“One more flyboy visits Nazareth,” Dawg told an invisible audience.
The city sprawled out of a deep bowl, covering the surrounding hillsides with shabby high-rises and haphazard slums.
Every caution light in the cockpit seemed to go off at once. Dawg punched out the flares and switched on the active countermeasures. Nothing else to be done. They had him. It was going to be allemissions, all-the-time now. And some wicked metal.
An explosion rocked the aircraft.
They were still flying.
Come on, baby. Gimme some juice. Let’s go, sweetheart.
The aircraft shook as if a furious giant had crunched it in his fist and meant to shake out any loose change.
His helmet display died.
Just fly, he told himself.
Had to get more altitude. Take that risk. Or he was going to plow a field for Farmer John. Dawg could see the Haifa Gap and, as he climbed, he glimpsed the sea beyond. But he was speeding down a broken road on four flat tires.
The aircraft began to go to bits around him.
Not going to make it, ladies and gents.
He pulled back on the stick until it refused to go any further, altering course to head straight for the Carmel Ridges. Struggling to hold the aircraft together for just a few more seconds. Through sheer willpower. And praying the ejection mechanism was still in working order.
As Dawg pulled high, he imagined his wings coming off. Or maybe it wasn’t his imagination. He tried to level off to eject. But the aircraft was unstable, uncontrollable now, gimp-twitching.
He punched out. It felt like going through an automobile windshield at a thousand miles an hour. Yank on the neck. His shoulder took a whack.
A reassuring jerk told him his chute had opened.
“The Americans are attacking! With aircraft. They’re everywhere!”
Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi remained calm. Someone had to remain calm. The excitability of his staff filled him with a cold, white anger. Would Arabs never learn discipline?
“With
“Yes, yes! Everywhere at once.”
“Then they’re fools. Shoot them down.”
“We
“Then we’ve been surprised twice in three days. When will we stop being surprised?”
The chief of staff calmed down. Slightly. “
“But first you will shoot their aircraft from the sky — am I correct?”
“Allah expects us to help. Go back and learn what is truly happening. Their aircraft are not ‘everywhere.’ Are they here, then? Why do I not hear their bombs?”
“I mean to say… that they are attacking at many places. Not everywhere.”
“Find out
“Yes, my brother. I only meant—”
“I am not your brother. I’m your commanding officer. If you cannot do your job, another can.”
“Yes, General.”
“Now leave me.”
When he was alone again, Abdul al-Ghazi, the sector commander, thought of two things. First, he thought that he would have very little time to redeem the general situation before the rage of his own superior, Emir- General al-Mahdi, fell upon him. Second, he wondered if the reports that the Crusaders had already reached the suburbs of Jerusalem were true. If that were so, al-Mahdi’s anger might be uncontrollable.
Al-Ghazi prided himself on being a professional soldier, trained in the old Jordanian fashion, as well as being a soldier of jihad. And al-Mahdi worried him. Clearly, Allah had touched al-Mahdi with a kind of genius. But al-Mahdi had been touched with madness, too. He could not escape the thrall of the past, and he saw everything through the lens of history, as if there could never be anything new in war or this war-torn landscape. Al-Mahdi’s plan of defense had been built upon bleeding the Americans, on the assumption that they would not bear great casualties. But all the reports from the Jerusalem front told of masses of dead and of relentless attacks over corpses.
Was this to be the end of civilization? With the Crusaders returned to rule with fire and sword?
The incompetence in his own ranks outraged him. And he couldn’t fully trust al-Mahdi’s judgment. Hadn’t any of them learned that the way to fight Westerners wasn’t by fighting in the Western way? Despite his formal training, al-Ghazi had little faith in mechanized infantry battalions and tank brigades, in the end. You had to strike the Crusaders where they were weak, not where they were strong.
Still, he was a soldier. He would carry out the mission he had been given. He would make the Crusaders pay a terrible price for staining the soil of the emirate with their boots.
But a part of him asked again: Was this to be the end of civilization? One of the orders given to him bit into his blood like a viper. Would nothing be left for which praise might be offered to Allah? Would the Crusaders destroy everything?
Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi did not mean to let that happen. No matter what strange measures might be required.
He pushed an old-fashioned button on his desk. A moment later, an aide-de-camp appeared.
“Go,” al-Ghazi told him, “but go quietly, and learn if my instructions have been carried out regarding the American taken in Nazareth.”
The explosions in the Jenin assembly area continued for an hour after the last of the Crusader planes had departed. No one had been prepared, too much had been done in haste. Stocks of ammunition rent the earth and tore the sky as they exploded. Vehicles burned, and men burned as well. A blackened man with no arms ran about madly, white teeth gleaming where his lips had been, until he dropped over dead.
“We have been betrayed,” Colonel al-Masri told his deputy. It was the only idea that came to him. Saying it aloud made him feel better.
A lone F/A-18 landed on the strip at the old British airfield on Cyprus. And then there was nothing.
Major Jenks climbed out of his cockpit, followed by his weapons systems officer. Down on the apron, the two of them just bent over, hands on their knees. As if about to vomit.
One aircraft out of seven. Lieutenant Colonel Randall “Wicked” Wilkes, the group’s XO, decided, with galling bitterness, that the blue-suiters had been right. It was impossible to send manned aircraft into that electronic stew.
Wilkes watched as Jenks sat down on the tarmac and buried his face in his hands. The XO decided to give him one more minute, after which he would tell him to get up, grow up, and act like a Marine.
One crew out of seven. Jenks was a lucky bastard. Him and his goddamned buddy on the self-pity express.
Then a miracle occurred. Four dots appeared in the heavens. Moments later, four F/A-18s flew over the airfield in perfect formation, taking a victory lap. They disappeared, reappeared, and came down one after the other, clean as if they were landing at an air show.
“Get on the link to General Morris,” the XO shouted. Then he lowered his voice again. But he couldn’t stop
