Fallout

28

The ring was amplified and broadcast by a PA system throughout the small area. Luke’s heart pounded in his chest as he sat up straight and watched the ground crew scurry around. The officer in charge of the ground crew held the phone to his ear, spoke quickly back, then put it down. He ran to Luke’s ladder and climbed up to talk to him. “One of our border guards reported that a flight of jets just flew over him at very low altitude. Very fast.”

“Pakistani?” Luke asked as he tightened his lap belts. He looked up at lights from a helicopter that was approaching from the east. The craft’s anticollision lights intruded on the otherwise pitch-black sky.

The Indian officer gazed at the helicopter with a puzzled expression, then replied, “Has to be. We aren’t flying anywhere near there. They are on their way.”

“Your airborne radar planes didn’t see anything?”

“I don’t know, sir. I am just telling you what they told me.”

“Where are they?” he asked, trying to disguise the unsteady voice he heard in his own head. The helicopter continued to approach, making conversation harder.

The officer handed him a chart and shone a flashlight on it. “They were coming through a small pass… here.” He pointed.

“That’s about two hundred miles from here. Heading?”

“He couldn’t tell. But he estimated southeast.”

“Let’s go!” Luke said. “Get this info to—”

“He already has it.”

“Then let’s get on with this,” Luke said, starting to envision a low-level intercept at night. Khan clearly had night-vision goggles and knew how to use them. Luke hadn’t even thought about asking for goggles.

Luke was about to close his canopy when out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure jogging toward him from the helicopter. Suddenly Vlad scrambled down from his cockpit with something in his hand. He ran and caught up with the man from the helicopter, who turned slightly to talk to Vlad. The red rotating beacon caught the side of his face; Luke could tell it was Sunil. Strange, Luke thought. What’s he doing out here?

He waited to start his engines. They finished their conversation, and Sunil turned toward Luke. He waved, and Luke waved back. Sunil turned and ran back to the helicopter, which was quickly airborne again.

Vlad ran around to the port side of the MiG and scurried up the ladder. As Vlad reached the cockpit level, Luke got a glimpse of what was in Vlad’s hand—something long and sharp and metal. His heart jumped. All his doubts about Vlad came flooding back, all Brian’s doubts, all Katherine’s unwillingness to take Vlad at face value. Luke saw it all before him, as he envisioned himself at Vlad’s mercy beneath a tree in Nowhere, India. He was still strapped in and had no chance to do anything about it if Vlad meant him harm.

Vlad stood next to Luke and leaned over toward him. He grabbed Luke by the helmet and pulled him toward himself. Vlad brought his left hand up and showed Luke he had a screwdriver in his hand. He said loudly through Luke’s helmet, “I am going to use this. Don’t tell our Indian friends. In the left wheel well of our airplanes is a small box that I will open. It will set our engines on their war mode. Hotter temperatures and more thrust. It will give us all the thrust this engine was intended to put out. Don’t tell them, because it will probably also ruin the engines!” Vlad smiled a huge, energetic smile.

“What was Sunil doing here?”

“Don’t worry about it. It was about me. I explained everything to him about what we are doing.”

“But he was headed over here.”

Vlad nodded with understanding. “He thought I was in this airplane.”

Luke watched him disappear into the left wheel well, then reemerge after thirty seconds. He gave Luke a nod and a thumbs-up as he ran back toward his own airplane.

Luke quickly lowered the canopy. He shook his head as the first thought that came to him was that Vlad had somehow disconnected the left landing gear or released a fitting in the hydraulic system. As soon as he got up to speed, the MiG would lose the left strut and veer off the road, killing him. He was angry at himself for not trusting Vlad but unable to rid himself of lingering doubts.

He turned on the electrical power from the battery and quickly switched on the auxiliary power unit. It began turning his number one engine as the Indian ground crew watched. Two men stood to the left of the MiG with fire extinguishers in their hands, and a plane captain stood in the grass directly in front of Luke. Luke squinted to see him and realized that his windscreen was covered with mist. Great weather brief. He glanced up at the sky but couldn’t see it through the darkness and the tree covering him.

As the engine turned, Luke watched a man by the road working with a box that had a long electrical line coming from it. It clearly wasn’t responding as he would like. He adjusted something, and suddenly the highway was lit by a mile-long string of lights on either side, creating a rough, wet, uneven, poorly maintained runway. It was the very kind of strip the MiG-29 was designed to operate from.

The first engine roared to life, and the fuel flow, turbine inlet temperature, and RPM climbed into normal ranges. He deselected the auxiliary power unit and quickly did a cross-bleed start of the number two engine, redirecting some of the jet air from the first engine across to the second engine to get its turbine spinning. He watched the RPM of the first engine dip slightly as the second began to turn. As soon as the second engine reached 10 percent RPM, he pulled its throttle off the stops, automatically lighting the engine off. The RPM jumped to 65 percent, idle, and he deselected cross-bleed. He turned on all the electronics and prepared to taxi.

The plane captain began signaling for the preflight checks—flaps, control surfaces, and the like. Luke was having none of that and shook his head vigorously. He had to get in the air.

Luke signaled to the plane captain to pull the chocks away from the wheels, and the plane captain signaled the men on either side of Luke’s MiG. They removed the large wooden blocks in front of the oversize tires. Luke switched on his taxi light, advanced the throttle, and the MiG-29 rolled down the grass toward the road thirty yards ahead. The MiG drew in the night air from the louvers that were open on the shoulders of the airplane. The large intakes that would feed the hungry engines with the air it needed while airborne remained closed, to avoid sucking anything off the ground and damaging the turbine blades.

Luke looked to his right and saw the light on the nosewheel of Vlad’s MiG bouncing as he taxied forward from his position. As Luke headed toward the road in the pale moonlight that fought its way through the mist, the Indian ground crew saluted him. He returned their salute and turned on his radio. They had agreed to keep their radio communication to a minimum, and only on the frequency that Luke alone would choose.

Luke pondered the idea of taking off from a state highway in the night to intercept an F-16 without the use of any ground or airborne early-warning radar to help him run the intercept. He tried not to think too hard about the fact that the only information they had on Khan’s whereabouts was from a border guard. The heading information they’d received was marginal at best, but Luke could imagine the heading, or calculate it, if Khan headed directly for his target. If he didn’t, Luke knew he would never find him.

Luke scanned his engine instruments, glowing in the dark cockpit. He turned his MiG to face down the makeshift runway. He looked ahead of him at the narrow road with the lights on either side. It was slightly downhill and curved to the right in the distance where the lights stopped. The lights rose up and down with the road. It gave Luke the impression of trying to take off from a piece of bacon.

He advanced his throttles and moved forward slightly, trying to point his MiG exactly down the center of the road. Then he glanced into his rearview mirror. Vlad was directly behind him. Luke looked at the clock on the dash and knew he had to go. He pushed the throttles to full military power, waited until 100 percent RPM was generated in each engine, did a quick check of the engine instruments and flight controls, and released the brakes on the Fulcrum. The plane sped down the road, the lights disappearing under its wings one by one. The bulbs reflected their white light off the inside of Luke’s canopy as if he were dashing into a movie theater.

The MiG accelerated through eighty knots, then one hundred. The road dipped and the nose gear compressed but threw the Fulcrum’s nose back up as it headed out of the dip. The airplane almost had enough air over its wings to fly, and the impulse of climbing the small hill nearly threw the Fulcrum into the air before Luke was ready. He pushed the stick forward and held the Fulcrum on the ground waiting for the proper rotation speed.

The curve in the road was coming up too quickly. He knew he had to be airborne before he reached it. He had disabled nosewheel steering and was able to keep the MiG on the road only by using the rudder pedals to control the big rudders behind him. He put in more rudder and checked his airspeed. He was passing through 135 knots. He hated the idea of taking off with rudder input, but he was afraid of losing control around the turn.

He pulled the stick back smoothly, and the Fulcrum’s nosewheel came off the road. The louvers closed and the large engine intake doors opened, sucking in the fresh, moist air. The nose dipped, Luke trimmed it out, and the MiG lifted off. Luke could suddenly feel the crosswind he hadn’t even been aware of, having attributed all the side force to the curve. The rear wheels lifted off, and Luke felt himself drifting hard left over the road. He pushed the stick to the right and pulled back on the nose to climb over obstacles, the invisible trees and bushes and wires that surrounded the area. He wanted to get away from the earth as rapidly as he could. He punched in a little afterburner to climb faster, then immediately deselected it to save gas. He raised his flaps, sucked up the landing gear, and pulled away from the road and Vlad behind him.

Vlad released the brakes on his Fulcrum as soon as the lights on Luke’s airplane showed him airborne. He rolled down the undulating road, acutely aware of the crosswind he’d seen Luke’s plane absorb. He gave himself a little afterburner just before liftoff to avoid the curve he’d seen Luke fight. He was promptly airborne, and he rendezvoused with Luke at five thousand feet over the local navigation aid they had agreed to use.

Luke and Vlad kept their radars off. They knew they had to make the intercept without any help from a ground controller. They would get course corrections if absolutely necessary, but they wanted any communication kept to a minimum to avoid detection.

Luke steadied on a heading of 220 to take them fifty miles ahead of Khan’s expected course. He suddenly realized he had no idea how many airplanes were with Khan. The border guard had simply said “airplanes.” That could mean two, or four, or six. It would be a rare person indeed who could distinguish the sound of two low-flying jets from that of three or four, especially if they flew directly overhead with their lights off.

Luke increased his throttle until it was at the stops. He pulled back on the stick and climbed to ten thousand feet to save gas and have a better chance of detecting the low-flying Pakistanis with his infrared system.

Luke knew the sensitivity of the F-16 radar-warning indicator much better than Vlad did. He wasn’t about to hand Khan any advance warning by giving him a radar strobe from his MiG. Even a passing hit would alert Khan that MiGs were airborne. Luke didn’t want Khan to have any idea they were coming until they were on top of him.

Luke turned up the screen of his infrared detector to see the green against black clearly. It didn’t transmit anything, it just detected heat sources. He had practiced with it on almost every hop at the Nevada Fighter Weapons School. He found it easy to use and loved the idea of a totally passive intercept, where he would shoot down another airplane without even turning on his radar, without the other pilot even knowing he was nearby. It was a device few American fighters had. The F-16 had no infrared search-and-track system for air-to-air use, nor did the F/A-18 that Luke had spent most of his time flying.

He checked the status of the two Archer and two Alamo missiles he was carrying. It was a decent load, but he would have preferred to carry four Archers. “Spread,” Luke transmitted. Vlad took combat spread, a mile to Luke’s right. They climbed to ten thousand feet, high enough to hear the chatter on the air-control frequency. The ten Indian MiG-29s Prekash had ordered to defend the nuclear plant were now airborne and flying low combat air patrol near the plant. Other airborne early-warning aircraft were searching for Khan and broadcasting everything they thought would help identify them to the fighter patrol. Luke was sure somebody would be monitoring the Indian radio channels and fighter control to alert Khan of any developments. Khan would receive any such intelligence over his own radio without disclosing his own position.

Luke checked his chart again and turned toward Pakistan. Vlad was a mile to his right, slightly above him in combat spread. Luke studied the IR image and saw nothing that resembled an airplane. He didn’t have much range with the IR system, but he refused to turn on his radar and give himself away.

He looked out toward the dark land below. He could barely see the ground. There were a few headlights on the invisible roads. The waning moon provided some illumination, but not enough to navigate by.

Luke figured they’d beaten the F-16s to this point on their flight path by ten minutes. He turned outbound and headed toward the pass where the guard had heard the fighters. If his estimates were right, he had less than five minutes until he would be on top of the F-16s.

Vlad was getting antsy. “Nothing.”

“Ditto,” Luke replied.

Luke suddenly saw a flash on the left side of his infrared screen. Something very hot was fifteen or twenty degrees below the horizon and far to his left. “Hard left!” he transmitted as he threw his stick to the side and rolled his Fulcrum into a ninety-degree angle of bank in the darkness. He headed left and down as his IR system continued to search for and reacquire the target. Luke couldn’t see anything and wondered if he’d deceived himself into thinking he’d seen a return. He searched higher and lower. Still nothing. His speed passed through 550 knots as he passed through five thousand feet toward the ground. He rolled out of his turn and pointed at where he thought the targets should be. He couldn’t find any signs of any airplanes at all.

He began to doubt himself even more when suddenly he had a strobe, a hint of an IR return on his screen, still to the left and down. Then a second, then a third hit. It had to be them. They were low, and less than ten miles away, still far to his left. If he hadn’t caught the initial return, they would already be past him. He would never have seen them.

He pulled into the targets in a descending left turn and accelerated. He tweaked the controls on the IR system to separate out the bogeys. He tried to remember the minimum safe altitude of the area to avoid flying into a hill or antenna tower, but couldn’t remember what it was.

Luke heard a buzz in his helmet—the sound of an F-16 radar on his radar-warning receiver. He had a strobe from his one o’clock position, just to the right of his nose. “I’m getting tickled,” he transmitted ominously to Vlad.

“So am I.”

“I’m going active.” Luke threw on the switch for his radar and turned the powerful MiG-29 radar toward the targets tearing across the Indian countryside. He quickly located them and locked up the lead to concentrate the radar’s total energy on that one airplane. He was doing 620 knots. Luke was stunned. The altitude readout showed “zero” feet, so low that the radar couldn’t tell they weren’t on the ground. Night-vision goggles, Luke concluded. That gave them a big advantage he hadn’t anticipated.

He broke lock on the radar and went into track-while-scan. He saw two other targets immediately, and then a third came up tentatively on the screen. Abruptly the third target started turning toward him and coming up after him. Luke hesitated as he suddenly realized that Khan had done the very thing Luke had told him not to do—he’d brought fighter escort. Two light F-16s, unencumbered with fuel tanks or bombs, peeled off Khan’s formation to come after Luke and Vlad.

They had speed, they had good position, and they had American forward-quarter-firing AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. Luke knew they had to act immediately or they would be dead. “Two free fighters coming up after us, Vlad. I’m going low.”

“Roger. I’m going up, then. Over,” Vlad responded quickly.

They extinguished their anticollision lights.

Luke pushed the nose of his MiG-29 over, to pass by the climbing F-16s and race toward Khan. The lead F-16 anticipated his move. Luke suddenly had an F-16 radar locked on him from the right side of his MiG. Luke had to turn into him to defend himself or he would never be able to intercept Khan. But if he did, Khan would slip away to his left. Luke had no choice.

He brought the Fulcrum around hard right and looked up through the windscreen with his helmet-mounted sight toward where the F-16 should be. He couldn’t see him in the pitch-black sky. Luke tried to get the Archer missile to search for it, to give him the growl he yearned to hear, but there was no sound at all from his heat-seeking missiles.

He strained against the high G forces as he continued around to the right. He slaved his radar to the right toward the F-16, but still nothing. He still had a hard strobe on his radar-warning indicator. The F-16 had him locked up. Luke dumped some chaff to try to break the radar lock but had no success. He was trapped. The F-16 was coming uphill at him. It had a radar lock and almost certainly a sweet infrared shot. Luke had nowhere to go. Suddenly he remembered to activate the electronic jammers in the hump of his MiG, the jammers designed and installed just to defeat American-built radars. He reached and quickly threw the switches. He waited for the flash of the AIM-9 missile coming off the rail, but so far he had seen nothing. Then the F-16 radar was gone, deceived by the electronics of the MiG. Luke grunted. Good old Russian engineering.

The two fighters raced toward each other at twelve hundred miles an hour, neither able to see the other, both following the vaguely remembered strobe of the F-16 radar, which had broken lock seconds before. Luke suddenly noticed a return on his infrared receiver and slaved the seekerhead of the Archer missile to it. The Archer missile picked up the heat signature of the F-16 as it climbed away from the land. The missile seekerhead growled in eager anticipation. Luke fired immediately, reduced his throttle to idle, and turned back hard to his left to stay on Khan’s trail.

He saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. The second F-16 had taken a shot at Vlad.

Vlad transmitted, “I’ve got one coming directly at me!”

Luke saw another flash to the right and behind him as Vlad fired a radar missile back at the F-16, which he almost certainly couldn’t see. Vlad made a hard left turn to follow behind Luke and went to afterburner and dropped several hot burning flares to draw off the Sidewinder missile.

Luke saw Vlad scream by in full throttle toward Khan and his wingman as they in turn headed toward the Indian nuclear power plant. The Sidewinder chasing Vlad slammed into one of the flares Vlad had dropped and blew it into a bright orb like the one at the end of a fireworks show.

Just then Luke’s Archer missile reached its target and flew into the engine intake. The invisible F-16 exploded in a ball of flames and tumbled toward the ground. Luke saw two bright plumes of afterburner ahead of him. It had to be Vlad—the F-16s had only one engine.

Luke wanted to kick himself. He had flown an intercept on the lead F-16 with fighters in cover behind. If one of his students had done that at NFWS, he would have given him a “down” for the flight. He stole a look toward the other F-16, or where it should be, but couldn’t see anything. It was like a knife fight in a dark closet.

Luke’s radar was on, as was his infrared search-and-track. His plan for a secret intercept of the F-16s to a nice rear-quarter Archer shot had gone up in missile smoke. He pulled back on his stick, deselected afterburner, and climbed to three thousand feet, well above the F-16s somewhere below him.

He was also now in the position of being to the side of the attacking F-16s with no ability to pick them out of the clutter of the ground. He raced toward his expected intercept point but was losing confidence with every second. “Did you get that bogey?” he asked, wondering if Vlad’s first missile had hit its target.

“I don’t know. Didn’t see impact,” Vlad replied.

Luke’s radar-warning receiver was clear. The F-16s had not reacquired him.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Vlad replied. “I’ve got them three miles ahead of me.”

“Hit your burner,” Luke said.

He saw a burst of two afterburners ahead, then darkness again. “Got you,” he said. Luke pulled hard left to get back on the F-16s’ course. Now he was chasing them from behind, but there was an F-16 somewhere behind him that probably hadn’t gotten shot down.

Suddenly the voice of Prekash, the Indian squadron commander, came on their frequency calmly. “Let us know if they get through.”

“Wilco,” Luke transmitted with supreme annoyance.

He glanced up at the moon to see which side of the airplane would be illuminated. He wanted to be up-moon of the F-16s so they would see only his shadow. Luke accelerated as he began searching the air in front of them with his radar. “Still have them?” Luke asked Vlad.

“Lost them. Too low!”

“Still searching,” Luke said.

“I’ve got them!” Vlad transmitted. “They are three miles ahead of me. On the deck. Heading 130.”

Luke pulled to his left, took up a position of combat spread off Vlad, and redirected his radar toward Khan. Luke’s track-while-scan radar picked up the targets quickly this time. They had a hundred knots of closure on the bogeys, not enough for Luke. “Push it up,” he said. They closed on the two F-16s. Luke glanced at the navigation aid they’d been using, then the chart on his kneeboard, and noted they were seventy-five miles from the nuclear plant. Fifty was their limit. If they didn’t get Khan stopped by fifty miles, Prekash would take over with the rest of his squadron. Luke was tempted to let them do it, to break off the chase and leave it to the Indians, where it belonged. But he wasn’t there to help India.

A red glow began to illuminate the horizon, and the rest of the countryside was now almost visible, even though still in mostly dark grays and black. Luke strained to see his enemy through the windscreen. He glanced down at his radar picture. “I’m showing them in tight formation,” Luke transmitted.

He had no doubt Khan knew they were there. He was certainly getting a radar strobe from the MiGs. But now Luke wanted Khan to know they were behind him. He wanted Khan to pull up, to do anything that would stop his progress toward the target. “Alamo!” Luke transmitted to Vlad as he pulled the trigger on the stick and the heavy radar missile dropped off his wing. One second later the rocket motor ignited, nearly blinding him with its intense yellow flame, as it headed for Khan’s flight of two jets.

Luke heard a buzz in his headset, the sound of a radar locked on to him. He glanced down to his radar-warning receiver screen and saw a strobe from directly behind him. Shit! That other F-16 had caught up with them. The missile launch had shown him where they were. “I’ve got one on my tail!” he transmitted.

Vlad immediately broke into a hard turn to cover Luke’s tail. “Looking.”

The radar-warning receiver couldn’t tell the range, only the direction. The strobe showed just that the bogey was directly behind him. It could be a mile back, or ten.

Luke’s eyes were fixed on the ball of fire ahead of him that was still heading toward Khan. Khan hadn’t jinked or moved up at all. He watched the missile hit the ground a full half mile before the fleeing jets. Luke yelled to himself, “Damn it!” as he smashed his fist into the canopy. “Stupid damned Russian missiles couldn’t hit the ocean if you dropped them off a pier!”

Vlad continued to pull hard left a thousand feet off the ground, with his radar searching for a target behind where he knew Luke must be. His radar was in auto-acquisition mode, and it locked onto a target a mile and a half behind Luke. He didn’t have any time at all. He slaved one of his Archer missiles to the radar to point in the direction of the bogey and fired before he even had a good tone or could see the bogey. He was looking into the black sky to the west, well aware he was presenting a nice silhouette for the bogey as the sun approached the horizon behind him. The Archer screamed off the rail, and Vlad squinted and turned back toward Luke.

The Archer wasn’t to be fooled. It angrily bore down on the bogey, hitting it directly on the tail, just forward of the exhaust. Then it exploded, cutting off the entire back half of the airplane. The pilot ejected as the F-16 slammed into the ground.

“Stay behind me and high. I’ve got to close on these guys.”

“Roger,” Vlad said as he pulled his Fulcrum up to five thousand feet and scanned the sky for any other Pakistani fighters. No more surprises.

“You need help?” Prekash transmitted.

Only Vlad heard it, as he was high enough to catch the transmission. He replied, “Negative. Will keep you posted. Splash two F-16s.”

“Roger. How many remaining?”

“We think two.”

“You need support?”

“Recommend you vector a flight of four out now, heading”—Vlad looked quickly at the chart with the nuclear plant marked—“290. If the F-16s are still airborne by there, we’ll need a lot of help.”

“Roger. Flight of four outbound.”

Luke heard Vlad’s transmission. He assumed that Vlad was talking to Prekash, who no doubt was watching a radar picture of two bombers inbound to his nuclear power plant with the two world-class fighter instructors chasing them from behind. Not how it was supposed to go.

Luke noticed that his fuel was lower than he’d hoped. He didn’t have much more time to complete this intercept. The F-16 had more fuel than the Fulcrum could ever hope to have; the F-16 had only one engine. He had to get Khan now, or he’d be out of gas. He went to full afterburner and accelerated toward Khan and the infrared signature he had. He again worked his radar onto Khan’s jet. He fired another Alamo, his last radar-guided missile. He didn’t have much faith in the large Russian missile by now. He had yet to see it hit anything, not at San Onofre, not here.

The morning air was clear and smooth as he started to see color in the landscape. It was the same patchy color as the camouflage scheme on his Indian MiG. He could make out a few trees or an occasional road as he raced across the countryside below him. He watched the Alamo speed toward Khan and knew that Khan was getting the radar-lock indication on his radar-warning gear.

Luke almost smiled, as he could see Khan’s face in his F-16 trying to decide whether he was safer by pulling up and doing a hard turn into the missile or staying low and fast and hoping the missile would hit the ground. He’d stayed low last time, and he might again. But it was going to be harder. Luke was closer, and Khan had to know that. It took a special coolness to take no evasive action when a missile was tearing up on you from behind.

Luke had closed to within a mile of Khan and could finally see the two F-16s as they danced over the Indian countryside. He could get only occasional glimpses of the airplanes, since they blended in with the darkness, but the missile had a very clear picture. It was getting radar return off the F-16s that guided it beautifully toward them. Luke saw small flashes on the underbellies of the two F-16s as they dropped chaff behind them to try to deceive the missile. The Alamo headed right toward them in a downward line like an arrow, when suddenly Luke’s radar broke lock.

Khan went even lower, literally at treetop level, still running for the nuclear power plant. As much as he would have loved to turn and fight the two Indian MiGs he was sure he could defeat, he was determined to get to the target.

“Shit!” Luke yelled inside the noisy Russian cockpit as he watched the Alamo fail. He had only one Archer missile left.

Luke closed to within three-quarters of a mile of the fleeing F-16s and reacquired them with his radar. He selected Archer, the fast, infallible, maneuverable missile that he’d taught everyone to fear. He slaved the seekerhead to the radar, heard that growl, and fired. The hungry heat-seeking missile went right at Khan. Its motor burned brightly in the morning, illuminating the white smoke trail it left from Luke to the bogey. Khan knew what was coming. Flares dropped from the F-16s like rain. They burned at different intensity from a jet engine, a different color. The Archer chose one of the flares and blew it to hell.

What? Luke thought. The Pakistanis have a flare that will beat the Archer? When did they get it? It suddenly occurred to him for the first time that he might not be able to get Khan. He had failed to shoot him down with the best maneuvering missile in the world. He was out of missiles and options. The Indians were going to have to take care of him themselves.

He suddenly heard the buzz of a radar that had him locked up. His heart jumped. He looked down at the radar-warning receiver. It was a MiG-29 radar. “Vlad, you’ve got me locked up!”

“Vlad!” he transmitted. “I’m Winchester. Get ahead of me and take a shot!” He continued to close on Khan, now only half a mile ahead. As he tore his eyes away from Khan to glance over his shoulder at Vlad, Luke noticed to his surprise that his thirty-millimeter gun was fully loaded. Bullets! But he’d never fired a Fulcrum gun. He wasn’t even sure how to interpret the gunsight. He slaved the IR system to the radar and saw the hot signature of the F-16s against the cool ground. He selected laser, and the laser range finder showed one thousand meters to the F-16. He selected the gun and wrapped his finger around the large trigger on the back of the stick. He studied the gunsight picture in the HUD. He had almost two hundred knots of closure. He pulled hard left and back to the right, to allow himself to pull lead on Khan and have a downward shooting angle. “Vlad, hold off! I’m going to guns.”

Again there was no reply.

Luke pulled back around hard to the right, with the buzz of Vlad’s radar ever-present in his mind. Luke was finally close enough to begin his gunnery run, although he was nearly supersonic—much faster than he wanted to be—but the F-16s weren’t slowing down for anything. Luke pointed his nose directly at the lead F-16 and watched the pipper—the aiming point—march toward the dark figure streaking across the ground.

The laser range finder and IR system were on target. Luke pulled the trigger, and the thirty-millimeter cannon spit the huge bullets out the front of the MiG. He watched the tracers arc toward Khan and fall just behind him. He pulled hard left to pull more lead on Khan.

Khan knew he had to move. If he continued straight ahead, he’d be dead. He pulled hard left as his wingman broke hard right, in a controlled, disciplined turn. They stayed low to the ground, not giving up the safety of their altitude.

Luke tried to pull lead, but the turn was too tight to saddle in, and too low. If he continued ahead, he would overshoot and fly into the ground. “Vlad, take the one in the right turn!” he transmitted with some difficulty through the seven-G turn. He leveled his wings and pulled up to avoid the overshoot. At least he’d gotten Khan to turn from his target, and he was burdened with whatever bomb he was carrying, not a help in a dogfight.

Khan continued to turn hard right next to the ground, making it almost impossible to get a shot on him as he waited for a chance to pull his nose up and take a snap shot at Luke.

It was a clever tactic, Luke acknowledged, but not clever enough. Luke had three dimensions within which to work, and Khan had two. Luke leveled his wings and pulled up away from the earth, the nose of his Fulcrum pointing anxiously into the purple darkness above. He looked over his shoulder to see if Khan was going to follow him up. Khan continued to fly in his tight circle until he saw Luke almost completely vertical, then turned back to his original heading and accelerated away. It was what Luke had been waiting for. He pulled the Fulcrum down and pointed the nose of the Russian fighter toward Khan’s F-16. As he plummeted toward the earth, he saw the flash of the missile out of the corner of his eye as Vlad fired.

Luke’s heart stopped. Vlad’s radar was still on Luke. He waited to see if the missile was heading toward him and saw it was going toward Khan’s wingman. Luke finally realized that Vlad was keeping Luke on his radar to make sure he didn’t shoot him. He’d fired an infrared missile and had slaved the missile seekerhead to the IR receiver instead of the radar. Leave it to Vlad to come up with that, Luke thought.

Luke pulled the trigger as soon as his pipper was near the F-16. It was a bad shot, but he wanted Khan to know he was still around and wasn’t going away. Khan would have to fight or go down. In his peripheral vision Luke saw Khan’s wingman coming back to support Khan. He was higher than Khan and in afterburner, trying to regain some of the speed he’d lost turning with Vlad. Vlad was behind him about a mile. Luke’s tracers arched in front of Khan again, daring him to keep flying straight.

Khan’s wingman never saw Vlad’s missile. It hit him in the canopy and spiked the F-16 into the ground like a tent peg.

Khan couldn’t take any more. He pulled up hard away from the earth toward Luke. Luke quickly selected radar and locked on to the climbing F-16. He placed Khan directly in the middle of his windscreen. The radar grabbed the reflected return from the metal airplane climbing away from the diminishing clutter and held on.

Khan pointed his nose directly at Luke. Khan’s bomb limited his ability to maneuver, especially nose up as he now was. Luke heard the buzz from an F-16 radar lock as Khan got his radar onto Luke, then fired one of the Sidewinder missiles on his wing rail at Luke.

“Low fuel, low fuel!” the Indian woman warned Luke.

Luke dropped several flares and headed toward the ground at the same time Vlad did. The Russian-made flares were calculated to defeat the known enemy of all Soviet-bloc airplanes, the AIM-9L Sidewinder. The version the United States had sold to Pakistan was the older model Sidewinder. The Russian-made flare was exactly the right infrared frequency and deceived the Sidewinder into thinking that it was a jet exhaust in afterburner. The Sidewinder slammed into the small burning flare, its warhead exploding two hundred feet from Luke’s MiG.

Luke and Vlad were both behind the fleeing Khan now, fifty miles from the nuclear plant. Vlad transmitted, “One left.”

Prekash replied, “Roger, break off your attack. We have you inbound at fifty miles. We have four fighters ten miles away. Repeat, break off your attack.”

“Stick, did you hear that? They want us to break off.”

“I need you down here, Vlad! We’ve almost got him.” “Emergency fuel! Emergency fuel! Land immediately!” the nice Indian woman told Luke in her inimitable voice. He longed for Glenda.

Vlad replied to Prekash. “Yes, roger that. Luke is closing on him. He is still with him, hold your fire!” he yelled as he rolled over and pulled toward the ground.

“Are you Winchester?” Luke asked Vlad.

“One Alamo left,” Vlad replied.

“Lock him up.”

“I’m on my way,” Vlad said, selecting afterburner and racing ahead toward Luke, whom he’d again locked up with his radar. Vlad broke the radar lock on Luke and searched for Khan. He rolled wings level. “Got him.”

“You got a good shot?” Luke demanded.

“Not very.”

“Shoot!” Luke insisted.

“Too low! You’re between us! It will never—”

“Shoot now! That’s an order!”

“Alamo!” Vlad said as he pulled the trigger, and the last missile of their flight dropped off the Fulcrum and tore through the cool morning air.

Luke saw the flash behind him in his rearview mirror and continued to hold Khan on his radar. He had only guessed where Vlad was behind him; he hadn’t really known. He’d taken a huge risk in ordering Vlad to shoot past him to Khan, but his method had its own madness. The Alamo flew by Luke’s Fulcrum on his right a quarter mile away. It headed directly toward Khan.

Khan could see it coming and went lower to try to cause the missile to hit the ground as all the others had. It was exactly what Luke had wanted. He stayed in afterburner and closed to gun range. If Khan stayed straight and level, Luke would have him. If he pulled up, the missile would get him.

Luke pulled lead and placed the gunsight pipper on the nose of the F-16. It danced around in the bumpy airstream, but Luke could hold on the nose of the bogey. The laser range finder instantly gave the MiG computer the firing solution it needed. He pulled the trigger, and the thirty-millimeter rounds pounded out of the cannon.

With the tracers in front of him, Khan knew he had to make an instant decision. He lowered the nose of his F-16 slightly and descended to the trees. The belly of his plane scraped the tallest trees, and the Alamo came up immediately behind him and tried to get him by going through the branches. One of them was too thick for the fiberglass radome of the radar missile. It shattered the nose of the missile and its radar guidance. The missile went stupid and guided left and down, away from Khan. But it had gotten close enough to Khan to know where he was. Like most airborne missiles, it had two fuses: an impact fuse and a proximity fuse. The proximity fuse measured the range to the target when it got to within a few hundred feet. When the decreasing range suddenly reversed and started increasing, the missile knew it was passing the target and triggered the warhead to explode instantly. It did.

Khan pulled up hard to avoid the tracers at the same time the warhead’s proximity fuse sent its message. The high-explosive warhead that sent shrapnel out at incredible speeds took off a foot of the left tail of the F-16. Khan’s hard pull-up lost much of its authority, and instead he drifted higher in an arcing left-hand climbing turn. He flew directly into Luke’s cannon fire. The first huge, high-explosive incendiary round cut through the center of the F-16. The second hit the back of the ejection seat in which Khan sat. The third shell passed through the fuel tank in the middle of the back of the F-16, and the airplane exploded as it pitched over and slammed into the ground.

Luke and Vlad both pulled up high into the sky as Vlad transmitted quickly on the radio, “Splash four F-16s.”

“You got them all?” Prekash asked.

Luke could now hear Prekash as his Fulcrum passed through five thousand feet with ease. “Got them all, Prekash. Four down, maybe one survivor,” Luke said in his studied casual tone.

“Well done. How’s your fuel?”

Luke checked his fuel gauge for the first time in ten minutes. His Fulcrum was out of gas. The Indian woman had apparently given up. She knew that her stupid pilot was going to kill her and had surrendered to the inevitable. The primary weakness of his favorite fighter had been vividly demonstrated. “I’m out of gas. Request vector to the nearest airfield.”

“There isn’t one within two hundred miles. Just put her down,” Prekash ordered.

“Say your fuel state, Vlad.”

“Zero.”

Luke leveled out at seven thousand feet and glanced down below him. There was a straight section of a highway five miles away. “I think I see our new auxiliary runway below us.”

“I’m right behind you,” Vlad said.

“We’re going to set down on the highway right below us. Do you have our position?” he asked Prekash.

“We’re looking. We’ll send a helicopter right away. Good shooting.”

Luke took off his oxygen mask and gasped for air. He rolled into a downwind leg approaching the highway as if it were a typical runway. He checked for power lines and traffic and saw neither. He relaxed, lowered his landing gear and flaps, and prepared to land. He lined up on the road, which now looked narrower than he’d thought. He slowed carefully, then flared and touched down on the road. He quickly deployed his drag chute and got on the brakes. He watched his speed drop below 120 knots, then below 100. The MiG was behaving beautifully.

Something to his left caught his eye. He suddenly realized it was Vlad’s MiG, in a steep nose-down descent. “Vlad!” he yelled. He pushed the transmit button on his radio, “Pull up! Pull up!”

There was no response. The MiG plunged into the ground and burst into flames.