"They're carrying something, skipper. MiG-29s, for sure."

"Right." Jackson checked the display himself, then keyed his radio. "Stick, this is Spade, over."

"Go ahead." The digital radio circuit allowed Jackson to recognize Captain Richards' voice.

"Stick, we have ID on the bogies. Four MiG-two-niners. They appear to have under-wing cargo. Course, speed, and altitude unchanged." There was a brief pause.

"Splash the bandits."

Jackson's head snapped up. "Say again, Stick."

"Spade, this is Stick: splash the bandits. Acknowledge."

He called them 'bandits', Jackson thought. And he knows more than I do.

"Roger, engaging now. Out." Jackson keyed his radio again. "Bud, follow me in."

"Shit!" Shredder observed. "Recommend we target two Phoenix, left pair and right pair."

"Do it," Jackson replied, setting the weapons switch on the top of his stick to the AIM-54 setting. Lieutenant Walters programmed the missiles to keep their radars quiet until they were merely a mile out.

"Ready. Range is sixteen-thousand. Birds are in acquisition."

Jackson's heads-up display showed the correct symbology. A beeping tone in his headset told him that the first missile was ready to fire. He squeezed the trigger once, waited a second, then squeezed again.

"Shit!" Michael 'Lobo' Alexander observed, half a mile away.

"You know better than that!" Sanchez snarled back at him.

"Sky is clear. I don't see anything else around us."

Jackson closed his eyes to save as much of his vision as possible from the yellow-white exhaust flames of the missiles. They rapidly pulled away, accelerating to over three thousand miles per hour, almost a mile per second. Jackson watched them home in as he positioned his aircraft for another shot if the Phoenixes failed to function properly.

Arabov made another instrument check. There was nothing unusual. His threat receivers showed only air-search radars, though one reading had disappeared a few minutes earlier. Other than that, this was an exceedingly routine training mission, proceeding straight and level on a direct course towards a fixed point. His threat receivers had not detected the LPI radar which had been tracking him and his flight of four over the past five minutes. It was able, however, to detect the powerful homing radar in a Phoenix missile.

A bright red warning light flashed on, and a screeching sound abused his hearing. Arabov looked down to check his instruments. They seemed to be functioning, but this wasn't - his next move was to turn his head. He just had time to see a half-moon of yellow light and ghostly, star-lit smoke trail, then a flash.

The Phoenix targeted on the right-hand pair exploded just a few feet from them. The one hundred thirty-five pound warhead filled their air with high-speed fragments which shredded both MiGs. The same happened to the left-hand pair. The air was filled with an incandescent cloud of exploding jet fuel and airplane parts. Three pilots were killed directly by the explosion. Arabov was rocketed out of the disintegrating fighter by his ejection seat, whose parachute opened a scant two hundred feet over the water. Already unconscious from the unexpected shock of ejection, the Russian major was saved by systems that anticipated his injuries. An inflatable collar held his head above water, a UHF radio began screaming for the nearest rescue helicopter, and a powerful blue-white strobe light started flashing in the darkness. Around him were a few thin patches of burning fuel and nothing else.