near the opposite wing. The MiG-29 entered a flat spin at once, then broke apart.
All of it had gone to plan. The group captain dropped his head to the MFD. The data link picture confirmed what he expected: the MiG-29 pair in front had abandoned their pursuit and were turning south to run. Though the Indians could not see him, Sami noted the lead MiG's read on the tactical situation was remarkably accurate. He clearly knew which direction the threat was coming from. The group captain felt a pang of regret. He should have detached two aircraft southward earlier. He could have had the pair bottled.
"We press after them. They can't fly south indefinitely. They'll have to turn back into Indian airspace before the fuel runs out."
"Lead, our fuel isn't great either." Abbas reminded him.
"Where's Griffin?" the group captain asked, glancing down. The two F-16s were still running, though they had climbed a little.
"Griffin lead, you're closest to the bandits. Return to the fight at once." Sami called.
"Negative, Group Captain. We're almost out of fuel." Uhaq said. By now he had figured out entirely that Sami had used him as bait. He had no appetite for turning around and doing Sami's pursuit work for him.
"Command, I need Griffin back in the fight." Sami called Major General Islam directly. Every pilot on the net heard it.
"Command speaking. Griffin flight, return to the fight at once. Do not worry about fuel. A tanker is orbiting southwest of you."
Islam, in the command post, backed Sami within seconds. For the major general, downing more Indian aircraft was the priority. He did not want two MiG-29s on full throttle getting home. He also knew that while the F-16 had less fuel than the Thunder, the Thunder could not refuel in the air. The F-16A could.
1. MiG-29B vs MiG-29UPG (米格29b): Earlier chapters (C11 onward) identified the Tridents as flying the MiG-29UPG. The text here clarifies that No. 223 Squadron's aircraft remain in the older MiG-29B configuration, with the Zhuk-ME radar retrofit and other UPG-standard upgrades delayed by Russia's wartime supply difficulties. This explains the radar's poor look-down performance against Uhaq's F-16As in the previous chapter and its failure to reacquire the retreating pair here. ↩
2. Helmet-mounted sight with R-73: The MiG-29's Shchel-3UM helmet-mounted sight allows the pilot to cue the R-73 seeker to roughly 40° off-boresight by eye. Sami's dismissal; that such shots have "near-zero" hit probability against an aircraft that manoeuvres at all; is partly bravado for his wingmen. In practice the R-73 was one of the more feared close-range systems of its generation. His underlying point is sound: a cued launch without full seeker acquisition is defeatable by immediate hard manoeuvre. ↩
3. Flight Lieutenant Abbas (阿巴斯中尉): A pilot in Sami's No. 26 Squadron, previously mentioned by name in the opening chapters during the mountain rescue engagements. The Chinese 中尉 corresponds to the PAF rank of Flight Lieutenant. ↩
4. PL-5E (PL-5E导弹): A Chinese short-range infrared-guided air-to-air missile, an improved member of the PL-5 family with an all-aspect seeker head. In this chapter it is mounted on the JF-17 Thunder for close-in engagements; Sami's earlier remark that No. 26's Thunders cannot yet fire the SD-10 medium-range missile (C26) makes the PL-5E his only air-to-air option. ↩