The Silent Front
"Correct heading two five five. Coming up on the next waypoint," Goyal recited. In the clear sky, the six aircraft began their turn. The movement was like a rehearsal run again and again; they had used the same route for days on end. If the enemy had been watching all the while from cover, this pattern had no surprise left in it at all.
"Eagle leader, good news, the War Gods' A-50 is airborne. In a moment you'll be able to link to her datalink."1
"Understood. Wing Commander, I was only wondering: where are those Thunders of No. 26 Squadron now? Surely they won't stay out of sight for days?"
"Don't worry. From whatever direction they appear, we'll know ahead of time. In my view they haven't the nerve to come up," Mohsin said. To his mind, sending up an aircraft without a medium-range missile was simply tired of living; combat within visual range was treacherous beyond reckoning, no aircraft could match a missile for turn rate, and so it was best avoided.
"Wing Commander, what I worry about isn't that they'll appear; it's that they won't. And those Su-27s newly added to their order of battle, the Chinese copies.2 I really would like a meeting."
Mohsin was at a loss for a few seconds; he did not know how to answer such a thing. This young man had grown up fast in the war, and seemed more mature, but also more pugnacious; the second change was one Wing Commander Mohsin had not foreseen. Most pilots, once chased down by an enemy aircraft or a missile, pass through a stretch of not coping with it, longer for some and shorter for others; but Goyal seemed an aberration. He had never shown the smallest sign of flinching from a fight; rather he grew keener for it, and won every time. Perhaps he was simply born for it, Mohsin thought.
Within a month, the record of this once-obscure pilot had become quite outstanding. He had shot down three enemy aircraft in the air, and destroyed two mobile search radars and a surface-to-air missile site on the Siachen Glacier. The results achieved under his command were more numerous still, including some forward-airfield runways confirmed by satellite as utterly destroyed, and some ground installations that could not be verified. Days earlier he had set the Indian air force's first precedent of opening fire on an airborne-warning aircraft, and was now studying further ways to strike them.
The six Su-30MKIs split into two three-ship formations and, on the assigned track, turned over Amritsar and flew southwest for a stretch, to mislead the enemy and, at the same time, to wait near the border for the strike force to join; the Su-30s always had fuel to spare, so they always waited on the others.
The electronic-warning platform kept an effective watch on the enemy's electronic activity, but found nothing; the enemy behaved as in the previous two operations, neither running a radar track nor bringing fighters near. The flight lieutenant thought that Multan's warning radar had probably seen this pair of Su-30s of his; but the whole point of the Su-30s' presence was to cover the low-flying groups and to overawe enemy aircraft, so being exposed did no harm.
Goyal knew that Pakistan's ground air-defence network had lately been quietly strengthening, but that near the Rajasthan or Punjab border they dared not deploy it rashly. They might hide the equipment in the deep mountains and spring an ambush, as they had sprung it on the Lions last time; but if they tried the same trick twice, he would surely make them regret it.
Once the formation entered the Thar Desert belt, Goyal could see the Rajasthan Canal below.3 For days he had navigated simply by this canal. There were belts of shelter trees a few hundred metres wide on either side, and along the edge of the western belt a line of trucks could be seen coming and going without pause. If the infantry had put troops here, he thought, they would be sited too far back; which suggested that the rumours of an army thrust through the centre were not to be trusted.
"Eagle leader, two aircraft off from Islamabad field, possibly J-7Ps. They're heading west, though."
"Understood. Looks as if today, again, they daren't come close."
Could it be that Pakistan had no fighter left that dared take off to meet them? So the flight lieutenant thought; but then he checked himself, feeling he must not grow careless. He had to keep watch at all times for the light aircraft lifting from forward fields repaired in secret by night, or they would suddenly be right in front of him.
"Eagle, Scorpion four-ship is below you."
"I have them. I'll stay close behind and drop after them."
It took Goyal a while, but at last he made out the "Scorpions" below, those furtive MiG-27s all sprayed in a dull-yellow desert camouflage; but for the slight rocking of the airframes throwing sun off the canopies, they were hard to pick out. They always liked to tuck in beneath the Hawks, flying flat against the ground, turning and fleeing the moment their bombs were away. On the whole they were a pitiable lot, their own air-combat ability little better than a MiG-21's.
Just then, in the cockpit of a MiG-27 below, Flight Lieutenant Pandit was also looking up, at the Su-30MKIs drawn up in two tidy rows above.
"Look at these swaggering great things, the bomb loads they carry are a wonder. Let's hope they keep their minds on the job and don't let those Pakistani Su-27s slip across," the flight lieutenant said. To this day he still went in dread of those Chinese-built fighters that looked so like the Su-30MKI, only without the canards; he had seen how one of them chased down the aircraft of the Flying Bullets flight leader, and to a knowing eye he judged it might beat the Su-30MKI in rate of climb. At long range, of course, the Su-30 was perhaps the stronger; but that was no business of his. On every mission now, the Scorpions carried only two R-60 missiles on the outermost pylons, and those just for show;4 whatever aircraft the other side brought near, the Scorpions could do nothing but jettison their bombs at once, turn, and run.
"Leader, if the enemy attacks, they won't leave us to fend for ourselves, will they?" a voice asked over the radio.
"Listen: if the enemy flies in close, you may not be able to tell who's who, so it's best not to count on anyone else. Turn east at once. Let's hope the Hawks up top can hold the enemy's attention," Pandit said. He was not in the least afraid the squadron commander in the command post would hear his defeatist words, for that was the commander's own meaning too. So far the Scorpions were in tatters; besides the aircraft lost to being shot down, more had gone lame from engines reaching the end of their lives or from a want of spare parts. Word was that if the combat aircraft dropped by a few more, the Scorpions would very likely be merged with another broken MiG-27 squadron, or a Jaguar squadron, into a combined attack wing. This was the outcome Wing Commander Makunda least wished to see, so he warned his pilots again and again not to grow careless: since that dam was so solid, there was no need to drop height and speed deliberately for a fraction more accuracy; and faced with enemy fighters, still less should anyone have ideas above his station. Let the more advanced escort fighters do the swaggering.
1. The War Gods' A-50: No. 50 "War Gods" Squadron flies the A-50EI Phalcon, the IAF's large airborne-warning aircraft, whose datalink feeds the Su-30 pilots a shared air picture. It is the counterpart, and rival, to the Saab 2000 Erieye the PAF flies. ↩
2. The Su-27 copies: The J-11, China's licence-built Su-27 derivative, ten of which the novel has passed to the PAF. The pilots call them "Su-27s" because that is what they are, twin-tailed and, without the Su-30MKI's canards, hard to tell from an Indian Flanker at a glance; it is the very aircraft that unsettled the Scorpion pilots earlier (C55N3). Goyal's itch to meet one drives much of this batch. ↩
3. The Rajasthan Canal: The Indira Gandhi Canal, the long irrigation canal that runs southwest through the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. Its tree-lined course is one of the few reliable landmarks in an otherwise featureless waste, which is why Goyal uses it to navigate. ↩
4. R-60 (source: "p60"): The R-60 (NATO AA-8 Aphid), a short-range infrared missile with a weak, uncooled seeker. The source's "p60" reflects the Cyrillic Р (which transliterates as R), and the designation is normalised to R-60 to match the author's own usage elsewhere. On the Scorpions' MiG-27s the two rounds are carried only for form's sake; the aircraft has no realistic prospect of winning an air-to-air engagement. ↩