by Dale Brown
“Hey, don’t tell me what my job is,” Mace retorted. “I don’t know when you developed this emperor complex.”
“About the same time you chickened out,” Parsons shot back. “You’ve wanted to turn tail and run ever since we got executed. You probably noticed that gauge malfunction a long time ago.”
“That’s bullshit,” Mace said angrily. “I don’t dump my computers or roll weapons on purpose, and I’m sure as hell not afraid to do this mission. We have instructions to transmit status messages anytime we have a serious aircraft or weapons malfunction, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He immediately began composing a status message and transmitted it to the Pentagon via AFSATCOM; Parsons could do nothing but monitor the instruments.
The bomber’s flight path took them just east of Dukan Reservoir in eastern Iraq, then directly south between the cities of Kirkuk and As-Sulaymaniyah, but no missile launch indications were received.
They were now out of the Torosular Mountains and into the endless desert plains, only fifteen minutes to the missile launch point. Without the mountains to hide them, it seemed as if the entire Arabian Peninsula was visible to them—and, in turn, every fighter pilot, radar operator, and gunner in Iraq could see them, yet no dangerous radar emissions locked on to them.
A yellow light marked SATCOM RCV blinked on the forward instrument panel, and Mace waited impatiently as a thin strip of thermal paper rolled out of the printer. Parsons’ attention was riveted on the instruments as they zoomed around low, rocky outcroppings and dove into dry riverbeds, but every now and then he sneaked a peek at his partner as Mace decoded the message: “Acknowledging our rescue and aircraft status messages,” Mace said a few moments later. “No other orders.”
Parsons said nothing.
The bomber skirted the Iraq-Iran border east of the As Sa’ Diyah Reservoir, and it was here, near the city of Tolafarush, that they were “tapped” by their first fighter. A search radar with a height-finder from Subakhu found them and locked on. “Search radar … height-finder item of interest. Descend and accelerate.”
“Clear me on those power lines and a left turn,” Parsons said. “Stand by on chaff.”
“Clear left and clear for two hundred feet,” Mace said, checking the radar. Power lines and transmission towers showed up fairly well on the AN/APQ-114 attack radar, but the AN/APQ-134 terrain-following radar sometimes had trouble with them. He switched the TFR clearance plane to two hundred feet and punched out chaff as Parsons banked steeply left. “More power lines at twelve o’clock. We gotta climb in about sixty seconds. Twelve minutes to the launch point. We accelerate to six hundred in two.”
“I’m already at six hundred,” Parsons reported. The exasperated tone in his voice told Mace that he was thinking the same thing—the earlier they went to higher power settings, the farther behind they’d be on the fuel curve. Their five-hundred-pound fuel margin to bingo would be eaten up in no time, and then he’d have no choice but to abort the mission—but by then they’d be in the center of the air defense beehive of Baghdad, risking their necks for nothing. But Parsons had already made his decision, and he wasn’t about to give the likes of Daren Mace the opportunity to be right. Parsons took a firmer grip on the control stick, swallowed hard, and added, “We’re continuing. Gimme a countdown on those power lines.”
Boy, Parsons would rather bust the minimums than do a fuel abort now, Mace decided. Something really serious was going to have to happen before Parsons would call this mission off.
Resigned to keep his mouth shut and press on, Mace turned back to the attack radar: “Roger. Range five miles. Thirty—” Just then an inverted “V” symbol appeared on the RHAWS scope, along with a high-pitched fast warbling tone. “Fighter at our three o’clock,” Mace said. The symbol stayed on the scope and moved from the three to four o’clock position. At the same time, a yellow warning light marked MISSILE WARNING illuminated, and an “I” symbol appeared on the RHAWS scope, indicating that the AN/AAR-34 infrared warning receiver, a supercooled heat-seeking eye that scanned behind the bomber looking for enemy aircraft, was tracking the fighter. “He’s locked on … Jesus! Climb now!”
He had almost forgotten about the power lines, and the TFR radar had not commanded on them. Less than two seconds before impact, Parsons hauled back on the control stick. Mace was slammed back in his seat, then slammed into the centerline rail as Parsons executed a steep right bank, then pressed down into his seat as the TFR system pulled them out of the steep descent back to two hundred feet above ground. Parsons was yelling “Chaff! Chaff!” as the radar warning tone continued to sound.
“Unload, dammit!” Mace shouted. The G-forces from the violent turns were preventing Mace from reaching the ejector buttons.
Parsons decreased his bank angle slightly, allowing Mace to reach the chaff/flares ejector panel, but Parsons was reaching for it first: “Dammit, Daren, punch that chaff out before I turn!” The fighter “bat-wing” symbol was still present and still locked on to them, so Parsons hit two chaff buttons and then reversed turn and jinked left. The bat-wing symbol disappeared—they had successfully broken the fighter radar’s lock. It only made Mace feel even more helpless and edgy to watch his pilot activating the switches he, not Parsons, was responsible for. “I’ll kick your ass all the way back to New Hampshire if you don’t get with it,” yelled Parsons.
“Fuck y—” Another high-pitched warbling tone erupted in the interphone, followed by a red MISSILE LAUNCH light. When the AN/AAR-34 infrared threat sensor was locked on to a target behind them and then detected a second pulse of energy, it interpreted that second flash as a heat-seeking missile launch. As it notified the crew, the system automatically ejected chaff and flare decoys. Parsons shoved the throttles to max afterburner, banked left, and pulled on the control stick, squishing Mace into his seat. The sudden, rapid-fire changes in direction made Mace’s head spin, and for the first time he found himself completely disoriented—his inner ear was telling him he was turning, his seat told him he was not turning but descending, and his eyes were believing both of them. For the first time in his flying career, he felt an uncontrollable wave of nausea wash over him, and he ripped his oxygen mask off just before vomiting on the control console between his legs.
“Flares! Flares!” Parsons screamed as he reversed his turn. The stall-warning horn was blaring—even though they were careening through the night sky at well over seven miles per minute, the wings at full-aft position, and. the airspeed bleeding off during the tight turns meant a drastic loss of lift. Mace jabbed his thumb at the flare ejector button, then gripped tightly to the glare shield and stared at the standby attitude indicator on the front instrument panel to reorient himself.
Although the engines were roaring, in and out of afterburner power, Mace could feel the aircraft sinking as Parsons held the bomber right on the edge of the stall—the airplane wasn’t flying anymore, it was wallowing. “Stall horn!” Mace shouted over interphone. Parsons looked as if he was fighting the stall-inhibiting system, which was trying to lower the nose to regain flying speed. “Get the nose down! Wing sweep!”
Parsons finally shook himself out of his panic, grasped the wing sweep handle, and shoved the wings forward past the 54-degree lockout and all the way to 24 degrees. He also eased up on the back pressure on the control stick. The Aardvark’s nose was still ungainfully high in the air—it was as if they were on final approach to landing, and flying almost that slow. The stall-warning horn was still blaring, but the plane felt solid and stable again. “Find that fighter!” Parsons shouted.
Mace checked the RHAWS scope—it was clear, with no symbols except for intermittent “S” symbols denoting the search radars at Subakhu, now several miles behind them. He switched the RHAWS briefly to IRT mode, looking for a small white dot that would be the system tracking the fighter, but it was clear. Just to be certain, he scanned the dark skies outside the cockpit, although he knew it was impossible to see a fighter out there at night unless he w
as just a few feet away. “We’re clear,” he told Parsons.
“When I say ‘chaff,’ Daren, you better give it to me,” Parsons said irritably. “Get your head out of the radarscope and you won’t get airsick. If you punch out chaff and flares while we’re in the turn instead of before we turn, the missile will fly right up our ass.” Mace was too dazed and dizzy to argue, but he continued monitoring the threat scope and scanning the skies as they continued at two hundred feet above the desert floor toward the launch point.
The numbers of ground-based early warning and missile radars decreased rapidly—south of Baghdad there didn’t seem to be any at all. But Mace had no time to think about that—once they headed west and crossed the Tigris, they were on the missile launch run.
“Missile select switch to ‘all,’ status check … all missiles powered up, prearmed, and ready. Racks unlocked and ready,” Mace reported as he ran the Before Missile Launch checklist. “Missile target data checked. Launch mode switch in manual. Bomb door mode switch auto. Consent switch.”
“Consent switch up, guard closed,” Parsons reported.
“Copy. Checklist complete. Three minutes to launch point.”
It was less than one hour to sunrise, and the brightening sky began to reveal more and more details of the battle-scarred country below, and more details of the raging battle that was Desert Storm. One by one, Mace could see the gleaming office buildings and towers of Baghdad far to the north, the ancient city of Al Hillah, the ruins of Babylon ahead—and, to his complete amazement, aircraft filling the skies overhead. “Bogeys, one o’clock high,” Mace reported. “More at ten to eleven o’clock high. All heading northbound. Nothing on the RHAWS—they must be friendlies.” He paused for a moment, then said, “They’re heading north, Bob—they’re heading right toward the target. Right towards Karbala.”
“I’m standing by for the safe-in-range light, Mace. You got the launch point fix?”
Parsons was ignoring the obvious—there were friendlies flying within the lethal zone of a nuclear blast. Obviously someone had screwed up, and it wouldn’t be too great to nuke a bunch of Coalition aircraft. “What time do you have, Bob?” Mace asked.
“Jesus, Mace …” Parsons scowled.
“Dammit, Bob, there’s got to be a reason all these other aircraft are here. Maybe I screwed up the time. When I thought we were late before, maybe I got it backwards and we’re really early.”
“You didn’t screw up anything,” Parsons said. He pointed at the SATCOM clock on the forward instrument panel, which had Zulu time set for satellite synchronization. “That time checks with my watch. Now, unless we both got bad time hacks, we’re dead on time. But if you got a bad time hack and set a bad time in the SATCOM receiver, we wouldn’t have gotten anything on SATCOM. We received a message, you sent a message, and it was received and acknowledged. Everything’s on schedule. I don’t know why those other planes are up there, but it’s not my problem—this mission, and getting my butt back on friendly territory in one piece, is my only concern right now. Now, get back on the damn bomb run.”
“Whatever you say,” Mace muttered. Mace took his eyes off the nearby Coalition aircraft and went back into the radarscope: “Stand by for launch point fix.” Mace stepped the bombing computers to the launch point fix and selected the first offset aimpoint. After refining his aiming, he selected a second aimpoint, a tomb fifteen miles south of the dry lakebed. A semicircle of seven forts and tombs surrounded the lone tomb, so identification was positive.
Mace switched the radar to GND VEL to magnify the radar image, carefully laid the crosshairs dead on target, then reduced the range and selected offset three, a transmission tower just west of another lone tomb just twenty miles southeast of Karbala. The transmission line could be seen on radar as a thin, silvery sparkling line across the scope, making a definite jog southwestward where the right transmission tower was. The crosshairs were dead on. “I got the lead-in aimpoints,” he told Parsons as he reconfigured the radar to wide field-of-view. “Checking switches. Launch mode switch is in.”
Suddenly, on the international emergency GUARD channel, they heard, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Nightmare. Stop launch, stop launch. I repeat, Breakdance, this is Nightmare, stop launch. Time one-seven-zero-three-two-five, authentication poppa-juliett. Acknowledge. Over.”
It was an incredibly eerie feeling to hear your call sign, which was supposed to be a secret from most of the Coalition, being broadcast in the clear over an international emergency channel. The cloak of invisibility they felt by being part of a secret mission was shattered—it felt as if everyone in the entire world, bad guys as well as good, could see them now. Mace didn’t recognize the call sign Nightmare—they had a top secret codebook that would tell them who Nightmare was, but Mace had no time to look—but “stop launch” was a standard range director’s order to cease all missile firing activities. “What in hell was that?” Mace cried out. “That can’t be for real.”
“Ignore it,” Parsons said nervously. “It’s, uh, a message in the clear, and we don’t respond to clear-text messages. Take the fix and let’s go.” He turned to his radar navigator and found him furiously digging through an AQK-84 tactical decoding card. “Mace, I said ignore it.”
Mace ignored him. “It checks, Bob,” Mace said. “Jesus Christ, it checks. Someone just gave us a stop-launch order.”
“We don’t accept clear-text messages,” Parsons repeated, “and we sure as hell don’t accept a ‘stop-launch’ order, whatever that means.”
“It’s a standard range order,” Mace said. “You hear it on live-fire exercises all the—”
“This is not an exercise, Major,” Parsons snapped. “We’re probably being MIJIed by the Iraqis—they might have captured the Raven, its crew, and their classified documents and devised a phony order to keep us from launching.” MIJI, which was an acronym for Meaconing, Intrusion, Jamming, and Interference, was a standard tactic to try to divert aircrews from their mission or issuing false orders by the enemy. Aircrews had specific procedures for dealing with MIJI, and they had to be followed to the letter.
Mace knew that, but this still did not make sense—somebody was trying to tell them something.
“What are you doing now?” Parsons asked.
“If we get a recall or termination message,” Mace replied, “it’ll be on this page in the decoding book. I want to be ready.”
“Forget about that and get back on the bomb run.”
Mace silently muttered a “Fuck you.” The crosshairs tracked perfectly as well, which meant the heading and velocities in the bombing system were perfect. “Got the final aimpoint… taking the fix.” He set the right side MFD to the NAV Present Position page, checked that the update mode was in RADAR, then pressed the ENTER FIX Option Select Switch. The reverse video on the ENT FIX legend went out, and the FIXMAG readouts went to zero, indicating a successful position update. Mace switched his right side MFD from the Present Position page to the SRAM Air page and placed the Bomb Data page on the left MFD. “Got the fix. I need—”
“Holy Mother of God!” Parsons suddenly heeled the bomber into a steep right turn, then rolled left again to stabilize. Mace looked up from the radarscope and saw two American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers streak away to the north. The Strike Eagles were two-man versions of the F-15 Eagle fighter, modified for precision low-level bombing but retaining their air-to-air intercept and dogfighting capability. They had crossed the F-111G’s path less than five hundred feet away. “Jesus!” Parsons shouted. “Where did they come from?”
“Those were F-15s!” Mace said incredulously. “They had Sparrows and bombs on board! Why are they heading toward the target area?”
“What difference does it make? We’re on the bomb run.”
“Bob, this attack should have been deconflicted,” Mace said. “Any aircraft within twenty miles of ground zero will probably get blasted out of the sky. Those guys will be practically right over the target when the SRA
M detonates.”
“Jesus, Mace, we got a valid launch message … just punch that fucking missile out,” Parsons said. “Put the launch mode switch in ‘auto’ if you got any problems. When I see the ‘safe-in-range’ light, I’ll start a turn and head outbound. When I roll out of the turn, the missile will launch.”
“Parsons, don’t you get it? Something’s wrong here!” Mace snapped. “Somehow I think we decoded an invalid message. I don’t know how, but something’s really wrong.”
Parsons said, “It’s impossible to validate an incorrect message. Either the message doesn’t make sense or the authentication doesn’t check. Both were correct. Stay on the missile run.”
“We’ll be killing our own guys!”
“You don’t know that, Mace!” Parsons shouted. “Those guys can be heading anywhere. All we know is the orders we’re given. Now stay on the goddamn bomb run!”
But Mace kept on looking across the gradually brightening sky, and the more he looked the more he was shocked to see dozens of other aircraft passing nearby, going in all directions—but mostly going north into Baghdad.
“Safe-in-range light,” Parsons reported. “Countdown to turn started.” The SAFE IN RANGE light indicated that the SRAM missile was within its launch envelope, or “footprint,” and capable of hitting its target. The SRAM footprint extended not only ahead of the bomber’s flight path but behind it as well, so Mace and Parsons could accomplish an “over-the-shoulder” launch. They would fly westbound until they were about fifteen miles from the target, then turn 180 degrees away from the target and launch the missile after rolling out of the turn. At detonation, the F-111G would be at least forty miles from ground zero, safe from the blast and EMP effects.
The sixty-second high-speed run toward the turnpoint was the most frightening of Mace’s young life. “Thirty seconds to turn …”
