by Ian Slater
They all thought she took it very well. The truth was, however, that as much as Lana wanted to cry — crying for her having always acted as a tranquilizer — she couldn’t, for the simple fact was that she and David weren’t that close. At twenty-four, being the youngest of the family, David hadn’t seen much of Lana, who, though she hadn’t finished college because of Jay, was in her third year when he was still in high school. There was simply too big a gap between them, so much so that they hardly ever wrote to one another, the only news between them passed on by her mother and father in his letters home before he’d been wounded. Yet in other families, different ages didn’t seem to make a difference. Why was it? she wondered. Was it because of her father, a kind enough man but of the old “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” school? The boys had always been dissuaded from wearing their emotions on their sleeve. Or had it to do with their expectations, the difference of what they each wanted in life so disparate, David in political science before he joined the marines, she in the jet set world of Jay La Roche. Perhaps the lack of communication on David’s part had more to do with his disapproval of Jay La Roche. He had said nothing about her leaving La Roche — whether it was desertion or disapproval, she didn’t know.
As she walked back from the head nurse’s station and into the ward, she felt as if she were suddenly in a goldfish bowl. Everyone clearly knew about her brother missing — how did news travel so fast? — expecting the gung ho “I can take it” exterior. It was a strain accepting the condolences. She felt smothered by everyone’s sympathy, wishing they would just go away. She wanted to be alone, away from the island, a chance simply to sit, think for herself.
She dialed the pilots’ quarters.
“Lieutenant Alen please?”
She heard whistling at the other end of the line and ribald laughter. She almost hung up, but he was on the line. His voice reminded her a little of Frank Shirer. From the noises she could hear in the background, he was taking a ribbing about talking to her, but he was polite, clearly refusing to be suborned by the grunts of the macho pack in the background.
She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t know your first name,” she said with some amazement.
“That’s all right. It’s Rick.”
“When are you scheduled to go to Adak?”
“In the morning. Oh five hundred.”
“Kind of early.”
“There’ll be a break in the weather then — or so they say.”
“Okay, but if I come along, I’ll have to be back for the dog watch. You think that’ll be a problem?”
“No problem at all. Ah — Lana?”
It was the first time he’d called her by her first name.
“Yes?”
“Sorry about your brother.”
“Thanks.”
* * *
When he got off the phone, Alen stiffened his right arm from the elbow up, slapping his left hand hard down on the bicep, driving the rigid forearm into the air. “In like flint!”
There was a chorus of encouragement: “Way to go!” and someone yelling, “Rick the dick!”
He grinned boyishly, and immediately felt ashamed.
“Better strap her down, Rick. Could be a rough ride.”
Everyone wanted to be copilot, but the assignments hadn’t changed — nor had the forecast for a break in the cloud cover around five in the morning.
“Gobble, gobble!” shouted a navigator.
* * *
That night Alen slept fitfully, but he didn’t worry. Sometimes when he was bone-weary, against all common sense, he got so hard, it felt like steel. The only thing that worried him was that if she touched him, he mightn’t be able to wait. The closer it got to the 0400 preflight call, the more relaxed and sleepy he became. When he did doze off, he was in a dream — the plane on automatic pilot, the commanding officer of Adak now bawling Alen out for his violation of orders — bringing a Wave on a “goddamned joyride” in the middle of a combat zone. And Alen with no pants on, telling the CO that Lana was merely fulfilling the requirements of her posting — putting in at least thirty hours as required by Waves for the purposes of ATF— air time familiarization — which the pilots called “airtime fucking. “ Alen also pointed out Washington’s rationale — that in the event of the Aleutians being attacked, the Waves would have to help the pilots ferry back the most seriously wounded to either Dutch Harbor or beyond to Anchorage in Alaska, and yet the only flight time most of them had was on the civilian flight from the lower forty-eight states.
At 0407 on the morning of October 17, Alen was feeling so thick from lack of sleep, it took three cups of coffee to pump him awake. The weather report was holding, though in the “caldron of storms,” as the volcanic Aleutians were called, the projected rise in barometric pressure could very quickly disappear. When he got to the fogbound airstrip, the latest weather posting, only an hour old, still called for clearing. But Lana was nowhere in sight.
“Come on,” said the copilot, “let’s go.”
Alen looked plain miserable as the AC-130 E Hercules’ four turboprops sputtered to life, throwing off curls of exhaust into the pea-soup morning. He glanced anxiously at his watch. The most he could delay on preflight recheck was ten minutes. And the weather was getting worse.
“Goddamnit!” said Alen, looking past the copilot at the fog-shrouded runway. “C’mon, c’mon! What the hell’s she doing?”
“Checking her diaphragm!” shouted the copilot.
CHAPTER NINE
Coming in at eight hundred miles an hour on the vector given him when he left Cornwall, the sea a wrinkled bluish slate racing backward beneath him, Roger Fernshaw altered trim, heard the Jaguar’s target-lock-on tone, and fired one of his two Exocets.
The Yumashev’s radar saw the blip of the Jaguar’s Exocet but lost it thereafter in sea clutter echo. Fernshaw, monitoring the head-up display, itself monitoring the side-scan and umbrella radar feed, glanced at the sky above — white cumulus and breaking. A Russian pilot’s radar that, technically speaking, might pick him up wasn’t Fernshaw’s major concern, however, for he was flying so low, trained in the dangerous twisting and turning low-level runs through the glens of Scotland, that he was initially “on the deck,” forty feet above the waves, where the Jaguar’s image would hopefully be lost in the sea clutter blanketing any active radar signals beamed his way.
Firing the second missile fifteen seconds and forty miles after the first, Fernshaw was still safely beyond the Russian cruiser’s best thirty-mile-range Goblet surface-to-air missiles. As he began his turn, doing visual as well as instrument checks, needing height to complete the maneuver, he momentarily took himself out of the clutter. He saw a wink of red against the cobalt-blue sea, most likely the first Goblet leaving the cruiser. For a moment he was struck by the perverse fact that if the twenty-foot-long Russian missile had been upgraded with boosters for a fifty- or even forty-five-mile range, he would be, as his American colleagues in Cornwall were fond of saying, “up Shit Creek without a paddle.” The count for the Exocet missile was now down to thirty-one seconds, and while his radar lit up with Goblet and other AA ordnance opening up at him, the Exocet feed stayed live. At seven seconds Fernshaw saw an orange wink on the horizon blossom, then fade, and on his channel scanner he was picking up excited Russian chatter, presumably radio traffic emanating from the cruiser itself. He didn’t see his second missile hit the cruiser, and scribbled “P/D” on his knee pad, indicating a “probable” or “dud.” He also noted that the seven-second gap between the time the Exocet should have impacted the cruiser and the time it actually did suggested the Jaguar’s ground crew should do a computer overhaul of the fire control system as soon as he returned.
The Exocet hit the Yumashev abaft the starboard beam and below the head-net C radar aerial, the second missile’s explosion gulped by the inferno of the first, though striking farther back in the deck housing below the headlights’ radar, which only minutes earlier had been tracking
the incoming Jaguar. The damage to the cruiser’s superstructure would have been much worse had the missiles been better spaced, for much of the second missile’s impact was in an area already hit. Even so, the Exocet’s explosion, on the waterline, well below the head-net aerial, effectively gutted the cruiser, sailors suddenly sucked out from what only moments before had been warm, watertight compartments, their bodies, like so much flotsam, pouring like stunned fish into the ice-cold Atlantic. Only a few of those in the water showed any signs of life as their comrades in the rescue squads threw out the tethered Malvinsky raft-drums, the halves of each container opening in the shape of an ugly mouth into tent rafts whose blossoming was like enormous orange flowers on the heaving surface of the sea.
Forty miles to the northeast, the two Soviet Sukhoi Flagon-Fs accompanying the long-range Badger dispatched by Admiral Brodsky had seen the blue line of the Jaguar’s Exocet as it streaked at deck level toward the sub-chaser Yumashev, but the Sukhois did not leave the Badger. Although capable of a dual role, as a medium bomber and maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the Tupolev-16 Badger, with a maximum speed of 615 miles per hour, was ill suited to go it alone in any seek-and-destroy mission against the reported American Sea Wolf. It badly needed the “in-flight refueled” Sukhois to guard its flanks, and its captain knew that whether or not the two escorting Russian fighters would be called upon to fire their weapons would depend entirely on the pilot of the Jaguar. With the NATO fighter almost certainly approaching the end of its fuel-pod-extended radius of one thousand miles, the Badger’s six-man crew were making wagers as to whether the Allied pilot would engage them in an effort to take out the Badger’s twenty-thousand-pound load of sub-detecting air-launched sonobuoys, MAD-magnetic anomaly detection — gear, and its free-fall ordnance of air-launched depth charges and torpedoes.
For Pilot Officer Fernshaw, however, seeing three Russian aircraft on his radar screen, a decision about whether or not he would attack them was more difficult than they could imagine. The problem was the fighting in Europe. It was going badly for the Western Allies, the half million British, American, and German troops trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket surrounded by a steel ring of six hundred T-90s pounding away at them with laser-guided 135-millimeter armor-piercing and high-explosive shells. In the air of sustained crisis in the Allied camp, the decisions being forced upon Whitehall for all British combatants as far down the chain as individual pilots like Fernshaw were often as confused as they were urgent. SACEUR — Supreme Allied Commander in Europe — headquarters, Brussels, was now reporting to England that if all available NATO air cover was not marshaled in defense of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, then NATO’s shriveling central front would cease to be and trip off full-scale collapse all along the German front from the North Sea to Switzerland.
Accordingly, in Whitehall, the minister of war, bearing what Washington called the “big picture” in mind, advised the headquarters of all United Kingdom air forces, in Wycombe, and Royal Navy Commander, Western Approaches, that if a pilot was confronted with the choice of running low on fuel in pressing an attack, thereby risking the loss of his aircraft, he was to exercise “discretion.” What this meant to Fernshaw and others like him in the “Highways Department,” as the STOL — short takeoff and landing — Jaguar arm was referred to, was that if Whitehall, the Admiralty, or the Royal Air Force didn’t like the decision you made, you would be up another creek — and smartly at that. At the same time, the Admiralty was arguing, “wherever possible,” attacks to protect the SSBN/SNs must be pressed home “at all costs.” And Fernshaw knew their reasoning was sound, for if Germany was lost, France would fall, and with it the vitally needed ports for NATO, making resupply from America impossible. Then the SSBN/SNs and the relatively few Stealth bombers would be left as a mobile deterrent. On the other hand, a single Jaguar, its superb fly-by-wire avionics making it one of NATO’s best ground-hugging, close-support fighters, could knock out ten times its number in tanks.
Normally Fernshaw, his plane entering thick stratus, wouldn’t have found the decision a difficult one to make, but like so many of the other outnumbered Allied pilots called upon day after day, night after rain-sodden night, to rise from carrier England and stem the “surge” tactics of the Russian air forces, Fernshaw was exhausted. Fatigued from having lost twelve pounds in a week due to the wrenching G forces, he wasn’t sure that the decision whether or not to engage the Badger and its outriders was a case of weighing military priorities or a plain old-fashioned matter of funk versus guts. He headed for cloud.
Both the Russian leader, front right of the Badger, and the second Sukhoi to the Badger’s left rear and higher, covering his leader’s konus ranimosti—”cone of vulnerability”— spotted the Jaguar climbing fast, forty-three miles ahead. The Russians’ confidence with the two-to-one advantage was further boosted by the fact that their Sukhoi Flagon-Fs’ speed — up to 2.5 Mach should they go as high as thirty-six thousand feet — was much faster than the Jaguar’s 1.6 Mach. The sun was also behind them, and no matter how sophisticated the electronics of the Anglo-French plane’s fire control and weapon-aiming computer were, the sun in your visor was still a distinct disadvantage. In the millisecond world of fighters so fast they could outstrip some of their missiles, direct sunlight, Polaroid visors notwithstanding, could produce oslepitel ‘nost’— “glare-out”—on the dials.
The Jaguar was climbing hard and fast into high-piled cumulus, the Russian leader glimpsing the Jaguar’s round-chisel-shaped nose, telling him he was up against a state-of-the-art British-Ferranti weapon-aiming system. But he had no clue as to whether the British pilot was going for “high ground” in cloud cover to attack or to escape. The Russian pilot, knowing that radio silence had been broken earlier by the cruiser’s transmission to Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters, switched on, instructing his wingman, “Stay with Mother. I’ll sbiyu—’knock off’—our friend in Heaven.”
With the wingman acknowledging, the leader’s Flagon, now approaching the same height as the Jaguar 40.1 miles away, hit the Turmansky afterburner. In straight vertical climb, the wings’ flash in sunlight gave the fighter beauty as well as the aspect of pure power as it rocketed five thousand feet in less than ninety seconds, giving the Russian a ceiling of eleven thousand should the Jaguar be contemplating an attack after all. If the NATO fighter was carrying a second Exocet on one of its hard points, then the Badger and the two Sukhois would now be within range. Everyone, except pilots, the Russian pilot knew, thought electronic warfare had made modern aerial combat little more than a superfast computer game. The fact, however, was that there were so many variables, from sunlight and weight of ordnance to a bird looking like a fighter for a fraction of a second, that machines couldn’t do it all.
Now the Jaguar, forty-six miles away, invisible in cloud but a clear blip on the Flagon’s “Skip Spin” intercept long-range radar screen, was heading nor’nor’east — toward southwestern England. But this could well be a feint.
Leveling out, the Russian pilot saw a faint orange ball in the cloud. He banked fast left, until he realized the orange ball and the others like it were decoy flares the Jaguar was jettisoning as protection from heat seekers. The Russian pushed the select button for one of his two air-to-air Amos “actives,” flicked the cover, and fired, watching the missile streaking, at over a thousand meters a second, toward the Jaguar over thirty miles away, its radar-seeking head programmed to ignore infrared signatures, going instead for the enemy’s own radar pulse. Then the Russian pilot saw his own warning radar screen go to fuzz, the Jaguar obviously dropping chaff to jam the Amos’s radar guidance. The Russian fired both of his heat-seeking AA-3s.
Fernshaw saw his warning lights flashing frantically and heard the “Bogey” tone. His Jaguar perilously low on fuel, the Sukhoi engaging him with a three-hundred-miles-per-hour speed advantage, Fernshaw knew that unless he dropped his extra fuel pod to gain more speed, he would not escape. He released the external pod and shut off all ra
dar, heading higher into cloud, noting his fuel consumption rapidly increasing in the thinner air, and the three Russian missiles closing.
Seeing the Jaguar’s drop tank tumbling, reflecting like foil in the sun, the Russian leader shut off his active radar in case the British pilot had tried to be clever, going high to fire off a radar seeker of his own. The Russian banked sharply to his left, ordering his wingman to stay with the Badger and both of them to go as low as possible to evade the western approaches’ long-range over-the-horizon radar. He then went to radio silence, leaving only his channel scanner turned on. Within a second his radio surged — the panic-stricken voice of the Badger’s observer — and in a flash he knew what had happened. The Jaguar had outfoxed him, shutting off its radar, doubling back in the cloud rather than running, while he, the Russian, had been looking for the Jaguar up ahead.
Immediately the Russian went into a tight turn and dove, his nose starting to bleed profusely in the G force, the Badger already under attack, the Jaguar passing on its forward right side four miles away and firing its remaining Exocet at the big, droning maritime reconnaissance plane.
With the extra speed afforded by the release of the fifteen-hundred-pound Exocet, the British fighter, its twenty-eight-foot six-inch wingspan six feet shorter than the Sukhoi’s, was in its classic tight turn, coming in fast behind the second Sukhoi, whose pilot was now breaking right and, in an effort to beat the Jaguar at its own game, fired a cluster of six 120-pound Aphid passive heat seekers, which would ignore all radar signals, homing in only on exhaust. At eight hundred miles per hour, the Aphids were twice as fast as the oncoming Exocet, but their best mode of attack, because they were heat seekers, was rear entry. They needed to do a U-turn, but it was too tight.
They missed the Exocet, but two of them had now locked on to the exhaust of the Jaguar itself as the British fighter, completing a turn in a sound barrel of rolling thunder, passed behind the Badger, the tracer from the Badger’s top turret ceasing for a split second as the Jaguar flashed past the airplane’s three-story-high tail. The 23-millimeter cannon in the Badger’s radar-guided rear turret, however, was still firing even as the Exocet slammed into the plane’s starboard exhaust flange, the explosion blowing the plane in two, the tail assembly tumbling more slowly than the forward section, whose engines, or rather, the red-hot mass that had been the twin Mikulin turbojets, plummeted like a rock, the entire section upside down, cockpit intact as it slammed into the sea, disintegrating in spumes of steam and spray. Yet before it had gone down, the half-second burst from its radar control rear turret had strafed the Jaguar, the fighter’s cockpit now whistling, the splintered Perspex and metal fragments from the demolished HUD screen disintegrating in the hail of the Badger’s 23-millimeter cannon. The Jaguar was shuddering violently, yawing to the left. Fernshaw thought he must be hit but wasn’t, his double-ply flying suit and visor protecting him from the peppering of the instrument panel’s debris. But he couldn’t see for several seconds. At first he thought it must be his visor scratched to a fog, but then he could smell electrical fire, realizing that the fog was smoke. He fought for control, but too many of the fly-by-wire microcircuits were blown. He felt the plane’s nose drop suddenly, glanced at the altimeter but couldn’t see it through the smoke, guessing it had been shot out anyway. Elbows tucked in, he took hold of the yellow and black zebra-striped hand grips. The bolt release fired. Icy air was roaring about his helmet. He prayed he was at least five hundred feet above the ocean. Smoke gone, he could now see he was at least a thousand feet above a sharply inclined slab of white-veined blue that was the sea. He could spot only one of the Sukhois — a silver dot miles to the east. Then he thought he saw the second one, but it was only the hapless Hormone chopper several miles away hovering helplessly above the wreckage of the Yumashev, rescue harness extended, picking up survivors as Fernshaw struggled to crawl into the orange one-man tent raft.
