Purpose of Evasion

by Greg Dinallo

  As soon as Qaddafi and his family were aboard, the Transport-panzer drove off, escorted by an armed military convoy. Its destination was the desert town of Hun, where a new national capital, its future dependent on the water that would one day flow through the Sahara pipelines, was under construction.

  The leader of the People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya sat deep in thought. Although he was the nation’s leader, he had retained the rank of colonel and held no formal government office, to emphasize his kinship with the common people of his birth; other than his family, only General Younis and staff members involved in the scheme to acquire the supersonic bombers had been forewarned; and though Qaddafi had been assured the upcoming raid was designed to “minimize collateral damage,” he knew Libyans would die this night and he had agreed to it.

  FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES to the west, the spectral glow from F-111 cockpits streaked through the blackness. The bombers flew in tight RRC formations, one tucked left, right, and beneath each tanker. If detected by defense radars, the return from each radar resolution cell would appear on the screen as one aircraft, not four.

  The strike force was approaching the Straits of Gibraltar when the high-speed extensible booms of the Stratotankers began lowering for the second of four refuelings. Minutes later, thousands of gallons of JP-4 fuel had been pumped simultaneously into each bomber.

  When refueling was completed, Larkin, Applegate, and the members of the other F-111 crews each ingested a 5-mg amphetamine capsule to ward off drowsiness brought on by the long flight, ensuring they would be at peak sharpness over the target.

  About an hour later, the inky blackness was broken by specks of light twinkling in the distance, where the port cities of Tarifa, Spain, and Punta Cires, Morocco, pinch the Straits to a width of 8 nautical miles.

  The attack force was now 1,375 miles from Tripoli. ETA to target was 1 hour 42 minutes.

  IN THE WATERY DEPTHS BELOW, the USS Cavalla was 500 meters beneath the Mediterranean, just off the Libyan coast. The continental shelf is unusually narrow here, extending less than 10 miles from shore before dropping off sharply. This meant the Cavalla could make a deep-water approach, minimizing the chance of detection.

  To further diminish it, Duryea rode the currents that swirl counterclockwise from Tunisia and Sicily into Tripoli harbor, moving silently into position.

  The submarine’s interior had been in redlight since sunset, a daily event on dived boats, giving the crew a sense of day and night. It also preserved night vision for periscope surveillance should it surface.

  Duryea was hunched over his chart table, his face bathed in the eerie glow from the luminous screen. He scooped up the phone and punched the button labeled Sonar.

  “Talk to me, Cooperman—”

  “I’m doing a three-sixty now, skipper,” the sonarman replied. He was absorbed in the fuschia-colored readouts and the sounds of the sea singing in his headset, while he methodically switched through the various sonar arrays. “Usual surface traffic, nothing else.”

  “Good. Anything weird turns up, anything, I want to know right away.”

  “Aye-aye, skipper.”

  “Let’s take her up to a hundred and go in,” Duryea said to McBride firmly.

  The exec relayed the command to the duty officer in the control room, and the planesmen who controlled the boat’s depth and angle went to work.

  The hiss of high pressure air and the rush of water being forced from the ballast tanks reverberated through the hull. The bow tilted upward, and the Cavalla began rising from the depths. She had just leveled off when the BQQ-5 dish in the bow detected another submarine.

  Cooperman immediately reported it to the captain.

  “One of ours?” Duryea prompted anxiously.

  “Beats me, skipper,” Cooperman answered, studying the acoustic signature pattern that was tracing across his monitor and printing out, simultaneously, on the console below. “This is going to sound weird but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard before.”

  “Nuke? Diesel? Twin screw? Single? Take a shot,” Duryea prompted, unsettled by the threat an unidentified submarine represented.

  “Twins,” Cooperman replied, pressing a key on his console to store the data in the boat’s computerized acoustic signature library. “Probably a diesel. I’d put my money on a clunker; a real old one.”

  “What are the chances this antique is tracking us?”

  “Slim and none, skipper. She’s way out there,” Cooperman replied, pressing a hand against one side of his headset. “She just cut back her engines. My guess is she’s surfacing.”

  “Okay, talk to me if she starts getting nosy.” Duryea hung up, swiveled to his keyboard, and encoded a command. A pulsing cursor appeared on the electronic chart table, marking the mystery sub’s location. He watched it blinking at him for a moment, then turned to McBride and said, “Let’s move into final position.”

  THE AMERICA’S PROW cleaved through the Mediterranean like Excalibur’s blade, the broad flight deck at its hilt broken by silhouettes of A-6 Intruders lurking in the steam that belched from launch catapults. Its air group of eighty-five warplanes could deliver more destructive power than the entire navy in World War II.

  In the combat center—a computerized maze of video monitors, Plexiglas charts, and status boards—tense young men, many still in their teens, were about to launch the air strike against Benghazi.

  “Ready to launch!” the air boss barked.

  On deck, the taxi director, alienlike in green helmet, goggles, earmuffs, and kerchief tied outlaw-style over his nose and mouth, dropped to one knee and thrust his right arm to the black sky.

  The pilot of the A-6 in the catapult responded with a thumbs-up and shoved the throttle to the stops. The turbojets seared the pop-up exhaust baffle with blue-orange flame. The bomber strained at the massive steel hook until the engines had built up enough power to keep it out of what fliers call the box—too much speed to stop, too little to become airborne.

  The instant launch-pressure had been reached, the catapult operator released the hook.

  In less than 2 seconds, 25 tons of exotic metals and electronics were accelerated from a dead stop to 150 miles an hour. The bomber was 60 feet above the water when the Pratt and Whitney turbojets took over and sent the gleaming-white Intruder climbing into the blackness above the Gulf of Sidra.

  IN WASHINGTON, D.C., the sun had set, leaving a luminous lilac haze in the sky. The time was 6:47 P.M.

  In the oval office, technicians were adjusting lighting and camera positions in preparation for the president’s address, which would follow the raid.

  The chief executive sat in an anteroom, reviewing the script with his writers while a television makeup artist added some color to his complexion. When he was finished, the president headed for the situation room in the basement, where Kiley, Lancaster, and his other civilian and military advisers had gathered. He had just settled in his chair beneath the presidential seal when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had taken a call, announced, “Intruders are in the air. ETA to target nine minutes fifty-three seconds.”

  AT OKBA BEN NAFI AIR BASE, a former U.S. Air Force installation on the coast just east of Tripoli, a platoon of infantry ringed hangar 6-South, where the two F-111s would be housed. Once called Wheelus Field, it was the most well equipped and defended of Libya’s air bases, hence its selection as the landing site.

  Inside the hangar, in an office that had been set up as a command post, General Younis anxiously awaited word that the bombers had arrived. His attention was riveted on an aide who was in communication with air traffic control in the tower.

  “SAM batteries are ready, General,” one of his officers reported, referring to the antiaircraft missiles that would defend the airport during the raid.

  “You checked each and every one?”

  “Yes, sir. Guidance radar is off. Only adjusted sixes have been mounted.”

  “Good. We wouldn’t want to blow up our F-111s before w
e get our hands on them.”

  Indeed, Younis had been faced with the problem of shooting down two bombers without shooting them down. Antiaircraft fire was required to explain their loss during the raid and couldn’t be curtailed; and though Libyan missile defense batteries would be forced to turn off their ground radar to prevent air-to-ground HARM missiles from homing on the signal, greatly diminishing their accuracy, the chance of a lucky hit had to be eliminated. Younis knew that both heat-seeking and radar-homing SAM-6s were fitted with proximity fuses, which detonated just prior to impact, and had ordered them adjusted to maximum sensitivity. This meant they would detonate, not just prior to impact, not even close to impact, but on the slightest detection of the flares and metallic chaff that would be released into the air by each bomber to confuse missile guidance.

  IN THE COCKPIT of the lead F-111, the pilot glanced at his flight navigation monitor.

  “Thirty miles to target,” he announced.

  The wizzo grasped the Pave Tack control handle in the sidewall and thumbed one of the buttons. A long cylindrical pod pivoted out of the plane’s belly. Its spherical head began scanning the horizon with radar and infrared cameras, using the preprogrammed alphanumeric data to search for its target.

  The pilot put the bomber into an attack dive. He leveled off at 500 feet and thumbed the countermeasures release button. Bundles of missile-distracting flares and chaff were ejected into the slipstream from ports beneath the stabilizers.

  “One plus thirty,” the pilot announced.

  The F-111 was slicing through the darkness toward downtown Tripoli at 595 MPH when the wizzo reacted to the image of the Bab Al Azziziya Barracks on his screen. Columns of alphanumeric data flanked the image; one fixed, the other changing rapidly.

  “One minute,” the pilot said, turning over command of the bomb release mechanism to the Pave Tack computer.

  “Target acquired,” the wizzo replied, pressing a button that fired a pulsing red laser from the Pave Tack pod to the ground. The pencil-thin beam locked onto the target and began measuring the range, relaying the ever-changing alphanumerics to the Pave Tack computer. “We have a lock,” he called out when the target indicator became fixed on Qaddafi’s compound.

  “Twenty seconds . . . ten . . . five . . . four—”

  Electrical impulses activated the ejector feet on the bomb release units below the F-111’s wings and, in a programmed sequence, four 2,000-pound GBU-15s were unleashed from the hardpoints.

  The pilot punched the throttles to avoid the upcoming explosion. The agile warplane accelerated up and away but the Pave Tack pod, swiveling in its gimballed cradle, kept the laser locked on Qaddafi’s compound.

  Sensing devices in each bomb began making adjustments in the moveable tail fins. This kept the bombs homing on the laser’s frequency, as if they were traveling on a wire stretched between warplane and target.

  The time was 1:57 A.M. when the first percussive blast blew out the front wall of Qaddafi’s residence.

  “Yeah!” the wizzo exclaimed, having no reason to think Qaddafi wouldn’t be at home. “Kiss it good-bye!”

  IN DOWNTOWN TRIPOLI, in the deluxe Al Kabir Hotel on Al Fat’h Street where the international media was housed, the force of nearby blasts set chandeliers swinging and guests scurrying for cover.

  The time was 2:03 A.M.—7:03 P.M. New York time.

  On the ninth floor of the Al Kabir, a CBS News correspondent crouched next to the window of his room, talking by phone to anchorman Dan Rather, who had just started his nightly telecast.

  “Dan,” he reported. “Tripoli is under attack.”

  IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Congressman Gutherie and his staff were also watching the report on CBS.

  “Put your microphone out that window and let us hear it,” Rather urged the correspondent in Tripoli.

  Sounds of explosions boomed from the television.

  “Perfectly timed for the evening news,” Gutherie cracked. “Only thing the White House didn’t do was list it in TV Guide. Must be killing them they couldn’t.”

  ON ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE in Maryland, Stephanie Shepherd and her children were in the den, surrounded by Walt’s air force memorabilia: recruiting posters, photographs of military jets, a large American flag, flying helmets, trophies, and academy citations and awards.

  She had finished the Gutherie interview that afternoon by phone and was at her desk working on it—one eye on her word processor, the other on the television news. She stiffened as Dan Rather said: “Informed sources have told CBS News that United States Air Force F-111 bombers based in England are carrying out the surprise attack.”

  “Come up here with Mommy,” Stephanie said to Jeffrey, who was playing with his trucks. “Come on,” she coaxed, as she pulled him up onto her lap.

  Five days had passed since she and Laura had phoned Walt and learned of his transfer to Upper Heyford. He never called back, and the feeling of not really being part of his life had begun haunting her, though now Stephanie thought she understood why he hadn’t called.

  HIGH ABOVE THE MEDITERRANEAN near Sicily, 300 miles from Tripoli’s laser-slashed skies, the Hawk-eye strike-control aircraft was in a holding pattern, monitoring the action on radar. It was out of skin-painting range, which meant pulse-doppler scanning couldn’t pick up raw radar returns from the F-111s; only radio transponder signals, using special frequencies not detectable by enemy radar, were being tracked on the screens in the electronics-packed fuselage—alphanumeric data next to each blip denoted tail code, altitude, and air speed.

  Radio silence had reduced C3—command, control, communications—to waiting. No signal to commence attack had been given by the mission commander; none would be given to cease. Each crew was on its own; each flew the sequence points to its target, bombed it, and proceeded to a holding area to regroup. All but two.

  Colonel Larkin was approaching his target, a military installation in the desert, when he reached to the fuel control panel, lifted the red safety catch, and threw the toggle used to dump fuel.

  At the rear of the aircraft, directly beneath the vertical stabilizer and centered between the engine exhausts, the conical fuel mast opened, releasing a burst of JP-4 into the bomber’s slipstream.

  Larkin flicked the toggle to off; then, capitalizing on a technique called torching, sometimes used by pilots to distract heat-seeking missiles, he hit the afterburners, igniting the fuel, which erupted in a massive fireball a distance behind the F-111. To any of the other crews that might be observing—crews concentrating on high-speed bombing and evasive maneuvering in total darkness—it would appear that one of the bombers had been hit by a surface-to-air missile.

  The instant the fuel exploded, Larkin put the F-111 into a steep dive, pulled out at extremely low altitude, and shut off his transponder.

  In the Hawkeye, one of the eight radar operators monitoring transponder signals stiffened apprehensively as an F-111 in his sector began losing altitude rapidly. Suddenly, the blip vanished from his screen. “One-eleven down, sir,” he reported in a choked voice.

  “Tail code?” the mission commander asked, knowing the crew wouldn’t have broken radio silence even if able.

  “One seven nine, sir.”

  The MC scanned his computerized roster. “Shepherd.”

  An operator at an adjacent console winced as a blip vanished from his screen. “Bastards got another one, sir.”

  Immediately upon acting out their crash scenarios, Larkin and Applegate made sweeping low-level turns onto headings for Okba ben Nan and walled the throttles.

  AT OKBA BEN NAFI AIR BASE, an air traffic controller, keeping a vigil for the F-111s, picked up the raw return on his radar as they came within skin-painting range.

  “Two aircraft approaching,” he reported to his anxious superiors in the hangar command post.

  General Younis lit another cigarette and went outside to see the fast-moving, aerodynamic shapes emerging from the darkness; then, in an eyeblink, two fully armed United S
tates Air Force F-111 attack bombers touched down and roared past in a startling blur.

  Younis smiled, nodding to personnel who began rolling back the huge sliding doors. Soon the black needlenose of an F-111 stabbed into the hangar, followed by a second.

  Libyan Air Force maintenance and ground crew personnel were waiting for them. They rolled ladders up to the cockpits the instant both bombers were safely inside. Larkin and Applegate popped the canopies and climbed down the ladders, followed by the Special Forces aviators who had acted as their wizzos. Each carried a small gym bag that contained civilian clothes.

  “They’re all yours, General,” Larkin said to Younis, who came forward to greet them.

  “You have brought ANITA with you?” the general asked, referring to the Pave Tack programming key.

  “On the sub,” Larkin replied, not too exhausted to share a little smile with Applegate. “I’ll turn them over to Moncrieff soon as the hostages are aboard.”

  Younis grunted, led the way to the command post office, and placed a call to Qaddafi at his quarters in Hun. While the general reported the good news, an aide went to another phone, dialed, and handed it to Larkin.

  IN TRIPOLI HARBOR, on a desolate wharf where the hostages would be released, Saddam Moncrieff and Katifa Issa Kharuz stood in the darkness, scanning the expanse of choppy water.

  That morning they had boarded a regularly scheduled Middle East Airlines flight in Beirut, arriving in Tripoli just before noon. They had spent the remainder of the day at the Bab al Azziziya Barracks, going over details of the exchange with Younis and other members of Qaddafi’s military staff.

  Now, as a steady breeze blew across the harbor, Moncrieff and Katifa waited. Soon, two vessels—the Cavalla and Abu Nidal’s gunboat, which was delivering the hostages—would emerge from the foggy blackness and tie up on opposite sides of the narrow wharf; the hostages would walk the short distance between them. They had just spotted the gunboat’s running lights streaking toward the wharf when the radiophone that Moncrieff was carrying twittered.