Over the Mediterranean sea, Approaching Port said, Egypt

The Israeli Air Force was now about to break radio silence.

“This is blue leader one. Blue leader one. Maintain elevation and flight pattern.”

The sixty other pilots of the Israeli F-16s and the F-15s guarding them acknowledged. They were flying low to avoid radar detection. It was still dark, but a sliver of red was starting to appear on the horizon.

The captain in the lead fighter was expecting to see landing ships at any moment or some sign of a massive naval flotilla arriving at Port Said. Presumably the enemy would then construct a launching platform for an invasion from the south. It didn’t make sense to the captain; it seemed too far south, but HQ had ordered it as a first strike. He figured their intel was on target.

This first sortie was to deal a devastating blow to the invading navy.

Something showed up on the captain’s radar. Two ships, three miles ahead. Maybe it was just the tip of the spear. The captain wondered out loud, “There have to be more than this. Where’s the invasion?”

Then suddenly he saw more blips on his screen. Ten ships. No, twenty-five … thirty ships. This was it.

He gave the order, and the jets closed in for bombing formation. Two miles. One mile. One thousand feet.

The first wave thumbed the release buttons, as the first two ships came into their guidance screens, and sent their missiles into the vessels.

They could see the two frigates burst into flames.

But there was nothing else they could pick up on visual. Suddenly the other blips on their screen disappeared. The IAF fighters, as well as IDF headquarters, had been fooled. One of the two ships had been a recon vessel equipped with radar imaging that was designed to send phantom signals of multiple ships that didn’t exist.

“Save your missiles,” the captain shouted.

“Where’s the rest of them?” one of the pilots asked.

But he wouldn’t get an answer. Seventy MiGs flown by Libyan pilots swooped in on them from their flank, sent from their air base in Qantara, Egypt.

Then the antiaircraft defenses set up around Port Said opened fire, sending flack out to the Mediterranean, side pinning the IAF formation in.

The Libyan fighter pilots, though specially trained by the Russians, were still no match for the Israelis. In the first fifteen minutes of the dogfight, twenty-seven MiGs had been shot down. Only six Israeli jets had been downed. For the next twenty minutes the air battle would continue. Four more IAF fighters would be lost.

But the primary aim of Israel’s enemies had been achieved.

Sixty-one out of Israel’s three-hundred-fighter-jet fleet had been waylaid to the extreme south, distracting them from the main thrust of the invasion, keeping them far away from the path of the incoming Russian-Islamic forces — where the real killing was about to begin.