EPT"...keep pilots warm and enhance combat functionality in high-G maneuvers...constrict the legs to keep blood from pooling in them during long combat missions..."
Keep him from passing out. He got it. And the helmet wrapped around his bald pate had to pump pure oxygen into his system to assist in that duty, oxygen which only added irritated lungs atop his endless itch. It had to, because his cockpit was only "lightly pressurized" to guard against explosive decompression. The cockpit couldn't be strengthened because the engineers had to save weight. The plane had to save weight to be a better combat machine. The plane had to be a better combat machine so that Fuchida Hideo could live up to his namesake.
"Fuck," Hideo breathed into his headset. Always, always, always his great-grandfather would intrude on his private thoughts, as if the old gray gentleman was still alive, his ancient Nakajima B5N fluttering alongside Hideo's F-35, the leather-jacketed arm reaching out to fire the green flares signalling the swarm of two hundred planes behind him to vomit their deadly hail upon an unsuspecting enemy, the cocky voice breathing the three-word code phrase that would launch the American Era.
Of course, no one at the base mentioned his great-grandfather to his face. And no one descended from his great-grandfather mentioned him. After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo, flight commander of the air group that bombed Pearl Harbor, had become a committed pacifist and Christian evangelist. Hideo was the black sheep in his family, the one who had, in his father's words, "thrown away the lessons that his forefathers acquired at the cost of three million dead."
Being estranged from his family only spurred Hideo to train harder. Mitsuo's ghost was the only relative who acknowledged him. Sometimes, it would scowl at him when he tried to slack off in the mundane mechanical tasks of peacetime piloting. And sometimes, in the most inopportune of times, it would appear next to him, distracting him from the task at hand.
"C'mon, pops. Not the time," Hideo muttered to no one in particular.
Hideo was the best pilot in his unit. As such, he led the deterrence patrols against Chinese aircraft that tried to intrude on the disputed rocks some eight kilometers below him.
Barely fifty meters to his right, a Chinese J-31 rocked its wings to tell Hideo that he was getting too close. Hideo ignored the signal. Eighteen hundred meters behind them, another J-31 and F-35 followed at a thousand kilometers an hour. The four planes had been flying concentric rings around, but just outside, the island's territorial waters for the past half-hour, and Hideo's legs kept itching.
The J-31 began to descend, and Hideo was followed to maintain contact. His orders had been the classic ones used in territorial disputes between countries since the deadly clockwork of the nuclear era had been first set in motion. Bug the other guy so much that he either backs off or is forced to shoot first. The American pilots called it "road rage with fighter jets."
The J-31 kept dropping lower and lower, approaching the clouds. Hideo was glad. A lower altitude meant thicker air, which meant everyone would run out of fuel faster, which meant a shorter mission. Then the dark triangle kept dropping, disappearing into the fluffy white carpet beneath them, and Hideo's confidence wavered. He toggled his mike.
"How low does this bastard want to go?" Hideo said to his wingman.
The wingman, a fresh-faced trainee pilot, was some right-wing politician's son who was on the patrol mission to burnish his father's nationalist credentials. In spite of the nepotism, the lieutenant's response was crisp and professional.
"I'm not sure, Captain, but his wingman is staying at eight-two-zero-zero. Should I maintain contact with him?"
Hideo gave a curt "Yes", then resumed pitching his F-35 downward. The last two digits on his HUD altimeter blurred as the angle of descent steepened. He punched through the cloud cover, found the Chinese plane, and cursed.
"Crazy son-of-a-bitch!" Hideo realized that the J-31 pilot was daring him to follow the Chinese jet into the flat, flawlessly blue ocean. To his left, the white band of the horizon had turned nearly perpendicular to his wings. Without terrain features, it would be nearly impossible to judge the distance to the water until it was too late. And Hideo had to closely watch the J-31, which meant he couldn't really keep an eye on the altimeter.
Hideo tapped the air brakes and stretched the distance between the planes to three hundred meters. Now, if the J-31 pilot really flew into the ocean, Hideo thought, his splash would serve as a prior warning.
At about one hundred fifty meters of altitude, the J-31 pilot suddenly leveled out. Gritting his teeth, Hideo yanked hard on the stick and followed. The suit did its job, fighting the G-forces and squeezing his lower body and torso so hard Hideo knew he would have marks on his skin for a week.
Hideo began to pull closer to the J-31, and he saw the wings rock once more. He ignored it. He was now barely one hundred meters behind and to the left of the J-31. The J-31 began to descend slowly, taunting Hideo. He followed.
The itch returned, much worse now. Hideo finally gave in and reached down for a scratch. At that precise moment, the Chinese plane banked right, passing barely a hundred meters in front of Hideo's F-35. The jet wash buffeted him around in the seat. Then his HUD flared red as warning kanji blanketed his field of view.
The F-35's engine had flamed out upon breathing a load of concentrated jet exhaust instead of oxygen. At five thousand meters, this was a simple issue to fix--simply pull up gently and press the re-ignition button--but Hideo was at barely twenty meters. His turbines flared to back life just as the stealth jet clipped the top of the waves.
Hideo's last conscious thoughts touched on how ironic it was to push the gears which his great-grandfather had set in motion.
Captain Kang Zongqi saw the F-35 disintegrate behind him and gasped with shock. He had never meant for that to happen--to him and his wingman, the job was just a dance to keep the netizens placated, to fill the weekly helmet-cam videos the Nanjing Military Region released on the internet showing how the Air Force was "defending the motherland's inviolable territorial integrity."
His wingman spoke immediately. "Flight leader, what happened down there? My dance partner just started screaming at me."
Zongqi dialed up the volume on the international comms channel. A sea of static, then the unmistakeable sound of angry Japanese cursing. Then his wingman cut back in. "Wait a sec, he's climbing and slowing down. He's on my six now, six o'clock high. What the fuck is going on?"
Kang Zongqi responded guiltily. "My bogey crashed. I don't think his wingman saw it through the clouds, though."
Zongqi's wingman responded brusquely. "Great. That's just fuckin' great. He probably thinks you brought him down on purpose. What are we gonna do?"
Zongqi fought to remember the vague and poorly-delivered lessons on incident management. "We need to contact higher to get a translator on the channel, and immediately disengage from the mission area."
Just as Zongqi finished his phrase, the cursing stopped and became a phrase which Zongqi half-remembered from old Chinese propaganda films.
"Tenno Heika, BANZAI!"
Oh shit, Zongqi thought. "Watch out, watch out, I think he's about to--"
The radio suddenly filled with hard thumps and screaming, then cut to silence.
Zongqi was momentarily stunned, then awakened from his state of reverie by the triple beeps of his radar warning receiver. A cold sweat broke out across Zongqi's shoulders. At such close ranges, the relative intensity of radar illumination nullified the stealth shaping of both planes, and worse yet, the bogey was somewhere above him, giving his missiles a normally inescapable energy advantage.
In spite of his thousands of hours in the simulator and cockpit, Zongqi found real combat wildly disorienting. The expected pair of short-range missiles poked through the clouds, like the fingers of God. Zongqi popped chaff, then flares, then wrenched the black stealth jet into a hard turn directly towards the bright, modern arrows. His twin engines whined with the redlined abuse. Fighting his instincts to run, he counted on the knowledge that against radar seekers, the front of his stealth jet offered the smallest radar cross-section, and thus the greatest chance to survive. Turning into the missiles also gave Zongqi the opportunity for an instant reply instead of waiting around for the F35 to finish him off after the initial attack.
His neck jerked left, right, upward, but the F35 was nowhere to be found. Going off a blind, caveman, instinct to fight back, he popped off a heat seeker into the incoming missile contrails while slamming the active jamming suite to full power, cracking his LCD screen with the force of an outstretched, panicked, palm. The white streaks grew closer and closer; a sticky wetness at his crotch told him he would need new underwear--if he could make it back to base. At the last possible second, Zongqi dove hard to his right, the negative G forces forcing thirty percent more than the normal volume of blood into his eyeballs and forehead for a brief second. Zongqi felt as though his world was being crushed by a vise, but didn't know why.
A roar, sudden, to his left. One missile slid harmlessly past Zongqi's aircraft. Zongqi silently exhaled, but was cut mid-breath by a blast wave that tossed his plane about like a champagne cork, followed by a sickening shredding sound from his port side. The second missile's proximity fuse had set it off about fifteen meters from his left wing.
Beep beep beep.
The Japanese jet, too, had been busy--cutting afterburners to decrease its heat signature and popping flares like a madman. This kid must be new, Zongqi thought, as his maneuver rendered the F35 a slow-moving target marked by the classic, smoky, angel-shaped bullseye of burned-out flares caught in wing vortices.
The radar reciever was now silent. His radar locked on to the fat tail section of the F-35. "My turn," Zongqi muttered, then launched everything he had--two radar missiles and a heat seeker--straight for the F35.
Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep.
The F35 waggled its tail and popped chaff immediately, then engaged afterburners. But the heat-seeker was not so easily fooled. It picked up the scent trail of the afterburners, then dove into the F35's engine like a rabbit into its warren. A split-second later, the F35 disintegrated in a fifty-meter wide fireball.
The age-old truism of air combat: tt's always what you don't see that kills you. "Chaff and flares, always chaff and flares, never just one or the other," Zongqi muttered.
Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. BEEEEEP.
"What's that sound?" Zongqi fumbled at his plane, then his helmet, before realizing one side of his helmet mounted display was completely dark.
"That's strange," Zongqi thought. Shifting his helmet around, he realized with a sickening finality that his left eye was completely blinded. Zongqi thought back to the dive, the blood rushing to his head from the negative Gs, popping all his retinal capillaries. "Fuck!" He'd always treasured his eyes growing up, jealously guarding them from books and computer screens, all so he could eventually become a pilot. Now he would never fly again.
BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.
Zongqi felt a violent death rattle coming from the left engine. Adjusting his helmet, his right eye finally caught a wall of warning symbols down the left side of the helmet-mounted display. Turn around to get a visual on the damage--more curses. The port wing was completely shredded. The left engine was on holed and spitting pieces of flaming scrap sideways and upwards.
Nothing more to do, no time to think. Zongqi's training kicked in. When he awoke from the knockout blow of the ejection seat, he was already peacefully drifting into the East China Sea. Directly below him, an emerald island jutted proudly from concentric rings of white froth.
A final wave of sweat coursed over Zongqi's body. He was still in disputed waters. Fighting the urge to vomit, Zongqi dialed home base on his emergency radio.
Next part:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=391370
