Chains of Command Page 6

  “Give me two hundred, hard ride,” Parsons shouted over the continuous deedle deeedle deeedle of the radar warning system. Every time a new triple-A system appeared on the scope, the warning tone blared. Soon there were five, ten, then more than a dozen A symbols on the RHAWS scope, aligned straight ahead. Occasionally they could see intermittent bursts of heavy-caliber gunfire slicing the darkness outside, but it was random and just sweeping aimlessly across the sky—obviously the EF-111 was doing its job. Mace clicked the TF switch twice to the left, then moved the large center RIDE knob from NORMAL to HARD—this would command steeper climbs and descents over the mountains. At night, in rugged terrain, and while under attack, this was the most difficult flying imaginable for a bomber crew.

  “Two hundred hard ride set,” Mace reported. “High terrain, six miles, not painting over it … five miles … four miles … give me twenty left to go around this sucker.”

  In his attack radar, a high mountain peak resembled a yellow ripple across the screen, with black beyond it. The black indicated how high above the bomber’s flight path the terrain was: if the black receded as they approached, the bomber was climbing over the peak; if the black grew larger and began to stretch toward the top of the scope, the bomber would eventually hit the hill. At two hundred feet aboveground, there was a lot of black on the scope.

  Parsons thumbed a button on the control stick, which briefly disconnected the heading control portion of the autopilot to allow for minor course corrections (without disabling the critical terrain-following and fail-safe flyup features of the autopilot), and edged the control stick left. When they were clear of the hill, Parsons released the NWS/AP HOLD switch, and the bomber automatically swung right toward the next turnpoint.

  “We got triple-A at two o’clock, just outside lethal range,” Mace announced. “SA-3 search radar, one o’clock, outside lethal range. Sirsenk army air garrison.” Sirsenk was the northernmost air base in Iraq, but more importantly Sirsenk protected the northern edge of the Torosular mountain range. “High terrain, eleven miles, not painting over it.”

  Parsons did not acknowledge all those important calls.

  “Sirsenk now at three o’clock. Still got an SA-3 up, but it’s not locked on,” Mace reported. It was Mace’s job to coordinate the terrain outside—which Parsons could not see with the naked eye—with Parsons’ only terrain indicator, the “E-scope” on the forward instrument panel. The E-scope painted a distorted one-dimensional picture of the terrain ahead, with a squiggly line depicting the bomber’s flight path; if the terrain broke the line, they would hit the ground. Mace would call out terrain ahead until Parsons saw it on the E-scope and could confirm that the bomber’s terrain-following autopilot was responding properly. Also, Mace had to coordinate all that with the radar threat scope and with the flight plan route—it wouldn’t do any good to successfully avoid a hill only to fly right into lethal range of an SA-3 missile or “ack-ack” artillery battery, or fly so far off course as to get off time or miss the target area completely.

  Suddenly, just a few miles ahead, a streak of antiaircraft artillery fire lit up the sky. Streams of tracer bullets seared the darkness. Parsons unconsciously swung farther left to fly away from the tracers, and the bomber’s nose zoomed upward.

  “Don’t turn left!” Mace shouted. “High terrain to the east!”

  Parsons’ throat turned dry—he thought he could feel the jagged, frozen rocks scraping the bomber’s belly as they crested yet another ridgeline. The hard-ride TF autopilot yanked the bomber’s nose into the darkness of a crevasse so abruptly that both crewmembers felt light in their seats, as if they were momentarily weightless.

  “Those tracers looked like they were firing well to the south of us,” Mace pointed out. “It must be the Raven beating the bushes for us. Those guys will never buy another beer in their lives as long as I’m around.” As the radar warning receiver scope cleared, Mace deselected the four jammer switchlights, shutting off the ECM system until the next threat.

  The first half of the Torosular mountain range was one hundred nautical miles long, and at nine miles per minute it was the hairiest ten-minute ride of Mace’s life. The tops of the ridges were sometimes two thousand feet higher than the bomber’s flight level, and some mountain passes narrowed to less than twelve thousand feet wide or ended abruptly with a one-thousand-foot sheer wall of rock. Parsons had to go to zone 3 afterburner a few times to safely clear a ridgeline—losing an engine while climbing fifteen thousand feet per minute over a jagged ridge would mean certain death—and they knew that the bright afterburner plume only increased their chances of detection, even in these desolate mountains.

  “Better step it up to one thousand feet,” Parsons said. “We’re safe for now in these mountains, and we can’t afford to use blowers to help us get over these ridges.”

  “Amen to that,” Mace said, quickly resetting the TF ride switch to the higher clearance plane. As they inched higher above the rugged mountains, he could breathe a bit easier as the effective range of his radarscope expanded from just a few miles to almost twenty miles. “Got a three-hundred-foot FIXMAG on the last fix,” Mace said to Parsons. “System’s running pretty well.” The FIXMAG was the difference between the radar position fix and the computer’s position—a three-hundred-foot difference after thirty minutes of hard maneuvering was very good. With a new, accurate radar update in the system and the bomb-nav system running well, Mace could afford to take his mind off the navigation system for a while and concentrate on getting ready for the missile launch run—the most important one of his life.

  Things were quiet in the cockpit at the moment, and they were at the higher clearance plane setting, so Parsons said, “Good. Station check, oxygen and switches.”

  “Roger.” A station check was a quick but thorough and coordinated check of all the cockpit instruments and systems, and all the personal systems in use.

  The entire check took about thirty seconds: “Checks over here,” Parsons said as he checked the autopilot and flight controls by “stirring the pot” with the control stick and jockeying the throttles.

  Mace nodded and gave his partner a thumbs-up. “Everything looks—”

  He never finished his short sentence. A loud, fast deedledeedledeedledeedledeedle erupted in the interphone, and a circle with a flashing “9” was centered in the middle of the RHAWS radar warning receiver. At the same time, bright-yellow MISSILE WARNING and MISSILE ALERT lights on the forward instrument panel illuminated.

  TWO

  “Jesus!” Mace shouted, “SA-9 missile launch!”

  He reached up to the ECM panel with both hands, depressing the jammer switchlights; at the same time, he used three fingers of his right hand and hit the L CHAFF and R CHAFF and FLARE buttons, which would pop white-hot magnesium flares and bundles of tinsel-like strips of metal from the AN/ALE-28 dispensers to decoy radar- and heat-seeking missiles fired at them.

  “Chaff! Flares!” Mace shouted. It was vital to make the SA-9’s “Dog Ear” surveillance radar break lock, because once the SA-9 missile launched it almost never missed. “Break! Accelerate! Descend! I’m ready on the TFs!”

  “Two hundred hard ride!” Parsons shouted. As Mace twisted the TF clearance plane knob back to two hundred feet, Parsons swept the wings back to 72 degrees and cobbed the throttles to full military power, then into zone 5 afterburner. “Clear my turn!”

  “Go right!” Mace shouted. Parsons threw the bomber into a 120-degree bank turn to the right and the bomber knifed downward. As the bank angle exceeded 45 degrees, the automatic safety fly-up feature of the terrain-following radar system commanded a full pitch-up maneuver, but because they were nearly upside down, the fly-up only helped to drag the nose earthward—Parsons used that fly-up to quickly lose altitude. He held that altitude for three full seconds, then abruptly rolled upright and pulled the throttles out of afterburner and back to military power.

  “Chaff! Flares!” Parsons shouted, after he was sure the TFs we
re in control of the bomber’s altitude. When he saw Mace punch the ejector buttons, he made another hard bank, this time to the left, pulling on the control stick and letting the fly-up pull the nose left so hard that the bomber began to stall. When the stall-warning horn blared, Parsons relaxed the back pressure on the stick. “Find the missile!” he shouted.

  Mace was practically climbing up the back of his ejection seat and onto the canopy, searching behind and to all sides for any sign of an SA-9 missile in flight. But the missile weighed only seventy pounds and was only six feet long, and unless you were very lucky it was impossible to acquire it visually. “Nothing!” Mace shouted. The blinking 9 and the MISSILE WARNING light were still going, so Parsons had to assume that the SA-9 missile was still in flight and still tracking them. He shouted for chaff and flares again, and threw the bomber into a gut-wrenching break to the right so hard that Mace’s head slammed against the center cockpit beam.

  The flashing 9 was still on the radar warning receiver. “Radar’s still up!” Parsons shouted. “Check the trackbreakers!”

  Mace ran his fingers across the ALQ-135 control switches and found two buttons had not been depressed. As soon as he pressed them in fully, their XMIT (transmit) lights came on, meaning that they had detected the SA-9’s tracking radar and were jamming it.

  The 9 symbol in the radar warning receiver scope went out a second later—right in the nick of time. Mace saw the rapid flash of light above and to their left as the SA-9 missile careened past them and exploded harmlessly about fifty feet away. “Fuck! It just blew up to the left! One more second and we would’ve been toast.”

  “Get ready for another launch!” Parsons said. “Those SA-9s got four rounds per unit.” He had just finished that sentence when the 9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light illuminated once again. Parsons pushed the throttles to zone 3 afterburner, yelled, “Chaff! Flares!” and made a hard jink to the right as Mace pressed the ejector buttons. He then checked the trackbreaker buttons and noticed the XMIT lights on, indicating that their jammers were working. Seconds later the MISSILE WARNING light and 9 symbol on the threat scope went out. “I think we lost it.”

  “I see it! I see the missile!” Mace shouted. Far off to the right and behind them, a streak of light from the tiny splash of light that was Bashur army air base raced across the darkness, crossing ahead of them from right to left. It was followed a split-second later by two more shots. Just before the F-111G bomber ducked behind a ridgeline, Mace could see a stream of tiny blobs of light fly off into space. “Flares!” he shouted. “It must be the Raven! He’s dropping flares!”

  “Clear my turn, Daren,” Parsons said. He wanted back into the protective radar clutter of the mountains right now.

  Mace checked his radarscope. “Very high terrain to the left,” he said. “Get your nose up to clear it. One ridgeline and then we’ll be down in the next valley and away from Bashur.”

  “How much do I have to climb?”

  “It’ll be about a thousand feet, but we’re really close … nose up, Bob, and give it some juice … high terrain three miles, not painting over it … check your fuckin’ wing sweep.”

  The AN/APQ-134 terrain-following radar system was issuing its audible climb/descent cues, a low-pitched boop boop boop in a descent and a high-pitched beep beep beep when signaling a climb was necessary, and the rate of the sound was commensurate with the rate of climb or descent. Right now the TFR audio was beeping so fast that it sounded like one continuous tone. Parsons had to shove in zone 5 afterburner and move the wings from 72 degrees (full aft) to 54 degrees, then to about 30 degrees, to get the heavyweight bomber over the ridge without stalling.

  They ballooned over the ridge traveling less than three hundred knots—only about a hundred knots above their stall speed. The TFR audio switched to a steady boop boop boop and the nose eased over. For a moment the SA-9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light came on, but it went out almost immediately as they nosed lower. “Steering’s good to the next point, Bob. Gimme thirty.”

  There was a bright flash of light and a fiery streak not more than five or six miles ahead. The winks of flames could be seen clearly, like a big, slow meteor. At the same moment they heard on the tactical command radio channel, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Windfall, we are hit, we are hit. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”

  Then there was nothing. Mace could not see the streak of fire impact before the terrain blocked his view.

  “God damn …”

  “They got out,” Parsons said quickly. “I thought I heard the pyros going off in the background.”

  Mace heard no sounds of the EF-111’s escape capsule blowing free of the stricken jet, but he wasn’t going to argue. “They took a missile meant for us,” he said soberly. “I’m sending a Glass Eye report. Better step it to a thousand feet.” As Parsons gently climbed the bomber to a safer altitude, Mace recalled a canned Glass Eye aircraft-down report from his AFSATCOM computer, inserted the EF-111’s approximate position and time, and transmitted the report. The report would go to Washington first, but the brass in Washington would eventually flash the message to Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia so they could arrange a rescue sortie. Normally an E-3 AWACS radar plane would be tracking the planes and would call in a search and rescue mission, but Mace and Parsons and the crew of the EF-111 from Incirlik had no AWACS following them. “Message sent.”

  Parsons checked his BNS time-to-go readout: “I’ve got thirty minutes to the IP. Station check.”

  Mace called up the “SRAM Air Operations Page” on the CDU (Control and Display Unit) on his right-side instrument panel and double-checked that both missiles were prearmed and ready to fly. “Weapons unlocked,” he told Parsons.

  “Copy,” Parsons said. “Daren, make sure those suckers are in manual.”

  Mace bristled. He paused a bit, then touched the floor-mounted interphone switch with his left foot: “I got it, Bob.”

  “Just check the damned switch,” Parsons snapped.

  “I said I got it.”

  “Check the fucking switch!” Parsons shouted.

  Mace had never seen Parsons this rattled. Normally the weapons belonged to the nav, and the aircraft belonged to the pilot, and rarely did either one question the other’s responsibilities—but one look from the pilot made Mace hold his tongue. Parsons was obviously still hoping that this deadly mission would be called off, and the last thing he wanted was the nuclear-tipped missile to launch before the White House had a chance to terminate it.

  “Hey, you keep the damned plane out of the rocks and I’ll worry about the weapons,” Mace said. But if the pilot wanted to double- and triple-check switches, that was fine with him. Mace put his hand on the launch mode switch—it was in MANUAL, and the bombing system switch was OFF. “Manual and off, Bob,” Mace said. He paused for a moment, then added, “I got this bomb run wired, Bob, so ease up.”

  “I want full control of those missiles, Daren,” Parsons said. “Full control. That switch doesn’t leave manual under any circumstances.”

  “It’s not supposed to,” Mace replied. “Chill out.”

  Parsons nodded, then flexed his right hand on the control stick as if to relieve the tension in his arm and hand. “Sorry, Daren. Station check.”

  This time the cockpit and instrument check found a malfunction, and a serious one: “Shit. The fuel totalizer is reading zero. I’ve got the fuel feed selector switch in ‘wing,’ “ Mace reported.

  “What?” Still at terrain-following altitudes but one thousand feet above ground, Parsons checked the total fuel gauge—it read zero, with both body tank needles at zero. “Dammit, jettisoning the tanks must’ve shorted out the fuel gauge electronics.”

  “Shit, we’ve been dumping fuel overboard,” Mace interjected. The automatic fuel management system worked off the gauge’s needles, automatically maintaining a proper center-of-gravity balance between the forward and aft fuel tanks. If the forward-tank needle was too low, pumps would transfe
r fuel to the forward tank to prevent a dangerous aft center of gravity—but if the needle had malfunctioned and the forward tank was in reality already full, fuel would spill overboard through overflow vents. “It’s been a long time since we punched the tanks off.”

  “Three minutes, at five hundred pounds per minute—that’s fifteen hundred pounds of fuel we could’ve lost,” Parsons figured. “How does that work on the fuel curve?”

  Mace had been copying down the fuel readings on almost every turnpoint on the flight plan, comparing the flight plan’s fuel figures to their actual ones. “We were two thousand short the last time I took a reading,” Mace said. “This puts us three point five below the curve. We were flight planned to recover with six thousand.”

  “And we can recover with no less than two thousand, according to the mission directives,” Parsons said. “We’re still five hundred pounds on the ‘go’ side.”

  “Five hundred pounds ain’t spit, Bob,” Mace retorted. “The gauges can be off by a thousand pounds at least. We’ve got a no-shit emergency here. If we start losing body tank pumps or lose the generators, we can have an aft CG problem so fast—”

  “But we haven’t lost any pumps,” Parsons insisted. “The system’s working fine in manual. We got no choice but to continue.”

  “Maybe so,” Mace said, “but I’ll report the malfunction on SATCOM and ask for instructions. They can still abort us.”

  “No one makes a decision to abort this mission except me,” Parsons snapped.

  Mace turned to his pilot in absolute surprise.

  “The Pentagon can either recall or terminate this mission, but it cannot order us to abort because of a systems malfunction. You got that, Major?”

  “Hey, Colonel, “ Mace said. “This plane didn’t come with just one seat. It came with two. It’s a crew decision to abort.”

  “I decide where this warplane goes and when,” Parsons declared. “Your job is to maintain the navigation and bombing systems and assist me.”