Chapter 66
SOMEWHERE OVER IRAQ
RA’AD, ra’ad, ra’ad.”
Hearing the Arabic word for thunder echo across his jet’s UHF radio felt surreal to Yossi.
During his multiple decades piloting fighter jets, he’d always conversed in Hebrew or English.
Never Arabic. He didn’t speak the language, and more importantly, Arabic was the native tongue of his enemies.
This was why it was being broadcast to the strike package.
The radio call was encrypted, but in the unlikely event secure communication failed, the Air Force planners had decided that hearing Arabic code words would arouse less suspicion in Iraqi, Jordanian, or Saudi air defense personnel than random Hebrew phrases.
Yossi couldn’t fault their logic, but it still felt strange for the operation’s final clearance to be given in Arabic.
Then again, nothing about this operation felt normal.
Turning right, Yossi flashed a red-lens light out his canopy.
A second later, his wingman repeated the pattern, confirming that he had also heard the radio brevity code word meant to signify that the convoy had just passed north of the small Iraqi village of Rutba as expected and was now proceeding west for the final one-hundred-mile push to the Al Waleed Iraqi-Syrian border crossing.
Though Double Tap had been compared frequently to the strike on the Iraqi Osirak nuclear site near Baghdad, there was one very substantial difference between the two operations.
The reactor was fixed, but the chemical weapons convoy was a moving target.
Absent an asset in the convoy to provide real-time position updates, Yossi and his strike package had no idea where the target package was located and they possessed neither the fuel nor the time to zip along the convoy’s proposed route and attempt to find the transport vehicles.
This was to say nothing of what would happen if a driver took a wrong turn or, even more worrying, if the intelligence dictating the convoy’s route of travel was incorrect.
To remedy this information shortfall, Israeli air planners had settled on a unique solution.
A drone.
The Searcher unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, was a propeller-driven, fixed-wing, remotely operated sensor platform.
The aircraft typically had a range of about two hundred miles, but the version gliding through the skies of Iraq tonight had been specially modified for this operation.
Its payload consisted of a sensor pod and a jettisonable external fuel tank meant to increase its combat radius and loiter time.
The aircraft had been configured for a one-way trip and was rigged with explosives to self-destruct at the end of the operation in order to prevent its sensitive communications suite and cameras from falling into Iraqi hands.
The slow-flying Searcher had launched hours before Yossi’s strike package and was currently tooling through the sky three miles above the convoy.
The imagery streaming from the school bus?sized aircraft allowed mission control back in Israel to vector the Double Tap strike aircraft onto target through the series of Arabic code words broadcast on a secure UHF frequency via a radio mounted to the UAV.
Once again, the Israeli Air Force was pushing the boundaries on what was believed possible in the real-time integration of manned and unmanned aircraft, but Yossi wasn’t giving much thought to the history-making nature of their mission.
He was more interested in finding the convoy.
Activating his targeting pod, Yossi slaved the sensor to the reference grid coordinates he’d been given during the mission-planning phase.
The eight-digit alphanumeric sequence corresponded to a walled compound that sat just to the south of where Highway 1 crossed beneath Highway 11.
According to the ra’ad brevity code word, the convoy was currently east of the grid reference point, but west of Rutba.
That gave Yossi twenty miles of road to search, which was still more territory than what he intended to survey on his own.
This was where the Searcher came in.
Once the ra’ad, or thunder, brevity code was transmitted, the ground crew flying the UAV would reposition it directly above the convoy.
At an altitude of fifteen thousand feet, the aircraft would be extremely difficult to detect with the naked eye.
Its engine noise would only be audible as a low buzz, which shouldn’t be loud enough for the convoy’s occupants to hear it over their vehicles’ engines.
From the ground, the Searcher would be essentially invisible.
But not to the air-to-air radar employed by Grover’s flight of F-15s.
As with radio communications, the Israeli aircraft’s radar emissions had been kept to a minimum to facilitate their stealthy passage through first Jordanian, then Saudi, and finally Iraqi airspace.
This was about to change. Grover would conduct one sweep from his radar east along Highway 1’s heading to locate the Searcher UAV and thereby the convoy below it.
Using his low-power UHF aircraft-to-aircraft radio, Grover would pass the coordinates to Yossi, who would then set up his attack run based on the vehicles’ position.
It wasn’t a foolproof plan, but the unorthodox setup allowed the strike package to orient on the convoy without the need for radio instructions from Israel.
Such a powerful radio transmission, even if encrypted, would signal to the Iraqi military’s signal analysts that someone had violated their airspace.
This way, the strike package could retain the element of surprise until bombs began to fall on the convoy.
At least that was the theory.
But as Yossi knew from many combat missions, theories didn’t always hold up once bullets started flying. As if he could hear Yossi’s thoughts, the air-to-air radio crackled with Grover’s voice.
“Lion, this is Shepherd. Albatross sighted. Confirm ready to copy.”
Yossi engaged his aircraft’s heading hold, hesitated a second to ensure the flight computer was correctly maintaining the assigned course, and then slipped his pencil from his kneeboard. “Lion is ready to copy.”
Grover read off a string of digits, which Yossi diligently scribbled onto his kneeboard. The convoy was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be.
The operation was progressing exactly as planned.
Yossi was preparing to thumb the radio transmit button to confirm he’d received the coordinates when Grover’s voice again crackled across the airwaves.
“Lion, this is Shepherd. Be advised, we have a flight of what appear to be five rotary-wing aircraft approaching from the southeast. Negative squawk.”
The last sentence gave Yossi pause.
The F-15 was the most formidable air superiority fighter in the world. This was partly due to the aircraft’s aerodynamic design and high thrust-to-weight ratio, but the Baz’s Hughes X-band pulse-Doppler air-to-air radar system also played a huge role in ensuring the aircraft’s dominance.
In addition to detecting both high-flying and low-level targets, the radar system could “interrogate” an unknown aircraft’s transponder in order to determine if the target was a military or civilian plane and thereby a friend or foe.
A negative squawk meant that the radar system on Grover’s F-15 hadn’t been able to a response from the approaching helicopters’ transponders, which meant the devices were turned off.
The approaching flight didn’t want to be seen.
Yossi considered his response.
As the leader of the air superiority section, Grover would act to protect the flight against enemy fighters without consulting Yossi, but this was different.
While helicopters could carry air-to-air missiles, these were mostly the heat-seeking short-range variety effective against other helicopters or low-flying fixed-wing aircraft.
Even if the approaching flight were military aircraft, they represented little threat to the Israeli strike package.
By employing his powerful Hughes radar to feed targeting information to his AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, Grover could swat the helicopters from the sky long before the approaching flight of bogeys detected the strike package.
But doing so would cost at least five valuable air-to-air munitions, perhaps as many as eight or nine, leaving the F-15s that much less able to defend the strike package against more significant threats such as Iraqi or even Jordanian or Saudi fighter aircraft.
Yossi keyed the radio. “ETA for the flight?”
“Possible interception in eight minutes.”
Eight minutes.
It would be close, but Yossi and his wingmen should be able to deliver their payload of bombs and neutralize the weapons convoy before the helicopters arrived on station, assuming the flight maintained its present course and speed.
Better to reserve Grover’s armament for something that truly qualified as a threat.
“Understood,” Yossi said. “Continue to monitor. We are commencing our attack run.”
“Roger all.”
Yossi entered the coordinates Grover had provided into his weapons computer and slaved his targeting pod.
The image in his multipurpose display wavered as the thermal camera tracked to the grid position.
Then a vehicle swam into view. Yossi zoomed in a field of view and smiled. It was a flatbed cargo truck.
He’d found the convoy.
Now it was time to execute a drill he’d practiced countless times.
The Barak flight would divide into two sorties of two aircraft each.
Yossi and his wingman would attack the convoy first. The remaining two Baraks would wait for the thermal plumes generated by the exploding bombs to dissipate before commencing their attack run.
Once those aircraft wheeled off station, Yossi and his wingman would reengage.
This dance of death would continue until the target was neutralized or the Barak fighters ran out of ordnance.
He was in the process of setting his aircraft’s master arm switch to arm when Grover’s voice interrupted him.
“Shepherd has two unknown targets approaching from the west. Fast movers. No squawk.”