Phoenix Sub Zero

Ahmed glanced out to the starboard wing and saw an identical Tomcat. As he watched, the second jet slowed and faded back until he was a hundred meters directly behind Ahmed’s Firestar. That maneuver was also understood — one false move and the rear F-14 fires his cannons.

The pilot on the port wing waved again, the gesture the indication that the three-jet formation was to turn. The F-14 banked over into a gentle turn to the left. Ahmed followed until the screen display showed that they were now headed to the east. Toward Cyprus. Undoubtedly to an airfield on the island, where he and Sihoud would be taken prisoner.

Somewhere over the western horizon a nuclear submarine would be surfacing, the captain wondering what had happened to them. On the central status screen the words flashed electronic warfare pod power storage 85 %. One last time Ahmed wondered about fighting the Tomcats, but by then the rear F-14 was too close for the N16 missile to get a hit. Ahmed began to regret his earlier impulse not to fight the American jets — if he had they would be over the Hegira by now. He was committed to using the electronic-warfare pod but there was a better than even chance that the pod would cripple all three jets, tumbling Ahmed and Sihoud into the sea. One thing was certain, that death would be better than capture. Ahmed waited the endless minutes while the planned rendezvous point with the Hegira grew distant behind them, the port jet engine still whining shrilly as it charged the EW pod’s storage coil.

The escorting Tomcat on the port wing began to descend to a lower altitude. Ahmed followed, his altimeter display numerals rolling down as the Firestar dived. Sihoud, quiet up till then, woke up, startled by the closeness of the F-14s and the unexpected position of the sun. The center console flashed background colors rapidly while announcing ew pod ARMED. RELEASE COUNTDOWN SEQUENCE ESTABLISHED: SECONDS — 10.

The numbers on the screen slowly counted down until they reached zero, and with scarcely a sound the EW pod detached from the Firestar’s nose and plummeted to the sea below. Ahmed took one last look at the instrument console and tightened his grip on the control stick.

* * *

Joe Galvin glanced over at the Firestar fighter, a nagging feeling that this had been too easy, that the pilot of the UIF jet should be fighting back. A photograph flashed in his mind, the old Newsweek glossy of the Iraqis lined up by the dozens, surrendering to the U.S. Army three days into the Persian Gulf’s ground war. It seemed the propaganda about the Muslims fighting to the death was often rhetoric. In any case the pilot in the Firestar was like the Iraqis, no doubt a scared second lieutenant flying a piece of machinery he could not really understand. When the Firestar landed at the Nicosia airfield, air force technicians would take it apart to the last bolt, analyze every printed circuit, every line of code written in the hard drive of the computer. The pilots would be detained and questioned, then shipped to a POW compound in Sardinia for the rest of the war. For these Muslim pilots the war was about to end — all they had to do was lower the landing gear, put out the flaps, and touch down on the Coalition airfield.

Galvin’s mind was already envisioning the day of liberty in Nicosia, wondering what the women were like there.

He looked down into the cockpit to check his altitude for the approach vector to Nicosia, and so did not see the pod dropping from the nose of the Firestar.

The pod fell away from the Firestar and counted seconds. It had been fed the initial altitude by the Firestar’s computer and was careful not to fall so far that it hit the surface of the ocean before doing its work. Once the Firestar above and ahead was outside the present minimum distance, the relay contacts closed in the controller of the pod. The contacts completed a circuit that engaged the high-voltage output-breaker, an oil-enclosed heavy-duty casing with two contact hammers, each the size of a human fist. The hammers, loaded by high-tension springs, slammed into the bus bars of the high-voltage direct-current circuit, linking the dormant energy of the helium-cooled superconducting coil to the oscillators and the transmitter antennae. The current flowed from the ultrahigh-voltage coil, changed from a DC current to AC in the heavy-duty oscillators, and cascaded to the transmitters, which broadcast the resulting electromagnetic energy out into space.