“Right, noted,” said the mission commander. In most airplanes the pilot is the captain and in complete charge. In an AWACS the pilot has that charge for the safety of the airplane, but the mission commander calls the shots when it comes to giving orders across the air.
“But sir,” protested the sergeant, “Bluejay Leader spoke in clear. Gave the mission target. Shall I RTB them all?”
“Negative, mission continues,” said the controller. “Carry on.”
The sergeant returned to his console completely bewildered. This was madness: If the Iraqis had heard that transmission, their air defenses at Tikrit East would be on full alert.
Then he heard Walker again.
“Bluejay Leader, Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Ejecting.”
He was still speaking in clear. The Iraqis, if they were listening, could have heard it all.
In fact, the sergeant was right—the messages had been heard. At Tikrit
East the gunners were hauling their tarpaulins off their triple-A, and the heat-seeking missiles were waiting for the sound of incoming engines. Other units were being alerted to go at once to the area of the lake to search for two downed aircrew.
“Sir, Bluejay Leader is down. We have to RTB the rest of them.”
“Noted. Negative,” said the mission commander. He glanced at his watch. He had his orders. He did not know why, but he would obey them.
Bluejay Flight was by then nine minutes from target, heading into a reception committee. The three pilots rode their Eagles in stony silence.
In the AWACS the sergeant could still see the blip of Bluejay Leader, way down over the surface of the lake. Clearly the Eagle had been abandoned and would crash at any moment.
Four minutes later, the mission commander appeared to change his mind.
“Bluejay Flight, AWACS to Bluejay Flight, RTB, I say again RTB.”
The three Strike Eagles, despondent at the night’s events, peeled away from their course and set heading for home. The Iraqi gunners at Tikrit East, deprived of radar, waited in vain for another hour.
In the southern fringes of the Jebal al Hamreen another Iraqi listening post had heard the interchange. The signals colonel in charge was not tasked with alerting Tikrit East or any other air base to approaching enemy aircraft. His sole job was to ensure none entered the Jebal.
As Bluejay Flight turned over the lake, he had gone to amber alert; the track from the lake to the air base would have taken the Eagles along the southern fringe of the range. When one of them crashed, he was delighted; when the other three peeled away to the south, he was relieved. He stood his alert down.
Don Walker had spiraled down to the surface of the lake until he levelled at one hundred feet and made his Mayday call. As he skimmed the waters of As Sa’diyah, he punched in his new coordinates and turned north into the Jebal. At the same time he went to LANTIRN, with whose aid he could look through his canopy and see the landscape ahead of him, clearly lit by the infrared beam being emitted from beneath his wing.
Columns of information on his Head-Up Display were now giving him course and speed, height, and time to Launch Point.
He could have gone to automatic pilot, allowing the computer to fly the Eagle, throwing it down the canyons and the valleys, past the cliffs and hillsides, while the pilot kept his hands on his thighs. But he preferred to stay on manual and fly it himself.
With the aid of recon photos supplied by the Black Hole, he had plotted a course up through the range that never let him come above the skyline. He stayed low, hugging the valley floors, swerving from gap to gap, a roller- coaster zigzag course that carried him upward into the range toward the Fortress.
When Walker made his Mayday call, Mike Martin’s radio had squawked out a series of preagreed blips. Martin had crawled forward to the ledge above the valley, aimed the infrared target marker at the tarpaulin a thousand yards away, settled the red dot onto the dead center of the target, and now kept it there.
The blips on the radio had meant “seven minutes to bomb launch,” and from then on Martin was not to move the red spot by an inch.
“About time,” muttered Eastman. “I’m bloody freezing in here.”
“Not long,” said Stephenson, cramming the last bits and pieces into his Bergen. “Then you’ll have all the running you want, Benny.”
Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.
In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ...
the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. “Ninety seconds to launch
...”
The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.
The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedo-shaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.
In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.
The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.
Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun.
He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.
The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch lever. He never made it.
Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.
“Bloody hellfire,” whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.
Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135 degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.
It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot.
For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched. These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had—Franco-German Rolands.
The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet’s tail behind it.
Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.
“Eject, eject ...”
The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting
