Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (68 page)

 
          
Talhi’s
copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of
the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot’s seat swiveled around the rear compartment
so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by
facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the
remote-controlled 23-millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now
he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. “At least two
fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast,” Birish reported. Thankfully
Talhi had his unit’s most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn’t
saying much—systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the
bombers themselves than pilots. “India-band search radar—Mirage 2000s.”

 
          
“Don’t
tell me—tell our fighters!” Talhi shouted. Birish got on the command radio and
frantically passed along the information. He pushed the bomber’s nose down even
farther. The terrain was flat and rolling, so terrain wasn’t a problem—but the
waves and waves of heat swirling up from the desert floor created turbulence so
bad that it felt as if they were riding a dune buggy across a mountain of
rocks. The twenty-year-old ex-Soviet bomber’s aged fuselage shrieked in protest
with every bump.

           
“They’re closing in fast,” Birish shouted.
“They’re right on us—the E-2 Hawkeye radar plane must be vectoring them in.”

 
          
“Five
minutes thirty seconds to go,” Talhi’s bombardier, Captain Masad Montessi,
shouted on intercom. “Hold steady for fifteen seconds.”

 
          
“Fifteen
seconds? Better make it quicker than that, navigator!”

 
          
“I
said fifteen seconds, or at this speed we’ll be lost and flying over downtown
Cairo
before we know it!” Montessi shouted back.
He was in a tiny compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber below the pilot, with
only a ten-inch RBP-4 Rubin navigation radar, an optical bomb sight between his
legs, some mechanical flight computers, a compass, a Doppler radar system, and
two small windows. He had just finished laying his crosshairs on a small
mountain peak ten miles ahead, then changed to the second aim-point—another
peak on the other side of courseline.

 
          
The
crosshairs were off just a small amount. He doublechecked his aiming on the
first aimpoint, switched back to the second, verified the aimpoint, then moved
the crosshairs on the second peak using a large tracking handle he called the
“goat turd.” As soon as he moved the crosshairs, he could hear the
clack-clack-clacking
of the mechanical
navigation computer as it updated itself. He switched back to the first
aimpoint, and the crosshairs rested right on it—all of the heading and velocity
errors in the system had been corrected. “You’re clear to maneuver! Go! Go!”

 
          
“Sahra
flight! Take tactical spacing! Lead is maneuvering south!” Talhi executed a
quick turn to the south, rolled out momentarily, then executed a tighter turn
around a very short valley. He wasn’t going any lower, so left and right
maneuvering was all he had to escape the Egyptian pursuers.

 
          
No
use. “Mirages still on us, estimate twenty miles— coming within lethal range,”
Birish shouted. “I’ve got fighters going after our wingman.”

 
          
“Sahra
flight, you’ve got company, coming in fast!”

           
Talhi reported on the command
frequency. “Do you have him?”

           
“Negative! Negative! Our threat
receiver is down!” the pilot aboard the second Tu-22 responded. “Our navigation
radar is down too!”

 
          
“Then
get the hell out of here,” Talhi said. “If you’re blind and deaf, you’re no use
to us out here! Return to base!”

 
          
“Negative,
lead,” the other pilot reported. “I’ve got dead reckoning and I think I can
find enough landmarks to proceed. I’m inbound to the target.”

 
          
Talhi
didn’t blame him too much at all—he wouldn’t want to face the wrath of
President Zuwayy and his henchmen either, if he returned to base without
completing his mission. “I understand, Sahra. Do you have a good DME on us?”
Each of the Tu-22 bombers was equipped with radio direction finders that gave
range and bearing to the other.

 
          
“Affirmative.”

 
          
“Then
keep us in front of you—we’re inbound to the target too,” Talhi said. He banked
southeast and fined up on the navigation steering bug, then pushed the
throttles all the way to full military power. “We’re target direct now, crew.
Our wingman has got no other way to find the target, so he’s going to follow us
in to the target.”

 
          
“Mirage
moving in to lethal range,” Birish said on intercom. “All jammers active,
countermeasures ready.” On the command frequency, he said, “Sahra flight, we’ve
got Mirages moving in to radar missile range. Use side-to-side jinks and make
sure your jammers are active.”

 
          
“We’re
jinking, lead, we’re jinking,” the second bomber pilot acknowledged. “Just find
the damned target. We’ll be right behind you.”

 
          
But
they were losing this race. The Egyptian fighters were moving in faster—they
must be “headed down the ramp,” zooming in from high altitude to use the extra
speed to rapidly close in for the kill. “Rapid PRF—fighter locked on!” Birish
shouted. “Vertical jinks! Find any terrain you can! Let’s lose this guy!” The
Egyptian fighter’s radar changed from rapid-pulse-rate frequency to a constant
tone. “Uplink active! Missile launch!
Break
left!”

           
But just as Talhi began to yank the
control wheel to the left, Birish reported, “Uplink down! Radar down! The
fighter disappeared!”

 
          
“Did
he shut down his radar?”

 
          
“Could
be, but he wouldn’t do that right after firing a missile.”

 
          
They
heard the reason a few moments later: “Sahra flight, Dufda flight, this is
Fadda flight of six. Your tail is clear. Now shove a few down their throats!”

 
          
Talhi
whooped for joy. Fadda flight was a flight of six MiG-25s, some of the fastest
fighter planes in the world. Originally designed to chase down and destroy
high-flying supersonic American bombers over the
Soviet Union
, the titanium-armored MiG-25 could attack
targets at over three times the speed of sound. Based in Tobruk, the Libyan
fighters covered a lot of ground very quickly and caught the Egyptian pilots
from behind.

 
          
Talhi
climbed his Tu-22 back up to fifteen thousand feet above ground level, and his
bombardier programmed his weapons for their attack. Talhi’s bomber was in what
was called the “overload” condition—it carried three Kh-22 air-to-surface
missiles, called “Burya” in
Russia
, one under the fuselage and one under each
wing. The Kh-22, powered by its own liquid-fueled rocket engine, was the size
of a small fighter jet and could fly at over six hundred miles per hour. It
carried an inertial navigation system, a thousand pounds of fuel—and a
three-thousand-pound high-explosive warhead.

 
          
One
by one, Montessi dumped navigation and heading information into the Buryas’
computers, aligned their inertial navigation gyros, and let them fly. Although
he had done many simulated Kh-22 attacks, Talhi had never actually seen one of
those behemoths fly before. The rocket engine firing up sounded like an
explosion right under their belly, and when it blasted free, it seemed as if a
fiery spear from Allah himself had just missed them.

           
The missiles started a rapid climb
on tongues of fire and headed for their targets—
Egypt
’s network of early-warning surveillance
radars along its western frontier. The Burya missiles used passive radar homing
devices to zero in on the early-warning radars, and once they had computed the
radar’s exact position, they could not miss. With devastating accuracy, the
huge Kh-22 missiles struck their targets, obliterating the radar installations
and flattening any aboveground buildings or objects for over a mile around the
impact point.

 
          
Meanwhile,
the Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters went to work themselves—on the Egyptian
E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. The Hawkeye was over one hundred miles away and
had its own flight of Mirage fighter escorts, and when the radar plane detected
the Libyan MiGs heading eastbound, it shut down its radar, headed northeast
toward safety, and sent its fighter escorts after the intruders. But the Libyan
attackers hopelessly outnumbered them. The MiG-25 fighters merely blew past the
Mirages with their superior speed, and the MiG-23s pounced when the Egyptian
defenders turned to pursue. The MiG-25s took care of the Hawkeye radar plane
after losing only one fighter to enemy missiles.

 
          
With
both the airborne and ground radar sites destroyed, the way was clear for the
second Tupolev-22 bomber to climb to a safer altitude and pick its navigation
waypoints with care. With Talhi’s Tu-22 leading the way, the bombardier aboard
the second Tu-22 lined up precisely on his preplanned bomb run course. The
courseline had to be perfect: Although the weapons did not need to be directly
on target to be effective, they would get maximum effect by being no more than
one or two degrees off the desired course. One by one, he seeded the area with
small two- hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs fitted with radar fuzes.

 
          
Far
below was the massive Salimah oil complex,
Egypt
’s newest oil project. Comprising over
thirty thousand square miles of southern
Egypt
, it was the largest known oil and natural
gas reserves in northern
Africa
.
Seven wells had been drilled every day for the past two years, and none of them
showed any signs of lessening their output. Five thousand workers, mostly Arabs
and Africans from
Sudan
,
Chad
,
Kenya
, and
Ethiopia
, worked around the clock in Salimah, housed
in rows and rows of trailers and huge tent cities stretching as far as anyone
could see.

 
          
One
of
Egypt
’s two field armies, known as the King Menes Army, was in charge of the
defense of Salimah. Although it was seriously under its full strength, the King
Menes Army comprised well over a third of all of Egypt’s fighting forces,
included two full armored divisions, three mechanized infantry divisions, one
infantry division, five artillery battalions, two fighter-interceptor
squadrons, two fighter-attack squadrons, and one helicopter squadron. The
eighty thousand troops were distributed with the bulk of the forces, mostly
heavy armor, arrayed along the borders of Libya and Chad, with the other
lighter, more rapid- response forces deployed mostly north of the oil fields as
a reserve. The two westernmost military Areas of Responsibility were Al-Jilf
and Al-Kabir, and these were the two areas targeted by the weapons dropped by
the Tu-22 bombers.

 
          
One
might believe the bombardier missed his target, because the gravity weapons
detonated a thousand feet in the air, producing nothing more than a loud
BANG!
and a puff of sand below. The
explosion was repeated sixty-three times in the space of six minutes, ten
weapons per minute, as the Libyan bomber sowed its deadly seeds. Curious
soldiers below looked up when they heard the explosions, and they jumped and
felt the sudden gush of air and a little bit of pressure in their ears—nothing
more severe than a slammed door or a slug of mud popping out of a new well. But
there was very little heat unless the explosion was directly overhead, no trace
of vapor or liquid, and no shrapnel or caltrops. Before most folks realized it,
the noisemakers were gone. They could have been fireworks, except these
fireworks were in the morning, which didn't make sense at all.

 
          
It
still didn’t make sense later that day—even when the soldiers started dying in
massive, horrendous numbers.

           
The ones directly under the
airbursts were first, complaining of headaches that increased in intensity
quickly, eventually causing loss of eyesight and loss of equilibrium. Hours
later, they were coughing up blood. By the time they were able to get off work
later that day, they were usually unable to take themselves to the infirmary.
Many of them died in their beds or in their living rooms, surrounded by their
puzzled comrades and worried corpsmen. The ones that were as far as one mile
away from the bursts didn’t start having symptoms until the next day, but their
fate was the same—crushing headaches leading to blindness, loss of balance
eventually leading to incapacitation, and sudden loss of blood leading to
hemorrhage and death within eight hours.