Major Pyotr Arabov was no tenser than usual. An instructor pilot, he was teaching three Libyans the intricacies of night over-water navigation. They'd turned over the Italian island of Pantelleria thirty minutes earlier, and were now inbound for Tripoli and home. Formation flying at night was difficult for the three Libyans, though each had over three hundred hours in type, and over-water flying was the most dangerous of all. Fortunately, they had picked a good night for it. The star-filled sky gave them a good horizon reference. Better to learn the easy way first, Arabov thought, and at this altitude. A true tactical profile, at one hundred meters and higher speed on a cloudy night could be exceedingly dangerous. He was not any more impressed with the airmanship of these Libyans than the U.S. Navy had been on several occasions, but they did seem willing to learn, and that was something. Besides, their oil-rich country, having learned its own lessons from the Iraqis, had decided that if it were to have an air force at all, it had better have a properly trained one. That meant the Soviet Union could sell a lot more of its MiG-29s, despite the fact that sales in the Israel area were now severely curtailed. It also meant that Major Arabov was being paid partly in hard currency.
The instructor pilot looked left and right to see that the formation was — well, not exactly tight, but close enough. The aircraft were behaving sluggishly with two fuel tanks under each wing. Each fuel tank had stabilizing fins, and looked rather like bombs, actually.
“They're carrying something, skipper. MiG-29s, for sure.”
“Right.” Jackson checked the display himself, then keyed his radio. “Stick, this is Spade, over.”
“Go ahead.” The digital radio circuit allowed Jackson to recognize Captain Richards' voice.
“Stick, we have ID on the bogies. Four MiG-two-niners. They appear to have underwing cargo. Course, speed, and altitude unchanged.” There was a brief pause.
“Splash the bandits.”
Jackson 's head snapped up. “Say again, Stick.”
“Spade, this is Stick: Splash the bandits. Acknowledge.”
He called them “bandits,” Jackson thought. And he knows more than I do.
“Roger, engaging now. Out.” Jackson keyed his radio again. “Bud, follow me in.”
“Shit!” Shredder observed. “Recommend we target two Phoenix, left pair and right pair.”
“Do it,” Jackson replied, setting the weapons switch on the top of his stick to the AIM-54 setting. Lieutenant Walters programmed the missiles to keep their radars quiet until they were merely a mile out.
“Ready. Range is sixteen-thousand. Birds are in acquisition.”
Jackson 's heads-up display showed the correct symbology. A beeping tone in his headset told him that the first missile was ready to fire. He squeezed the trigger once, waited a second, then squeezed again.
“Shit!” Michael “Lobo” Alexander observed, half a mile away.
“You know better than that!” Sanchez snarled back at him.
“Sky is clear. I don't see anything else around us.”
Jackson closed his eyes to save as much of his vision as possible from the yellow-white exhaust flames of the missiles. They rapidly pulled away, accelerating to over three thousand miles per hour, almost a mile per second. Jackson watched them home in as he positioned his aircraft for another shot if the Phoenixes failed to function properly.
Arabov made another instrument check. There was nothing unusual. His threat receivers showed only air- search radars, though one reading had disappeared a few minutes earlier. Other than that, this was an exceedingly routine training mission, proceeding straight and level on a direct course towards a fixed point. His threat receivers had not detected the LPI radar which had been tracking him and his flight of four over the past five minutes. It was able, however, to detect the powerful homing radar in a Phoenix missile.
A bright red warning light flashed on, and a screeching sound abused his hearing. Arabov looked down to check his instruments. They seemed to be functioning, but this wasn't — his next move was to turn his head. He just had time to see a half-moon of yellow light and ghostly, star-lit smoke trail, then a flash.
The Phoenix targeted on the right-hand pair exploded just a few feet from them. The one hundred thirty-five pound warhead filled their air with high-speed fragments which shredded both MiGs. The same happened to the left-hand pair. The air was filled with an incandescent cloud of exploding jet fuel and airplane parts. Three pilots were killed directly by the explosion. Arabov was rocketed out of the disintegrating fighter by his ejection seat, whose parachute opened a scant two hundred feet over the water. Already unconscious from the unexpected shock of ejection, the Russian major was saved by systems that anticipated his injuries. An inflatable collar held his head above water, a UHF radio began screaming for the nearest rescue helicopter, and a powerful blue-white strobe light started flashing in the darkness. Around him were a few thin patches of burning fuel and nothing else.
Jackson watched the entire process. He'd probably set an all-time one-shot record. Four aircraft on one missile salvo. But there had been no skill involved. As with his Iraqi victim, they hadn't known he was there. Any new nugget right out of the RAG could have done this. It was murder, not war — what war? he asked, was there a war? — and he didn't even know why.
“Splash four MiGs,” he said over the radio. “Stick, this is Spade, splash four. Returning to CAP station, we need some gas.”
“Roger, Spade, tankers are overhead now. We copy you splashed four.”
“Uh, Spade, what the fuck is going on?” Lieutenant Walters asked.
“I wish I knew, Shredder.” Did I just fire the first shot in a war! What war?
Despite his earlier screaming, the Guards tank regiment was about as sharp a Russian unit as Keitel had ever seen. Their T-8o main battle tanks looked slightly toy-like with their reactive armor panels festooned on turret and hull, but they were also low-slung dangerous-looking vehicles whose enormously long 125mm guns left no doubt as to their identity and purpose. The supposed inspection team was moving about in groups of three. Keitel had the most dangerous mission, as he was with the regimental commander. Keitel—“Colonel Ivanenko”—checked his watch as he walked behind the real Colonel.
Just two hundred meters away, Gunther Bock and two other ex-Stasi officers approached a tank crew. They were boarding their vehicle as the officers approached.
“Stop!” one ordered.
“Yes, Colonel,” the junior sergeant who commanded the tank replied.
“Step down. We are going to inspect your vehicle.”
The commander, gunner, and driver assembled in front of their vehicle while the other crews boarded theirs. Bock waited for the neighboring tanks to button up, then shot all three Russians with his silenced automatic. The three bodies were tossed under the tank. Bock took the gunner's seat, and looked around for the controls he'd been briefed on. Not twelve hundred meters away, parked at right angles to his tank, were over fifty American M1A1 tanks whose crews were also boarding their vehicles.
“Power coming on,” the driver reported over the intercom. The diesel engine roared to life along with all the others.
Bock flipped the loading switch to Armor-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding-Sabot round and punched the load button. Automatically, the breech to the tank's main gun dropped open, and first the shell, then the propellant charge were rammed home, and the breech shut by itself. That, Bock thought, was easy enough. Next he depressed the gunsight and selected an American tank. It was easy to spot. The American tank park was lit up like any parking lot so that trespassers might easily be spotted. The laser gave him a range display, and Bock elevated the gun to the proper stadimeter line. The wind he estimated as zero. It was a calm night. Bock checked his watch and waited for the sweep hand to reach the twelve. Then he squeezed the triggers. Bock's T-8o rocked backwards, along with three others. Two-thirds of a second later, the shell struck the turret of the American tank. The results were impressive. He'd struck the ammo compartment in the rear of the turret. The forty rounds of ammunition ignited at once. Blowout panels vented most of it straight up, but the protective fire-doors inside the vehicle had already been blown out by the shell, and the crew incinerated in their seats as their two-million-dollar tank turned into a mottled green-and-brown volcano, along with two others.
One hundred meters to the north, the regimental commander froze in mid-sentence, turning towards the
