Chapter 12 Excerpt: A Missile Sucker Punch

Lancer keyed his mic on his inter-formation comm channel to Victor only, “Victor, let's climb to Angel's 16 and push it up to four hundred eighty knots as we turn south. Take up a right echelon on me so you can watch me and these crazy Iranians if anything happens. Let's warm up an AMRAAM and Sidewinder in case we have to get off some shots at these guys.”

“Roger, Lancer.”

Lancer pushed the throttle to max and started a climbing and accelerating turn. As they came through their turns, both their radars painted the Flankers and their track data became more accurate. They each selected an AMRAAM and Sidewinder missile and set them to standby for an immediate firing with no power-up delays.

“Hey Vic, preset your Q-239 for chaff and flare responses in case these guys fire on us. I don’t like it, but ROE says we have to let them fire first. I’ll be out in front to take the sucker punch if they throw it and deal with it, but you be ready to fire everything you can.”

“Lancer, we could probably cut and run now. Nobody would complain.”

“Vic, this is what I took the oath and trained for. I’ve drawn an eighteen-mile line in the sand, and I’m not leaving it.”

“Roger. I’m your wingman, Lancer. I’ll cover you forever.”

The Hudner CIC came on the Ford Air Ops net, saying “Bolt-248, Hudner CIC. These guys just pickled their drop tanks, so I think this may go south in a hurry. Watch your DAS scopes. I’ve got a feeling these guys have a mission. We’ve got four SM-6s green’ed up down here, so no matter what happens out there, if these guys shoot, none of them are going home.”

Lancer responded. “We shall not yield!”

As Lancer studied his situation, he had a few spare seconds. He had said his usual pre-flight prayer, but sensed the need for another brief prayer. He spoke alone in his oxygen mask, “Gracious Father, I humbly request Your guidance and blessing for whatever is going to happen in the next few minutes. Guide, guard and protect me with Your loving hand. I know that, regardless, nothing ever separates me from Your love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

To be ready to cover Lancer, Victor opened his Bombay doors to lower the Sidekick AMRAAM launcher into the slipstream to be ready for an instant shot.

Over in Yuri’s Flanker cockpit, he was setting up for his engagement. He had orders to fire an Archer IR missile from inside Syria’s air sovereignty boundary. This would falsely imply that the Navy aircraft had crossed into Syrian airspace, which was not the case. Lancer’s flight was paralleling the boundary at eighteen miles, meaning that Yuri would have to fire at over six miles away. That was well within the Archer’s range, but not in its sweet spot of two to five miles.

His plan was for him to take out the lead, Lancer, with the first Archer shot while Sergey focused on the wingman, Victor. He had been instructed to keep his radar on standby so that the Americans would not be cued to his offensive first strike, and use his passive infrared search & track (IRST) system to track the American leader until he fired.

Yuri was not sure, he could count on Hashem and Vahid for anything but a fish-in-a-barrel shot because neither one was good at reactive maneuvering.

Yuri keyed his mic to talk to Sergey, “Okay Sergey, as quick as we’re certain I killed the lead, you can activate your radar and press the attack on the wingman with an Archer or Adder, whichever is best. Hashem and I will join you and Vahid in a four-on-one cleanup as soon as the leader is dead.”

Sergey responded to Yuri. “Okay, I’ll follow you into the fight.”

As he passed the ten-mile mark, Yuri sped up to four hundred and eighty knots and climbed to fourteen thousand feet. His IRST picked up Lancer eight miles away, about twenty degrees off his starboard side but two thousand feet above him. Yuri pulled his nose up and zoomed to match Lancer’s altitude as he approached the air sovereignty boundary.

Yuri used his helmet sight to lock the Archer on Lancer’s IR signature and, just before he crossed the twelve-mile boundary, he fired the Archer. It came off the rail and climbed before vectoring off toward Lancer.

In Lancer’s cockpit, the DAS system alarmed: YATO.

The combined DAS track on the Archer fed Lancer’s display with an Archer ID, threat direction, and a time to intercept of a relatively long thirteen seconds. Lancer’s display gave a recommended vector to turn away and rely on his flares and chaff to shield his IR signature and cause the Archer’s proximity fuse to detonate on the chaff as he outdistanced the missile. This was a decent strategy as it would let Victor engage Dash-2 with either an AMRAAM or Sidewinder. But they would still have three enemy aircraft in optimal positions against the two of them.

Lancer recalled his Pinecastle Archer reaction maneuver and instead pushed his F-35C into afterburner and pulled 8G’s while turning left, directly toward Yuri’s Archer missile path coming at him. Lancer had discussed this tactic against an Archer missile with Victor, so Victor halfway expected this.

By turning toward the incoming Archer, Lancer was shortening his intercept time by actually helping the missile to close the gap, and the time-to-intercept on his display began to more rapidly decrease below 10 seconds. The Archer missile was tracking his large afterburner IR signature, and the angle rate of change as Lancer’s signature was moving left to right across the Archer’s IR sensor field of view.

In the meantime, Victor locked up Hashem’s Flanker on his radar and fired an AMRAAM at him. It streaked off on its deadly path toward an unsuspecting Hashem, who was focused on Yuri.

Lancer came quickly to the Archer heading, but was now only four seconds from intercept. He pushed his countermeasure button on the stick, and brilliant magnesium flares began spraying from below the F-35C. The Archer’s IR seeker was instantly saturated by the flares but continued to track Lancer’s most recent angle rate change of left-to-right, expecting Lancer to continue his fool’s turn.

The Archer’s last IR signature had been Lancer’s afterburners, which was a strong signal. But now, a significant portion of the Archer’s IR seeker field of view was blinded by the heat of the flares and the sensor elements had been desensitized so they couldn’t detect a signature lower than the flares.

Lancer keyed a couple of bursts of chaff, which blossomed into a large radar-reflecting cloud. He then pulled the throttle power setting back out of afterburner to about ninety percent. He was going over five hundred knots and had plenty of airspeeds to support his next maneuver.

At just over two seconds to intercept, he executed a right roll while spraying a final spiral of flares before deactivating the flare dispenser. The role set Lancer up for a right turn, and he pulled all the G’s he could as his aircraft reversed course on the missile tracker.

As he was pulling 8G’s to avoid the Archer, Lancer spoke into his oxygen mask, “I love you, Lindsey.”

Lancer’s F-35C flew out of the huge flare background to the Archer seeker’s left with less of an IR signature from the lower throttle setting. The seeker had been expecting Lancer to emerge out of the seeker’s right side of the flare cloud with a large IR signature. So, Lancer’s F-35C was not immediately reacquired by the Archer seeker.

The Archer missile flew past Lancer’s aircraft, missing it by about three hundred meters. The missile’s proximity detection mini-radar fuse detected the chaff cloud Lancer had left and immediately detonated amongst the remaining flares and chaff.