as if they were riding a dune buggy across a mountain of rocks. The twenty-year-old ex-Soviet bomber's aged fuselage shrieked in protest with every bump.
'They're closing in fast,' Birish shouted. 'They're right on us-the E-2 Hawkeye radar plane must be vectoring them in.'
'Five minutes thirty seconds to go,' Talhi's bombardier, Captain Masad Montessi, shouted on intercom. 'Hold steady for fifteen seconds.'
'Fifteen seconds? Better make it quicker than that, navigator!'
'I said fifteen seconds, or at this speed we'll be lost and flying over downtown Cairo before we know it!' Montessi shouted back. He was in a tiny compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber below the pilot, with only a ten- inch RBP-4 Rubin navigation radar, an optical bomb sight between his legs, some mechanical flight computers, a compass, a Doppler radar system, and two small windows. He had just finished laying his crosshairs on a small mountain peak ten miles ahead, then changed to the second aimpoint-another peak on the other side of courseline.
The crosshairs were off just a small amount. He doublechecked his aiming on the first aimpoint, switched back to the second, verified the aimpoint, then moved the crosshairs on the second peak using a large tracking handle he called the 'goat turd.' As soon as he moved the crosshairs, he could hear the clack-clack-clacking of the mechanical navigation computer as it updated itself. He switched back to the first aimpoint, and the crosshairs rested right on it-all of the heading and velocity errors in the system had been corrected. 'You're clear to maneuver! Go! Go!'
'Sahra flight! Take tactical spacing! Lead is maneuvering south!' Talhi executed a quick turn to the south, rolled out momentarily, then executed a tighter turn around a very short valley. He wasn't going any lower, so left and right maneuvering was all he had to escape the Egyptian pursuers.
No use. 'Mirages still on us, estimate twenty milescoming within lethal range,' Birish shouted. 'I've got fighters going after our wingman.'»
'Sahra flight, you've got company, coming in fast!'
Talhi reported on the command frequency. 'Do you have him?'
'Negative! Negative! Our threat receiver is down!' the pilot aboard the second Tu-22 responded. 'Our navigation radar is down too!'
'Then get the hell out of here,' Talhi said. 'If you're blind and deaf, you're no use to us out here! Return to base!'
'Negative, lead,' the other pilot reported. 'I've got dead reckoning and I think I can find enough landmarks to proceed. I'm inbound to the target.'
Talhi didn't blame him too much at all-he wouldn't want to face the wrath of President Zuwayy and his henchmen either, if he returned to base without completing his mission. 'I understand, Sahra. Do you have a good DME on us?' Each of the Tu-22 bombers was equipped with radio direction finders that gave range and bearing to the other.
'Affirmative.'
'Then keep us in front of you-we're inbound to the target too,' Talhi said. He banked southeast and lined up on the navigation steering bug, then pushed the throttles all the way to full military power. 'We're target direct now, crew. Our wingman has got no other way to find the target, so he's going to follow us in to the target.'
'Mirage moving in to lethal range,' Birish said on intercom. 'All jammers active, countermeasures ready.' On the command frequency, he said, 'Sahra flight, we've got Mirages moving in to radar missile range. Use side-to-side jinks and make sure your jammers are active.'
'We're jinking, lead, we're jinking,' the second bomber pilot acknowledged. 'Just find the damned target. We'll be right behind you.'
But they were losing this race. The Egyptian fighters were moving in faster-they must be 'headed down the ramp,' zooming in from high altitude to use the extra speed to rapidly close in for the kill. 'Rapid PRF-fighter locked on!' Birish shouted. 'Vertical jinks! Find any terrain you can! Let's lose this guy!' The Egyptian fighter's radar changed from rapid-pulse-rate frequency to a constant tone. 'Uplink active! Missile launch! Break left!'
But just as Talhi began to yank the control wheel to the left, Birish reported, 'Uplink down! Radar down! The fighter disappeared!'
'Did he shut down his radar?'
'Could be, but he wouldn't do that right after firing a missile.'
They heard the reason a few moments later: 'Sahra flight, Dufda flight, this is Fadda flight of six. Your tail is clear. Now shove a few down their throats!'
Talhi whooped for joy. Fadda flight was a flight of six MiG-25s, some of the fastest fighter planes in the world. Originally designed to chase down and destroy high-flying supersonic American bombers over the Soviet Union, the titanium-armored MiG-25 could attack targets at over three times the speed of sound. Based in Tobruk, the Libyan fighters covered a lot of ground very quickly and caught the Egyptian pilots from behind.
Talhi climbed his Tu-22 back up to fifteen thousand feet above ground level, and his bombardier programmed his weapons for their attack. Talhi's bomber was in what was called the 'overload' condition-it carried three Kh-22 air-to-surface missiles, called 'Burya' in Russia, one under the fuselage and one under each wing. The Kh-22, powered by its own liquid-fueled rocket engine, was the size of a small fighter jet and could fly at over six hundred miles per hour. It carried an inertial navigation system, a thousand pounds of fuel-and a three-thousand-pound high-explosive warhead.
One by one, Montessi dumped navigation and heading information into the Bury as' computers, aligned their inertial navigation gyros, and let them fly. Although he had done many simulated Kh-22 attacks, Talhi had never actually seen one of those behemoths fly before. The rocket engine firing up sounded like an explosion right under their belly, and when it blasted free, it seemed as if a fiery spear from Allah himself had just missed them.
The missiles started a rapid climb on tongues of fire and headed for their targets-Egypt's network of earlywarning surveillance radars along its western frontier. The Burya missiles used passive radar homing devices to zero in on the early-warning radars, and once they had computed the radar's exact position, they could not miss. With devastating accuracy, the huge Kh-22 missiles struck their targets, obliterating the radar installations and flattening any aboveground buildings or objects for over a mile around the impact point.
Meanwhile, the Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters went to work themselves-on the Egyptian E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. The Hawkeye was over one hundred miles away and had its own flight of Mirage fighter escorts, and when the radar plane detected the Libyan MiGs heading eastbound, it shut down its radar, headed northeast toward safety, and sent its fighter escorts after the intruders. But the Libyan attackers hopelessly outnumbered them. The MiG-25 fighters merely blew past the Mirages with their superior speed, and the MiG-23 s pounced when the Egyptian defenders turned to pursue. The MiG-25s took care of the Hawkeye radar plane after losing only one fighter to enemy missiles.
With both the airborne and ground radar sites destroyed, the way was clear for the second Tupolev-22 bomber to climb to a safer altitude and pick its navigation waypoints with care. With Talhi's Tu-22 leading the way, the bornbardier aboard the second Tu-22 lined up precisely on his preplanned bomb run course. The courseline had to be perfect: Although the weapons did not need to be directly on target to be effective, they would get maximum effect by being no more than one or two degrees off the desired course. One by one, he seeded the area with small twohundred-and-fifty-pound bombs fitted with radar fuzes.
Far below was the massive Salimah oil complex, Egypt's newest oil project. Comprising over thirty thousand square miles of southern Egypt, it was the largest known oil and natural gas reserves in northern Africa. Seven wells had been drilled every day for the past two years, and none of them showed any signs of lessening their output. Five thousand workers, mostly Arabs and Africans from Sudan, Chad, Kenya, and Ethiopia, worked around the clock in Salimah, housed in rows and rows of trailers and huge tent cities stretching as far as anyone could see.
One of Egypt's two field armies, known as the King Menes Army, was in charge of the defense of Salimah. Although it was seriously under its full strength, the King Menes Army comprised well over a third of all of Egypt's fighting forces, included two full armored divisions, three mechanized infantry divisions, one infantry division, five artillery battalions, two fighter-interceptor squadrons, two fighter-attack squadrons, and one helicopter squadron. The eighty thousand troops were distributed with the bulk of the forces, mostly heavy armor, arrayed along the borders of Libya and Chad, with the other lighter, more rapidresponse forces deployed mostly north of the oil fields
