“What’s their SAM capability back at their bases?” Hunter asked Baldi.
“The best,” the man replied. “We did hire a mercenary group about a year ago. Bunch of Finnish guys flying some old shitbox Italian fighter-bombers. They reconned the Sidra-Benghazi coastline, flew back here, and gave me our money back. Too many SAMs. They didn’t want any part of it.”
“What’s their bombing timetable?” Hunter asked.
Baldi thought for a moment, then said, “It’s like clockwork. Every other day, just before noon. They awake, eat breakfast, fly here at a leisurely pace, bomb, and get home for a late lunch.”
Hunter was getting an idea. “Mr. Baldi,” he said, “how would you like to make a deal?”
Two days later, just before noon, radar operators on one of Olson’s frigates stationed off the southern coast of Malta picked up eight blips on their radar screens. The news was flashed to the Saratoga, where Hunter sat in the F-16 waiting for launch.
“Okay, major,” he heard the launch officer say over the radio. “They’ve got eight bogies coming in at two-niner Tango. Airspeed three-four-six knots.”
“Roger, Launch,” Hunter answered.
He felt the steam pressure build up under the fighter. The launch officer twirled his finger, then pointed an emphatic signal. In an instant, Hunter was hurled back against the cockpit seat and the jet was roaring off the carrier.
“From zero to one hundred twenty MPH in two seconds,” Hunter thought. “I’m beginning to enjoy this.”
His launch was quickly followed by the three Harriers, taking off the conventional way to save fuel, plus two Viggens. Once all the airplanes were aloft, they formed up into two three-plane groups and headed southeast.
Hunter began monitoring all radio frequencies immediately, searching for the band the Sidra-Benghazi bombers were using. After five minutes, he finally got lucky. The pilots were talking in Arabic, but he recognized enough flying terms to know it was the Bisons.
He called back to the carrier. “Monitor one-two-five-six UHF,” he radioed to the CIC radio operators. “We’ve got some Med Arab dialect.”
“That’s okay, Major,” the reply came back. “We’ve got an expert standing by.”
Hunter smiled. He knew that the commander of the Moroccan desert fighters was in the CIC, ready to translate.
They tracked the bombers as they routinely swung around the northeast side of the island and prepared to start their bombing approach. While the CIC monitored the routine chatter between the bomber pilots and passed the translation on to the Saratoga pilots, Hunter activated his radar-monitoring system. Unbelievably, the Bison pilots hadn’t switched on their long-range airborne radars. In fact, he was willing to bet the cost-conscious mercenaries didn’t bother to carry an air-defense radar man. “Boy, they are leisurely,” he thought.
The Bison group pilot began to drop down through a thick cloud bank to his bombing altitude. As soon as he broke through the overcast, he noticed a glint of light off to his left. He was startled to see a F-16 fighter jet riding just 200 feet off his wing.
He looked to his right, hoping to turn that way to escape when he saw a Harrier riding on that side too.
He was trapped and he knew it.
Suddenly a strange voice broke in on his group’s frequency. It was the Moroccan troop leader. The pilot listened to his ultimatum: follow instructions or all eight of his airplanes would be shot down. The pilot — a hired mercenary with no real loyalty to the Sidra-Benghazi faction — agreed.
As instructed, he followed the F-16 …
One by one the eight Bison bombers circled the abandoned RAF Malta base and came in for a landing.
Hunter was there to meet the bombers, having landed before the mercenaries. There was also a battalion of Moroccan Marines on hand to surround the Soviet-built bombers once they reached their taxi stations. Unexpectedly, the troops were needed to keep away angry Maltese citizens, who showed up to throw rocks, bottles and, in one case, a fizzled Molotov cocktail at the bombers.
The pilots were immediately handcuffed and led away to a Maltese jail. “If they are worth anything,” Baldi said, “we’ll be able to ransom them.”
Now Hunter and Heath and six other carrier pilots climbed into the Bisons, along with other assorted members of the carrier force. Each airplane carried a Moroccan officer, plus a bombardier, a navigator, and a radar operator who knew what he was doing. The airplanes were refueled and their bomb loads checked. Within ten minutes, the Soviet-built airplanes were roaring off the runway, heading south for the Libyan coastline.
The hired-hand radar officer stationed at the SAM base at Tripoli yawned. It was almost the end of his shift. His assistant — a corporal just hired for the station — called his attention to the eight blips on the radar screen. They were approaching from the north, he said, flying at 340 knots.
Don’t worry, the officer told him. That was the regular bombing force returning from Malta. But they were breaking up into eight separate flight courses, the corporal told him. The officer yawned again. Don’t worry about it, he told the rookie. It was probably some training maneuver, or the weather, or something. Besides, it was end of the officer’s shift.
Soon the corporal was alone in the SAM radar station. He didn’t get too concerned when he noted that one of the blips was heading right for his position.
A minute later, he heard a curious, whistling sound. Almost like a bomb …
Up and down the coast, the Bisons attacked the eight major SAM installations. Once the antiaircraft sites were destroyed, the Tornados swept in and hit troop concentrations, oil-storage tanks, and port facilities. The Viggens, carrying antirunway bombs, cratered the Gang’s only workable landing strip in the area. The final insult came when the four old Jaguar jets, on their first mission, swept in and destroyed the Sidra-Benghazi headquarters with delayed-fuse iron bombs.
The attack was a complete surprise — and an overwhelming success. Not only were no aircraft lost — none of the attackers were even fired upon. Why? The Sidra-Benghazi Gang had committed the cardinal sin of warfare. They’d become lazy. They had assumed that well-paid mercenaries would compensate for the lack of loyal, homegrown soldiers. The opposite was true. Hunter knew by the way the Saratoga’s aircraft carried out the raids with such impunity that many of the Gang’s hired hands simply left their posts at the first sign of trouble.
It all came down to a fighting for a cause. The Saratoga force was made up almost entirely of paycheck soldiers, but they believed in what they were doing. They recognized that Lucifer had to be stopped and that they were in the vanguard of that effort.
It made all the difference in the world …
They returned the Bisons to Baldi. “Our plan,” he told Hunter, as they shared a bottle of Maltese wine in Baldi’s office, “is to sell them on the open market. They should bring a pretty penny, I should think. Then we’ll buy some decent fighter protection and some SAMs.”
“Malta has always been fought over, invaded, disputed,” Hunter said. “Yet it has never capitulated. It’s a tribute to your people.”
“We couldn’t have done it without your help,” Baldi said. “Now, when we first met, you mentioned a deal. Well, you’ve fulfilled your part of this unspoken bargain. Now what can we do for you?”
“Lend us your UDT unit,” Hunter told him. “We got a report that the Soviets have mined a good part of the Suez canal. We’ll need frogmen to clear a path for us.”
Baldi slapped his hand down on his desk for emphasis. “Done!” he said in a booming voice. “And, by the way, we will be able to scrape up some supplies for you. Not much, but we want to show our appreciation.”