Now, as Hunter watched the Moroccan troops, he felt another kind of military strategy take over. That of self-sacrifice …
Although he couldn’t believe it at first, he watched the Moroccans climb out of their trenches and, with bayonets on their rifles, walk out on the desert and toward the approaching multitude of enemy troops.
“Christ … ” Hunter said in awe of the Moroccans. He knew the advance was suicide, but there was nothing to be done. No airplanes from the carrier could take off in time to help them. Not that it would have done much, so overwhelming were the odds against the brave desert fighters. He knew the Moroccans believed strongly in freedom. They were the most vocal anti-Lucifer element in the flotilla. Now they were sacrificing themselves in order to sting the madman’s Legion.
“‘Into the jaws of Hell … ’” Hunter whispered. As he watched, the Moroccans slowly walked into the cloud of dust being raised by the approaching enemy troops. Soon the air crackled with the sound of gunfire. He could see explosions rising up as the two forces clashed. He could almost hear the cacophony of shouts that usually accompanies fierce hand-to-hand combat.
It was over in a matter of thirty minutes. He saw the Moroccans had stopped the Legion advance, at least temporarily. But he was also sure there were no Moroccan survivors.
Things got worse. Now there was a new threat on the horizon. He could see the smokestack trails of four major ships sailing up the Canal. These were the battleships. Above them flew an escort of at least two dozen Hinds.
“Fuck it,” Hunter said, climbing down from his perch. He was going to get airborne whether the 16 was ready or not.
Chapter 43
One by one the aircraft launched off the Saratoga. Many of the pilots knew it was for the last time. Hunter had assigned half the remaining jets to bomb and strafe the approaching Legion troops, the other half — his F-16 included — would take on the Hinds and the battleships.
The battle lasted for more than two hours. The swirling dogfight between the slow but maneuverable Hinds and the supersonic jet fighters was both incredible and bizarre. The missile-firing Soviet choppers got the worst of it, to be sure. But it had turned into another numbers game. Despite the best efforts of the fighter pilots, there were so many Hinds that some inevitably got through and were able to deliver devastating blows to the Saratoga and the frigates. Luckily, by this time the supertanker and the oiler had withdrawn further up the Canal.
Hunter was in the thick of it, blasting endless waves of choppers. When the opportunity presented itself, he strafed the lead battleship for good measure. The jets attacking the Legion ground troops had succeeded in mauling the soldiers to such a point they temporarily retreated. Now these planes joined the air battle above and around the carrier. But then, as if on cue, more Hinds appeared.
Hunter felt a chill run through him. There were just too many Hinds and they were attacking with suicidal ferocity.
Suddenly his radio crackled. “Flight Ops to F-16,” the caller said. Hunter instantly recognized it as Sir Neil.
“Go ahead, Flight Ops.”
“Hunter, we are really taking a beating here,” the British Commander began. “I can’t risk any more lives in this … ”
Hunter then waited for the words he thought he’d never hear from Sir Neil.
“I’m giving the order to abandon ship,” the Brit said slowly. Even through the impersonal radio speaker, the pain was evident in the man’s voice,
Hunter was stunned. He knew that, in the strictest military sense, the time to withdraw was long ago. But this was not a true battle in the strictest military sense. Wasn’t this a crusade? With a sense of purpose? How can one retreat from that?
But Hunter knew that Sir Neil was giving the order simply to stop the bloodshed. The Canal was now so blocked up with wreckage, both around Ismailia and at its southern entrance, that it would be a slow process indeed to move Lucifer’s huge fleet up and out of the waterway. The Saratoga’s mission was thus complete. Perhaps if The Modern Knights arrived on time, they would meet Lucifer’s ground forces just as they reached the northern end of the Canal, or even before that. Hunter knew the battle that would take place then would make this “holding action” look like a squirt-gun fight.
Sir Neil continued the transmission: “Can you hold them off until we get most of the people ashore, Hunter?”
“You can count on it,” Hunter replied.
So this is how it ends, the pilot thought, watching the sea battle continue in the narrow confines of the Canal. So typically British. Magnificence in defeat …
The word was passed on the carrier to evacuate. Now Heath’s job was to get everyone off. And quick. Emma, Clara, and the high-class call girls were the first to go, transported in life rafts to the western side of the waterway, where they were put under the protection of the combined Aussie-Gurkha force. The ship’s many wounded went next, then the surviving Italian, French and Spanish mercenaries, and then Yaz’s sailors.
Back in the air, Hunter knew his pilots were running low on fuel and ammo. In addition, the Legion troops had been reinforced, and now they had reached the area of the Canal opposite where the big ship lay. They began mortaring the carrier, despite two of the frigates blasting them with their deck guns.
In the course of two minutes, Hunter saw three more of his jets go down — whether by Hind air-to-air missiles or AA fire from the battleships, he never knew. Now he too felt as if he had tripped into the jaws of Hell.
Then he saw that even the evacuation was in jeopardy. Two of the battleships had been disabled by the fighters, but two were relatively healthy and were now steaming right toward the carrier. The huge guns began to open up on the flattop, one-ton projectiles splashing nearer and nearer to the carrier.
Between the battleships and the Legion troops pouring up the eastern shoreline, Hunter knew a “strategic withdrawal” was close to impossible.
That’s when he looked up and saw Lucifer’s face in the sky …
“Flight Commander, this is Eagle Strike Force Command aircraft, come in please.”
“Go ahead, Eagle,” Captain Crunch O’Malley answered, turning up the volume slightly on his F-4’s radio intercom.
“Flight, we have indications of aircraft at Two-Delta-Tango, your south heading zero-three-seven,” the voice from the KC-135 AWACs ship replied. “This puts some kind of activity in the vicinity of Ismailia, right on the Canal itself. Over.”
“I copy, Eagle Leader,” Crunch said, checking his position. They were now just over the deserted city of Cairo, the local pyramids casting strange shadows in the early afternoon sun. “Have you got a report on the situation at Alexandria yet?”
Crunch was at the head of a nine-aircraft convoy — three F-20s were directly behind him, as well as four C-130 gunships and KC-135 in flight tanker that was doubling as an AWACs plane. The airplanes, all belonging to the Pacific American Air Corps or their allies, were the force that General Jones had promised him when he had radioed the US less than a week earlier to report that Hunter might need help.
The Eagle Strike Force had set down on Majorca the day before. The crews had rested briefly, refueled, and took off early the next morning. Their destination: the Suez Canal.
It was an interesting flight. Shortly after taking off from Majorca, the members of the Eagle Strike Force passed over the devastated floating platform near the island of Panatella. They could only guess what had happened there, until they put down for a refueling stop on Malta. There, a man named Baldi told them how Hunter and the others had destroyed the flying-boat base and defeated the Sidra-Benghazi Gang.