Early 2011, the Mediterranean
Thirty-five year-old Hadrian Potter, current Officer Commanding of 22 SAS was bored. He'd received an urgent summons from an American General who was at RAF Akrotiri, and just to show the American that he could not be called to heel like a dog, he'd stopped on Malta for a couple of hours of site seeing, after reassuring the Maltese that the IRIS-T guided air-to-air missiles mounted on the wings of his Hawker Hunter FGA.74 were only mock-ups and not the real thing.
As if. It was rather unusual for an SAS commanding officer to go anywhere without an armed escort, so he provided his own. The Hunter's quad ADEN cannon carried a hundred-and-fifty shells, the projectiles of which each weighed two-hundred and twenty-nine grams, firing them at a rate of twenty-five a second, per gun. That meant that every second of firing meant that the Hunter fired a hundred shells, or twenty-three kilos of projectiles.
He was just considering cracking open a can of coke when, cruising at forty-thousand feet, five MiG-21s burst through the thin layer of cloud, needle-like, deadly in their elegance,
"Unidentified aircraft, you will descend bearing one-seventy to Benghazi." buzzed the radio.
Harry glared at the aircraft through his sun-visor. Libyan Air Force roundels.
"I am a civilian aircraft flying in international airspace. You have no right to force me out of my current course." he radioed back, after all, his Hawker Hunter was in a garish civilian paint-job, and officially was on the British civil register. They indeed had no right to force him from his current course.
"You will obey orders or be shot down." was the chilling reply.
Like hell he was.
"All forces, this is Hunter Golf-Papa-Oscar-Tango-Tango, three-fifty degrees north-west of Benghazi in International Airspace, I have been intercepted by five Fishbeds, requesting armed assistance." Harry barked, having gone onto a NATO channel with his radio.
That done, he slowly pushed the nose down and turned until his compass was pointing to one-seventy degrees. Glancing in his mirror, Harry checked that they were all following him down. Amateurs.
All hell let loose.
Harry jerked the release lever for his drop tanks and snapped the fighter onto its port wing-tip, slamming the stick back into his stomach, feeling the anti-G suit compressing his legs to hold off the blood-drain to his lower half. Even so, as turn tightened, he saw the grey tunnel narrowing his vision. He saw for a moment his drop-tanks tumbling in a shower of unburnt aviation fuel toward the sea tens of thousands of feet below.
A moment later, he was face-to-face with a MiG-21 at a closing speed of about eight-hundred knots. Safety off. The gyroscopic gunsight showed him the lead indicator for the aircraft that was on his radar. There was no lead indication. They were attacking head-on He squeezed off a half-second burst which ripped into the pointed nose-cone and the needle-like fuselage, demolishing the front end and injecting a large amount of lead into the engine, which promptly spat most of its internal mechanisms out of the exhaust before exploding.
Jerking the stick back into his stomach, Harry 'jumped' the Hunter over the burning wreckage, just as a hail of tracer went through where he had been, and a second MiG-21 overshot him. He identified the missiles on pylons as Sidewinder-copies, the AA-2 Atoll, a fairly poor weapon.
He didn't have a speed advantage, but he did have his own missiles. Flicking the switch to select missiles, Harry held down the arm button, receiving an intermittent buzz in his ear for a few seconds before it became a constant whine. He released the arm button and pressed the fire button, releasing one of the IRIS-T missiles, which were compatible with the Sidewinder pylons on the Hunter.
The missile flew straight up the tail-pipe of the MiG and detonated, blowing the entire aircraft in half. Harry snapped a photo with the gun-camera and pulled up. He had a third aircraft right on his tail. They rocketed upwards, side-by-side right up until he closed the throttle. The Hunter stalled, and began to yaw over to port, and just as it began to slip out of the sky, the MiG flew right into his gunsight. He couldn't miss the big delta wing, and again, with very little deflection required because of the shallow angle of attack, fired. The ADENs roared, tearing the starboard wing off, leaving the MiG tumbling out of the sky like a spinning sycamore seed.
Harry slammed the throttle open as he dived after the falling aircraft, pulling out as he spotted the pair of '21s who had been providing top cover. They were shooting downwards after him. Their speed and lack of manoeuvrability would be the death of them.
Pushing the stick over to port and pulling back on it hard, Harry executed a tight hundred-and-eighty degree turn and, after taking a moment to get the lead indicator on his reflector gunsight in the right position, fired the last of his shells into the rear of the second of the MiGs remaining. It blew up spectacularly as his shells hit the fuel tank in the fuselage's spine behind the cockpit, leaving nothing but fluttering debris.
The last MiG pulled up hard and put on full afterburner, which gave Harry a perfect target for another heat-seeking missile. But just as he got the whine and launched one of his three IRIS-T missiles, the Libyan cut his afterburner and launched a spread of chaff flares, diverting his missile.
Powering through the sky, well ahead of the Hunter, the MiG gained enough altitude and banked around to face his opponent, who was still climbing.
Harry's headset began to howl as it detected a radar lock on his aircraft. Throttling back, he watched the jet pipe temperature gauge drop, and as he saw a missile detach from the MiG, Harry turned hard to starboard. The AA-2 would try and automatically lead his turn, so when he suddenly slammed the stick over to port, it was suddenly going in the opposite direction to him. Harry knew from his reading that he had to just hold off the missile for twenty-one seconds from launch time and it would run out of rocket fuel and fall out of the sky.
When he spotted the streak of white behind him, he pulled the Hunter through a wide barrel-roll at full power which would hopefully interrupt the seeker's lock-on for long enough. And it did, suddenly the protesting screech in his ears went silent. He turned hard to chase after the MiG which was making another shallow turn to bring itself onto his tail.
Harry soon had lock-on and launched his penultimate weapon. The MiG jinked to port suddenly, followed by a hard turn to starboard and simultaneously dispensed flares. The combination broke his lock-on and locked the missile onto one of the flares, which it promptly blew up.
Then the MiG opened up on full afterburner, just in time to receive Harry's last IRIS-T up the jet-pipe.
Harry balanced the Hunter against the shockwave of the passing aircraft, making sure not to drop his can of coca-cola. He recognised a pair of Italian Air Force Eurofighters accompanied by a Panavia Tornado. Moments later another flight of aircraft screamed past, Hellenic Air Force Dassault Mirage 2000s accompanied by two carrier-launched USMC F/A-18 Hornets, which slowed and fell into formation on either side of him.
"Where are those fuckers bud?" asked a thick American accent.
"They decided that they were going to go somewhere else." Harry answered.
"Viper Zero-Two, this is SAR from USS Truxton, we have debris on the surface." interrupted another radio call.
"Like I said, they decided they were going to go somewhere else." Harry said with a hint of smugness.
"-And today, while transiting international airspace between British Gibraltar and RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, an armed defence contracted Hawker Hunter was attacked by five supersonic interceptors of the Libyan Air Force. The pilot, who has been named as Colonel Hadrian Potter of the Parachute Regiment, a Gulf War, Bosnia, Ireland, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, piloting the obsolete Hunter, fought back. He became an ace, scoring five confirmed victories, evading missiles and cannon fire from the attacking MiGs." the news reporter droned as a photo of the aircraft in question came up, blinding many viewers with its lurid paint-scheme.
Painted British Racing Green as a background colour, a band around the central fuselage was painted with the WWII camouflage colours and identification marks of JE-J, EN398, Air Vice Marshal Johnnie Johnson's thirteen-kill Spitfire. From where the camouflage ended to the tip of the tail and the jet-pipe, the Hunter was painted with cartoonish scantily-clad women in various erotic poses. The gun-ports were encircled with jets of flame, painted on artistically, while it was very noticeable that the nose cone was painted with the gaping maw of a wolf, red eyes... and a handlebar moustache.
"Colonel Potter released the following statement upon his return. 'I would like to apologise to Mikoyan-Gurevich for spoiling one of their masterpieces of aircraft design, and apologise to the Libyan instructors for humiliating their pilots. Furthermore, I am sending a bill to Colonel Gaddafi to the tune of four heat-seeking missiles, six-hundred cannon rounds and two very expensive custom-made drop-tanks. Lastly, I would like to comment that Britain would be great if it could produce another aircraft as good as the Hunter again'. He was awarded the Bar to an earlier award of the Distinguished Flying Cross by Her Majesty upon his return to Britain."
"Well mate, you did a real good job." drawled Jack Whitehill, a rough cockney-speaking Eastender who had served under Harry for a decade as an SAS NCO.
"I must admit it was a masterpiece of smugness." Harry chuckled, sipping at a bottle of beer.
"He meant the flying." countered Staff Sergeant Andrew McKay, one of two Staff Sergeants, both Scots, who had been through thick and thin with the Regiment and its commander.
"It was the most fun I've had in years, and I'll admit, the scariest." said Harry eventually; "On the ground, I know I'm dependant on myself, in the air I was dependant on an old airframe based on a design from the fifties. I didn't have a speed advantage, but I did have fire power and better handling."
"Well, here's to big guns and British engineering." cheered Whitehill, raising his bottle.
"And cannons based on a German design and German missiles." Harry added.