The Fist of God (72 page)

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 The Fist of God

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.

“We have five unidentifieds, ten o’clock low,” the wizzo muttered, and engaged IFF. The other three wizzos in the flight did the same.

Identification Friend or Foe is a sort of transponder carried by all combat airplanes. It sends out a pulse on certain frequencies, which are changed daily. Warplanes on the same side will receive this pulse and reply: “I am a friend.” Enemy aircraft cannot do so. The five blips on the radar screen crossing the track of the Eagles miles ahead and close The Fist of God

to the ground might have been five friendlies coming back from a mission—more than likely, since there were far more Allied aircraft in the skies than Iraqis.

Tim questioned the unidentifieds on modes one, two, and four. No response.

“Hostiles,” he reported. Don Walker flicked his missile switches to Radar, muttered, “Engage,” to his other three pilots, dropped the nose, and headed down.

Abdelkarim Badri was at a disadvantage, and he knew it. He knew it from the moment the Americans locked onto him. He knew without any IFF to tell him that these other aircraft could not possibly be fellow Iraqis. He knew he had been spotted by hostiles, and he knew his young colleagues would be no match for them.

His disadvantage lay in the MiG he flew. Because it was the trainer version, the only type with two seats, it was never destined for combat.

Colonel Badri’s radar had only a sixty-degree sweep out of the nose.

He could not see who had locked onto him.

“What do you have?” he barked at his wingman. The reply was breathless and frightened.

“Four hostiles, three o’clock high, diving fast.”

So the gamble had failed. The Americans were bucketing down the sky from the south, intent on blowing them all out of the air.

“Scatter, dive, go to afterburner, head for Iran!” he shouted.

The young pilots needed no second bidding. From the jet pipes of each MiG a blast of flame leaped backward as the four throttles went through the gate, punching the fighters through the sound barrier and almost doubling their speed.

Despite the huge increase in fuel consumption, the single-seaters could keep their afterburners going long enough to evade the Americans and The Fist of God

still reach Iran. Their head start on the Eagles meant the Americans would never catch them, even though they too would now be in afterburn.

Abdelkarim Badri had no such option. In making their trainer version, the Soviet engineers had not only fitted a simpler radar, but to accommodate the weight of the student and his cockpit, they had considerably reduced the internal fuel capacity.

The fighter colonel was carrying underwing long-range fuel tanks, but these would not be enough. He had four choices. It took him no more than two seconds to work them out.

He could go to afterburner, escape the Americans, and return to an Iraqi base, there to be arrested and handed over sooner or later to the AMAM for torture and death.

He could engage afterburner and continue for Iran, evading the Americans but running out of fuel soon after crossing the border. Even if he and his brother ejected safely, they would fall among the Persian tribesmen who had suffered so horribly in the Iran-Iraq war from the cargos dropped on them by Iraqi aviators.

He could use the afterburner to avoid the Eagles, then fly south to eject over Saudi Arabia and become a prisoner. It never occurred to him that he would be treated humanely.

There were some lines that came into his head from long ago, lines from a poem he had learned at Mr. Hartley’s school in that Baghdad of his boyhood. Tennyson? Wordsworth? No, Macaulay, that was it, Macaulay, something about a man in his last moments, something he had read out in class.

To every man upon this earth,

Death cometh soon or late.

The Fist of God

And how can a man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods?

Badri pushed his throttle through the gate into afterburner, hauled the MiG Fulcrum into a climbing turn, and went up to meet the oncoming Americans.

As soon as he turned, the four Eagles came into his radar range. Two had scattered, racing down after the fleeing single-seaters, all of them with afterburner engaged, all beyond the sound barrier.

But the leader of the Americans was coming straight down and at him.

Badri felt the shudder as the Fulcrum went supersonic, adjusted the control column a fraction, and went for the diving Eagle ahead of him.

“Christ, he’s coming straight at us!” said Tim from the rear seat.

Walker did not need to be told. His own radar screen showed him the four vanishing blips of the Iraqi aircraft fleeing for Iran and the single glow of the enemy fighter climbing toward him to engage. The rangefinder was unwinding like an alarm clock out of control. At thirty miles, they were hurtling toward each other at a closing speed of 2,200

miles per hour. He still could not see the Fulcrum visually, but it would not be long.

In the MiG, Colonel Osman Badri was totally bewildered. He had understood nothing of what had happened. The sudden thump of the afterburner engaging had hit him in the small of the back again, and the seven-G turn had caused him to black out for several seconds.

“What is happening?” he shouted into his mask, but he was unaware that the mute button was on, so his brother could not hear him.

Don Walker’s thumb was poised over his missile controls. He had two The Fist of God

choices: the longer-range AIM-7 Sparrow, which was radar-guided from the Eagle itself, or the shorter-range AIM-9 Sidewinder, which was a heat-seeker.

At fifteen miles he could see it, the small black dot racing up toward him. The twin fins showed it was a MiG 29 Fulcrum—arguably one of the best interceptor fighters in the world in the right hands. Walker did not know he faced the unarmed trainer version. What he did know was that it might carry the AA-10 Soviet missile, with a range as long as his own AIM-7s. That was why he chose the Sparrows.

At twelve miles he launched two Sparrows dead ahead. The missiles flashed away, picking up the radar energy reflected from the MiG and obediently heading straight toward it.

Abdelkarim Badri saw the flashes as the Sparrows left the Eagle, giving him a few more seconds of life unless he could force the American to break off. He reached down to his left and pulled a single lever.

Don Walker had often wondered what it would be like, and now he knew. From the underside of the MiG’s wings came an answering flicker of light. It was like a cold hand gripping his entrails, the icy, freezing sensation of pure fear. Another man had launched two missiles at him. He was staring certain death straight in the face.

Two seconds after he launched the Sparrows, Walker wished he had chosen the Sidewinders. The reason was simple: The Sidewinders were fire-and-forget missiles, they would find the target no matter where the Eagle was. The Sparrows needed the Eagle to guide them; if he broke away now, the missiles, without guidance, would “gimbal,”

or wander off across the sky to fall harmlessly to earth.

He was within a fraction of a second of breaking off when he saw the missiles launched by the MiG tumble away toward the ground. In The Fist of God

disbelief he realized they were not rockets at all; the Iraqi had tricked him by releasing his underwing fuel tanks. The aluminum canisters had caught the morning sun as they fell, glittering like the ignited fuel of launching missiles. It was a trick, and he, Don Walker, had damn nearly fallen for it.

In the MiG Abdelkarim Badri realized the American was not going to break off. He had tested the man’s nerve, and he had lost. In the rear seat Osman had found the Transmit button. He could see by looking over his shoulder that they were climbing, already miles above the ground.

“Where are we going?” he screamed. The last thing he heard was the voice of Abdelkarim, quite calm.

“Peace, my brother. To greet our father. Allah-o-Akhbar.”

Walker watched the two Sparrows explode at that moment, great peonies of red flame three miles away, then the broken fragments of the Soviet fighter tumble down to the landscape below. He felt the sweat trickling down his chest in rivulets.

His wingman, Randy Roberts, who had held his position above and behind him, appeared off his right wingtip, the white-gloved hand raised with the thumb erect. He replied in kind, and the other two Eagles, having abandoned their fruitless chase of the remaining MiGs, swam up from below to reform and went on to the bridge above Al Kut.

Such is the speed of events in fighter combat that the entire action, from the first radar lock-on to the destruction of the Fulcrum, had taken just thirty-eight seconds.

The spotter was at the Winkler Bank on the dot of ten that morning, The Fist of God

accompanied by his “accountant.” The younger man bore a deep attaché case containing one hundred thousand American dollars in cash.

The money was actually a temporary loan arranged by the banking
sayan
, who was much relieved to be told that it would simply be deposited with the Winkler Bank for a while, then retrieved and returned to him.

When he saw the money, Herr Gemütlich was delighted. He would have been less enthusiastic had he noticed that the dollars occupied only half the thickness of the attaché case, and he would have been horrified to see what lay beneath the false bottom.

For the sake of discretion, the accountant was banished to Fräulein Hardenberg’s room while the lawyer and the banker arranged the confidential operating codes for the new account. The accountant returned to take charge of the receipt for the money and by eleven the matter was concluded. Herr Gemütlich summoned the commissionaire to escort the visitors back to the lobby and the front door.

On the way down the accountant whispered something into the American lawyer’s ear, and the lawyer translated it to the commissionaire. With a curt nod the commissionaire stopped the old grille-fronted elevator at the mezzanine floor, and the three got out.

The lawyer pointed out the door of the men’s room to his colleague, and the accountant went in. The lawyer and the commissionaire remained on the landing outside.

At this point there came to their ears the sounds of a fracas in the lobby, clearly audible because the lobby was twenty feet along the corridor and down fifteen marble steps.

With a muttered excuse the commissionaire strode along the corridor until he could see from the top of the stairs down to the hallway. What The Fist of God

he saw caused him to run down the marble steps to sort the matter out.

It was an outrageous scene. Somehow three rowdies, clearly drunk, had entered the lobby and were harassing the receptionist for money for more liquid refreshment. She would later say they had tricked her into opening the front door by claiming they were the postman.

Full of indignation, the commissionaire sought to bustle the hooligans outside. No one noticed that one of the rowdies, on entering, had dropped a cigarette pack against the doorjamb so that, although normally self-closing, the door would not quite shut.

Nor did anyone notice, in the jostling and pushing, a fourth man enter the lobby on hands and knees. When he stood up, he was at once joined by the lawyer from New York, who had followed the commissionaire down the stairs to the lobby.

They stood to one side as the commissionaire hustled the three rowdies back where they belonged—in the street. When he turned around, the bank servant saw that the lawyer and the accountant had descended from the mezzanine of their own accord. With profuse apologies for the unseemly melee, he ushered them out.

Once on the sidewalk, the accountant let out a huge sigh of relief.

“I hope I never have to do that again,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” said the lawyer. “You did pretty well.”

They spoke in Hebrew, because the accountant knew no other language. He was in fact a bank teller from Beershe’eva, and the only reason he was in Vienna, on his first and last covert assignment, was that he also happened to he the identical twin of the cracksman, who was then standing immobile in the darkness of the cleaning closet on the mezzanine floor. There he would remain motionless for twelve hours.