Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

92 JEFF EDWARDS
HUD, signaling the missile’s acknowledgment. He released the arming
selector and gave the control stick a tiny jog to the right, improving his
alignment on the target, to give the missile the best possible odds of
success. His thumb shifted to the fire button.
The Kormoran missile dropped away from the wing, falling for nearly a
second before its engine fired in midair. Then it dropped even closer to
the water to begin the inertial-guidance portion of its attack on HMS York.
Oberleutnant Hulbert twisted his pistol-grip control stick to the right,
peeling his aircraft away from the firing bearing as quickly as possible. It
was a good tactic: what any smart fighter pilot would have done in the
same situation. But in this case, it was fatal.
The 114mm cannon shell that tore through his port wing wasn’t even
aimed at him; he just happened to fly between it and its intended target.
Red tattletales began flashing all over his instrument panel,
accompanied by a small choir of alarm bells and warning buzzers. Fly-bywire
was out and shifting to backup. Fuel pressure was dropping rapidly.
The HUD lost power and went dark, and half of his instruments started
fluctuating wildly.
The plane began to vibrate, and the control stick bucked crazily in his
hand. A quick glance over his left shoulder told him that the carbon-fiber
wing was starting to delaminate. He had perhaps ten seconds before the
entire aircraft came apart on him.
He reached behind his head and groped for the looped shape of the
eject handle. His fingers locked on it.
The second 114mm shell wasn’t aimed at his aircraft either. It punched
through the thin skin of the EF-2000S’s fuselage just aft of his seat, about
sixteen centimeters left of centerline. The explosion rolled through the
tight little cockpit, simultaneously shredding Hulbert’s body and flashcooking
it to cinders. Unable to contain the expanding pressure wave, the
aircraft ruptured like an overripe fruit, spilling fire and twisted metal into
the night sky.
Kormoran 2 (mid-flight) :
Oberleutnant Hulbert’s AS-34B flew two meters above the wave tops.
In route to its target, it encountered two fat radar contacts, both of which it
discarded as too large. The missile’s target selection algorithm evaluated
the third radar contact it detected and decided that the new candidate was
of a size and shape appropriate for a valid target. Twice, the missile made
mid-course corrections to improve its angle of attack, unaware that the