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.