“Sahra flight copies,” Talhi responded. “Sahra flight, go to point nine.” The pilot pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty knots—eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.

Talhi’s copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot’s seat swiveled around the rear compartment so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the remote-controlled 23-millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. “At least two fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast,” Birish reported. Thankfully Talhi had his unit’s most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn’t saying much—systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the bombers themselves than pilots. “India-band search radar—Mirage 2000s.”

“Don’t tell me—tell our fighters!” Talhi shouted. Birish got on the command radio and frantically passed along the information. He pushed the bomber’s nose down even farther. The terrain was flat and rolling, so terrain wasn’t a problem—but the waves and waves of heat swirling up from the desert floor created turbulence so bad that it felt as if they were riding a dune buggy across a mountain of rocks. The twenty-year-old ex-Soviet bomber’s aged fuselage shrieked in protest with every bump.

“They’re closing in fast,” Birish shouted. “They’re right on us—the E-2 Hawkeye radar plane must be vectoring them in.”

“Five minutes thirty seconds to go,” Talhi’s bombardier, Captain Masad Montessi, shouted on intercom. “Hold steady for fifteen seconds.”

“Fifteen seconds? Better make it quicker than that, navigator!”

“I said fifteen seconds, or at this speed we’ll be lost and flying over downtown Cairo before we know it!” Montessi shouted back. He was in a tiny compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber below the pilot, with only a ten-inch RBP-4 Rubin navigation radar, an optical bomb sight between his legs, some mechanical flight computers, a compass, a Doppler radar system, and two small windows. He had just finished laying his crosshairs on a small mountain peak ten miles ahead, then changed to the second aim-point—another peak on the other side of courseline.

The crosshairs were off just a small amount. He doublechecked his aiming on the first aimpoint, switched back to the second, verified the aimpoint, then moved the crosshairs on the second peak using a large tracking handle he called the “goat turd.” As soon as he moved the crosshairs, he could hear the clack-clack-clacking of the mechanical navigation computer as it updated itself. He switched back to the first aimpoint, and the crosshairs rested right on it—all of the heading and velocity errors in the system had been corrected. “You’re clear to maneuver! Go! Go!”