tended to operate at twenty thousand feet and up. He wanted to skirt the Iraqi town of Al Kut to its north, then head straight for the safety of the Iranian border at its nearest point.
That morning, at that hour, Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Al Kharz was leading a flight of four Strike Eagles north toward Al Kut, his mission to bomb a major river bridge over the Tigris across which Republican Guard tanks had been caught by a J-STAR heading south for Kuwait.
The 336th had spent much of its war on night missions, but the bridge north of Al Kut would be a “quick fix,” meaning there was no time to lose if Iraqi tanks were using it to head south. So the bombing raid that morning had the coding “Jeremiah directs”: General Chuck Horner wanted it done, and now.
The Eagles were loaded with two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs and air-to-air missiles. Because of the positioning of the bomb-attachment pylons beneath the wings of the Eagle, the load was asymmetric, the bombs on one side being heavier than the Sparrow missiles on the other. It was called the bastard load. Automatic trim control compensated for this, but it was still not the load most pilots would choose to have hanging underneath them in a dogfight.
As the MiGs, now down to five hundred feet and skimming the landscape, approached from the west, the Eagles were coming up from the south, eighty miles away.
The first indication that Abdelkarim Badri had of their presence was a low warbling in his ears. His brother behind him did not know what it was, but the fighter pilots knew. The trainer MiG was in the lead, the four juniors strung out behind him in a loose V formation. They all heard it too.
The warbling came from their RWR—radar warning receiver. It meant there were other radars up there somewhere, sweeping the sky.
The four Eagles had their radars in the search mode, the beams running out ahead of them to see what was there. The Soviet radar warning receivers had picked up these beams and were telling their pilots.
There was nothing the MiGs could do but keep going. At five hundred feet they were well below the Eagles and heading across the Eagles’
projected track.
At sixty miles, the warbling in the Iraqi pilots’ ears rose to a shrill bleep. That meant the RWRs were telling them: Someone out there has gone out of search mode and is locked onto you.
Behind Don Walker, his wizzo Tim saw the change in his radar’s attitude. From a gentle side-to-side scan, the American radars had gone to lock-on, narrowing their beams and concentrating on what they had found.
“We have five unidentifieds, ten o’clock low,” the wizzo muttered, and engaged IFF. The other three wizzos in the flight did the same.
Identification Friend or Foe is a sort of transponder carried by all combat airplanes. It sends out a pulse on certain frequencies, which are changed daily. Warplanes on the same side will receive this pulse and reply: “I am a friend.” Enemy aircraft cannot do so. The five blips on the radar screen crossing the track of the Eagles miles ahead and close to the ground might have been five friendlies coming back from a mission—more than likely, since there were far more Allied aircraft in the skies than Iraqis.
Tim questioned the unidentifieds on modes one, two, and four. No response.
“Hostiles,” he reported. Don Walker flicked his missile switches to Radar, muttered, “Engage,” to his other three pilots, dropped the nose, and headed down.
Abdelkarim Badri was at a disadvantage, and he knew it. He knew it from the moment the Americans locked onto him. He knew without any IFF to tell him that these other aircraft could not possibly be fellow Iraqis. He knew he had been spotted by hostiles, and he knew his young colleagues would be no match for them.
His disadvantage lay in the MiG he flew. Because it was the trainer version, the only type with two seats, it was never destined for combat.
Colonel Badri’s radar had only a sixty-degree sweep out of the nose.
He could not see who had locked onto him.
“What do you have?” he barked at his wingman. The reply was breathless and frightened.
“Four hostiles, three o’clock high, diving fast.”
So the gamble had failed. The Americans were bucketing down the sky from the south, intent on blowing them all out of the air.
“Scatter, dive, go to afterburner, head for Iran!” he shouted.
The young pilots needed no second bidding. From the jet pipes of each MiG a blast of flame leaped backward as the four throttles went through the gate, punching the fighters through the sound barrier and almost doubling their speed.
Despite the huge increase in fuel consumption, the single-seaters could keep their afterburners going long enough to evade the Americans and still reach Iran. Their head start on the Eagles meant the Americans would never catch them, even though they too would now be in afterburn.
Abdelkarim Badri had no such option. In making their trainer version, the Soviet engineers had not only fitted a simpler radar, but to accommodate the weight of the student and his cockpit, they had considerably reduced the internal fuel capacity.
The fighter colonel was carrying underwing long-range fuel tanks, but these would not be enough. He had four choices. It took him no more than two seconds to work them out.
He could go to afterburner, escape the Americans, and return to an Iraqi base, there to be arrested and handed over sooner or later to the AMAM for torture and death.
He could engage afterburner and continue for Iran, evading the Americans but running out of fuel soon after crossing the border. Even if he and his brother ejected safely, they would fall among the Persian tribesmen who had suffered so horribly in the Iran-Iraq war from the cargos dropped on them by Iraqi aviators.
He could use the afterburner to avoid the Eagles, then fly south to eject over Saudi Arabia and become a prisoner. It never occurred to him that he would be treated humanely.
There were some lines that came into his head from long ago, lines from a poem he had learned at Mr. Hartley’s school in that Baghdad of his boyhood. Tennyson? Wordsworth? No, Macaulay, that was it, Macaulay, something about a man in his last moments, something he had read out in class.
To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?
Badri pushed his throttle through the gate into afterburner, hauled the MiG Fulcrum into a climbing turn, and went up to meet the oncoming Americans.
As soon as he turned, the four Eagles came into his radar range. Two had scattered, racing down after the fleeing single-seaters, all of them with afterburner engaged, all beyond the sound barrier.
But the leader of the Americans was coming straight down and at him.
Badri felt the shudder as the Fulcrum went supersonic, adjusted the control column a fraction, and went for the diving Eagle ahead of him.
“Christ, he’s coming straight at us!” said Tim from the rear seat.
Walker did not need to be told. His own radar screen showed him the four vanishing blips of the Iraqi aircraft fleeing for Iran and the single glow of the enemy fighter climbing toward him to engage. The rangefinder was unwinding like an alarm clock out of control. At thirty miles, they were hurtling toward each other at a closing speed of 2,200 miles per hour. He still could not see the Fulcrum visually, but it would not be long.
In the MiG, Colonel Osman Badri was totally bewildered. He had understood nothing of what had happened. The sudden thump of the afterburner engaging had hit him in the small of the back again, and the seven-G turn had caused him to black out for several seconds.
“What is happening?” he shouted into his mask, but he was unaware that the mute button was on, so his brother could not hear him.
