Meanwhile, the Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters went to work themselves—on the Egyptian E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. The Hawkeye was over one hundred miles away and had its own flight of Mirage fighter escorts, and when the radar plane detected the Libyan MiGs heading eastbound, it shut down its radar, headed northeast toward safety, and sent its fighter escorts after the intruders. But the Libyan attackers hopelessly outnumbered them. The MiG-25 fighters merely blew past the Mirages with their superior speed, and the MiG-23s pounced when the Egyptian defenders turned to pursue. The MiG-25s took care of the Hawkeye radar plane after losing only one fighter to enemy missiles.

With both the airborne and ground radar sites destroyed, the way was clear for the second Tupolev-22 bomber to climb to a safer altitude and pick its navigation waypoints with care. With Talhi’s Tu-22 leading the way, the bombardier aboard the second Tu-22 lined up precisely on his preplanned bomb run course. The courseline had to be perfect: Although the weapons did not need to be directly on target to be effective, they would get maximum effect by being no more than one or two degrees off the desired course. One by one, he seeded the area with small two- hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs fitted with radar fuzes.

Far below was the massive Salimah oil complex, Egypt’s newest oil project. Comprising over thirty thousand square miles of southern Egypt, it was the largest known oil and natural gas reserves in northern Africa. Seven wells had been drilled every day for the past two years, and none of them showed any signs of lessening their output. Five thousand workers, mostly Arabs and Africans from Sudan, Chad, Kenya, and Ethiopia, worked around the clock in Salimah, housed in rows and rows of trailers and huge tent cities stretching as far as anyone could see.

One of Egypt’s two field armies, known as the King Menes Army, was in charge of the defense of Salimah. Although it was seriously under its full strength, the King Menes Army comprised well over a third of all of Egypt’s fighting forces, included two full armored divisions, three mechanized infantry divisions, one infantry division, five artillery battalions, two fighter-interceptor squadrons, two fighter-attack squadrons, and one helicopter squadron. The eighty thousand troops were distributed with the bulk of the forces, mostly heavy armor, arrayed along the borders of Libya and Chad, with the other lighter, more rapid- response forces deployed mostly north of the oil fields as a reserve. The two westernmost military Areas of Responsibility were Al-Jilf and Al-Kabir, and these were the two areas targeted by the weapons dropped by the Tu-22 bombers.