In the Blink of an Eye
Just as the enemy aircraft to the west broke through the Hawks' fighter screen, the Indian air force's second bombing wave was under way; lacking a datalink, the Swifts' MiG-27s did not yet know the enemy was approaching from the west. Unlike the Scorpions of the previous wave, who flew the same type, on this mission the Swifts took their control from Halwara on the ground, and the muddled command system left this squadron's six MiG-27UPGs with a hidden danger. Though communications were clear, the ground command post never told the unit in time that the screen had collapsed and enemy aircraft were closing from the flank and rear; perhaps because command was inefficient, or perhaps because these MiG-27s likewise carried the television-guided bombs that might attack that great crack, and the senior officer in the command post did not want the group turning hastily back to base and letting the attack fall short.
Only when the "Sirena" warning system shrieked in their cockpits did the pilots learn their aircraft had been caught by a radar in the air to the southwest.
At thirty degrees off the Indian attack aircraft's right, at a range of thirty kilometres, eight J-11s did not open fire; they seemed to prefer to plunge into the enemy's formation for a fight within visual range.
Squadron Leader Athar Hamid, another of Group Captain Sami's students from many years back, was now an instructor with No. 37 Tactical Training Wing.1 Ten days earlier he had gone with several other instructors of the wing on an urgent visit to China alongside the Deputy Prime Minister, returning home only a week ago; and during a ferry flight carrying weapons, guided by ground control's voice navigation, he had cleanly killed with medium-range missiles two MiG-27s that had suddenly slipped across the border to raid the dam.
The heavy fighter he now flew was the best aircraft China could provide at short notice. When Deputy Prime Minister Latif made his visit, he took several senior pilots of No. 37 Squadron with experience on the type to China, and bluntly informed the Chinese side of the heavy losses among some of the country's elite squadrons, requesting that China urgently provide eight advanced aircraft to fill the gap. After only a few days' wait, the Pakistani side had all the aircraft it had asked for, all of them drawn by China from front-line aviation divisions and handed over; such urgent rescue in another's hour of need was not the first time in the history of China and Pakistan. In the end this batch of heavy fighters reached Pakistan even sooner than the J-10Bs the Pakistani side had ordered years before, which was owed too to the pilot-exchange training the two sides had begun long ago; in fact Hamid had flown this aircraft in northern China long since (Chinese pilots very likely getting their hands on the F-16C/D in exchange), and at home he had kept up the corresponding simulator training. Now these measures looked remarkably far-sighted.
By now the squadron leader's radar had a clear picture of the fleeing enemy aircraft; they seemed to be accelerating, having perhaps just jettisoned tanks or ordnance, but it was a little late for that.
The two medium-range missiles the squadron leader carried had all missed in his earlier brush with Goyal's flight, lost to radar breaks. Now he had six PL-8 dogfight missiles left, and the weapon load of a heavy fighter truly impressed him.2 So he thought little of the medium-range misses; a low hit rate at long range was a common ailment of every air force in the world, but air combat was another matter, and the PL-8 was a reliable dogfight weapon, in which the squadron leader had full confidence. He had to kill a few more of the enemy before Group Captain Sami appeared on the battlefield (no doubt any student Sami had trained was cut from the same cloth). Old Sami's tally so far stood at eight; Hamid's, to date, only two. No matter; the war was still long.
"0531, mind you stay tight on me. Seize the advantage; don't be distracted by those Su-30s, they're still far off," the squadron leader said. These eight aircraft were the core of the operation, which was one reason there were two AWACS in the air; because the compatibility problem could not be solved in a short time, a Chinese-built AWACS had to provide the datalink information for these eight aircraft, and in air combat as it now stood, the side without a datalink (like the Indian Swifts' MiG-27s) was very, very passive.
"0531 understood, taking the rear position," the wingman answered. These aircraft had no squadron of their own yet, no name of some beast or monster for a callsign. So they could only, like the Chinese, use dull numbers as their airborne callsigns for communication.
"Shafi, don't drop your height, keep on level and chase the Jaguars; I hope you can cut them off west of the border. Leave this to me, and watch for the SA-6 site near Ferozepur," the squadron leader ordered. He judged that four aircraft were enough to deal with six MiG-27s, so he sent the second pair after the Jaguars, which had run further off.
"New Su-30 formation coming up on bearing zero-nine-five. It may loop around to our rear," Flight Lieutenant Shafi warned; the datalink data on his vertical display showed several Su-30s a hundred and sixty kilometres off, flying west, not driving straight in, but perhaps meaning, once they had passed abeam through three o'clock, to loop behind. In that case they would be inside their long-range weapons' envelope in a moment.
"Don't worry, Group Captain Sami will be here soon. Let him hold off these enemy aircraft."
"Squadron Leader, I see those MiG-27s now, they're climbing."
"Good. My order is plain: not one to get away."
The squadron leader boxed the last enemy aircraft in his HUD. He was in no hurry to track it; against any mishap, he first used an interlaced radar scan at different PRFs to sweep the whole airspace, in case some threat lay hidden low, but found nothing, which matched the intelligence the AWACS provided.
Before they had climbed to sufficient height and speed, the Swifts' MiG-27s were forced to switch to level acceleration, which quickly brought them past the speed of sound. But the J-11 formation up high could still catch them easily. The MiG-27s' wrong choice of acceleration only dropped them faster into a passive position; at Mach 1.2, this aircraft could not manoeuvre above 3.5 g, far short of the J-11 in this respect,3 and so, in this hound-chasing-hare hunt, the six aircraft of No. 22 Squadron lost, at one stroke, both their straight-line speed and their turn-radius advantage.
"Radar acquisition complete, ranging complete."
"Good, closer, then fire," Hamid said. All this while he kept his eye on that flight of Su-30MKIs to the south; they were at his three o'clock, heading opposite to his own formation, and he had to see whether they turned toward him or toward Hassan's F-16C group. They could not go on flying straight like this; their purpose was surely an envelopment. Hamid was a careful-minded man, and he watched and analysed the whole confused battlefield with great attention: if Hassan's group could drive off or draw away all the Su-30MKIs on the battlefield, then all that would be left to him was a heap of attack aircraft not worth a blow.
1. Hamid and the emergency transfer: Squadron Leader Athar Hamid, a former student of Sami's and an instructor at No. 37 Tactical Training Wing, leads the eight J-11s. The novel accounts for the aircraft through Deputy Prime Minister Khalid Latif's urgent mission to China (C52): with Pakistan's elite squadrons bled white, China drew eight Flankers straight from front-line divisions and handed them over, faster even than the long-ordered J-10Bs, made flyable at once by the pilot-exchange training the two sides had run for years. The name is transliterated; "Athar" is the likeliest real reading of 亚瑟. ↩
2. PL-8 (p l8): The PL-8, China's Python-3-derived infrared dogfight missile, six of which Hamid's J-11 carries after its medium-range rounds missed Goyal's flight. It is the reliable close-in weapon he means to fight with; the J-11's ability to carry so heavy a load of them is part of what impresses him. The medium-range missiles the J-11 fires elsewhere in this batch are its semi-active radar rounds, most plausibly the R-27, though the source does not name the type. ↩
3. MiG-27 at Mach 1.2: The Swifts' error is to firewall the throttle and dive-accelerate before reaching height, pushing past Mach 1; at around Mach 1.2 the MiG-27 is limited to about 3.5 g, so it can neither out-turn nor outrun the J-11s above it. The right choice, as a later chapter notes, was to set the wings to a mid sweep and fight a medium-speed turning battle against a smaller pursuing force. ↩