Rogue Element (33 page)

Shidyahan pondered the origin of the enemy aircraft he’d seen on his screen. Given that they were probably somehow related to the sighting of the Osprey, and that the Osprey itself was only in service with American forces,
that meant he was up against the US army, navy or air force. The United States of America, shooting missiles at him within the airspace of his own country!? Shidyahan’s fear turned to anger. He tightened his shoulder straps.

Three bandits winked out on Toad’s radar screen. Two. Three. Four. Where was bandit number one? Shit. Bandit one must have outrun its AMRAAM. And the pilot in that plane had had less time to react than the other three. Yes, there he was, number one, painted on his display. He must have gone low. And survived. He silently toasted the F-16 pilot’s good luck and obvious skill. The bastard should buy himself a lottery ticket, Toad thought.

On his display, Toad saw the three surviving aircraft turn towards him. Shit, he thought, that was definitely not a good sign. Those guys would be seriously pissed. He wished he had more AMRAAMs under his wings, or more aircraft in his flight. It was time to bug out. Carefully. Museum piece or not, the F-16 was a formidable enemy in the right hands, even an F-16A armed only with AIM-9s and guns. And, as he’d just witnessed, at least one of those guys could fly it. That meant their training was probably pretty good across the board.

He was checking his weapons stores again; a couple of AIM-9Ms and the gun, just as the picture presented on the small screen display went blank. What the hell . . . ? The transmission to the AV-8s from the AWACs had suddenly been cut. Just when I need them most, those bastards break for lunch, Toad fumed. He was in the process of cursing them out loud when he saw why the link had gone down. He’d just put the towering volcano between himself and the AWACS, and one thing radio waves would not
penetrate was solid rock. He checked his fuel stores. Christ, they were getting marginal. His flight was now being stalked by a force that was numerically superior, and on their home turf. And he’d lost his link to the AWACS. Definitely time to bug out, thought Toad. But where the hell was that slow-mover, the V22?

The V22 accelerated to around 100 knots as it barrelled into a volcanic channel. The pilot swung through a tight turn in the channel at sixty degrees angle of bank. The bend in the channel tightened, forcing the Osprey to make a tighter, higher-g turn. The wall of the channel edged closer to the outside wing, threatening to clip it, and then suddenly it widened, allowing the aircraft to slip through unscathed. Ahead, the walls narrowed again. The pilot and co-pilot hoped the channel would lead away from the volcano, rather than snake back towards it.

It was difficult to know what was going on. Suryei couldn’t rely on her inner ear for bearings at all. She couldn’t see a horizon line; the window was small, revealing little detail. At one stage she was convinced they were flying nearly straight up, and then the aircraft felt like it was falling backwards. It was a very awkward motion, and bad news for her stomach. Suryei retched bile. She had never suffered from airsickness before and it was not a pleasant feeling.

A flash of green coloured the small window diagonally opposite. The blue of the sky followed. Then black rocks. She worked out that the aircraft was banking savagely through a narrow passage. Suryei wondered if there’d be any warning before they hit a mountain. Probably not, she thought, if they hit it head-on.

She remembered looking into the muzzle of the Indonesian soldier’s rifle and knowing that she was about to die. Her attitude at the time had been one of resignation to her fate. She remembered feeling beyond fear. Death had failed to panic her. It was the same now. Airsickness, however, was something else entirely. The thought of dying gave her some relief. Her stomach convulsed, but nothing came up.

The V22 jinked violently up and down, then banked sharply left. It was a wild ride and Suryei found it an effort keeping her head from lolling about uncontrollably. The pressure was on her shoulder straps – they were holding her down in her seat. Her stomach felt light, as if it was trying to find its way up and out of her mouth. She retched again dryly into the bag. She was then forced the other way, driven into her seat, the air forced out of her lungs and her eyeballs squashed into their sockets. She tried to lift her hand out of her lap and found it impossible. It seemed to weigh four or five times more than usual. Suryei tried holding her breath to stop the heaves. It didn’t help and she vomited through her nostrils instead.

Toad called up the V22 and got the aircraft’s position. They were all participants in a game not unlike chess, where the individual pieces were capable of moving in specific and particular ways. The slow-mover was somewhere directly below him. Now, where were those bandits? Then just as quickly as it went down, the display on his screen came back up.

Shit! The F-16s were coming up behind the V22! Jesus, they’d managed to get there damn quick. Toad immediately rolled inverted and fed back pressure into the stick.
His wingman followed. The AV-8s both pulled five-g half loops and accelerated towards the F-16s. The V22 Osprey was his responsibility. He was there to protect it, which meant getting it back on friendly ground in one piece; and with its cargo alive and kicking. There was a time to fight and a time to run. With no BVR missiles left, it was definitely time for the latter, but not until the V22 was secure.

Unfortunately, while the AV-8s could sprint away at the speed of sound, around 580 knots at sea level, the V22 had its balls hanging out at around 270 to 280 knots. With a top speed of well over 1000 knots, an F-16 would mow them down. There was no alternative but to engage the Indons and either try to shoot them out of the sky or persuade them to go home. Toad and his wingman were above and behind the F-16s. With a bit of luck, the Indons’ radar might not have picked them up.

As only Murphy’s Law could predict, Major Shidyahan crossed over the end of the channel at the same time as the V22 exited it. Shidyahan’s eyes went wide at his sheer good fortune when he looked over the nose of his Falcon and saw the V22 sitting in his one o’clock low position like a fat grey cockroach waiting to be stomped on. He selected heaters and went for a tone. He couldn’t get one. The angle was rear three-quarter. Perhaps the thing’s engines weren’t radiating enough heat for a lock. Shidyahan toggled through to gun mode. He had to be quick. His mind calculated angles and speeds. With a little deft feathering of the throttle, he might just manage to get off a burst of cannon into the odd-looking aircraft before overshooting it.

The V22 shook as a handful of 20 mm shells ripped into it and exploded, punching jagged holes in the fuselage and across the upper wing. The V22 staggered and the
engine pitch heaved to a different, desperate note. Oil and smoke exploded with a ball of orange flame from the port engine. The sudden change in torque loadings threw the aircraft into a temporarily divergent flight path. The odd motion brought the paper bag back in front of Suryei’s face. She took a quick look around. No one seemed hurt, but she could see blue sky through the ragged holes in the ceiling.

Toad did a conversion turn, another half loop, putting his AV-8 on an F-16’s tail. The Indon was already pulling up into a high-g yo-yo, positioning itself for another run at the Osprey. Whatever damage it was capable of causing on its first pass was done and there was nothing Toad could do about it. He swore and hoped that the V22 was not in a terminal state.

Suryei’s eyes nervously flicked over the V22’s interior. The SAS soldiers were all in their seats. Astonishingly, one of them, Ellis, Lance Corporal Ellis – yes, that was his name – was asleep, a little drool running from one corner of his mouth onto the headrest. She wanted to kick him awake.

On the flight deck, the pilots quickly brought the aircraft back under control. They realised they’d been hit when a ribbon of tracer arced across the nose of the plane and the airframe shook with impacts. This was the first time the V22 had seen action, let alone received battle damage. They were now way outside the aircraft’s test envelope, charting territory only explored in simulation. How she would perform in the real world was a mystery that would now be revealed. The instruments indicated that the port engine was next to useless. Oil pressure was nonexistent and the temps were well into the red. Fuel
pressure was dropping. Fortunately, the starboard engine appeared to be running sweetly with temps and pressures all normal.

The co-pilot shut the port engine down while the captain went to full power on the remaining turbofan. A shaft running through the Osprey’s wing automatically transferred power from the good engine to the failed engine’s rotor, preventing the torque imbalance that would have made the aircraft virtually impossible to fly.

The Osprey’s pilots were surprised at how well the aircraft took the damage. The flight computers had assessed the radically altered static and dynamic loads on the aircraft and adjusted the outputs to the control surfaces accordingly. They’d had this sort of scenario in the simulator, of course. It was reassuring, and somewhat surprising given the plane’s uncertain flight test history, to know that, for once, reality was presenting nothing different to the virtual.

The engine nacelles had only just finished transitioning to the horizontal position, the V22 approaching its cruising speed, when the aircraft took the hits. The Osprey had immediately dived for the nearest cover, a deep ravine at right angles to its track, and in the opposite direction to that of the three F-16s that ripped through the air overhead.

Going on the offensive was Toad’s only alternative. No communication with the Osprey was necessary; they could all see each other on their radar screens courtesy of the AWACS. Unseen by the Indon pilots, he accelerated quickly to the AV-8’s maximum velocity and shot under the F-16s as they climbed. The AV-8s reached a low escarpment with an overhang just as the F-16s completed their 180-degree course change, flying inverted high overhead. Toad and his wingman threw their thrust vectors into reverse, bringing
their aircraft to such a violent negative-g stop that their eyeballs felt as if they would be plucked out of their sockets. Toad hovered there with his wingman, hidden from the F-16s by the overhang, and watched horrified as their fuel levels dropped before their eyes, the AV-8’s Pegasus engines gulping through the juice like dehydrated athletes after a long race.

Major Shidyahan was feeling angry and vengeful and, he had to admit, also pretty damn good for the first time all day. He had an enemy to shoot at, at last. And he also knew pretty much where that enemy would be – somewhere in his slipstream. He didn’t care who they were. They had fired on him, murdered his comrades, wrecked his squadron’s beautiful F-16s. He would kill them for it.

The F-16 was responding well to his commands. Today, Major Shidyahan was at one with the aircraft. Had he not just evaded a deadly AMRAAM? He would be the toast of his squadron tonight. Maybe even a little secret alcohol perhaps? He had time to reflect on the hero’s welcome he would receive as the F-16’s nose came around. The V22 was just where he knew it would be, in his sights, even though it was trying to evade him by diving down another channel. This time, there’d be no overshoot. He selected heaters and closed for the kill.

Shidyahan throttled back. He wanted to make absolutely sure this time, but then the fear that every fighter pilot gets of something hiding in his six, in the blind spot behind him, filled him with a moment of paranoia and made the flesh on the back of his neck tingle. He glanced around, straining as he tried to take in as much sky as possible. The Falcon’s bubble canopy provided panoramic
views, but when a threat could come from any quarter, the view was never perfect.

The F-16 roared over the ledge shielding Toad and his wingman from sight. Toad smiled as the F-16 shot past. The hunted was now the hunter. He’d lost the ACI from the AWACS again but this time he was prepared for it. He made a brief call to his wingman to sort out targets. When they were both a suitable distance behind the F-16s, they selected their AIM-9s, and counted down from three. At zero, both brought their missiles’ infrared targeting systems to bear on the opposite outside F-16s, which they chose for maximum weapons separation. It took less than a second for the locked-on tone to sound in their headphones, indicating that their missiles had chosen a target. Toad and his wingman pressed the fire buttons on their control side sticks simultaneously. The missiles instantly accelerated from their wingtip rails.

The two targeted F-16s had time to make panicked half-turns away from the centre aircraft before the high-explosive warheads in the AIM-9s detonated behind their engines. The lock tone provided by the F-16s’ threat indicators barely gave the pilots any time to react, let alone begin effective evasion. Toad watched both aviators eject as their crippled aircraft nosed forward and broke up in the sky, rolling over into fireballs and spraying the canopy below with liquid flame and molten aluminium.

Major Shidyahan bugged out of the engagement. He had flown in with five other aircraft, the pride of the TNIAU, with men he had loved and respected as fine aviators, professionals and warriors. Now, most of those comrades were dead, and all the aircraft except his had been shot down. Shidyahan was filled with rage and frustration. He
was against a force with superior weapons and tactics and he felt he had no choice. Whatever these people – these Americans – were doing illegally in Indonesian airspace, he was powerless to prevent. The major executed a 180 degree turn just as his engines started sucking vapour.
Fuel!
He couldn’t remember hearing the low-fuel warnings in his headphones. He tried to gain as much height as he could but his airspeed was low. There was no alternative and he pulled the ejection handles. The bubble canopy blew off and rocket charges blasted the major’s seat clear of the doomed aircraft.

‘Ferret Leader. Ferret Rotor. We have cannon shell damage and falling fuel gauges. We will need a tanker in approximately thirty minutes.’