“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 aim-point—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!”
“Sahra flight! Take tactical spacing! Lead is maneuvering south!” Talhi executed a quick turn to the south, rolled out momentarily, then executed a tighter turn around a very short valley. He wasn’t going any lower, so left and right maneuvering was all he had to escape the Egyptian pursuers.
No use. “Mirages still on us, estimate twenty miles— coming within lethal range,” Birish shouted. “I’ve got fighters going after our wingman.”
“Sahra flight, you’ve got company, coming in fast!”
Talhi reported on the command frequency. “Do you have him?”
“Negative! Negative! Our threat receiver is down!” the pilot aboard the second Tu-22 responded. “Our navigation radar is down too!”
“Then get the hell out of here,” Talhi said. “If you’re blind and deaf, you’re no use to us out here! Return to base!”
“Negative, lead,” the other pilot reported. “I’ve got dead reckoning and I think I can find enough landmarks to proceed. I’m inbound to the target.”
Talhi didn’t blame him too much at all—he wouldn’t want to face the wrath of President Zuwayy and his henchmen either, if he returned to base without completing his mission. “I understand, Sahra. Do you have a good DME on us?” Each of the Tu-22 bombers was equipped with radio direction finders that gave range and bearing to the other.
“Affirmative.”
“Then keep us in front of you—we’re inbound to the target too,” Talhi said. He banked southeast and fined up on the navigation steering bug, then pushed the throttles all the way to full military power. “We’re target direct now, crew. Our wingman has got no other way to find the target, so he’s going to follow us in to the target.”
“Mirage moving in to lethal range,” Birish said on intercom. “All jammers active, countermeasures ready.” On the command frequency, he said, “Sahra flight, we’ve got Mirages moving in to radar missile range. Use side-to-side jinks and make sure your jammers are active.”
“We’re jinking, lead, we’re jinking,” the second bomber pilot acknowledged. “Just find the damned target. We’ll be right behind you.”
But they were losing this race. The Egyptian fighters were moving in faster—they must be “headed down the ramp,” zooming in from high altitude to use the extra speed to rapidly close in for the kill. “Rapid PRF—fighter locked on!” Birish shouted. “Vertical jinks! Find any terrain you can! Let’s lose this guy!” The Egyptian fighter’s radar changed from rapid-pulse-rate frequency to a constant tone. “Uplink active! Missile launch! Break left!”
But just as Talhi began to yank the control wheel to the left, Birish reported, “Uplink down! Radar down! The fighter disappeared!”
“Did he shut down his radar?”
“Could be, but he wouldn’t do that right after firing a missile.”
They heard the reason a few moments later: “Sahra flight, Dufda flight, this is Fadda flight of six. Your tail is clear. Now shove a few down their throats!”
Talhi whooped for joy. Fadda flight was a flight of six MiG-25s, some of the fastest fighter planes in the world. Originally designed to chase down and destroy high-flying supersonic American bombers over the Soviet Union, the titanium-armored MiG-25 could attack targets at over three times the speed of sound. Based in Tobruk, the Libyan fighters covered a lot of ground very quickly and caught the Egyptian pilots from behind.
Talhi climbed his Tu-22 back up to fifteen thousand feet above ground level, and his bombardier programmed his weapons for their attack. Talhi’s bomber was in what was called the “overload” condition—it carried three Kh-22 air-to-surface missiles, called “Burya” in Russia, one under the fuselage and one under each wing. The Kh-22, powered by its own liquid-fueled rocket engine, was the size of a small fighter jet and could fly at over six hundred miles per hour. It carried an inertial navigation system, a thousand pounds of fuel—and a three-thousand-pound high-explosive warhead.
One by one, Montessi dumped navigation and heading information into the Buryas’ computers, aligned their inertial navigation gyros, and let them fly. Although he had done many simulated Kh-22 attacks, Talhi had never actually seen one of those behemoths fly before. The rocket engine firing up sounded like an explosion right under their belly, and when it blasted free, it seemed as if a fiery spear from Allah himself had just missed them.
The missiles started a rapid climb on tongues of fire and headed for their targets—Egypt’s network of early-warning surveillance radars along its western frontier. The Burya missiles used passive radar homing devices to zero in on the early-warning radars, and once they had computed the radar’s exact position, they could not miss. With devastating accuracy, the huge Kh-22 missiles struck their targets, obliterating the radar installations and flattening any aboveground buildings or objects for over a mile around the impact point.
Meanwhile, the Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters went to work themselves—on the Egyptian E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. The Hawkeye was over one hundred miles away and had its own flight of Mirage fighter escorts, and when the radar plane detected the Libyan MiGs heading eastbound, it shut down its radar, headed northeast toward safety, and sent its fighter escorts after the intruders. But the Libyan attackers hopelessly outnumbered them. The MiG-25 fighters merely blew past the Mirages with their superior speed, and the MiG-23s pounced when the Egyptian defenders turned to pursue. The MiG-25s took care of the Hawkeye radar plane after losing only one fighter to enemy missiles.
With both the airborne and ground radar sites destroyed, the way was clear for the second Tupolev-22 bomber to climb to a safer altitude and pick its navigation waypoints with care. With Talhi’s Tu-22 leading the way, the bombardier aboard the second Tu-22 lined up precisely on his preplanned bomb run course. The courseline had to be perfect: Although the weapons did not need to be directly on target to be effective, they would get maximum effect by being no more than one or two degrees off the desired course. One by one, he seeded the area with small two- hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs fitted with radar fuzes.
Far below was the massive Salimah oil complex, Egypt’s newest oil p
roject. Comprising over thirty thousand square miles of southern Egypt, it was the largest known oil and natural gas reserves in northern Africa. Seven wells had been drilled every day for the past two years, and none of them showed any signs of lessening their output. Five thousand workers, mostly Arabs and Africans from Sudan, Chad, Kenya, and Ethiopia, worked around the clock in Salimah, housed in rows and rows of trailers and huge tent cities stretching as far as anyone could see.
One of Egypt’s two field armies, known as the King Menes Army, was in charge of the defense of Salimah. Although it was seriously under its full strength, the King Menes Army comprised well over a third of all of Egypt’s fighting forces, included two full armored divisions, three mechanized infantry divisions, one infantry division, five artillery battalions, two fighter-interceptor squadrons, two fighter-attack squadrons, and one helicopter squadron. The eighty thousand troops were distributed with the bulk of the forces, mostly heavy armor, arrayed along the borders of Libya and Chad, with the other lighter, more rapid- response forces deployed mostly north of the oil fields as a reserve. The two westernmost military Areas of Responsibility were Al-Jilf and Al-Kabir, and these were the two areas targeted by the weapons dropped by the Tu-22 bombers.
One might believe the bombardier missed his target, because the gravity weapons detonated a thousand feet in the air, producing nothing more than a loud BANG! and a puff of sand below. The explosion was repeated sixty-three times in the space of six minutes, ten weapons per minute, as the Libyan bomber sowed its deadly seeds. Curious soldiers below looked up when they heard the explosions, and they jumped and felt the sudden gush of air and a little bit of pressure in their ears—nothing more severe than a slammed door or a slug of mud popping out of a new well. But there was very little heat unless the explosion was directly overhead, no trace of vapor or liquid, and no shrapnel or caltrops. Before most folks realized it, the noisemakers were gone. They could have been fireworks, except these fireworks were in the morning, which didn't make sense at all.
It still didn’t make sense later that day—even when the soldiers started dying in massive, horrendous numbers.
The ones directly under the airbursts were first, complaining of headaches that increased in intensity quickly, eventually causing loss of eyesight and loss of equilibrium. Hours later, they were coughing up blood. By the time they were able to get off work later that day, they were usually unable to take themselves to the infirmary. Many of them died in their beds or in their living rooms, surrounded by their puzzled comrades and worried corpsmen. The ones that were as far as one mile away from the bursts didn’t start having symptoms until the next day, but their fate was the same—crushing headaches leading to blindness, loss of balance eventually leading to incapacitation, and sudden loss of blood leading to hemorrhage and death within eight hours.
The soldiers in bunkers and even chemical weapon-resistant shelters were not spared—even those in underground storage areas and shielded command centers could not escape. Eventually the deadly neutron and gamma radiation from the sixty-four neutron bombs detonated over Salimah, unrestricted by the uranium outer shell as in regular fission weapons, claimed over twelve thousand lives . ..
. .. without harming one piece of oil-drilling equipment, spilling one drop of crude oil, or ruining one piece of precious military hardware.
CHAPTER 9
NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE CORONADO,
CORONADO, CALIFORNIA
DAYS LATER
Patrick detested running, but it was the only aerobic exercise he cared for, and he knew he’d probably blow up like a “bunker-buster” bomb if he didn’t do it. When he was in town he usually jogged the short distance from his condo on Coronado Island, across the bay from San Diego, to the base gym at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. This time, however, he had Bradley with him, so he drove. It took longer to go down to the garage, strap Bradley in, and pull out onto busy Silver Strand Highway than it did to get to the base.
Going to the gym was one of the few things he liked to do alone, just for himself—but not anymore. It was another of the little changes he had to make in his life, with Wendy gone.
Security was tight on base—even the sticker on his windshield with the white star on blue background of a brigadier general didn’t help speed things up. Along with an ID check, Patrick’s car was checked underneath with a mirror, and the inside of the car from bumper to bumper was checked visually and also with a military working dog. Bradley liked the dog, and he enjoyed having his car seat sniffed by the dog after Patrick had to lift him up and out of his seat. After clearing security, he headed off to the gym. He checked Bradley into the base gym’s day-care center—one of Bradley’s favorite places to go, even for an hour or two— and changed into workout clothes in the locker room. Five minutes on the elliptical trainer, then five minutes on the stretching chair to warm up, and he was ready to go.
The news on the televisions surrounding the workout room was full of information on the Libyan attack on the Egyptian military forces defending Salimah. The death toll in just one day was simply staggering. Patrick had a tough time conceiving of the five thousand killed at Mersa Matruh, and now the deaths at Al-Jilf and Al-Kabir were probably going to triple that toll.
The toll that most likely included Wendy. Oh, God . .. That thought made him tear into his workout with a vengeance.
The tail end of the news reports focused on the American response to the attacks on Egypt—or, more accurately, the lack of response. There were two aircraft carriers with almost a hundred combat aircraft plus ten thousand U.S. Marines within helicopter distance of Egypt, yet the United States made no move to help. There were stem warnings to Libya not to use any more neutron weapons, that using them increased the danger of the conflict spreading and growing to a full-scale nuclear war in a short time—but the response was far short of what most folks expected of the President.
Well, Patrick thought, that was typical of this President—speak softly, but carry a big twig.
Soon, Patrick found he had disregarded his workout log completely and finally ended up just picking a weight from the racks, in some cases fifty percent more than he was able to throw around before, doing repetitions until he lost count, then continuing doing more reps until his muscles gave out completely. After twenty minutes of an absolutely blistering workout, finally something gave way in his left shoulder during an incline bench press, and he was forced to toss a seventy-pound dumbbell aside in pain.
“Are you all right, General McLanahan?” he heard behind him. He turned and saw Captain Fred Jackson, the commanding officer of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, standing behind him, a look of serious concern on his face. Jackson was a tall, powerful-looking ex-SEAL who still looked as if he could command a team on a mission—he sometimes worked out with Patrick in the gym or at the SEAL Training Facility across the street, and even though Patrick had been working out for many years and Jackson was at least five years older, Patrick found it impossible to keep up with him.
Patrick nodded. “I’m okay, Fred,” he said ruefully.
“My guys told me you were on the base, so I thought I’d stop by and say hello,” Jackson said. “I’ll get a corpsman to look at that shoulder for you.”
“Not necessary. I’ll just get some ice on it.” But Jackson was not accustomed to anyone saying “no” to him—he already had someone on the way. A few minutes later they were sitting down together, Patrick with a bag of ice on his shoulder.
“You upset about something, sir?” Jackson asked. “You looked like you were about ready to toss those dumbbells through the mirrors.”
“No—just cranky because I’m getting more and more of these little pains,” Patrick said.
“The price of getting old ... I mean older,” Jackson said.
Patrick nodded at the TV as well. “I don’t understand why we’re not doing more over in Egypt, and that’s upsetting me as much as my shoulder.”
“I expected you to be in Washington a
dvising the President on what to do,” Jackson said.
“Why do you say that?”
“According to what I’ve been reading, you’re still the number-one candidate for national security adviser,” the Navy SEAL said. “I thought you’d be out there in the thick of things, writing your policy papers, getting your classified briefings, and getting ready to testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee after your nomination.”
“So that’s why you’re over here looking me up, eh, Fred?” Patrick asked with a smile. “Thought you’d get a little face time with the rumored number-one guy?”
“Now, would I do that, sir?” he asked with a toothy grin. “Oh, by the way, I’m letting your son play in my office, I got him his own SEAL to watch him, and I brought in a gourmet chef from the Del to fix him lunch. Is that okay?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Fred, but I haven’t been anywhere near Washington or the White House in many moons, and I’m not likely to be,” Patrick said. “We don’t see eye to eye on much of anything.”
“Which is why all the pundits are saying you’re ‘it’— Thom likes surrounding himself with ideological opposites,” Jackson said. “You just remember your buddies who give you their tee times and let you fly your plane from their airstrips, the next time you talk to the President about the next chief of naval operations, okay?”
“Don’t hold your breath, Captain,” Patrick said with a laugh—his first laugh in many, many days.
“How’s the missus?” Jackson asked.
Patrick tried not to let his smile completely wash away. “Still away. She should be back in town next weekend.”
“Good. Can’t wait to see her again. You still owe my wife and me a rematch of our last golf match.”
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