The moment DAS recognized another jet was on his wing, no matter how its presence was detected, it would track the contact using every available means and provide continuous guidance to the pilot. That was useful when the other aircraft was an enemy, but Jug thought nothing of it since he knew it was being flown by his friend.
“Visual,” Jug said, letting Colt know he saw him.
Suddenly, his jet banked left, and he bounced his helmet off the canopy before being thrust down into his seat with the sudden onset of G-forces. His vision narrowed as he scrambled to perform the anti-G straining maneuver and keep blood in his head to prevent from blacking out.
“Holy shit!” Chen shouted, panning her head left and right while twitching both hands to manipulate the virtual reality controllers. The hijacked jet responded by breaking away from a second aircraft that her jet’s Distributed Aperture System had detected less than two miles away. She didn’t have any experience in aerial combat and reacted on instinct alone, hoping that would be enough.
Though she sat on solid ground and felt the comforting caress of the cool ocean breeze, her stomach knotted up and a thin sheen of perspiration coated her skin as she strained against the virtual G-forces. She felt the tension in her neck as she looked over her shoulder to maintain sight of the enemy fighter, struggling to believe he had found her.
She had worried something like this might happen but didn’t think the Americans could have reacted fast enough to launch a counter-air mission. She thought she would at least have enough time to launch the two Joint Strike Missiles and complete the mission before the carrier launched its fighters to intercept her. That it had happened so early into the flight, before even turning south to begin her attack run, meant that the Americans were expecting her.
But she still had the advantage. She still had control over the jet and still had an air-to-air missile she could use to maintain her advantage. All she needed to do was shoot down the pursuing jet and continue with her mission.
“Let’s see what you’re made of,” she whispered.
Colt watched Jug’s jet break into him and had a moment of panic before his training kicked in. He banked to oppose the other jet’s nose and kept his helmet against the head box as he strained against the growing G-forces to keep sight of the attacking Joint Strike Fighter as he maneuvered to the merge.
“What’s going on, Jug?”
“Left-to-left… I think.”
Colt pointed his nose to the right, and they passed each other with less than one hundred feet of separation. He checked across Jug’s tail and watched the other jet giving up angles and pulling up into the vertical with cold lift vector placement.
He processed the myriad of tactical errors and capitalized on each by rolling inverted and pulling pure nose low to counter the other jet’s nose high, but he kept the top of his helmet pointed right at his opponent. As his nose came up, he watched the other’s come down, setting up for a classic low-to-high merge that gave Colt the distinct advantage. A good pilot would have tried flattening out the merge, but Colt knew his opponent wasn’t that.
As they neared the second merge, this time in the vertical plane, Colt rolled his left vector ninety degrees and pulled back on the stick to early turn his opponent. His timing might have been off by a few tenths of a second, but he saw the other JSF reenter his field of view right where he expected. He added rudder and spiraled his jet down into Jug’s control zone.
“Talk to me, Jug,” Colt said.
“The pull’s coming on…”
He watched Jug’s nose slowly coming up to the horizon, but before it got there, the jet rolled onto its back in an ill-timed ditch maneuver. Colt shook his head, knowing that if it had been executed properly, it could have given him a closure problem to contend with.
“I think I just ditched…”
“Poorly,” Colt replied.
A pilot with less experience might have overshot anyway and given up his offensive advantage, but there was nowhere Colt felt more comfortable than at the controls of a fighter. He quickly pulled his nose up to slow his closure and increase his vertical separation, waiting until he had passed over the top of the other F-35 before rolling inverted and pulling his nose down to follow.
