When I was a kid, my dad told me stories of the world up above, in the skies. Of beautiful views the world across, the deep dark blue, the adrenaline of howling through canyons going Mach 2, or being in a dogfight against an opponent on equal terms.
Until I did it myself, I never really believed him. As an adult, standing here, I realise that dad had a point. There's nothing quite like flinging through an enclosed space at breakneck speeds.
Bless the poor man's heart. Wherever you are now, I hope you found your peace.
"Wardog 2, in from the north."
From the clear skies above, a dark-grey monster of an aircraft dived into a thick cloud layer. Amongst the clouds the strike fighter was virtually invisible visually. Water droplets slammed against the canopy at high speed but were wicked away by the airstream. Sitting in the pilot's seat of the F-15E Strike Eagle, Ashley Paige was focused on her instrumentation to keep her bearings. The fighter breached the bottom of the cloud layer and suddenly the fighter was struck by moving sheets of rain.
"Isha?" Ashley called out to her backseater. Behind her in the cockpit, Kitagawa Isha was working her magic with the tools available to her. If one were outside the aircraft while it was idle in good conditions, they would most likely hear the whirring of the LITENING targeting pod as the sensor head rotated to lock on target.
"Tally, locked." Isha called back to the pilot.
"Wardog 2, pickle, pickle!" Ashley called on the radio to say she was conducting a bomb drop. As soon as a pair of captive GBU-24 laser-guided bombs left the wings of the Strike Eagle, Ashley pulled back on the stick to get the aircraft back up above the clouds. The increased gravitational forces - g-forces - on the turn pushed Ash into her seat, but soon enough they were back above the cloud layer. All the while, her backseater was tracking their target - a ten-by-ten metre box meant to represent a building. Both bombs smashed through the roof of the box. A kill.
"Boom." Isha muttered. "Direct hit."
"Good shit." Ash replied, bringing the Strike Eagle around one hundred and eighty degrees so that the fighter was moving north back towards friendlies. "Havoc, Wardog 2, call BDA."
"Wardog 2, Havoc, target destroyed. Return to Racetrack Vodka." A forward air controller on the ground forwarded bomb damage assessment information to the aircraft flying around some kilometres up.
"Acknowledged, moving to racetrack." Ash confirmed that she had heard the last transmission, maintaining her current course. Racetrack Vodka was only a scant few kilometres to the north of where they had just bombed.
"How the fuck is he seeing that?" Isha pondered. "Can't see the target from up here."
Ash snickered. "Perspective's a helluva bitch."
"True enough."
A beep registered over the radio, and a familiar voice popped up. "Holy shit, you actually hit the target. I'm impressed."
Isha beat Ash to the reply. "Mighty rich coming from the guy who missed the last target, twice!" A third man chuckled.
"You nuggets can bully each other over scores at debrief. Let's wait for the next tasking." Their squadron leader, a salty old veteran, commented. Ash giggled.
"Yes, sir. Blaze, forming up on your four-o'clock." Wardog 2 reunited with the leader of the flight. Combined, they flew on.
August 28, 2010
Cape Landers Missile Range
Western Osea
The military never stops training, not even in the face of severe weather conditions such as the heavy rain and strong winds that had been persisting over the Cape Landers region for the past week and a half. Army troops got their chance to conduct movement exercises in poor conditions, signallers got to cope with shitty atmospheric conditions for communications, and pilots sat up in the sky, bombing a range of different targets in low-visibility conditions. It was great. If only they had more than two aircraft up in the sky at any given time, then it would be a good opportunity for a squadron exercise. Or at least that was what Ash was thinking as she trailed her squadron leader waiting for a new tasking.
First Lieutenant Ashley Paige, or Blaze as everybody minus two people called her, was a bit of a day dreamer. An exceptional pilot in training, as a person she looked unassuming with an average height of five-foot-eight combined with a slender frame, dark brown hair and striking blue eyes that were currently concealed by her helmet and oxygen mask. The right side of her helmet had a hand-painted flame decal decorating it.
Second Lieutenant Kitagawa Isha, callsign Samurai, contrasting to Blaze, was always focused on the task at hand. A pilot from the Sotoan Air Self Defense Force currently on an exchange program with the Osean Air Defense Force, Samurai had all of the sharp features constant with Sotoan women: jet black hair, a sharp jawline and a sleek body. A katana and samurai helmet decorated the side of her helmet.
"Hey kid, you better not be daydreaming back there." Blaze's squadron leader called in. Blaze shook her head.
"Never, sir." Blaze retorted.
"Good boy- aw, come on." The squadron leader went from being light-hearted to being irritated in the span of half a second. "I'm babysitting, can this wait?"
"Command Room to Wardog Squadron, we have a leaker, aircraft type unknown, crossing the border north-west of your LOC. Heartbreak One, you're the only flight available in the area to make an intercept." An officer responsible for air traffic control instructed, probably positioned in an air-conditioned office all the way back at their airbase, transmitted to the flight.
"...Affirm. Wardog Flight is intercepting to VID, two-seven-zero for one hundred." Major Jack Bartlett reluctantly took the tasking. "C'mon kid, let's kick it into overdrive."
"Roger that, I'm on your 3-o'clock." Blaze pushed up so that she was on Bartlett's right wing. She pressed the throttle wide open and the Strike Eagle rapidly picked up speed, going from a cruising speed of Mach 0.6 to an intercept speed of Mach 1.5.
"Oop. Tally one bogey, two-six-three for seventy." Bartlett's WSO, a considerably younger sounding man, called.
"Stay dark." Blaze issued a brief command to Samurai to keep the aircraft's radar off for the time being. Whatever the bogey was, it knew that Bartlett was in the vicinity and searching with the radar of his Strike Eagle. On the flip hand, there was a good chance that it didn't know Blaze was also present. Yet.
"Hah, the IFF's struggling today. It's got no idea what it's looking at." Bartlett's WSO, a young man by the name of Oscar "Ghost" Gammon, mused. Based off that radio call alone, Blaze figured the bogey must have been an aircraft with low-observable aspects of some description. An Su-57, maybe? They would know in the coming few minutes once visual contact was made.
"Ghost, where is it?" Blaze asked a couple of minutes later. She was effectively flying blind electronically speaking.
"Two-six-five for twenty. Where's… tally bogey, twelve-o'clock high!" Ghost was saying when he suddenly started speaking frantically. Blaze looked up. She didn't see it at first, but evidently Samurai had.
"Twelve-o'clock, over the nose." Samurai pointed it out somewhat in vain.
"Oh shit, yeah seen. The fuck is that?" Blaze had seen the bogey, but it wasn't any kind of aircraft she had seen. Painted in a desert splinter scheme, it almost looked like a delta-canard fighter like the Belkan Typhoon or the Erusean Rafale. But it wasn't. It had canards with a strange forward-swept wing configuration. All of the control surfaces were very close together.
"Well well, I can't say I've seen one of those before." Bartlett remarked. "Control, Heartbreak One, tally bogey. Looks like a Yuke prototype. I've never seen anything like it."
"Heartbreak One, roger that. Uh, establish contact and get them back towards their side of the ocean." The instructions from ground control were clear enough. Get the leaker out of Osean airspace.
"Understood. Hey, Blaze-" Bartlett began.
"Don't fucking start." Blaze cut him off, sarcastically chuckling. She hit a few buttons and she was on the internationally recognised emergency broadcast net. Blaze waited to get on to the bogey's tail before broadcasting. She was practically looking up the aircraft's tailpipe.
"Attention, unidentified aircraft in the vicinity of Cape Landers, this is the Osean Air Defense Force aircraft on your six-o'clock. Make reply or rock your wings if you're receiving this transmission." Blaze made a stern and formal announcement to the unidentified aircraft. She heard nothing over the radio, and a lack of movement from the aircraft made her guess that either the aircraft was suffering from a radio failure, or the pilot was deliberately not listening. After five seconds of no reply, Bartlett pushed ahead of Blaze.
"Let's see if this'll catch his attention." Bartlett said. Blaze watched as he pulled out to the left of the bogey, gained some speed to get ahead and then cut across the bogey's nose while dumping flares. To the utter surprise - and horror - of both Blaze and Samurai, the moment Bartlett crossed the bogey's nose, the bogey turned into a bandit by firing a burst from its rotary cannon.
"Ohshit!" Bartlett sounded like he had suddenly clutched up. "Bogey is a bandit!"
Quickly overcoming that split second moment of shock, Blaze flipped over a switch so that her F-15E's M61A1 twenty-mike-mike cannon was live, put the pipette over the target and fired a long burst. She couldn't call it a lucky shot, because the bandit was flying in a straight line and wasn't manuevering. Whatever the prototype-looking aircraft was made out of, it was quickly shredded apart by twenty-mil API. The aircraft quickly spiralled out of control and down into the abyss, while trailing fire and smoke.
"Wardog 2, splash one bandit!" Blaze called. She looked for Wardog 1. "Major Bartlett, you still airborne?!"
"We're alive, Ash!" Ghost was the first to reply. "Bandit overshot by a long mile."
Blaze released a breath of relief. Her wingman was still up.
"Wardog 2, ground control, say again your last?!" The ground controller didn't believe what he was hearing.
"I say again, Wardog 2 has splashed one bandit." Blaze repeated her earlier statement.
"...copy." The ground controller sounded stressed. Dickhead, you're not even out here, Blaze thought. To her right, Bartlett appeared from the clouds on Blaze's right wing.
Bartlett whistled. "That was exciting. Perrault's going to lose his shit when he hears about this."
Samurai chuckled from the rear of Blaze's F-15E. "You can say that again."
"Hey kid, what do you say we RTB?" Bartlett said as if it was a suggestion, but Blaze knew it was an order.
"Yeah…" Blaze looked down at her hands. She was trembling a little bit. "On your six, sir."