This really must be war, Sultan thought, because things are rapidly getting all screwed up.

Breaking radio silence, he called the “Camel” aircraft, asking for his position (“Camel” was the call sign used by Saudi pilots for their refuelers).

His tanker answered that he was a hundred miles to the south, too far for Sultan to make a rendezvous, refuel, and make it to the target on time. In other words, Sultan and Mohammed were out of the show their very first try at combat.

Just then, another Camel aircraft called, its pilot a longtime flying buddy of Sultan’s. “Sultan, is that you? Do you need gas? I’m at the refueling track at the next block altitude, sixteen thousand feet.”

In their excitement, Sultan and his KC-130 pilot friend were talking in Arabic instead of the more correct English, until someone else came up on frequency to tell them to keep quiet (they were supposed to be comm out). Sultan then climbed up 4,000 feet and put his Tornado behind this new tanker. Now he had to get hooked up to the basket trailing a hundred feet behind the KC-130. During daylight and in good weather, this was a demanding task. At night and in thunderstorms with a heavily loaded jet, it proved close to impossible.

Sultan called his tanker friend: “If you really want to help me, climb another four thousand feet so we can get on top of this weather.”

“I can’t,” Camel replied. “There are aircraft above us.” (He had read the Air Tasking Order, good man.)

Always the fighter pilot, Sultan simply hooked up and said, “Then keep your eyes open and give me high flow.” (That meant pump the gas at maximum pressure, so the receiver aircraft would fill its tanks in the minimum time.)

As they bounced through the night sky, riding the tops of angry clouds, desperately hanging on to the hose of a pirated tanker, risking collision with other aircraft scheduled to use that same piece of sky, Sultan asked Mohammed to let him know exactly when they had enough fuel to get to the target and back. Though they were now eight minutes late and still short on gas, Mohammed advised Sultan that they could do that.

Sultan thanked the tanker and backed off, then rolled the fighter onto its back and split “S”s down into the inky blackness. Because of their high-speed descent, and because the tanker had dropped them off at the north end of the refueling track, they were able to save six minutes. Now they needed only to fly faster and make their appointed time over target.

Leveling off at 3,000 feet, Sultan checked out the terrain-following radar and its connections with the jet’s autopilot. Since everything was working, he selected 1,500 feet, soon followed by 1,000 feet; and then, swallowing hard, he flipped the switch that caused the fighter to drop to 200 feet above the ground.