Hit Rate
Kushan knew a missile was somewhere close, but when the pilot in the rear seat looked back, he could not for the moment place where it had gone. All he could see was a single white trail spiralling up from below. Perhaps the missile had already lost the target? the pilot thought. The Su-30 was not an aircraft that could never be shot down; but he hoped that, whatever happened, it would not be today.
The missile detonated in an instant, violently, in the observation blind spot behind and below the aircraft, and the huge fighter began to roll hard. Lieutenant Kushan did not need to look back to know the aircraft was finished. The savage tumbling began to drag his consciousness away. He watched the airspeed reading fall to a low figure before he hauled the canopy-jettison handle, and the zero-zero ejection seats1 flung both crew clear of the doomed machine. Turning over in the air, waiting for his chute to open, the lieutenant saw his own falling fighter blown to pieces; the missile had plainly detonated very close beneath the aircraft.
"Command, we have lost a Lion. The pilots appear to have ejected."
The AWACS reported to the ground command post.
The Chief of Air Staff had inserted himself stubbornly into the operation, and in doing so had disrupted the existing command structure. For the moment everyone, the AWACS included, had to obey him, and yet he was the man furthest from the battlefield. For several years the Indian Air Force had been experimenting with a new command arrangement, one that gave airborne command authority priority over ground command, a method the Chief of Staff himself had pushed hard. But an arrangement is one thing; the moment his orders came over the radio into the air, everything changed.2
"I saw it. Bring the Torch flight all the way home," Bifrata answered. He had a premonition this would not be the only Su-30 lost today.
The order to withdraw came, perhaps, a little late. The Torch flight was already sinking into confusion. On the ground the Pakistani fire-control radars were tracking the flight's four aircraft without a break, and those radars were plainly very close: the flight was at a range where they could absolutely burn through the jamming.
The distant Flying Snake flight (the electronic-warfare aircraft) was 100 kilometres off, accelerating toward the battle area, but by now it too could do nothing. The pre-battle electronic reconnaissance had been carried out by the drone units, and they had indeed gathered some emission data from the Pakistani side's radars; the Flying Snake flight had stored those signatures as well. But the radars the Pakistanis were using today had signatures that were an entire blank in the records. These radars were known to run short, shifting pulses across rapidly varying frequency bands, and follower deception3 (recording the incoming emission, delaying it, and transmitting it back to confuse the enemy radar) was almost wholly ineffective. This meant the enemy on the ground certainly had strong technical support directing the Pakistani operators (the only conclusion the Indian pilots could draw from years of dealing with Pakistan's ground-to-air units). The missiles scattered through the mountains began to fire, one after another, and dazzling white light filled the sky.
The FD-2000 system was capable of engaging multiple targets at once, and in theory could fire on all nine remaining aircraft; but today the ground commander did not appear greedy. He aimed at only four targets, and put two missiles onto each.
As Flight Lieutenant Sahili4 was scrambling to direct the Torch flight clear of the missile attack, his rear-seat weapons officer made a startling discovery on the data-link display: the Thunder flight fleeing to the west had actually begun to turn. The flight lieutenant realised he had walked into a shameless piece of bait-fishing.
Within twenty seconds, two of the Su-30s in the formation were struck in succession and went down in the Dumaili5 hill country. The lieutenant saw all four aircrew take to their chutes (Kushan's aircraft could not see it), but he knew this was a long way from the border and rescue was out of the question. Given that they had just taken part in the dam-bombing operation, how Pakistan would treat these No. 31 Squadron pilots was a thing very much worth worrying about.
This engagement was the FD-2000's first use in combat, and its hit rate did not seem especially high (ten rounds bringing down three aircraft). Clearly the figure was somewhat below the hit rates written in the export brochures propped beside the display stand. Even so, the result was already enough to have Air Commodore Islam6, inside the Saab 2000, grinning ear to ear. The air commodore now had no mind at all for the rest of the battle. He had just detailed the AWACS communications NCO to contact the ground troops and immediately search for the ejected Indian pilots and the wreckage, as though terrified the wreckage might slip away. His thoughts had long since flown off the battlefield; he was thinking that he ought to bring every foreign journalist out to the wreckage to take photographs, so they could see how an aircraft India produced at a rate of a bare twelve per year had, in a single morning, become three heaps of scrap.
Air Commodore Islam had reckoned a touch conservatively. His ace card was at that moment leading a four-ship flight, hard on the tail of the seven Su-30s falling back. Perhaps Sami's ambition ran larger still: what he hoped to destroy in one stroke was half a year of Indian production.
"Group Captain Sami, the enemy aircraft are fleeing southeast. No other aircraft observed taking off from Indian-side airfields. That electronic-warfare aircraft has stayed over the Sialkot7 area. It is jamming communications." The controller aboard the AWACS.
"I've already seen it," Sami answered. At the same moment his half-fuel warning tone chimed once. Sami switched the reminder off, entirely unconcerned.
"Abbas, you're too slow. Don't come chasing over here. Do your best to drive off that damned jammer by the border; while it sits there, we can't see the Indian fighters taking off and landing west of Adampur," Sami said, watching his multifunction display. Abbas was too far from the battle to have cut off the enemy, which disappointed him somewhat.
"Understood."
On the screen, the distant Two flight began to turn toward the lone electronic-reconnaissance aircraft.
Ever since data-link picture-format information support had arrived, communication between pilots seemed to have become terse. For an old hand like Sami, this was without doubt a technology that raised the efficiency of command.
"Thunder squadron leader, your aircraft is past half fuel. Please take note," the AWACS reminded him again.
"Mm, I know," Sami answered, brushing it off.
"Listen, we're going to make a maximum-effort push (a strike that disregards the fuel needed for the return leg). You may leave the battle at your own discretion at any time, or put down nearby at Allama Iqbal International Airport,"8 Sami said to his pilots over the VHF; his words, of course, would certainly be heard by Air Commodore Islam aboard the AWACS.
"You cannot land at an international airport. This... cannot be permitted," the air commodore cut in at once over the radio, hurrying to call a halt. He could not tolerate Sami rewriting the rules on his own say-so.
"Listen, old friend, my radar has already seen their leader. He's fifteen kilometres ahead. I've taken up a very good position; maybe I can bring him down near the border."
"No. Whatever happens, you cannot land at an international airport."
"Maybe we can take an Indian fighter squadron leader alive. You could interrogate him yourself. Think of it: Singh would weep."
Sami's oblique needling seemed to work on the air commodore. He fell silent for a while, and did not explicitly forbid the reckless plan.
1. Zero-zero ejection seat (零零弹射坐椅): A seat certified to fire safely at zero altitude and zero airspeed, i.e. from a stationary aircraft on the ground. The Su-30MKI uses the NPP Zvezda K-36 series, one of the more capable escape systems of its generation. Kushan's crew eject at low altitude and low speed, precisely the envelope the "zero-zero" rating exists for. ↩
2. Airborne versus ground command: The friction that decides this engagement. Bifrata, the Chief of Air Staff, is running the operation by radio from his command post at Jaipur rather than from an aircraft, which leaves him the participant furthest from the fight and slowest to react. Compare the deal Sami extracted from Islam in C60N3, that Islam would command from an AWACS in the air. The novel keeps drawing the same contrast: command-post latency is fatal in this kind of trap. ↩
3. Follower / repeater deception (随动的欺骗): A jamming technique in which the aircraft captures a hostile radar pulse, holds it a controlled interval, then retransmits it to generate false range or angle data in the enemy set. It works only against radars whose pulse and frequency parameters the jammer has already characterised. The FD-2000's engagement radar uses frequency agility and jittered pulse-repetition intervals precisely to defeat this; with no stored signature for the Pakistani emitters, the Flying Snake's deception mode is inert. ↩
4. Sahili's rank drift: The source calls him 上尉 (Flight Lieutenant) here, having used the functional title "deputy squadron leader" in C62. The two are not in conflict: 上尉 is his substantive rank, deputy squadron leader his appointment. This translation keeps Flight Lieutenant for the rank and reserves "deputy squadron leader" for the role. ↩
5. Dumaili (杜梅立): The hill country where the two Su-30s come down, in the FD-2000 ambush arc west of Kharian. The Chinese 杜梅立 (Dùméilì) does not correspond to a readily locatable place; like Jegwala (C63N5), it appears to be one of the author's coined micro-place names for the Kharian foothills. Transliterated as written; referent uncertain. ↩
6. Air Commodore Islam (伊斯拉姆): The source calls him 少将 (major general) throughout this chapter, but Islam is an air officer and holds the PAF one-star rank of Air Commodore, established at his introduction (C34N3). The army-style "major general" is the author's recurring rank-generic slip; this translation keeps Air Commodore throughout and flags the slip once. ↩
7. Sialkot (希亚尔科特): A city in northeastern Punjab, Pakistan, hard against the Working Boundary with Indian-administered Jammu and roughly opposite the Adampur–Amritsar sector. Its position lets the Indian jammer loiter on the Indian side while blanketing the airspace over the Pakistani forward bases. First appearance in the novel. ↩
8. Allama Iqbal International Airport (阿拉玛伊克巴勒国际机场): Lahore's civil airport, the same field Pandit's flight was tasked to strike on the first night of the war (see C19). Sami's readiness to divert a combat sortie onto a busy international runway is the same instinct that put him down almost on the UN envoy's tail at Islamabad in C14; Islam's alarm is the standing objection nobody has ever made stick. ↩