Watching the F-15 spread its wings and climb into the sky, Raz quelled the surge of excitement in his heart. At this moment, the bombing operation had entered its final countdown.
Once the F-15 climbed, it was immediately picked up by the radar stationed near Baghdad. Yet the radar operator had to report up the chain of command, and the order had to filter back down to the airfield; only then could fighters scramble to intercept—another few minutes lost. With those minutes, the last few dozen kilometres of the bombing run could be completed.
Those f－15s overhead would guarantee temporary air superiority.
Although this was a violation of a sovereign nation's airspace, Raz felt no guilt; though the mission brimmed with danger, he was not afraid. He was a Jewish warrior, and serving the Jewish state was his duty.
A little farther on, level flight would bring them to a lake that served as the steering landmark; there they would turn, climb, and cover the final twenty kilometres to the target for the bomb run.
Beneath the wings the winding river was already visible—this was the cradle of one of the four great civilisations, a river that had nurtured a magnificent culture.
Raz pulled his thoughts back and fixed his eyes on the nav unit; according to its guidance, the lake should appear any second.
"Prepare for combat." Zhang Feng gave the order with chilling calm; from the sound of it, the enemy jets might scream overhead the very next second.
The gunners' hands were already on the firing buttons, waiting only for an aircraft to appear so they could smash the intruders. Their hearts brimmed with faith in Qusay; the man seemed almost divine, having predicted the exact route and time of the enemy's arrival.
Raz nudged the stick a little to the right, the better to spot the little island in the lake from the starboard side, ready to begin his climb.
But his heart lurched—the island in the middle of the lake was gone. How could that be?
The nav system said they had reached the turning point, yet the island that should have been there was nowhere in sight.
In a split second Raz made his call: the cutting-edge American fighter he flew carried the most advanced laser-gyro inertial nav system; errors were impossible. The island had probably vanished for some accidental reason—perhaps the lake had risen and submerged it. (GPS did not yet exist; navigation relied mainly on inertial systems that measured the aircraft's acceleration and automatically integrated it to derive instantaneous velocity and position data.)
Without hesitation he lit the afterburner, hauled the stick aft, and pushed right rudder. The fighter turned into a runaway stallion, roaring as it slanted upward, lancing the sky; its belly flashed in the sunlight, the horizons on either side of the canopy dropping swiftly from view. Crushed into his seat by the crushing G-load, Raz fought the stick.
Behind him, the other three aircraft of Team "String" followed their leader into the climb, trusting him implicitly as they prepared for the bomb run: pull up and enter the attack vector.
The gunners in the anti-aircraft pits, eyes already stung by the whirling turbulence of the climbing jets, heard the fire command and instantly pressed their triggers.
"Thump—thump-thump-thump!" The position erupted in a furious howl.
Forty guns with a hundred and sixty barrels hurled a blizzard of shells, weaving a wall of fire above the vanished island.
Raz felt the fighter shake violently. Had he over-stressed the jet and triggered a compressor stall? Impossible—he had flown this manoeuvre hundreds of times.
He did not know that the shells bursting around him were tossing the aircraft in their shockwaves. Crushed by G-forces, he had no spare attention for the sky; his eyes were on the instruments—he had to reach one thousand metres.
But Raz would never get the chance. In the next second his aircraft exploded mid-air.
Although he had already begun to climb, he was only three hundred metres above the ground when a shell drilled straight into the wing tank and detonated.
A gigantic fireball blossomed in the sky, outshining even the sun.
Seeing that blazing sphere, the remaining three pilots knew something had gone wrong. Beneath the seemingly placid lake, anti-aircraft guns had been lying in wait—an ambush.
The four aircraft had been flying in a diamond, Raz at the apex. The two behind him reacted on pure instinct: the pilot on the left shoved his stick left, the one on the right shoved right; the pair split left and right. Reflexes honed in countless life-or-death moments had chosen the correct evasion.
Flying is a high-risk profession; flying fighters is risk squared. A delay of one-tenth of a second can decide life or death. These Israeli air-force elites did all they could to adapt.
But they had been too close to Raz; his aircraft had barely blossomed into flame before, two seconds later, they too were hit.
"Nice flying—almost as sharp as the August First Aerobatics Team. Man-made smoke trails are pretty, but nothing beats this show." Zhang Feng watched the sky with relish.
The first three aircraft disintegrated in an instant; the last pilot of Team "String", Yadlin, made the wrong move.
Yadlin watched the flight paths ahead. Climbing higher was suicide; turning left or right was no better. He clenched his teeth and hauled the stick all the way back.
If he couldn't go up, left, or right—then he'd go backward! He held the stick hard aft; the fighter obeyed, nose rising, rising… still no let-up. Then it began to pitch back, aiming for a 180-degree roll.
The instruments spun wildly while the steel beast beneath his hips followed Yadlin's command: first up, then back.
According to normal training the manoeuvre wasn't difficult; even a brief grey-out could be handled.
But Yadlin forgot the conditions: you needed at least three thousand metres of altitude and an air-superiority load—four medium-range and two short-range missiles.
Right now two two-ton monsters hung under his wings. With those brutes, no engine on earth could help.
The fighter felt like a doddering old man, taking forever to swing around—but it never completed the turn. Halfway through, as if starved of power, it began to spiral downward.
The wing stalled; the aircraft entered a flat spin.
At altitude an F-16 could recover easily, but this was extremely low—only a few dozen metres up.
Before Yadlin could even begin the recovery, the jet smashed into the lake and shattered.
Worse, the impact detonated one of the Mk84 bombs. A fireball erupted from beneath the lake, hurling water several metres into the air; spray rained onto the anti-aircraft position, hissed against the hot barrels and turned instantly to steam.
In the next instant Zhang Feng's smile vanished. Wahrih, standing nearest, heard His Excellency Qusay spit a single syllable in some strange tongue: "Kao!"
Five years later Wahrih, on a state visit to that ancient civilisation in the East, heard the word again while strolling a street—and at last grasped the rich meaning hidden inside it.