“Unknown. Stand by,” Aldo answered. The radar on the AWACS could differentiate altitudes but had to change itsmode of operation and that took a few seconds, which Martin no longer had.
“Tallyho,” the colonel called. He could see the bandits high in the sky, still in front of him, silhouetted against the reddening dawn. He pulled back on the stick and climbed, hooking into the six o’clock of the nearest Flanker. He had hidden, now it was time to be quick. The Flanker was still four thousand feet above him when he hit the weapons select switch, bringing his radar out of standby. The radar did as it was commanded and locked on the nearest target. The symbology on the HUD switched to air-to-air and he followed the steering dot. The pipper centered on the target and he squeezed the trigger, sending a short burst of 20-millimeter into the Flanker.
Now he skidded violently to the left and did a Split S, heading back for the deck. Joe had to know he was out here now. “Splashed the bastard,” his wizzo told him, confirming that he had his fourth kill.
“Shit hot!” Martin shouted, not because he was one kill short of becoming an ace, but because his radar had just found two aircraft down on the deck below him. One of them had to be Joe. “One pass, haul ass,” Martin promised his backseater.
Johar’s head was twisted to the right as he scanned the sky above him, looking for the fighter that he knew was out there. He could see the falling dart of fire that had been a Flanker, the latest commander of Mosul. How many are out there? he wondered. Don’t panic, take them one at a time. They’ve got to find me. Now his radar warning gear growled at him. He glanced inside the cockpit and saw a single symbol for a fighter at his six o’clock position. “Samir,” he radioed, “bandit six o’clock, closing, no tally.”
“No tally,” Samir answered. They drove straight ahead and waited. Both men strained to see the fighter they knew was slashing down on them.
“Tallyho!” Johar shouted. He had finally seen the dark silhouette of Martin’s F-15 against the morning glow. “Turn and hook … Now,” Johar commanded. The “turn-and-hook” was a low-level tactic they had worked out while sitting standby alert. Since Johar had called for it, he would make a level turn to the right as low to the ground as possible. At the same time, Samir would reef into a hard climb, maintaining his airspeed. The goal was to make the attacker commit on one of them. It didn’t matter which.
“He’s on me,” Johar called, watching for a missile, extending his speed break and slowing below 200 knots. As expected, a Sidewinder leaped off the F-15 and tracked on him. At die same time, Samir was ruddering his bird over to hook into the fight from above. Johar watched the missile close. His left hand dropped behind the throttles and bounced off a big button, laying a string of flares and chaff behind him to decoy the missile while he honked back on the stick. His airspeed was below 140 knots. Now his tail was turning away from the missile, presenting a reduced heat signature for the missile to home on. His angle of attack increased to above forty units as the nose came up and he slowed even more. The missile homed on a flare.
Johar watched the F-15 do exactly as he had planned. The American pilot had obviously seen Samir coming down from above and had to think about disengaging. The F-15 headed directly for Johar and accelerated for one last snap shot with his gun — something to keep Johar occupied while he ran for safety. It would have worked beautifully with an average pilot.
Now Johar honked back even farther on the stick and the Flanker mushroomed above a thousand feet, its nose high in the air. It resembled the head of a cobra rearing back to strike. Now the F-15 pilot had no chance for a snap shot and was in full afterburner as he flashed by underneath Johar’s cobra, now disengaging, worried more about Samir. Johar had been counting on the American to see him as a sitting duck — a pilot who had let his airspeed decay and gotten himself into a stall while trying to avoid a missile.
But the Flanker was nowhere near a stall. Johar pushed the stick forward and retracted his speed brake. The nose of his Flanker dropped, the head of a cobra striking at its victim. Johar’s timing was perfect and he sent an R-60 dogfight missile at the escaping jet. The F-15 pilot saw the missile and jinked to the left. Then he turned harder to the left, keeping the missile and the two Flankers in sight. Flares popped out behind the Eagle. But the missile NATO called Archer ignored the flares and followed the F-15 through the turn. Itwas still accelerating when it flew up Martin’s left exhaust and exploded. The F-15 pitched into the ground.
“Samir, say position,” Johar radioed. He was in a left turn, orbiting the burning wreckage.
“At your six, joining on your right.” The two Flankers flew one 360-degree turn over the destroyed F-15. Johar tried to reconstruct the engagement from the dead pilot’s point of view to analyze the effectiveness of the turn-and-hook tactic. The American had engaged using hit-and-run tactics and opted to “hit” on him when it looked like Samir had zoomed out of the fight. Johar’s slow speed had tricked the American into closing for a guns solution after launching a Sidewinder. If the pilot had been less aggressive, not so sure of himself, and had turned away and disengaged immediately after launching the Sidewinder, he would still be alive. Would it work again? He didn’t know.
The radio crackled with commands from their ground controller, demanding they report in. “Go common,” Johar said, changing to a frequency where they would not be disturbed.
“What now?” Samir asked when they were established on the new frequency.
“Our controllers are worthless,” Johar said. He checked his fuel, thinking. The Flanker carried more than twenty-two thousand pounds of fuel internally and could stay airborne for long periods of time. “We know the corridor the Americans use,” Johar told his wingman. “Let’s wait for them to come to us.”
Michael Cagliari and General Cox were huddled over the Teletype operator in the small room that housed the Hot Line to the Kremlin. After being off-line for days, the machine was spitting out a message. Someone in the Kremlin wanted to talk to the Americans. The Teletype operator was fluent in Russian and read out the text a line at a time as it scrolled up. “Get another translator,” he told his supervisor. The woman motioned for another Teletype operator to read the message. The two men conferred, wanting to be absolutely sure they had it right. An English language translation of the message started to type out. “The Russians want to be sure we don’t botch the translation,” the first operator said.
“Acknowledge receipt,” Cagliari said. “Write your translation down and get it to me.” He picked up the originalcopies and hurried into the Situation Room while Cox called the hospital to tell the President that the Hot Line was up and that the newest leader of the Kremlin wanted to talk to him. Then he followed Cagliari into the Situation Room.
The secretary of state was reading the message out loud to Bobby Burke. He carefully laid the message down when he was finished. “What do you think?” he asked Burke.
“Obviously, we don’t know what’s on his mind, but it’s not going to be good. Count on it.”
The message was from Marshal Grigori Fydor Stenilov, now general secretary of the Communist party and the leading hard-liner in the Soviet Union.
Levy was leading what was left of his tanks and APCs down a hollow that opened onto the main valley floor. When he saw movement in the gap in front of him, he ordered his tanks to disperse to both sides and hide, hoping whatever was out there had not seen them and would slip by. Levy didn’t want to be trapped short of the jumping-off point for their breakout. Halaby guided the tank up a low ridge, heading for concealment on the other side. “GO!” Levy shouted. The movement had turned into three T-72s and the lead tank had seen them.