The Fist of God

“Before dawn. Tomorrow I am leading a flight of MiGs across to Iran. Others have gone before. It is a crazy scheme by the Rais to save his best fighter planes. Nonsense, of course, but it may save our lives.

You will come with me.”

“I thought the MiG 29 was a single-seater?”

“I have one trainer version with two seats. The UB model. You will be dressed as an Air Force officer.

With luck, we can get away with it. Go now.”

Mike Martin was walking west that night along the Ar-Rutba road when the car of Osman Badri flashed past him, heading toward Baghdad. Neither took any notice of the other. Martin’s destination was the next river crossing, fifteen miles ahead. There, with the bridge down, trucks would have to wait for the ferry, and he would have a better chance of paying another driver to take him farther west.

In the small hours of the morning he found exactly such a truck, but it could take him only to a point just beyond Muhammadi. There he began to wait again. At three o’clock the car of Colonel Badri sped back again. He did not hail it, and it did not stop. The driver was clearly in a hurry. Just before dawn a third truck came along, pulled out of a side road onto the main highway, and paused to take him aboard.

Again he paid the driver from his dwindling stock of dinar notes, grateful to whoever had thought to give him the wad of money back in Mansour. By dawn, he assumed, the Kulikov household would complain that they had lost their gardener.

A search of his shack would reveal the writing pad beneath the mattress—an odd possession for an illiterate—and a further search would reveal the transmitter beneath the tiles. By midday, the hunt would be well up, starting in Baghdad but spreading across the country. By nightfall, he needed to be far away in the desert, heading for the border.

The truck in which he rode was beyond KM 160 when the flight of MiG 29s took off.

Osman Badri was terrified, being one of those people with a deep loathing of flying. In the underground caverns that made up the base, he had stood to one side as his brother briefed the four young pilots who would form the rest of the flight. Most of Abdelkarim’s contemporaries were dead; these were youngsters, more than a decade his junior, not long out of training school. They listened with rapt attention to their squadron commander and nodded their assent.

Inside the MiG, even with the canopy closed, Osman thought he had never heard a roar like it as, in the enclosed space, the two RD 33 Soviet turbofans ran up to maximum dry power. Crouching in the rear cockpit behind his brother, Osman saw the great blast doors open on their hydraulic pistons and a square of pale blue sky appear at the end of the cavern. The noise increased as the pilot ran his throttle through the gate and into afterburn, and the twin-finned Soviet interceptor shuddered against her brakes.

When the brakes came off, Osman thought he had been kicked in the small of the back by a mule. The MiG leaped forward, the concrete walls flashed past, and the jet took the ramp a

nd emerged into the dawn light.

Osman shut his eyes and prayed. The rumbling of the wheels ceased, he seemed to be drifting, and he opened his eyes. They were airborne, the lead MiG circling low over KM 160 as the other four jets screamed out of the tunnel below. Then the doors closed, and the air base ceased to exist.

All around him, because the UB version is a trainer, were dials and clocks, buttons, switches, screens, knobs, and levers. Between his legs was a duplicate control column. His brother had told him to leave everything alone, which he was glad to do.

At one thousand feet the flight of five MiGs formed into a staggered line, the four youngsters behind the squadron commander. His brother set course just south of due east, keeping low, hoping to avoid detection and to cross the southern outskirts of Baghdad, losing his MiGs from prying American eyes in the clutter of industrial plants and other radar images.

It was a high-risk gamble, trying to avoid the radars of the AWACS out over the Gulf, but he had no choice. His orders were formal, and now Abdelkarim Badri had an extra reason for wishing to reach Iran.

Luck was with him that morning, through one of those flukes in warfare that are not supposed to occur but do. At the end of every long shift on station over the Gulf, the AWACS had to return to base and be replaced by another. It was called changing the cab rank. During the cab rank changes, there was sometimes a brief window when radar cover was suspended. The MiG flight’s low passage across South Baghdad and Salman Pak coincided with just such a lucky break.

The Iraqi pilot hoped that by keeping to one thousand feet, he could slip under any American flights, which tended to operate at twenty thousand feet and up. He wanted to skirt the Iraqi town of Al Kut to its north, then head straight for the safety of the Iranian border at its nearest point.

That morning, at that hour, Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Al Kharz was leading a flight of four Strike Eagles north toward Al Kut, his mission to bomb a major river bridge over the Tigris across which Republican Guard tanks had been caught by a J-STAR heading south for Kuwait.

The 336th had spent much of its war on night missions, but the bridge north of Al Kut would be a “quick fix,” meaning there was no time to lose if Iraqi tanks were using it to head south. So the bombing raid that morning had the coding “Jeremiah directs”: General Chuck Horner wanted it done, and now.

The Eagles were loaded with two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs and air-to-air missiles. Because of the positioning of the bomb-attachment pylons beneath the wings of the Eagle, the load was asymmetric, the bombs on one side being heavier than the Sparrow missiles on the other. It was called the bastard load. Automatic trim control compensated for this, but it was still not the load most pilots would choose to have hanging underneath them in a dogfight.

As the MiGs, now down to five hundred feet and skimming the landscape, approached from the west, the Eagles were coming up from the south, eighty miles away.

The first indication that Abdelkarim Badri had of their presence was a low warbling in his ears. His brother behind him did not know what it was, but the fighter pilots knew. The trainer MiG was in the lead, the four juniors strung out behind him in a loose V formation. They all heard it too.

The warbling came from their RWR—radar warning receiver. It meant there were other radars up there somewhere, sweeping the sky.

The four Eagles had their radars in the search mode, the beams running out ahead of them to see what was there. The Soviet radar warning receivers had picked up these beams and were telling their pilots.

There was nothing the MiGs could do but keep going. At five hundred feet they were well below the Eagles and heading across the Eagles’ projected track.

At sixty miles, the warbling in the Iraqi pilots’ ears rose to a shrill bleep. That meant the RWRs were telling them: Someone out there has gone out of search mode and is locked onto you.

Behind Don Walker, his wizzo Tim saw the change in his radar’s attitude. From a gentle side-to-side scan, the American radars had gone to lock-on, narrowing their beams and concentrating on what they had found.