Escape
"Black Spider lead, the bandit's wingman is down." the AWACS said.
"Good."
Sami barely got the word out. The aircraft was still accelerating; every syllable cost him.
"Another update. Two enemy Su-30s are eighty-five kilometres away and inbound, now at a thousand kph. I recommend you break off." the AWACS continued.
"Copy."
Sami knew that at that closure rate he would be inside the Su-30's long-range missile envelope in thirty seconds. But there was time for one more pass. From what he could see, the MiG-29 he was chasing was slowly opening the gap. The Indian pilot had been entirely right to fire off the two R-27s. He now had a slight thrust-to-weight advantage, and that advantage might carry him away.
On the Thunder's HUD, two twisting thin lines were shifting constantly. The group captain fought the aircraft steady and tried to bring the MiG-29 into them. The funnel-shaped reticle was not the conventional gunsight; based on continuous radar ranging, it compensated for the target's attitude. If the shooter could fit the MiG's wings roughly inside the funnel's walls, the gun solution was reliable. But it was miserable work, because a target that manoeuvred hard could usually spoil the aim.
The enemy broke off his pure acceleration and resumed lateral jinking, working with everything he had to break the track. When Sami pressed the gun button, the MiG was already rolling one way. A burst of cannon shells flew off toward a far horizon and hit nothing. The group captain followed into the turn, but the reticle could not keep pace. It brought back to him the canard-delta he had flown days earlier when he shot down the Mirage 2000. That aircraft's instantaneous turn rate and acceleration were far superior to the JF-17's.
The second burst went the same way. The MiG reversed suddenly the other direction. Snake-weave was reliable against a radar-ranged solution. The group captain knew the pilot ahead was not running blindly. He was looking back constantly, reading Sami's intent.
"Black Spider lead, I remind you, your fuel is low."
Sami ignored it. He silenced the low-fuel audio warning, which had been chirping for some time. He had the fuel picture in his head. Benazir Bhutto International was close by,1 and he was not rushed. A day earlier, Major General Islam had warned every pilot that landing casually at civilian airfields might hand the Indian Air Force a pretext to strike civilian targets. Sami had paid the warning no mind. If India wanted a pretext, it would always find one.
The MiG-29 slipped slowly out of gun range. Neither aircraft had altitude left to trade for speed. Sami picked his moment and fired his last missile. The enemy twisted away in an ugly, bludgeoning hard turn. An old missile against a pilot of genuine quality: lock broken too easily, maddening to watch.
Sami watched his quarry cross back into Indian airspace, powerless. As he turned away, the two Su-30s that had come up fast were now forty kilometres out. They did not fire. They turned back. No. 31 Lion Squadron was legendary for its caution. The IAF had lost more than a hundred aircraft in ten years; the Lion Squadron had lost none. Their conservatism was baked into their tactics.2 Without AWACS support they would not push deep.
Captain Rawal sat in the cockpit breathing hard. He had just had his life handed back to him. A few days earlier, he and Flying Officer Goyal of Bareilly had met for the first time in a corridor at Hindustan National Television. They had talked about the air engagements each had flown, in different sectors, and something in the conversation had overlapped. Rawal had mentioned that after his flight used a BVR missile to down an F-16, a Thunder with a madman at the stick, from the same enemy formation, had single-handedly pursued four MiG-21s returning to Sarsawa and shot two of them down. The story had plainly caught Goyal's interest. Goyal had guessed on instinct that this was the same Thunder that had nearly killed him. He still remembered the tail number: 101.
A minute earlier, as Rawal had pulled his aircraft round in a hard turn, he had kept looking back. The pursuer had been very close, trying the gun. Rawal had read the tail number clearly. It was 101. Perhaps an internal squadron serial. But only two PAF squadrons flew this type.3
"Trident lead, you may follow No. 31 Squadron's aircraft and divert to Halwara. It's closer. There's no tanker in the area if your fuel's short." The ground station pulled Rawal out of his thoughts.
"Negative. I can make Adampur. I need to report this engagement to the wing commander at once. They have never used these tactics before."
"Captain, these tactics aren't their invention. It's retaliation for the two F-16Cs the Eagles took from them over the Siachen glacier this morning."4
"Every time we get boxed in, I want to know where the hell our AWACS is. They tell us the enemy has only a few. The bandits still come out of every direction."
"There was a ground-radar problem. At first light a group of infiltrators blew up the long-range warning radar on the Dawa Heights. A short while ago, anti-radiation bombs knocked out another army search radar."
The whole thing was farce. It seemed to Rawal that before the Defence Ministry decided on all-out war, it ought to have thought matters through a little more soberly. Singh had assured everyone that going at Pakistan would be as clean as the American campaign against Iraq, and that within a few weeks the Indian Air Force alone would beat Pakistan into submission. Every sort of unfavourable development was instead coming in like the set-pieces of a third-rate script. Pakistan's handful of Erieye AWACS still could not be overcome. The IAF's ground radars were being destroyed by Muslim insurgents, in places that should have been heavily defended even in peacetime. The Tridents had several MiG-29Bs sitting beside the runway at Adampur for want of spare parts. Perhaps the Defence Ministry had decided that this state of readiness was enough to win a two-front war, without troubling to stockpile parts first. And if the far stronger neighbour to the northeast entered the fight, Rawal could not begin to imagine what would follow.
1. Benazir Bhutto International (贝布托国际机场): Pakistan's principal civilian airport, serving Islamabad and Rawalpindi, about fifty kilometres east of Sami's home base at Attock. In Chapter 14, Sami had already used it as a diversionary airfield; the earlier farce of landing almost directly behind the UN envoy's Boeing 747 remains the outstanding precedent. Islam's warning against casual civilian-airfield diversions is the sort of injunction Sami has always been incapable of heeding. ↩
2. No. 31 "Lion" Squadron's zero-loss record: The caution of the Lions is a running thread. Their conservatism contrasts with the aggression of No. 50 "War Gods" (Phalcon, C34) and the Eagle flight that ambushed Hassan at Siachen (C37–C38). The squadron's refusal to cross the border without AWACS cover is, from the Pakistani point of view, an operational gift. ↩
3. Aircraft 101: Sami's JF-17 Thunder in No. 26 "Black Spider" Squadron at Attock, introduced in Chapter 25. Rawal now connects three separate engagements to the same airframe: the Thunder that shot down two returning MiG-21s from the bait flight he launched (C13–C14); the "madman" Goyal's flight had barely escaped on Day One (C5); and, a minute ago, the pursuer on his own tail. Pakistan operates the Thunder in No. 26 at Attock and in No. 14; only the former had been in combat at that time. ↩
4. The Siachen score: The ground controller's reference is to the morning's engagement over the Siachen Glacier (C37–C38), in which Goyal's Eagle flight of Su-30MKIs, cued by an A-50EI Phalcon, ambushed Major Hassan's four-ship of No. 5 Squadron F-16Cs. Two F-16Cs were destroyed (Rashid and Falcon Four); Hassan himself escaped by flying through a mountain valley the Su-30s could not follow. The final result was two Pakistani F-16Cs for two Indian MiG-21 bait aircraft. ↩