[quote=@Silverwind Blade]
The small flotilla of riverine craft were a mess after the round of attacks by the Black Knights flight dedicated to ground-attacks. With Kei's assault rounding off the run on the small force of repurposed civilian boats, the reinforcements were left treading water, floundering or drowning - or floating in charred, dead lumps with the flow towards the ocean.

The attack on the ground had, for the moment, been broken. A breathless message from Major Constantine confirmed as much; the Gendarmerie and Militia forces had been able to take back positions to the edge of town, forcing the surviving rebels to fall back to earlier positions, and giving the defenders a line to hold, until the Thunderbolt Black ground reinforcements arrived with armour and heavy weapons. 

***

From the direction of the missiles, a pair of aircraft blasted past, performing their own superbly executed break, splitting wide and curving in the morning skies, faint trails of vapour gleaming from their wingtips as the two sleek, angular tactical aircraft turned to engage. 

The pair were a mis-matched duo; an SU-37 Terminator and a Dassault Rafale. Both were coal-black, with the Rafale having electric blue accents on the wingtips, canards and rudder, and the Terminator having deep orange in the same places. Both also sported a horned skull insignia in various places, and the numbers '2' and '5' in gothic script. Each were laden down with ordnance, both aerial and ground-attack, and at the sight of the Black Knights, turned to engage their aircraft. 

The Rafale began to pursue the Tornado, positioning itself between Marciano and Stalin, while the Terminator harassed its sukhoi stablemate, driving hard towards Charnel with the powerful radar in the SU-37's large nose hunting down the Ukranians' aircraft as it banked to 270 degrees at the apex of its' climb, hammering down hard toward his plane.

***

Scott observed the situation from his position. St. Helen had fed the image from the powerful and huge AESA radar in the ASF-14's nose to his console and he quickly assesed the situation. His ordnance for ground attack was virtually depleted.

Both Kei and Rodrieguez had more rounds to expend, however, and the airstrip was visible. The pair of bandits hadn't dallied with the ground-attack flight as of yet, and Austin looked to be in the clear too: perfect opportunity for a two-on-two. 
"Short Round, Spirit. Go turn that Airstrip back into a jungle clearing. Break. Viking, this is Heartbreak; go give Charnel a hand with his new fan, I've got Stalin's tail, over"

He pushed more power into the ASF-14's engines, the wings sweeping back that little more as he climbed and banked, angling to slot in on the SU-37's tail as it dove for Stalins' jet. "Razorblade, lock that fucker up for me!" he grunted over the intercom, keeping his eyes fixed on the gleaming shimmer of the Terminator, a good half-mile distant above the sea of green below.

The skies over the airstrip were clear; the airstrip itself was nothing more than a logging camp roughly repurposed into a temporary strip. Sheds for construction equipment, now left out in the open, shielded the few light aircraft and helicopters in position, and sandbagged heavy machine-guns or truck-bed mounted guns were the only air defences along with handfuls of shoulder-fired SAMs dotted here and there. 

Traces, aimed manually and fired too early or on reflex, curved wildly up into the skies along with small-arms fire, and it was easy to see people running in terror as the sounds of the oncoming jets was heard. The last Dragonfly from the earlier attack was still at the end of the runway, waiting for whatever the rebels had planned for it. 
[/quote]

Barrel-rolling victoriously out of her latest pass in order to stay low tight and fast on the corner, Short-Round had made short-work of her foe's efforts to outflank her client in the thick forests with small and nimble boats (likely from former narcotics-smugglers). And was given token-appreciation from Constantine's forces on the ground.

But just as suddenly as they themselves appeared upon the scene, the balance of favor quickly began to shift against them all with the arrival of two sleek multinational multiroles that [i]most definately[/i] were not part of the locals. Although she had some good air-to-air capabilities, her jet was still lugging three quarters of a ton of ordnance as Scott identified just [i]one more target[/i] to hit: their airfield.

Although nobody would see or hear it, Kei nodded at her orders and flicked-on a tape-recording [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el_vead9pTY]of an old song[/url] as her air-superiority fighter flirted with the idea of moving some mud to raise hell just one more time. She started her attack inverted in a high-G turn to line-up with the runway, firing a few volleys of 'nails' at anything that so much as blinked something shiny at her plane as it came barreling-in from three kilometers as her plane snaked into position for a bombing-run with her last napalm-can diagonaly across the 'strip' and hopefully into what appeared to be a control tower or bunker of some sort, likely to render the whole field useless for at least an hour.

A quick glance at her multi-function panel indicated somewhere in the mid-teens when it came to 'nails' remaining, and most of the soft targets had been well peppered already... still they had one more trick...

A 'nail', when fired at a target less than a kilometer away, behaved exatcly as the name describes: as a single solid lump of armor-penetrating hardened steel traveling at about mach 6... resaulting in lovely over-penetration as the nose breaks-up like a twenty-pound glaser-slug followed by still-burning solid rocket fuel. Only problem was that her 68mm SNEBs were never the most accurate things in the world, but at those ranges, it was pretty hard to miss. She just had to remember to pull-up, roll over, pick another target while leveling-out, fire another pair of nails, and pull-out again, rinse and repeat until either every sandbagged ammo and fuel bunker was on-fire, or her insides found a new home on the front of her visor... but in this case she simply ran out of rockets.

"Rounds complete, egressing. All yours, Spirit.

Time elapsed since first bomb: 2 minutes, 36 seconds.