by Robert Gandt
“How many prisoners?” Gritti asked.
“Over a hundred. Those that couldn’t haul ass quick enough.”
Gritti could see them squatting in the clearing, guarded by a couple of marines. They looked less like soldiers than frightened tribesmen. Two intel specialists, with the help of a linguist, were pumping them for information about the Al-Fasr complex and the remaining Sherji force.
“Casualties?”
“One, a gunny in Delta company. A 7.62 round in the calf. He’s already been evacuated along with the wounded from the TRAP team.”
Gritti realized he had already asked that question. He removed his helmet and massaged his temples with his fingertips. Shit, he was tired. He was starting to forget stuff.
Darkness was less than three hours away, and he had no intention of spending another night in Yemen. But even more than the impending nightfall, he had another worry. At any time he expected to receive the order to withdraw. Before that happened, he intended to be inside Al-Fasr’s compound.
<>
Pearly kept the Hornet low, a hundred feet above the deck, paralleling the ridge. The high ridge protruded from the scruffy terrain like the spine of a dragon. In tactical language this was called “terrain masking”—using topographic features like the ridge to obstruct the view of air defense radar.
As he skimmed the undulating terrain, a thought nagged at him: I’m going to catch hell for this. Maxwell is gonna kick my ass from here to Bahrain.
Pilots weren’t supposed to go after a SAM site bythemselves, and certainly not with guns. It was the business of the EA-6B Prowlers or another package of F/A-18s to hammer the sites with HARM missiles. The HARM—high speed anti-radiation missile—homed on the briefest of emissions from a fire control radar. Best of all, it could be fired from a safe stand-off distance.
He put the thought out of his mind. He was a man on a mission. Like all fighter pilots, he hated SAMs and the evil bastards who fired them. Enemy fighter pilots he could regard as equals—warriors with whom he shared a code of battle. But the sneaky little shits who fired missiles at you were like rattlesnakes in the weeds.
Five miles. Almost to the pull up point. He needed at least three miles to pop up, acquire the target, and roll in. The site was concealed in a patch of trees at the end of a high, twisting ridgeline.
Nudging the throttles forward, he watched the airspeed notch over 500 knots. He wanted lots of energy when he popped up.
At this speed and altitude, Pearly’s view amounted to a narrow cone of vision directly ahead. On either side, the terrain unrolled in a brownish blur. He had to concentrate, gently moving the stick to keep the Hornet just above the earth. One second’s lapse, he would be a grease spot in the desert.
Still no RWR warning. Either the fire controllers weren’t picking him up yet—or they had hauled ass. The launcher and fire control radar were mounted on tracked vehicles. He prayed that they hadn’t yanked up their gear and headed for cover.
Three miles. Time to unmask.
He pulled the Hornet up hard, grunting under the four-G load. With the nose thirty degrees above the horizon on his HUD, he peered through the canopy at the drab brown Yemeni landscape, looking for the SAM site.
Nothing. Where was the goddamn missile site?
The warbling sharpened in pitch. They were getting a lock. Any second now he would see the flaming telephone pole streaking toward him. Where was the fucking site. . .
Over there! He had been off by a couple of miles. Farther to the west, beyond the ridge line, pointing like a monolith through the canopy of trees and camouflage net. Moving, swiveling on its self-propelled launch chassis.
Toward him.
Rolling inverted, Pearly hauled the Hornet’s nose back through the horizon. He shoved the throttles full forward.
He guessed the range was two miles, maybe less. The warbling RWR changed pitch, telling him that the acquisition radar was locking on to him. The thought flashed through his mind that he perhaps should have let the HARM shooters do the job.
Too late. The long tapered nose of the missile was swinging toward him. Pearly and the SA-6 were both committed.
Diving at a shallow angle, the Hornet gathered speed quickly. Five hundred knots. Five-twenty.
He could see the site clearly. The missile was dark brown, nearly twenty feet long, slender and menacing. Another missile was nestled next to it, ready to fire. He remembered the intel details about the SA-6. Labeled “Gainful” by NATO, it had been around since the seventies and ravaged Israeli jets during the Yom Kippur war.
The SA-6 was aimed directly at him. The warbling sound became frantic in his RWR.
Smoke was billowing from around the self-propelled launcher. The thing is launching!
He squeezed the trigger.
Brrrrrraaaaappppp. The first burst hit the earth twenty yards short, kicking up a storm of dirt and rocks.
The second caught the missile as it cleared the launcher. The high-explosive shells ripped through the missile’s cylindrical body.
The missile’s warhead detonated.
Twenty-millimeter cannon fire continued raining down on the SAM site. The second missile, still on the launcher, exploded. In succession, each missile in the stockpile exploded. Smoke and orange flame gushed into the sky above the site.
Pearly squeezed his eyes shut as the Hornet punched through the cloud of debris.
He gave his engine display a quick glance. Temperatures, RPMs, fuel flows still okay. No damage.
As he cranked around to make another firing pass on the missile battery, he saw that it wasn’t necessary. The self-propelled launcher was a smoldering hulk. A thirty-yard-wide hole had been cleared by the explosions of the missiles. The radar and fire control vehicles looked like shattered toys.
For the first time in several minutes, he became aware of the persistent voice in his earphones. “Runner One-two, do you read Battle Axe? Are you on frequency, Runner One-two?”
“Go ahead, Battle Axe.”
“Where have you been? We thought we lost you. We were calling a hot burner six in your sector, but it’s just gone cold.”
Pearly gazed down at the blackened ruin of the SA-6 battery. “I confirm that, Battle Axe. The burner six is cold.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Eye of the Needle
North Central Yemen
1315, Thursday, 20 June
A gun kill.
With his left hand, Al-Fasr punched the arm switch for the Gsh-301 thirty millimeter cannon. It was the most primitive of air-to-air weapons—and the most satisfying. Nothing matched the rattling, visceral satisfaction of a gun kill. Modern weapons like the radar-guided Alamo and the heat-seeking Archer missile were efficient killers, but for him the big rotary cannon mounted in the Fulcrum's left wing root was the weapon of choice.
He rolled the MiG into another high scissors, hauling the nose back toward the opposing Hornet. Sweat stung his eyes as he fought to keep the enemy in sight. The high G forces caused perspiration to ooze from beneath the skull cap of his helmet.
He guessed that this was the Hornet flight leader, probably a senior officer. He was flying the F/A-18 with surprising skill. Al-Fasr wondered if it was someone he knew from the old Red Flag competitions. He hoped so. This would be a symbolic kill, just as the assassination of the two admirals had been symbolic.
Just as the sinking of the Reagan would have been symbolic.
The carrier was still afloat. That much he knew. That the ship could still operate was a mystery to him. Somehow they were able to contain the damage and launch fighters.
The thought made him wonder again: What happened to Manilov? Since the torpedo attack, he had heard nothing more about the Russian captain or the fate of the Ilia Mourmetz.
He put it out of his mind. That phase of the plan was finished. He had deluded that posturing fool, Babcock, into believing that Yemen would become an American puppet state, a source of cheap oil. After today the United States w
ould have no more stomach for military adventures on the Arabian peninsula. Especially not after almost losing their most prized warship.
As the ruler of Yemen, he would be regarded as an equal by the Arab world. By the Americans, of course, he would be hated. And feared.
He felt the MiG lurch in the jetwash of the Hornet as they crossed flight paths again. He glimpsed once more the pilot peering at him. Time was critical. He was taking a great gamble going one-vee-one—one fighter versus one fighter—against a Hornet. He couldn’t expect support from his three other mercenary pilots. They were expendables who would probably not be alive in five more minutes. He had to kill this Hornet quickly before others joined the fight.
The Hornet was pitching up again, rolling. Al-Fasr matched the maneuver, pitching and rolling into him, gaining a tiny increment of advantage, and—
What happened? Al-Fasr blinked, then craned his head from side to side in the cockpit. Something was terribly wrong.
The Hornet. It had vanished.
<>
They called it a bunt, and it was the most brutal of maneuvers.
Maxwell shoved the stick full forward. The Hornet’s nose punched down, transitioning instantly from positive Gs to negative.
His helmet thunked into the Plexiglas canopy. His vision became a blurry red, and he felt himself jammed upwards against his harness fittings.
With the jet pitching downward, he pushed the stick into the right forward corner, rolled away to the right, then he again yanked back on the stick. The sudden positive G load slammed him back hard into this seat.
He strained to peer over his left shoulder. The Fulcrum pilot had lost sight of him, at least for a critical second. The MiG was still rolling left, belly to him, searching for the missing Hornet.
Maxwell hauled the nose up and around in a high-G barrel roll. Coming through the roll, he saw exactly what he had hoped for—the underside and tail of the MiG-29.
His fingers went to the select button for the AIM-9—a heat-seeking Sidewinder. The range was close, less than a thousand yards. He uncaged the missile’s seeker head and heard the low growl indicating that the missile was tracking the heat of the Fulcrum’s jet exhausts. The mottled brown paint scheme of the Fulcrum swelled in his HUD.
He squeezed the trigger.
The Sidewinder leaped off the rail on the Hornet’s starboard wing tip, trailing a thin gray wisp of smoke.
The MiG pilot realized the danger. A stream of decoy flares appeared behind the Fulcrum. The jet abruptly rolled inverted and pitched downward.
Maxwell couldn’t believe it. They were only six thousand feet above the terrain. The Fulcrum pilot was executing a split-S—pulling his nose into a vertical dive, flying the bottom half of a loop.
The sudden maneuver—and the short range—were too much for the Sidewinder. The missile whizzed past the tail of the diving Fulcrum, then flew aimlessly off into the clear sky.
Maxwell watched the MiG escape the missile. This pilot was either very lucky or very good. Both, probably. Only one MiG pilot in this part of the world fit that description.
It had to be Al-Fasr.
He hesitated, watching the MiG-29 dive at the earth. It was suicide.
He rolled the Hornet inverted and followed the MiG.
<>
Seven Gs. It was the best he could do without stalling the wing. To stall would insure that he made a smoking hole in the earth below.
Al-Fasr kept a steady pressure on the stick, watching the brown landscape fill up the fighter’s windscreen. The pull out would be low, dangerously low.
He had dodged the missile. How had the Hornet pilot gained the advantage? Whoever it was behind him was not the average U. S. Navy fighter pilot—the kind Al-Fasr used to humiliate back in the old days. The kind he had scraped off on the ridge during the Red Flag games.
The altimeter was unwinding in a blur. The nose of the Fulcrum was coming through the vertical while the hard earth of Yemen rose up to meet him.
He grunted against the gray-out effect of the sustained Gs. His vision was tunneling—narrowing to a thin channel of awareness. Dimly he sensed the ground rushing up at him.
Through the gray veil of his remaining vision he searched the ground—and glimpsed what he wanted. There! The valley.
He nudged the Fulcrum’s nose to the right, aiming for the notch in the earth. He grunted harder, pressing his diaphragm against his guts in the effort to maintain consciousness.
The valley opened up under the nose of the jet. He was bottoming out of the split-S. On either side he sensed the walls of the chasm speeding past in a brown blur.
The jet was level. With the G-load lifting from him, his vision returned.
Where was the Hornet?
He rolled the MiG into a knife-edge bank and peered over his shoulder. He hoped to see an oily black mushroom of smoke marking the death site of the Hornet.
No smoke. Instead, a dull gray frontal silhouette, three kilometers behind him—an F/A-18 Super Hornet.
He slammed his fist against the padded glareshield. The smug, arrogant American bastard! Al-Fasr sucked hard on his oxygen, held his breath a second, forced himself to be calm.
Think. You know the terrain; he doesn’t. Kill him like you killed that fool in the Red Flag exercise.
He knew where he was. The valley was a relic from an antediluvian period when Yemen had flowing rivers and green hills. Now it was a brownish ravine that wound northward into the barren high desert. Within a few kilometers, the valley deepened and widened into a twisting canyon.
Yes, that was it. The canyon.
<>
This is crazy, thought Maxwell. It was also dangerous as hell.
The canyon twisted one way, then the other, sometimes making ninety degree turns. Towering rock formations sprang up, looking like monuments from the stone age.
Sweat poured from his helmet as he weaved and dodged, staying on the Fulcrum’s tail. The MiG was flitting like an insect across the display in the HUD. He had the Sidewinder seeker head uncaged, tracking the Fulcrum’s tailpipes. The low acquisition growl would swell in his earphones, then cease as the MiG vanished around a corner of the canyon.
A female voice barked at him. “Bingo! Bingo!” It was Bitchin’ Betty, the aural warning. Bingo meant that he was fuel critical. He would have to refuel from a tanker or he wouldn’t make it back to the ship. A prolonged duel with the MiG would exhaust his reserve fuel and he’d be forced to punch out.
The thought of another ejection over Yemen filled Maxwell with dread.
They were no more than a hundred feet above the floor of the canyon. It occurred to him that Al-Fasr knew where he was going.
And Maxwell didn’t. This is stupid. He’s setting you up. He’s going to plant you into a canyon wall.
The MiG rolled into a hard right bank. A second later it disappeared around the corner of the canyon. Maxwell rolled the Hornet into a vertical bank and followed the MiG around the corner.
The MiG was gone.
Suddenly he saw why. The canyon made a zigzag turn back to the left. Ahead, the far wall of the canyon rose in front of him, approaching at a speed of 400 knots. He could see sprigs of scrub brush dwarf trees protruding from the slanting wall.
He wrenched the stick to the left and pulled hard. The acceleration jammed him down into the seat as the jet wheeled into a maximum-G turn to the left.
Bzzzzttt. Bzzzztt. Bzzzzt. It sounded like the croak of a cicada. He could feel it through the airframe of the jet—and he knew what it was.
The Hornet was clipping the trees on the slope of the canyon wall.
The buzzing noise abruptly ceased.
Ahead Maxwell could see the canyon straightening out, then bending back to the right. The MiG was still there, low and fast.
The MiG rolled into another bank, knifing into the next turn. Maxwell’s heart was pounding from the near-miss with the canyon wall. He nudged the throttles forward.
The canyon made a gradual t
urn back to the east. Vertical clusters of sandstone jumped up at him as he skimmed the deck. Both jets were weaving through the canyon, each dodging the rock formations that rose from the floor like primordial monoliths.
Again the MiG made a sharp right bank and disappeared around a sheer precipice. Maxwell wheeled the Hornet around the same corner—and his heart nearly stopped.
Across the canyon stretched a natural stone bridge. The opening looked like the eye of a needle. It was high, a hundred feet or more, but too narrow for the Hornet’s wing span.
He glimpsed Al-Fasr’s MiG-29 disappearing through the eye of the needle in a vertical bank.
In a milli-second the realization flashed through Maxwell’s mind: This is what he was waiting for.
Instinct took over. As the narrow passage rushed at him, he reacted. He snapped the Hornet into a knife edge bank. Into the eye of the needle.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Compound
North Central Yemen
1320, Thursday, 20 June
Maxwell squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the impact.
In the next instant the Hornet was through the eye of the needle, in the clear. He rolled the wings level and peered around. Ahead, the canyon opened into a broad valley. No more rock formations, no more bridges.
The MiG was gone.
Maxwell’s eyes flicked to the radar display. Where was the Fulcrum? No return. No blip, no target where the MiG-29 should have been.
He looked outside again, scanning the terrain. Had the Fulcrum hit the ground? Crashed against the slope of the valley?
He saw nothing.
An alarm was going off in Maxwell’s head. When he was visible, Al-Fasr was a dangerous adversary. Invisible, he was deadly. The old fighter pilot’s maxim came to Maxwell’s mind: Lose sight, lose the fight.
He had lost sight. The eye of the needle was another Al-Fasr surprise. Now he was defensive again.
Something alerted him— a flicker of light, a momentary shadow in the cockpit.
