"Sir!" a landing control officer in the Tolkein's CIC shouted across the room to Stewart. "We're picking up contacts heading towards the landing forces!"
"Elaborate, please," Stewart replied. He glanced towards a map across the room. The map showed seventy or more red blips roaring towards the Jihad landing front, travelling at Mach 1 at the slowest.
"I'm picking up a wing-scale attack group - a large number of Frogfoot attack fighters, apparently backed by F-15Es and F-4 Phantoms. There's a small number of what appear to be stealth blips as well - they look like birds but they're keeping up with the wave. I assume they're those Lyran fighters the Blood Jihad Air Force encountered out west."
Stewart looked at the attack wave. "Vector as many of our fighters as you can to intercept them. Move the fleet towards the coast; we need to give the troops some air defense!"
"Finally," the pilot of the F-15E Strike Eagle said to himself as his seventy-one friends drove in towards the Jihad invasion force. "Finally, we get to hurt those Jihaddi for what they did to us!"
When Barney Himself had decreed that Argentina was to be annexed by the Purple Alliance, Captain Jake Smith was ecstatic. He didn't know much that didn't pertain to Barney or his brightly-colored F-15, but he did know that it had been some time since the Alliance had last tried to liberate an area of Jihaddi influence. In fact, there'd only been a few real attempts in the last three or four years. The first was the Battle of Halifax, where 300,000 Alliance troops tried to take the strategic port city by force. They were pushed back by Jihaddi counterattacks, but not before levelling a large part of the still-rebuilding city. The second was an attack to take out an entire JAO - MAUL - which was neatly brushed aside with nearly half a million casualties. The third was an assistance to the X'hirjq invasion last year - also unsuccessful, but more damaging than the first two strikes. The Jihad was reeling for months.
This last major strike resulted in success. The Argentine flag was replaced with the bright greens and purples of Barney's Alliance.
And those mean Jihaddi were trying to end that!
Baaaad!
The aerial attack continued to bore in, passing over the ALliance and Lyran Imperial positions along the coast. Twenty-four F-15s, twenty-four Su-25s, and twenty-four F-4s. A number of Lyran stealth fighters followed the flight group, as the conventional jets passed the sixteen-kilometer mark.
Smith glanced around his control panels, examining the brightly-colored instruments for the standard pre-combat check. Everything seemed stupendous!
"We're picking up some incoming Jihaddi planes!" the radio control officer on an AWACS plane about forty kilometers further inland reported. "I think they're sending planes at you guys!"
Fourteen kilometers.
"Okay, friends," the colonel commanding the strike team said from two F-15s over. "The Eagles will attack first while the F-4s deal with the Jihaddi fighters. When the Eagles finish dropping their bombs, they'll help the F-4s, and then the Frogfoots will shoot up the rest. Got it?"
Eight pilots needed the instructions repeated...
"I've got blips on my screens!"
"Take 'em out!"
"Roger. Engage!"
Ensign Chris Campbell, NEBULA, glanced at the radar display on his Sukhoi Su-27 "Flanker" counter-air fighter. The area for its 240-kilometer radius search radar was utterly alive with activity, no less than six hundred aircraft on both sides furiously engaged in the huge landing. Campbell turned on IFF coding, and the blips suddenly became a not-so-evenly matched spread of blue and red dots. The red were vastly outnumbered, but in three distinct arrow-shaped groups cruising towards the landing forces.
"All fighters off the Tolkein and Zahn, set a course to intercept the incoming enemy aircraft! They're going to bomb the beach!"
Campbell glanced again at the radar, figured out an appropriate heading, and turned that way. Lighting his afterburners, he was pressed back into the seat by twin jets of 27,000-pound thrust. His agile fighter shot over suprised Lyrans and Alliance troops, as it and over one hundred and fifty other craft screamed towards the wing of sponge fighters.
Shrih'Kan, Lyran of the Third Circle, glanced calmly around the instruments on his stealth fighter. The Jihaddi had begun an impressively large attack on the Empire's positions in Argentina, and on several fronts. However, all they would manage is a foothold. The pitiful Purple Alliance forces were already beginning to crumble under the Jihad attack, but the Empire was coming, and before it all fell.
The Lyran completed his control check and throttled up, heading to the front of the Alliance fighters. As the group passed eight kilometers, the Jihaddi fighters became visible in the distance.
Shrih'Kan nodded to himself; all was ready. Shrih'Kan to all fighters, he relayed to the other Alliance/Imperial craft, Begin the attack.
"All fighters! Break off for individual combat! Good luck to you all!" the voice of the Timothy Zahn's wing commander came over the radio. Campbell activated all his weapons systems and, along with eleven other Su-27s and dozens upon dozens of other Jihaddi fighters, tore into the Alliance wing.
From a kilometer apart, the two waves of fighters fired off at least a hundred missiles. Forty-eight of the Alliance fighters - all Strike Eagles or Frogfoots - dove slightly, while the F-4s turned off to engage the Jihad fighters.
"That's a pretty lameass strategy," Chris thought as he went to guns and dove over one F-4 and under another, tearing a third to shreds with his 30mm cannon. The Phantom broke apart and tumbled to the ground below, exploding in a fireball right where a Purple Alliance artillery emplacement once was. He smiled to himself as he turned his fighter around, heading back into the furball.
Sixty to seventy Jihad fighters of assorted configurations went about ripping the F-4 flight to shreds, while another similar number charged after the Su-25s and F-15Es, which were just barely managing subsonic speed as they tore towards the main landing area. Campbell went into the furball again, firing off a pair of AA-10 air-to-air missiles and destroying another F-4, when suddenly, a bright green burst of energy burnt past him. The blast hit an F-14 Tomcat a few hundred meters off his wing, which exploded instantly.
"What the fuck?"
Amirault dove behind a rock, raised his M-16 over it, and fired a burst of three bullets towards a sponge soldier charging through the open towards him. The soldier was missed by the first two, but the third caught him in the center of the chest and laid him flat. He didn't get up again.
The attack was going well. Only one member of Amirault's 19-man platoon was down, struck down by a .50 caliber bullet shortly after the landing, and the rest was covering the REASON team as they finished setting up. Amirault was getting used to the roars of battle at this point, and was only slightly unnerved at the dozens of Jihaddi fighters which screamed overhead at treetop hight a few minutes ago, so he almost missed one of his troops' report that the railgun was ready.
"I said, we got the REASON set up!" the trooper, Private Mackenzie, shouted over the din after being asked what he said again.
"Good!" Amirault replied. "Fire at will!"
The REASON rotary railgun roared to life, firing a hundred 3mm depleted uranium shells a second into defensive positions. Raking the gun back and forth like a .50 caliber machine gun, Mackenzie joined in with several dozen others at more-or-less the same time, hurling a solid wall of shells into sponge and Lyran positions. The REASON shells pretty much shredded most things the came in contact with, and after that one ten-second burst from the platoon's gun, most things ahead of them were gone.
The momentary surge of confidence vanished as a horde of purple aircraft charged the coastline at high subsonic speeds. Although they were being trailed by almost a hundred Jihaddi fighters, and were losing two or three of their number a second, they made it to the beach and opened fire.
Only seven of the F-15Es managed to survive long enough to drop their weapons against the vastly superior Jihaddi air defense, including the dozens of fighters, and now, a similar amount of "Stinger" anti-air missiles and gunfire, but those F-15s managed to drop nearly two hundred cluster bombs across the three-kilometer-wide, two-kilometer-deep beachead.
The bombs from the fighters struck home, and the world around John Amirault burst into flames.