Alpha Strike

PROLOGUE

Mein Low swore as the adversary Chinese Sukoi-27 Flanker vanished into the blinding glare. He could almost feel the other pilot yanking his aircraft into a hard, gut-wrenching turn, bringing his guns to bear on Mein Low’s advanced prototype F-10 fighter while the sun hid his turn.

In combat the lines between men and aircraft blur until the difference between them disappears. My vision — the radar. My will — the weapons. And so it is for him as well. We both know only one of us will land after this knife fight.

The sky flashed metal, slightly above him at ten o’clock. The Flanker pilot had underestimated the width of his cloak of invisibility, exposing one wingtip. The attack geometry flashed into Mein Low’s mind.

Bleed off air speed, turn, and drop in behind me for the killing shot. But now that you’ve exposed your direction of turn, you’ve lost the advantage of uncertainty. And you will lose this engagement as well!

Mein Low jerked the F-10’s nose up to thirty degrees above the horizon and rolled to the right, keeping his eyes glued to the approaching Flanker. The seat fell away slightly from his back as the faster and more maneuverable F-10 slowed rapidly. Fifteen hundred feet later, Mein Low was inverted, craning his neck back to stare down at the Flanker desperately trying to turn away from him.

Too late. The Flanker had given up too much precious airspeed in his last maneuver. As the Flanker drew parallel beneath him, Mein Low completed the roll, dropped the nose of the aircraft down, and dove into a killing position behind the slower aircraft.

The Flanker bobbed and jinked, and the turbulence from his jet’s engines battered the F-10. Mein Low’s hand clamped down around the control stick. His weapons selector switch was already toggled to guns. The F-10’s cannon spat out six thousand rounds per minute, stitching the Flanker’s side.

The other aircraft’s canopy exploded in shards, and the metal framework peeled back from the rest of the airframe. He caught a glimpse of the other pilot, crumpled and bloody in the cockpit, before leaking fuel met hot metal. Mein Low jerked his fighter into a tight turn just as the Flanker exploded into a bloody red-orange fireball.

Only one more test. Five miles from the training field, a Grumble surface-to-air missile waited, the final obstacle to full funding of the F-10 program — his program — and his promotion to Wing Commander. Defeat it, and Mein Low would vault up the ladder of power and prestige in the Chinese army.

The radar threat indicator screamed a warning microseconds before the missile symbol blipped onto the heads-up display in the cockpit. Mein Low shoved the throttle on the F-10 forward, dumping raw fuel into the jet’s engine. In seconds, the aircraft muscled its way through the shock waves that battered the aircraft at Mach.9 and accelerated past Mach 1.

Against a Mach 3 missile, the fighter’s supersonic speed was almost irrelevant. Still, the point of the operational exercise was to prove the capabilities of the next-generation Chinese fighter operating at the edge of its envelope.

Let them tell the Flanker pilot, now spread across five miles of desert with his aircraft, that it was just an operational test!

The missile closed to five miles.

Mein Low twitched his finger, activating the countermeasures toggle on the stick. Four gentle thumps shook the aircraft as a combination of flares, chaff, and electromagnetic decoys shot out of the belly slots. The pilot stabbed the preload button on his G-suit. As soon as he felt the pressure on his extremities increase, he threw the sleek jet into a hard breaking turn, tensing every muscle in his torso to augment the effects of the constrictive flight suit and force increased blood flow to his brain.

Cold sweat soaked his flight suit as he fought against unconsciousness. He would enter the next cycle of life knowing whether or not he’d succeeded, not blindly exiting this life without ever knowing the results!

Time slowed to a crawl. He had all eternity to watch the deadly white missile grow larger, the tiny oscillations in its flight stilled as the Front Dome radar tracker and illuminator seeker head zeroed in on the jet, so close now he imagined he could see the invisible pulses of energy radiating out from its nose.

Suddenly, the missile twitched. Its nose dropped a few inches as it shifted its aim.

It worked! Cold joy filled Mein Low, and time resumed its normal speed. A white flash of death streaked past him and impacted the cluster of decoys behind and below the F-10.

Turbulence from the blast almost accomplished what the missile had failed to do, knocking the jet nose down and tail high. The F-10’s air speed plummeted into the stall region in seconds, and Mein Low’s vision narrowed to a tiny pinpoint of light.

The barely conscious pilot fought the jet back into stable flight, regaining control five thousand feet above the barren plains. With stall warning buzzers and threat indicator alarms still ringing in his ears, he automatically turned the jet toward the airfield.

Fifteen minutes later, he was on the deck. A wave of cheering technicians, scientists, and engineers swamped the fighter the second it stopped its roll-out. The crowd pulled Mein Low from the cockpit and carried him on their shoulders to the hangar. By the time his feet finally hit the tarmac, his hands had stopped shaking.

Still dazed, he raised his right hand to the crowd. The assembled mass fell silent.

“Today,” he said, surprised his voice remained steady, “we regain control of our skies. Your hard work and dedication have given your country the next generation in fighter aircraft. With it, I pledge to you restoration of our historic rights over the South China Sea. Each victory in the air is not ours — it is yours!”

He raised his hand again, and let the roar of the crowd wash over him.