Late 2011, the Mediterranean
Thirty-five year-old Hadrian Potter, current Officer Commanding of 22 SAS was bored. Again. It was the second time he was flying down the Mediterranean that year. The first time, flying his Hawker Hunter hadn't ended well. The Libyans had launched five aircraft to intercept him, resulting in a ferocious air-battle. This time, the Prime Minister wanted a reason to attack the Libyans, so he was flying an aircraft perfectly balanced for the job.
The SAAB Viggen carried an immensely powerful cannon, firing the same shells as the A-10 Thunderbolt II's GAU-8 Avenger, and his single, single-barrelled Oerliken cannon carried a hundred-and-fifty shells, the projectiles of which each weighed about four-hundred grams, firing them at a rate of twenty-three a second. That meant that every second of firing meant that the Viggen saturated the sky with over nine kilos of projectiles leaving the muzzle at approximately at two-thousand three-hundred miles an hour.
Under the wings were six pylons, carrying two Skyflash missiles and two IRIS-T missiles, and under the nose were two pylons carrying AMRAAM missiles, giving him a good mixture of different weapons for different situations. If he needed to blow something up that was over fifty miles away, he had the perfect equipment. Unfortunately, he couldn't just blow up the targets like that, he had to wait for them to attack.
He was just considering cracking open a can of coke when, cruising at fifty-thousand feet, he received a signal from Akrotiri. He switched on the transponder and sat back. It took ten minutes before the Libyans, having identified the same transponder code as had been on the Hunter which had torn through a flight of five MiG-21s, launched another interceptor force. This time, Harry had more height, he had a far faster and just as manoeuvrable aircraft.
Another five MiGs. Maybe they thought that had a chance of getting through him. Like hell they were.
"All forces, this is Viggen Golf-Oscar-Delta-Echo-Sierra, 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. Almost the exact same words as the previous time.
All hell let loose.
Harry jerked the release lever for his three-hundred and thirty Imperial Gallon drop-tank and pushed open the throttle. He pushed the stick forward, grimacing as he began to red-out. The only way to counter negative G was strangulation. Something he wasn't keen on happening to himself.
Diving straight at the MiG flight, he saw his drop-tank tumbling out of the sky. Harry smirked as one of the MiGs had to pull away to avoid it wiping him out. The closing speed of the two forces was somewhere in the region of Mach two-point-five. Harry had screamed straight through the sound-barrier, his turbofan pushing a good twenty-eight thousand pounds force of thrust on afterburner.
The lead MiG broke from the formation, just as Harry opened fire with the Oerliken, his shells harmlessly bespattering the sea tens of thousands of feet below. Making a slight adjustment to port, Harry watched the squirming line on his HUD, drawing one of the MiGs right into the circle at the end. He pushed the fire button again. The thirty-millimetre cannon rattled the aircraft as it spat its payload out of the muzzle.
Harry observed the first strike on the side of the pointed nose-cone, then more strikes followed, like stitches, the shells burst in a neat line along the fuselage, perforating it with holes. Then a flare of fire. Smoke. Debris. Harry was blinded for a second as, while looking in his mirror after shooting past the doomed aircraft, it suddenly spat out a load of debris and imploded, showering the sky with bits of old Russian aeroplane.
Firmly pulling the stick back into his stomach, Harry dragged the Viggen back up into a climb. He slammed the stick back for a moment, 'jumping' over the burning wreckage, just as fan of light from tracer fired by the twin-barrelled gun of a MiG went through where he had been, and a second MiG-21, the shooter, overshot him. And despite their last skirmish, the Libyans were still using the Sidewinder-copy AA-2 Atoll .
He didn't have a climb-rate advantage, but he did have an overall speed advantage, and his own missiles. Jerking the throttle open, he experienced the sensation that the god of fighter pilots, Adolf Galland, had described as 'though angels were pushing' as the Volvo turbofan exploded into life.
Flicking the switch to select the missile systems, Harry flicked his gaze to the port side of his canopy as a MiG drew level with him, and slammed the stick over to port and jerking back for a moment, before dragging it back to starboard. Weaving backwards and forwards across each-other, the two struggled to gain the tail of the other, until Harry suddenly cut the throttle. As they had been climbing nearly vertically, he was suddenly losing speed, and the MiG streaked past.
He held down the arm button and selected a Skyflash missile. After a few seconds of receiving an intermittent buzz in his ear,it became a constant whine. The MiG pilot suddenly knew he'd made a mistake. Harry was certain that all sorts of alerts were going on inside the Libyan's cockpit as he began furiously weaving, trying to break the Viggen's lock. Harry had slammed open the throttle, and was also weaving, stood right on the tail of the MiG.
Releasing the arm button, Harry stabbed his thumb down on the fire button, just as the whine went back to the buzz. He'd lost the lock and launched the missile simultaneously. The missile dropped from the underside of the Viggen before its rocket motor engaged. It wasn't over. Harry had upgraded the avionics to integrate a helmet-control system, and using the monocle over his right eye, slewed the missile around, racing it towards his target.
The missile flew straight up the tail-pipe of the MiG and detonated, ripping the airframe in half. Jerking forward on the stick to miss the largest intact parts, the wings, which hurtled past his canopy, Harry banked to port. He quickly made sure that the gun-camera was working, having turned it on the moment that the Libyans arrived. A howl in his ear alerted him to the fact that he had a third aircraft right on his tail.
Slamming the stick over, he jerked back the throttle, sliding the tail over in a hammerhead maneuver. The MiG couldn't follow as easily. Opening the throttle, Harry dived away, accelerating past the sound barrier in his near-vertical descent. Easing out as he caught onto the tail of one of the MiGs who sat back and waited for one of their compatriots to destroy him, Harry was pleased to see the pilot open up onto full afterburner.
They rocketed upwards, side-by-side right up until he closed the throttle. The Viggen 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 Oerliken 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 sat, high up, hoping that the others would finish him off. They were sat in a neat formation on his tail, side by side, rocketing 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 hastily pulling the aircraft back to get the lead indicator on his reflector gunsight in the right position, fired a long burst. The first shell hit the MiG in the centre of the wing, exposing much of the internal mechanics, but the rest fell behind. Well-spooked and damaged, the fighter rolled over, dodging a second spray of tracer.
His own ever-increasing speed was nearly his downfall. The damaged MiG, trailing smoke, pulled around hard, but he'd failed to see the second approaching from a near vertical angle, nearly straight into the path of it. But he'd suddenly banked to starboard when he saw the needle-like fuselage race past, vertically.
Selecting the Sidewinder pylons carrying the German fire-and-forget heat-seeking IRIS-T missiles, he tried to fix both aircraft in the fire-control radar. They weren't having it, and began furiously tacking to evade the marauding SAAB. Harry scowled as the two weaved around him, unable to break the stalemate.
"Rapier One, this the Liverpool, we are one-hundred miles to your west, permission to access the data link and upload radar data from ARTISAN." buzzed Harry's radio, distracting him for a moment. Jabbing a series of keys on the bottom of the radar screen beyond the stick of the Saab, the screen suddenly lit up with radar reports.
Harry grinned a predatory grin, ready to open fire, when suddenly, both MiGs decelerated, idling their engines and dropping out of the sky. Harry pulled back on the stick, half-looping into an inverted dive after them. He had lock on both of them. Selecting IRIS-T, he pressed the fire button for two seconds, and watched as two radar reports separated from the one he knew was himself. He cursed as both missiles changed their lock-on to the damaged aircraft and ignored the other one.
It did however mean that the Mediterranean would be getting another wreck. Flashing past the fluttering, flaming wreckage in pursuit of the last enemy.
"Rapier One, Rapier One, contacts have just appeared. You're on the very edge of our radar and they are five miles south, speed is eight-hundred and fifty knots, contacts, five, height, thirty-five thousand." Liverpool alerted him. Then a pause before another message came through; "Rapier One, correction, add two contacts, fifteen-hundred knots at sixty-thousand feet. Same direction, damn, add three contacts, same direction, one-thousand one-hundred knots, height, forty-five thousand feet, closing from the south."
Harry was going to get the last MiG. A burst of Oerliken finished it off, but already, he was calculating. He had under twenty seconds before the slowest moving of the contacts would be on top of him. Fuck.
"Roger."
He cut the link with HMS Liverpool and turned on his tail-chase radar, which lit up with ten reports. Already, he had a radar lock incoming. The jamming system was working overtime to prevent the lock-on. Evaluating his situation, it looked grim. It had taken longer than he had the last time to get assistance, he had three missiles left. He'd fired a hundred-and-thirteen shells according to his computer, leaving just thirty-seven.
Launching his three remaining missiles, one Skyflash and two AMRAAM, Harry opened the throttle. His only hope was to survive until relief arrived. Relief, he'd been assured, would be expecting the order to scramble. The AMRAAM was a fire-and-forget missile, requiring no input from the beleaguered pilot. The missiles left the pylon, slewed around and raced for the highest targets, sending back the data to the cockpit including image footage.
The Skyflash was similar, it needed little input from Harry and simply followed the data from the tail-chase radar. Three kills later and it was only seven to one, instead of ten to one. Turning into the centre of the formation as they closed up, trying to trap him from above and below, Harry watched as a Mirage F1 was wiped out by the falling debris of what he thought was a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25, if his identification of the wing silhouette was right. Then a second tumbling fireball passed him. It looked like the top of their flanking move was no longer going to be of use.
However, he had to deal with one more MiG-25 above him, the remaining Dassault Mirage F1 at his height and four Sukhoi Su-24s below, one of them having been destroyed. He'd take his luck with the analogue-systems and no cannon of the MiG-25. Harry pulled back, hard, pushing the throttle to full afterburner. Turning the autopilot on, he slaved it to the radar, which quickly gained a lock on the MiG-25. It would mean he could concentrate on small moves to allow minimal cannon fire to destroy his target, and leave some shells for trying to get rid of the Mirage.
Forty-five thousand feet. Climbing. Closing speed with the Foxbat was about two-thousand three-hundred miles per hour. Climb rate was... a lot. The closing speed meant that the HUD's lead computer was of absolutely no use. It was simply too fast for the small screen to display the distance. Harry made a guess, stabbed the fire button with his thumb, releasing it as soon as he'd depressed it. One shell left the muzzle and slapped into the belly of the MiG, dead centre.
Harry pulled back on the stick, completing what was in effect an Immelmann. He stayed inverted though, watching the MiG. He was disappointed, but not particularly surprised that the one shell had done nothing. Suddenly the aircraft seemed to droop, and the canopy burst off, then a flare of fire and the rocket on the ejector seat fired, launching the pilot out of the cockpit. The empty aircraft began to sink downwards, then suddenly, the wings folded upwards, 'clapping' together. The fuselage spun, out of control, towards the sea, sixty-thousand feet below.
"Jackdaw flight, rolling in."
The much-awaited relief had arrived.
Harry wasn't finished. His tail-chase radar had picked up the Mirage and was constantly jamming the lock-on. He pulled back on the stick, going into an inverted dive. Building up speed, he shot through a formation of three Eurofighters who were circling in, closing on the Mirage, which had turned away when the Eurofighters had arrived. At a shallow angle as both dived through Mach Two, Harry fired. The last shells bespattered the Mirage, ripping it apart. When going at high speed, the stress on the airframe was so much more, that when the slightest impact occurs, it can be devastating. Thirty-six shells, each weighing four-hundred grams, going at the same speed as the Viggen plus the muzzle velocity of two-thousand three-hundred miles an hour shredded his target.
"You bastards better have a good excuse for taking this long." Harry growled over the radio.
"We do." was the brief reply from a feminine voice Harry recognised well. After all, whenever they weren't on duty and were in the same part of the world, they shared a bed; "Status?"
"A bit miffed, and in need of some fuel, though the plane has enough, and lacking in any armament." Harry's flippant response came across the radio a moment later.
Glancing at the fuel gauge, he was about three-hundred and twenty miles from anywhere (Malta on one side and Crete on the other), but the closest military airbase was actually Sicily, and Sigonella Naval Air Station. He had just enough fuel to get there, and it would probably be en-route for the inevitable wave of offence against Libya.
"Going to sunny Italy. Ciao for now Amy." he added, flipping the Viggen around.