High overhead, the F-14s on TARCAP — target combat air patrol — waited to intercept inbound enemy fighters. The Tomcat crews assumed that such a threat, though unlikely, would have to come from the west, either Eritrea or Chad across the Red Sea.
No fighters had appeared.
“Ninety-nine Gippers, check switches,” Maxwell transmitted, using the groupwide call sign. Glancing over his left shoulder, he saw that B. J. Johnson was in good position, a quarter mile abeam. Off his right wing was his second section, Flash Gordon and Leroi Jones, also in position.
Each strike fighter was carrying a Paveway laser-guided bomb. Smart bombs were life insurance for fighter pilots. Besides being accurate enough to park on a doorstep, they could be released with the standoff distance to keep the pilot out of antiaircraft gun range.
Today it didn’t matter. There were no antiaircraft guns.
Behind Maxwell’s flight were two more four-plane divisions from the Bluetail squadron armed with Mark 20 Rockeye cluster bombs. The Bluetails were the mop-up crew. After the Paveway bombs had dealt with the buildings, the Bluetails would scour what was left with the cluster bombs.
Overkill, Maxwell thought. The place looked like a ghost town.
“Gipper Zero-one is in hot.” Maxwell rolled in on the target.
In quick succession, each of the other three members of his flight reported rolling in on the target.
Through the HUD, Maxwell saw the headquarters building, the largest structure in the complex. It was a big, hard-to-miss sitting duck.
With his left forefinger he slewed the laser designator over the target, stopping it on the gray tin roof. A couple of fine adjustments, positioning the designator exactly in the center… hold it a second… release.
He felt the jolt all the way through the airframe of the Super Hornet as the two-thousand-pound bomb kicked free of its station.
While the GBU-24 soared toward its target, Maxwell found himself wishing. It would be sweet justice if Al-Fasr was in the building. He had delivered the order that took Josh Dunn’s life. And Tom Mellon’s. Today was payback time. Eight tons of armor-piercing, high explosive bombs in exchange for one wire-guided missile.
This was the hard part: waiting, letting the laser designator illuminate the target. Each of the other Hornets in his flight was doing the same, each lasing on a different optical frequency.
The bombs were all in the air now, descending like a hail of death on the tin-roofed buildings. Anything left alive would be shredded by the Bluetails and their Rockeye cluster bombs.
He sensed the bomb impact without actually hearing it. The center of the roof opened like the lid of a can, sucking the building inward. An orange ball of flame roiled into the sky. The sides of the building burst apart.
A microsecond later, the adjacent building erupted. Then another. Each of the tin roofed buildings was mushrooming into the morning sky.
It was a lesson right out of Sun Tzu: Taunt your enemy, lure him into your territory, reveal to him your apparent weakness.
A dozen times Al-Fasr had read the classic on guerilla warfare. Now he was executing the principles, not in medieval China but here in the milky sky of Yemen. When he commits to the attack, surprise him. And kill him.
So it was happening.
The three MiGs came blasting out of the underground revetments, taking off from the makeshift runway at the old BP complex, one behind the other in full afterburner. Staying low and accelerating to supersonic speed, they spread out in a loose line-abreast formation, separated from each other by half a kilometer.
No radio transmissions, no air-to-air radar — not yet. No signal that would reveal their presence to the enemy’s electronic surveillance gear.
Ahead, beyond a low ridge, Al-Fasr could see plumes of black smoke. It meant the first bombs were already landing on the decoy compound. Against the backdrop of pallid sky, he could see the specks of two fighters climbing steeply up from the target. At any moment they would be detecting the unexpected presence of the MiGs.
At this altitude, less than a hundred meters above the terrain, the earth was flashing by in a brownish blur. He glanced at the machmeter. The Cyrillic-lettered gauge was showing 1.06 mach, which at this altitude equated to thirteen hundred kilometers per hour. Speed is life, went the fighter pilot’s mantra. The more the better.
He glanced over his left shoulder. It took him a second to pick out the mottled paint scheme of Rittmann’s MiG, nearly invisible against the landscape. To the right was Novotny, the Czech pilot. Novotny was an able but unimaginative pilot, always waiting to be told what to do. He had no illusions about Novotny’s life expectancy in the coming battle.
Rittmann was another matter. He was aggressive — too aggressive, perhaps. In their brief training exercises back in Chad, before deploying to Yemen, Rittmann had surprised Al-Fasr with his boldness, but it was an undisciplined boldness. The German would thrust himself into air-to-air engagements like a snarling attack dog. Rittmann needed a leash.
Al-Fasr knew that any second now the American pilots would be receiving urgent warnings from their AWACS. He wished he could eavesdrop on their tactical frequency. It would make him laugh. The invincible American Navy pilots would be squealing like pigs about to be slaughtered.
He checked the display on his inertial navigation system. Ten kilometers to go.
“Radars active,” Al-Fasr called to his two wingmen, breaking their radio silence. “Acquire your targets.”
He punched the mode control on his Sapfir radar display from standby to acquisition mode. Three sweeps later the display came alive, the screen filling with greenish, hash-marked target symbols.
There they were, the two he had acquired visually as they climbed off target. Another pair was just pulling up. Behind them, approaching from the next quadrant, four more Hornets. Al-Fasr counted twelve in all. As he expected.
The information from his source was accurate.
There would be more up high. The MiG’s Sapfir Doppler radar had a gimbal limit of sixty degrees up, not enough to paint any high CAP fighters, but it didn’t matter. If the assessment report continued to be accurate — and Al-Fasr was now sure of it — he knew exactly where they would be. He even knew how many — four F-14 Tomcats orbiting at twenty-four thousand feet. Exactly the wrong place to counter the threat of low-flying MiGs.
Another lesson from Sun Tzu: Learn your enemy’s strength; conceal your own.
On his armament panel, Al-Fasr selected an AA-11 Archer missile. The low growl of the Archer’s heat-seeking head filled his earphones.
Boyce’s eyes were glued to the tactical display screen. He hated this role, sitting here in CIC like a goddamn spectator at a ball game, watching his team play and not being a part of it. Shit! It had been his own paranoid decision to stay back here aboard ship. Him and his gut feelings. He should have swallowed his doubts and done what an Air Wing Commander was supposed to do — lead his people.
Well, it was turning out okay. Better than okay, because Maxwell and his strikers were taking out the terrorist compound like it was an anthill. Best of all, the ants weren’t shooting back.
He could see Admiral Fletcher peering at his own tac display, while a young lieutenant explained the symbology on the screen to him. Boyce wondered again why a flag officer who didn’t know shit about tactical air operations was in command of this show.
Then he remembered. Sitting next to Fletcher was Babcock, his chin in his hands, staring at the display.
The only problem so far had been with the KS-3 Viking tankers. While on his refueling station, one of the tankers had called in with a hydraulic failure. Now Stickney and Cmdr. Williams, the air boss, were preoccupied with getting him back aboard. Up on the flight deck, yellow shirts were scrambling to respot parked jets.