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.

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.