The Air Groups
"Release," the flight lieutenant said.
The MiG-27's airframe shuddered violently, and a tongue of flame flew out from under the thick fixed strake. Eyes never leaving his display, the flight lieutenant steered the bomb as it glided toward the crack. Dropping a KAB-500 he had long since mastered, but hitting a crack so small was truly a tall order; this bomb was the most accurate in India's arsenal, yet even so it suited only targets no smaller than five metres by five, roughly the size of a pillbox.1 And that great crack ahead, running top to bottom of the dam, was, just as the reconnaissance satellites had photographed it, only two metres wide, and not straight either.
In the bomb's field of view, the wobbling crosshair flew swiftly toward the fine crack. Flight Lieutenant Pandit steered its course with care. If it hit, well and good, and the footage would be capital for showing off his skill to the junior pilots of the Scorpions; and if it missed, that was no matter to him either. Unlike the somewhat naive Flying Officer Sachi, the flight lieutenant had never once expected a single 500-kilogram bomb to bring the great mass before him crashing down.
"Flight Lieutenant, I see enemy infantry along the right bank, moving with rocket launchers on their shoulders," Sachi said over the radio, his tone a touch unsure.
Pandit started; he let the falling bomb go, jerked his head up, and searched to the right. He knew an RPG against a fixed-wing aircraft was quite hopeless; but he also knew Flying Officer Sachi's powers of observation were more hopeless still.
"Damn it, those are Stingers, evade, quick," the flight lieutenant shouted. He had already seen a trail of white smoke rise from the edge of the trees, climbing straight for some aircraft at the rear of the formation. Sachi's mistaking a Stinger with its IFF antenna stripped off for a rocket launcher was a fatal jest.2
The No. 3 aircraft in the formation banked hurriedly to one side, but the movement was sluggish. As he began to release infrared decoy flares, the Stinger had already reached the aircraft's flank; the pilot wanted to bank hard, but could not bring his speed up in time. After a flash, Pandit watched this Scorpion aircraft fall trailing thick smoke, time seeming to freeze. He craned round with all his might, watching the great MiG-27 sink in a slow spiral, waiting for his comrade to bail out; and until the aircraft struck the embankment by the riverbank, no ejection seat came out of the cockpit.
"Shameless," the flight lieutenant swore under his breath. This was the third aircraft lost under his lead in the last ten days. He could not bear the look of dumb grief on Wing Commander Makunda's face as he listened to yet another explanation of how yet another pilot had been lost. Pandit could feel the squadron commander's mood, of course, for the guilt he felt standing before him was very likely the same as what the commander felt through his sleepless nights, writing letters to those pitiable widows.
"Swine, why bomb this dam without end?" A thought sprang up in him suddenly; but this was no moment to let his mind wander.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the trees, several more muzzle flashes flickered; no need to think twice, a Stinger position was surely hidden here.
"Break off the attack, evade."
Pandit shoved the nose down at speed, threw the throttle to afterburner, then reached back and hauled the wing lever down, the most effective way to gain airspeed and turn at once. Though he had seen no missile fly at him, given how poor the MiG-27's rearward view was, he had to confirm again in the bank that there was no missile around. He saw, in the sky, the trail left by a Stinger spiralling in pursuit of the last aircraft in the formation. That aircraft had only just begun to bank and release flares; these pilots were all too young and too fixed on their bomb runs, their evasive movements slow and ugly, and everything plainly already too late.
The flight lieutenant hauled into a fast turn and dived at the trees. He still had two pods of rockets, and might suppress those ambushers hidden in the wood, and pay them back. He had never been a rash man, but today he could not quite hold himself in.
The flight lieutenant put his gunsight pip roughly onto the spot. Trimming his speed a little, he pressed the gun button. The tongue of flame from the six-barrel 23-millimetre cannon3 flung earth and timber flying through the little wood. He had no time to work out a precise lead, and only corrected slightly by the white tracer of the shells; then he loosed all of his two pods of sixty-four 57-millimetre rockets at the rough area. The rockets' trajectory drifted a little higher than the shells, and their spread was far wider. Within a few seconds the wood before him was blasted into a sea of fire.
"Flight Lieutenant, our No. 4 aircraft has been shot down too, I didn't see a parachute," Sachi said over the radio, in a fluster. He had only just, and barely, dodged a Stinger's pursuit, and was still shaken.
"Understood, we return to base at once." The flight lieutenant circled a few times in the air and saw several Pakistani infantry drag their wounded out of the burning wood; but the rest of the result of his attack he did not see. He knew only that roughly a hectare of forest, some sixty by a hundred and sixty metres, had been levelled by him.
"Fortress, there are quite a few Stinger positions in this area, I recommend the follow-on aircraft not make low-altitude runs, all switch to level bombing."
The AWACS did not answer the flight lieutenant's request at once; perhaps they were asking a higher-ranking officer.
The second wave of Jaguar attack aircraft, arriving straight after, dared not press in low after all; some of them had to use ordinary aviation bombs for another rambling level bombing run over the dam area, and most of the bombs fell near the dam and directly above it. Such an attack seemed of no use at all for destroying the dam. And though the other part, laser-guided bombs, precisely struck the dam's face, the effect was still slight; it only added, out of nothing, more dense clusters of craters.
Driving a few precision weapons into the interior of the cracks to blast them seemed the most effective way to break a concrete gravity dam of this kind; but today, thanks to a few Stingers, the plan fell short once again.
The strike group, its bombing done, began to leave the raid area and turn for home in scattered flights. Flight Lieutenant Pandit was still full of rage; but not against Pakistan's crafty Stingers, rather against this baffling plan.
In these meaningless operations under the flight lieutenant's lead, the Scorpions and the Flying Bullets had now lost four aircraft. And not one of the four pilots had managed to bail out. He found it hard to understand why the top should have it in for a lump of cement, where there was no army massing, no radar, no artillery, nor any other useful military equipment, and where the Jhelum dam was very likely the most solid target in the world. He knew that in wars past, to destroy a dam of this kind, one had to use giant munitions of several tonnes; India had no such weapon, but that should not be a reason for the higher-ups to fill this bottomless pit desperately with pilots' lives. What on earth did this dam mean?
"Large enemy formation appearing over the western Sulaiman mountains," the AWACS guidance officer said mildly, as though reading out the morning weather. The flight lieutenant, whose mind had been wandering, jumped; he knew that the heavy fighters Pakistan had lately got from China were very likely hidden over there, on the Afghan side of the mountains.
1. KAB-500Kr (kab500): The Russian television-guided bomb the Scorpions carry against the dam's cracks (Pandit's Mangla weapon in earlier chapters). Accurate as such weapons go, it is still meant for targets no smaller than a few metres across; a two-metre crack, crooked and vertical, is at the very edge of what it can hit, which is the whole difficulty of these attacks. ↩
2. Stinger, IFF antenna stripped: The FIM-92 Stinger (C75N2); the tube's forward IFF interrogator antenna, once removed, leaves a plain shouldered launcher that a nervous young pilot can mistake for an RPG. Sachi's misidentification costs the flight the seconds it needed to react. ↩
3. The six-barrel cannon: The MiG-27's internal gun is in fact the six-barrel GSh-6-30, a 30-millimetre Gatling, not the 23 millimetres the source gives; the barrel count is right, the calibre an author error, preserved here. The rocket pods carry the 57-millimetre S-5, an unguided area weapon, which is why Pandit can only aim at "the rough area." ↩