injected the drug.
What an idiot, Vasilyeva thought. She had bribed a Tripoli drug pusher to spread her name around as a trained nurse and anesthesiologist; she had been admitted to the residence almost immediately. Zuwayy liked whores and he liked heroin-he was a slave to both. But apparently he disliked having his nurses and his whores around for too long, so he usually had them killed after about a week in the residence.
That was not going to happen to Vasilyeva.
The drug she had administered was not heroin but thiopental sodium, an ultra-fast-acting, short-duration sedative. Zuwayy was not unconscious, just very relaxed. Vasilyeva removed the rubber tube from his arm and swabbed the injection site. 'Do you feel all right, Highness?'
'You can leave me now.'
'Not quite yet, Highness. Where is the female American prisoner, the one called McLanahan, and the other American prisoners?'
'The American spies? In my interrogation facility.'
'Which ones? Where?'
'Who are you, woman? Why do you care about the Americans?'
'I'm here to take care of your problem with the Americans, if you just tell me where they are.'
'I don't care to tell you.'
Vasilyeva had to remember to be patient. Thiopental sodium, also known by its brand name Sodium Pentothal, was just a mild sedative, not the much-vaunted 'truth serum' fiction writers made it out to be. If the subject didn't want to talk, thiopental sodium couldn't make them do it. Eventually, however, she could get the information from him. She needed to learn a little more about his peccadilloes, fantasies, fears, and weaknesses. One or two more days and she would have him eating out of her hand.
She prepared a small dose of heroin and, as expertly as the first time, injected it into a vein, 'jacking it off' by drawing blood into the syringe in and out several times before injecting it all into his arm.
He looked at Vasilyeva with half-closed, dreamy eyes. 'Are you going to kill me now?' he asked.
'I have no such orders, unless you resisted,' she said.
'Good. I was hoping to get rid of those damned Americans anyway-I should've shipped them off to Mersa Matruh and had them zapped with the neutron bombs along with the others.'
'How very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh with a neutron weapon? It wasn't an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or Hizb'allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was you?'
'Sure. I wasn't going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did the Americans too.'
'Of course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?'
'Pretty good scam, wasn't it? I've got half the world believing I'm a fucking god. It's priceless. Some fools will believe anything you tell them as long as they think they'll get something good out of it.'
'How clever of you. What will you do now, Highness?'
'Attack Egypt, again,' Zuwayy said. 'That bitch Salaam won't back me with the oil cartel, so I'm going to have to destroy Salimah. Actually, not destroy it-just Jhe workers. I'll keep the oil fields for myself. I've got enough troops to take the whole southern part of Egypt.' 'Did you already give the order to attack?' 'Yes. And that cowardly bastard Fazani better follow my orders too.'
She picked up the phone beside the lounger. 'Call off the attack, Zuwayy. Killing all those workers won't get you any closer to the oil.' But he had already drifted off into his drug-induced world, oblivious to the real one.
As soon as the three fighters lit their afterburners, the copilot started counting: 'Talaeta, itnen, waehid… daeyikh!' The pilot released brakes and slowly moved the throttles up to full military power, let them stabilize a few seconds, then pushed the throttles into afterburner zone. He waited for the inevitable kohha-the 'cough'-as the old fuel valves struggled to keep raw fuel flowing into the afterburner cans. Half the time, especially if the pilot advanced the throttles too fast, a valve stuck or failed and the afterburner would blow out completely. But it didn't happen this time-the nozzles opened, the fuel-flow needles jumped, and the Libyan Tupolev-22 bomber leapt down the runway. Six seconds behind him, the second Tu-22 bomber began its takeoff roll.
A third bomber wasn't so lucky-both of its Dobrynin RD-7M-2 turbojet engines' afterburners blew out seconds after engagement. The pilot quickly yanked the throttles back to military power and tried once more to light the afterburners, inching the throttles up over the detent in slow, careful increments. But it was no use, and the third Tu-22 bomber aborted the takeoff, its screeching, smoking brakes barely managing to stop the two-hundred- thousand-pound bomber before it rolled off the end of the runway.
Libyan air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles jumping wildly in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be, contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a ten-year veteran of the Al Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al Libya, was the Libyan air force's most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you were hardly out of flight school-in Libya, surviving that many hours usually meant a promotion. Tupolev- 22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs-they routinely cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even that ratio wasn't enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and inflight emergency in a Tu-22, but had never crashed one. That made him top dog in the Libyan air force.
'Sahra flight, check.'
'Two,' his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff, and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.
'Dufda flight, Sahra flight checking in.'
'Sahra flight, acknowledged,' the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoyan-23 fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern Libya just ahead of the bombers and were already at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. 'No contact yet, but we expect company any minute.'
Just ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising at nearly the speed Of sound across the northern Libyan Desert.
But they were not low enough for Egypt's main air defense system-a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The powerful I radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian alert fighters-a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from three different bases in central and southern Egypt.
'Sahra, Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing,' the lead pilot of the MiG- 23 fighter escorts reported.
'Sahra flight copies,' Talhi responded. 'Sahra flight, go to point nine.' The pilot pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty knots-eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.
Talhi's copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot's seat swiveled around the rear compartment so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the remote-controlled 23- millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. 'At least two fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast,' Birish reported. Thankfully Talhi had his unit's most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn't saying much-systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the bombers themselves than pilots. 'India-band search radar-Mirage 2000s.'
'Don't tell me-tell our fighters!' Talhi shouted. Birish got on the command radio and frantically passed along the information. He pushed the bomber's nose down even farther. The terrain was flat and rolling, so terrain wasn't a problem-but the waves and waves of heat swirling up from the desert floor created turbulence so bad that it felt
