John Nance - Lockout

“Patyish 21 engaged, bearing zero-eight, fifty out,” was followed by the pulsating cursor on his heads up display as he walked the pipper to the left and locked up the oncoming target who had gone “to tone,” locking up his F-15 as well.

“Patyish 21, Fox Two,” he said on tactical channel as he pickled off two of his air-to-air missiles. The bright plumes of their rocket motors disappearing into the indistinct clouds was startling enough to a veteran fighter pilot, but to the adjacent commercial airline crew, they had to look terrifying.

Normally he would have ordered his wingman to climb and join him in a tight left turn while dispensing chaff to throw off the incoming missile the Iranian pilot had probably fired, but that would leave the Airbus a sitting duck, and he lit his burners and pushed ahead of the Airbus into a tight right turn instead, launching two flares to pull any incoming missiles off of both of them.

The tactical channel was now full of his wingmen’s voices and their clipped, cryptic reports as one by one they locked up and engaged various members of the oncoming Iranian formation, preparing to fight a high-speed battle with an enemy still thirty miles distant. The larger Israeli force below shot skyward now to join the battle, throwing overwhelming numbers at the oncoming Iranian pilots who were undoubtedly not expecting to see their tactical radar screens break out in Israeli warplanes.

Light years from Hollywood’s concept of a World War II aerial dogfight, the radar-based battle revolved around digital images on the heads up displays, and whatever was about to happen would be over in minutes, without either side actually ever seeing the other.

A large explosion in the distance marked the apparent end of one of the enemy fighters as one of the radar returns fragmented and disappeared from the Israeli scopes. The major’s radar picture showed the Iranian pilots breaking formation, which was expected, but what type of fighter was flying toward them was a mystery. With the rag-tag roster of single-seat aircraft Iran still flew, he wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to find himself in mortal combat with the one ancient American F-14 from pre-revolution days that Iran still tried to keep operational.

The major studied his radar picture once more, expecting to see a second wave of Iranian aircraft backing up the first, and as expected, the images now moved onto his screen. The eight digits he was supposed to transmit to the airliner were still on his kneeboard but there was no time to pull back in position with a screen full of oncoming enemy, yet…

He handed off command to his number two wingman and lit his afterburner for a few seconds to get back on the left wing of the Airbus, matching speeds before pulling out his personal cellphone again to go through the cumbersome task of typing in the numeric string with his oxygen mask off, pressing the phone’s little speaker against the microphone, all the while maintaining formation at 460 knots.

An explosion to his left told the tale of an Iranian warhead that had barely missed one of his men, but the fact that the enemy had succeeded in pickling one in the middle of his formation to begin with was very disturbing.

The sounds of the battle were picking up in the exchanges among his men.

“Patyish 23, engaged, bandit ten o’clock, six, Fox Two.”

“Patyish 24, supporting.”

“Dyan 12 is in, engaged, tally on bandit at two o clock, six miles.”

“Dyan 11, break left, break left, flare. Bandit on your six with lockup!”

Digit by digit he kept his jet steady as he punched the numbers in, forcing himself not to react to the intense tactical exchanges of his pilots or the new chirping of a ground anti-aircraft missile battery that had acquired them as they continued to deal with the oncoming Iranians. Somewhere just behind him was the border, and they were now streaking into heavily defended enemy airspace.

The White House

The call from St. Paul’s Hospital in Denver and Steve Reagan had come right on the heels of passing Jenny Reynold’s code to the prime minister.

“Paul, we’ve got it! We’ve got the code! Ready to copy?”

“Go ahead,” he said, not wanting to reward what had to have been Herculean effort with the news that it was undoubtedly too late.

He wrote the numbers down as Steve intoned them.

“Stand by,” Paul Wriggle said, feeling a rush of adrenaline as he pulled the other note containing the Reynold’s code across the table and placed it side-by-side with the numbers he’d just inscribed, reading them with the care of a potential lottery winner making certain his wishful thinking was not overriding reality.

My God! Paul thought to himself, confirming one more time. They’re the same!

He forced himself to take a deep breath, the urgency suddenly gone.

“How is Gail?” he asked.

“She’ll be okay.”

“Thank her deeply for me.”

“She’s still pretty balmy. She thinks we’re married, sir,” Steve Reagan said with what sounded like a nervous chuckle. “I’ll have to let her down easily.”

“Or, you could just marry the girl! I always thought you two made a great team.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have to go.”

Jenny Reynolds and Will Bronson were both watching him carefully from halfway down the conference table as the general turned to them, the shadow of a smile playing around the edges of his mouth.

“Well, Miss Reynolds.”

“Sir?”

“It seems you cracked the code. Your numbers were correct. That was the unlock sequence.”

She came forward slightly, eyes wide. “Really? How do you know? Did it work?”

“We don’t know if they got it in time, and I can’t tell you how I know, but…” he said, aware that he was stumbling linguistically, his mind’s eye a half world away with a civilian airliner flying into combat unarmed with anything more than a string of digits in the night.

He yanked himself back to the Cabinet Room. “I’m impressed that you figured it out, and, I assume, Mr. Bronson, that your efforts led to getting it here. Thank you. In fact… if it worked… I am deeply in your debt.”

“When will we know, General?” Will asked.

“Soon. Very soon.”

The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel (7:40 a.m. / 0540 Zulu)

Clearly , Gershorn Zamir thought, this is the moment.

An aerial battle just over the Iraq/Iran border was raging, and both he and whoever was in charge in Iran had their fingers poised over respective nuclear buttons.

“Four splashed for certain, perhaps a fifth kill,” the air force chief was intoning as he monitored several radio channels with a phone to each ear. A widescreen depiction of the battle zone was before them on the latest technology screen, along with each of the potential Iranian ballistic launch sites deeper into Iran. The airliner had lumbered through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace with the respective countries either unaware of the Israeli fighter escort, or unwilling to get involved. Despite their public rhetoric to the contrary, every responsible government in the Middle East was secretly hoping the Israelis would disregard American advice and go for Iran’s throat.

Gershorn glanced around the room, recounting the advice of his fellow civilian leaders who were nervously standing by to sign off on any doomsday launch decision.

Surprising, he thought, that no one was pounding on him for a preemptive strike. With all the logic of that terrible move and Moishe Lavi’s suspected orchestration of this opportunity, he had expected a full court press. Yet only one of the generals and one of the Knesset members had taken him aside for the hard sell, and even they seemed tepid in their support for the nuclear option.