Chimera

Khurana’s eyebrows went up in surprise to see the Su-27 still flying. But the latter was now crippled and attempting to exit the area on one engine. He switched his weapon system to “GUNS” and moved in for the kill. As his aircraft jittered with burst fire from the cannon, the sky in front of him lit up with tracers. These slammed into the underside of Su-27 with shuddering hits before the aircraft was enveloped in a small ball of fire and dived out of the sky…

Khurana had to pull his aircraft frantically to avoid flying though the flaming debris. He barely managed to skim though the smoke at the side of the fireball and streaked back into the night sky above…

Score two!

* * *

Khurana wasn’t the only pilot who had switched to guns. As aircraft after aircraft on both sides ran out of missile stores, they began switching to guns. The skies were now lined with tracers, white-hot flares dropping out of the skies and corkscrewed smoke trails from expended missiles. Then there were the small smoke columns of burning debris falling against the skies. More than two dozen remaining Indian and Chinese fighters neared exhaustion in numbers, fuel and weapons…

As dozens of yellow tracers and cannon rounds shuddered past the cockpit above his head, Khurana missed a heartbeat and pulled his control stick to the right and dived to the side. Behind him a Su-27 did the same. Crews from both sides had seen their comrades blown to smithereens in this battle.

It was all personal now.

As Khurana was pulling his aircraft down into an accelerating dive towards the hills below, he was scanning two other potential dangers in front of him in addition to the enraged Su-27 driver diving in behind him, guns blazing. His HUD was showing that the fuel level was getting dangerously low. It was not all the way into the red yet, but it was getting there. The Mig-29 was not a high endurance fighter designed for extended combat. And it showed. Khurana realized that the Chinese guys in the Su-27s had no such worries.

Secondly, his HUD was indicating no remaining air-to-air missiles save for a single R-77 hanging off his port wing. Only a hundred odd rounds of gun ammo remained in his Mig-29 now. In comparison, Khurana had seen the half a dozen or more weapons still hanging from some of the Su-27s in the skies around him. The Sukhoi bird was much larger than the Mig-29 and carried a lot more weapons. Additionally, there were fewer Indian Mig-29s than there were Su-27s in the skies over Ladakh. It was now getting to the point that the Indians were in serious risk of being outgunned, outnumbered, out of ammo and then out of fuel. The battle could not go on for too much longer.

We cannot disengage either…

Khurana thought of options as he flipped his aircraft yet again to evade another slashing pass from the Su-27 behind him with the latter’s tracers streaking by the cockpit. He punched off another round of flares and realized that sooner or later they would empty too. Khurana was having difficulty losing his attacker who was clearly an experienced pilot and not a rookie like his earlier two kills…

“Claw-One, this is Talon-Seven! I have the bugger on your tail in my sights. Break left on my mark. Let’s see if I can shove an R-60 up this guy’s jet pipe.”

“Roger that! On your mark!” Khurana shouted back as he evaded another burst of cannon fire. A few long seconds later the radio squawked again:

“Break left, now!”

Khurana didn’t hesitate and flipped his aircraft to the left. The Su-27 pilot attempted the same before an R-60 missile slammed right into his port engine exhaust.

This time, however, the aircraft disappeared into a ball of fire as the primary on-board fuel storage exploded. Khurana felt the jolt from the shockwave not more than a few hundred meters behind him as a massive flash appeared from the rear and flared out his night-vision. He jerked his head to see the other Mig-29 appear from behind the earthbound fireball and streak upwards into the starlit sky.

“Claw-One to Talon-Seven: plenty thanks! One more down! Let’s see who else is out there!” Khurana shouted over the radio and started breathing again. He could hear his heart pounding inside his chest.

But the battle was not over.

“Talon-Seven here. I see three bandits and two friendlies at three o’clock high. Can’t find any other friendlies though…”

Damn!

What the hell happened to the rest of Claw and Talon flights?

“Claw-One, this is Eagle-Eye-One. We show inbound J-10s on our scopes. Ten bandits from Kashgar heading south for the Karakoram peaks. Angels twenty, bearing three-four-zero. Over.”

“Eagle-Eye-One, this is Claw-One. We cannot, repeat: cannot, engage! We are getting chewed out over here! Requesting priority assistance! We need help over here right freaking now!”

OVER HIMACHAL PRADESH

DAY 1 + 1945 HRS