Close Combat
Uhaq had no choice. He accepted the general's order and turned back on the two MiG-29Bs. He checked his fuel carefully. The drop tank was empty. He switched the selector to the wing tanks and jettisoned the external store. His wingman was in slightly better shape: a few hundred litres remained in the drop tank.
"Griffin, listen. Take their right flank, light up your radar, and drive them to me." Sami had begun to run the whole engagement with unmistakable ambition.
"Griffin copies. But they're carrying a full weapons load. Without BVR missiles, best not to overreach." Uhaq warned his old commanding officer out of genuine concern. Sami was never easy company, but he remained the Pakistan Air Force's most precious fighter pilot.
"Thank you for the reminder. Only one Indian fighter gives me any concern at all, and it isn't these MiG-29s."
Twenty kilometres away, Captain Rawal was caught between two bad options. Having turned away from the F-16 pair ahead, his tactical picture had shrunk almost to nothing. The price of flying this deep into enemy territory. All he knew was that a radiation source to the northwest had been active without a break; certainly an AWACS. Which meant every other Pakistani fighter in the area could find him without using its own radar. Tracing enemy positions through their emissions was therefore useless. How many enemies were in the other quadrants, and where, he had no idea. The one thing he did know was that going back the way he had come was a very bad bet. Number three had been shot down from the rear; the enemy's scheme was to cut off the retreat. One option remained: call for help.
"Command, I need Lion support."
"Trident lead, we do not have you on radar."
"I'm one hundred and fifty kilometres west of Halwara. You'll have me soon enough. There are a lot of bandits behind me."
"Lion Squadron has two aircraft on alert, ready to scramble. You can close on them."
It was difficult to fathom how feeble Punjab's air surveillance had become. A single pair of F-16s, using a handful of small anti-radiation missiles, had crippled ground navigation and low-level air defence across the whole sector.1 He was pinning his hopes now on No. 31 Lion Squadron's Su-30MKIs getting airborne in time and using their AESA radars to sweep this dangerous airspace. Among Indian aircrew an article of faith circulated: never count on the AWACS. When you need it, it won't be there.
At four o'clock, an F-16's radar returned on Rawal's RWS. The enemy had turned back. Rawal knew the F-16s had no BVR missiles, but without being able to measure the range, the fact was no comfort. He could have held south for a while, shaken them, then turned east. It was too late. The fuel warning light had come on. He made the wrong call. He jettisoned his drop tank and turned hard east, flying blind toward Sami's formation.
Sami, reading it on the data link, saw his moment. The enemy would be wary of his quadrant, but there was nowhere else to go.
"Black Spider lead, the bandit is crossing your front. Suggest you reduce speed, don't overshoot."
Sami ignored the prompt. He had the picture. He knew what to do. Given a BVR weapon, he could have fired now. Without one, it would cost a few more turns.
"Abbas, climb high. Stop them escaping upward. The rest of you follow me. We cut inside their turn. Eyes sharp: don't let them see us first." The group captain reverted, once again, to his preferred ambush.
Far away at Halwara, two Su-30MKIs scrambled and accelerated west, radars on, sweeping due west. What they saw startled the pilots. At 120 kilometres, numerous aircraft were boxing in two MiG-29s from several directions. The Su-30 pilots relayed this to the ground command at once. It was already late. Rawal's pair were locked in a one-sided turning fight against three Thunders holding the higher, more advantageous position. Both MiGs were on the defensive.
The moment the Su-30s lifted off, Sami had noted them to the east. The group captain, on the attack, was paying little attention to his surroundings. These new contacts were still far out, posed no immediate threat, and within a minute the fight here would be decided. He had latched on to the Indian lead and was forcing him apart from his wingman. As expected, the lead MiG tried the instinctive answer: climb. Abbas was waiting above.
Sami left the wingman to his two trailing aircraft. The wingman was clearly not a serious opponent: he was wallowing left and right, a cardinal sin in a dogfight. Every extraneous motion cost altitude or speed, which was why competent pilots did not move unless they had to. The lead MiG was another matter. Pinned, he had hauled his aircraft almost vertically up, hovering just above Sami's canopy rail: visible to the eye but above the fire-control radar's upward vertical-scan limit. On the HUD, the velocity vector had slid to the bottom of the display. Both aircraft were pulling full climb, instantaneous g approaching eight.
"Abbas, cut him off."
Sami did not know precisely where Abbas was. There was no time for the HDD. In principle Abbas should be at six, able to box in the MiG. The Indian pilot's agility with two R-27s still on the rails made a strong impression. Sami began to worry the MiG would slip through his fingers.
Abbas's Thunder had now taken a favourable head-on position. From above, with the radar aperture steady on the climbing MiG at the top of its zoom, he fired two PL-5Es without hesitation. But the stubborn Indian pilot's attention was total. He had seen the launch flashes. A roll, level, then an immediate hard descending turn. Sami watched the two missiles come tumbling through a wash of flare smoke toward him, like headless flies. He had to wrench into a savage bank: a nine-g manoeuvre that almost lost him the target. He watched them pass, then brought his nose back. The radar reacquired quickly. In that moment, the MiG-29 had clawed its speed up to an astonishing 700 kph. The Indian had wasted nothing. Nose down, afterburner, a burst of chaff, and the two superfluous R-27s fired away into the ground.2 A veteran, past question. Sami shoved the throttle to the stop. The MiG rolled ninety degrees onto its side without turning; clearly he was flying sideways to keep an eye on one quadrant of the fight. Sami fired a missile at two kilometres. The Indian pilot had been watching his six the whole time and dodged in time again. For an older missile, telling tracers and a jet exhaust apart was hard work. But the evasion brought the two aircraft inside a kilometre. Sami went straight to guns. He knew that against a nimble but wide-profile airframe, a radar-ranged gun mode3 could be remarkably effective, especially given that the Indian pilot was not manoeuvring laterally to any serious degree.
1. Anti-radiation effects on the sector: Uhaq's MAR-1 strike in Chapter 44 took out one Indian army guidance radar; a second search radar is destroyed later in the day (see C47N3). Combined with the earlier sabotage of a long-range warning radar by infiltrators, the loss cascade has punched a significant hole in Punjab sector's lower-altitude coverage, exactly the vulnerability Amos and Singh were discussing in Chapter 33. ↩
2. Jettisoning the R-27s: An R-27 (NATO: AA-10 Alamo) weighs approximately 250 kilograms. Shedding two of them in extremis, even without firing them usefully, meaningfully improves the MiG-29's thrust-to-weight and acceleration. The Chinese text describes the pilot firing them into the ground rather than simply ejecting them, which is faster and avoids the additional drag of a separation transient. A move that only an experienced pilot under duress would think to make. ↩
3. Radar-ranged gun mode (漏斗状瞄准): The "snake funnel" or EEGS (Enhanced Envelope Gun Sight) reticle on the HUD. Radar ranging continuously computes the lead required for a gun solution, given the target's aspect and the projectile's time of flight, and projects a funnel-shaped figure on the HUD. The shooter brings the target's wingspan to fit the funnel's walls at the corresponding range mark. Effective against a non-jinking target; easily defeated by the kind of snake-weave evasion Rawal employs in the following chapter. ↩