Scott watched the track on his screens, fed from the E-2 Hawkeye as Jefe and Stingray's missiles flew toward their targets. There was no counter fire; their reactions were too slow. Even if they'd heard or seen the jets approaching their respective targets, the relative ground speed was too slow to do more other than, perhaps, run for cover or scream an alert - by which time, Ximena and Ayvee's bombs or missiles would already be hitting their targets.
And just as he predicted and expected, the tracks showing the enemy radar winked out of existence, and it was proper go time. Skywatch's voice came over the radio, calling out the targets as hit, and Scott picked up the thread.
"Heartbreak, engaging!"The radar in the Harrier's dark grey nose went active, and in an instant he'd picked out the shape of one of the Libyan navy corvettes. He climbed and throttled up slightly. Already, the ship and its' escorts were nerves-raw. The plume of smoke and flame pouring from the upper works of the warship where the radar had been obliterated by Stingray's attack marked the ship well against the ocean, and was a perfect point to fix his attack. It was mirrored by a second, a short distance away, from the second corvette.
A caress of his thumb, and a duo of five hundred pound GPS-Guided JDAM's were on their way to the first ship, and he was peeling up and away, flares and chaff in his wake to discourage any counter-fire. The main radar might have been out, but the ship had subsidary fire-control radars for other weapons, and they could swat him out of the sky - if he wasn't careful, anyway.
Scooting for the coastline of Linosa to hide against the terrain, he throttled up, the dusky grey of the attack jet a blur against the terrain as he angled around for a reattack.
"Heartbreak; weapons released. All units, engage at will, over!"Katherine Kane
Kat listened intently as Scott and Skywatch's words came over her radio. The shoreline of the island loomed ahead, and the ocean passed beneath the straight, ordnance-laden wings of her A-10. It looked low enough that a high enough wave might splash on her cockpit, or she expected the belly of the jet to be wet; but her altimeter still had her a good hundred feet off the deck.
Plenty of room.
She was a pilot trained for ground attack, she was practically
soaring at this height...!
The successful call from the anti-radar attack came through, and she gently eased the stick back toward her belly, and the A-10 climbed upward (consciously ignoring the momentary sense of relief), as it crossed the coastline. Ahead, her targeting pod bracketed a trio of helicopters parked in a field, and the support equipment around them, getting closer rapidly. One of the three, a Hind gunship, had rotors turning, and a second Puma had it's own starting to slowly turn.
"Kitten, engaging!"She slid the laser point of her Litening pod onto the grounded helo, and thumbed the weapon release, and a Maverick blasted off of the rail. quickly, she slid it across and changed weapons; four high-explosive rockets from the APKWS pods went into the Puma, and the Hind drifted into her sights as she nudged the rudder with a tap of her toes. The closing speed was too fast to try a missile or rocket; but-
She squeezed the trigger in the brief instant the gunsight drifted across the mean, almost insectoid-looking hulking shape of the Hind in its' distinctive green-and-sand camouflage. The familiar drumming thrum of the GAU-8 reverberated the cockpit and through her seat, and the nose of her jet was obscured for the briefest of moments by gunsmoke, even with the briefest stroke of the trigger -
and then she was past, standing the plane up on it's right wing in a sharp bank, coming around to check her targets and see what she'd hit, even as tracers from small-arms fire whipped past the cockpit, and stirred the air.
One thing was for certain, the Libyans were now well-aware that Cobalt squadron were there, and gunning for them. Across Linosa and Lampedusa, the skies were criss-crossed with searching eyes, and alert sirens sounded, as frantic radio messages garbled back-and-forth, calling men and women to action. The Mirage F-1 fighters on patrol immediately swung in to try and engage the aircraft of Second Flight, and the alert MiG-23's started to roll down the strip for takeoff at the airport, the other pair starting engines as their pilots climbed aboard in a frantic hurry to taxi for their own takeoff.
The HAWK batteries, blinded by the loss of their radar, were rendered effectively useless. But the ZSU-23 mobile anti-aircraft guns came to life, searching the skies with their own short-range radar, and the remaining ships doing the same.
Across Limosa, the helicopter units frantically hurried to start engines and get into the air, while the patrolling trucks and their crews scanned the skies for the intruders, desperate to try and swat them from the skies - before they were destroyed themselves.
@Smike,
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