'Maybe we can turn back in-keep the fighters around for a little while longer?'
'I think we used up all our lucky charms on that last stunt,' the pilot said. 'Those Libyan bastards could've pulled the trigger just to see what color the fire would've been as we plummeted to earth-we're not going to risk twisting the tiger's tail again. It's the bomber's turn nowwe did our job.' He switched to the command channel and spoke: 'Headbangers, this is Three Sierra Mike, we've made our turn northbound. We kept eight bandits with us as long as we could. Good luck.'
We copy, Sierra Mike,' George 'Zero' Tanaka responded. 'Thanks for the assist.'
The second EB-52 Megafortress, with Tanaka and Wickland back at the controls, swept in at low altitude over the rolling sand- and rock-covered hills of southern Tripoli inbound toward the Presidential Palace. Wickland's supercockpit display was a nightmarish presentation of destruction: Every Libyan air defense site discovered by the FlightHawks was highlighted, and the route of flight adjusted accordingly. Because they had no standoff weapons- both of their Kh-27 antiradar missiles worked, but they had to expend both of them early on the inbound run because so few sites had been taken down by the first Megafortress-they were forced to zigzag in between the threat computer's guesstimate of each site's lethal radius.
'Coming up on a right turn, thirty degrees of bank, ready, ready… now,' Wickland said, and the modified B-
52 Stratofortress bomber banked hard in response. 'We've got a ZSU-57-2 site at our nine o'clock, seven miles.' Wickland glanced out the cockpit just as the radar-guided twin-barreled fifty-seven-millimeter antiaircraft artillery guns opened fire-their jammers and trackbreakers did not even need to jam the Libyan radar because they were well out of range. Tracers fluttered through the air in eerie snakelike patterns across the sky-a few rounds twisted in their direction, but most of the rounds were behind them as the site's radar locked onto the countermeasures array towed behind the Megafortress. 'Coming up on a hard left turn, forty degrees of bank… now.' It was like being on an indoor roller coaster.
Wickland activated the laser radar arrays for two seconds to take a snapshot of the sky and earth surrounding them. 'Those fighters are headed this way,' he said. 'First flight of MiGs is north of us at forty-three miles oming in hard. The other two flights of MiGs are still heading north with the DC-10.. and now we got another flight of three MiGs lifting off from Mitiga Airfield, one o'clock, eighteen miles. They'll be on top of us in no time.'
'How are we doing on the bomb run?' Tanaka asked.
'Thirty seconds to the first target,' Wickland responded. 'This will be a pull-up push-over release on an SA-3 site. I need full military power for this release.'
'You already got it.'
'All trackbreakers and jammers active. Acquisition radar at eleven o'clock, eight miles.' Wickland magnified the last LADAR image of the target area. This SA-3 site consisted of four quadruple-missile fixed launchers with a trailer-mounted long-range radar and another trailermounted fire-control radar, all in a five-acre hand-shaped site. The Megafortress's attack computers programmed the coordinates of the center of the 'hand' and the 'thumb,' where the radars and control systems were located. At the exact point as directed by the attack computer, the rear bomb doors opened and retracted inward, and the Megafortress began a steep climb.
'Warning, SA-3 target tracking mode,' the threat warning computer blared.
'Trackbreakers active.. '
'Warning, missile launch, SA-3 uplink!' The threat computers automatically ejected decoy chaff and flares, and the jamming signals coming from the towed array came on continuously.
'C'mon, baby, toss those suckers!'
The Megafortress nosed over, then began a hard left bank. At the very apex of the roller coaster-like arc, the attack computer released two one-thousand-pound highexplosive bombs from the rotary launcher. Like the last kid in a 'crack-the-whip' line, the bombs sailed out of the bomb bay with such force that they flew nearly three miles through the air. Just as two SA-3 missiles streaked from their launcher, the bombs hit, destroying the fire-control radar with an almost direct hit.
The first missile self-destructed seconds after launch when it lost its uplink signal; the second missile was able to switch to command line-of-sight guidance signals from the SA-3 long-range radar. Fortunately, the long- range radar was locked onto the towed countermeasures array, not the Megafortress itself, and the blast from the second missile's one-hundred-and-thirty-pound warhead destroyed the towed array-well over two hundred feet behind the bomber. The Megafortress's jammers completely shut down the long-range search radars and defeated a second two-round missile volley launched moments later.
The Megafortress made another hard left turn, correcting on course, dropping six air-retarded cluster bomb canisters on a power substation at the periphery of the palace grounds before making a hard right turn back toward the Presidential Palace. Wickland ordered a climb to one thousand feet, then sixty seconds later released another stick of six cluster bomb dispensers on the security guard barracks and headquarters outside the palace gates. The last releases were virtually simultaneous: two gravity bombs on the front gates themselves, the last stick of cluster bombs on the entryway to the palace, and two more gravity bombs on the palace itself.
The Megafortress then continued eastbound, passing right over Matiga Airfield, the old American Wheelus Air Force Base on the eastern side of the city. Antiaircraft artillery units fired into the sky all around them, but the Megafortress's jammers and trackbreakers kept any of the radar-guided heavier-caliber units from locking in on them. The final bomb run was right across the center of the airfield, dropping the remaining gravity bombs on the runway, radar facility, and control tower, then seeding cluster bombs throughout the aircraft parking areas. Almost a dozen aircraft of all kinds, from fighters to cargo planes to helicopters, were destroyed.
'Set clearance plane COLA,' Tanaka ordered. The Megafortress turned sharply northward away from the coast, but Tanaka had to override the autopilot because it appeared they turned right toward a large Libyan warship intheGulfofSidra. '
'We've got company,' Wickland said. 'MiG-23s, com-
ing in fast, seven o'clock, eleven miles.' At that same instant, they received another warning: 'Missile launch, SAN-8 from that Libyan warship!' The threat defense computers ejected chaff and flares, and the Megafortress did a hard right break back toward the coast near Ed Dachla. The naval surface-to-air missile exploded less than a hundred feet off their left side, violently shaking the big bomber.
'I think we got some fuel leaks from the left wing, and we're losing pressurization,' Tanaka reported. 'I've also got a fault on the left ruddervator trim system.'
'We got a 'MISSILE HOT' light on the left weapon pylon,' Wickland said. He acknowledged the fault, but by then the weapons computer had ejected first the left pylon and its remaining air-to-air missiles, and then the right pylon to balance out the aircraft. 'There goes the last of our heaters.' He checked the supercockpit display. 'I think we're clear of that ship, but the fighters are coming in hot,' he said. 'Let's continue southeast. We'll try to make it to the Cussabat Mountains-the MiGs may not be able to find us there.'
But they were too late. The first MiG-23 moved in almost at the speed of sound and fired a heat-seeking missile from point-blank range. The Megafortress detected the missile launch and immediately initiated a right break, ejecting chaff and flares from the left ejectors. The combination of the decoys and the active laser countermeasures system steered the missile away from a direct hit, but the Russian-made R-60 missile exploded just ahead of the left wingtip.
'Shit, we lost the entire left wingtip!' Tanaka shouted. The vibration coming from the left wing was tremendous-it felt as if the entire wing was going to snap right off. 'I've got to slow down or we'll lose the whole wing!'
'The second MiG coming in fast!'
'Stinger airmines!' Tanaka shouted. 'Blast that sucker!'
But the second MiG-23 was already firing its twentythree-millimeter cannon as the airmines were launched, and the bullets hit first: Warning messages flashed on all of the multifunction displays in the Megafortress's cockpit. Wickland looked out his window and saw the number-four engine throwing off tongues of flames and flashes of fire. 'Oh, Jesus!' he shouted. 'We're hit!'
'Just make sure you smoke that MiG!' Tanaka shouted. He kept his eyes flying over the system readouts, hands on the controls and throttles and his feet on the rudder pedals, ready in an instant to take over if the Megafortress's flight computer didn't immediately respond. But the computer was in charge for now: By the time the warning messages had flashed on the screens, the computers had already shut down the number-four engine,
