The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  The Phantoms had spread into a wide pattern, converging on the fleet from all points of the compass. They planned to attack simultaneously and for a few seconds saturate the defenders. The crews remembered Jack’s description of the most likely survival tactic: “one pass, haul ass,” or as Thunder put it, “shoot and scoot.” A crew from the 378th zigzagged through the defenders, heading for the Sirri. Its Wizzo pinpointed its bright return on his radar and the Maverick’s infrared seeker-head was sensing the unbelievably bright target at six miles. He drove the crosshairs onto the heat-signature and locked on. The pilot grunted when his wizzo told him he was cleared to pickle, then headed into a gap between two small patrol boats escorting the Sirri. He popped to twelve hundred feet to fire the Maverick and hit the pickle button, sending two missiles with their one-hundred-twenty-five-pound warheads toward the ship. But before he could jam his plane back onto the deck to escape, a crossfire of Triple A from the patrol boats ripped into the fuselage, building a huge fireball in the night.

  The late pilot’s wingman marked the crossfire, teeth grinding, and headed for the two escort boats. He was able to avoid the trap his lead had fallen into and rippled off two Mavericks at the boat on the right, then jinked hard, pulling to the deck and leveling off fifty feet above the water as a stream of tracers etched the sky above him. His wizzo noted that the two Mavericks had blown the patrol boat apart and that the Sirri was burning as they ran for home. At least some payback…

  A crew from the 377th now arced across the water toward a heavily camouflaged Polnocny-class landing ship in the van of the fleet. The wizzo’s RHAW gear was screaming its loud warbling cry at them, telling them they were in the beam of a guidance radar. He checked the RHAW scope and didn’t see any flashing symbols that indicated a missile was tracking them, so he punched off the system’s audio. Probably a malfunction, he told himself, willing to rely on visual warnings on the scope.

  The crew never saw the two missiles that blew them out of the sky…

  Wrango, a Wolf from the 378th, was tail-end Charlie. He circled the fleet three hundred feet off the deck, selecting a target, counted twelve fires and decided to hit a ship that was coming to the aid of a burning freighter. When his wizzo couldn’t make the system lock on as he ran in, Wrango had to break off the attack run. “We’ll have to come back another day,” he told his Wizzo. But neither saw the stream of thirty-millimeter tracers reaching for them from the burning ship as they turned away, presenting their exposed belly to the ship. Two explosions promptly rocked the Phantom. Wrango’s telelight panel flashed warnings at him as the stick shuddered in his hand and he had to fight to control the violently shaking plane as he yelled at his wizzo to retard the throttles while he ballooned to a higher altitude. For three minutes he kept up the fight for control as smoke and fumes filled the cockpit. Finally, unable to take his hands from the stick, he yelled for his backseater to eject them.

  It was a clean ejection, the Martin-Baker performing as advertised, and they landed unhurt in the water less than a thousand feet apart. The wizzo had released his parachute risers when his feet touched the water and was pulling himself into his one-man dingy when he felt a sharp tug at his foot. Before he could check it…he figured his boot was caught in a parachute shroud…two more sharks hit him, one ripping off his leg, the other gouging him in the side. The man’s scream carried a quarter-mile over the calm water. Wrango never heard it. Two sharks had hit him before he could release his parachute risers, and now his inflated parachute dragged him, lifeless, through the water.

  Sergeant Nesbit handed Waters a note telling him the C-130 from Mildenhall had called in and would be landing in ten minutes with a VIP code-six on board. “What the hell’s a general coming in here for?” Waters said, collecting Jack and heading for the bunker the wing was using to muster the next group to be evacuated. They found Stansell in front of the bunker when they drove up. “Rup, get all the women out quick as you can.” Waters paused and looked at the clipboard Stansell was holding. “Get most of Intel out too.” If the base was overrun, he sure as hell did not want Intel captured.

  “Colonel,” Stansell said, “the women aren’t asking for any special favors, let’s go with the priority we’ve established. Intel, okay, we don’t need them now—”

  Their exchange was cut off by the howl of the C-130 as it taxied to a halt in front of the bunker, the crew-entrance door opened and Shaw stepped onto the ramp as the engines spun down. Stansell was rushing the next group aboard the ramp at the rear of the Hercules.

  “Well, Colonel Waters, you’ve got yourself into one hell of a mess,” Shaw said, shaking Waters’ hand.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Waters quickly filled him in, including how he was trying to shuttle his people out before the base was attacked by the oncoming fleet.

  Shaw motioned at the C-130’s flight deck, signaling Pullman to join them. “I need a command communications net. Is there one at Dhahran?”

  Waters shook his head. “Dhahran only has a small message center. But Nesbit’s got the 45th’s command net up and working.”

  “So I’ll stay here and scream for help. Maybe the Air Force will listen to a general that’s on the spot. Chief, you go with the C-130 at Dhahran and keep the shuttle going from that end—”

  “General,” Waters interrupted, “wouldn’t it be better if you ran the show from Dhahran? Things are going to heat up around here…”

  Shaw gave him a drop-dead look, then pointed to the C-130. “Get going, Mort,” and the sergeant ran back aboard as the number three prop started to wind up.

  “It’ll be a few minutes before the Hercules can take off,” Waters told the general. “We’ve got birds recovering.”

  Jack drove the pickup as the three then returned to the command post, where the launch-and-recovery board was mute testimony to the high cost of attacking the ships. Four recovery squares were open and two planes that had made it suffered battle damage that made it doubtful if they would fly again. Shaw stood at the back of the room while Waters ordered Maintenance to turn the birds ASAP, Farrell to switch the crews on air-defense alert with the recovering crews, and Nesbit to check with the GCI site for movement of the fleet. “Jack, get with the crews and find out what happened. Work up some new way to go against those ships.”

  Jack looked away, not wanting to tell that he was fresh out of ideas.

  Before Jack could take off, Nesbit relayed a report from the GCI site’s radar: the invasion force and the ships were heading directly for Ras Assanya.

  “We’ll hit them again,” Waters said.

  A lousy situation, but Shaw had at least seen enough to convince him that Waters was in control of it. He watched Waters in admiration. The colonel’s strength was the galvanizing factor that kept the men going. Muddy, he realized, was a for-real leader. It was something he’d never really accepted about his old friend until now. Shaw turned, commandeered Nesbit and his communications net and set to work spurring the shuttle on.

  The situation-map board was a magnet that drew everyone’s attention. A board poster had only to move toward it and the room went silent in anticipation. The latest plot showed the ships moving inside forty miles…

  Jack leaned close to Waters. “We’re going to try corridor tactics, Colonel, go at them with a series of punches at the same spot and try to blast into their center—go after the landing ships. But we’re running out of Mavericks. And it seems they’ve armed their patrol boats with some new type of Strela”—Jack, who got his information from the crews, shared their mistaken impression that the Stingers the PSI were using against them were a much improved Strela. “We’re going to try using AIM-4 Sparrows on them. I don’t see a lot of difference between a fast-moving patrol boat and a slow-moving plane. Maybe a radar missile can keep their heads down.”

  The board posters started to mark up launch times as eighteen Phantoms headed toward the ships. Shaw pulled a chair next to Waters and watched the board rapidly fill
with takeoff times. “MAC has been ordered to start a full-blown airlift to get you out of here,” Shaw said. “There’ll be a steady stream of C-141s and C-5s into Dhahran starting in about seven hours, and six more C-130s should be here in about ten hours. MAC has gone to a full wartime footing and lifted all peacetime restrictions but one: they won’t risk C-141s or C-5s coming in here if the base is under attack.”

  “I see. Well, we need to talk to Rup,” Waters said, picking up a phone that patched into the bunker. The colonel would have preferred to talk face-to-face with Stansell but didn’t want to leave the Command Post or pull Stansell away from the bunker. “How many can you have out of here by morning?” Waters asked him.

  Stansell ran the numbers for him. “I’ve sent seven loads out with seven hundred and thirty people. A shuttle takes about two hours, and with sunrise at 5:30 we’ll get four more shuttles out of the two C-130s. That’s about eight hundred more. Should have about sixteen hundred out by morning. We could sure use another Hercules or a C-141, Colonel.”

  “Sorry, Rup, this is all we’re getting for a while.” He hung up and turned to Shaw, who had been listening on an extension. He pointed to the situation board and the constantly advancing ships. “If we don’t get those mothers turned around, they’ll be on us in a few hours…”

  Time dragged as the birds checked in and landed. The landing squares on the launch-and-recovery board filled, until three remained open. Waters looked across the board, checking the names of the missing crews, each name a hot iron in his gut. “Battle damage?” he asked, keeping his voice a monotone.

  Three birds had taken hits and looked bad. Two others had minor damage and would be turned in a few hours. Two pilots and one wizzo had been wounded and were on the way to the hospital. “John,” he said to Shaw, “I came in here with one hundred and eight crews and seventy-two F-4s. I’ve got seventy-six crews left and thirty-seven effective aircraft, maybe thirty-nine. I’m going to draw down to forty crews and get the rest of them out of here.”

  Shaw couldn’t argue with it. The returning crews from the attack reported encountering two more frigate-type ships that put up a wall of fire and had to be avoided. Word went out for volunteers for a third attack that Waters wanted to throw against the ships, and sixty-eight crews packed into the COIC asking for the assignment. The room quieted when Waters walked in. He looked around, taking in each face. “You know what our situation is,” he said. “We’re fighting a rear-guard action until we can get the wing out. We’ve got to keep those ships away from the shore…”

  Before he could go on they heard a distant whistle followed by an explosion. “Artillery,” Waters called out, and sent the crews running for bunkers. He went for the Command Post as they heard another loud explosion out to sea, followed by a brief flash that settled into a glow.

  The frigate Sabalan had made a run at flank-speed past Ras Assanya, throwing a 4.5-inch high-explosive shell at the base. But shallow water had forced the ship to keep well out to sea, and so the shell had been for ranging. Before the frigate’s fire-control system could adjust and lay the next round, the ship struck one of the mines that Chief Hartley had seeded around the approaches to the base. The following explosion ripped a forty-foot gash in the frigate’s skin, and the ship now lay dead in the water as fire spread through its mid-section.

  A reprieve.

  Shortly after two A.M. four Phantoms taxied onto the runway. The control tower had been abandoned and the controllers moved to a small bunker at the southern edge of the runway. One of them held up an Aldis Lamp, flashed the Phantoms a green light. The F-4s took off to the south, arcing out to sea as they sucked up their gear and flaps and armed their weapons. When they turned north they were less than two minutes flying time from the ships. After talking to the crews, Jack suggested they start a series of sorties directed at the edge of the fleet, throwing a stream of attacks against them, though not trying to penetrate, just whittling away at them with constant pressure. The four planes split and started to range around the ships. Within minutes the ships had started to move together, reducing their perimeter, a wagon train circled by Indians.

  In the light of a rising quarter-moon one of the circling Phantom pilots caught an unusual movement at the nose of one of the ships and maneuvered until he could better make out what was happening, disregarding the streams of tracers that engulfed him. He dropped his bird onto the deck and retreated when he felt two thumps. Once he was clear of the ships he slowed down and climbed to six hundred feet, calling the command post. “Rats Ass Control, this is Wolf One-Four. Be advised the landing ships have their ramps down and landing craft are in the water. Also, Mayday, I’ve got two fire lights.” He then pointed the Phantom toward the shore and within a minute was flying parallel to the beach on the east side of the runway. His wizzo pulled the ejection handle between his legs and they ejected, landing in the water two hundred feet off-shore inside the shark net, and waded ashore.

  Broz watched Wolf One-Four’s Phantom start to burn when he made the call to the command post. “Hey, Ambler,” he said to his wizzo, “see those puppies heading for shore?”

  “Roger on the puppies, Broz,” the wizzo replied, “let’s nail ’em.”

  “We’re in.” The pilot selected guns and dialed thirty-nine into the mil depression on his gun-sight for a ten-degree strafing run. “You don’t happen to remember the max speed for using the gun, do you?”

  “No, but make this one quick,” Ambler told him.

  Broz rolled in, jinking back and forth as his wizzo jabbed at the chaff-and-flare button while they bore down on the landing-craft heading ashore. A curtain of bullets and missiles rose in front of them as the pilot walked his pipper across three low silhouettes in the water. And then they were off, twisting and turning as they ran for safety. “By damn,” Ambler shouted, “I do believe we’re still alive.”

  “You’re right, but we have got one sick bird.” Broz keyed the radio, sending out a Mayday. Four minutes later the Phantom’s hook snagged the cable stretched across the approach end of the runway, dragging the bird to a halt.

  Blind luck, Broz sighed. Next time…?

  The SAS team leader watched the F-4 strafe the boats before he motioned his twenty-eight blackened-faced men toward the beach. Silently, with an ease gained from repeated training sessions, they took out the advance party as it came ashore, making sure no warning messages were transmitted. The rising moon helped to light the approaching landing craft. While twenty-four of his men rushed to seed the beach with land mines, he called his four squad leaders together. “Look,” he told them in a clipped British accent, “no heroics. Do it as planned and withdraw immediately. The clock starts running when the first boat runs aground. Do it bloody right.”

  The leading six scout cars grounded within seconds of each other and ran into a storm of machinegun and mortar fire. The few survivors stumbled ashore and started across the short strip of land, only to set off the freshly planted land mines. The brief opposition to the landing was not meant to be a resistance in the force, and the momentum behind the landing forced the second echelon ashore as the defending fire stopped.

  The puzzled attackers worked their way across the deserted beach, setting off an occasional mine but not encountering any more ground resistance. Two phantoms roared overhead, strafing the beach and dropping CBUs. One of the Phantoms exploded as a SAM from a landing ship found its mark.

  Four fast patrol boats started a run toward Ras Assanya eleven miles to the south, trying to bring their small-caliber guns and rockets into range. The boats were two miles offshore when the lead struck a mine. The remaining boats withdrew, not stopping to rescue the survivors.

  A reprieve.

  Stansell checked his watch: 3:15. He figured he could get in two more shuttles before sunrise. He watched the shadowy image of the C-130 as it took the Active. At first the lieutenant colonel thought a lightning flash had illuminated the base, but the loud concussion that followed warned that the base
was coming under an artillery barrage. He dove into a slit trench, raised his head to check on the C-130. As the cargo plane began to move down the runway a flash followed by an explosion swallowed it in smoke. And like a dragon poking its ugly snout out of a misty cave, the Hercules emerged, accelerating out of the smoke, rolling down the runway and lifting into the air.

  Stansell waited for the barrage to end, counting forty explosions. “So they’ve got a BM-21 ashore,” he muttered to himself. And that worried him. If the PSI had managed to get the truck rocket-launcher within its nine-mile range, they could also hit the base with heavy artillery. He dusted himself off and keyed his brick, calling for the next round of men and women to report to the evacuation bunker. He ignored the fires burning at the far end of the runway and the wailing sound of the crash trucks that had rushed to the north end of the runway as soon as the barrage had ended. Now they found the burning hulks of four Phantoms on the taxiway, where they had been caught in the open during the rocket attack. As best they could tell, a rocket had scored a direct hit on the second bird in line and its exploding ordnance had destroyed the other three. An NCO ripped off his silver helmet, throwing up as the smell of burning flesh washed over him. Another fireman keyed his radio and called for a bulldozer to clear the taxiway as the trucks started to put out the fires.

  The board posters in the command post erased the four tail numbers from the shrinking list of mission-capable aircraft. Waters counted the thirty effective aircraft now available to him. The board posters had started another list, marking up the total people evacuated. As one list grew shorter, the other increased. He turned to Farrell. “Steve, match one aircrew to each of those thirty birds. Round up the extra crews and take them out on the next shuttle.”