*
The sun was well up when 641 Squadron’s Venoms came whistling back into the circuit at Faraz Airport. Yeoman, who had been making a rapid tour of the defences around the airfield perimeter in his jeep, saw with relief and satisfaction that all seven jets were back safely. It was less than three-quarters of an hour since Swalwell had radioed for help from the ridge, with the news that the Khoratis were attacking.
Yeoman went to meet Don Sutherland as the latter climbed from the cockpit. The pilot was soaked in sweat, and there was a big smile on his face. He raised a thumb as he came over to join Yeoman in the jeep.
‘That was a classic,’ he said, as he settled down in the passenger seat. ‘We hit ’em right on the nose. Got overhead just as the leading tanks were entering the defile. We had no difficulty in spotting the SAS positions, so we just queued up in line astern, flew along the defile and pressed the button.’ He grinned. ‘Five-hundred-pounders can make a hell of a mess of tanks, in a confined space. We brought down a fair amount of rock, too, from the cliffs at the entrance to the defile. It’ll be a while before anything can get through that little lot. I should imagine that the SAS will be able to hold — ’
His words were drowned in a thunderclap of sound. Yeoman swerved in nervous reaction as a dark shadow darted overhead. Almost at the same instant, one of 359 Squadron’s Venoms, standing at its dispersal fifty yards from where the jeep was passing, exploded in flames.
‘Hang on!’ Yeoman yelled, and put his foot down on the accelerator, sending the jeep careering on a zigzag course towards the airport buildings. He had been caught in this situation too many times in the past not to react instinctively to it. As he drove, he found time to glance up and behind, and was in time to catch a glimpse of two MiGs, climbing away from their attack.
In front of the control tower, the RAF Regiment men had sited two Bren light machine-guns, mounted on tripods behind sandbags. There was no sign of the Muramshiri gunners who were supposed to have been manning them.
Yeoman brought the jeep to a screeching halt and jumped out, shouting to Sutherland to grab one of the weapons. A box of ready-filled magazines stood between the two; he seized one and clicked it into place, cocking the gun and nestling the butt against his right cheek.
The MiGs were turning for another attack, and Yeoman saw now that there were four of them, coming in from opposite directions. Small-arms fire came up at them from the positions on the perimeter as they swept low over the airfield, their cannon blazing. Sick at heart, Yeoman saw their shells churn into two more Venoms, one of which was loaded with 500-pounders; it exploded with a terrific thud, disappearing in a geyser of smoke, sand and flying wreckage.
The Bren shuddered as he opened fire, spraying bullets at one of the MiGs as it flashed past several hundred yards away. It was a futile gesture, but it was better than nothing. Beside him, Sutherland was also blazing away, shouting obscenities at the speeding jets.
On the far side of the airfield, there was a vivid flash. A column of white flame lanced high into the air, to be replaced almost instantly by billowing clouds of dense black smoke.
‘Oh, my God,’ Yeoman said. ‘They’ve got the fuel dump.’
The MiGs raced away, one of them waggling its wings as though to mock the men on the ground. Sutherland fired a last despairing burst at it, but it flew on unscathed. The roar of jet engines died away, leaving only the crackle of flames and the staccato banging of exploding ammunition.
Slowly, Yeoman and Sutherland stood up. They could see for themselves the extent of the damage the MiGs had caused; clouds of smoke rose from the funeral pyres of at least six Venoms, adding to the spreading pall that drifted over the field from the burning fuel dump.
The fact that very few airmen had been in the vicinity of the aircraft, but had been lending a hand with setting up the defences around the perimeter, had probably saved a lot of lives. As it was, three airmen had been killed and twice that number injured. A few minutes after the attack, Yeoman learned that MiGs had also hit the SAS positions on the ridge, and that Swalwell’s small force had taken casualties too — casualties it could ill afford.
It was a grim-faced wing commander who summoned all his pilots to a briefing in the Operations Room while, outside, the ground crews and Muramshiri army personnel fought the fires.
‘The situation is this,’ he told them. ‘We’re down to thirteen serviceable aircraft, and we haven’t got any reserves of fuel. The 641 Squadron Venoms which attacked the armoured column a while ago still have half tanks, but two of them were knocked out by the MiGs; that leaves five, and I’m holding them in reserve here in case the SAS need more support.’
He fished in his pocket, removed his pipe and played with it between his fingers. Those of the pilots who knew him well exchanged sidelong looks; something unpleasant was coming.
Tour of 359’s aircraft have been destroyed,’ he went on, ‘which leaves eight. All of them had been refuelled prior to the air attack, so their tanks are full — full enough to fly all the way to Khorat and back.’ There was a buzz of speculative conversation in the room, and Yeoman held up his hand for silence.
‘That’s right. We’re going to hit the MiGs on their own ground, before they can come back and finish us off. It won’t be easy. The Russians have set up ground-to-air missiles at the MiG base, and God knows what else besides. Apart from which, what I’m proposing is in direct contravention of orders, which means we’ll probably all end up being court-martialled; they’ll more than likely hang me.’ He touched a match to his pipe, and gazed at them through a blue haze of tobacco smoke.
‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m asking for volunteers. Does anyone feel like sacrificing his promising Air Force career to take a crack at those bastards?’
He had anticipated their reaction correctly. An instant later they were all on their feet, clamouring to be given a place. He waved a hand, motioning to them to sit down again.
‘Thanks, chaps. Thanks very much.’ He looked at Wells and smiled. ‘Sorry, Ernie, but you’ll have to stay. If anything goes wrong, you’ll have to take over here. You’re needed here too, Don.’ Sutherland looked crestfallen, and Yeoman assured him: ‘Don’t worry. I’ve a feeling there’ll be plenty to occupy you. The chaps on the ridge will be bound to need more support, but you’d better make the next sortie count, because you won’t have any fuel left after that.
He picked seven pilots to accompany him on the mission to Khorat, and spent the next few minutes briefing them as fully as he knew how. He had no real idea about the opposition they might expect; the thing was to get in quickly while the MiGs were still on the ground, being refuelled and rearmed, punch hard and then get out as fast as possible.
The others, who were staying behind, watched the eight Venoms take off, phantom shapes through the drifting smoke. Ernie Wells, hands thrust deep in his pockets, stared into the northern sky for long after the aircraft had vanished from sight. He could not shake off a terrible premonition that he was unlikely to see Yeoman and the other seven again.
Half an hour later, another pair of eyes also watched the. progress of the eight jets as they streaked past the derricks of the oilfield, northward bound. The paratroop lieutenant-colonel smiled to himself, divining their purpose. Things were working out better than he had anticipated.
Chapter Ten
Above all else, Yeoman hated airfield attacks. On more than one occasion, during the war, he had taken a full squadron of aircraft into action against a strongly-defended enemy airfield, and had seen half his pilots shot to pieces. Silently, he prayed that it was not going to happen all over again.
The eight jets stayed low, only two hundred feet above the desert, sacrificing precious fuel in exchange for the element of surprise. If the enemy had radar — and the earlier loss of the two Canberras seemed to indicate that they had — the mountains that divided Khorat and Muramshir would shield the incoming Venoms from its probing rays.
The mountains were ahead now, an
d Yeoman led the Venoms, in pairs, through a pass he had picked out from his maps. The rock walls echoed the banshee wail of their turbojets as they speared on, below the level of places where tribesmen sought out fleet-footed goats that had strayed from their herds; tribesmen and goats alike looked down at the twin-tailed demons that shrieked past, and fled in terror for the nearest crevice.
Yeoman had ordered his pilots to maintain strict radio silence. There was no sound in the cockpits as they flew on, except for the whisper of the airflow and the usual hiss and crackle in their headphones.
Nothing lay between the mountains and their target except desert; the fertile coastal strip was far away on the right. Yeoman was following a course that would take the Venoms well clear of the newest of the two Khorati airfields, the one still under construction; someone would be certain to raise the alarm if the unfamiliar shapes of the British jets were spotted. Navigation was made easier by the fact that the air over the desert was dead calm; there was no wind, and therefore no need to compensate for drift. The heading of the Venoms, with corrections to allow for magnetic variation and compass error, was the same as the track they were following over the ground.
From the photographs Sampson had shown him, Yeoman had retained a good impression of the layout of the Khoratis’ MiG base. If nothing had changed, the MiGs would be parked in one long line in front of the hangars; after all, the Khoratis and their Russian friends had nothing to fear from air attack — or so they thought. As far as the missile sites around the base were concerned, Yeoman had chosen to ignore them. He did not know how great a threat they presented, and manoeuvres aimed at avoiding them would only serve to reduce the speed and surprise of the air strike.
They were on the airfield almost before Yeoman realized it. It emerged over the horizon as a series of low mounds: the hangars and buildings, their outlines cleverly camouflaged by sand and earth, banked up around them.
And there were the MiGs, right over the nose, the morning sun glinting on their wings, lined up in a neat row, as Yeoman had suspected. There was no need for radio silence now.
‘Target twelve o’clock. Good luck.’
The eight Venoms attacked in pairs. Each aircraft had only six rockets in place of the usual eight; the few others that remained had been held back at Faraz, in case they were needed.
Yeoman, flanked by a Sergeant Pilot, released all six rockets as the line of MiGs swept into his sights and then stayed low, overtaking the smoke trails of the weapons, sweeping across the airfield at 550 mph. In his rear-view mirror he caught sight of smoke and debris spurting high into the air.
Then the flak started to come up from all sides, weaving patterns of light over the field, spattering the sky with bursts of smoke and shards of flying metal. He sensed, rather than felt, splinters rattling on the wings and fuselage of his speeding jet. Then he was across the field and climbing hard, still followed by the Sergeant Pilot, switching his weapons selector control to ‘guns5 as he looked back.
The flight line of MiGs was ablaze from end to end. The Venoms were achieving what they had set out to do, but at a cost. Even as he watched, he saw one Venom, its twin tails blown clean away aft of the jet pipe, cartwheel crazily into the ground and explode in a bubble of smoke and flame.
Suddenly, a shout from the Sergeant Pilot resounded in his headphones.
‘Look out, leader! Nine o’clock low!’
Turning, Yeoman looked down to his left. From somewhere beyond the airfield, a strange object rose into the sky. It looked for all the world like a telegraph pole, dragging a streamer of flame and black smoke. As he watched, it wavered in its climb and turned sharply towards the two Venoms.
‘Dive!’ Yeoman yelled. ‘Right down on the deck!’
The Venoms hurtled earthwards, racing across the desert away from the airfield, the flak and the unearthly menace that streaked towards them. From other points round the field, similar objects were roaring up. Yeoman pressed the R/T button.
‘All pilots,’ he cried urgently. ‘Stay low, as low as you can! There are rockets coming up!’ He could not explain why, but he instinctively felt that the lower you stayed, the less chance there was of being shot down by one of those weird things. They were unlike anything he had ever encountered. It was as though man had suddenly disappeared from the arena of aerial combat, and robots were taking his place.
Suddenly, the rocket that had been converging on him and his wingman wavered in its flight and streaked harmlessly overhead. He distinctly heard a loud roar as it passed, and stared in fascination for a few moments as its smoke trail, still wavering, headed out over the desert. It was almost as if the missile’s mind had become confused, he thought, and in a sense he was right; what had happened was that the ground radars which had been guiding it had been unable to depress their antennae sufficiently to track the low-flying jets, causing the rocket to miss its target and impact somewhere out over the desert.
The enemy launched a dozen rockets, and one of them found a target. One of the two pilots who were bringing up the rear, attacking into the full fury of the anti-aircraft fire and the debris hurled up by the rockets of their predecessors, felt a thud as something struck the underside of his aircraft and panicked, pulling back the stick and hurtling up to five thousand feet. A rocket curved towards him and its warhead passed clean through the fuselage of his Venom, exploding as it emerged from the other side and reducing the aircraft to metal confetti that fluttered slowly down. The body of the pilot, still strapped in his ejection seat, hurtled out of the cloud of wreckage, described a parabola over the airfield and impacted on a hanger roof.
Yeoman and his wingman turned and flew back past the airfield at a respectful distance. The MiGs were finished, their metal carcasses crumpled and eaten by the flames of their own fuel. A great pillar of smoke rose from them. There was no point in making a second run across the field, through that inferno of flak. It had already cost the lives of two pilots.
Yeoman ordered the remaining pilots to head back to Faraz. For long after the enemy airfield had vanished from sight over the horizon, the great pall of smoke that hung over it remained visible, like a thundercloud. Yeoman was reminded of those days in May 1940, when the blazing oil tanks of Dunkirk had spread their smoke over the English Channel.
The Venoms climbed to ten thousand feet as they re-crossed the mountain range, the pilots secure in the knowledge that no enemy fighters would now be pursuing them. No one spoke over the radio; they were all saddened by the loss of their two colleagues, and each man was privately wondering what the consequences of their action would be. Those were Russian jets that had been knocked out in Khorat, probably flown and serviced by Russians. There were bound to be repercussions of some sort.
‘Leader, I think you’re losing fuel!’
The urgent tone of his wingman drove everything else from Yeoman’s mind. Startled, he scanned the instrument panel; the fuel pressure warning light was glowing at him like a malevolent red eye. He pressed the R/T button.
‘How does it look?’
‘Pretty bad. You’re pulling a lot of vapour. I’ll take a closer look.’
‘All right, but not too close.’ Yeoman had bitter memories of a day during the Battle of Britain, when a Hurricane flown by a Pole named Bronsky, one of his closest friends and a genial giant of a man, had suddenly begun to stream petrol vapour high over the Weald of Kent. A few moments later, it had exploded in a soundless gush of light and heat. Yeoman would never forget watching the glowing ashes of his friend’s aircraft, spiralling slowly earthwards.
Half a minute later, the sergeant pilot came over the radio again.
‘You’ve taken some damage; there are holes in the underside of your wings and fuselage. You’re losing fuel very fast.’
‘Okay.’ There was nothing more to say, nothing to do except hope that the remaining fuel would hold out long enough to enable him to get as close to home as possible. But the fuel contents gauge was dropping lower and lower even as he watche
d, and he knew within him that the hope was a forlorn one.
Five minutes later the Ghost turbojet, starved of fuel, flamed out. Yeoman, his voice displaying more calm than he felt inside, made a quick radio call.
‘I’m going down. Don’t waste time circling. I’ll be back in a day or two. Good luck to you all.’
He trimmed the Venom to glide, then set about trying to relight the engine, going through the checks methodically. Fuel pump isolation switch on, booster pump on, throttle closed, booster coil and ignition circuit breaker in. He moved the high pressure cock to the three-quarters-open position, then pressed the booster coil pushbutton on the right-hand side of the cockpit for ten seconds, his eyes glued on the rpm and jet pipe temperature gauges, ready to move the HP cock to the fully open position if either of them showed signs of a relight. They did not.
For a few moments he toyed with the thought of ejecting, then abandoned the notion. The desert was flat enough for a belly landing, and the sand would cushion the impact. There was some risk of an explosion from the fuel vapour that would still be in his empty tanks, but that was a chance he was prepared to take.
He made a quick check of his position and turned a few degrees to the right, towards where he could see the derricks of the oilfield poking up over the horizon. It was the only sign of civilization in the otherwise featureless desert terrain that crawled beneath his wings. A half-formed plan was taking shape in his mind. If he could reach the oil site, perhaps steal an aircraft from the airstrip there …
He was down to five thousand feet, and looking ahead to pick out a suitable spot for a forced landing. Sweat trickled down his neck. As he got lower, he saw that the flat nature of the desert, seen from altitude, was deceptive; it was dotted with hummocks and broken with frequent outcrops of rock.
Venom Squadron Page 13
