“Colonel Raider,” Locke said over the intercom in his jet, “I’m going to quarter plane and zoom on this engagement. But I’m going to make a deliberate mistake and give the defender just enough room to counterturn on me and enter into a scissors. But he’s got to be damn good to see it. So don’t be surprised if you see his nose pitch back into us when we’re still ninety degrees off his heading.” Locke was worried about the heavy breathing he could hear coming over the intercom. Come on, Ramjet, he thought, this is no biggy.
As briefed on the ground, the two jets positioned and Locke slashed down onto Matt, rapidly closing to his six o’clock position and almost ninety degrees off Matt’s heading. To kill his high overtake speed, Locke pulled his nose up and traded his airspeed for altitude before rolling and pulling his nose back to Matt’s six o’clock. But Matt saw that Locke had given him enough room to counterturn and reefed his fighter into a hard upward turn, bringing his nose onto Locke. Now the two were climbing as they repeatedly turned nose-to-nose and overshot each other. Both pilots were decelerating as fast as possible, each trying to get his nose behind the other’s tail.
“Shit hot!” Locke yelled over the intercom. “He caught it!” The heavy breathing coming from his rear cockpit grew more rapid as their airspeed fell below 200 knots and Locke pulled over thirty units of angle of attack. “Now watch this,” Locke said. “We’re going to get in the phone booth with him.” The veteran pilot closed to a thousand feet. “Damn, the boy’s good,” he muttered as Matt timed a rolling reversal perfectly and gained a slight advantage.
“Too close!” Ramjet shouted.
“Still a thousand feet separation,” Locke told him, trying to calm the colonel. “The regs say we can close to five hundred before knocking it off. Pontowski can handle it.” Locke hardened up the scissors, slowing down to 160 knots and bringing his nose up, increasing the angle of attack. “Screw the phone booth, time to get into the coin return.” He closed to inside six hundred feet.
The angle of attack indicator was bouncing around thirty-five units and Ramjet lost sight of Matt’s aircraft under the nose. At the same time, he felt the onset of a slight buffet that would increase as they slowed the fight and increased the angle of attack. Ramjet saw it all and it hurt — he wasn’t used to flying in the pit of an F-15E and watching a close-in fight from that perspective.
Locke was pleased with the way Matt handled the maneuver. He decided to disengage, eased off the stick to separate, and transmitted a cool “Knock if off” over the radio. He was smiling.
But Ramjet panicked at that same instant. He desperately wanted to get a visual on the other aircraft and drowned Locke’s radio call with a shouted “Knock it off! Knock it off!” as the two F-15s joined together in a midair collision.
The forces generated by the two aircraft, each weighing over twenty tons, when they smashed into each other were horrendous. The G meters in the cockpit spiked to the max and froze, unable to sense the full impact. Matt’s left wingtip slashed into the canopy of stretched acrylic on Locke’s F-15, killing both colonels instantly. Most of Matt’s left wing and horizontal stabilator were ripped off as his jet tried to shed the wreckage of Locke’s F-15. Fuel and hydraulic lines ruptured as the engines sucked debris into their turbofans. The delicately balanced blades came apart, becoming instant shrapnel, igniting the fuel the high-pressure pumps were still forcing toward the engines. The rear of Matt’s aircraft exploded.
But the engineers and workers at McDonnell Aircraft Company had done their job well and the Eagle refused to die. The titanium bulkheads and the heat-bonded joints held and Matt and Haney were still alive after the initial impact. Haney pulled at both ejection handles on the side of his seat and started a dual, sequenced ejection. The canopy flew back into the slipstream and Haney’s seat went up the rails first. In less than half a second, the rocket sustainer under his seat kicked in, sending him well clear of the jet and directly into a piece of their left aileron that was fluttering to earth. It looked like the aileron lightly brushed the top of Haney’s seat, but again, the impact forces were horrendous. Haney’s seat lost stabilization and tumbled earthward, its parachute shredded.
Haney separated manually from the seat and pulled his ripcord. But nothing happened. He was conscious for the full three minutes before he hit the ground.
Thomas Fraser looked up from his seat and well-ordered desk and smiled at the two Air Force officers Melissa had escorted into his office. No look or word betrayed the frustration that was souring his day. “General Cox, good to see you again.” Fraser stood and extended his right hand, all his Irish good nature up front. Deep inside, he wanted to order Cox to leave the White House and never come back.
“Mr. Fraser,” Cox began, “I’d like you to meet Lieutenant Colonel William Carroll. Bill’s our premier expert on the Middle East.”
“So, you’re the man whose reports on what’s happening over there have gotten the President’s attention,” Fraser said as he shook Carroll’s hand. He waved the two officers to seats and settled into his own chair. “General Cox, is this the first time you’ve briefed the President?” Fraser was furious that he could not control all the information reaching the President and wanted to learn what the DIA was going to tell him in advance. It was a matter of damage control.
Cox smiled. “I brought Bill along so he could brief the President directly. Straight from the horse’s mouth — so to speak.”
“Most unusual, but then Admiral Scovill did tell the President you were producing some great work at the DIA.” Fraser made a mental promise to even the score with the crusty old admiral who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff and never cleared what he was going to say with Fraser first. “Just what will you be reporting to the President this morning?”
“Essentially, Bill will be presenting a detailed update of the summaries you’ve seen in the President’s Daily Brief. Should take sixteen minutes if there are no questions.”
That’s not likely, Fraser thought. Pontowski always asks questions. Fraser did not like the way the President insisted on personally hearing opposing viewpoints on every major issue. He liked it even less that a young-looking, bright lieutenant colonel was briefing him. He felt his control slipping away. Michael Cagliari, the national security adviser to the President, walked into the office. “Okay, gentlemen,” Fraser beamed, “you’re up. Keep it short. The President has a full schedule today.” He escorted Cagliari and the two officers into the Oval Office and found a chair in the corner, his stomach churning in frustration.
Cox introduced Carroll and let him do all the talking. Pontowski sat silently, taking it all in. Carroll’s message was a simple one: Iraq and Syria were patching up their longstanding feud and Carroll linked it with the Egyptian-Syrian mutual assistance treaty. “In short, Mr. President,” Carroll concluded, “we are seeing Egypt, Syria, and Iraq preparing to fight a war.”
“And the target?” National Security Adviser Cagliari asked.
“Israel,” Carroll answered.
“I’m having trouble accepting Syria and Iraq finally getting in bed together after all the years they’ve been at each other throats,” Cagliari said.
“Iraq has always been one of the hard-line confrontation states and regards itself as in a state of constant war with Israel,” Carroll explained. “But distance and short wars kept Iraq out of the fighting so far. By the time Iraq could get itself organized to logistically support participation in an Arab-Israeli shooting match, the war was over. The main points of disagreement between Iraq and Syria have been over Syria’s support of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and of Kuwait in the 1991 conflict. Now the Syrians are reevaluating their position, trying to find an accommodation with Iraq.”