A New Adversary
"Captain, you hit it. I saw it." Arish said over the radio. The result was just as he had expected.
"I'm overhead watching for you. Drop now."
The captain pulled up to 800 metres. For him, things had become very simple. Wait for the others to release, then withdraw together. The three trailing aircraft made the run in single trail at one-kilometre intervals. With the rooftop AAA gone, the run was little harder than an exercise. All three TV-guided bombs struck the dam; on the great front face of Mangla Dam, however, they left only three trivial little craters.
"Strike complete. No appreciable damage to the dam." Pandit circled once over the dam and saw the small craters smoking white. He felt suddenly that the entire attack had been worthless. Only an Agni missile with a nuclear warhead could harm something on this scale,1 and that, of course, was unthinkable.
"Scorpion flight, return at once. Bandits inbound from your north." A bad piece of news from the ground command.
"Range, bearing?"
"Last contact at forty kilometres. Lost now. May be hidden behind terrain."
The PSM-33 long-range radar's antenna only made eight rotations a minute, so losing a slippery target was routine.
"Rhino flight, where are they?"
"Bearing 130. They're inbound, you must vector southeast."
The MiG-27 had no fashionable toys like a data link. No multifunction LCD to display friend and foe. Not even a radar. So ground voice control was, for these bombers, all but the only means of acquiring beyond-visual-range information.2 Now the captain did not know the enemy's exact bearing or range. He could only do as ground told him and run. But he kept one thing in mind: he did not want to retreat into the face of the Rhino Su-30MKIs, even though that was, on paper, the safest course. None of the pre-mission briefings had ever covered what happened when one was sandwiched between two parties both capable of beyond-visual-range fire. In any event, while crossing the radar coverage of both sides, the IFF panel, which was supposed to be on, had not blinked once. Which was to say, the IFF unit, twenty years old and never upgraded, would not necessarily work when it needed to.
"Scorpion flight, on me. Heading 102."
"Copy."
Number three and number four were still in the climb. The captain had to complete his orbit and wait for them. He had decided to take the shortest route home. "Forty kilometres is not a great distance. If these Pakistani aircraft that have just appeared are carrying medium-range missiles, it's a very dangerous distance." He could hardly wait to bring his nose east, push the bank over, and complete the last turn. In the meantime, he saw two pinpricks of light at the far edge of the sky, coming toward him. Pandit had never been on the receiving end of a real missile attack and froze for a moment. Then he glanced down at the radar warning system. It was still serenely unaware.
"What is…"
Number three and number four below him exploded in mid-air, in succession, within less than a tenth of a second of each other.
"Enemy missile launch. Scorpion flight, evade." The warning on the VHF radio had only just come through. Plainly the long-range warning radar, with its sub-ten-revolution-per-minute sweep, could not refresh its target picture in time, much less detect an enemy launch and warn against it.
"Direct hit, the damned RWS didn't work, it's their F-16s." The captain shouted, sweeping for Arish's number two. He now understood that the enemy was an aircraft (or aircraft) with the ability to engage multiple targets at long range, and naturally enough assumed those missiles had come from F-16s, the most advanced aircraft in Pakistani service.
"On me. Burn for the border." he called, pushing the throttle to the afterburner detent. As he accelerated the aircraft began to buffet violently. He worked the manual variable-sweep lever to the maximum sweep angle and switched on the anti-surge system. Arish's voice came through in time: "On your six. Their radar lock just dropped, never got a fix on him."
The captain did not answer. Number two had fallen in behind on his own. The only thing to do was accelerate clear. Perhaps the Rhinos would close in time and intercept. Perhaps the enemy had got his fill and was already turning home. Either way, he was blind. He had no patience for guessing. He still had no idea where the bandit was, no idea whether the bandit might use his eastward heading to cut him off. If the bandit had been northeast of him a moment ago and had used some method to defeat the slow, low-grade horizontal sweep of the ground warning radar, the possibility could not be ruled out. As of now, both the air support and the ground control had been a damned mess. Worse to come? Who could say.
A twin-tail aircraft emerged from a distant cloudbank to the north. So big that the captain made it out by eye at about eight kilometres' range. Pakistan had no twin-tailed heavy fighter, so this aircraft did not belong to the PAF. But why was it flying on a wrong heading?
It was not a Rhino Su-30MKI; the captain saw no large canard at the front. Perhaps an Su-30K? To his knowledge, India's Su-30Ks were deployed far away, on the Bangladesh axis. Why his fear was not eased by the timely appearance of a friendly aircraft, he could not say. He could see the Su-30's wings, with their two missiles, glinting in the late afternoon sun. It was making straight for him.
"Su-30 driver, bandit on your six. Don't fly toward us." The captain called on the simulated secure analogue net pre-set for the operation. No reply. The other aircraft only rolled half a turn, growing larger and more menacing. The damned pilot must be off his head; he was setting up a firing solution.
"Damn it. Bandit." the captain bellowed, voice tearing. The most terrifying moment of his life: ten times worse than seeing his comrades disintegrate a minute earlier.
"Say again?" the ground command pressed. The captain did not answer the late and slow command post. They had not been able to see the enemy clearly all this time, and they would not be of any use now either. He kept punching out flares and chaff to spoil any solution the other pilot might be working, dropped from 1,500 to 500 metres in a single descending spiral, and gave little thought to number two. It was now down to whatever each man could do to save himself. When he looked back, the single-seat Su-30 (Su-27?)3 was tearing off in another direction. Toward Arish. The aircraft did not look as broad as a Rhino MKI and bore no tactical markings of any kind.
"He's stuck on me. I can't shake him." Arish shouted on the radio. The link cut. Pandit saw no explosion in the surrounding sky.
"Status?" the base asked, role reversed.
"I… saw… I saw…" the captain wheezed, pushing past Mach 1; the last hard turn had robbed him of his breath.
"Say… again."
"An Su-30. Theirs."
The captain ran straight for the border. He had used the afterburner so long that he did not have the fuel to make it back to Jodhpur. He diverted to the closest forward field, Bathinda, for an emergency landing. Two days later, when he returned to Jodhpur, he was astonished to find that Flying Officer Arish had also made it back safely. The cost had been considerable. To shake the Su-30 off his tail, Arish, in the MiG-27 he had brought down from the Flying Bullets, had pulled an instantaneous ten-g turn close to the speed of sound; well outside the manual. He had nearly blacked out. The turn had embodied its squadron's name to perfection and saved the lieutenant's life. The price was high. When the aircraft landed, just barely, the ground crew found severe airframe deformation. The left wing could no longer return to anything past 45° sweep. The aircraft was a write-off.
1. Agni missile (烈火导弹): India's Agni family is a series of land-based surface-to-surface ballistic missiles developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation, with ranges from a few hundred kilometres (Agni-I) up to intercontinental class (Agni-V/VI). The Agni is India's principal nuclear delivery vehicle. Pandit's reflection that "only an Agni with a nuclear warhead could harm something on this scale" is the captain admitting, after the fact, the strict pointlessness of the conventional strike. Makunda's hint in Chapter 51 that "effect is secondary, hit the target is all" now reads as the calmer, political logic Lin laid out in Chapter 52: the strike is a signalling operation, not a destruction operation. ↩
2. The Sirena warning system: The Chinese parenthetical here adds that the only other beyond-visual-range cue available to the MiG-27 pilot is the Sirena radar warning system, which would chirp if a hostile fire-control radar managed to lock the aircraft. Sirena (NATO designation SPO-10/SPO-15) is the Soviet-era family of radar warning receivers fitted to the MiG-23/27 generation. Pandit's "RWS" indicator is the same Sirena box; in practice, against a modern AESA emitter operated in low-probability-of-intercept mode, the Sirena is essentially deaf. ↩
3. "Su-30 (Su-27?)": Pandit's parenthetical confusion in the source is preserved verbatim. He has caught a glimpse of a heavy twin-engine, twin-tail fighter without canards and without tactical markings, and his catalogue is inadequate to the sight: the only Pakistani-side platform he has any reason to expect with that silhouette is a fictionalised Su-30K, which he has just talked himself out of. The aircraft is in fact a J-11; that is, a Chinese-licensed Su-27 derivative, as discussed in Rujadnahan's brief to Singh in Chapter 52, evidently flown by Major Song Ning of the Kamra delegation (C25). The novel has set up the reveal carefully across three chapters and now lets the Indian pilot witness, but not name, the new variable in the war. ↩