The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  Suddenly, without knowing it, Anthony Waters was in a personal war with a fanatic whose new mission was the death of an aging, well-married American colonel.

  3 August: 0308 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0508 hours, Athens, Greece

  The phone call from the dispatcher woke Dave Belfort first. The C-130 navigator stared at his watch, noting that they had been in crew rest ten hours, the minimum the regulations allowed. He staggered to the window and twisted open the wooden shutters, marveling at the beauty of the first touches of sunrise across the Aegean. The busy street below them that led into the heart of Athens was quiet in the early morning dawn, a rare condition. “Come on, Sid.” He shook his pilot, Sid Luna, awake. “A C-141 diverted into Athens for engine problems. We’ve got to pick up their passengers and get them down to Ras Assanya. I’ll shake out Toni and the others.”

  An hour later the sleepy C-130 crew met the commander of the advanced party for the F-15 squadron going into Ras Assanya. “Where in the hell have you been?” the lieutenant colonel demanded. “We’ve got to get to Ras Assanya to receive and bed down twenty-four F-15s that are going to be landing there in eight hours.”

  The C-130 crew was started by the short man’s barrage.

  “Excuse me, Colonel,” Belfort said, “it’s a five-hour flight. We’ll get you there with over two hours to spare.”

  “That’s not enough. It’s time you trash haulers earned your keep. Unplug your asses and get us in the air.” The lieutenant colonel then stormed out to the waiting C-130.

  “I’d say that Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Stansell has more than a touch of the Napoleon complex,” Dave Belfort said, taking the man’s name from the passenger list.

  “More like an Adolf, if you ask me,” Toni D’Angelo put in…

  Five-and-one-half hours later the C-130 taxied off the runway at Ras Assanya. Much to the relief of the crew, the lieutenant colonel ignored them and stalked out of the Hercules toward the tall colonel wearing a flight suit waiting by a pickup truck.

  Dave and Toni made the walk to Base Ops to file a new flight plan back to Athens while the C-130 offloaded. The dispatcher told them to expect at least an hour delay in getting the flight plan cleared. “The Arabs have been replacing foreign ATC controllers with Saudi nationals. The system is starting to bog down.” Toni shrugged her shoulders. C-130 crews were used to delays for many reasons. They returned to the Hercules and were sitting on the ramp in the shade under the wing when the first F-15 touched down after making a radar-controlled approach. “I thought fighters did overhead recoveries,” Toni said. An hour later the C-130 taxied out to take off as the last of the F-15s landed. They waited for a C-141 on final to land before they took the Active…

  Captain Mary Hauser looked out of one of the small windows of the C-141 as the cargo plane taxied in, catching a glimpse of the C-130 taking off. The GCI controller from Outpost had been assigned to a new radar control post, Caravan, to furnish ground control to the F-15s. The Air Force also wanted her to determine if Caravan could be used as a cover for an intelligence-gathering operation. For Captain Mary Hauser—The times they were a-changin’.

  4 August: 1000 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1300 hours. Ras Assanya, Saudi Arabia

  The order lifting the stand-down from daytime missions came in that morning. A frag order detailing three targets for the 45th arrived by courier two hours later. General Mashur al-Darhali had also seen and copied the frag order that directed the 45th to bomb the railroad-and-road complex leading to the Strait of Hormuz. Intelligence confirmed the People’s Soldiers of Islam was shifting some men and supplies toward the south.

  Carroll pointed out to Waters the PSI’s growing number of amphibious and assault landing craft. “This could mean a military buildup that will allow the PSI to use those ships to strike across the Strait of Hormuz right into Oman. Not only will that give them control of both sides of the Strait and the ability to seal it off, but they’ll have a beachhead on the Saudi Arabian peninsula.”

  The frag order made overwhelming sense.

  Stansell had insisted that his pilots be thoroughly briefed on the entire operation before they flew CAP for the 45th and the main briefing room in the COIC was filled to overflowing as the F-15 pilots settled in for their orientation briefing, eager to start flying combat. Jack and Thunder stood in the back of the room, listening to a fresh echo of their own words when they had first arrived. Now the refrain…“It’s the only war we got”…didn’t seem so funny to the two veterans.

  The room was called to attention when Waters and Stansell entered and took their seats in the front row. But when Captain Mary Hauser stood to outline local Ground Control Intercept procedures and capabilities Stansell interrupted her. “Captain, are you to be in charge of controlling F-15s? We had expected someone more senior to be in charge—”

  “I am a fully qualified master controller and have commanded units in the past, Colonel”—Mary wasn’t too surprised by this boring outbreak of old-fashioned sexism. “If my rank is bothering you, captains normally run radar posts—”

  “I was thinking of someone with more experience.” Stansell’s face was going to red. “We’re the premier F-15 squadron in the Air Force. That’s why we’re here. Don’t you forget it.”

  Jack couldn’t take any more of it, and Waters was about to bust. “Colonel Stansell, excuse me.” Jack spoke just loud enough to catch Stansell’s attention. “I’ve worked with Captain Hauser before. She’s the best GCI controller I’ve run across.”

  “And what in the hell would an F-4 driver know about what makes a good GCI controller?” Stansell shot back. Heads pivoted toward Jack. Stansell now smiled indulgently and decided to administer the coup de grace: “Fighter aircraft don’t need a backseater.”

  Jack returned the smile and lowered his voice, making everyone strain to hear what he was saying. “We”—he nodded toward his wizzo—“were being controlled by Captain Hauser when we got a MiG. I believe that’s one more than anyone else in this room can claim. I believe that’s testimony to her ability as a controller.”

  A round of approval via applause and even whistles from the middle of Stansell’s own F-15 pilots broke the heavy tension.

  “Off-hand,” Thunder said to Locke, “I’d say Colonel Stansell isn’t the most popular fellow with his own troops.”

  The shrill siren-like sounds of cranking F-15 engines blended with the blunt roar of the F-4s. Crew chiefs hurried to button up the panels on the F-4s and marshal their birds into the taxi flow of the combined mission as the first eight F-15 Eagles taxied rapidly out of their bunkers, bringing their canopies down in a synchronized routine. Twelve of C.J.’s squadron followed, loaded out for SAMs and Triple A suppression. Another eight F-15s fell into place followed by thirty-six lumbering, bomb-laden attack F-4s. The last eight F-15s then taxied out, completing the strike force.

  Waters twisted about in the cockpit of his F-4 to see if his entire package had taxied. A pickup truck pulled up alongside and the driver gave him a thumbs-up followed by a zero formed by his thumb and forefinger: there were no dropouts; the strike was formed. A green light flashed from the control tower and the Eagles roared down the runway in pairs, quickly lifting off and reaching for the sky, not needing to light their afterburners.

  The fighters headed southeast. C.J. and his wingman split off from his flight and headed for the Russian trawler that was moving inshore trying to monitor the takeoff visually. The two Phantoms dropped down, skimming the smooth green cellophane of the Gulf. They could see figures running on deck as they bore down on the trawler. C.J. clicked his sight on and told his wizzo to lock on with his radar. “That should get their attention.” The two Phantoms stroked their afterburners, pulling up and barely clearing the spy ship, which rocked under their jet-wash. The two birds rejoined as the trawler turned back out to sea. “If we can’t touch the bastards, maybe we can scare them away,” C.J. observed.

  The PSI watch team on the coast had been warned about the l
aunch and had no difficulty counting the birds as they took off. The radio operator was encoding the launch warning when a small British commando squad attacked. The twelve men from the SAS moved with precision and speed as they annihilated the team. Each man, but one, took out his assigned target within twenty seconds. The lone survivor had escaped to the latrine under the floor-boards. The attackers methodically searched the area for the missing man until the leader motioned the unblooded member of his squad toward the latrine. The man scampered soundlessly across the open ground until he was within ten yards of it. In passable Arabic he called out a name: “Amini, come out. The fighting is done.” When nothing happened he repeated it in Farsi. Slowly the man climbed out of the muck. And a single shot took off the top of his head.

  The commando leader checked the stopwatch on his wrist. “Message?” he rapped. The shake of a head told him that the PSI watch-team had not gotten off a warning message. He wiped the sweat off his blackened face. “Bloody hell,” he added in a crisp British accent, “even an unscheduled trip to the loo can’t stop us.”

  Jack and Thunder sat on the beach and counted the jets as the strike force completed their launch. Since Wolf Flight was scheduled to fly that night, they were not part of the strike. They saw C.J. buzz the trawler in the distance but doubted it would do much good. “He’ll radio the Gomers,” Jack said. “At least he’ll have the count wrong.”

  “He’ll be back out there tonight when we launch,” Thunder said. “I wish we could do something about him.”

  Jack tried to think of a way to discourage the trawler from monitoring their takeoffs. “We need a different type of intimidation…”

  While the trawler did not get an accurate count of the launching aircraft, its crew was able to relay the exact time of launch to the PSI’s waiting air-defense command net. The MiGs were standing by and scrambled to meet the Americans. Mary Hauser was at her radar console analyzing the multiple targets appearing on her scope. Her right hand flashed over the buttons on her IFF panel. Without looking, she selected the mode that interrogated the Floggers’ IFF. “Let’s see if any of you gentlemen have your IFF’s on,” she said under her breath, hitting the interrogate button. Every target responded. Mary nodded in satisfaction and quickly counted eighteen bandits. “So, you assume your IFF is secure. Never assume anything in this business…”

  “Stormy.” Mary keyed her transmit button, calling the lead F-15. “Bandits, ten o’clock at eighty-five, angels thirty.” The short transmission by the GCI controller alerted every Eagle pilot to the inbound threat, telling them hostile aircraft were coming at them from sixty degrees to the left, eighty-five nautical miles away and were at thirty thousand feet. By only identifying the lead F-15, she hoped to confuse any enemy monitoring her radio frequency; they would have to sort out who “Stormy” was and the number of F-15s.

  The F-15s turned to the left, into the Floggers. The radio crackled with commands as the F-15s used their radar sets to break out the MiGs and assign each Eagle a target. Then the PSI started communications jamming. Only the GCI site had the brute power to override the jamming, and Mary Hauser’s cool voice could be heard as she paired up targets and F-15s, rapidly calling the Eagles to new, jam-free radio frequencies. The F-15s surged away from the F-4s and met the MiGs head-on while the attack birds dropped down to the deck, still over water.

  Much to Mary’s surprise the F-15s did not mix it up with the MiGs but launched their radar missiles from a front aspect and then blew on through the MiGs, zooming out of the flight. The symmetry of the engagement shattered as the MiGs dodged the missiles and scattered over the sky. The MiG pilots were startled to find no F-15s to contend with and switched their attention to the F-4s, which they had no trouble finding, their camouflage paint standing in stark contrast against the bright green of the gulf.

  C.J. swore at the F-15s, angry at their poor tactics. He pushed forward the radio transmit button under his left thumb on the throttles to transmit an abort, and in his anger broke the switch off. Before he could tell Stan to transmit the message he heard Waters aborting the mission and ordering the Phantoms to jettison their loads. C.J.’s left hand moved over the weapons-selector panel, choosing what he would jettison. He punched off the F-15 type fuel tank on his centerline but kept the two valuable Standard Arm anti-radiation missiles carried on each inboard pylon, then toggled his pinky switch under his left little finger on the throttle to guns.

  The voice of Stan-the-Man came over the intercom. “Bandit, left eight o’clock, coming to your nine, low. Hard left, engage.” He could have been at the bar ordering a round of drinks, for all the excitement in his voice. The Flogger was not in a position behind C.J. to launch a missile and was closing in for a gun kill with its twenty-three-millimeter cannon.

  Without first looking for the bandit, C.J. wrenched his bird to the left as Stan had directed. When the MiG pilot saw the F-4’s nose turn and point directly at him, he chose to disengage, break off the attack, turned slightly to the right and accelerated ahead. But the Flogger pilot had given C.J. too much room to turn onto him. He should have pointed his Flogger directly into the Phantom. As it was, the thirty degrees he gave C.J. would cost him his life. With his Phantom still in front, at the Flogger’s eleven o’clock, C.J. now pulled his nose up, not wanting to shoot past the MiG in the opposite direction, and used the vertical to turn into the MiG. He was still on his back and pulling the nose toward the ground when the Flogger slashed into his sight ring. C.J. always flew with a “stiff sight,” reducing the amount of lead fed into the sight-picture, a mode especially suited for a close-in fight. Now he mashed the trigger for a snap shot, sending a stream of high-explosive bullets into the MiG. Over thirty rounds tore the plane apart.

  But there was no momentary exultation in the kill for C.J. He immediately checked his fuel and rolled ninety degrees for a belly check, looking for bandits beneath him. He was a professional going about his business. He would celebrate later.

  “Shit hot,” his wingman yelled over the radio. “I’m at your six, come off right.” C.J. turned one hundred eighty degrees to the right and rolled out, heading for Ras Assanya. His wingman fell into place on his left and slightly above him in a tactical formation. Homeward bound.

  Jack and Thunder were still sitting on the beach when the first of the Phantoms started to recover. Jack glanced at his watch. “They’ve aborted the mission; something must have gone wrong.” They stood in the hot sun and counted the returning planes. The worry they both felt lessened when a returning Phantom entered the pattern and did a victory roll as it passed down the runway. “The Eagle drivers aren’t going to like that,” he said. “Looks like one of C.J.’s Weasels got a MiG.”

  “It was C.J.,” Thunder said. “I caught the tail number.”

  “I only counted forty-seven F-4s,” Jack said. One Phantom was missing. “Let’s get over to the COIC and find out what in the hell went wrong.” They pulled their flight suits over their trunks and ran across the hot sand.

  They found Waters in the crowded main briefing room of the COIC talking to Bull Morgan. The returning air crews were waiting for their turn to debrief and most were sitting dejectedly, not talking.

  Stansell came into the room and marched up to Waters. “What went wrong?” the little colonel demanded.

  Waters glared at him. He had seen bravado used as a smoke screen for a foul-up before. “I was going to ask you that question.”

  “We engaged like we briefed,” Stansell shot back. The room went silent. “We plan and practice to shoot the bad guys in the face, blow on through and take on the next wave of targets. We maintain our flight integrity and use our head-on ability to the max extent possible—”

  “That would be nice if you managed to shoot someone down,” Waters said. “As it was, you didn’t get a single kill and left the area. We were right under the MiGs, still over water; they had no trouble finding us. We were lucky, they only got one. That’s my eleventh loss. At least the others got over
Iran—for whatever that’s worth. You didn’t help, you just got in the way.”

  Waters cut it off, turned and walked out of the room. Each loss his wing suffered made it increasingly difficult for him to keep pushing his crews into combat. As the war ground on, his chief concern was slowly shifting away from the mission he had been assigned and onto the survival of his aircrews. The Pentagon might not understand that. Well, they dealt in paper, not people.

  Bull Morgan was experiencing a different reaction. He had seen his wingman explode in a fireball when an Atoll missile, fired by a MiG that had maneuvered behind them, found its target. When Stansell started to leave the room after Waters he found his way blocked by Bull’s bulk, which materialized in front of him. The corded strength of Bull’s neck muscles caused arteries to visibly pulse. He stuck a finger in the middle of Stansell’s forehead. “Stick around to fight next time or I’ll squash your fucking head.”

  Stansell stood his ground. “Maybe a court-martial will remind you of the difference between a lieutenant colonel and a major. Don’t threaten me—”

  “Not a threat, Colonel”—Bull’s finger punched a tattoo on his forehead—“a promise that you’ll be giving your testimony with freshly rearranged brains.”

  Jack hurried up to put a hand on Bull’s shoulder, feeling the man’s knotted muscles ripple in anger. “Your turn to debrief,” he said, leading his squadron commander away.

  Ten minutes after Stansell’s own debrief he walked across the freshly paved street to the small set of trailers that served as wing headquarters, where he found Waters’ office door open. “Come in, Colonel Stansell. I had a feeling you’d be along.”