Viper Three is in the water twenty-five miles west, alive and smoking, and two bandit patrols are being vectored to make sure he stays there. The rescue helo goes in anyway — your job is written on every SAR briefing board ever chalked: nothing touches the helo.
The Angel flies the whole profile. Off the deck, seventy-five knots at sixty feet, out to the smoke — then two minutes hovering dead still at eighteen feet while the hoist does its work, then the long low run home. She does not evade, she does not climb, she cannot afford to.
Two bandit waves hunt her. The first pair vectors in on the transit; a three-ship comes for her during the hoist, when she is slowest and lowest. Rated-65 pilots — veterans, cleared for the whole maneuver library.
Lose the Angel and the sortie is over. Bring her feet dry with Viper Three in the cabin and the debrief writes itself: that was the whole job — and you did it.
A turboprop contact, bearing 270, a hundred ten miles out, Angels 27 — and she is not out there to take pictures. The Tu-95MS Bear-H joins the sim: four NK-12 contra-props on a 35° swept wing, a glazed bombardier nose, twin guns in the tail barbette, red stars on the fin. She is in the gallery, the print bay, and the store — and she is the centerpiece of the two hardest sorties in the campaign:
M14 BEAR HUNT (80/100). One Bear, two Flankers riding shot — rated 75, aces, cleared for every maneuver in the library. She trucks for her launch point fifty miles off the boat; an expert pilot runs her down and kills the archer with the arrows still on the rails.
If the arrows fly. Two AS-4 Kitchens, eighteen seconds apart, steering for the moving carrier the whole way in. You and Viper Two hunt them — and if one leaks past, the escorts’ Phalanx CIWS is the last wall of lead: mounts pick the closest missile inside 3.8 km, walk tracers onto it, kill odds climbing steeply as the range closes. One Kitchen amidships and the sortie is over.
M15 BEAR PAK (95/100). The demonstration team: two Bears on two axes, four Flankers rated 92, eight killers in the air at once. Bring everything the school taught you. This one is the final exam.
The fleet does not send students to war. The campaign board now stays locked until you graduate flight school — all seven sorties, in order — and it says so in plain amber: GRADUATE FLIGHT SCHOOL TO UNLOCK THE CAMPAIGN. Around it, the board got honest about what everything costs:
Difficulty, numbered. Every campaign mission and school sortie carries a rating out of 100, banded green to red — the first intercept reads 20/100, the Bear PAK finale reads 95/100. No more guessing what EXPERT meant.
Enemy pilots, rated 0–100. Early bandits fly like GREEN patrol pilots; by the late campaign you are meeting VETERANS, ACES, and finally LEGENDS — and the rating is not a label, it drives the AI directly. Higher-rated pilots fly faster, shoot sooner, and only they are cleared for the advanced maneuver library: split-S escapes, barrel-roll spoils, loops to force the overshoot. The briefing now prints the assessment before you commit: ENEMY PILOT RATING: 75/100 — ACES.
New school sortie: T-5 AEROBATICS. Rolls, loops and split-S, graded by the instruments — upright to inverted to upright for the roll, over the top for the loop, inverted then pull through for the split-S, all above 1,800 m or the figure doesn’t count. GUNNERY and DOGFIGHT renumber to T-6 and T-7; the dogfight remains your graduation.
The old glamour line. Pacific Empress still flies the DC-10 the way it was meant to be flown — white gloves, gold cheatline, and three CF6s trailing that unmistakable trijet howl across the Pacific. 268 souls in the back. And one of them, one night not so long ago, was a man half the intelligence services of the Pacific Rim were looking for.
THE AIRCRAFT — McDonnell Douglas DC-10 · length 182 ft · wingspan 165 ft 4 in · three CF6 engines, the third buried in the tail and breathing through the S-duct above the fuselage · cruise Mach 0.82 · range about 5,200 nautical miles · seats 270 and up · first flight 29 August 1970 — the trijet era made flesh.
Where to meet her: Mission 7. When the call comes that an Empress heavy is inbound with a defector aboard, every bandit in the Bay will try to keep him from talking. Get there first, run the escort, and put the old trijet on the ground in one piece. The rest of the week she flies the line like any other transport — treat her accordingly.
San Francisco International is open for business. Around the clock and in every weather, the heavies now work the bay: ALLIED 747-400s, LIBERTY 737s, CASCADE MD-90s and PACIFIC EMPRESS DC-10s, climbing out and letting down on the corridors real traffic flies into SFO. They squawk on the radar with airline callsigns, they hold their routes like professionals, and they will absolutely ruin your merge if you cut across final at the wrong moment.
The Hornet’s fire-control computer doesn’t care what you lock — an airliner tracks, designates and takes a missile like anything else. The Navy cares. Splash a civilian and the sortie doesn’t end with a score line, it ends with a COURT MARTIAL. Fly the intercept, make the visual ID, and keep your finger off the pickle.
Which brings us to MISSION 7: one of those Pacific Empress DC-10s is carrying a defector the other side very much wants back, and bandits will vector in to make sure he never talks. Get to him, see off the welcoming committee, and put him safely on the ground. And because a sky this busy shouldn’t keep moving while you’re reading the menu, the whole bay now freezes when you hit Q — traffic, bandits, carrier and all — and picks up exactly where you left it.
