The Akash Missile Site
The enemy did indeed begin to turn south to chase the F-16s under Hassan's command. This gave Squadron Leader Hamid a secret satisfaction; it showed their commander had still not seen where the heart of this attack lay. In war the attacking side can always act to its own plan, while the defender can hardly avoid errors made in haste.
"Level the aircraft, ready to fire."
"Understood."
"Ranging complete."
"Missile power on."
By now these fighters' radars pointed firmly at the several MiG-27s at thirty-five hundred metres. Those enemy aircraft began hastily to accelerate; at so high a speed the MiG-27 could barely perform any large manoeuvre.
So the J-11s' radars soon completed their measurement of the enemy's motion vectors. Had these aircraft made a hard turn now they might still have broken lock, but the aircraft of No. 22 Swifts Squadron only dived and accelerated blindly, which took their speed a little past the J-11s at five thousand metres, at the price of movements grown still more rigid. However you looked at it, it was the wrong choice made in a panic; the MiG-27 could have set its wings to a sweep of around forty-five degrees and fought a very effective medium-speed turning battle against a pursuing force smaller than itself, but instead they merely lit afterburner in an attempt to flee by the simplest means. To the PL-8 this meant nothing; the J-11s' high-speed dash gave the missiles very high launch speed and range. Within seconds of Hamid and his wingman squeezing their triggers, the missiles had far outstripped the Swifts. Hamid could see the missiles' dazzling exhaust flickering toward the targets. With hardly any correction to their tracks, they closed on the enemy aircraft ahead along a nearly flat arc.
The Swifts' pilots at once threw out great quantities of tracer flares as infrared decoys, but simple decoys had little effect; because these aircraft had lost the power to turn hard, three were hit in the first round, and the rest plunged wildly toward the ground, each seeking its own way of escape.
At the same time, Shafi's pair had also, from high up, used their radar to track the fleeing Jaguars; though the range was great, their height of eight thousand metres let them make full use of the missiles' reach. At the very limit of maximum range for a rear-hemisphere shot, Shafi's pair loosed all eight of their remaining semi-active radar-guided medium-range missiles,1 and in the end downed the last two Jaguars, the rest of the missiles falling into Indian territory.
At the northernmost end of the confused battlefield, Group Captain Sami was rushing at speed toward the fight. He knew the chances left to him were few now, so he had to throw everything into cutting off the remaining enemy aircraft at the border; he sternly forbade his flight to use their radars, hoping such a measure would let him snatch some small advantage from the muddled battle. His measure paid off: the AWACS far off over Rajasthan failed to spot this group of Thunders take off in time.2 Perhaps the pilot aboard the AWACS had assumed from the start that the runways at Attock could no longer launch any aircraft, and so had not risked flying a little further northwest to bring that field within his scan. But in fact, after a night's hard work, the Pakistani ground crews had filled in most of the dense craters on the runway and cleared a long usable stretch. The War Gods only saw four Thunders lifting from near Islamabad and giving chase in another direction, and so, to this point, no one had warned Flight Lieutenant Pandit that four enemy aircraft were closing.
All this while, Pandit's radio was full of calls from every quarter, some begging for help, some asking for a counterattack, sometimes the ground asking to confirm whether a pilot had bailed out. The flight lieutenant knew today's raid had certainly met a great reckoning. But apart from these dispiriting messages, he heard nothing useful; it seemed no one still cared about them.
The flight lieutenant knew that all the fighting now was in the southwest; the battlefield seemed to have been left far behind him. Still, he dared not put complete trust in the AWACS and the ground command, nor even much in his own wingman. Perhaps out of the lesson of being ambushed from the north last time by the J-11 Hamid flew, he kept watching the north without cease. Only the north was all quiet; not a single enemy aircraft to be seen, no radar beam scanning. He also heard, over the radio, a section of the Trident squadron in contact with the tower at the Adampur forward field, seeming to discuss a landing, which showed there were still a few MiG-29Bs near him, and this too eased the flight lieutenant a little.
"Flight Lieutenant, I have a bad feeling," Flying Officer Sachi said over the radio, a most unlucky thing to say, which set the flight lieutenant's temper off.
"Bad feeling, of course, we've lost half our aircraft. The Scorpion squadron will very likely be disbanded because you couldn't recognise a Stinger."
"I don't mean that; I just feel things could get worse still."
"Shut your mouth. Have you forgotten squadron regulations? Don't talk about things off the mission on the radio. If you've time for that, keep a better watch behind us for me."
"Flight Lieutenant, eight o'clock... enemy aircraft."
Sachi was like some uncanny prophet of ill omen, only this time what he conjured up was not a few Stingers but four Thunders.
"Damn it, you really are... too..."
Pandit whipped his head round, and sure enough four fighters glittering in the sun stood in line abreast, below and behind at about five to eight kilometres in the eight o'clock, quietly seizing an advantageous position.
"Scorpion calling Fortress, enemy aircraft closing at my eight o'clock, I need nearby fighters for cover."
The flight lieutenant put in his request to headquarters; things were urgent now, so he did not curse the fools aboard the AWACS over the radio.
"Please confirm the enemy position again, we see no enemy aircraft." The AWACS told the flight lieutenant, calm and level, that the enemy aircraft did not exist.
"They're right behind me, hiding in the low altitude. Damn it."
"..."
"Flight Lieutenant, we have to light afterburner at once, go supersonic..." Sachi shouted.
"Fool, if you want to die quick, accelerate; I suppose you can fly a little faster than a missile."
"What do we do?" Sachi was almost pleading.
"Listen to me. As long as they haven't used their radars, we're safe at this range." The flight lieutenant had seen through Sami's design at a glance; he knew Sami meant an ambush, so he had not switched on his radar, nor seized height. And without radar guidance, the enemy aircraft could use no weapon at this range. He knew these "Thunders," this month at least, still had no acquisition gear on the electro-optical channel.3
"Listen to me. Follow me and turn right, slowly, set your wing sweep to forty, not too fast, understood?"
"Understood."
The flight lieutenant glanced at the figure on his rough heading indicator; the border was very near here, and thanks to thorough homework before the war he had memorised every one of the nineteen SA-6 sites along this border, and the newly built Akash missile sites.4 And near the Gurdas col there happened to be an Akash missile battalion stationed. He thought he could lure the reckless enemy into this trap; whether or not those Trident MiG-29s arrived, it was the surest way. But before that, he must on no account throw away his most vital asset, his ability to manoeuvre, by blindly accelerating.
1. Semi-active radar missiles: Shafi's pair kill the last two Jaguars with rear-hemisphere shots at the edge of range, using the J-11's semi-active radar-homing medium-range missiles (most plausibly the R-27, though the source leaves the type unstated). The rear-aspect shot against a receding target, from height, is where these missiles reach furthest. ↩
2. The repaired Attock runway: Sami's Thunders lift from Attock, whose runway the AWACS had written off as unusable; ground crews patched it overnight, and by ordering radar silence Sami slips his four aircraft in unseen behind Pandit. It is the same ambush pattern that opened this dam campaign, turned back on the Indians. ↩
3. No electro-optical channel: Pandit's reasoning for holding his nerve: the JF-17 Thunders, this month, lack an infrared search-and-track feed for their missiles, so without switching on a radar (which would warn him) they cannot generate a firing solution at this range. His safety rests entirely on the enemy staying passive, which is exactly what an ambusher wants to do. ↩
4. The Akash site (阿卡什 / 阿喀什): The Akash is India's indigenous medium-range surface-to-air missile, a command-guided, ramjet-boosted weapon (broadly the class of the SA-6) directed by the Rajendra phased-array radar, with a reach of some tens of kilometres. Pandit means to draw the ambushing Thunders across the border and into the engagement envelope of an Akash battalion near the Gurdas col, whose location most likely stands in for Gurdaspur in Indian Punjab. ↩