MiG
Captain Pandit sat in the not particularly roomy cockpit of his MiG-27 reading a copy of The Times of India. He had been there for several hours, half-suspecting that, as yesterday, the strike order would once again fail to come down.
The runway air temperature had reached forty degrees Celsius. Inside the cockpit a rumbling cooling cart was forcing chilled air in, making things a touch more bearable. This was the seventh day of the war, and Pandit's third day sitting at the end of the runway waiting for an attack order. He could turn his head and see Squadron Leader Makunda in the distant tower, the man's pate slightly thinning, pacing back and forth, no doubt also waiting for the word from above.
The captain shook his head and went back to his paper. The headline was the Prime Minister's solemn condemnation of the Pakistani bombing of a village in the Siwal district. Kahan had said: "Only cowards strike civilians again and again, and the Pakistan Air Force is unmistakably a coward, refusing to face battle and capable only of harming civilians."
Every other item in the paper was war-related, without exception. In an inconspicuous corner, the captain found a Foreign Ministry release exposing the latest list of weapons aid that a certain East Asian great power was providing to the Pakistani government. The article said: "Behind the terrorists is unquestionably the Pakistani government, and behind the Pakistani government appears to lie the shadow of a certain great power." Pandit knew the kind of veiled article aimed at the Chinese; the phrasing changed nothing because Chinese aid to Pakistan had always been open. The weapons list, however, caught his eye. After a long enumeration of tanks and armoured vehicles, a fighter type appeared. Pakistan was a small country and its air force had no experience with heavy fighters; on the list, however, the Pakistanis appeared to be on the verge of receiving a relatively heavy twin-engine fighter.1
For decades, Pakistan had built itself around a frontline fighter force whose centre of gravity was a body of well-trained pilots, with the airframes themselves, from the Mirage III through the J-7P to the F-16, all in the lightweight category. The major weakness of these aircraft was insufficient combat radius. Apart from the small number of F-16 Block 52s, every other aircraft in the inventory, including the new Thunder, simply could not fly far. If they had a few aircraft along the lines of the Su-30, then for the No. 29 Scorpion Squadron MiG-27s, which depended on getting in unobserved against ground targets, the seams to slip through would shrink considerably.
"Scorpion lead, please verify daytime targeting pod." the squadron leader's voice came over the radio. The order had finally arrived.
"Copy."
The captain switched on the HUD power and looked into the distance. He needed a slightly distant reference object to set the pitch alignment. By coincidence, a man was standing about a kilometre directly ahead of the aircraft, probably a runway-end sentry. He moved the rectangular video field-of-view box on the HUD upward to overlay the man, who was leaning against a tree, woolgathering, then powered up the television monitor. At maximum magnification, the fool standing there smoking became sharp in the centre of the screen. His breach of wing discipline was now plainly recorded, and he had no idea.
"Monitor working normally."
"Check instruments and weapons systems."
The captain spent a little time going over the aircraft's antiquated instruments and the master arm panel, confirming that the rack of dials was all in working order. Operating the aircraft was entirely a matter of skill; in fact more difficult than flying one of the great expensive Su-30s.
"Instruments normal. Weapons normal."
"Tasking received. Scorpion flight, prepare for take-off. Boys, good hunting."
Just as Makunda finished, a ground crewman climbed up the ladder beside the cockpit, checked the pilot's helmet, and adjusted the headrest. The captain took the chance to hand him the newspaper for safekeeping. He had not yet finished the article on the new aircraft the enemy might field. He hoped he could finish it that evening.
The canopy lowered slowly. The captain drew a deep breath. He knew the danger of today's tasking. The dam was a heavily defended position, and fresh reconnaissance reported AAA and radar systems mounted directly on top of the dam. As the aircraft made its level approach, however low it stayed, the defenders would have a long window in which to track and aim.
The ground crewman in front of the nose gave him the engine-start signal. The captain pressed the start switch. With a series of vibrations, engine RPM began to climb on the gauge. No drop tanks were needed for this mission, so he turned the fuel-pump selector to the wing tanks. He glanced at the second MiG-27 starting up beside the runway, where Flying Officer Arish2 in the cockpit gave him a V sign. The two aircraft would take off together; the other two would follow shortly. To strike a target this large was not, in itself, difficult. But to hope to destroy a dam with four 200-kilogram warheads was wishful thinking. There was no settled estimate of the warhead size required against such a dam: this, perhaps, was precisely the value of carrying out a real strike for assessment, since the air force could hardly use one of its own dams as a test article. One conservative figure: a concrete gravity dam of this scale would require dozens of direct hits with one-tonne warheads.3 Most of the world's tactical air forces did not carry bombs of that weight. Perhaps the Americans did, but they would not give them to India.
"Scorpion One requesting take-off."
"Runway clear. Take off at your discretion."
"Copy."
The MiG-27 take-off procedure was elaborate. Beside the throttle, the left hand had a separate lever for the wing-sweep angle; both had to be moved together to set the wings at a fixed angle for take-off, and the angle determined take-off distance. This redundant design had been considered modish 1960s technology, vanished from contemporary aircraft. The MiG-27 was a Cold War relic and had retained its variable-sweep wings.
At fifty per cent engine RPM, the captain released the brakes. The aircraft began to roll. He turned his head and watched Arish's number two open his wings and begin rolling on his rear quarter.
The two aircraft lifted off in sequence; the second pair followed off the runway from Jodhpur. The four pilots assigned to this strike had been hand-picked by the Air Staff from the personnel files. Two were from No. 18 "Flying Bullets" Squadron at Kalaikunda.4 Each had over a thousand hours; each had flown at least one previous combat sortie.
The first portion of the route was not dangerous. Mangla Dam sat close to the Indian border, and the aircraft could close on the target in tight formation along the Indian side.
"Pray we do not run into those damned F-16s today." Arish in number two said.
"What I really worry about is the Stinger on the ground. Once it has you, no one will warn you." Pandit said. The MiG-27 could shake off a Stinger by lighting the burner, but the small SAM was hard to spot. An experienced operator would launch when the aircraft was in profile, leaving the narrow-vision MiG pilot blind to the missile's spiralling smoke trail. In particular, near the release area, the pilot's eyes had to leave the front and look down to the cockpit-floor television monitor, while bringing speed back to about 500 kph for the release. The most dangerous moment for being killed.
1. The Foreign Ministry leak: A novel-internal piece of stagecraft. The "weapons aid list" planted in the Indian press is intended to draw a Chinese diplomatic response that can be parsed for what Beijing is or is not denying. The detail about a heavy twin-engine fighter is the giveaway: the J-11 quietly mentioned by Rujadnahan in Chapter 52 as a possible Chinese transfer to Pakistan. Pandit, an experienced strike pilot but no intelligence officer, reads the same item and draws the operational implication for his own squadron's job. ↩
2. Flying Officer Arish: New character; Pandit's wingman, originally with No. 18 "Flying Bullets" Squadron at Kalaikunda, attached to the Mangla strike package. Survives the chapter; survives the next two as well, though at substantial cost to the airframe. ↩
3. Bombs against a concrete gravity dam: A concrete gravity dam resists overturning and sliding by sheer mass; breaching one requires either a very large warhead applied with care to the structural geometry, or a sequence of warheads concentrated on the same point. The British Operation Chastise of May 1943, against the Möhne and Edersee dams in the Ruhr, used the purpose-designed Upkeep bouncing bomb (each weighing roughly 4,200 kilograms) to defeat exactly the same problem. The MiG-27's standard load of 250 to 500-kilogram general-purpose bombs is two orders of magnitude short of what would be needed for serious damage. Pandit understands this; the strike's purpose, as Makunda has hinted in Chapter 51, is not actually to breach the dam. ↩
4. No. 18 "Flying Bullets" Squadron: A real Indian Air Force squadron, historically associated with the MiG-27 ground-attack role, with stations at various points including Kalaikunda Air Force Station in West Bengal. Drawing two of the four strike pilots from a unit normally posted to the eastern sector indicates the value the Air Staff is placing on experienced MiG-27 operators for the Mangla mission. ↩