“Well, you’re allowed all the hunches you like, Lieutenant—it’ll keep the men on their toes,” the brigade commander said after another lengthy, agonizing pause. “But may I remind you that your battery will have to reposition to another location after the alert is over, so your men will be up all night.”

“I am aware of that, sir.” Once the missile batteries turned on their radars, spy planes and satellites could map their location easily, so it was important to move the missiles and radars around to make it more difficult for the enemy to find and target their radars. Fortunately, the S-300 missile system was very easy to relocate—it took less than a half hour to set up again after finding a suitable spot. The units were moved several times a week—no more than a few hundred meters, but far enough where garbage pits, latrines, and launcher anchor points had to be redug each time out of the desert. That was usually the hardest part, and the aspect of the move that caused the most grumbling.

“Very well.” The lieutenant was one of the best battery commanders in the entire brigade. The lieutenant started out as a conscript after dropping out of high school at the age of fifteen. By the age of eighteen, he had accepted a regular enlistment, and just two years after that was made a noncommissioned officer. Being prior enlisted himself, he could handle his enlisted men, conscripts, and noncommissioned officers just fine. “Report your threat assessment and engagement to the brigade operations officer immediately after you’ve called off the alert.” There were a few clacks in the net; then, on the brigade-wide channel, the lieutenant heard, “All units, all units, Twelve has issued a general air defense warning for the brigade. Report and correlate all contacts now. This is Brigade, out.”

My God, what in hell is going on here?” Greg “Gonzo” Wickland, the mission commander aboard the EB-52 Megafortress, exclaimed. They had just launched from Jaghbub and had no sooner turned southbound on course than the entire Libyan air defense network seemed to light up all at once. “SA-10, SA-11, SA-5s—every theater and tactical air defense radar is on the air all of a sudden.”

“Sanusi’s men didn’t make it,” the aircraft commander, George “Zero” Tanaka, surmised. “The Libyans probably shot down the Mi-24, and that alerted the whole country.”

“What do we do?”

“We press on,” Tanaka said. “The Hind helicopter was just a feint—we can still go in on our own.”