by Dale Brown
Now, as senior weapons and tactics training officer of the Thirty-Seventh Tactical Group at Incirlik Air Base, it was Mace’s job to help train NATO crewmembers on how to fight together as a team. He had many crews rotate in from all over the world, including F-111s, and in the past few months he started to get MiG-27 and Sukhoi-17 planes and crews from the Ukraine and Lithuania training with NATO forces. He got to fly—and fix—them all, but he loved it. It was an exciting time to be in Turkey …
… that is, Mace thought, if it wasn’t for the Russians. The closer the Ukraine got to full integration with NATO and eventual full NATO membership, the testier and more forceful, even unpredictable, Russia was getting. At the same time, it seemed the United States was getting weaker by the day. Mace saw lots of Reservists at Incirlik, including units that he knew used to be active-duty ones but were now either full, partial, or Enhanced Reserve Program bases. Now was not the time to downgrade the military, he thought—it was time to gear up. All they had to do was check the winds.
As Mace gathered up his gear and stepped out of the cockpit of the Sukhoi-17, he was met by the group commander, Colonel Wes Hardin. “Hey, hotshot, how did it go?”
“Except for almost getting myself killed, great,” Mace replied.
“I saw on the range video,” Hardin said. “You had about a tenth of a second to live, you know that.”
“Sixty feet is as good as sixty miles. I take it by the way young Ivan is jumping around that we did good.”
“You did good. Two for two. You’re making it look too easy.” He motioned to a pod mounted on the right wing fixed section, inboard of the swiveling section of the wing. “The electronics interface pod worked good?”
“Sure did,” Mace said. The AN/AQQ-901 electronics interface pod was designed to give older Soviet-made aircraft the look and feel of modern warplanes by giving them all the necessary electronic “black boxes” in one easily installed unit that did not require massive aircraft modifications. The pod provided satellite navigation updates by the U.S. GPS or Russian GLOSNASS constellations; a ring-laser gyro for precise heading and velocity information; a MIL-STD data interface bus for precision weapons such as Western laser-guided bombs and inertially guided missiles; and sophisticated weapon targeting and monitoring capability.
Someday when the Ukraine joined NATO, it would have access to very sophisticated weapons like the British Tornado or the American F-16 and F-111 fighter-bombers, but for now they had to settle for their old Soviet equipment with a handful of high-tech electronics pods to bring them up to Western standards. Even so, it took nothing away from the Ukrainian crew’s ability to fly and fight.
“These Ukrainian kids are good,” Mace replied. “They need to fly their planes, not just drive them. They need to think in three dimensions. But once you show them how to do it, man, they go out and do it. I pity the next guy who has to fly with Kondrat’evich—he’s going to spend a lot of time upside down, I think. So who’s my next victim?”
“Nobody, Daren,” Hardin said. “I got news for you. I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but I got plenty of news.”
Mace had been expecting this ever since passing twenty years as an officer—he was not going to be allowed to make full colonel. “Get it over with, Wes. When’s my retirement party?”
“Last month,” Hardin said. “You were officially RIFed as of last month.”
The RIF, or Reduction in Forces, was the current Administration’s ongoing program to reduce the size of the U.S. military to below one million members by 1996. The cuts were far-reaching and relentless. Mace wasn’t surprised to find himself on the hit list, but now that it really hit him, it hit hard. “So when’s my DOS?”
“You don’t get a date-of-separation, Daren—you get a Reserve commission, effective last month,” Hardin said. “You got thirty days to decide whether you accept it or not. Your thirty days expires in … oh, about five minutes.”
“Hell, then let’s go to the club and celebrate my last few minutes in the service, Wes,” Mace said, “because I’m not accepting a Reserve commission. You work just as damn hard as an active-duty type, but for half the money. Tell our wonderful President and his crew, thanks but no thanks. Forget it. Let’s get drunk.”
“If you accepted the Reserve commission, it comes with a new assignment.”
“Who cares? I don’t want it,” Mace said, shaking his head.
“How about Maintenance Group commander of the 394th Air Battle Wing at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, Daren?”
Mace stopped and stared at Hardin. “I said I don’t … what did you say, Wes?”
“You heard me, hotshot,” Hardin said with a smile. “MG of the hottest base in the force. This is your base, my man, your plane. You developed the design data for the RF-111G reconnaissance and Wild Weasel variant, you test-flew the -111 with HARM antiradar missiles and photo pods on them. This is the assignment you should have gotten. You accept this, you’re sure to make full bird colonel in two to four years.”
“Isn’t this the unit that’s supposed to be prima donna central?” Mace asked. “Full of mama’s boys and weak-dicks … ?”
“And flybabes too, Daren,” Hardin reminded him. “Six or seven women on the -111 side, including Paula Norton, the big-titted blonde who did the hot-pants poster a few months back, the ex-NASA astronaut … ?”
“Shit, Wes, flying with women?” Mace said. “It’s just… ah, hell, weird. Especially in the -111, sitting side-by-side. It’s too strange.”
“Welcome to the new military, son.”
“And Furness, the first female combat pilot—she’s there, right?” Mace interjected. “A real winner, huh? Busts guys’ balls and eats ’em for lunch.”
“The Iron Maiden, Rebecca Furness.” Hardin laughed. “Yeah, she’s one of the flight commanders now, transitioning crews from training flight to mission-ready. I don’t know if ‘iron’ describes her ass or her chastity belt. Do you want to find out or not? Daren? What about it?”
But Mace wasn’t listening. That name … Rebecca … as well as the thought of returning to the RF-111G he loved so much … the RF-111G, the reconnaissance and Wild Weasel variant of the F-111G, which used to be known as the FB-111A.
He flew the F-111G years ago, during Operation Desert Storm—the only time the FB-111A/F-111G model had ever been flown in actual combat. He flew a combat mission on the morning of January 17, 1991, along with thousands of other Coalition forces—except he wasn’t part of Desert Storm. His classified mission was called something else. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to block it out. For so long now he had. And yet, in his heart, he knew he could never escape that terrible incident, even if he tried. It would always be a part of him. The memories seemed as real as yesterday.…
PART ONE
How good bad music
and bad reasons sound when
we march against an enemy.
—Nietzsche
ONE
Over the Murat River valley, eastern Turkey Thursday, 17 January 1991, 0539 hours local
U.S. Air Force major Daren J. Mace stripped off his oxygen mask and cursed in a voice loud enough to be heard over the scream of the engines and the high-speed windblast just a few inches away. “The damned stealth fighters missed. They fuckin’ missed. Our mission’s been executed.” Mace waved a slip of paper he had just pulled from a satellite communications printer. His aircraft commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons, sitting to Mace’s left in the close confines of their fighter-bomber cockpit, wore a stunned expression.
It was not the news they had been waiting to hear.
Mace and Parsons were at twenty thousand feet in an F-111G “Aardvark” fighter-bomber, holding in a “parking” orbit over the city of Elazig in eastern Turkey. They had launched two hours ago from a small air base called Batman, in eastern Turkey, two hundred miles east of the main Coalition air base in Incirlik. The radio channels were filled with the excited, jabbering voices of men goi
ng to war.
Now, it appeared, Parsons’ and Mace’s turn had come as well.
It was the opening hours of the largest air invasion since World War II. Operation Desert Storm. The only thing that was definite about the war so far was the intense level of confusion that reigned.
Dozens of aircraft were departing Incirlik Air Base to the west, sweeping across Syria, and hundreds of others were racing northward from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. All were directed to use the radios only in an emergency, but it seemed as if half the fleet had emergencies, because the channels were jammed. Aircraft from earlier raids on Baghdad were returning, and a lot had suffered battle damage—which didn’t help the tension levels. Reports of sheer curtains of triple-A—antiaircraft artillery—and hundreds of radar- and infrared-guided surface-to-air missile launches were echoing through the radio channels in a dozen different languages. The full might of the Iraqi military, with some of the world’s most sophisticated air defense weapons on-line, was being brought to bear against the coalition of countries aligned against it.
Once airborne, Daren Mace and Robert Parsons were cut off from communications except for two vital radio links: one was a discrete UHF link to their tanker for the precious fuel they would need; the other, a special UHF link to a Strategic Air Command satellite twenty-two thousand miles in space, which would relay messages from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters or from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
The last message the crew had received, printed on a tiny thermal printer on the navigator’s right-side instrument panel in the cockpit, was not from Schwarzkopf or Horner at CENTCOM—the addressor said “NCA,” the National Command Authority. It was from the President of the United States himself, relayed from the White House to the Pentagon directly to Parsons and Mace.
There was only one kind of message that would come directly from the President himself.
“Gimme the entire message, Daren,” Parsons asked his radar navigator nervously, “then let’s go through the authentication together. Show it to me step by step so I can be sure.”
“I don’t like the smell of this,” Mace mumbled. He opened the red-covered decoding booklet, onto which he had clipped the Air Force Satellite Communications printout and recopied the encoded message. Pointing to each section block in the decoded message so Parsons could follow along, he read: “NCA sends, actual message, reference date-time group, SAC Eighth Air Force units, operation code X-Ray-Bravo.”
Mace opened a second folder marked top secret and flipped it open to the proper page, as indicated by the date-time group in the decoded message. “Page sixty-three, XB decodes to Operation Desert Fire.”
Parsons nodded.
The code book had listings for dozens of preplanned missions involved in the opening morning of Desert Storm, but only one pertained to Parson and Mace: Desert Fire. If it decoded out to any other mission name, even if the authentication was correct, the message would be invalid.
Mace continued: “Here’s the code for the flight plan set, the weapons unlock code, and here’s the authentication code and sequence.”
Using a third top secret code book, Mace looked up the proper document letter from the authentication code and withdrew a thin, stiff card from his secrets bag. After Parsons confirmed that he had the right one, Mace snapped the card open and laid a series of uncovered alphanumerics next to the last six characters in the decoded message. They matched and were in exact sequence.
“Message authenticated,” Mace said. “We’re going in. Shit.”
Parsons sighed in resignation while Mace began composing a reply message. Parsons was silent, thinking about the challenge that lay ahead. It was a challenge no one ever wanted to really face, but it was part of the job. He’d faced them before, though not on this scale, in Vietnam, Libya, Panama. But he was an older breed of flyer. He glanced over at Daren Mace and wondered how this talented hotshot navigator would handle what they were inevitably going to do.
Not much younger that Robert Parsons’ own forty-five years, Daren Mace was typical in so many ways of what one would expect an Air Force officer to look like: tall, blond hair, good-looking chiseled features, pearly white teeth, and a hint of a tan. But Daren Mace was atypical in many other ways, his attitude a sharp contrast to his appearance. He hated exercise (and didn’t need it, being that rare breed who neither gains nor loses, but maddeningly stays the same year after year), and preferred lifting mugs of Coors and chasing women to anything resembling sports. The Air Force’s 391st Bomb Wing kept a close eye on Mace, who vocally scoffed at the monthly fitness tests as a waste of time and delighted in pencil-whipping them simply to aggravate the flight surgeons. When the Air Force began using additional duties to evaluate its officers instead of real yardsticks—like job performance, for example—Mace rolled his eyes, usually muttered that it was a “bunch of shit,” and challenged any rule that did not involve flying. For in Daren Mace’s mind, flying ruled the day. Period. No ifs, no ands, no buts.
Despite his attitude, which was a constant thorn in his superiors’ side, no one could deny that Daren Mace was the best. It was why on this day, the opening hours of Desert Storm, Mace was Robert Parsons’ partner. Mace could navigate the hell out of the F-111G bomber, and nobody knew the Aardvark bomber better than he.
Because of his abilities, Mace usually flew the “newbies,” the new pilots in the squadron, until they had enough hours under their belt, usually getting assigned to work with the lower-rated “R” (ready) crews, not the “E” (experienced) or “S” (superior) ones. His independent attitude usually lost him consideration for the more high-profile sorties or exercises. The wing commanders knew where their bread was buttered, and as talented as Mace was, one bad impression on the brass could destroy an entire wing’s reputation … and their careers. So, in effect, Mace was kept in the closet.
“I really can’t believe this,” Mace muttered as he composed, encoded, and keyed the reply message into the AFSATCOM terminal keyboard. “Those stealth fighters were supposed to be such hot shit, and they can’t even hit the target.”
“Take it easy, Daren,” Parsons said to his radar navigator. “What do you expect when the rag-heads have a triple-A on every rooftop in Baghdad? The Goblins aren’t supersonic, you know.”
“Tell me about it,” Mace said. “They couldn’t hit anything in Panama, either. What a waste! If Schwarzkopf wanted the job done right, he should have sent the F-111s in right away.”
“Hey,” Parsons said, “what’s done is done. The -117s had their chance. They blew it. Now it’s up to us.”
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons was the commander of the 710th Bombardment Squadron (Provisional), a Strategic Air Command F-111G medium bombardment squadron secretly deployed to Batman, Turkey. Parsons’ thin gray hair and baggy eyes attested to the high degree of thinking and planning he did in preparation for every mission, from the easiest “cakewalk” training sortie to the toughest combat mission. He had been flying various models of the USAF/General Dynamics F-111 medium bomber for nearly twenty years, but he studied, planned—and, yes, worried—like a cherry lieutenant.
Parsons’ contingent included four bombers, sixteen crewmembers, forty aircraft maintenance and weapons handling personnel, thirty security troops, and five support personnel, but officially his small provisional unit did not exist—in more ways than one. The two F-111G (what had then been known as the FB-111A bomber) bases in the northeast United States had both been closed and the bomb wings disbanded, the result of severe budget cuts enacted long before the Persian Gulf War. The FB-111A supersonic bombers of the Strategic Air Command, in service since 1970, had been transferred to USAF’s Tactical Air Command, upgraded, and redesignated the F-111G, so officially the FB-111A bomber itself did not exist. The four bombers deployed during Desert Storm had been kept in mothballs in storage hangars at McClellan Air Force Base, an aircraft maintenance depot in northern California, when Operation Desert Fire had been executed.
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This mission was possibly the last flight of the F-111G. It was no longer the unstoppable supersonic avenger: the winner of more bombing trophies than any other bomber in history, the hero of Operation El Dorado Canyon, the bombing mission against Muhammar Quaddafi of Libya in 1986, and of thousands of successful, precision air raids in Vietnam that forced North Vietnam to the negotiation table. Now it was the advanced warplane no one wanted, the twenty-year combat veteran forgotten in the U.S. military’s current budget crunch, the orphaned stepchild that had never even been given an official nickname.
Even the bomber’s forward operating base in Turkey was a secret. Batman was a Turkish army air base being used by the United States for special operations missions into Baghdad—inserting Special Forces troops deep within Iraq, mounting rescue missions within enemy lines to retrieve downed aircrews, eavesdropping on or jamming Iraqi radio messages, even dropping leaflets with surrender instructions printed on them over Iraqi military bases or over cities. All the American aircraft there, including Parsons’ four orphan “swing-wing” supersonic bombers, were concealed in carefully guarded hangars. The F-111s had flown in directly from California after a grueling twenty-two-hour-long nonstop flight, always flying apart from other Coalition aircraft, to make sure their presence was a strict secret.
