Chapter Text
Estovakia. A modest country on the eastern end of the Anean continent.
The year is 2012. Over five hundred thousand people have died over five years of civil war. Every day, men and women are thrown into the meat grinder by the hundreds.
The war has been at a stalemate for six months. Supporters on both sides of the conflict are beginning to lose hope.
Yet the fires of war are being stoked. The Eastern Faction is on the cusp of achieving a breakthrough for the war effort. The Lye United Faction is aware of this and are scrambling at all haste to halt this breakthrough.
1 November 2010
Victa City Naval Air Station
Estovakia
The sun was rising, the wind blowing across the bay was nice and cool, and people were slowly starting to wake up. Next to a small dirt airstrip sat four hangars, the breeze blasting through them as if they weren’t there. Planted next to those hangars were a handful of tents, puffed up with the air pressure from air conditioning. Lying face down on a rack inside the tent was a man dressed in a green one piece uniform. His snoring was audible even through a pillow.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!
“Scramble, scramble, scramble!”
Startled and woken up by the obnoxiously loud air alert siren, the brown haired man went flying from his rack, grabbing a helmet from the foot of the bed and rushing out of the tent, almost bringing the door down with him in the process. Hastily putting his helmet on, the man ran towards the hangar tents, where a second man was waiting for him.
“Come on, Mako!” The second man, a person of average height and build and with his face concealed behind a visor and a mask, was waiting for the sleeping giant.
“I’ll be right behind you, go!” Mako shouted to the masked man, hooking a left turn into one of the hangars where the sight of an aircraft awaited him. By aircraft standards, and especially by combat aircraft standards, it was a small plane, but despite that fact it was more than capable of committing lethal acts of force.
Mako practically went flying up the ladder, throwing his legs over the edge of the cockpit and slipping into the seat with a muffled thud. He flicked a switch and the fighter’s electrical system flickered to life. Mako put his helmet on, connected the various related radio and oxygen downloads and slammed home the canopy.
“Mako, radio check.” Mako transmitted a message, seeing if his radios and microphone actually worked.
“ Loud and clear.” Mako’s wingman transmitted back.
“Loud and clear, out here.” Mako initiated his engine startup while flight crew personnel on the ground went around preparing the aircraft, pulling out safety pins and removing fuel hoses.
This wasn’t Mako’s first rodeo. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Killion - Mako, his nickname, to most people - had been a naval aviator for a long time, at least compared to the majority of his peers, coming on eleven years of active duty service. His initial years had been within the ranks of the Estovakian Navy, but the majority of those years had been spent fighting in the Civil War as part of the Eastern Faction Naval Forces. With a face full of freckles accompanied by bright green eyes and topped by brown hair, Mako’s appearance made him look like somebody in their early twenties, despite the fact that he was thirty five. Nevertheless, his experience made him a fierce pilot and anybody who had faced him knew it.
The crew chief of Mako’s plane made a hand signal to the aviator indicating that his aircraft was ready to go.
“ Bracer 2, departing.” Mako’s wingman was already sortieing. Mako could vaguely hear the sound of a second set of engines powering up and moving. Mako pushed forward on the throttle lever and his aircraft started rolling forward.
“Bracer 1, departing.” Mako declared on the radio, pulling out of the hangar and onto the airstrip. Ahead of him, Bracer 2’s twin turbofan engines were roaring at afterburner. The fighter rapidly picked up speed, lifting up into the cool morning air. As soon as Bracer 2 had lifted off, Mako mimicked his wingman’s takeoff procedure, throwing the throttle to full afterburner and soaring up into the sky.
BRACER 1 / MAKO / MIG-29K
BRACER 2 / SAPPER / MIG-29K
“Watchtower, Bracer Squadron is airborne.” Mako sounded off on the radio. “What’s the situation?”
“ Bracer, three bandits have been detected breaching the CAP barrier, bearing 236, range 300, altitude ten thousand feet. Bandits are heading towards Victa City at speed. Intercept and destroy or turn away any hostile aircraft.” Watchtower, the ground station responsible for coordinating air activity in the region, explained the threat and gave the relevant range, heading and altitude for the intercept Bracer Squadron was meant to carry out.
“Roger, Bracer Squadron is outbound heading 236 to intercept enemy aircraft.” Mako glanced over to his wingman. “You got that, Sapper?”
“ 236 for 300 at Angels 10.” Sapper replied dryly. “ Yeah, I heard.”
“Hit it.” Mako ordered, banking around to the west and pitching up at thirty degrees to climb to the aforementioned altitude. The afterburners of the two MiG-29K Fulcrums - a carrier capable variant of the blooded MiG-29 Fulcrum - lit up the morning skies as the two aircraft rocketed up. Hanging from their pylons were missiles, six missiles per aircraft, twelve aircraft in the flight, more than enough to deal with the enemy. The two Fulcrums broke the sound barrier before leveling out at twelve thousand feet, zooming off towards the contacts.
Halfway to the target, Mako looked down at his radar warning receiver display: RWR for short. He was being pinged by radars to his rear, most likely the various air search radars surrounding the city they were stationed at, but there was nothing emitting radar signals to his front.
“Sapper, you picking up anything on your RWR at your front?” Mako asked Sapper, making sure that he wasn’t suffering from an equipment malfunction.
“ Nothing but the SAMs back home.” Sapper replied, indicating that he wasn’t picking up any forward looking radars either.
“Alright, light ‘em up and paint them.” Mako ordered, flicking on his Fulcrum’s radar. He trusted that Sapper had done the same, but even at a hundred and fifty kilometres the chances their radars would pick anything up was unlikely. The mechanically scanned Zhuk radars they carried were small and anemic. The two Estovakian pilots pushed forwards, hoping to pick up their targets as they got closer. Sure enough, as they closed the distance Mako picked up one contact, quickly followed by two smaller accompanying bandits.
“ Tally three bandits.” Sapper called out the contacts before Mako could make the report. “ 110 on the nose. Are we sure these guys are hostile? They’re moving at a snail’s pace.”
Mako grit his teeth. “Close the distance, pick them up on IRST, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
“ Copy.”
Moving along at almost two times the speed of sound, Bracer Squadron continued to close the distance from a hundred kilometres down to forty, the maximum effective scanning distance of the infrared search and track system mounted on the nose of their Fulcrums. The central bandit, the first aircraft they had picked up on radar, had turned around a hundred and eighty degrees away from the Fulcrums, but the other two aircraft had picked up speed and were aggressively pushing them. There was no doubt about it, these aircraft were hostile. The fact that neither aircraft pushing them had their radars on had Mako on edge, which made him curious as to what they were up against.
Beep. New IRST track. Mako glanced down at the display.
“Harriers?” Mako was perplexed. “Lyes must be getting desperate.”
“ That or they were the closest aircraft for a sortie.” Sapper offered an alternative solution. “ Are we shooting these guys down.”
Mako manipulated the radar screen to acquire and lock up the Harrier immediately in front of him. “Yeah, weapons free. I’ve got eyes on the left bandit.”
“ Copy, going for the guy on the right.” A pause. Mako saw a trail of smoke rocket away from Sapper’s aircraft. He had fired a missile. “ Sapper, Fox 3.”
Now was as good a time as any. Mako cycled through his weapons until he had an R-77 on his trigger. He pressed the trigger.
Clunk. Wooosh….
“Mako, Fox 3.” Mako reported as the radar guided missile left the rail and went searching for its target. Predictably, the enemy Harrier started violently evading, turning around, diving towards the ground and dumping chaff in an attempt to evade the missile fired at it. Mako followed the Harrier as it soared downwards and away. The Harrier wasn’t capable of breaking the sound barrier, it couldn’t outrun a Fulcrum in any scenario. Mako closed to within twenty kilometres of his target before the Harrier was lost from both IRST and radar.
“ Sapper, splash one.”
“Mako, splash one.” Mako called his kill. “Watchtower, Bracer 1, two bandits splashed. Third bandit is withdrawing. Orders?”
“ Bracer, intercept and destroy final bandit before they cross No Man’s Land.” Watchtower ordered.
“Roger, Bracer is moving to intercept last bandit.” Mako declared, turning and burning to chase after the aircraft that had turned around as soon as they had detected the two Fulcrums. Sapper joined on Mako’s wing to give chase.
The third bandit hadn’t gotten far since it had turned around, and it wasn’t going anywhere near fast enough to evade the fighters, nor their missiles.
“Want to take the honours?” Mako asked his wingman.
“ What, your trigger finger sore all of a sudden?” Sapper mocked his flight lead as he got off a second missile. “ Sapper, Fox 3.”
Mako chuckled openly on the radio as Sapper’s missile disappeared beyond the horizon. He kept a track on the final remaining aircraft with his radar. After a couple of minutes of flight time, the last target very quickly lost speed before disappearing from radar. They had gotten it.
“ Sapper, splash two.” Sapper made the call.
“Watchtower, Bracer 1, all bandits splashed.” Mako made his final contact report to ground control.
“ Watchtower acknowledges, all bandits destroyed. ” Watchtower verified that Mako and Sapper had completed their mission. “ Good job, Bracer. Return to base.”
“Bracer acknowledges all, RTB. Out here.” Mako popped his mask off and leant his head against the ejection seat. Sapper pulled up alongside him as they turned for home.
“ All in a day’s work, hey Mako?” Sapper jabbed at his flight lead. Mako checked his watch. It was coming on 0630.
“The day is young, Sapper. The day is very young.” Mako mused.
“ Lyes Faction hasn’t conducted a major offensive operation in this area for a couple months now.” Sapper did what he could to be reassuring. “ You really think today is the day they throw shit at the wall?”
“It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be in a week.” Mako retorted his wingman. “All I know is that this could be a sign.”
“ If you say so.” Sapper audibly sighed. “ If you say so…”
Flying back to their base at half idle power, Bracer Squadron did a quick flyover of their base before coming in for a landing approach. Victa City Naval Air Station sounded like a name fitting for a major installation with several hangars, multiple large paved runways and enough infrastructure to support a population of several thousand people, but in reality the naval air station was anything but that. Originally built as a minor outpost for the Estovakian Coast Guard in the 1930s, the base had been abandoned for decades before the Eastern Faction occupied the outpost. Its infrastructure was limited to a dirt airstrip just barely large enough to support operations for small light fighters, a couple of old brick buildings and a tiny air traffic control tower that was half rusted out. Most of the base’s infrastructure was made up of mobile tents.
Mako let Sapper land first, circling around the airbase a couple of times while Sapper touched down and taxied off the airstrip. Mako looked around. One of the few nice things about the air station was that it was located a five minute walk away from a decent beach on the south-western inlet of the bay that the station flanked.
Once Sapper was out of the way, Mako made one final circle around the airstrip before coming in for his landing approach. Mako touched down on the dirt with his flaps and airbrake fully extended. Once Mako slowed down enough to not go sliding off the airstrip, he applied the wheel brake and the Fulcrum came to a stop with a decent amount of runway to spare. Directed to the tent hangar from which he had started from in the first place, once the wheel chocks were in place, Mako shut down the Fulcrum’s engines, opened the canopy and killed the electrical system. He undid his straps, stretched and jumped out. Walking out of the hangar with his helmet under his arm, Mako found Sapper waiting for him outside.
“Took you long enough.” Sapper mused, walking in pace with Mako. The latter scoffed.
“Waiting for your lanky ass to get out of the fucking way.” Mako joked, earning a small chuckle from Sapper.
“We need to get another runway excavated.” Sapper said as they approached their tent. “It’s hard enough running two planes at the same time off this place, it’s going to be a nightmare whenever we get reinforced.”
“You can say that again.” Mako replied, sighing as he and Sapper entered the air conditioned interior of their tent. Mako put his helmet on the edge of his rack as he sat down and took off his survival vest. Similarly, Sapper sat down on the edge of his own rack and took off his helmet, boots and vest, revealing strong orange hair and a pair of sharp blue eyes. For a tent that was fifteen metres in length and just shy of seven metres across, it was conspicuously empty. Meant to house up to twenty people and their personal belongings, Mako and Sapper were the tent’s only two occupants.
“Three more to the board?” Lieutenant Tim Sapper McKenna said to Mako. Compared to the latter. Tim was slightly shorter at five foot nine and a fair bit younger, a mere twenty seven years old. His hair was the most standout feature about him, the aforementioned strong orange-brown. Much like Mako, Sapper was also a naval aviator, although he had less than half of the experience.
Mako set aside his vest and stood up. “Three more to the board.”
The board in question was a whiteboard set up on a tripod towards the middle of the tent. On it was a patch depicting a circular brown and silver shield, set above a series of rows of tally strokes. There were rows for aircraft, tanks, structures and everything in between. By far the largest row was the aircraft row, with over fifty individual aircraft tally strokes. Mako grabbed a whiteboard marker and added three more to the count.
“Fifty five enemy aircraft confirmed down.” Mako remarked. “Almost an entire wing between you, me and the old guys.”
“At that pace, we might hit a hundred by the end of next year.” Sapper joked. Mako snorted, putting down the whiteboard marker and going to lie down on his rack.
“Tell you what, if we make a hundred by this time next year, I’ll be a happy-”
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!
“Scramble, scramble, scramble!”
Mako groaned in annoyance. “I just laid down!”
Across from him, Sapper was rushing to put his boots, vest and helmet back on. “So about throwing shit at the-”
“Don’t fucking start.” Mako growled as he put his vest on, running out the tent and over to his aircraft where the ground crews were still rearming and refuelling his Fulcrum. “How long?!”
“Two minutes!” The plane chief called back. Mako put his helmet on and shot up the ladder into the cockpit. Much like their earlier sortie, Mako started the electrical system, started the engines and shut the canopy. He spotted Sapper rushing past the hangar and over to his own Fulcrum. The moment that Mako’s Fulcrum was rearmed and refuelled, the plane chief gave Mako the signal that he was green to go. The wheel chocks were pulled. Within the next minute, Mako was airborne, followed thirty seconds later by Sapper.
“Bracer Squadron, airborne.” Mako reported. “Watchtower, SITREP?”
“ Bracer Squadron, Watchtower, four bandits inbound towards Victa City, bearing 195, range 360, altitude thirty thousand feet. Vector heading 180 to intercept bandits. Reinforcements are outbound from Ellenoy are on their way, estimate they’ll be on station in five minutes.” Watchtower gave Mako the situation report. Mako winced. Four aircraft versus two. Not impossible odds, but definitely not favourable.
“Bracer copies all, heading south at haste to intercept.” Mako replied to Watchtower, banking to the south and speeding up past Mach 1 and then Mach 2. Sapper followed Mako without hesitation. As opposed to their first intercept where the enemy they were opposing didn’t have any radar, the four bandits they were intercepting now very much had radars. And according to the RWR, these bandits had considerably sharper teeth.
“ Tigersharks? Shit, Lyes is out for blood.” Sapper mused. “ We going live?”
“Fuck it, yeah.” Mako switched on his Fulcrum’s radar set. Not long after him and Sapper went live on radar, the four F-20 Tigersharks turned into the Fulcrums. The two parties closed to within a hundred kilometres of each other. As Mako started to lock up the left most pair of Tigersharks at eighty kilcks out, he was surprised that he wasn’t being locked up and fired at in return. Tigersharks were theoretically capable of firing AIM-120 AMRAAMs, radar guided missiles that outranged Mako and Sapper’s R-77s.
“I’ve got the left two.” Mako told Sapper. “Mako, Fox 3, Fox 3.”
“ Sapper, Fox 3, Fox 3.” Sapper said a moment after Mako. The two collectively lofted four missiles at the four enemy aircraft. Utilizing a kind of radar search method called Track While Scan - TWS - Mako and Sapper were able to fire missiles without immediately tripping the enemy’s RWRs. This allowed the missiles to get closer without the enemy performing evasive maneuvers owing to a lack of warning. The two Fulcrum pilots continued to close the distance. As Mako crossed the sixty kilometre mark he received his first radar lock warning.
Meep, meep, meep, meep, meep-
“Bracer 1, spiked.” Mako stated on the radio. He wasn’t too concerned. Judging by the distance the Tigersharks were engaging from, they had the outdated and inferior semi-active radar homing AIM-7 Sparrow, a missile that dated back to the sixties in its original form and which was easy to evade using fairly basic evasive techniques.
MEEPMEEPMEEPMEEPMEEP!
“Bracer 1, engaged.” Mako rattled off calmly. He banked around ninety degrees to the left, traveling perpendicular to the Sparrow’s direction of travel, a practice known as notching meant to confuse the seeker of the missile. Mako popped some chaff canisters as extra insurance and before long he had broken the missile’s lock. Mako turned back in as their missiles closed in on the Tigersharks. The enemy fighters were now evading hard, presumably because they were now being pitbulled upon by their R-77s. One by one, all four fighters disappeared from radar.
“Bracer Squadron, splash four bandits.” Mako made the call. “Watchtower, Bracer 1, bogey dope, over.”
“ Bracer 1, Watchtower, picture clean.” Ground control replied. “ Good work once again, Bracer. Reinforcements have been recalled, you are clear to return to base.”
“Affirm, Bracer Squadron is RTB.” Mako replied, banking around, reducing his throttle and turning for home. Sapper joined on his left wing.
“ Four more for the board?” Sapper asked.
Mako nodded despite the fact that Sapper couldn’t physically see him. “Four more for the board.”