Robert Gandt
With Hostile Intent
For Annie,
Partner, best friend, sweetheart
Also by Robert Gandt
SEASON OF STORMS
The Siege of Hongkong, 1941
CHINA CLIPPER
The Age of the Great Flying Boats
SKYGODS
The Fall of Pan Am
BOGEYS AND BANDITS
The Making of a Fighter Pilot
FLY LOW, FLY FAST
Inside the Reno Air Races
INTREPID
The Epic Story of America’s Most Famous Warship
THE TWILIGHT WARRIORS
The Deadliest Naval Battle of WWII and the Men Who Fought It
ACTS OF VENGEANCE
BLACK STAR
SHADOWS OF WAR
THE KILLING SKY
BLACK STAR RISING
THE PRESIDENT’S PILOT
May God have mercy on our enemies;
they will need it.
In waking a tiger, use a long stick.
It is always the one you don’t see that gets you.
Chapter One
The Kill
“Fulcrum!”
The effect was always the same. Just calling out the radar contact never failed to spike First Lieutenant Tracey Barnett’s pulse rate upward by twenty beats. She knew it was having the same effect on the other two controllers. In the spectral glow of the E-3C Sentry’s red-lighted command-and-control compartment, she could see them both hunched over their own consoles.
“Make that two Fulcrums!”
She had them tagged now. They were out of the Al-Taqqadum air base, just west of Baghdad. They were headed south, toward the thirty-third parallel, the boundary of the No Fly Zone. And she could label them as bona fide, no-shit bandits, meaning they were hostile. She had a good electronic ID on them and these guys were definitely MiG-29s — twin-engine Russian-built fighters with the NATO code name “Fulcrum.”
They were coming her way.
Tracey studied the two blips on her scope. It was not like the Iraqi Air Force to come out and challenge the allied air patrols. If they took off at all, they would make a faint-hearted thrust at the NFZ, then cut and run back to the interior of Iraq.
At least, that’s what they usually did. But not today. These guys weren’t running. They were supersonic, about 1.2 mach and accelerating.
Still coming this way. Headed south toward the NFZ.
Just to be sure, she called up Rivet Joint, the intelligence-gathering RC-135, in its own orbit over the Gulf. Like the AWACS, Rivet Joint was a version of the ancient Boeing 707, but without the saucer-like radome atop the fuselage.
“We confirm that, Sea Lord,” said the controller in Rivet Joint. “Two Fulcrums in the air. Looks like the game’s on. Hope you got shooters available.”
Tracey went back to her console, giving the display a quick scan, checking her assets. She needed shooters — armed and ready fighters. Now, where were they…?
There. Perfect! A flight of four Navy F/A-18s, just launched from the Reagan, still refueling on the tanker.
She called the fighter division lead. “Stinger One-one, this is Sea Lord. You with me?”
A mini-second’s pause. “Stinger One-one is up, Sea Lord,” the F/A-18 flight leader answered.
“Show time, Stinger. Got a hot vector for you.”
“You called the right number, Sea Lord. You point, we shoot.”
One hundred-ten kilometers to go.
The desert was sweeping beneath them in a brown-hued blur. Colonel Tariq Jabbar knew that at this velocity — one and a half times the speed of sound — they would reach the thirty-third parallel in less than five minutes.
Ninety kilometers.
Of course, the trick at this speed was to time your turn to avoid penetrating the forbidden air space. In fact, Colonel Jabbar did not intend even to get close to the so-called boundary, just rush at it in a threatening way. Taunt the Americans. Make them scramble fighters and go through yet another useless exercise.
An idiotic game, thought Jabbar. A senseless waste. It was all an extension of the Gulf War, which had been the mother of all idiotic games. He felt a wave of anger rise in him, just as it always did when he recalled the slaughter of thousands of young Iraqi men. For nothing.
Colonel Jabbar pushed the thought from his mind. He had a mission today, senseless that it was. If he wanted to survive another encounter with the enemy he had to remain focused. He already knew from experience that he was on his own out here. He could not obtain help from any quarter. What information he received from his own GCI — Ground Controlled Intercept — was not only sparse, it was often woefully wrong. Iraq’s air defense network had been so pummeled by allied anti-radiation weapons, they had only a single functioning intercept radar. It was co-located with the approach control radar at the Baghdad airport, which had saved it from being demolished like the others.
Without an adequate air defense radar, even sophisticated warplanes like Jabbar’s MiG-29 were easy prey for the American fighters, who had the backing of their AWACS ships and a fleet of ship-borne control systems. The Iraqi fighters were flying blind.
But Colonel Jabbar, commander of the 21st Air Intercept Squadron of the Iraqi Air Force, was, if nothing else, a pragmatist. His task today was not to win wars or even to do battle. He and his wingman would merely feint at the allied-imposed No Fly Zone, cause some sphincters in the American warplanes to tighten. Then they could return in triumph to Al-Taqqadum. Their glorious humiliation of the cowardly Americans would be duly reported to the President. Both Colonel Jabbar and his wingman, Captain Hakim Al-Fariz, would be summoned to the presidential palace to have medals pinned on them by Saddam himself.
This would come to pass, Jabbar knew, because of one simple truth: Captain Al-Fariz, incompetent ass that he was, was the son of Saddam Hussein’s second youngest sister. It was no secret that the young officer had been designated for rapid advancement in the Iraqi military. Even though he had just completed his initial training in the MiG-29, he was already assigned as Jabbar’s assistant squadron commander.
Today was Al-Fariz’s first tactical mission in the MiG-29. And he was useless.
Jabbar glanced over his left shoulder, checking on his neophyte wingman. At first, he couldn’t find him. Then he spotted the MiG, down low, nearly a mile in trail.
“Close it up, Blue Wing,” Jabbar barked on the radio. “Bring it abeam, and closer.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
Jabbar watched Al-Fariz’s MiG slide forward. It was not enough. The oaf knew nothing about tactical formation. He was still too far out, still in trail. Jabbar felt like keying his microphone and telling the imbecile, as he would any other pilot in his squadron, what a worthless specimen of fly-encrusted shit he was, that he had no business driving a goat cart, never mind a supersonic killing machine like the MiG-29.