With Hostile Intent

Chapter One The Kill

“Fulcrum!”

The effect was always the same. Just calling out the radar contact never failed to spike First Lieutenant Tracey Barnett’s pulse rate upward by twenty beats. She knew it was having the same effect on the other two controllers. In the spectral glow of the E-3C Sentry’s red-lighted command-and-control compartment, she could see them both hunched over their own consoles.

“Make that two Fulcrums!”

She had them tagged now. They were out of the Al-Taqqadum air base, just west of Baghdad. They were headed south, toward the thirty-third parallel, the boundary of the No Fly Zone. And she could label them as bona fide, no-shit bandits, meaning they were hostile. She had a good electronic ID on them and these guys were definitely MiG-29s — twin-engine Russian-built fighters with the NATO code name “Fulcrum.”

They were coming her way.

Tracey studied the two blips on her scope. It was not like the Iraqi Air Force to come out and challenge the allied air patrols. If they took off at all, they would make a faint-hearted thrust at the NFZ, then cut and run back to the interior of Iraq.

At least, that’s what they usually did. But not today. These guys weren’t running. They were supersonic, about 1.2 mach and accelerating.

Still coming this way. Headed south toward the NFZ.

Just to be sure, she called up Rivet Joint, the intelligence-gathering RC-135, in its own orbit over the Gulf. Like the AWACS, Rivet Joint was a version of the ancient Boeing 707, but without the saucer-like radome atop the fuselage.

“We confirm that, Sea Lord,” said the controller in Rivet Joint. “Two Fulcrums in the air. Looks like the game’s on. Hope you got shooters available.”

Tracey went back to her console, giving the display a quick scan, checking her assets. She needed shooters — armed and ready fighters. Now, where were they…?

There. Perfect! A flight of four Navy F/A-18s, just launched from the Reagan, still refueling on the tanker.

She called the fighter division lead. “Stinger One-one, this is Sea Lord. You with me?”

A mini-second’s pause. “Stinger One-one is up, Sea Lord,” the F/A-18 flight leader answered.

“Show time, Stinger. Got a hot vector for you.”

“You called the right number, Sea Lord. You point, we shoot.”

One hundred-ten kilometers to go.

The desert was sweeping beneath them in a brown-hued blur. Colonel Tariq Jabbar knew that at this velocity — one and a half times the speed of sound — they would reach the thirty-third parallel in less than five minutes.

Ninety kilometers.

Of course, the trick at this speed was to time your turn to avoid penetrating the forbidden air space. In fact, Colonel Jabbar did not intend even to get close to the so-called boundary, just rush at it in a threatening way. Taunt the Americans. Make them scramble fighters and go through yet another useless exercise.

An idiotic game, thought Jabbar. A senseless waste. It was all an extension of the Gulf War, which had been the mother of all idiotic games. He felt a wave of anger rise in him, just as it always did when he recalled the slaughter of thousands of young Iraqi men. For nothing.

Colonel Jabbar pushed the thought from his mind. He had a mission today, senseless that it was. If he wanted to survive another encounter with the enemy he had to remain focused. He already knew from experience that he was on his own out here. He could not obtain help from any quarter. What information he received from his own GCI — Ground Controlled Intercept — was not only sparse, it was often woefully wrong. Iraq’s air defense network had been so pummeled by allied anti-radiation weapons, they had only a single functioning intercept radar. It was co-located with the approach control radar at the Baghdad airport, which had saved it from being demolished like the others.

Without an adequate air defense radar, even sophisticated warplanes like Jabbar’s MiG-29 were easy prey for the American fighters, who had the backing of their AWACS ships and a fleet of ship-borne control systems. The Iraqi fighters were flying blind.

But Colonel Jabbar, commander of the 21^st Air Intercept Squadron of the Iraqi Air Force, was, if nothing else, a pragmatist. His task today was not to win wars or even to do battle. He and his wingman would merely feint at the allied-imposed No Fly Zone, cause some sphincters in the American warplanes to tighten. Then they could return in triumph to Al-Taqqadum. Their glorious humiliation of the cowardly Americans would be duly reported to the President. Both Colonel Jabbar and his wingman, Captain Hakim Al-Fariz, would be summoned to the presidential palace to have medals pinned on them by Saddam himself.

This would come to pass, Jabbar knew, because of one simple truth: Captain Al-Fariz, incompetent ass that he was, was the son of Saddam Hussein’s second youngest sister. It was no secret that the young officer had been designated for rapid advancement in the Iraqi military. Even though he had just completed his initial training in the MiG-29, he was already assigned as Jabbar’s assistant squadron commander.

Today was Al-Fariz’s first tactical mission in the MiG-29. And he was useless.

Jabbar glanced over his left shoulder, checking on his neophyte wingman. At first, he couldn’t find him. Then he spotted the MiG, down low, nearly a mile in trail.

“Close it up, Blue Wing,” Jabbar barked on the radio. “Bring it abeam, and closer.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Jabbar watched Al-Fariz’s MiG slide forward. It was not enough. The oaf knew nothing about tactical formation. He was still too far out, still in trail. Jabbar felt like keying his microphone and telling the imbecile, as he would any other pilot in his squadron, what a worthless specimen of fly-encrusted shit he was, that he had no business driving a goat cart, never mind a supersonic killing machine like the MiG-29.

Colonel Jabbar kept his silence. The idiot nephew of the country’s idiot President held the key to Jabbar’s own destiny. If Jabbar returned from this mission with Al-Fariz safely on his wing, he would be covered in glory. Of course, if the unthinkable happened and something happened to the nephew, Jabbar would be peering down the muzzles of a Republican Guard firing squad. Such was life in the Iraqi Air Force.

Forty kilometers. Two minutes. Jabbar rolled into a bank, searching the pocked desert for landmarks. There were few good visual cues for the invisible 33^rd parallel. Again he cursed the worthless Iraqi air defense radar. They had no reliable way to guide him to the precise boundary of the NFZ. He would have to depend on the MiG’s quirky navigational display and on his own knowledge of the Iraqi landscape.

There! A wave-like series of wadis, a twisting road in the desert leading to a rocky promontory. Jabbar recognized the landmarks that identified the boundary — the invisible line drawn in the sand after the Gulf War, beyond which the Iraqi Air Force was forbidden to fly. Jabbar figured that his headlong charge at the boundary would already have lit up the allies’ radar screens and alerted their interceptors. Now he and his wingman would execute a hard turn, parallel the boundary, tease them like a cat taunting a leashed dog.

The trick was knowing how long the leash was.

Commander Killer DeLancey, leader of the four-plane flight of F/A-18E Super Hornets, watched his second section refueling from the KS-3 Viking tanker. Delancey and his wingman, Lieutenant Hozer Miller, were finished with their own refueling. Now they were in a high perch position off the tanker’s left wing.

DeLancey glanced at the MDIs — Multipurpose Disply Indicators — on his instrument panel. With the afternoon sun streaming over his shoulder, he could see his reflected image in the glass screen — camo-drab helmet, oxgyen mask pressed against his face, sun visor pulled down over his eyes. He looked like a creature from science fiction.

While he waited, DeLancey assessed the tools of his trade. The Super Hornet was armed with an arsenal of air-to-air weaponry. With the touch of a button he could select three different ways to destroy an airborne adversary. On each wingtip he carried an AIM-9 heatseeking Sidewinder missile. On inboard stations were mounted the AIM-120 radar-guided missiles. In the long pointed snout of his Hornet fighter nestled the twenty-millimeter Vulcan cannon with its horrific 6,000-round-per-minute rate of fire.

With his right hand DeLancey kept a light hold on the control stick. The stick grip bristled with knobs and switches — cannon and missile firing trigger, the pickle button that launched air-to-ground munitions, the three-position air-to-air weapon select button.

DeLancey’s flight had been scheduled for a routine CAP — Combat Air Patrol — of the NFZ. It was supposed to be a four-ship CAP. But that was before the call from AWACS.

Now he wanted to move out. He rolled his Hornet into a turn and shoved the throttles up. Hozer Miller stayed glued to his left wing.

“Stinger one and two will take the hot vector,” Delancey said. “Three and four, rejoin after you’ve tanked.”

“Standby, Killer,” came the voice of Commander Brick Maxwell, leading the second section of Hornets. Maxwell’s wingman was still plugged into the tanker’s refueling drogue. “We haven’t finished tanking. This oughta be a four-ship.”

DeLancey assessed the situation. That damned Maxwell was lecturing him again. Maxwell was DeLancey’s operations officer. He had been in the squadron three months and he was a royal pain in the ass.

DeLancey gave it a moment’s thought, then reached a decision: Screw Maxwell. Screw the four-ship. This was war.

He swung the nose of his Hornet to the north. He was not going to wait while those two old ladies took their sweetass time refueling. Not with MiGs headed into the NFZ.

“Stinger One-one is taking the vector,” Delancey said. “Hozer, stay joined. We’ll engage as a two-ship.”

“Roger that, Skipper,” Miller replied without hesitation. Hozer might be a suck up, thought DeLancey, but he was a team player.

DeLancey knew the radio exchange was being monitored and recorded both aboard the AWACS and back in the Combat Information Center on the Reagan. He also knew he would catch hell from CAG Boyce, the Air Wing Commander. So be it. It wouldn’t be the first time he had to explain his actions in front of some thumb-up-his-ass captain or admiral. This was combat, or at least the closest thing to it. In combat you had to seize opportunity.

DeLancey knew about seizing opportunity. On the side of his Hornet, just beneath his name, were the painted silhouettes of three fighters. One was a MiG-21. The other two were Super Galebs. The MiG was from the first night of Desert Storm, over Iraq. The Galebs were a flight of two in Yugoslavia. DeLancey had caught them from behind and shot them both with AIM-9 Sidewinders. With three kill symbols on his fuselage, Killer DeLancey was America’s top-scoring fighter pilot.

Here was another opportunity. Two bandits.

The significance of the two Iraqi jets aimed southward was fixed like an implant in DeLancey’s brain. Another kill symbol on his jet would ensure his status as the world’s top fighter pilot. Two more… the thought made him almost giddy. Killer DeLancey would be the only active-duty ace in the world.

He would be a legend.

Tracey Barnett could see the whole picture. It was a classic intercept. On her tac display, the shooters and the bandits were converging like glow worms in a meadow. “Stinger One-one, Sea Lord,” she said in her microphone. “Bandits bearing zero-one-zero, range sixty-two miles, at thirty-one-thousand. Looks like they’re turning to parallel.”

Tracey was beginning to relax. This was going to be another of those cruise-the-boundary capers the Iraqis liked to pull. She wondered why they bothered. Why did they want to expose themselves? Maybe it made them feel good.

Sometimes Tracey marveled at how progress and antiquity were melded together in this business. The lumbering four-engined E-3C, for example, with its saucer-shaped radome and array of advanced electronic warfare equipment. This big truck was the same basic Boeing 707 that first flew nearly fifty years ago. Yet it was the most sophisticated — and deadly — command and surveillance tool on the planet.

She heard the Hornet leader. “Stinger One-one has a lock.”

Tracey stared at the screen. A lock? That meant the Hornet leader was targeting the bandits. What the hell was going on?

“Your weapons status is tight, Stinger One-one. Copy that?” “Tight” meant that the Hornets did not have clearance to arm their air-to-air missiles. They had to wait for an indication of hostile intent.

She waited for Stinger One-one’s acknowledgment.

And waited.

Nothing.

“Stinger One-one, confirm weapons status tight.”

Still nothing. Damn! He was stonewalling her. She could see the fighters — Hornets and MiGs — converging on the tac display.

Fifty miles. Okay, guys, this is going too far.

She jabbed her intercom button. “Butch, you better check this out.”

“Coming,” answered Butch Kissick, a graying, crew-cut Navy lieutenant commander. Kissick was the ACE — Airborne Command Element — who reported directly to a three-star general headquartered in Riyadh.

Kissick walked to Tracey’s console and plugged in his own headset. He looked at the tac display, and a frown passed over his face. The Hornets were flying a pursuit curve that would put them in firing range in the next two minutes.

“Stinger One-one, this is Hammer,” Kissick said. “Answer up, cowboy, or I’m gonna yank your ass out of there.”

Three seconds passed.

Finally, “Stinger One-one copies, Hammer. We show the bandits turning nose hot.” “Nose hot” meant that the opposing fighter’s nose was pointed toward them. It was an indication of hostile intent.

“Negative, negative,” Kissick replied, his voice rising. “They’re gonna turn and stay north of the border.”

Another two seconds. “Copy.”

Kissick stood there, watching the glow worms on the screen come closer. If this peckerhead in Stinger One-one pushed any harder, Kissick was going to call the game off. But as long as they followed the rules of engagement, he’d let them play. At least they might scare the crap out of a couple Iraqi fighter jocks.

Maxwell glanced to his right. A quarter mile away, in combat spread formation, was his wingman, Leroi Jones. Both jets were in full afterburner, hauling ass to catch their commanding officer, who had just charged off to engage the Iraqi Air Force.

Maxwell studied his situational display. The bandits were heading west along the border. They were obviously playing their game of feint and tease. The other two blips in the display — Killer and Hozer — were nose hot on them, in a ninety-degree intercept angle.

Maxwell was getting a bad feeling in his gut. He called on the tactical frequency: “Stinger One-one, confirm the rules of engagement. We gotta see hostile intent, right?”

“We already covered that in the briefing.”

“I show the bandits nose cold.”

“Get off the frequency,” DeLancey snapped, “unless you’ve got something I need to hear.”

In the cockpit of his Hornet, Maxwell smoldered. Everyone on the channel — AWACS, Rivet Joint, the rest of Stinger One-one flight — had heard the rebuff.

Okay, asshole, go for it. Maybe we can bail you out. Maybe not.

Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!

Colonel Jabbar heard the aural alert from his Sirena RWR — radar warning receiver — and he felt every nerve fiber in his body tingle.

He had heard it before, of course. And he expected it. It meant that the Americans — probably F/A-18 Hornets — were rushing toward the NFZ at high speed. Even his enfeebled GCI up in Baghdad had been able to pick them out and send the warning. So it was all very normal that Jabbar and his wingman would be getting an RWR warning from the inbound fighters. It was part of the game.

Still, that slow chirping of the Sirena made his blood run cold. Jabbar toyed for a second with the notion of turning hard into the Yankee bastards and engaging them. Stuff a couple of AA-10 missiles up their intakes. It would be glorious. It would correct a hundred past humiliations the Iraqi Air Force had suffered.

But not today. He did not have an expendable wingman to lose in such an engagement. Instead he had Saddam’s idiot nephew to protect.

“Blue Wing, stay with me,” Jabbar radioed Al-Fariz. “We have fighters approaching from the south.”

Jabbar started a gentle turn to the north. He would play it safe, show everyone that he was giving the border a wide berth. As he turned, Jabbar glanced over his left shoulder. Make sure Al-Fariz was following.

He saw nothing.

No wingman. Just empty sky.

“Blue Wing, where are you? Join up! Now!”

Captain Hakim Al-Fariz heard the warning. Enemy fighters inbound from the south! Even though Colonel Jabbar had briefed him that the Americans would probably send up fighters, the news that they were out there — coming toward them! — sent a surge of adrenaline through Al-Fariz’s body strong enough to jolt a camel.

His immediate reaction was to go to his own radar. Fighters! Where were they? From what angle?

Fixated on the display, he twirled the acquisition knob. He was a novice with the complicated Russian-built tactical radar display. Why wasn’t he picking up the targets? Where in God’s name were they?

While Al-Fariz toiled with his radar, his MiG-29 rolled into a gentle left turn.

Southward. Into the NFZ.

They all saw it.

Tracey Barnett, in the E-3C AWACS, picked it up on her display. The trailer MiG was… Oh, shit!.. the guy was turning nose hot!

Butch Kissick was peering at the same display. “God damn it!” he roared. “Look at that. The sonofabitch is flying right into the NFZ.”

Brick Maxwell, leading the second section of Hornets at Mach 1.2 toward the NFZ border, observed the MiG drifting across the border. He also saw the lead Fulcrum in a shallow turn — to the right. What the hell? Were these guys playing a game? Some kind of setup? The trailer Fulcrum was either playing a game of chicken or he was totally out to lunch.

Maxwell felt a sense of dread. This was going to be ugly. The other pair of blips — Stinger One-one and his wingman — were closing fast from the left. DeLancey and Hozer were almost within the envelope for a missile shot. And so was the Fulcrum. He was still coming left.

Nose hot.

DeLancey wasn’t worried about the Fulcrum pilot taking a shot. If the guy really wanted to fight, Delancey figured, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to make a shallow turn like that into two opposing fighters. Even if he managed to get a missile into the air, DeLancey was sure that at this range he and Hozer would have the time and tools to defeat it.

Only one worrisome thought troubled him: This MiG jockey might get homesick and bug out for Baghdad.

He might get away.

And sure as hell, that’s what the guy was doing. DeLancey could see it happening on his radar. He could see the bandit’s nose cranking around back to the right. The sonofabitch was going to cut and run!

Well, maybe he’d get away, maybe not. If the stupid bastard was in the NFZ, he was fair game.

On his stores display, DeLancey selected an AIM-120 radar-guided missile. It would be at the far edge of his firing envelope, but it was the only shot he would have.

He rolled his Hornet into a right turn, leading the Iraqi jet’s turn to the north. He superimposed the target acquisition box in his head up display over the radar symbol of the retreating Fulcrum.

Looking good… almost… hold it… There!

Fighter pilots called the AIM-120 a “wild dog in a meat locker.” This was because the missile contained its own autonomous guidance system which, when locked onto a target — any target — guided the weapon without further control from the pilot. Once launched, the AIM-120 pursued its prey like an unleashed hunting animal.

Delancey squeezed the trigger on his stick.

Whoom!

He squeezed again.

Whoom!

Two AIM-120 missiles, one after the other, were racing out ahead of the Hornet. Behind each missile trailed a wisp of smoke and vapor.

“Fox 3!” yelled DeLancey, signaling that he had just fired radar-guided missiles.

Hunched inside the cockpit of his MiG-29, Captain Hakim Al-Fariz heard the slow chirping of the Sirena radar warning receiver. Then he heard it sharpen to a high-pitched warble.

Al-Fariz felt a stab of fear that nearly made his heart explode. Even though he had never been in combat, he recognized that shrill warbling sound: The Sirena, which had been receiving the American fighters’ APG-73 radar emissions, was now hearing something else.

A missile! An air-to-air missile was inbound. From where? Was it targeting him?

Al-Fariz refused to believe what was happening. How could this be? This was his first tactical mission in the MiG-29. He wasn’t supposed to be fired upon by the enemy.

“Help!” he squawked on the radio. “Colonel! The Sirena. A missile—”

“Break right!” came the voice of Colonel Jabbar. “Turn right now! Immediately!”

The urgent command penetrated like a laser into Al-Fariz’s paralyzed brain. Turn! He jammed the stick hard to the right, then pulled. The MiG wheeled hard into a right turn. Al-Fariz hauled the stick back, grunting under the heavy acceleration. Five Gs, six, seven Gs. Seven times his normal body weight, the blood being forced from his brain. Turn! Make the missile overshoot.

The AIM-120 bored through the sky toward the MiG. The sudden angle-off and the seven Gs were more than the missile could manage. Nearly at the end of its envelope, the air-to-air missile swished past the tail of the hard-turning MiG-29, then sputtered and lost its guidance.

Al-Fariz was alive.

But the second missile, a quarter-mile behind the first, stayed locked-on. As Al-Fariz’s MiG-29 pulled hard in its seven-G vertical bank, the AIM-120 continued in a relentless arcing pursuit curve.

Tracking. Closer, closer, still tracking.

Kablooom! The missile impacted the MiG squarely in the cockpit.

The forward half of the MiG-29 disintegrated from the blast of the AIM-120’s warhead. Captain Hakim Al-Fariz, who had been an athletic, handsome specimen of young Iraqi manhood, was transformed into a molten blob of protoplasm.

The aft portion of the jet, containing the engines and the fuselage fuel tank, exploded in an orange fireball. The flaming debris descended like a comet to the floor of the desert.

“Stinger One-one, splash one!”

The radio call from the Hornet crackled like an electric shock through the command cabin of the AWACS. Butch Kissick stared at the tactical display console. “What the fuck…?”

Tracey Barnett was shaking her head. “He did it. He shot him.”

“I don’t believe this shit,” said Kissick.

“What do you want me to do, Butch?”

“Remember everything that happened. I guarantee you we’re gonna be standing in the general’s office.”

From thirty miles away, Maxwell saw the fireball. It looked like a tiny Roman candle, arcing downward to the earth.

On his radar display he could see the aftermath of the engagement: The lead bandit was still in a turn to the north. The blips from DeLancey and Hozer’s Hornets were still pointed northward, into Iraqi air space.

“Stinger One-one,” said Maxwell. “Heads up. You’re past the NFZ boundary.”

“Roger that,” said Killer. Maxwell could hear the exhilaration in DeLancey’s voice. “We’re bugging out. Stay nose on the bandit and cover us while we egress.”

“Three copies. You’re covered.”

Maxwell saw the two radar symbols — Killer and Hozer — executing a turn-in-place to the left. In unison, their noses swung toward the south, back to the NFZ, egressing from Iraqi air space. As they turned southward, Maxwell and his wingman swept past them with their noses — and missiles — trained on the surviving MiG. Just in case the MiG leader decided to come back and take a shot at the retreating Hornets’ exposed tail pipes.

And that, Maxwell realized with a start, was exactly what the bastard was doing.

There it was on his display — the symbol of the lead Iraqi MiG-29. He wasn’t turning north any longer. The MiG’s nose was in a hard turn southward. Toward Maxwell and his wingman.

“Sea Lord, Stinger three,” Maxwell called. “Do you show the lead bandit coming nose hot?”

“That’s affirmative,” answered Tracey Barnett from the AWACS. “Looks like he’s reengaging.”

Maxwell cursed inside his oxygen mask. It was just what he was afraid would happen. The fight that DeLancey started wasn’t over. DeLancey had hosed this guy’s wingman. Now the Iraqi wanted to take his own shot at someone.

Maxwell was the someone. It was going to be a face-to-face shoot-out.

Colonel Jabbar scanned the empty sky where Al-Fariz’s MiG had been. No sign of a parachute. He was not surprised. He knew from the pitch of the Sirena warning that it was a radar-guided weapon, not a heat-seeker. It had been a direct hit. At least Al-Fariz did not suffer a painful death.

Jabbar felt himself filled with a white-hot fury. The smoking trail of his wingman’s destroyed jet was still falling to the desert. The arrogant bastards had executed Al-Fariz like he was a stray dog in a garbage heap.

He could see in his radar the two fighters — the ones who had killed Al-Fariz — egressing from the area. If he accelerated, pursued them into the NFZ, Jabbar could lock them up, take them both out.

But then he saw something else. Two extra blips that weren’t there before.

He should have known. Two more enemy fighters coming at him. They were twenty miles, nose on.

Just as Jabbar reached to slew the target designator in his radar display to lock up the lead fighter, he heard the aural warning in his headset. The warning was in Russian: “Low fuel! Low fuel!”

For a second Jabbar considered. If he stayed in the fight, he would probably run out of fuel before he made it back to Al-Taqqadum. If he turned tail, he would be exposed to a shot from the enemy fighters. Either way, his chances were nil.

Jabbar’s finger went to the missile launch button on the control stick.

He was about to depress the button when he heard another aural alert. Chirp! Chirp! Chirrrrrrrp!

The Sirena. It was going crazy. They had fired another missile! This time Jabbar was the target. The enemy had preempted him. Now he was defensive.

Colonel Jabbar made an instantaneous tactical decision: Try to save yourself. Maybe, if you survive the missile, you might even escape a firing squad.

Jabbar snapped the MiG into a seven-G right break. He shoved the throttles into afterburner and dove for the deck. With its nose down, under full thrust from the two mighty Tumansky afterburners, the MiG-29 accelerated — Mach 1.5. Mach 2. The brown vastness of the Iraqi desert filled his windscreen.

Jabbar was in a deadly tail chase. Behind him the Mach 3 air-to-air missile was trying to overtake his Mach 2 MiG-29 fighter. It was a game of hound-and-hare, except that the hound possessed an 800-mile-per-hour advantage.

He could hear the angry shrill squeal of the Sirena. Sweat poured from inside Jabbar’s helmet, stinging his eyes. Chiiirrrrrrrrrrp!

The chirping intensified. More shrill, more relentless. The missile was closing on him. Jabbar hunched down in his cockpit seat, holding his breath, waiting for the inevitable.

The chirping stopped.

Jabbar waited. The chirping did not resume.

He took his first breath in nearly a minute. He had outrun the killer missile and its fuel was exhausted. But the Americans were still behind him. Was another missile on its way?

Maxwell prepared to fire his second missile. His finger curled around the trigger.

His first shot had been launched at the extreme end of the AIM-120’s range. The MiG pilot had made a smart move. He had dived and managed to outrun the missile. It had saved his life, at least for the moment. It had also persuaded him to haul ass for home.

But now, because the MiG had gone nearly vertical, Maxwell had closed the distance. He could take a second shot and still bag the MiG. Maxwell hesitated, finger on his trigger. Should I kill this guy…?

The window was closing. He had perhaps three seconds. He could shoot now — and the MiG would be dead. Another anonymous Iraqi fighter pilot would be history.

Maxwell’s finger touched the trigger.

Squeeze the damn thing. Shoot and get it over.

Another second.

“Position check, Brick,” said Leroi, high off Maxwell’s right wing. Jones’s job was to radar-search for “spitters” — unobserved newcomers to the fight. Jones sounded worried. “We’re thirty miles past the boundary.”

So they were. The two Hornets were deep into Iraqi air space, and going deeper. On his display Maxwell could see the blip of the Iraqi jet retreating northward at twice the speed of sound.

The MiG was still in range. Maxwell still had a shot.

He slid his finger off the trigger. Okay, pal. You owe me one. Have a nice life.

“Copy that. We’re bugging out.”

Screech. Screech.

The landing gear of the big Russian fighter squawked onto the asphalt surface of Highway U45, the main thoroughfare from Baghdad to the Al-Taqqadum military complex.

Jabbar saw an Army truck coming at him head on. Jabbar’s MiG was still rolling at over a hundred kilometers per hour. From the cockpit, Jabbar could see the truck driver’s eyes. They looked like huge white lamps. At the last instant the driver swerved toward the ditch, rolling the truck up on its side. Jabbar swept past, giving the driver a friendly wave.

Well, he’d almost made it back to Al-Taqqadum. The full-afterburner race with the air-to-air missile had consumed the last of his reserve fuel. Knowing that he would not make it to the Al-Taqqadum runway, Jabbar had decided to plunk the MiG-29 down on the highway while his engines were still running.

That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Ten seconds after touch down, he saw the RPM indicator for the left engine begin spooling down from fuel exhaustion. And then the right engine. Now he was coasting down the highway in total silence.

Still rolling, Jabbar passed a sign declaring that visitors were ordered to halt. They were entering a restricted military area. Ahead he saw the main gate of Al-Taqqadum air base. Jabbar let the jet roll until the long, drooping snout of the MiG-29 was pointed directly at the door of the sentry house.

A startled guard, holding his Kalishnikov across his chest, came charging out of the sentry house. Suddenly aware of the immense object rolling toward him, the guard dug in his heels. Losing traction, he fell in a heap, still clutching the Kalishnikov.

Jabbar brought the MiG to a smooth stop. He opened the canopy and removed his brilliantly painted red helmet. The red helmet was the single indulgence by which he distinguished himself from his other squadron pilots.

Despite the searing afternoon temperature, the outside air felt cool. He gazed around him at the shimmering desert, the dumbstruck guard, the air base he hadn’t quite reached. Overhead, the sky was a dull, hazy blue. Jabbar realized that he was soaking wet from perspiration.

Several hundred yards inside the gate, he saw a personnel vehicle coming. It would be the base commander and, surely, several Republican Guardsmen.

All in all, he thought, this had been a very bad day. And the worst was yet to come.