“Mirage moving in to lethal range,” Birish said on intercom. “All jammers active, countermeasures ready.” On the command frequency, he said, “Sahra flight, we’ve got Mirages moving in to radar missile range. Use side-to-side jinks and make sure your jammers are active.”

“We’re jinking, lead, we’re jinking,” the second bomber pilot acknowledged. “Just find the damned target. We’ll be right behind you.”

But they were losing this race. The Egyptian fighters were moving in faster—they must be “headed down the ramp,” zooming in from high altitude to use the extra speed to rapidly close in for the kill. “Rapid PRF—fighter locked on!” Birish shouted. “Vertical jinks! Find any terrain you can! Let’s lose this guy!” The Egyptian fighter’s radar changed from rapid-pulse-rate frequency to a constant tone. “Uplink active! Missile launch! Break left!”

But just as Talhi began to yank the control wheel to the left, Birish reported, “Uplink down! Radar down! The fighter disappeared!”

“Did he shut down his radar?”

“Could be, but he wouldn’t do that right after firing a missile.”

They heard the reason a few moments later: “Sahra flight, Dufda flight, this is Fadda flight of six. Your tail is clear. Now shove a few down their throats!”

Talhi whooped for joy. Fadda flight was a flight of six MiG-25s, some of the fastest fighter planes in the world. Originally designed to chase down and destroy high-flying supersonic American bombers over the Soviet Union, the titanium-armored MiG-25 could attack targets at over three times the speed of sound. Based in Tobruk, the Libyan fighters covered a lot of ground very quickly and caught the Egyptian pilots from behind.

Talhi climbed his Tu-22 back up to fifteen thousand feet above ground level, and his bombardier programmed his weapons for their attack. Talhi’s bomber was in what was called the “overload” condition—it carried three Kh-22 air-to-surface missiles, called “Burya” in Russia, one under the fuselage and one under each wing. The Kh-22, powered by its own liquid-fueled rocket engine, was the size of a small fighter jet and could fly at over six hundred miles per hour. It carried an inertial navigation system, a thousand pounds of fuel—and a three-thousand-pound high-explosive warhead.

One by one, Montessi dumped navigation and heading information into the Buryas’ computers, aligned their inertial navigation gyros, and let them fly. Although he had done many simulated Kh-22 attacks, Talhi had never actually seen one of those behemoths fly before. The rocket engine firing up sounded like an explosion right under their belly, and when it blasted free, it seemed as if a fiery spear from Allah himself had just missed them.

The missiles started a rapid climb on tongues of fire and headed for their targets—Egypt’s network of early-warning surveillance radars along its western frontier. The Burya missiles used passive radar homing devices to zero in on the early-warning radars, and once they had computed the radar’s exact position, they could not miss. With devastating accuracy, the huge Kh-22 missiles struck their targets, obliterating the radar installations and flattening any aboveground buildings or objects for over a mile around the impact point.