[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hCOgv-yvFM]Mood music[/url]

"Clem" Captain Greggor stiffly acknowledged to the plan to blow-through them, and drag the Yurril right back into Ranger three's crosshairs, as he dropped tanks, swept wings, and the MiG-23 breifly went into a ballistic-dive as it cranked-up airspeed. The Yerril knew they were coming, they had radar too. His HUD confirmed this as it put red blips up on his windscreen, but like a crocodile lazing in the sun, he wasn't too worried about [i]those[/i]. They'd also learned not to leav all their radar up, the far bigger danger was from the crocodiles that were well-hidden; at the very line of the merge, everyone flew blind under the direction of whoever was in back with the beefiest radar.

His IRST picked up a pair of fast-movers traveling dark. He gave the left rudder a nudge, a bit of right-stick, and put it into a gentle mach 1 left-slip as he picked-off a plane for his first R-27ET, then shimmied his plane into a right-slip to dump his other passive heat-seeker in a seprate direction, all the while trying to remember the proper inter-service brevity for what he just did, "Maydog, Maddog, Fox Two." Although not true all-aspect missiles, flying bricks tended to get plenty warm compared to a sleek fighter-jet.

He then rolled inverted, getting a good look at the spectacle below him as he readied the next salvo of otherwise dead wieght. Thankfully if Xi was any good at his job, the MiG-31 that graciously held-back would be able to simultaniously guide-in more missiles on the opening-salvo than the plane itself could carry.

He popped a flare to get the Yerril's and Xi's attention as he lined-up a few shots. This time he did not mince his brevity. "Fox One Cheapsot, Fox One Cheapsot" Now a full metric ton lighter, Yuril pulled back on the stick and put his bird in a dive at full-burner, his plane did best in the boom-and-zoom, but even despite its antiquated age they were up against a race that mastered interstellar-travel, no matter how good of an energy-fighter was dragged-out, theirs would ultimately prove better.

Clem could see a pair already making a steady climb up to meet him, he estimated them going at better than 800 meters per second of closing velocity. Most of it was his.

He flipped a switch on his dash and pulled the trigger on his stick. "Clem. Grakata." Two streaks of light came shooting out his UB-32 rocket-pods. Yerril ECM may be good, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfuK2MFmxnM]but he'd never seen someone argue for very long against the ten kilos of hypersonic-steel[/url] spewn out in front of him covering a swath the size of a soccer-field. That is, however, had the rockets flied true, one broke right, another went high. The upside however, was that one of the pair merged with a cloud of steel and got themselves peppered for their trouble. The other broke low and disappeared under the nose of his MiG.

Flipping another switch, Clem yanked the stick, heard a tone in his ear, and popped a nasty surprise a quarter of a second later to give the rear-pointed R-60 just barely enough room to arm itself lest they run out of range. "Fox Three. Bittersweet." The Bulgarian grunted into his throat-mic, the strain of the 7-G pullout was wearing heavy on his lungs even as his RWR told him to evade the inevitable counter-punches. Flares, chaff, snap-roll, turn the pullout into a Cuban-8 as he broke into a dive to the left in order to get back in-line with where Lonnie's MiG-31 should've been popping out from the furball he was now dragging on the deckline. His mach-gauge was redlining at this altitude on 1.2, [i]he was pushing the needle a little past that[/i].

He wasn;t sure how many he'd gotten in the first pass, or how many bandits were being dragged through the weeds behind his plane, but it felt like he was trolling all the entire Yerril forces staring up his stovepipe as he flew low, fast, and between just about every obstacle he could put between him and one of their death-beams. He could've sworn he was picking-up small-arms fire and hostile tree-branches as he buddy-spiked the MiG-31, and re-acquired visual of the tiny speck of steel in the sky to save himself the trouble of calling out that five was blind. All the while his last R-60 was giving the steady hum of afterburn-heated ground-clutter. He puffed flares at just about every jive through the valley though, just to be sure.

Then he saw the fellow MiG finally turn to re-engage... time to bump.

"Clem!" He keyed, as his plane burst into an unsustainable zoom-climb, within 4 seconds he was already 3 kilometers up, bleeding airspeed just enough for him to unfold his wings back from its aggressive 72 degrees, to 45 degree dogfight configuration, and then whip his plane back around tail over nose to re-engage like a crop-duster getting ready to sow poison upon the next row of grain.