Prologue

All around you there is nothing but beautiful blue sky, the clouds being several thousand feet below you. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a pleasant summers day but the truth is you are an intruder into what is almost an alien world. Without your oxygen mask you would suffocate in minutes. Without your thick flight suit keeping your temperature at a comfortable level you would succumb to the effects of hypothermia and die from the cold encountered at high altitude. While it looks like your hardly moving, there being very little visual references for your eyes to pick up on, you are in fact travelling at several hundred kilometers an hour and every time the aircraft turns the g-forces push down on your body trying to starve the brain of blood and forcing you to pass out.

This is the world of a fighter pilot...

My teeth clenched angrily together as I fought to keep my head looking out to the right as the Yuktobanian MiG-29 'Fulcrum' maintained its tight turn with my F-15C Eagle. The g-force of the turn was trying to push my head downwards and it felt like I was using all the muscles in my neck to keep it upright. If I lost eye contact with the MiG-29 for even a split second I may never regain it again in the heat of the fight and that could spell the end of my life. I kept the stick pulled back as far as it would go and my F-15 ached and complained as it too take a beating from the hard and fast turn.

Our distance in the turn decreased quickly as I kept the right yaw pedal down to stop the nose from pitching upwards. White vortices streamed from both our wingtips drawing long double lines in the sky. He was dropping back to my five o'clock position even though he knew he had no way of engaging me until he opened up the distance while I was still on his two-three o'clock. It was better for him to keep in that position rather than try to drop back and risk me coming around and catching him as he scissored through the sky.

We were both in trouble. If I broke the turn in the horizontal plane then he would have a shot provided he could drop back in time while he was running low on fuel and over enemy territory - my country. My only chance was to break the turn by going in the vertical and cutting the turning circle in half thus performing a maneuver known as the yo-yo. Pulling up would bleed a lot of energy from the engines initially but I would regain that after I had reached the top of the climb and pulled back downwards. Pulling downwards into a low yo-yo would have the opposite effect leaving my aircraft to bleed energy as I pulled back up but hopefully I would have attained enough excess power from the descent to make up for it. Altitude was, of course, another thing to consider with a low yo-yo.

My altimeter read 19,349ft and I knew the highest peaks of the mountain range below were well below that. With that fact in mind I threw the stick over to the right and my F-15 rolled inverted until the ground was now above me. I pulled back on the stick and the horizon dropped underneath my aircraft as the nose began pointing towards the ground. The altimeter was spinning in an anti-clockwise direction as my altitude plummeted. I was passing through 13,500 feet when the horizon was back where it should have been.

I had expected the MiG-29 to follow me through the maneuver as its pilot had been doing for much of this fight but to my surprise he turned west back towards the coastline and over the sea back towards the border and threw on his burners despite his low fuel. He was trying to make good his escape having taken the decision that it was better to live another day. If he made it across the border he knew he would have reinforcements as well as SAM and AAA batteries for help should I pursue. He had used my time to descend by heading as straight and level as he could to build up as much distance as his two engines would allow. Now that I was out of the descent and climbing again I'm sure he felt confident that he was going to get back across the line and into safety but I was determined to take him down. My mindset was one of pure hatred and anger that he was in my country and trying to kill me. Who was to say that he wouldn't come back another day and kill one of my fellow pilots?

Keeping the nose of my F-15 angled upwards at his rapidly escaping aircraft I switched my radar onto a narrow search beam that would give me maximum forward range but with a decrease in the search area to the side of me. I knew I was being tracked by our ground stations who would alert me to any of his buddies who might have sprinted across the border to help so I could concentrate on him. As I saw his aircraft as a blip on my green circular screen in the centre of my instrument panel I wondered if he knew I was coming after him or whether he was just desperate to get home. He was jinking from side to side but his moves weren't as pronounced as I would have done thus the mass of his aircraft was hardly moving and provided an easier but not ideal target.

I was in a tail chase position and with him being almost seven miles ahead of me my R-AIM-9 close in missiles were useless their maximum range being 9 miles head-on. My own fuel gauge was beginning to look low and this left me no choice but to go for a last minute shot with my Sparrow medium range semi-active missiles. I thumbed the targeting circle around the blob on my radar screen which guided my radar's targeting beam onto his aircraft.

Just then my headset crackled as I received a radio transmission, "Scimitar Two-Seven; do not violate red line, repeat do not violate red line."

That was the ground controller telling me not to cross the border. The higher ups didn't want the Yuke media to have a field day with images of a burned out F-15 in Osean markings inside their territory. They would probably claim that it was us who violated their territory and not the other way around.

I should have acknowledged the transmission but while I made a mental note of it I remained set on firing at the bastard. I knew I only had one chance and I also knew that the Sparrow was sometimes quite unreliable. Therefore I armed two missiles as I waited for the tone to buzz in my headset that the radar had locked them up and were ready to fire. I was just eight miles from the border when the sound rang out into my ears indicating that the MiG-29 was being 'painted' by my radar and the seeker heads of the Sparrows were receiving the returned signals which they would ride to the target. I squeezed the trigger in my right hand before releasing it. The missiles would only fire when the trigger was depressed so that the pilot had one last chance to cancel the launch as well as speed up reaction time.

As the missiles left my fuselage pylons I felt the aircraft shudder. The two weapons left huge smoke plumes protruding from either side of my F-15 as they quickly accelerated away. I was fast approaching the border but I had to keep the radar locked firmly on the MiG-29 during the whole engagement and that meant maintaining my northerly heading. The two missiles continued onwards into the distance. On my circular radar screen they were represented by two smaller blobs that were chasing the MiG-29 that was still highlighted inside the targeting ring on my HUD.

Suddenly the two smaller blobs merged with the larger. Out ahead of me I could vaguely see a small dot appear at the extremity of my vision. It was the plume of smoke from a missile impact against the MiG-29's fuselage. With only seconds to spare I rolled the F-15 to the left and pulled the stick back throwing the big fighter into a hard left turn to avoid crossing into Yuke air space although I was at this point in range of some of their most forward based SAM and air defence ships despite still being on our side of the border. Fortunately their crews were either too late to respond or were ordered not to unless I crossed the line into Yuke airspace.

Although I wanted to confirm the kill myself I was ordered back to base probably for a grilling from the Squadron Leader. It would be several hours before reports from ships at sea who had witnessed the shoot-down got back to me. It seemed that one of my Sparrows missed its target and carried on until it expended its fuel and fell harmlessly into dense forestry. The second missile had indeed struck the MiG-29 and blew its tail section off. It twisted and turned for several seconds before it broke up into two pieces which fell into the sea just before the border.