Chimera

Fuel conservation be damned, the first priority is to live!

The snow clad mountains now occupied the entire front view through the HUD as his aircraft dived for the hills. It took but a second for the hills to appear big enough to prompt Khurana to pull back on the control stick and be crushed into his seat as the aircraft pulled level within the valleys below. That was good news for him, bad news for the Chinese missile, which could not follow him through solid rock.

Khurana was punching out loads of chaff as his aircraft streaked and weaved within the peaks below. The RWR audio warning was screeching continuously now as missiles were all over the sky. Unit coherence had been lost by both sides and now it was every pilot for himself until the missiles from both sides exhausted themselves or lost track of their targets.

In all the frantic seconds of flying he realized that he had lost track of the Chinese missiles behind him. There was no way to know amongst the chaos. He could see the odd Mig-29 dashing across the valleys just like him. There was no way to know even if his own missiles had claimed any Chinese Su-27s or not.

By now the threat level was reducing. Khurana suddenly remembered that he was still on afterburner.

Oh shit!

He pulled the throttle back and clicked it through the afterburner shutdown and felt the engine making lesser noise and becoming slower. Khurana also realized that he had been on afterburner for a long time now and the Mig-29 was not exactly a high endurance fighter. He checked the fuel indicator to show that he still had fuel left for re-entering combat. At least for a while.

It was time to do that now.

He pulled back on the control stick. The nose of the Mig-29 pitched up sharply and quickly brought him above the valleys and into the night sky above. He found himself south of the Karakoram peaks, still inside Indian Territory, but barely. He immediately checked the radar display to find the disposition of friendly and enemy fighters but there seemed to be a clutter all around.

He then heard a friendly tune in his ears:

“Claw-One, this is Eagle-Eye-One. Single bandit at bearing zero-three-zero. Relative. Range twenty clicks and closing. Out”

He was glad to see the Phalcon was still in control of the situational awareness. Something he had lost a few minutes ago. And it had given him his first new target: a Chinese Su-27 pilot like himself had also evaded missiles fired at him and had returned to the fight. More importantly, the Phalcon had warned Khurana about the Su-27. But the Su-27 pilot had no idea that Khurana was bearing down on him…

Khurana flipped his aircraft to the right and pulled back on the control stick to bring the rear of the Chinese Su-27 within the center of the HUD. The green square was immediately followed by a smaller diamond one and Khurana depressed the button that sent his third R-77 missile towards the enemy fighter. This time the initiative was with Khurana who detected no counter-attack by the Chinese pilot unaware of the threat behind him.

His R-77 slammed into the Su-27 from the rear and blotted the latter out of the sky in a ball of fire. He noticed that the small green square fluctuated for a few seconds before it disappeared from his view.

Score one!

It was at this time that Khurana’s eye caught hold of a massive flash of light directly above his cockpit. He jerked his head up and saw the flaming debris of a Mig-29 falling out of the sky. As he flipped his aircraft to the side and cleared away, he saw two other Mig-29s from his squadron busy in a within-visual-range dogfight with Su-27s a thousand feet above him.

It was time to enter the fray and assist his outnumbered colleagues…

Khurana pulled back on the stick but this time carefully pulled the aircraft as he entered the raging air battle from below, hoping to catch a Chinese pilot by surprise. He switched now to the short-range R-60 missiles that were cued to his helmet optics. The nature of the audio tune changed as the R-60 seekers looked for a target.

Khurana finally found the large silhouette of Sukhoi against the green moonlit sky behind. He headed for this Su-27 from behind and below. It was a classic position for a shot. A few seconds later the missile left the pylons and headed quickly towards its target before hitting the port engine from below. The R-60 had a very small warhead that wasn’t well equipped for taking down heavy fighters. And sure enough, the Su-27’s port engine flamed out even as metallic debris fell out through the exhaust nozzle.