CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel (7:20 a.m. local / 0520 Zulu)
The military leaders of Israel had gathered in their war room for a real-time update. Prime Minister Zamir was acutely aware of the possibility that he would soon have to make a split-second decision based on little more than guesswork, intelligence, and reports from their pilots. The moment was almost upon him.
“Proceed, please, General,” Gershorn said as he sipped a seriously strong cup of coffee.
“Here’s the tactical situation. We have six F-15s in formation with Flight 10, and they’re eight minutes from Iranian airspace. They’re in a solid cloud deck up to 38,000 feet, but it’s now daylight. The Pangia crew is aware of only two fighters. We did not want to frighten them. We have sixteen more fighters in stealth mode on the deck, largely below Iranian radar, ready to pop up as necessary. The crew still does not have control of their aircraft, and they have almost no fuel remaining.”
“And the Iranians?”
“Eight fighters in the air flying combat air patrol just on the other side, all, we’re sure, ready to engage.”
“Engage who?”
“Flight 10, although our six F-15s at 38,000 feet aren’t necessarily invisible.”
“And we believe they’re prepared to shoot down this jetliner?”
“Yes sir.”
“If I don’t decide to do it for them.”
Silence greeted the rhetorical question.
“And the strategic picture with their ballistic force?”
“At least six ballistic missiles in four Iranian locations fueled and on their respective pads. We have real-time monitoring by satellite… the Americans are locking arms with us on this… and we believe that only one of the missiles is nuclear equipped, but the others may be biological.”
“What is the rhetoric from Tehran?”
“Shrill to hysterical, all because of Moishe Lavi’s presence.”
“Is anyone still in charge in Tehran?”
“We can’t confirm that control has been shifted to the field. We do think that if Flight 10 was to get more than a few miles inside the border, whoever is in charge is going to be hard pressed not to fire because the presumption would be that, as idiotic as it sounds, our friend Lavi is riding a nuclear bomb meant for them.”
Gershorn referenced the main digital clock at the end of the room.
“Very well, bring up the live connection with our lead pilot.”
An aide scrambled to punch up the connections as someone else handed a receiver to the prime minister.
“The White House, sir.”
Gershorn looked at him in puzzlement but wasted no time saying hello.
“Mr. Prime Minister, this is General Paul Wriggle calling for the president. I know we have only a few minutes, but we now have what we think is the correct release code for that airliner, and we need your pilot to try again. Can you patch me to that pilot?”
The White House
Paul Wriggle waited for the connection with the Israeli fighter pilot flying formation with the imperiled Airbus A330 and re-read the code sequence Jenny had handed him: 62993178. How anyone could figure out something that arcane from an encrypted satellite message he did not understand, but in lieu of any word from Gail Hunt’s bedside, it was their best shot.
“We have a problem, General,” the Prime Minister was saying, jolting Wriggle back to the moment.
“What is it?”
“Our pilots are already being radar locked by Iranian fighters and they’ve got to defend themselves. They may not have time to transmit the code again.”
“This is a different code, sir. This will solve the problem if we can get the code transmitted on UHF.”
“I’ll do my best, General. We all will. Stay on the line with my aide. We passed the code to our pilot.”
Airborne, 38,000 feet, approaching the Iraq/Iran border
Patyish 21, the call sign of the Israeli major leading the flight of six F-15s accompanying the Pangia A330, saw his tactical radar register the hostile intentions of the Iranian fighters long before they could be in visual range. Against his better judgment and instincts, he took the few seconds to jot down the eight-number sequence before ordering his wingmen into the appropriate formation for engagement. There was no time to explain to the Pangia crew what was happening, but presumably the airliner’s captain had seen him pull away.
“Engaging enemy fighters,” was all he had time to say, and that was probably too much, especially since he couldn’t now recall with adrenaline levels rising whether he’d said it in Hebrew or English.
“Patyish 21 engaged, bearing zero-eight, fifty out,” was followed by the pulsating cursor on his heads up display as he walked the pipper to the left and locked up the oncoming target who had gone “to tone,” locking up his F-15 as well.
“Patyish 21, Fox Two,” he said on tactical channel as he pickled off two of his air-to-air missiles. The bright plumes of their rocket motors disappearing into the indistinct clouds was startling enough to a veteran fighter pilot, but to the adjacent commercial airline crew, they had to look terrifying.
Normally he would have ordered his wingman to climb and join him in a tight left turn while dispensing chaff to throw off the incoming missile the Iranian pilot had probably fired, but that would leave the Airbus a sitting duck, and he lit his burners and pushed ahead of the Airbus into a tight right turn instead, launching two flares to pull any incoming missiles off of both of them.
The tactical channel was now full of his wingmen’s voices and their clipped, cryptic reports as one by one they locked up and engaged various members of the oncoming Iranian formation, preparing to fight a high-speed battle with an enemy still thirty miles distant. The larger Israeli force below shot skyward now to join the battle, throwing overwhelming numbers at the oncoming Iranian pilots who were undoubtedly not expecting to see their tactical radar screens break out in Israeli warplanes.
Light years from Hollywood’s concept of a World War II aerial dogfight, the radar-based battle revolved around digital images on the heads up displays, and whatever was about to happen would be over in minutes, without either side actually ever seeing the other.
A large explosion in the distance marked the apparent end of one of the enemy fighters as one of the radar returns fragmented and disappeared from the Israeli scopes. The major’s radar picture showed the Iranian pilots breaking formation, which was expected, but what type of fighter was flying toward them was a mystery. With the rag-tag roster of single-seat aircraft Iran still flew, he wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to find himself in mortal combat with the one ancient American F-14 from pre-revolution days that Iran still tried to keep operational.
The major studied his radar picture once more, expecting to see a second wave of Iranian aircraft backing up the first, and as expected, the images now moved onto his screen. The eight digits he was supposed to transmit to the airliner were still on his kneeboard but there was no time to pull back in position with a screen full of oncoming enemy, yet…
He handed off command to his number two wingman and lit his afterburner for a few seconds to get back on the left wing of the Airbus, matching speeds before pulling out his personal cellphone again to go through the cumbersome task of typing in the numeric string with his oxygen mask off, pressing the phone’s little speaker against the microphone, all the while maintaining formation at 460 knots.
An explosion to his left told the tale of an Iranian warhead that had barely missed one of his men, but the fact that the enemy had succeeded in pickling one in the middle of his formation to begin with was very disturbing.