Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  “Good, let’s do it.”

  “But it’s not possible in Israel,” she told him. He stared at her, not comprehending. “We don’t have civil marriages. Only a rabbi can marry a Jew here and religious law forbids marrying a Jew and gentile. We’d have to go to another country and there’s no time for that.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do as soon as this war is over. It can’t go on much longer.”

  For a few minutes, they said nothing, content to be with each other in the fading twilight. “Matt, you’re going to have to go soon. Nighttime is probably the best time to travel and I’ve got to find Hanni.”

  Matt resigned himself to leaving. “I need to use your phone to check in with the air attaché. He probably knows if the roads are open. Who knows, maybe my orders have changed.”

  It took Matt over an hour to get through to Gold at Ben Gurion Airport. The colonel sounded relieved when he learned Matt was still in Haifa. “Furry says they’re running into problems and it will be at least another twenty-four hours before the jet’s fixed. I want you to go over to Ramat David Air Base. They’ll be expecting you. Hurry.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Matt grinned when he hung up. “I was right. They’re sending me over to Ramat David.” He held her for a moment. “I’ll be back.”

  A middle-aged woman was waiting to escort him at the first checkpoint blocking the road to the air base. She climbed into the car and eyed him suspiciously. “You must be someone important,” she grumbled. Ten minutes later, she led him through the concrete warrens of one of Israel’s most closely guarded command posts. “You’re the first foreigner who’s ever been in here,” she told him. “Ben David himself cleared you in.” The tone of her voice told Matt what she thought of that decision. “They want you to observe a strike.” She pushed through a door into a large, dimly lit room.

  A strong odor of dried sweat and unwashed bodies assaulted Matt’s nose. A few heads looked up and took the newcomer in, every face tired and haggard. Three banks of consoles formed semicircles around a low stage where one man, the direction officer, sat behind a small console. From his position, he could direct the entire operation. Behind him, a massive Plexiglas sheet formed a wall. A map of Israel was etched into the Plexiglas and plotters worked behind it, posting new information. On a side wall to the left were three large computer-generated displays that had to do with air defense threats and Israeli force status. Large alcoves were set into the other two walls where he could see communications panels and radar screens.

  Matt concentrated on making sense out of the three large computer displays. He sucked his breath in when he realized what the numbers meant. The Israelis had started the war with twenty-five front-line squadrons with 602 fighters and another 150 in storage; 436 of those aircraft had been destroyed or lost to battle damage. The remaining 316 aircraft had been reconstituted into twenty below-strength operational squadrons. He mentally calculated an attrition of 58 percent.

  “We’re facing over eight hundred fighters now that Iraq has come into die war,” his escort told him. “Now, their flight to Iran pays off.”

  “Has my country flown in replacements?”

  “Not that I know of,” the woman said.

  “This is what you really wanted me to see.”

  “Yes, I think so. And an attack on the new Iraqi nerve gas facility outside Kirkuk.” With a few explanations from the woman, Matt was able to decipher the planned strike. The IAF was launching two attacks on the Syrian airfields at Shay rat and Tiyas as a cover for four F-16s that were going against the nerve gas plant near Kirkuk. It was a well-coordinated plan that had already started when Matt arrived. The four F-16s were holding in an orbit with a tanker over the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Syria waiting for a go.

  RPV drones were penetrating deep into Syrian airspace, serving as bait to bring up Syrian radars and air defenses. Once the Syrians committed on the drones and the Israelis knew the exact location of the detection and tracking radars, they would attack the radar sites with antiradiation missiles from F-4s. At the same time, other aircraft would start wholesale jamming of Syrian radio communications and surviving radars. If the direction officer determined the Syrians were sufficiently blinded, he would clear in more F-4s, which already were airborne, to attack the two airfields.

  The Israeli planners had calculated that the Iraqis would concentrate on the airfield attacks going on in Syria and be partially blinded by the jamming directed against the Syrians. Again, if the direction officer gauged the plan was working, he would order the four F-16s on the tanker against die primary target outside Kirkuk. The F-16s would then descend and head straight for the Syrian coast to make a four-hundred-nautical-mile, low-level dash across Syria and into Iraq. It was a long way in and out.

  “Why don’t you use Jericho missiles with conventional warheads to hit the target at Kirkuk?” Matt asked.

  “Two reasons,” the woman answered. “The Iraqis have not started to use their tactical missiles and we don’t want to give them a reason. Also, we’re ‘withholding’ our missiles.” She didn’t tell him that the Jericho lacked the throw weight necessary to send a heavy enough conventional warhead that could penetrate hardened bunkers at that range.

  Matt stared at her. You did that deliberately, he thought. The word “withhold” had a specific meaning—the Israeli missiles were being withheld from conventional use and being reserved for nuclear employment. Pieces started to fit together. “Ma’am,” he said, “may I ask you what your rank is?”

  “Aluf mishneh. “ A colonel.

  “You want my opinion?” No answer. “Your F-Sixteens are looking at a fifty-minute low-level into Kirkuk. Too long. The Iraqis will have time after the airfield attacks are over to get their act together and figure out what’s happening. They’ve got a squadron of MiG-Twenty-nines at Kirkuk and one of Su-Twenty-sevens at Mosul. Even though it’s night, your F-Sixteen drivers are going to have to fight their way in and out. I’d say their chances are slim to none.” He was thinking how his F-15E had been designed for this mission.

  “You overestimate the Iraqis,” the colonel said. “Besides, do we have a choice?”

  Matt wanted to say something about the dangers of underestimating the opposition but contented himself with “Gutsy drivers. Who’s leading the F-Sixteens?”

  “Major Dave Harkabi.”

  A rock hit the bottom of his stomach. “It’s a suicide run,” be said.

  On the center dais, the direction officer stood up and looked at a general sitting in the center of the front row of consoles. The general nodded his agreement and the direction officer keyed his mike. Matt heard him give the go.

  “Zanek!”

  The four F-16s were halfway to Kirkuk, hugging the ground at 420 knots. Dave Harkabi had deliberately planned to ingress at the slower speed to conserve fuel as long as they were still within the radar coverage of the E-2C Hawkeye supporting them. He was relying on the Hawkeye to give him early warnings of any hostile fighters that might be up and looking for them. With the Hawkeye keeping him aware of the situation, he could concentrate on sneaking through the hostile air defenses in front of him. Based on the total lack of radio transmissions from the Hawkeye, the covering attacks on the two airfields had deceived both the Syrians and the Iraqis.

  Ahead of them, Harkabi could see the end of the low cloud deck they had been flying under and bright moonlight. The moonlight was both good and bad; it would allow them to more easily find and hit their target, but at the same time, they were easier to find. The weatherman had told them to expect cloud coverage almost into the target area. He checked his navigation computer for their position—they were outside the radar coverage of the Hawkeye. For the first time, Dave Harkabi was on a mission totally unsupported by other aircraft. He didn’t like the feeling.

  Still twenty minutes out, Harkabi calculated. He increased his airspeed to 480 knots as they moved out from under the cloud deck. The four fighters spread farther apart into a box
formation in the bright moonlight.

  Johar Adwan sprinted for his waiting Cobra, urged on by the sharp wail of a siren. A crew chief was waiting by the Su-27 and held the boarding ladder as he scrambled up the steps. As he sank into the seat, his hands flew over the switches and hit the start button, bringing the right AL-31F turbofan engine to life. The pilot tugged his parachute harness into place, glad that he had left it in the cockpit like the Americans did. Next to him, he could see that Samir already had his helmet on. He pulled on his helmet and started the left engine. Now both he and Samir were ready to taxi, but they had to hold and wait for General Mana to taxi out first. They were the first ready to go and the last to take off.

  “Multiple hits on the nose, forty-five miles,” Harkabi’s wingman called over the radio, breaking radio silence. It was the first indication he had that interceptors were on to them. Fortunately, his wingman’s pulse-Doppler radar was peaked and tweaked and had an early acquisition. Now they had to wait. Then his own radar got a paint at thirty miles. He checked the altitude of the bandit—six thousand feet—well above them.

  He kept his radar in a 120-degree, four-bar scan, looking for other aircraft. Four more radar skin paints materialized, all directly in front of him, for a total of five bandits. He couldn’t believe it at first; the Syrians were coming at them in a bearing of aircraft formation. He knew how to discourage that and called up one of his two Sidewinder missiles. Harkabi’s radar detected a sixth aircraft. “Say bandits,” he asked his wingman.

  “Six.” The brief transmission was followed by two clicks on a mike button and then two more clicks—his number three and four agreed. He glanced down into the cockpit and checked his Radar Warning Receiver. Numerous bat-wings, the symbol for the radar the Soviets used in their newest fighters, were at his twelve o’clock. It all made sense and he was certain of the threat. His four against six, either MiG-29 Fulcrums or Su-27 Flankers, both with a reported look-down/shoot-down capability. But Harkabi was confident his ECM systems could jam the enemy aircraft’s pulse-Doppler radar. It was the Doppler radar that eliminated ground clutter from a radar system by only detecting relative motion. Then a pilot could “look down” from a comfortable altitude above, find a low-flying aircraft, and then launch a missile to “shoot down” the intruder. Harkabi’s ECM would make sure that no relative motion was detected by the Iraqi radar.

  Harkabi keyed his radio. “Lead split.” It was the command for a tactic they had practiced many times and used against the Syrians. Harkabi jerked his Falcon thirty degrees to the left as his wingman collapsed into a fighting wing position. The second element turned forty-five degrees to the right. At the same time, the four F-16s turned on the ECM jamming pods mounted under their centerline. The plan was for them to move apart and then turn back into the bandits, forming a pincers movement. The contract called for Harkabi to take a head-on missile shot with a Sidewinder and blow on through. The second element would do the same from the other side twenty seconds later.

  The tactic had always created havoc among the Syrians and Harkabi was counting on it to work against the Iraqis. By the time the Iraqis got their act together and turned after them, he planned to have joined his flight up and be headed for the target. Since their ECM pods had been specifically configured to counter the pulse-Doppler radar in Fulcrums or Flankers, he was certain they would escape radar detection. The Iraqis would have to get a “visual” on them and come down into the weeds to engage. Common wisdom among Israeli pilots held that to be highly unlikely. At best, the Iraqis would end up in tail chase. The Israelis did not jettison their wing tanks that were still feeding fuel.

  Harkabi turned back into the bandits and the harsh growl of his Sidewinder came through his headset. Now he had a visual on the first two bandits. He picked the number two man.

  It would have worked perfectly except that there were eight bandits, not six. The last two were in trail but not in a bearing of aircraft. Instead, they were in a spread formation two thousand feet apart, down on the deck, and at a coaltitude with the Israelis.

  The command radio exploded in a babble of orders and shouts in Arabic as the Israelis engaged. When Johar saw the flash of two aircraft exploding in front of him he keyed his mike. “Go common,” he ordered. It was a trick he had read about in a “Red Baron” report. Both he and Samir cycled their radios to an unused frequency. Now they could communicate. “Check right, now,” Johar said. The two flankers turned twenty degrees to the right. “Weave,” Johar ordered. The two pilots flew back and forth, crossing each other’s flight path. Johar was certain the Israelis would return to their original track and would be below three hundred feet.

  Both Iraqis checked their own radar warning scopes and realized they were being jammed by highly sophisticated ECM pods. Rather than give away their own position, they both turned their radars to standby and strained for a visual contact. As agreed on, both had called up AA-11 missiles to engage with, not trusting the bigger and more complex radar-guided AA-10 missile. All that they had read and studied told them to expect a close-in, visual turning engagement, and for that they needed the R-60, a short-range, infrared-guided, dogfight missile that NATO called the AA-11 Archer.

  Neither man believed they had much chance of finding the Israeli intruders unaided, at night, and down on the deck. But they were going to try. At least they were in the same patch of sky. Johar caught movement out of the side of his right eye. It had to be a bandit because Samir was on his left! Samir’s voice came over the radio: “Two bandits, two o’clock, low, I’m engaged.” As they had agreed on weeks before, the first pilot with a visual contact would lead the attack. Samir rolled in on the F-16s, which were now passing a kilometer in front of them. In the moonlight, the F-16 Falcons were little more than shadows.

  Johar wrenched his big fighter into the vertical, rolled 135 degrees to keep sight of Samir, and then pulled down behind and stroked his afterburners. They were set up for a sequential attack. Then the nose of the lead F-16 came around, turning on Samir, while the Israeli wingman checked, turned, and extended away before pitching back into the fight. The Israelis had seen them. But Samir’s reactions were lightning quick and he had been expecting it. He turned hard with the Israeli, matching his turn, fully expecting the second Israeli to come back and go for a sandwich. But Johar’s job was to engage the second Israeli and prevent the developing sandwich on Samir, which he did.

  The Israeli wingman was pitching back into the fight when Johar stuffed a missile up his exhaust nozzle. He had never seen Johar.

  A United States Air Force AWACS orbited 150 miles north of the engagement, well inside Turkish airspace. The E-3A, the specially constructed version of the Boeing 707, had been on station for eighteen hours and had just come off its second in-flight refueling. The rotodome on top of the E-3A rotated slowly at six RPM, scanning an area out to 250 miles with its searchlightlike radar beam.

  An operator at the center Surveillance console called the tactical director. “Sir, we’ve got one hell of an engagement going on at one-eight-oh degrees, one hundred fifty miles. Looks like those four Israelis we were monitoring have been bounced by eight Flankers out of Mosul.”

  “Keep on top of it,” the tactical director said, following the battle on the scope at his multipurpose console. He ran some quick checks, ensuring that they were getting it all on tapes and that another aircraft, an RC-135 communications recce bird, was still on station. Between the two aircraft, they would capture the entire engagement.

  Dave Harkabi knew he was in deep trouble when he saw the second Flanker streak by after his wingman. He had turned 140 degrees and the first Flanker was still on his tail, turning with him. Russians! flashed through his mind as he hit the jettison button, shedding both fuel tanks and the pair of thousand-pound smart bombs he had been carrying under his wings.

  Instinctively, he pulled into the vertical, trying to generate an overshoot. “I’m hit!” filled his headset. It was his wingman. “Ejecting!” The Flanker was s
till at his six and closing to a missile shot. Automatically, Harkabi ruddered his nose over, heading back down, turning his tail away from the threat. A missile flashed by. For a brief second, he wondered if the Flankers had a dogfight missile with a good infrared head-on capability.

  Then he keyed the radio switch on the throttle. “Abort! Abort!” he transmitted. “I’m engaged, two bandits.” He hoped his number three and four men could make it safely home. They had run into too many surprises on this mission and he was certain they couldn’t take out the nerve gas plant with an air strike. Now they had to conserve their jets. He turned his full attention to disengaging, leveled off at two hundred feet, and turned hard into the Flanker.

  “Joe,” Samir radioed, “say position.”

  “Lagging at your eight o’clock.” Johar was behind him, following the fight as the Israeli and Samir engaged in a flat scissors maneuver, barely five hundred feet above the ground. “Press and come off to the right.” He was telling Samir to keep the pressure on the Israeli for a few more seconds as the two planes slowed, each trying to get behind the other. When it looked like Samir was going to reverse, he was to turn to the right and separate. Johar would be in a position to fall in behind the F-16 and take a missile shot. The two Iraqis were herding Harkabi around the sky, working him close so as not to lose him in the moonlight, and not letting him disengage, keeping him down on the deck.

  “I’m off,” Samir radioed.

  “I’m in,” Johar answered. As expected, when the Israeli saw Samir pull off to the right, he rolled out and stroked his afterburner, climbing straight ahead, trying to disengage. Johar fell in behind him and squeezed his trigger. The Archer he had ready leaped off the right outboard rail and tracked the F-16, its cooled seeker head ignoring the flares popping out behind the doomed aircraft. For good measure, Johar launched a second Archer, but there was no target for it to home on.