War Cry by Keith Douglass

Author:Keith Douglass [Douglass, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Action & Adventure, War & Military, War Stories
ISBN: 9780425171172
Google: GwwNAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0425171175
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 1999-09-30T18:30:00+00:00

Korean Air Space Over the MLR

"Cat Two-Twelve, this is Home Base."

"This is Cat Two-Twelve. Go, Home Base." "We have a report of three aircraft heading your direction from the north from our E-2C Hawkeye. Expect some older-class MiGs. They are at fifteen thousand and about forty miles away closing your position at eleven hundred knots. Meet and greet."

"Our pleasure, CAG. Changing course now."

The three F-14 Navy fighters swept into a graceful turn heading due north, their radars reaching out to find the targets.

Cat Two-Twelve was Lieutenant Forest Corey, "Corny" to his buddies. "Got anything yet, Marsh?"

Corey asked his RIO in the backseat. The Radar Intercept Officer, Marshal "Marsh" Landower, had his nose buried in his readout radar screen.

"Nothing yet, Corny. Should be coming up fast. We're closing now at twenty-four hundred knots?"

"Near to it."

"That's twenty-seven-sixty miles per hour or over forty-six miles a minute. We should be halfway there by now."

Corey spoke on the plane-to-plane TAC to his two wing men.

"Gents, they'll probably split when they spot us. We'll take left, right, and middle, as always. Good hunting."

"About time we got some action up here," Pete Platamone said.

"Roger that, Leader man," the other pilot, "Ham" Jones, said. "Free beer for a week for whoever nails the first bastard."

"I've got them," RIO Marsh Landower said. "You're right, they are splitting, still out about twenty miles."

"Stay with them, guys," Corny said. "I've got the middle one."

"No radar-friendly recognition signal from the three," Marsh said. "They are not friendly. I repeat, the targets are not friendly."

"Light them up, Marsh, let's do it."

Marsh had the radar turned on and worked to get a lockup of his signal on the blip on his screen. The MiG was still eighteen miles away and turning hard to the left. "Stay with him, Corny. Almost had him. Damn. Now, now."

"Weapons free, fire when ready," Corny said.

"I have lock-on and . . . yes, that's a Fox Three," Marsh said. It was the traditional call for a Phoenix missile being fired.

At once the heavy Tomcat aircraft lurched several feet upward as the one-thousand-pound missile dropped from it and the solid-fuel rocket fired, jolting the thirteen-foot-long missile ahead at a speed that would soon reach Mach 5. It left a long cotton white contrail arching into the sky, then turning to the left following the radar input on the target.

The Grumman F-14 is the only aircraft in the U.S. arsenal that can fire the Phoenix. It takes a Hughes AWG-9 or AWG-17 radar/fire-control system, which the F-14 has. The system can be set to track while scanning and lock onto six separate targets while simultaneously guiding six missiles to their targets at the same time.

With its 127-mile range, the Phoenix would have no trouble reaching the MiG less than twenty miles away.

Marsh watched the enemy plane's radar blip do quick and sudden maneuvers to try to outwit the Phoenix, but it never had a chance.

The AWG-9 pulse-Doppler radar in the F-14 never lost contact with the MiG. Seconds later the

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