There were several limitations with such a system, starting with the fact that the launch ship had to lock on its target and then stay in a flight pattern that would keep it illuminated for a fair amount of time. The latter often meant that it was making itself a target.

There was no indication yet that the enemy planes even knew the Tigershark and her four escorts were there. Finding the planes, let alone locking them up for missiles, was not easy. The Tigershark and the Sabres had radar profiles smaller than an F–35. In fact, Turk had a hard time believing that the Mirages even knew his flight was in the air—right up until the moment he got a missile launch warning.

He double-checked with the computer. The Mirages had not locked onto the Tigershark or any of the four attack planes flying with him. Nonetheless, the four missiles—one from each Mirage—were all heading in their direction.

While ostensibly under his control, the four robot aircraft took evasive maneuvers without waiting for him to react. They dove toward the ground, making it even harder for the enemy to track them. They also altered course slightly, further diminishing the radar profile the enemy might see.

While each Sabre had ECM capabilities—electronic countermeasures that could be used to confuse the enemy missiles—these remained off. Under some circumstances, using the ECMs would be counterproductive, tipping an opponent off to their presence and even showing him where the target aircraft was.

The Tigershark’s computer, meanwhile, began suggesting strategy for countering the attack. For Turk, this was the most annoying and intrusive aspect of the advanced flight system. He felt he was being lectured on what to do.

The fact that the computer was inevitably right only heightened the pain.

The computer suggested that he take a hard right turn, snapping onto a flight vector that would put his aircraft at a right angle to the incoming fighters. It then suggested another hard turn into them, where he would fire four AMRAAM-pluses. Missiles away, he would head back toward the UAVs.

He couldn’t have drawn it up better himself.

But was he allowed to shoot them down? His ROEs—rules for engagement—directed that he not fire until he found himself or other nearby allies “in imminent danger.”

Did this situation meet that standard?

If these guys couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, would any situation ever meet that standard?

Turk called in to the air controller aboard an AWACS over the Mediterranean. He was handed off immediately to his supervisor, the acting “air boss” for the allied command.

“Four hostile aircraft, they have fired,” said Turk. “Am I cleared to engage?”

“Cleared hot,” the controller replied. “We see the launch—you are in imminent danger.”

“Roger. Copy. Tigershark engaging.”

While keeping the missiles in mind, Turk cut west to begin his attack on the planes. The Mirages split into two groups, one staying close to the original course north and the other vectoring about thirty degrees farther east.

Turk told the controller that he was ready to fire. Before the man could answer, the Mirages suddenly accelerated and fired more missiles.

“No lock,” added the computer, telling him that the missiles had been fired. Turk guessed that the pilots in the Libyan jets had only a vague idea where he was, and were trying to bluff him away—a foolish strategy, though not entirely without precedent.

“Cleared hot to engage,” reiterated the controller, just in case Turk had any doubts.

He did—he’d never shot down a real plane before—but that concern was far from his mind. His training had taken hold.

“Lock targets Three and Four,” Turk told the computer. “Lock enemy missile one. Compute target course. Prepare to fire.”

“Targets are locked.” Red boxes closed in around each of the enemy aircraft depicted in his helmet. “Ready to fire.”

Lined up on Mirage Three, Turk pressed the trigger. Within a nanosecond the Tigershark’s rail gun threw a bolt at the lead Mirage.

The weapon emitted a high-pitched vwoop as it fired, and the aircraft shook like a platform when a high-speed train shot by. As soon as the shot was away, Turk moved the aircraft slightly, hitting the next mark lined up on his targeting screen, which was playing in the pseudo-HUD at the center of his helmet visor.

Vwoop!

He had to turn for the missile, but it was still an easy shot.

Vwoop!

All three shots were bull’s-eyes; the projectiles hit their targets with less than .0003 percent deviation.

The projectile fired by the gun was relatively small, with a mass of only .7 kilograms—approximately a pound and a half. But the gun accelerated it at something in excess of 5,000 meters per second, giving the tungsten slug an enormous amount of kinetic energy—more than enough, in fact, to whip through the armor of a main battle tank.

In a conventional air battle, the pilot of a targeted jet might have many seconds and even minutes to react to a missile shot. He might employ a range of evasive maneuvers and countermeasures to ward off the incoming blow. In a head-on encounter at high speed, he would have the added advantage of a wide margin of error—in other words, even luck would be on his side.

In this case, luck wasn’t part of the equation. The pilots had no warning that the weapon had been fired; there was no signal from the Tigershark or the missile for the Mirages to detect. Traveling at close to two miles per second, the projectile reached the closest plane in a little more than ten seconds.

In a conventional air fight, a pilot hit by a missile would generally have several seconds to react and eject; under the best circumstances, he might even have time to try and wrestle some sort of control over the aircraft. But the rail gun’s bullet took that away. Under optimum conditions, which these were, the targeting computer fired at the most sensitive part of the airplane—the pilot himself.

Turk’s first shot struck through the canopy, went through the pilot, his ejection seat, and the floor of the jet.

The second plane was dealt a similar blow. The missile was hit head-on as well, igniting it.

Turk had no time to celebrate, and in fact was only vaguely aware of the cues that showed his bullets had hit home. Aiming for the two surviving Mirages, he corrected his course twenty-eight degrees, following the dotted line marked on the display. This took him another eight seconds, an eternity in combat, but he knew from training that the key was to move as gently and deliberately as possible; rushing to the firing solution often made things take far longer.

He got a tone and saw the red boxes closing around the two Mirages. He was shooting these from behind, though the gun computer was still able to aim at the canopies and pilots because he had an altitude advantage.

“Lock targets One and Two,” he told the computer.

“Targets locked.”

He pushed his trigger for target One. The gun flashed. The rail gun generated enormous heat, and its dissipation presented a number of engineering problems for the men and women who had designed the Tigershark. These were complicated problems of math and physics, so complex that the solutions were still being refined and perfected—the rail gun could only be fired a limited number of times before it needed to be stripped down and overhauled.

Turk’s presence here was part of the shakedown process. As part of the safety protocol, he was only allowed to fire the weapon two dozen times within a five-minute interval, and the safety precautions built into the weapon overrode any commands he might give.

The protocols weren’t a problem now. He lined up for his second shot, and pressed the trigger.

Turk felt a twinge of regret for his opponents. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he assumed they were brave men and skilled pilots; they had no idea what kind of power and enemy they were facing. From their perspective, the sky ahead was clear. Then suddenly their companions exploded. Before they could react, their own worlds turned painfully black.