Libyan air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles jumping wildly in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be, contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a ten-year veteran of the A1 Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al Libya, was the Libyan air force’s most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you were hardly out of flight school—in Libya, surviving that many hours usually meant a promotion. Tupolev-22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs—they routinely cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even that ratio wasn’t enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and inflight emergency in a Tu- 22, but had never crashed one. That made him top dog in the Libyan air force.

“Sahra flight, check.”

“Two,” his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff, and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.

“Dufda flight, Sahra flight checking in.”

“Sahra flight, acknowledged,” the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoyan-23 fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern Libya just ahead of the bombers and were already at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. “No contact yet, but we expect company any minute.”

Just ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising at nearly the speed of sound across the northern Libyan Desert.

But they were not low enough for Egypt’s main air defense system—a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The powerful AN/APS-145 radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian alert fighters—a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from three different bases in central and southern Egypt.

“Sahra, Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing,” the lead pilot of the MiG-23 fighter escorts reported.