Wings Of Fire

by Dale Brown

  "Good day, 'King,'" Susan said, making an exaggerated bow. "Don't worry about your people-they will be perfectly happy in Egypt. Where do you think you'll be headed next? I think Brazil is nice this time of year."

  "Get out!" Zuwayy cried out. "And I'd make sure you know where your bomb shelters are in Cairo-you'll need them!" Salaam and Baris departed, with Shafik backing toward the door right behind them, her right hand invisible under her jacket. "I want her dead, Fazani!" Zuwayy shouted after they departed.

  "You can't kill Salaam now, Jadallah-she's more popular than God right now," Fazani said. "If anyone finds out you put out a contract on her, we won't even be able to hide in Brazil. We'll have to live in Antarctica."

  "I don't want a piece of Salimah anymore-I want the whole damned thing destroyed!" Zuwayy shouted. "That American bitch has insulted me for the last time!" His eyes spun wildly as he thought. "Launch the attack immediately."

  "Jadallah, only a few hundred of the twenty thousandplus Libyans working there now have returned," Hijazi said. "You can't attack now! We'd be slaughtering our own people!"

  "No! Launch the attack immediately!" he shouted. "Do it. Let Queen Salaam be the ruler of the largest graveyard in Africa."

  Jadallah Zuwayy stomped off to his private residence, kicking furniture and individuals out of his way with equal fury. "How dare she?" he shouted as he slammed the door to his apartment closed. "How dare that bitch spit in my face like that? Who does she think she is?"

  "Who, my lord?" a woman's thickly accented voice asked behind him.

  "An Egyptian whore that has the unmitigated balls to tell me what to do!"

  The woman approached him, naked, holding a crystal glass of thick, potent arkasus, or licorice brandy, in one hand, and a silver tray with a linen napkin covering it. He tossed down the brandy in one gulp. She set the tray down on a nightstand beside a lounge sofa, then kissed the back of his neck and started to massage his shoulders. "Why don't you just eliminate this Egyptian whore, my lord?" the woman asked.

  "Because she was just elected president of the Muslim Brotherhood, and she is a guest in my country," Zuwayy said. "Do you know nothing of Arab culture, Russian?"

  Ivana Vasilyeva felt for the knot of bone at the base of Zuwayy's long, scrawny neck, then counted the right number of vertebrae up-right there. Snap that bone and Zuwayy would become a helpless lump of flesh on the floor, unable to do anything-except feel pain. But she simply continued her massage. "Forgive me, my lord," Vasilyeva said. "You must instruct me about your country and all its customs."

  Zuwayy turned, ran a hand roughly over a nipple, then pinched it, hard. Vasilyeva opened her mouth in a half-yelp of pain and half-moan of pleasure. "The first lesson is: Women must learn to be subservient," Zuwayy said. "You are nothing but bleeding, whining creatures who respond better to the lash than to reason or reality. The quicker you understand this, the happier your life will be."

  "Yes, master," Vasilyeva said.

  Zuwayy kissed her lips roughly, released her nipple, then lay down on the lounger. He rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. "You were recommended to me because you had a unique talent. Show me. And if you disappoint me, you shall pay dearly for it."

  "I understand, master." Vasilyeva removed the linen napkin from the tray, revealing a hypodermic syringe and a rubber hose. She wrapped the hose around Zuwayy's biceps, kissed his right hand, then curled his fingers for him, silently telling him to make a fist. Zuwayy never felt the needle slip into his vein; never felt a thing as Vasilyeva injected the drug.

  What an idiot, Vasilyeva thought. She had bribed a Tripoli drug pusher to spread her name around as a trained nurse and anesthesiologist; she had been admitted to the residence almost immediately. Zuwayy liked whores and he liked heroin-he was a slave to both. But apparently he disliked having his nurses and his whores around for too long, so he usually had them killed after about a week in the residence.

  That was not going to happen to Vasilyeva.

  The drug she had administered was not heroin but thiopental sodium, an ultra-fast-acting, short-duration sedative. Zuwayy was not unconscious, just very relaxed. Vasilyeva removed the rubber tube from his arm and swabbed the injection site. "Do you feel all right, Highness?"

  "You can leave me now."

  "Not quite yet, Highness. Where is the female American prisoner, the one called McLanahan, and the other American prisoners?"

  "The American spies? In my interrogation facility."

  "Which ones? Where?"

  "Who are you, woman? Why do you care about the Americans?"

  "I'm here to take care of your problem with the Americans, if you just tell me where they are."

  "I don't care to tell you."

  Vasilyeva had to remember to be patient. Thiopental sodium, also known by its brand name Sodium Pentothal, was just a mild sedative, not the much-vaunted "truth serum" fiction writers made it out to be. If the subject didn't want to talk, thiopental sodium couldn't make them do it. Eventually, however, she could get the information from him. She needed to learn a little more about his peccadilloes, fantasies, fears, and weaknesses. One or two more days and she would have him eating out of her hand.

  She prepared a small dose of heroin and, as expertly as the first time, injected it into a vein, "jacking it off' by drawing blood into the syringe in and out several times before injecting it all into his arm.

  He looked at Vasilyeva with half-closed, dreamy eyes. "Are you going to kill me now?" he asked.

  "I have no such orders, unless you resisted," she said.

  "Good. I was hoping to get rid of those damned Americans anyway-I should've shipped them off to Mersa Matruh and had them zapped with the neutron bombs along with the others."

  "How very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh with a neutron weapon? It wasn't an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or Hizb'allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was you?"

  "Sure. I wasn't going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did the Americans too."

  "Of course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?"

  "Pretty good scam, wasn't it? I've got half the world believing I'm a fucking god. It's priceless. Some fools will believe anything you tell them as long as they think they'll get something good out of it."

  "How clever of you. What will you do now, Highness?"

  "Attack Egypt, again," Zuwayy said. "That bitch Salaam won't back me with the oil cartel, so I'm going to have to destroy Salimah. Actually, not destroy it-just Jhe workers. I'll keep the oil fields for myself. I've got enough

  troops to take the whole southern part of Egypt." "Did you already give the order to attack?" "Yes. And that cowardly bastard Fazani better follow my orders too."

  She picked up the phone beside the lounger. "Call off the attack, Zuwayy. Killing all those workers won't get you any closer to the oil." But he had already drifted off into his drug-induced world, oblivious to the real one.

  SURT AIR BASE, NORTHERN LIBYA THE NEXT EVENING

  As soon as the three fighters lit their afterburners, the copilot started counting: "Talaeta, itnen, waehid. . . daeyikh!" The pilot released brakes and slowly moved the throttles up to full military power, let them stabilize a few seconds, then pushed the throttles into afterburner zone. He waited for the inevitable kohha-the "cough"-as the old fuel valves struggled to keep raw fuel flowing into the afterburner cans. Half the time, especially if the pilot advanced the throttles too fast, a valve stuck or failed and the afterburner would blow out completely. But it didn't happen this time-the nozzles opened, the fuel-flow needles jumped, and the Libyan Tupolev-22 bomber leapt down the runway. Six seconds behind him, the second Tu-22 bomber began its takeoff roll.

  A third bomber wasn't so lucky-both of its Dobrynin RD-7M-2 turbojet engines' afterburners blew out seconds after engagement. The pilot quickly yanked the throttles
back to military power and tried once more to light the afterburners, inching the throttles up over the detent in slow, careful increments. But it was no use, and the third Tu-22 bomber aborted the takeoff, its screeching, smoking brakes barely managing to stop the two-hundred-thousand-pound bomber before it rolled off the end of the runway.

  Libyan air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles jumping wildly

  in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be, contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a ten-year veteran of the Al Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al Libya, was the Libyan air force's most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you were hardly out of flight school-in Libya, surviving that many hours usually meant a promotion. Tupolev-22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs-they routinely cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even that ratio wasn't enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and inflight emergency in a Tu-

  22, but had never crashed one. That made him top dog in the Libyan air force.

  "Sahra flight, check."

  "Two," his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff, and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.

  "Dufda flight, Sahra flight checking in."

  "Sahra flight, acknowledged," the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoyan-23 fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern Libya just ahead of the bombers and were already at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. "No contact yet, but we expect company any minute."

  Just ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising at nearly the speed Of sound across the northern Libyan Desert.

  But they were not low enough for Egypt's main air defense system-a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The powerful I radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian alert fighters-a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from three different bases in central and southern Egypt.

  "Sahra, Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing," the lead pilot of the MiG-23 fighter escorts reported.

  "Sahra flight copies," Talhi responded. "Sahra flight, go to point nine." The pilot pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty knots-eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.

  Talhi's copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot's seat swiveled around the rear compartment so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the remote-controlled 23-millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. "At least two fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast," Birish reported. Thankfully Talhi had his unit's most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn't saying much-systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the bombers themselves than pilots. "India-band search radar-Mirage 2000s."

  "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 aimpoint-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 milescoming 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 lined 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 loc
ked 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 Bury as' 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 thenbelly, and when it blasted free, it seemed as if a fiery spear from Allah himself had just missed them. •