This was especially so since, with covert Soviet retrofitting, the relatively few first-line MiG fighters that the Iranian air force possessed had been upgraded with the latest that the Mikoyan Design Bureau had to offer. The planes were not only faster and more maneuverable than ever before, but they could be equipped with anybody's weapons, thanks to their hybrid missile launch rack systems. The wing strakes on the retrofitted Fulcrums could take French, British and American air-to-air or air-to-ground munitions, as well as natively manufactured Russian bombs and rockets.
Soon the MiG pilots closed with the escaping helos, which had split up and began undertaking evasive maneuvers. The Fulcrums did too, each selecting their first targets. The prioritizing was cut-and-dried here: The AH-1Z Vipers were the most dangerous, so they had to go first.
They were not about to go easily, though. Spotting the Fulcrums, one of the helos banked and got off two Sidewinder strikes before the MiG could return fire, causing the Fulcrum pilots to break left and right in order to evade the heat-seeking missile warheads.
When the Fulcrums came out of their defensive maneuvers, the escaping helos were no longer in visual range. The Fulcrums searched the skies, hunting their prey like the mechanical sharks they so closely resembled. They were not stymied for long. Their long-range threat identification radars soon got a target skin paint on a due west bearing.
Yes, they had them again.
This time the MiG pilots would not make the mistake of closing before firing. They would fire their French Mistral-3 missiles at the weapons' maximum standoff range. The Vipers were primarily tank- and armor-busters, never intended to undertake airborne combat. They possessed nothing like the radars of air dominance fighter planes such as MiG-29 Fulcrums. The MiG pilots simply kept out of range of the helos' weapons, put the pipper on their targets and pickled off their ordnance.
The Vipers didn't stand a chance, and they soon were history. The missiles scored two good kills within a matter of seconds. Puffballs of orange-black fire marked the places in the sky where the Marine helos had flown, whole and intact, moments before. The choppers had completely disintegrated under the impact of the lethal air-to-air munitions strikes. There was just nothing left.
Now the Fulcrums went after the V-22 convertiplanes. Here they had even less to fear from their far slower and completely unarmed quarry. And here again, they could effectively engage and destroy the target from the limits of standoff range. The Fulcrum pilots selected AA-10 Alamo beyond-BVR-capable missiles, the next best in their hybrid warload, and uncaged the birds. The missiles began to track and in moments would be ready to launch.
The MiGs had only seconds left before destruction, however, though their pilots didn't yet realize it. A far deadlier and far stealthier opponent than even the Fulcrums had been tracking the fighter sortie through the skies and was about to launch an AMRAAM strike on each enemy plane.
Behind the sleek armored laminate bubble canopies of the F-22 Raptors, the flight leader and his wingman had both acquired their targets, opened the internal weapons carriage doors and exposed the CSRL multiple launch racks so the AMRAAMs could uncage and complete the launch sequence. Now the Raptors' automatic fire control systems cooked off their birds.
The first and last intimation of the onset of death was the threat radars screeching out warning tones in the Fulcrum pilots' headsets. One moment they were about to fire on their slow-moving, unprotected targets, the next they themselves had come under surprise attack from a far deadlier foe. The MiG pilots broke sidelong to evade, their own attacks automatically aborted because the uncaged missiles had not yet been ready to launch.
The two AMRAAM missiles closed with the bogies and detonated on impact, destroying the Fulcrums in a meteoric shower of metal and flame. High overhead, the Raptors streaked past the fireworks display on opposite bearings. One F-22 escorted the Ospreys toward the Jordanian border. The other fighter plane broke eastward, in search of the idiot treehead colonel who the sortie had learned had gone off looking to win himself a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Chapter Nineteen
Breaux's problems were complicated by a shamal that had blown up during the convertiplane's low-altitude transit of the desert. The V-22 was of course equipped with advanced FLIR imaging modules, but forward looking infrared is essentially a navigational and targeting aid, not a search tool. An effective airborne search effort requires a lot of visual scanning of the outlying terrain with the naked human eye and field glasses where necessary.
The swirling clouds of sand and ice particles, blown by winds of often cyclonic velocity, also made keeping the V-22 airborne a test of the cockpit crew's skill, nerve, grit and determination. The Omega combat personnel at the helm were scared shitless, but they kept right on flying into the teeth of the worsening weather system. None of them had ever encountered anything like this before, not in training or in combat. It was, in short, a gold-plated, died-in-the-wool, fifty-ton-gorilla-sized bitch.
The Osprey continued to fly on.
The prayers of supplication had been concluded. The Trusted Ones, those brethren beloved of Allah, rose from the dust of the desert floor, their outer clothing stained with ochre patches. In their eyes, Dalkimoni saw the telltale gleam of fanaticism.
He had never fully understood it. He had always loathed it. Sometimes, indeed quite often, he had feared it as the force of mindless destruction that it undoubtedly was.
But the doctor had always known that it could be used. Focused and directed like a laser beam it was one of the primal, elemental forces of human nature, perhaps of the universe itself. It could and had toppled empires throughout the ages. Soon; very, very soon, it was to perform this miracle yet again.
The bomb-maker nodded at his bodyguard of Takavar, provided by Bashar himself. They were to secure the area after the trucks departed. No sign of their presence — including the hapless ones who'd been killed — was to be left behind.
Then Dalkimoni and they would depart for Tehran, there to await news of the developments that would take place within the space of a scant few hours. As the cool of the morning gradually changed to the fiery heat of the day, as the shamal dissipated and the desert sun rose to its zenith, other suns would rise. Suns of death — and vengeance long delayed.
The Marine piloting the Osprey angrily shook his head. The V-22 was running low on fuel. The convertiplane had limited avgas reserves and would have to turn around real soon if the crew and passengers stood any chance of reaching safety. Though the Osprey was equipped for air-to-air refueling, though it could drink avgas from a KC-10A through its nose-mounted refueling probe, it would first have to cross over to the friendly side of the Saudi or Jordanian border before filling up.
Fuelbirds preferred to dispense aviation gasoline at approximately twenty thousand feet. Flying the boom at this altitude kept the fuel at the right pressure and temperature to insure the maximum rate of dispersal, and also helped prevent other things happening to the avgas, like the formation of ice crystals in the mix.
The maximum ceiling for tanker aircraft was about forty thousand feet. This was a high ceiling for a tanker, but a low ceiling for a SAM. A fuelbird coupled up with a V-22 would be as easy a target for an Iranian SAM as two roaches fucking on the kitchen wall for a well-aimed sneaker.
The bottom line was that the V-22 had to be over friendly air before it had its drink. That was the long and the short of it. The Osprey had been outfitted with additional onboard fuel storage capacity, but the aircraft burned up hundreds of gallons by the minute, and flight time had to be precisely calculated. Breaux understood the equation. He knew that mere minutes remained to spot those trucks, and if he didn't luck out, then the Fat Lady had already sung, and that was it.