Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 55

"Falcon three, do you have a shot?" Jenna asked.

"Gotta get a lock-on," Troy said, gritting his teeth.

By this time, Raymond Harris knew he was up against someone good. He had tried to run, single-mindedly trying to get back on his trajectory to the target.

However, to do this was to put his vulnerable hindquarters into the eyes of the F-16's Sidewinders. Each time, he heard the ping of a lock-on. Each time, he was able to maneuver out of the way, but with each maneuver, he was off course for his target.

The Raven and the F-16 twisted and turned across the sky as Troy tried to achieve lock-on and as Harris tried both to prevent this and to push the Raven itself into a shooting position.

They had gotten into the dogfight maneuver that dogfighters call a scissors, a series of repeated turn reversals in which the aircraft being chased tries both to stay out of the line of fire and twist itself in such a way as to cause the pursuer to overshoot. The idea is that the hunted suddenly becomes the hunter.

Harris groaned and cursed.

The HAWX Program had designed the Raven to be as maneuverable as it was fast, but with seven hundred pounds of nuclear bomb in its central weapons bay, the Raven was not as agile as it might have been otherwise.

Troy thumbed off a burst of twenty-millimeter rounds as the Raven crossed his pipper.

They went wild, but at least Harris knew he was there.

Aha!

For a split second, Harris stopped maneuvering.

It is a natural impulse when you are taking fire to stop moving, and Harris had succumbed.

It is a natural impulse, when you see your quarry pause, to take a shot, and Troy succumbed.

The Sidewinder got its lock-on and streaked forward.

The distance was short — probably less than half a mile.

It is a natural impulse when you catch yourself pausing in a pursuit to move quickly to compensate for a moment of inaction, and Harris moved quickly.

He banked hard to the left.

Troy watched the Sidewinder arc left.

Harris scissored to the right.

The Sidewinder was going too fast to turn so quickly, and it missed him by barely a few feet.

It is a natural impulse when you are chasing your prey to push yourself to catch up. So it was with Troy.

However, he moved too fast, and he slid past the Raven.

He had overshot his prey.

The hunted was suddenly the hunter.

The pinging came, and Troy reacted.

He was in a left turn already, so he rolled hard left.

To evade a heat-seeking missile, you have to obscure the heat source. This was far more difficult for the F-16 than for the Raven. The F-16 does not have the advantage, like the Raven, of the heat signature of its exhaust duct being shielded. Therefore, evasive action must be very evasive.

Troy banked into a roll, rolled into a dive, and dove into a diving turn — all in an effort to outmaneuver the missile from which he could not hide.

Jenna had kept pace as she watched Troy chasing the Raven across the sky in a fast-paced pursuit, flying above and behind the two aircraft as they raced through Maryland airspace.

They were above the clouds, with no view of the ground, so Jenna had no bearings on how close or how far they were in relation to Camp David. They may have failed in their efforts to keep Harris too low to fly his strike mission — they were now above fifteen thousand feet — but at least they were keeping him from his primary mission.

Jenna watched the two aircraft scissoring across the sky, silently urging Troy to take a shot and knowing that he was the type to take it the moment he could.

However, suddenly, it was the F-16 that was in the lead.

The hunter was the hunted.

As she watched Harris launch an AMRAAM, and as she saw Troy roll out and dive, Jenna seized the initiative and swung in behind Harris.

She could sense by the way that he rolled his wedge-shaped aircraft that Harris heard the pinging of her lock-on.

She fired.

Another hunter had become the hunted.

Three warplanes.

Two missiles.

Crowded skies.

Dangerous skies.

Harris's AIM-120 Slammer was gaining on a desperate Troy Loensch, while the electronic brain of Jenna's AIM-9 Sidewinder sought to maintain its lock-on to Raymond Harris and the Raven.

Troy had one chance, and that was to use the Slammer's speed against it. He would allow it to follow him into a turn, then turn abruptly in the opposite direction, knowing — or at least hoping — that its speed would restrict it from so tight a turn.

Troy rolled into a hard left, and prepared to turn right.

That was when he saw it.

Just a quarter of a mile away, and on the same heading as Troy, was a US Airways Airbus A321-200, on approach to Baltimore-Washington Airport with about 170 passengers aboard.

Crowded skies.

Dangerous skies.

As Troy turned, the AMRAAM lost its lock-on for a split second — a desired effect.

As it is programmed to do, the AMRAAM sought to reacquire the broken lock-on.

It did.

However, the lock-on was not now to the F-16's F110 turbofan, but to the larger, hotter CFM56-5 turbofan engine hanging beneath the starboard wing of the US Airways jetliner — very much not an effect that Troy had desired.

Jenna watched her own Sidewinder chase the Raven, knowing that she had denied Raymond Harris the luxury of watching his AMRAAM chase Troy's F-16.

She did not notice the Airbus A321-200 until she glanced away from Harris for a second to watch the AMRAAM's contrail coiling across the sky toward Troy.

She saw Troy's F-16 slip out of the trajectory of the AMRAAM and the trajectories of the two separate. It was not until that moment that she saw the red and blue tail of the jetliner.

The crew on the flight deck may have seen the AMRAAM, although it was approaching from behind. They certainly had seen it on their radarscopes, and they were probably calling a mayday to the Baltimore tower.

They banked the aircraft slightly but were unable to muster serious evasive action.

Jenna saw the white contrail streak into the engine and watched helplessly as the right wing dissolved in a dirty orange fireball.

The force of the blast tossed the one-winged jetliner into a roll, and soon it was tumbling uncontrollably across the sky. Pity the passengers who had not been knocked unconscious by their being thrown into a five-G spin.