“Help!” he squawked on the radio. “Colonel! The Sirena. A missile—”
“Break right!” came the voice of Colonel Jabbar. “Turn right now! Immediately!”
The urgent command penetrated like a laser into Al-Fariz’s paralyzed brain. Turn! He jammed the stick hard to the right, then pulled. The MiG wheeled hard into a right turn. Al-Fariz hauled the stick back, grunting under the heavy acceleration. Five Gs, six, seven Gs. Seven times his normal body weight, the blood being forced from his brain. Turn! Make the missile overshoot.
The AIM-120 bored through the sky toward the MiG. The sudden angle-off and the seven Gs were more than the missile could manage. Nearly at the end of its envelope, the air-to-air missile swished past the tail of the hard-turning MiG-29, then sputtered and lost its guidance.
Al-Fariz was alive.
But the second missile, a quarter-mile behind the first, stayed locked-on. As Al-Fariz’s MiG-29 pulled hard in its seven-G vertical bank, the AIM-120 continued in a relentless arcing pursuit curve.
Tracking. Closer, closer, still tracking.
Kablooom! The missile impacted the MiG squarely in the cockpit.
The forward half of the MiG-29 disintegrated from the blast of the AIM-120’s warhead. Captain Hakim Al-Fariz, who had been an athletic, handsome specimen of young Iraqi manhood, was transformed into a molten blob of protoplasm.
The aft portion of the jet, containing the engines and the fuselage fuel tank, exploded in an orange fireball. The flaming debris descended like a comet to the floor of the desert.
“Stinger One-one, splash one!”
The radio call from the Hornet crackled like an electric shock through the command cabin of the AWACS. Butch Kissick stared at the tactical display console. “What the fuck…?”
Tracey Barnett was shaking her head. “He did it. He shot him.”
“I don’t believe this shit,” said Kissick.
“What do you want me to do, Butch?”
“Remember everything that happened. I guarantee you we’re gonna be standing in the general’s office.”
From thirty miles away, Maxwell saw the fireball. It looked like a tiny Roman candle, arcing downward to the earth.
On his radar display he could see the aftermath of the engagement: The lead bandit was still in a turn to the north. The blips from DeLancey and Hozer’s Hornets were still pointed northward, into Iraqi air space.
“Stinger One-one,” said Maxwell. “Heads up. You’re past the NFZ boundary.”
“Roger that,” said Killer. Maxwell could hear the exhilaration in DeLancey’s voice. “We’re bugging out. Stay nose on the bandit and cover us while we egress.”
“Three copies. You’re covered.”
Maxwell saw the two radar symbols — Killer and Hozer — executing a turn-in-place to the left. In unison, their noses swung toward the south, back to the NFZ, egressing from Iraqi air space. As they turned southward, Maxwell and his wingman swept past them with their noses — and missiles — trained on the surviving MiG. Just in case the MiG leader decided to come back and take a shot at the retreating Hornets’ exposed tail pipes.
And that, Maxwell realized with a start, was exactly what the bastard was doing.
There it was on his display — the symbol of the lead Iraqi MiG-29. He wasn’t turning north any longer. The MiG’s nose was in a hard turn southward. Toward Maxwell and his wingman.
“Sea Lord, Stinger three,” Maxwell called. “Do you show the lead bandit coming nose hot?”
“That’s affirmative,” answered Tracey Barnett from the AWACS. “Looks like he’s reengaging.”
Maxwell cursed inside his oxygen mask. It was just what he was afraid would happen. The fight that DeLancey started wasn’t over. DeLancey had hosed this guy’s wingman. Now the Iraqi wanted to take his own shot at someone.
Maxwell was the someone. It was going to be a face-to-face shoot-out.
Colonel Jabbar scanned the empty sky where Al-Fariz’s MiG had been. No sign of a parachute. He was not surprised. He knew from the pitch of the Sirena warning that it was a radar-guided weapon, not a heat-seeker. It had been a direct hit. At least Al-Fariz did not suffer a painful death.
Jabbar felt himself filled with a white-hot fury. The smoking trail of his wingman’s destroyed jet was still falling to the desert. The arrogant bastards had executed Al-Fariz like he was a stray dog in a garbage heap.
He could see in his radar the two fighters — the ones who had killed Al-Fariz — egressing from the area. If he accelerated, pursued them into the NFZ, Jabbar could lock them up, take them both out.
But then he saw something else. Two extra blips that weren’t there before.
He should have known. Two more enemy fighters coming at him. They were twenty miles, nose on.
Just as Jabbar reached to slew the target designator in his radar display to lock up the lead fighter, he heard the aural warning in his headset. The warning was in Russian: “Low fuel! Low fuel!”
For a second Jabbar considered. If he stayed in the fight, he would probably run out of fuel before he made it back to Al-Taqqadum. If he turned tail, he would be exposed to a shot from the enemy fighters. Either way, his chances were nil.
Jabbar’s finger went to the missile launch button on the control stick.
He was about to depress the button when he heard another aural alert. Chirp! Chirp! Chirrrrrrrp!
The Sirena. It was going crazy. They had fired another missile! This time Jabbar was the target. The enemy had preempted him. Now he was defensive.
Colonel Jabbar made an instantaneous tactical decision: Try to save yourself. Maybe, if you survive the missile, you might even escape a firing squad.
Jabbar snapped the MiG into a seven-G right break. He shoved the throttles into afterburner and dove for the deck. With its nose down, under full thrust from the two mighty Tumansky afterburners, the MiG-29 accelerated — Mach 1.5. Mach 2. The brown vastness of the Iraqi desert filled his windscreen.
Jabbar was in a deadly tail chase. Behind him the Mach 3 air-to-air missile was trying to overtake his Mach 2 MiG-29 fighter. It was a game of hound-and-hare, except that the hound possessed an 800-mile-per-hour advantage.
He could hear the angry shrill squeal of the Sirena. Sweat poured from inside Jabbar’s helmet, stinging his eyes. Chiiirrrrrrrrrrp!
The chirping intensified. More shrill, more relentless. The missile was closing on him. Jabbar hunched down in his cockpit seat, holding his breath, waiting for the inevitable.
The chirping stopped.
Jabbar waited. The chirping did not resume.
He took his first breath in nearly a minute. He had outrun the killer missile and its fuel was exhausted. But the Americans were still behind him. Was another missile on its way?
Maxwell prepared to fire his second missile. His finger curled around the trigger.
His first shot had been launched at the extreme end of the AIM-120’s range. The MiG pilot had made a smart move. He had dived and managed to outrun the missile. It had saved his life, at least for the moment. It had also persuaded him to haul ass for home.
But now, because the MiG had gone nearly vertical, Maxwell had closed the distance. He could take a second shot and still bag the MiG. Maxwell hesitated, finger on his trigger. Should I kill this guy…?
The window was closing. He had perhaps three seconds. He could shoot now — and the MiG would be dead. Another anonymous Iraqi fighter pilot would be history.