"Ow." Ash winced as Doctor Rogers worked a suture kit through her cheek.
"They say that chicks dig scars." Rogers mused as she tied off a knot. "If that's your thing, you're in luck."
"I'll be sure to keep that in mind if I ever enter the female dating scene." Ash retorted, earning a smirk from Rogers as she applied a bandaid over the small cut on her cheek. Three stitches from the fragmentation of a copper-jacketed AK calibre round. All in all, it could have been a lot worse.
"Hmmpth." Rogers giggled. "You're all good to go. Come back in two weeks from today to get those stitches taken out.
"Will do doc. Thanks, doc." Ash replied. Rogers smiled and dismissed the recovered pilot. Ash opened the door and walked out into the lobby where Kitagawa was sitting. The latter stood up upon seeing Ash.
"Didn't sting too much?" Kitagawa asked as they walked away from the clinic and towards the squadron room. Ash gently rubbed the bandaid on her face.
"Only a little bit. Should clear up in a couple of weeks, might leave a little facial scar." Ash told her WSO as they walked across the base.
"You know, they say chicks-"
"-dig scars." Ash finished Kitagawa's sentence for her. "C'mon, you already dig me as I am."
Kitagawa blushed. "...Okay, guilty."
20 November 2010
Sand Island
After the stunt Ash had pulled off leading into the last time that she had ejected from an aircraft, nobody in Wardog was particularly surprised to see her get out of her second ejection relatively intact. Alas, there was no rest for the wicked, so as soon as Wardog was back up to full operational capacity, they were being sent back into the fight.
WARDOG 1 / BLAZE, SAMURAI / F-15E
WARDOG 2 / CHOPPER, ZOOMER / F-15E
WARDOG 3 / EDGE, CORVUS / F-15E
WARDOG 4 / ARCHER / F-16C
After sinking the hundred thousand ton Hrimfaxi, Blaze thought that Wardog would be relegated back to ground strike missions and pushed away from anti-shipping operations, but optimism was a dangerous thing. Granted, the mission could have been much worse, but flying against a ship that was the literal definition of air denial didn't make Blaze feel any better. What made her feel worse was that the mission they were flying was to test some kind of new weapon platform.
Departing from Sand Island, Blaze took a look at the stores management system. The three anti-ship missiles they were carrying identified themselves as AGM-84 Harpoons on the aircraft's computer, but in reality the missiles looked like some variant of the JASSM, painted in dark grey and mounted on their wing and centreline pylons. As Wardog turned north-west to head towards their target, Blaze glanced down at her kneeboard. These experimental anti-ship missiles had an upper range of four hundred kilometres when fired from altitude, which would put them just outside of the maximum range of the S-400 missiles carried by a Ural-class cruiser.
"These are some big fucking Harpoons." Samurai muttered from behind Blaze.
"Almost three times the range." Blaze replied, looking over her shoulder at the weapon stations. "And a hell of a lot bigger to boot."
"Yeah." Samurai pressed a series of buttons. "Radar's in surface search mode."
"Rog." Blaze looked further back to the Viper pilot at the very rear of the formation. "Hey Archer, mind running as a surrogate AWACS for us?"
"With my tiny radar array?" Grimm pulled out of formation, climbing up a couple of thousand feet above them. "Can do."
"Sure, make the F-16 pilot the first one to get shot at by the anti-air warship. Great idea." Zoomer joked from Chopper's backseat.
"Hey, it'll be fine." Grimm replied heartily. "You Strike Eagle folk will deal with the ship before it comes to that. Right?"
Blaze snickered. "Don't sweat it, we'll kill it."
From what they had been told at the briefing, somebody high up in the Osean Defence Forces chain of command had been waiting for a Yuke air defence cruiser to slip port so that they could test their new anti-ship missile. Early in the morning, that chance came when three ships pulled their anchors and departed from Ochkabursk, tracking east-south-east towards Osean waters. Those three ships were a Ural, a Moskva-class helicopter carrier and anti-submarine warfare cruiser, and a single fast replenishment ship to allow these two ships to carry out sustained operations at sea without having to return to port to refuel.
In a full morning worth of sailing, the three warships had gotten a quarter of the way across the ocean. Accounting for the the range of their anti-ship missiles, Wardog had half an hour until they made contact with the ships. Plenty of time for Samurai to annoy Blaze.
"Your mask sealing properly with that bandaid on your cheek?" Samurai poked fun at Blaze's injury.
"It's on the middle of my cheek, it'll be fine." Blaze replied neutrally, scanning the skies and ocean around them for any signs of contact. So far, all clear.
"We haven't fucked in a while." Samurai said, completely out of the blue. Blaze sputtered.
"Later." Blaze said once the shock factor wore away.
"Later as in wanna fuck later or later as in-" Samurai started.
"Both." Blaze blurted out. "Can we sort this out later?"
"If you say so." Samurai leant back in her seat and remained quiet for the rest of the journey. Before any of them saw any of their targets on air to surface search mode, they picked up their electronic signatures, specifically receiving an RWR alert as the radar energies of a Ural were detected by their Mudhens. They were close.
"Ping on a Ural to our twelve." Grimm was the first to notice. "Not picking up any air contacts, but we're getting close."
"Move forward until we pick her up on radar." Blaze ordered. "Grimm, stay behind us so you don't walk right into him."
"Wilco." Grimm dropped his speed so that he ended up a kilometre behind the trio of Mudhens before matching their speed to keep pace. Now possessing a general bearing with which to pursue their target, Wardog changed their bearings slightly to approach the flotilla of ships, picking up speed to close the distance faster. Searching a flat plane of terrain from altitude, at just under four hundred kilometres the Mudhens got a hit on one, then two and finally three ships. Three ships, three targets.
"Edge, target the ship in the rear." Blaze delegated targeting orders to the squad. "Chopper, target the middle ship. I've got the closest vessel."
"Copy." Chopper.
"Wilco." Nagase.
"Got her spiked?" Blaze asked Samurai if the WSO had all three of their anti-ship missiles locked on the closest vessel, most likely the Moskva.
"We're hot."
"Wardog, fire on my mark." Blaze looked at her watch. "Three, two, one, mark!"
"Chopper, bruiser!"
"Edge, bruiser three!"
"Blaze, bruiser."
Their aircraft became markedly easier to control when the missiles dropped off the rails and accelerated forward under their own power. As soon as the missiles were safely away from their carriers, Wardog turned ninety degrees parallel to the task force to stay out of their air defence bubble.
"Jeez, those new fanged missiles are zooming." Chopper commented on the sheer speed of their weapons. The missiles were accelerating faster and achieving a higher top speed than the seventies vintage Harpoon.
"Hope those range estimates were accurate…" Blaze mumbled, looking down at her kneeboard and then at the radar and RWR displays for signs of disappearing ships. At the range they had fired from, it was a five minute wait until they saw any results or feedback as the missiles either slammed into their targets or got shot down by the defences of the Ural and the Moskva. Three minutes turned into four. Four minutes turned into five.
The air search radars of the cruisers turned off one after the other and went silent, disappearing from their RWRs. The likelihood that the two ships had gone silent to avoid passive sensor detection was incredibly unlikely and would have been a stupid move, so Ash took the lack of any kind of signal emissions as a sign that both ships had taken at least one hit each.
"Shacked." Samurai reported this fact even though literally everybody in the flight could tell what had happened.
"And we're out of here." Blaze ordered. "Wardog, turn 090, get the fuck outta here."