Chapter 68
YOSSI felt his Barak shudder twice and then pitch up as the jet was suddenly more than a thousand pounds lighter.
The autopilot immediately compensated for the aircraft’s increased lift, nudging the altitude back to the preset.
Yossi registered the brief change in altitude before the nose dipped back down, but his attention was directed elsewhere.
The flatbed truck in his sensor’s crosshairs.
He engaged the laser and was rewarded with a rapidly decreasing set of digits in the screen’s corner that represented his aircraft’s range to the target, but it was the smaller but also decreasing number on the screen’s lower right corner that received the majority of his focus.
These numerals indicated the time until the two bombs impacted their targets.
Thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds until he no longer had to fear that one morning he’d wake up to the sound of his children gasping in their bedroom from a cloud of death.
The time until falling ordnance impacted always seemed to stretch to eternity, but that was especially true now.
The Barak’s heading hold was keeping the fighter on course and level, while the weapons computer maintained the targeting laser’s spot perfectly centered on the truck’s chassis.
By now, his fellow Barak pilots were also tracking their assigned targets, but until the ordnance hurtling through the air impacted and the dust cleared, there was nothing for Yossi to do.
Fifteen seconds.
He risked a glance at his air-to-air radar and frowned.
The flight of helicopters was still closing. The rotary-wing aircraft wouldn’t arrive until after his wingmen pickled their bombs, but they’d be in for one hell of a show.
Yossi shifted right and scanned the desert below him.
The Barak’s bubble-shaped canopy offered its pilot unparalleled visibility and was one of the many reasons why the aircraft was so formidable in a dogfight.
He thought he could just distinguish the outline of the approaching helicopters, but it was difficult to pinpoint the black specks against the ground clutter.
He turned back to the sensor display as the time of flight ticked down to single digits.
Eight seconds.
It was really happening.
“Lion, this is Shepherd. Abort, abort, abort!”