The Accumulation of Errors
To chase a large body of Su-30s with four light Thunders is the kind of thing only a madman would attempt, and Group Captain Sami was exactly that madman. If the Su-30s ahead turned back on him now, they would still hold an overwhelming advantage in numbers, firepower, and electronic control; but Sami had known all along that the Lion Squadron fleeing in front of him was a paper unit, a crew of rookies. In every past encounter they had shrunk from a close fight (all along, the group captain himself had only ever heard the Lions in the air over the radio, and to this day had never once laid eyes on one). He judged these men incapable of any real adaptability, and reckoned they were at present dazed, their nerve broken.
The Su-30MKI's heavy load had become the burden that let them escape: as they lined up abreast and accelerated, the Thunder flight behind actually began to gain on them. Each of these Thunders carried only two of the newly arrived PL-9 missiles1 and nothing else to weigh it down (the three fuel tanks carried at take-off had all been jettisoned by now). "Fortress, when can Adampur's covering aircraft get airborne?" Sahili asked anxiously over the radio. He was full of dread now at flying over enemy territory, and found himself longing for the Trident Squadron's MiG-29s, the aircraft he ordinarily held in contempt, to come and cover him. A few minutes earlier, those missiles bursting suddenly out of the cloud and filling the whole sky had left the flight lieutenant with no faith at all in the electronic-reconnaissance and suppression capability the air force intelligence branch had boasted of.
"Torch flight, Adampur's aircraft are still refuelling. They cannot get airborne yet," the AWACS told him, truthfully.
The disposition of this operation really did have grave problems. Southwest Air Command, probably to show off its joint-operations capability to some senior figure on the ground, had put up roughly thirty aircraft at the start (a good many of them Adampur's MiG-29s). These aircraft had taken off in a rabble from several airfields, and some of them, the short-legged MiG-29Bs, looked to be no help to the mission at all, merely burning fuel and engine life in the air. When the mission was half over, the Trident Squadron's fighters had turned back with their tanks dry, and now, when their cover was wanted, those MiG-29s were sitting on the ground, unable to stir.
Flight Lieutenant Sahili slowly began to come to his senses. He kept checking the updated data on the HDD, and found that behind him were only ever four enemy aircraft. But he dared not turn back rashly, because he found it hard to understand what these grimly pursuing enemies intended; was it still part of some scheme? Whatever the case, two of the Su-30s in his flight were gradually falling behind, and he decided to have those two hold a straight course, flying directly for the border, while he led the other five in a forty-five-degree turn to the east, to see whether there was any chance of working around to a position from which he could fire a medium-range missile. It was a compromise: it avoided both an immediate turn into a knife-fight at contact range and the alternative of simply waiting while the enemy took up a favourable position. But it also split the flight lieutenant's forces.
"Group Captain, the enemy is turning, turning toward Amritsar. They've split up," said one of the wingmen in the Thunder flight.
"Lads, our chance has come. I was worried we wouldn't catch them. But now they're starting to make mistakes."
"Which do we chase, Squadron Leader?"
"Stay on those five. Kick them hard in the backside. Don't let them find a chance to fire."
"Understood."
"Abbas, damn it, forget that electronic-warfare aircraft. You have to hold those Lions off for me. Drive the lot of them into the pen."
"Squadron Leader, I'm still 120 kilometres off them."
"Don't worry. Just block them a little, and I promise their commander will lose his head soon enough."
Flight Lieutenant Sahili duly fell at once into helpless confusion. He found that the enemy behind him had not, as he had expected, chased the other two Su-30s, but had turned to follow him directly. And a pair of enemy aircraft at his two o'clock was also coming around. Very soon he and Abbas's flight had picked up each other's radar beams. He made another wrong decision, ordering a further change of heading to the left; and when that manoeuvre was done, the rear-seat pilot could already see the Thunder flight in close pursuit behind them. Now all five Lions were in the absolutely unfavourable position of sitting at the enemy's twelve o'clock.
"Torch flight, the enemy behind you is very close now. Recommend you dive and accelerate. Adampur's Trident flight is in the process of taking off."
There was nothing for it. Sahili, at a loss, could only follow the AWACS's advice. He led the flight down toward the ground defences he feared most. For the moment the flight lieutenant's mind could not sort out what had happened over the past ten minutes; his flight had started with ten powerful fighters and now had only half that number left. What for? A thing like this is of course not so easy to reason through. Only Sami, or Flight Lieutenant Rawal2, now taking off from Adampur, could feel the crux of it: many wrong decisions accumulate, in the end, into one great loss of control. Only a pilot who has crawled and scraped through air combat knows that the cardinal sin in a dogfight is meaningless thrashing about, which slowly gives a composed enemy his opening.
The hill country northwest of Amritsar. A tracked-chassis 37-millimetre twin-barrel self-propelled anti-aircraft gun3 stood on a wet hillside. The vehicle commander, Naik Mohammed Hanif4, in a loose rain cape, stood outside the vehicle; for ten minutes he had been sweeping the northern sky with his binoculars. Although the shaped antenna on the ageing gun vehicle kept rotating through 360 degrees, the PPI display inside the vehicle showed nothing but a field of flickering points. All the radio communication inside the vehicle had been entirely cut off by the Indians' unbroken electronic jamming. The naik simply reckoned, on instinct, that the enemy would likely appear from the north, because Mangla Dam lay to the north.
Hanif had never imagined bringing down anything important with this vehicle. Before he was posted to this desolate spot, his superiors had told him the primary targets were Indian reconnaissance drones crossing the border, or, once the ground fighting opened, Indian infantry armoured vehicles. This 37-millimetre self-propelled anti-aircraft gun was part of China's emergency military aid, plainly an old article that had seen many years of use. On the surface it carried its own radar and television-tracking system, even a simple fire-control computer, so that it looked capable of independent action; but all of its operating modes rested on manual entry of slant range and manual laying of the gun. So to the naik's mind, this gun seemed better suited to firing on ground targets of poor mobility.
From the rolling clouds on the northern horizon came a violent flash. The naik knew it was not real lightning, because no thunder followed. It was very likely an aircraft dispensing flares. He scrambled up onto the chassis and rapped hard on the hatch. A few seconds later the gunner poked his head out, dazed.
"Search the north, quickly. Use the optical sight."
Before the words were out, a grey aircraft emerged from the cloud. It flew east for a while, then turned suddenly toward the lone anti-aircraft gun.
"How do I do this again?" the gunner muttered. He was still far from familiar with this newly acquired weapon, and he was also afraid the aircraft would open fire on him.
1. PL-9 (霹雳9): A Chinese short-range infrared-homing air-to-air missile developed from the late 1980s at the Luoyang Electro-Optical Centre. Its airframe derives from the PL-5/PL-7 line and its cooled seeker from the PL-8 (itself a licensed Python-3 derivative), giving all-aspect capability and roughly forty degrees of off-boresight acquisition. The novel positions it a clear step above the PL-5E the Thunders carried earlier (see C45N4): the next chapter has Sami rate it close to the AIM-9M, short only of the helmet-cued off-boresight snapshot an R-73 allows. ↩
2. Flight Lieutenant Rawal (罗尔): The source writes 罗尔 here, one of the two Chinese forms the author uses for the same man (the other, 拉瓦尔, is the glossary canonical). Rawal is the Trident Squadron MiG-29 pilot and the unit's F-16 specialist, last seen escaping Sami over the same border in C47; that he alone among the Indians present could read the shape of this trap ties back to his own near-destruction by Sami's aircraft 101. The Chinese naming drift is flagged here and not again this chapter. ↩
3. The 37-millimetre twin self-propelled gun (37毫米双管自行火炮): The system matches the Chinese Type 88 (PGZ-88): twin 37-millimetre cannon on a Type 79 tank chassis, with an integral surveillance radar, electro-optical tracker, ballistic computer and IFF, engaging targets below about 3,000 metres. Only around two dozen were built; it was noted for poor performance in bad weather and at night, which fits the rainy engagement here. Naik Hanif's assessment that it suits low-mobility ground targets better than fast jets is close to the system's real reputation. See the earlier appearance of the same guns in the Jegwala hills (C61). ↩
4. Naik Mohammed Hanif (下士默罕默德汉尼夫): A Pakistan Army NCO, vehicle commander of the anti-aircraft gun; his unit is the 8th Armoured Brigade (named in C66). The Chinese 下士 corresponds to Naik in Pakistan Army usage, the rank below Havildar. The given name 汉尼夫 is the common Muslim name Hanif. First appearance. ↩