With Hostile Intent

Начало книги

“Fulcrum!”

The effect was always the same. Just calling out the radar contact never failed to spike First Lieutenant Tracey Barnett’s pulse rate upward by twenty beats. She knew it was having the same effect on the other two controllers. In the spectral glow of the E-3C Sentry’s red-lighted command-and-control compartment, she could see them both hunched over their own consoles.

“Make that two Fulcrums!”

She had them tagged now. They were out of the Al-Taqqadum air base, just west of Baghdad. They were headed south, toward the thirty-third parallel, the boundary of the No Fly Zone. And she could label them as bona fide, no-shit bandits, meaning they were hostile. She had a good electronic ID on them and these guys were definitely MiG-29s — twin-engine Russian-built fighters with the NATO code name “Fulcrum.”

They were coming her way.

Tracey studied the two blips on her scope. It was not like the Iraqi Air Force to come out and challenge the allied air patrols. If they took off at all, they would make a faint-hearted thrust at the NFZ, then cut and run back to the interior of Iraq.

Читать дальше →