by Dale Brown
Although no one would ever officially know they were there, the tiny unit was destined to play one of the most important—and deadly—roles in this war.
“Spin out our LLEP times so we can arrange to get our last refueling,” Parsons ordered.
“Right,” Mace replied. Using the reference date-time group in the execution message, Mace computed the bombs-away times for their two assigned targets, then backed that time through the flight plan and came up with a time to cross the LLEP, or low-level entry point, then back to the end air-refueling point, then to the air-refueling control point, or ARCP.
The TOT, or time over target, was so close that he would have to hustle to make the air-refueling control time as well as the time over target good within fifteen seconds. No leeway in this flight plan at all.
“Toad One-Five, Toad One-Five, this is Breakdance. CT at 1255. Repeat, ARCT at 1255. How copy?” asked Mace. It took three attempts, fighting through the horrible maze of accents and languages of the Coalition aircraft using the channel—American, British, French, Arab, Australian, even South American—before his tanker’s navigator acknowledged the new rendezvous time.
“This is the shits, Bob,” Mace said. He punched commands into the flight computer, and a box-shaped bug on the heading indicator, called the “captain’s bars,” swung to a northwesterly heading. “Captain’s bars on the ARCT. We gotta be there in fifteen minutes.”
Parsons glanced at the TIME TO DEST readout on the Multi-Function Display on his instrument panel, made a quick mental calculation, and shoved the throttles up nearly to full military power. He then selected HEADING NAV on his autopilot, and the F-111G Aardvark bomber obediently banked left and automatically rolled out on the new heading. “We gotta go balls to the wall to make the LLEP, then push it up to 540 on the low-level. That leaves us very little leeway for … stuff.”
“Stuff” on a low-level combat mission usually meant countering enemy air defenses. Circumnavigating antiaircraft artillery, dodging surface-to-air missiles, and outrunning enemy fighters at treetop level usually gulped a lot of extra fuel, which was rarely accounted for in fuel calculations on a flight plan.
“If we can’t make it, we abort,” Parsons said. “You got the flight-plan range estimates?”
“Right here.” Mace compared the flight-plan fuel calculations with the new fuel-burn figures in his performance manual for the higher airspeeds necessary in the low-level route. “If we get this air refueling, we have plenty of gas,” Mace said. “No abort. We have to abort if we can’t get both external tanks to take gas or if they won’t feed.”
Parsons turned to his partner, gave him a wry smile, and asked, “Praying for a busted boom or bad feed, Daren?”
Answering his squadron commander’s question was a Catch-22: he’d be lying if he answered no, and a coward if he answered yes. Instead, he replied, “If the -117’s had done their job, we wouldn’t be talking about this in the first place, sir.”
The hotshot F-117A stealth fighter jocks from supersecret Tonopah Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, the ones who were flown to and from work in plush airliners and who got promoted just by shaking a few hands and showing their unit patches to gaga-eyed generals, had apparently missed their assigned targets. Just like Panama in 1986: the nonsense about the stealth fighters being used just to “disorient” the Panamanian Defense Forces was hogwash. They missed their targets then, and they missed them again now. That did not sit well with the young F-111G crewdog.
The tanker was late to the air-refueling control point. Parsons and Mace had to wait for their companion aircraft: an EF-111 Raven tactical jamming aircraft, which was a modified F-111 fighter-bomber loaded with state-of-the-art electronic jammers, from the 42nd Electronic Combat Squadron, RAF Upper Heyford, England, deployed to Incirlik. Normally the F-111Gs were accustomed to going into a target alone, but the importance of the mission dictated that it be accompanied by the supersophisticated robin’s-egg-blue jamming aircraft; the EF-111 could fly as far, as fast, and as low as the F-111G, so it would follow Parsons and Mace all the way to its target and back.
All aircraft completed their air refuelings—all tanks refueled and all tanks were feeding, Mace noted with private disappointment, negating an abort—and they turned toward the Iraqi border and made preparations to attack. The EF-111 Raven had its own flight plan, carefully choreographed with Parsons’ and Mace’s, that would both deconflict the two aircraft and put it in position to best defeat any enemy radars that might highlight the Aardvark bomber. That was okay with Mace—he didn’t like having to worry about watching a wingman during night formation flying anyway.
They had ten minutes to fly to the low-level entry point, and they did so at just below the speed of sound to try to get their time pad back. On this mission, timing was not just important—it was a matter of life or death. Not just for Parsons and Mace, but for the hundreds of other aircraft that would be airborne over southern and central Iraq when Mace completed his bomb release. The ten minutes to the start-descent point was wall-to-wall checklists: TFR (Terrain-Following Radar) Confidence Check, cockpit check, route briefing, and fuel tank jettison checklists.
“Tanks gone,” Mace announced. He refigured all switches to normal, then announced, “Weapons coming unlocked.”
Using the unlock code from the execution message, Mace used yet another decoding book, broke out the six-digit weapons prearming code, and entered it into a code panel. Two minutes later, a green ENABLE light illuminated on the weapons arming panel. He then accomplished a weapons connectivity and continuity check on the weapons, checking that full electrical and data transfer capabilities were intact, then put the weapon arming panel from OFF to SAFE.
“Gimme consent,” Mace said.
Parsons reached around to his left instrument panel, twisted a thin wire seal off from a red switch guard, opened the guard, and flipped the lone switch up. “Consent switch up.”
Mace clicked the interphone, reached to his weapons arming panel, twisted a similar safety wire off a sliding silver switch, and moved the switch to CONSENT. In nuclear-capable aircraft, as in all American nuclear launch systems from sixty-pound battlefield shells to hundred-ton intercontinental ballistic missiles to two-thousand-ton nuclear submarines, two physically separate switches had to be activated before the weapons could be prearmed. Mace moved the large knob on the weapon arming panel from SAFE to GND RET. Two white switchlights on the weapon status panel illuminated; both read AGM-131X. He moved the missile select switch on the missile control panel to ALL and the silver arming switch from its center OFF position up to ARM. The status indication on the panel changed from SAFE to PREARM.
“If this shit wasn’t so serious,” Mace said to Parsons, “I’d swear I could hear ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ right now, just like in Dr. Strangelove.”
“Right,” Parsons said, his voice low and tense. “What have you got?”
“Weapons prearmed, racks locked,” Mace replied. “Double-check my switches.” He swiveled a small reading lamp down to the weapons arming panel so Parsons could check the indications, then he began composing another coded message to inform the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command headquarters that he had successfully prearmed his weapons…
… Two thermonuclear AGM-131X Short-Range Attack Missiles.
“Checked,” Parsons said uneasily. He sank back into his seat, and realized that he had just witnessed an historical event—this was the first time that a combat aircraft had prepared thermonuclear weapons for use since World War II. Plenty of aircraft had launched with nuclear weapons aboard during the Cold War, and there had been accidental releases and airplane crashes with atomic weapons on board, but this was the first time that a thermonuclear weapon had been prearmed and made ready for attack. It was all because the twelve F-117 stealth fighters, with their load of two-thousand-pound bombs, had failed to destroy one single building near the provincial capital city of Karbala, about fifty miles southwest of Baghdad and thirt
y miles west-northwest of the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. Along with a large military base, railroad yard, warehouses, and a large military airfield, Karbala was the site for one of the world’s most sophisticated military command posts. It was a deep underground reinforced-concrete bunker that reportedly controlled all of Iraq’s fixed and mobile offensive rocket forces—nearly three hundred medium-range SS-1 Scud missiles, over one hundred short-range SS-7 Frog missiles, and an unknown number of SS-12 Scaleboard missiles, a tactical nuclear-tipped surface-to-surface missile purchased from the USSR after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the United States. Each weapon could carry a high-explosive warhead—or biological, chemical, nerve agent, or even nuclear warheads—that could quickly devastate Coalition forces.
Karbala had to be destroyed early in the conflict, before Iraq could mount a heavy missile assault on Saudi Arabia, or the Coalition airfields near the Iraqi border, or Israel. If Saddam was foolish enough to launch Scud missiles against Israel, she would almost certainly use nuclear weapons to stop the Iraqi war machine. It was so important that Karbala be destroyed, that Iraq not launch any Scuds on Israel, that Israel not enter the war, that the United States planned the ultimate contingency mission—employ a low-yield nuclear device against Iraq.
Except for the standard nuclear strike weapons on board Navy ships, the two AGM-131X missiles aboard Mace and Parsons’ bomber were the only thermonuclear weapons deployed as part of Desert Shield and now fielded as part of Desert Storm. The warhead of each missile was a “subatomic device,” a very low-power weapon with a yield of less than one kiloton, or one thousand tons of TNT—about one-twentieth the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but still packing the same explosive power of fifty fully loaded B-52 bombers carrying non-nuclear weapons.
Mace knew the delivery procedures—he had practiced them often enough back home. The missile would be launched from low altitude, climb to fifty or sixty thousand feet with the power of its dual-pulse solid rocket motors, then follow a ballistic path to its target, steered by its inertial navigation system and the superaccurate, satellite-based Global Positioning System. The missile would fly for about forty miles—plenty of room for Mace and Parsons to escape the blast effects.
Only one missile was planned to be launched; the second missile was a backup. Mace had seen charts predicting the fallout path, likely contaminated areas, and a list of things that might happen when the electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) hit, but the bottom line was much simpler—there was going to be widespread, global fear, panic, and a bloody outcry directed against the United States, the Pentagon, the Air Force, and him.
The Pentagon planned, and the White House hoped, that Iraq would sue for peace immediately after that attack.
While speeding toward their low-level entry point, Mace had tuned his HF (high-frequency) radio to the Israel National Radio broadcasts from Tel Aviv—everyone stationed in the Middle East knew the INR’s HF single sideband frequency, 6330, by heart, as well as the Voice of America (2770) and the BBC (3890)—and a few minutes later they got the confirmation they had been dreading: “Fuck. Just heard it on the INR, Bob,” Mace told Parsons. “ ‘VIPER SNAKE.’ Tel Aviv and Haifa were hit by Scud missiles.” VIPER SNAKE was the Israeli code word to all its military posts of a mass attack against the country. “Report says that the missiles that hit in Tel Aviv were carrying chemical warheads. Israel is launching attack aircraft.”
“You’re shitting me,” Parsons said. He knew that civilian news broadcasts should never, never be used as sources of official information, but the report only seemed to confirm the orders they had already received from the Pentagon. “Boy, never thought they’d do it.”
“One thing about ol’ Saddam,” Mace pointed out, “is that he’s never failed to do something he said he’d do. He told everyone he’d destroy Israel if Iraq was invaded. I hope he’s under this SRAM when we cook it off.” Mace checked his bomber’s chronometer: “The Scud missiles hit shortly after four A.M. We got our execution message about ten minutes after the missiles hit. Christ, the brass didn’t waste any time.”
“Looks like we were primed to do this mission right from the start,” Parsons pointed out. “We haven’t heard much from Israel during the military buildup—we must be Israel’s secret guarantee that Saddam won’t destroy her.”
Mace was silent for a moment, then said over interphone, “Well, that’s typical of the brass—do a fucking back-door deal and keep us in the dark, then let us drop the nuke and bear the guilt of obliterating thousands while they sit back, smoke their cigars, and slap each other on the backs for a job well done. Then it’s off to the White House for victory cocktails with the Old Man. The bastards.”
Parsons knew the aggravation Mace was going through. He was feeling it himself, as well as a slow, sinking queasiness in his stomach that he hadn’t felt for some time—not since ’Nam, when he’d seen little Vietnamese children running through the rains of fiery napalm—ordered by the brass—burning their flesh to the core. It had sickened him then, as this sickened him now. But he was an officer serving his country, with a job to do. The President—their Commander in Chief—had ordered it and they would do it.
“Daren, I don’t like the thought of it any more than you do. But we are going to do it. You’ve trained for this. You knew there was a chance we’d have to when you stepped into the cockpit.”
“Christ, but I never …”
“Listen to me,” Parsons snapped. “You signed on for this just as I did. Nobody put a gun to your head. If you’re gonna flake out on me, say it now, before we head into Indian country.”
“And what if I don’t want to?” fumed Mace. “Killing thousands upon thousands of people …”
“Then we turn around. Our careers will be over. We’ll spend ten years in prison breaking big rocks into little rocks, and then we’ll receive dishonorable discharges. No one in their right mind would launch a nuke, but we’d be treated as cowards and pariahs for the rest of our lives because we refused to follow orders.” He turned to his radar navigator and added, “After all these years in the Air Force, are you so afraid to die that you would give up all you have, all you’ve accomplished … ?”
“I’m not afraid to die, Colonel,” Mace answered firmly, “and I’m not afraid of becoming a pariah. What I don’t like doing is something completely abhorrent simply because I’ve received a message to do so.”
Parsons said, “You know, Major, you should’ve sorted out all that before you stepped into the cockpit, before you volunteered for duty overseas, before you joined the bomb squadron. Sixty minutes from our TOT is not the time to have second thoughts. But let me tell you something: I’m not going to risk my life flying in combat with someone who’s not giving me one hundred percent. I don’t want to spend ten years in prison, but I don’t want to die needlessly because my nav is having a guilt attack. We either both say ‘go,’ or we abort and pay the piper back home. Do we go—or do we turn back?”
Mace looked at the time-to-go indicator on his Multi-Function Display—only three minutes to the LLEP. The EF-111 Raven would have already zipped out ahead, scanning for enemy threats and shutting down enemy SAM sites and long-range fighter-intercept radars.
The war is on, Mace thought. The Iraqis invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia and Israel. He was committed long before he had received that execution message.
“We go,” Mace said.
“You sure, Daren?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.” He fastened his oxygen mask in place, slipped on his fingerless Nomex flying gloves, and nodded to his aircraft commander. “ ‘Before TF Descent’ checklist when you’re ready.…”
While still one hundred miles from the Iraqi border, the crew of the F-111G fighter-bomber, call sign “Breakdance,” began a rapid descent to terrain-following altitude.
They were still thirty miles in Turkish airspace when the AN/APS-109B radar homing and warning r
eceiver (RHAWS) blared, and an “S” symbol appeared at the top edge of the circular RHAWS display. The unit had been displaying several “H” symbols, arrayed along the border—these were American-made Hawk antiaircraft missile sites, operated by the Turkish Army. The line of H symbols clearly outlined the border. But the S symbol was new, and it was not friendly.
“Search radar, twelve o’clock,” Mace reported. “Threat detection system is on, trackbreakers off.” The bomber’s internal AN/ALQ-137 internal electronic countermeasures system, called trackbreakers by the crews, was an automatic noise/deception jammer system that was effective on short-range, low-power radars like airborne missile guidance radars and mobile surface-to-air missile systems, but virtually powerless against big, heavy, ground-based radars like enemy search or fighter-intercept control radars—that was the reason Mace kept it off. The EF-111 Raven electronic-warfare aircraft escorting them was designed to jam these radars anyway. “Ready to step it down?”
“Give me four hundred,” Parsons said.
Mace twisted the terrain-following knob two clicks to the left, and the big F-111G bomber nosed gently toward the dark, unseen ground below. They were now flying only four hundred feet above the rugged terrain, screened from view of all but the closest and most powerful enemy radars. Seconds later, they crossed into enemy territory—and the real terror began.
The border region between Turkey and Iraq was one of the most heavily fortified in the world, with over 120,000 troops spread out on both sides along the two-hundred-mile frontier. As the friendly Hawk radar symbols disappeared on the radar warning receiver, they were replaced by “A” and “3” symbols—these were Iraqi antiaircraft artillery units and Soviet-built SA-3 mobile surface-to-air missile batteries, deployed with the Iraqi border army units to guard against hostile aircraft. Neither was a great threat to the fast, low-flying F-111G, but there seemed to be a solid wall of A symbols ahead. “We can’t go around them,” Mace said. “C’mon, Raven buddy, don’t let us down.”
