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 still 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.
Matt sat on a small table against the back wall of the command post at Ramat David Air Base. His hands clutched at the edge, knuckles white. The command post was mostly silent as mission reports filtered in; two F-16s lost, two safely recovered. Then Ramon’s operations report came in; Dave Harkabi last seen engaging two Flankers, his wingman reported hit and ejecting. “Damn,” he muttered. Matt had liked the Israeli major.
“Have you seen enough?” the colonel asked.
He nodded and stood up, ready to leave. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “You never told me your name.”
The woman looked at him. “Harkabi.” Matt was stunned, not knowing what to say. But the woman was too young to be Dave’s mother and too old to be his wife. “David is my nephew,” she said. “I’ve got to tell his mother.”
Outside, Matt took a breath of cool night air and looked up at the scattered cloud deck scudding across the sky. Damn, Dave, he thought, you were good. I know. I flew against you enough times and you should’ve been able to disengage from two ragheads. And the Flanker isn’t any better than the F-16.
Then another thought hit him. Or was it?
His first stop after he left Ramat David was Shoshana’s apartment in Haifa. He was disappointed but not surprised when she wasn’t home. “Lillian, will you please see Shoshana gets this?” He handed Shoshana’s aunt his Nomex flight suit. Lillian looked at him, not understanding. “It’s fireproof,” he explained, “like a tanker’s jump suit. Her fatigues aren’t and this might protect her.” He was thinking of the burned-out tank and the charred body he had seen.
Lillian nodded and took the flight suit. “Matt, take care and come back. She needs you.”
Matt gave her his lopsided grin. “I know. I’ll be back.”
“Shalom.”
The road south to Tel Aviv was clogged with trucks and vans of every description. Northbound traffic had priority and it took Matt five hours to cover the sixty miles to Ben Gurion. He used the time to take extensive notes, counting the number of trucks and types of equipment. He took pride in the number of new tanks and Bradleys that were moving forward, their United States insignias freshly painted over. MAC was moving cargo. Then he noticed the troops. Many of them were women, some still girls, wearing combat gear and carrying weapons.