Colonel Jabbar kept his silence. The idiot nephew of the country’s idiot President held the key to Jabbar’s own destiny. If Jabbar returned from this mission with Al-Fariz safely on his wing, he would be covered in glory. Of course, if the unthinkable happened and something happened to the nephew, Jabbar would be peering down the muzzles of a Republican Guard firing squad. Such was life in the Iraqi Air Force.
Forty kilometers. Two minutes. Jabbar rolled into a bank, searching the pocked desert for landmarks. There were few good visual cues for the invisible 33rd parallel. Again he cursed the worthless Iraqi air defense radar. They had no reliable way to guide him to the precise boundary of the NFZ. He would have to depend on the MiG’s quirky navigational display and on his own knowledge of the Iraqi landscape.
There! A wave-like series of wadis, a twisting road in the desert leading to a rocky promontory. Jabbar recognized the landmarks that identified the boundary — the invisible line drawn in the sand after the Gulf War, beyond which the Iraqi Air Force was forbidden to fly. Jabbar figured that his headlong charge at the boundary would already have lit up the allies’ radar screens and alerted their interceptors. Now he and his wingman would execute a hard turn, parallel the boundary, tease them like a cat taunting a leashed dog.
The trick was knowing how long the leash was.
Commander Killer DeLancey, leader of the four-plane flight of F/A-18E Super Hornets, watched his second section refueling from the KS-3 Viking tanker. Delancey and his wingman, Lieutenant Hozer Miller, were finished with their own refueling. Now they were in a high perch position off the tanker’s left wing.
DeLancey glanced at the MDIs — Multipurpose Disply Indicators — on his instrument panel. With the afternoon sun streaming over his shoulder, he could see his reflected image in the glass screen — camo-drab helmet, oxgyen mask pressed against his face, sun visor pulled down over his eyes. He looked like a creature from science fiction.
While he waited, DeLancey assessed the tools of his trade. The Super Hornet was armed with an arsenal of air-to-air weaponry. With the touch of a button he could select three different ways to destroy an airborne adversary. On each wingtip he carried an AIM-9 heatseeking Sidewinder missile. On inboard stations were mounted the AIM-120 radar-guided missiles. In the long pointed snout of his Hornet fighter nestled the twenty-millimeter Vulcan cannon with its horrific 6,000-round-per-minute rate of fire.
With his right hand DeLancey kept a light hold on the control stick. The stick grip bristled with knobs and switches — cannon and missile firing trigger, the pickle button that launched air-to-ground munitions, the three-position air-to-air weapon select button.
DeLancey’s flight had been scheduled for a routine CAP — Combat Air Patrol — of the NFZ. It was supposed to be a four-ship CAP. But that was before the call from AWACS.
Now he wanted to move out. He rolled his Hornet into a turn and shoved the throttles up. Hozer Miller stayed glued to his left wing.
“Stinger one and two will take the hot vector,” Delancey said. “Three and four, rejoin after you’ve tanked.”
“Standby, Killer,” came the voice of Commander Brick Maxwell, leading the second section of Hornets. Maxwell’s wingman was still plugged into the tanker’s refueling drogue. “We haven’t finished tanking. This oughta be a four-ship.”
DeLancey assessed the situation. That damned Maxwell was lecturing him again. Maxwell was DeLancey’s operations officer. He had been in the squadron three months and he was a royal pain in the ass.
DeLancey gave it a moment’s thought, then reached a decision: Screw Maxwell. Screw the four-ship. This was war.
He swung the nose of his Hornet to the north. He was not going to wait while those two old ladies took their sweetass time refueling. Not with MiGs headed into the NFZ.
“Stinger One-one is taking the vector,” Delancey said. “Hozer, stay joined. We’ll engage as a two-ship.”
“Roger that, Skipper,” Miller replied without hesitation. Hozer might be a suck up, thought DeLancey, but he was a team player.
DeLancey knew the radio exchange was being monitored and recorded both aboard the AWACS and back in the Combat Information Center on the Reagan. He also knew he would catch hell from CAG Boyce, the Air Wing Commander. So be it. It wouldn’t be the first time he had to explain his actions in front of some thumb-up-his-ass captain or admiral. This was combat, or at least the closest thing to it. In combat you had to seize opportunity.
DeLancey knew about seizing opportunity. On the side of his Hornet, just beneath his name, were the painted silhouettes of three fighters. One was a MiG-21. The other two were Super Galebs. The MiG was from the first night of Desert Storm, over Iraq. The Galebs were a flight of two in Yugoslavia. DeLancey had caught them from behind and shot them both with AIM-9 Sidewinders. With three kill symbols on his fuselage, Killer DeLancey was America’s top-scoring fighter pilot.
Here was another opportunity. Two bandits.
The significance of the two Iraqi jets aimed southward was fixed like an implant in DeLancey’s brain. Another kill symbol on his jet would ensure his status as the world’s top fighter pilot. Two more… the thought made him almost giddy. Killer DeLancey would be the only active-duty ace in the world.
He would be a legend.
Tracey Barnett could see the whole picture. It was a classic intercept. On her tac display, the shooters and the bandits were converging like glow worms in a meadow. “Stinger One-one, Sea Lord,” she said in her microphone. “Bandits bearing zero-one-zero, range sixty-two miles, at thirty-one-thousand. Looks like they’re turning to parallel.”
Tracey was beginning to relax. This was going to be another of those cruise-the-boundary capers the Iraqis liked to pull. She wondered why they bothered. Why did they want to expose themselves? Maybe it made them feel good.
Sometimes Tracey marveled at how progress and antiquity were melded together in this business. The lumbering four-engined E-3C, for example, with its saucer-shaped radome and array of advanced electronic warfare equipment. This big truck was the same basic Boeing 707 that first flew nearly fifty years ago. Yet it was the most sophisticated — and deadly — command and surveillance tool on the planet.
She heard the Hornet leader. “Stinger One-one has a lock.”
Tracey stared at the screen. A lock? That meant the Hornet leader was targeting the bandits. What the hell was going on?
“Your weapons status is tight, Stinger One-one. Copy that?” “Tight” meant that the Hornets did not have clearance to arm their air-to-air missiles. They had to wait for an indication of hostile intent.
She waited for Stinger One-one’s acknowledgment.
And waited.
Nothing.
“Stinger One-one, confirm weapons status tight.”
Still nothing. Damn! He was stonewalling her. She could see the fighters — Hornets and MiGs — converging on the tac display.
Fifty miles. Okay, guys, this is going too far.
She jabbed her intercom button. “Butch, you better check this out.”
“Coming,” answered Butch Kissick, a graying, crew-cut Navy lieutenant commander. Kissick was the ACE — Airborne Command Element — who reported directly to a three-star general headquartered in Riyadh.
Kissick walked to Tracey’s console and plugged in his own headset. He looked at the tac display, and a frown passed over his face. The Hornets were flying a pursuit curve that would put them in firing range in the next two minutes.
“Stinger One-one, this is Hammer,” Kissick said. “Answer up, cowboy, or I’m gonna yank your ass out of there.”