This is the big one," crackled the voice in the headsets of the four crew members. They were flying at nearly 30,000 ft. above western Iraq in a B-1B Lancer shortly before 3 p.m. last Monday. The message, from the controller aboard a nearby AWACs command plane, sent a thrill through the B-1 as Captain Sloan Hollis redirected the black, needle-nose plane toward Baghdad at 500 m.p.h. for an afternoon rendezvous with Saddam Hussein.
The B-1, which had just refueled in midair, had been out on another mission, but then came a scintillating tip. For the previous few weeks, Baghdad's tony...
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