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furiously scanned out their cockpit windows. Suddenly, the copilot shouted, “I got him! Two o’clock high! He’s diving right on top of us! He’s got us nailed!”
    The pilot swore loudly, then racked the bomber into a steep right turn, jammed the throttles to full military power, pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to the first detent, and zoomed the B-1 skyward.
    “What are you doing, Rodeo?” the copilot shouted.
    “I’m going nose-to-nose with this bandit!”
    “Are you
nuts?
”
    “The best way to defeat a fighter on a gun or close-in missile pass is nose-to-nose,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to let this Navy puke get a clear shot on us!”
    Both pilots clearly saw the oncoming fighter as it plummeted toward them. It was a Navy or Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet, the primary carrier attack plane, which also had a good air-to-air capability. The Bone’s nose was thirty degrees above the horizon in the steep climb. All they could see was blue sky and the fighter diving down on them.
    The sharp zoom maneuver was sapping their speed quickly. “Airspeed!” the copilot shouted—just a warning right now, not an admonition. The aircraft commander was still in charge here, no matter how unusual his actions seemed.
    “I got it,” the pilot acknowledged. He pushed the throttles forward into full afterburner power. “C’mon, you squid bastard. You don’t have a shot. You’re running out of sky. Break it off.”
    “We better get back down, pilot,” the OSO urged him. “We’re off our force timing!”
    “Get the nose
down
, pilot,” the copilot warned.
    “You lost us, bub,” said the pilot, addressing the pilot of the Hornet.
    The OSO switched his radar display to air-to-air, and the ORS immediately locked onto the Hornet. “Range three miles and closing!” he shouted. “Closure rate one thousand knots! This doesn’t look good!”
    “Airspeed!” the copilot warned again. They werenow draining fuel at an incredible three hundred pounds of fuel per
second
and going nowhere but straight up.
    “Pilot, we’re off our force timing and three thousand feet high!” the OSO called. “We’re inside the one-mile bubble!” For safety’s sake, the rules of engagement, or ROE, at Navy Fallon prohibited any pilot from breaking an invisible one-mile-diameter “bubble” around all participants. “The ROE—”
    “Shut up, co!” the pilot snapped. “We still got three seconds!” Breaking the ROE could put all the players in serious danger—and he was breaking rules one after another. “We’re not going to show ourselves.
He’ll
have to break it off.”
    “Get the nose down, dammit!” the copilot shouted again.
    Then, seconds before the copilot was going to push his control stick and try to overpower the pilot, the fighter rapidly rolled right. They had lost almost three hundred knots of airspeed—and for what? They saved themselves from the fighter but were now in the lethal envelope for any surface-to-air missile battery within thirty miles.
    “Ha! Where are you going, you wussie?” the pilot shouted happily. He was breathing as hard as if he had just finished a hundred-yard sprint. “Keep him in sight, co,” he panted.
    “This will work out perfectly, hogs,” the OSO said. “This next target is a Zeus-23. We’ll stay high and nail him! Center up.”
    The pilot started a left turn toward the next target. “Where’s that fighter?” he asked.
    “Eleven o’clock, moving to ten o’clock, way high,” the DSO reported.
    “Zeus-23 at twelve o’clock,” the DSO reported. The real “Zeus-23,” or ZSU-23/4, was the standard Russianantiaircraft artillery weapon system, a mobile unit with four 23-millimeter radar-guided cannons that could fill the sky with thousands of shells per minute out to two miles away—deadly for any aircraft.
    “That’s our target, crew,” the OSO stated. He put his cross hairs on the Zeus closest to the preplanned target area. “Action left forty-five.”