The Mountain Chase
"Leader, this kill?" the astonished voice of his wingman came over the radio.
"Of course I hit it, that's right, you can testify."
Sami said it offhand, but he had no time to be glad; two grave matters now faced him. The first was that the MiG lead aircraft was still fleeing, which he could leave to his wingman; but the second was thornier, for he had at once to use his anti-radiation missile to measure the signal of that Indian surface-to-air missile site. He had no full confidence of shooting first; the AWACS could not measure the missile site behind the col, nor give him the target's range, but for self-defence he had, at all costs, to strike first, even if it only forced the other side to shut down.
"Rehman, that other MiG-27 is yours. Don't be too hasty; I think that aircraft won't be easily taken. So... don't let him lure you down low. There may be Indian army air-defence weapons nearby."
"Understood."
Rehman drove his Thunder at once into an afterburner chase; he cared nothing for whether it was Indian airspace, for he had waited too long for this chance. (He had been a pilot a long time, but the chances he had had of real combat were few and far between.) Rumour had it that flying wingman to Sami always meant few chances, so this chance Sami had given him to have a free hand had to be treasured; his head was now full of the thought of showing his stuff before the group captain, and the group captain's warning went in one ear and out the other. The flying officer did not ask for much; he did not dare hope to meet a second good-for-nothing who bailed out on his own, but even if this Indian pilot's average was a little above the last, no matter, he was quite sure he could kill a few more.
Pandit at last came round from his shock. He knew the good side was that Sachi, the idiot, was still alive, and had come down on the Indian side of the border, so that as long as he had not landed in the river, the 55th Brigade's search party should take him in.1 As long as he lived, Pandit would have an easier account to give before the squadron commander. The bad side was that the squadron had lost another aircraft, and these aircraft could not be replaced in a short time; perhaps the fate awaiting the Scorpions really was to be merged with some other equally battered squadron. The thought made him boil with rage. But he did not lose his cool and turn back to fight an unrealistic one-against-two; blind action was not his style. He soon saw, however, that a Thunder had broken from its formation and charged at him. Perhaps a chance; he felt a sudden urge for a one-on-one, and it was time to teach the enemy a lesson, far more worthwhile than strafing a stretch of trees. He could not rush it yet; he had to lure this aircraft a little further from its leader first. So Pandit hauled down the variable-sweep lever and dived to accelerate, threading through the mountains with every trick he had, which left the glory-hungry Rehman unable to use his radar for a one-on-one track.
Flight Lieutenant Pandit, watching back the whole time, saw the wingman closing hard; at about a kilometre he suddenly pulled his nose up, trying to make his opponent overshoot ahead. This move could settle a careless opponent most cleanly, and spared him a messy, drawn-out turning chase in which a second enemy aircraft might catch up.
The flight lieutenant's skill was good; he handled the fiendishly complex MiG-27UPG with ease. But he did not yet know the Thunder; this fly-by-wire aircraft was extraordinarily agile, not like the clumsy MiG-21s of the exercises that overshot so easily. Green as Rehman was, and weak in observation, he still throttled back in time and raised his nose. Seeing the enemy aircraft come slowly round toward him, the flight lieutenant had no choice but to drop height again; a risky move, for to pass briefly across the nose of the other aircraft was very likely to be caught in his sights, yet it had to be done, since a pure climb offered his old aircraft no advantage at all, and only by entering a dizzying scissors could he draw out the performance of this variable-sweep aircraft, whose acceleration and deceleration were both fairly good.
The MiG-27 slid fast down across the top of the Thunder's canopy; Rehman tried to track it with a vertical radar scan, but the other aircraft, in its dive, had gained extra g, and the inexperienced Rehman had not foreseen the MiG's move; the enemy aircraft flashed by at his twelve o'clock, and the aim failed once more.
In a blink the MiG-27 ran into the blind angle of his lower view, and was gone. Flying Officer Rehman had to push his nose down again to search. The MiG-27 had dived into the hills once more, at an estimated range of only seven or eight hundred metres, just as Sami had said: this lead aircraft was hard to handle. The flying officer did not recall that this aircraft could fly so nimbly. Was the rumour true, then, that Sami always left the hard bones for his wingman to gnaw? Or had all his luck for this fight run out in one go?
Flying Officer Rehman had not yet realised that this was a dangerous moment, not only because the range to the enemy was growing shorter, so that he might easily be overshot on the enemy's next sudden pull-up, but because, all unawares, the flying officer had penetrated several kilometres into hostile territory. Though this had always been a barren mountain region, in the past month the Indian 55th Mechanised Brigade had secretly deployed here; the brigade was massing here in secret for a surprise attack.
The Indian soldiers on the ground had long since seen these two dogfighting aircraft, and had only held their fire for not being able to tell friend from foe. (The ground SA-7 site had run its friend-or-foe interrogation several times, but neither aircraft's IFF answered; still, common sense said that in so fierce a chase one of the two ought to be their own.) The commander of the distant Akash missile site was in a quandary too; he knew that of the three fighters in the airspace, one or two must be Indian, only he could not tell them apart for the moment (that the IAF's IFF failed to work was a common enough thing). To shoot down his own aircraft was absolutely not to be allowed; but to let any Pakistani aircraft through, and let it observe the ground deployment from low down, was strictly forbidden by his superiors. This commander stared at his radar screen, at a loss what to do; and on a battlefield any hesitation is fatal.
Pandit did indeed pull up hard once more, and this time Rehman caught a slice of the chance, for he had reckoned the enemy would repeat the trick, and so had powered up his missiles' infrared seekers beforehand. The enemy's movement in pulling up was slower (having lost one g), and Rehman slowed in time to follow it; though Pandit's aircraft was still off to the right, not fully within the infrared seeker's aiming ring at the centre of the HUD, the attack tone still sounded, dit-dit-dit: a missile had caught the heat source. Without a second thought the flying officer at once fired two missiles. One found no target and flew straight off the battlefield, but the other bit onto the enemy aircraft.
The enemy aircraft ahead reacted at once, turning to spew great quantities of tracer flares while diving into a hard turn. Because of the weapons shortage since the war began, the missiles slung on Flying Officer Rehman's aircraft were four of the older PL-5 type;2 this one could not withstand the countermeasures, and was decoyed straight into detonation by an infrared flare.
1. The 55th Mechanised Brigade and the IFF failure: An Indian brigade (the source calls it both mechanised and armoured, 机械化旅 / 装甲旅) that has secretly massed in these border hills for a surprise attack, so that a Pakistani aircraft observing it from low down is exactly what its superiors most fear letting happen. The friend-or-foe confusion is the pivot of what follows: neither aircraft's IFF answers, so the Indian air-defence crews cannot tell that one of the aircraft in the chase is their own. ↩
2. PL-5 (霹雳5): The older infrared dogfight missile the Thunder carries, four of them, because of the wartime weapons shortage. Its seeker is easily defeated by flares, which is why Pandit shrugs off Rehman's first shot; a newer round would not have been decoyed so simply. ↩