"How very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh with a neutron weapon? It wasn't an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or Hizb'allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was you?"
"Sure. I wasn't going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did the Americans too."
"Of course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?"
"Pretty good scam, wasn't it? I've got half the world believing I'm a fucking god. It's priceless. Some fools will believe anything you tell them as long as they think they'll get something good out of it."
"How clever of you. What will you do now, Highness?"
"Attack Egypt, again," Zuwayy said. "That bitch Salaam won't back me with the oil cartel, so I'm going to have to destroy Salimah. Actually, not destroy it-just Jhe workers. I'll keep the oil fields for myself. I've got enough troops to take the whole southern part of Egypt." "Did you already give the order to attack?" "Yes. And that cowardly bastard Fazani better follow my orders too."
She picked up the phone beside the lounger. "Call off the attack, Zuwayy. Killing all those workers won't get you any closer to the oil." But he had already drifted off into his drug-induced world, oblivious to the real one.
As soon as the three fighters lit their afterburners, the copilot started counting: "Talaeta, itnen, waehid… daeyikh!" The pilot released brakes and slowly moved the throttles up to full military power, let them stabilize a few seconds, then pushed the throttles into afterburner zone. He waited for the inevitable kohha-the "cough"-as the old fuel valves struggled to keep raw fuel flowing into the afterburner cans. Half the time, especially if the pilot advanced the throttles too fast, a valve stuck or failed and the afterburner would blow out completely. But it didn't happen this time-the nozzles opened, the fuel-flow needles jumped, and the Libyan Tupolev-22 bomber leapt down the runway. Six seconds behind him, the second Tu-22 bomber began its takeoff roll.
A third bomber wasn't so lucky-both of its Dobrynin RD-7M-2 turbojet engines' afterburners blew out seconds after engagement. The pilot quickly yanked the throttles back to military power and tried once more to light the afterburners, inching the throttles up over the detent in slow, careful increments. But it was no use, and the third Tu-22 bomber aborted the takeoff, its screeching, smoking brakes barely managing to stop the two-hundred-thousand-pound bomber before it rolled off the end of the runway.
Libyan air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles jumping wildly in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be, contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a ten-year veteran of the Al Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al Libya, was the Libyan air force's most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you were hardly out of flight school-in Libya, surviving that many hours usually meant a promotion. Tupolev-22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs-they routinely cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even that ratio wasn't enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and inflight emergency in a Tu-22, but had never crashed one. That made him top dog in the Libyan air force.
"Sahra flight, check."
"Two," his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff, and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.
"Dufda flight, Sahra flight checking in."
"Sahra flight, acknowledged," the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoyan-23 fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern Libya just ahead of the bombers and were already at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. "No contact yet, but we expect company any minute."
Just ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising at nearly the speed Of sound across the northern Libyan Desert.
But they were not low enough for Egypt's main air defense system-a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The powerful I radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian alert fighters-a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from three different bases in central and southern Egypt.
"Sahra, Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing," the lead pilot of the MiG-23 fighter escorts reported.
"Sahra flight copies," Talhi responded. "Sahra flight, go to point nine." The pilot pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty knots-eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.
Talhi's copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot's seat swiveled around the rear compartment so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the remote-controlled 23-millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. "At least two fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast," Birish reported. Thankfully Talhi had his unit's most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn't saying much-systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the bombers themselves than pilots. "India-band search radar-Mirage 2000s."
"Don't tell me-tell our fighters!" Talhi shouted. Birish got on the command radio and frantically passed along the information. He pushed the bomber's nose down even farther. The terrain was flat and rolling, so terrain wasn't a problem-but the waves and waves of heat swirling up from the desert floor created turbulence so bad that it felt as if they were riding a dune buggy across a mountain of rocks. The twenty-year-old ex-Soviet bomber's aged fuselage shrieked in protest with every bump.
"They're closing in fast," Birish shouted. "They're right on us-the E-2 Hawkeye radar plane must be vectoring them in."
"Five minutes thirty seconds to go," Talhi's bombardier, Captain Masad Montessi, shouted on intercom. "Hold steady for fifteen seconds."
"Fifteen seconds? Better make it quicker than that, navigator!"
"I said fifteen seconds, or at this speed we'll be lost and flying over downtown Cairo before we know it!" Montessi shouted back. He was in a tiny compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber below the pilot, with only a ten-inch RBP-4 Rubin navigation radar, an optical bomb sight between his legs, some mechanical flight computers, a compass, a Doppler radar system, and two small windows. He had just finished laying his crosshairs on a small mountain peak ten miles ahead, then changed to the second aimpoint-another peak on the other side of courseline.
The crosshairs were off just a small amount. He doublechecked his aiming on the first aimpoint, switched back to the second, verified the aimpoint, then moved the crosshairs on the second peak using a large tracking handle he called the "goat turd." As soon as he moved the crosshairs, he could hear the clack-clack-clacking of the mechanical navigation computer as it updated itself. He switched back to the first aimpoint, and the crosshairs rested right on it-all of the heading and velocity errors in the system had been corrected. "You're clear to maneuver! Go! Go!"