Operation Pacifica: Harm's Way part 1
by Trooper Charcharadon (highland@iastate.edu)

        "Can't see a damn thing through this cloud cover," Yearnshaw
  said.

        You can say that again, thought Charcharadon as Tiger 204
  hummed along in the recon formation.  For the past ten minutes he had been
  flipping sensors back and forth, trying to get some sort of reading on what
  was in front of them.

        "FLIR, lookdown radar, emissions, nothing..." he griped over
  the tacnet.  No jamming either.  That's what was really bothering him.
  Jamming he could deal with, because someone had to be there to do the
  jamming.  This was just a whole lot of nothing.  The sub drivers couldn't
  have made a mistake, could they?  Sonar and fluid dynamics wasn't really his
  area, so he couldn't say.

        Finally they got their answer.

        "We have contacts!" DarkSide said over the radio. "Bearing
  three-one four, ten miles, eight hundred knots closure!"

        "How many are there?" queried J-Rock.

        "Fifteen," came DarkSide's reply.

        'Oh dung,' thought Charcharadon.  Then the missile lock
  warning went off in his ear.

        [set theme = "Henry V Theme" Henry V Soundtrack]

        "Fuchikoma!" he yelled, not waiting for orders.  "Lose the
  drop tanks and prepare to employ countermeasures!"  Tiger flight broke
  formation and went twisting off in manic attempts to escape the missile
  homing radars.  Charcharadon rolled and nosed down, sliding into a
  serpentine pattern while Fuchikoma punctuated the sudden direction change
  with chaff.  As Charcharadon broke into another tight wing-over turn, there
  was a bright explosion somewhere nearby, and Fuchikoma reported both the
  fact that the missiles were no longer tracking them, and that one of the
  recon flight had been hit.

 'Christ, that was Persephone,' thought Charcharadon as he caught a
  glimpse of one of the planes from Tiger Flight cartwheeling towards the
  ocean below, sans wing. He snapped around to dogtail one of the Luv
  Fighters, grunting against the g-forces.  Holding tenaciously to the sponge
  pilot's 6, he was just about to get lock when he heard a warning from
  Fuchikoma.  Glancing quickly back he noted the second Luv Fighter that was
  settling in comfortably to shoot at him.  "Damn!"

        Unleashing a short burst of twenty mike-mike at his target
  just to keep him honest, Charcharadon yanked his flaps and air brakes,
  catapulting himself out of the dogfight and chopping a lot of speed just
  seconds before a missile streaked from the second Luv Fighter.  As his
  stomach was making its way back to its proper place after being left behind
  in that maneuver, he almost burst out laughing as the missile flew straight
  into the tail end of the first Luv Fighter, transforming it into a rapidly
  expanding cloud of debris.

        Charcharadon settled in behind the second Fighter, the pilot
  of which was still in a dazed state.  He unleashed a missile of his own,
  which homed in on its target and detonated, sending the second sponge to
  follow his companion.  Before he could even mentally subtract one more from
  the fifteen fighters, two more were on his tail and he went into another
  series of evasive maneuvers.

        "Charc, you got one coming around behind you!" DS exclaimed.

        Glancing back again, sure enough the first two had peeled
  off only to give way to a third.  Grunting and sweating, Charcharadon went
  into yet another series of rapid turns and changes in altitude.  The Luv
  Fighter followed him through all of them.

        "Urrgh.. I can't seem to shake him," Charcharadon grunted.

        "Break left -- now!"

        Standing Tiger 204 on its left wingtip, Charcharadon made a
  sharp roll.  As the B'Harnate fighter moved to maintain its advantage, it
  flew right into DarkSide's waiting gunsight. A rolling burst of 20mm shells
  sent the fighter into its last dive, smoke trailing from its fuselage.

        "Thanks, DS," Charcharadon said as he slid in behind the
  fighter presently tailing DarkSide's Tomcat, intent on returning the favor.
  He got lock at the same time his own warning siren went off.  Though he knew
  it was probably a bad idea, he stayed with his own target long enough to
  launch a missile.  He then yanked hard over on the stick.  The Tomcat
  hesitated, then obeyed his command.  By this time, a missile was closing
  very rapidly on him.

        "Oh no, don't start doing this to me.." he muttered at his
  plane as the avionics started to go out on him again.  "The technicians
  fixed you before we took off, don't pull this now!"

        He popped a copious amount of flares in the hopes that it
  would compensate for the drop in maneuverability, and it helped to a point.
  Instead of detonating inside one of his engine chambers, the missile
  detonated just about 50 feet off his tail.  Charcharadon ducked down (for
  all the good that would do) as his plane bucked from the force of the
  explosion.  It may have been 50 feet, but it sure as hell felt like it had
  gone off under his seat.

        Charcharadon looked at his instruments as half the warning
  lights for his engines, control surfaces, and fuel tanks went off at once.
  The other half weren't going off because they had been destroyed.  He
  glanced back over his shoulder just in time to see a portion of one of his
  vertical stabilizers rip loose and go sailing away on its own.  One of his
  elevators was flapping back and forth limply in the jet stream.  Under ideal
  conditions he could probably still make it back to the _Freedom_.  Being
  outnumbered, in a dogfight, and having your controls go all jell-o on you
  were not ideal conditions.

        "I'm hit! Bailing out!" Charc cried.  Disengaging Fuchikoma
  from his instruments and hooking it onto his flight harness, he pulled the
  ejection lever.  As he rocketed clear of the stricken Tiger 204, he
  reevaluated his earlier opinion.  _That_ felt like it had gone off under his
  seat.

        As he drifted slowly down towards the ocean, Charcharadon
  shook off the momentary blackness that had followed ejecting and tried to
  figure out two things: whether he had managed to break his arm again, and
  why his leg hurt so much.  He had managed to answer the first question with
  a satisfactory No when suddenly there was a voice in his head.

        [Charc - Zaph and I are coming to get you. Watch out for the
  nasties below...]

        "Persephone?  Zaph?"  He looked down and noticed the boat.
  Nagenta.  That's when he figured out why his leg hurt so much.  Where his
  sidearm would have been, his flight suit was ripped open and a nasty looking
  but superficial abrasion was stinging from contact with the salty sea air.
  Before he had time to start swearing loudly at the boatload of sponges, he
  was plucked from the sky by a large azure dragon.

        Christ, _that_ was Persephone, he thought as they went
  sailing away with him dangling by his parachute lines from one of the
  dragon's claws.  He tried to climb his way up the chute for a better perch,
  since this dangling and spinning around in the downdraft of Zaph's wings was
  beginning to make him feel motion sick.  Suddenly the dragon zigged
  drastically to the left and he lost his hold, falling back to full dangle.
  He glanced up irritably and was about to say something that people who are
  dangling from a dragon's claw probably shouldn't say when the missile
  streaked by on their right.

        Charcharadon had to admit, it was probably the first (and he
  hoped only) time he had actually been close enough to an air-to-air missile
  to actually feel the heat from it's engine as it went roaring past.
  Spinning around to look behind (which required a lot of effort and just a
  little luck, considering), he gasped at the sight of a Luv Fighter parked
  right behind the two (or was that three?) of them.  The sponge minion pilot
  waved cheerily at him as he cut loose with his machine gun.  Charcharadon
  made another hand gesture back at the pilot, with a less friendly meaning
  and requiring a few less fingers.

        "Why don't you just flame the fool!?!" he howled as Zaph
  zagged out of the way of the hail of gunfire.

        The reply he got was reasonable, if not what he wanted to
  hear.  He scrambled desperately up his parachute to one of Zaphire's legs
  and struggled out of his harness, loosing the parachute to go fluttering to
  the ocean below and more importantly freeing Zaphire of some rather unwanted
  drag.  He then hung on for dear life.

        The appearance of the _Freedom_ on the horizon was the most
  welcome thing he had seen all day.

[to be continued in Operation Pacifica: Harm's Way part 2]