Chapter Twenty-Five

It was a strange battle right from the start.

Typically, once an aerial engagement was on, the participants scattered and it became a free for all. But the six Su-34s were flying in a line-abreast formation, almost like an aerobatics team, and they stayed that way. That’s when Hunter realized these were three buddy flights he was looking at. Three full-fledged fighters along with three armed refueling planes.

That answered one question. The planes hadn’t come off the Isakov. They were transiting to it from someplace else—Hunter’s guess being somewhere in Russian-controlled Europe—and joining the air fleet already on the boat. They’d just happened to arrive in the middle of the chaos.

Wherever they’d come from, they were at the end of a long journey, in bad weather, and that told Hunter they were probably low on gas. In fact, he could see one buddy pair was still hooked up, hose-to-hose via underwing receptacles. For these two to start a brawl in that configuration could only mean the fighter-plane half of the buddy element must have been down to fumes.

He was dropping at nearly Mach 1.5, and they were climbing at almost the same speed. They opened fire on him at exactly twelve thousand feet, all at once, fighters and tankers. But no cannons this time. Instead, they launched a spread of Aphid-6 antiaircraft missiles—weapons designed to hit targets ten miles away. Using Aphids for in-close combat was like taking a guillotine to a knife fight. It was nasty, but there were easier ways to make your enemy bleed.

But no matter how they were used, Aphids were killers. They didn’t have to hit you; they just had to blow up near you. The resulting storm of shrapnel would do the rest. If just one of the dozen missiles went off in Hunter’s vicinity, he’d be toast.

He yanked his stick sideways and banked hard left. It was such an abrupt maneuver, the shower of Aphids went right by him and continued on to points unknown. At the same time, he’d fired his six-pack of Vulcan nose cannons at the two hooked-up planes. His combined stream of cannon rounds perforated the twin tails of the Su-34 buddy tanker. It instantly flew out of control, catching fire and rolling over to plummet to the sea, pulling the other Su-34 that was still attached down with it, its pilot unable to disconnect the fuel hose in time.

He did a complete horizontal loop, trying like hell to get in back of the two surviving buddy flights, which were still flying in formation. He got within twenty-five hundred feet of them, his finger poised over the six-pack trigger button, when suddenly the four airplanes split apart in four different directions. A diamond burst they called it—and again, it was not unlike an aerobatics display. But in combat? And in the middle of a hurricane?

“Holy Christ!” Hunter heard himself exclaim. Only a Su-34 could have pulled off a crazy jig like that. Small bomber in looks, yes. But these planes were every bit as agile as his XL fighter.

And their pilots were clever. They had drawn him in close. Now, linking back up while doing similar, incredibly sharp turns, they leveled out and were in back of him.

He banked hard left again, pulling on the stick with all his strength. In doing so, his nose went right across the canopy of one of the separated buddy tankers. A quick burst from the six-pack literally cut the Su-34 in two. There was one huge explosion, definitely no parachutes.

Suddenly, the odds were a little better. But it was still three against one.

The trio of Su-34s began turning mightily, trying again to get on his tail. He turned over and headed down again, this time at Mach 2. It was so unbalanced, it was all he could do to keep the XL from slipping into a fatal stall. But he didn’t want to just dump the rare Exocets if he didn’t have to.

Three Aphids were shot at him as soon as he started his plunge. In response, his inner light started him spinning again. The missiles roared by his tail a moment later, his gyrations screwing with their electronic heads. They blew up just a few hundred feet away, one, two, three. He felt the trio of shocks in the air but, luckily, was far enough away not to catch any of the shrapnel from the combined explosions. It had been close, though. At such high speeds, everything was relative. A few inches either way and he would have been reduced to cinders.

He was closing in on the wet deck. Once again battling gravity, aerodynamics, and the physics of balance and momentum, he pulled back hard on the stick, trying to level off before he wound up crashing into the storm tossed water. Finally, at just a hundred feet, he got some air under him. The pursuing Su-34s had backed off much higher, preferring not to follow a madman down to Neptune’s realm. Once they saw his recovery, though, they had to hastily remaneuver to get back to an advantageous position.

This gave him a few seconds to breathe. He was streaking along at seven hundred knots, just a tick above the raging ocean, when suddenly he found one of the convoy’s two battle cruisers began filling up his GEW-40 infrared targeting screen. He looked up, and piercing through the storm clouds with his night-vision goggles, he could just make out the outline of the giant battle cruiser a half mile away.

The people on the ship were very surprised to see him—but their antiaircraft weapons started lighting up right away. It didn’t matter. Even as one of the Su-34s made it down to a hundred feet and began to get a missile lock on him, Hunter pushed his B1 button again and juiced all three Exocets riding under his wings. That’s what it would take to whack this monster. The power light blinked green on the GEW-40IF, and he pushed the live fire switch.

The trio of Exocets flashed away—one, two, three—and headed for the huge warship. Due to electronic jamming or the weather or something else, they did not fly in a straight line. Instead, the big missiles began corkscrewing soon after coming off the rails, bucking their way through the high winds, leaving three bizarre exhaust trails in their wake.

They hit the ship, though. Not at the waterline, as designed, but all three square on its bridge. Close to twelve hundred pounds of explosives blew up, vaporizing the control room, along with the weapons systems room one level below and the officers’ wardroom, which was adjacent to the weapons center. In one stroke, nearly every senior NKVD officer on board was killed. But the ship did not stop or even slow down; it didn’t seem to miss a beat at all. It just kept moving, fighting the storm, but now without any senior officers, steering, navigation, weapons, or a control bridge.

An instant later, Hunter felt his hands grip the stick very tightly and pull it back. The XL was suddenly going straight up again, just missing a barrage of cannon fire from the pursuing Su-34. The other two Russian fighters saw him coming up and each fired an Aphid at him. Luckily, his quick ascent confused the missiles’ homing systems. He hit the throttles and was quickly out of range.

Once again, he found himself three miles above the Su-34s, just about where it all started. Enough of this bullshit, he thought. He wasn’t carrying any more extra baggage, and it was time to really dance. He turned over and started straight down again. At ten thousand feet, he began spiraling madly, engaging his Vulcan cannons as he fell. Hundreds of M61 rounds began gushing out of the XL’s nose, and by twisting as he dove, he created a carousal of continuous fire. Looking not unlike lightning bolts, they were all entwined, but heading in many different directions.

Two of the Su-34 pilots guessed wrong and banked directly into the cone of fire. The buddy tanker of the two caught the worst of it and disappeared in a fireball. His partner tried to fall away, but jagged pieces of the stricken fuel ship got sucked into its air intakes, and he blew up as well.

It almost hurt Hunter to see these beautiful airplanes being destroyed, but this was war. Plus, one enemy fighter still remained.

He stopped spiraling and leveled off at five thousand feet, watching his velocity fall to zero. The XL stopped in midair; a trick not too different from the clown plane. The last Su-34 roared right by his nose.

He engaged his cannons and watched six lines of giant phosphorous tracers slam into the remaining Su-34. Hitting square on the cockpit, both pilots were killed instantly. The big plane turned over one last time and started its final plunge to the sea, spiraling out of control.

That was it. Total time of the fight: one minute, thirty-three seconds.

But no sooner was it over than his radio crackled to life.

It was Dozer, and he was shouting, “You won’t believe what’s going on here!”