Airspace
South Eastern Sistan Va Baluchestan Province, Iran
April 17, 2:50 A.M.
Time stretched beyond its natural bounds, seconds morphing into minutes, minutes into hours. After flying at Mach-2 for nearly quarter of an hour, Karl caught up to the pair of MiGs. They were flying low to the ground, hugging the contours of the mountainous region. As he watched them on the screen, one of the two planes parted from the other. It banked hard to the right and jetted straight up. It leveled above Karl in altitude.
“Here we go,” Karl muttered.
He clicked the arming switch on the firing handle in his left hand. A distant shadow raced swiftly across the blackness of the night sky, silhouetted by the flame of its engine. High and to Karl’s right at about two o’clock, the shadow changed course and aimed towards him. Alarms burst a cacophony of barely audible warnings from the speakers on the main panel as his craft was locked onto by the attacker’s targeting system. His missiles were armed and would soon be coming Karl’s way. Once launched, they would be on him in seconds. His mind whirled as he tried to recall his training. It had been nearly eighteen years since the last time he had flown a fighter. He had to do something fast.
The tone in the speaker suddenly changed to a high-pitched alternating, “Tweedle, tweedle, tweedle!” Missiles were on the way. Karl banked hard, right and down. He pushed the MiG to get under the other plane before he fired his own missiles. A thin green line on the radar screen encircled the blip moving towards him. He pressed the button on the firing handle once, locking his rockets onto the heat signature of the fighter. He pressed again and, with a great whoosh, a pair of missiles hissed out from under his wings. The rockets’ fiery contrails streaked across the sky. Karl veered the craft to port and dropped steeply to three thousand meters as the other pilot’s deadly rockets approached his plane at supersonic speeds. He made a tight circle, perpendicular to the ground, in hopes of throwing off their trajectory and letting them pass by to explode against a mountain or fall to the ground once their fuel was spent. As he pressed into the four-G turn, the blood started to drain from his upper body like he was a test tube in a centrifugal separator. He sucked air into his lungs until they stretched inside his ribs, then tightened the muscles in his abdomen and chest, making a wild-sounding rhythmic grunting noise to force blood to stay in his brain and keep himself from passing out and slamming the plane to the ground in a flaming death.
Karl stayed alert, but the maneuver didn’t work. The missiles closed to within a hundred meters. Unable to read the Farsi labels, he frantically tried to figure out which switch would fire the plane’s counter-measures. As the missiles closed, he rapidly put the fighter into a long angle towards the surface of the earth, the screaming rockets drawing nearer with every second.
He cursed out loud as he searched the panel, afraid to randomly push buttons that might do something he didn’t want. Eighty meters. The radar detected the ground coming up fast and sounded a frenetic alarm, warning him to pull up. The rocky terrain rose swiftly beneath him as the fighter angled towards the earth at nearly twelve hundred miles per hour. It flashed past at less than two hundred meters beneath him and dropping. At forty meters, Karl leveled off, kicking up a high-speed dust cloud as his sonic jet shook the earth. The missiles followed fifty meters behind him.
He forced the stick back and right, shooting off at a sharp oblique angle, the stressed frame of the craft rattling like it was in the grip of an enraged giant. Vibrations rippled angrily through the MiG, threatening to peel the aluminum sheets from the wings. The missiles, unable to adjust their trajectory fast enough, zoomed past, sliding under his plane with a sonic boom. The rockets’ infrared eyes lost his heat signature and sped off to the horizon, impacting seconds later against a distant hill.
Karl climbed back to three thousand meters and checked his radar for the other MiG. It had successfully shaken off his missiles as well, and only fifty kilometers of sky lay between them. His evasive maneuvers had drawn Karl closer to the MiG27 and its nuclear payload. He adjusted his attack to the primary target, ignoring the oncoming MiG31. The graphical display on the console showed four rockets still under his wings and four hundred rounds of twenty-millimeter cannon shells in the nose guns. Karl locked his second pair of rockets onto the kamikaze and drew as close as he could. His finger wrapped around the firing button, then clicked once to acquire his target. The glowing circle did not immediately appear. Flying too close to the boulder-strewn ground was tossing interference back at the radar. He dropped altitude, getting behind the MiG27 for a clearer radar image. A sudden screech shattered his concentration. The locked alarms sounded again. His eyes snapped to the radar screen and saw the other MiG31 fast approaching from behind and above him.
Tweedle! Tweedle! Tweedle!
Karl peeled away from the MiG27 as the MiG31 released his rockets. Much to his chagrin, the missiles followed the flame of his engines dead on. Karl ran through his options, fast. Heaving back the stick, he rolled right and shot the jet skyward, missiles trailing him into the clear starry night. At five thousand meters, he pulled back further until the plane was upside down. His radar showed the other MiG31 right under him. He craned his head back, looking towards the earth. The other fighter’s flaming jet engines lit the sky below him. Inspiration blossomed in his mind. Karl came down and around like a roller coaster loop-de-loop and gunned his engines. Coming in close behind the enemy fighter, he put on a tight tail and followed hard on him to within forty meters. His plane quaked in the fiery jet wash of the other MiG. The missiles raced within sixty meters and closing. The Iranian pilot executed an abrupt right bank one hundred meters off the ground. Karl followed like a wolf chasing a deer.
“You are not getting away!” he muttered aloud, his words absorbed by the deafening roar of the massive jet engines beneath him.
The rockets were thirty meters behind him and closing. Karl throttled the jet and shot ahead, pulling up right on top of the other MiG, trapping it beneath him, unable to escape, and so close that the radar screen showed them as one plane. He jerked the stick back hard, launching his plane straight to the sky, guessed at the switch that would release his counter-measures, and hit it. With a pop, white hot chaff flares burst like a mini sun right behind the other MiG, dazzlingly reflective metal strips snatching the attention of the guiding radar signal. The missiles adjusted briefly, then locked onto their new target. The pilot in the other plane started an evasive bank, but twenty meters was just not enough space for escape.
A deafening roar rolled like thunder, then the sky burst into a super-heated wall of sound as the MiG exploded in a bright ball of flame, its nose cone tipped to the earth and the wings tumbled through the air like appendages torn from a tortured hornet.