“How the hell will he be at my eleven if he’s on my right side now? Don’t you mean one o’clock? And look out you don’t stall us.” Frederick grunted out against the G-load. Court didn’t answer. He’d taken enough crap from one each Major Theodore Frederick. Court eased off the G-load as the F-105 pointed straight up. He held the stick with a delicate grip as he babied it through the nibbles of a stall waiting for the right second to swing it in the direction he wanted. He still had the MiG in sight, but now had the eastern sun at his back so that the MiG pilot, if he were trying to track him, would lose him in the glare.
The MiG pilot held his steady-state bank angle, seemingly waiting for Frederick’s airplane to stall and start falling, when he would pounce. He’s good, Court thought. I’ll bet he’s got blond hair and blue eyes and is a lead jock in the Soviet Front-ovaya Aviatsiya.
Just when it would look to an outsider like the Thud had stalled and was going to spin or slide into oblivion, Court started to pull the nose down to the horizon as if coming through the top side of a loop. As the nose fell to a position just above the horizon, still inverted, he quickly rotated his head from over his right shoulder to look forward and down through the top of the canopy at the MiG. Though still upside down, the maneuver placed him up-sun and in the MiG’s six o’clock position.
“What the hell?” Frederick said, hanging from his straps.
“Start pulling the trigger, Frederick, he’s all yours,” Court cracked out as he ruddered the inverted airplane a few more degrees, nose low and to the right. He lost sight of the MiG as it slid behind the instrument shroud in front of him, but directly at Frederick’s eleven o’clock position as seen from their inverted position. If Frederick had to roll out to complete the kill, the MiG would be at his one o’clock position.
“You got the airplane,” Court said, light-headed from the negative g’s. “He’s at your eleven o’clock.”
Frederick wiggled the stick slightly to show he had control of the airplane and pressed the trigger on the B-8 stick grip. He placed forty-two rounds from the 20mm M-61 Vulcan gatling gun in the left wing root area of the MiG 19. Still firing, he let the pipper of his gunsight slide back to the center of the fuselage to the engine bay. Sparkling impact points lit the path. The MiG gracefully arced over as a great tongue of flame belched from the tailpipe and then the wing root. Frederick rolled to a wing low position, and quit firing as the left wing of the MiG separated in a blinding flash and the fuselage started violent snap rolls to the left. The side-load G-forces were so heavy the pilot would never be able to grab the handles and eject. He’d have to ride it down the remaining two miles contemplating his Marxist belief in no life after death. Frederick and Court watched for about one second, then Frederick stuck the nose down to gain speed and rolled to a westerly heading.
“See any more?” he asked Court.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Court said, as calm as he could, considering his heart was jack-hammering his chest. He had spotted a MiG very low to the east of Thud Ridge. So low, in fact, it looked about to belly in or land on a grass strip.
“Youuuuu got it,” Frederick said. “Let’s see what you can do for a second act.” As cool as both men were trying to sound to each other, they were both panting and sweating and jerking their heads around constantly to keep track of who was where in the swirling air battle. Since their wingman, Pintail Four, had blown up, they had to keep scanning their six o’clock in addition to all the other sectors of the sky.
Court rolled inverted, pulled the throttle back to 80 percent, and pulled the nose through until he was aiming at the eastern edge of Thud Ridge. Unlike with the second MiG, he had to dive straight at this one to get into position, but to do so would hide the MiG behind the instrument shroud in front of Court. The F-105F simply wasn’t made to be piloted in combat from the backseat. He had to turn it back to Frederick.
“You got him?” he asked.
“Yeah, I got him. Gimme the airplane.”
“You got it,” Court said.
“I got it,” Frederick said and wriggled the stick.
Frederick held the dive while rolling left and right in a modified diving jink. As he swung back, Court could get a glimpse of the MiG. It was another MiG 19 and its gear and flaps were down. It was trailing a thin wisp of smoke.
“Heh, heh,” Frederick said, “I’m not even going to pull the trigger. He’s got a little engine fire and has to land. Watch this.”
He lowered the nose even more, pushed the throttle up to 100 percent, and held steady until it seemed they would dive into the ground at the side of the hapless MiG. Then he pulled a 5-G level-off to recover at 200 feet above the ground. The airspeed indicator read 762 knots. They were splitting the air faster than the speed of sound. The supersonic F-105 trailed two conical shock waves, one from the nose and one from the tail. Had there been any windows or crockery under the airplane, which there were not, they would have shattered from the overpressure and vibration caused by the successive shock waves.
The MiG was at 400 feet, nose high at 135 knots, gear and flaps down, trying to land. Frederick flashed under it and started an immediate pull to the right as he headed west to fly up and over Thud Ridge. Both pilots looked back over their right shoulders. The MiG, caught in the two shock waves and the violent vortex of the supersonic Thud, was pitched into a position where its nose pointed straight up, and then it made a partial roll, as if the pilot were trying to recover. Out of control, the plane tumbled and fell and slammed into the ground, where it exploded into a ball of red-and-orange fire and black, greasy smoke.
“We got him,” Court yelled. “We got him.”
In the midst of his elation, Court’s flyer’s four-dimensional sense of space and time made him look forward just in time to see Thud Ridge begin to fill the side panel of his windscreen. Without time to blink, or shout a warning, his hand shot to the stick and eased it back a fraction. They were so close the speeding plane clipped the top of a tree when they swept over the Ridge. Frederick didn’t say anything as he regained control and started a climb to the west. A moment later he put out a call on the outbound frequency.
“Pintail Three’s on the way out. Lead, what’s your position?” No answer. “Anybody read Pintail Three?” No answer.
“Probably too low,” Court said. Frederick grunted. He held the climb headed west toward Laos and Thailand. He leveled at 32,000 feet and switched to tanker frequency. There were no other airplanes, friendly or enemy, in the sky.
“White, you up?”
“Calling White say your call sign.”
“White, Pintail Three. I need gas. Gimme a steer.”
“Roger, Pintail Three, hold down for a steer.”
Frederick pressed the mike button for five seconds, allowing White tanker’s direction-finding equipment to home in on his signal. Court had noticed earlier that the fuel gauge registered lower than their scheduled Bingo, the fuel level at which a pilot had either to head home or go for a tanker.
“Gotcha, Pintail. Steer 232. You copy?”
“Roger, 232.”
Thirty minutes later Frederick slid the F-105 under the tail of the White tanker. “Balls,” he said over the intercom, the first word he had spoken since they had nailed the three MiG’s. Court, who had been damn near biting through his oxygen mask to keep from shouting victory yells, had made up his mind he wasn’t going to say one bloody word until he absolutely had to. He had long ago emptied his water bottle of lemonade, but his mouth was so dry from the adrenaline surges that he figured he probably couldn’t talk anyhow. He wondered what Frederick had seen about the tanker that had made him say, “Balls.”
“White, are you a papa?” Frederick asked.
“Roger that, Pintail. Thought you knew. Our frag order shows Pintails on Green today, not White. You must be a tad skosh on fuel to come to us.” White was the closest tanker to Frederick and Court’s egress point from North Vietnam. Had they come back directly with Pintail flight as br
iefed, they would have had enough fuel to go to the scheduled poststrike tanker.
Frederick cleared his throat. As they eased up to the tanker, Court saw there was a long hose with a basket on the end dangling back from under the tail, instead of the boom with the flyable vanes that the boomer would plug into the Thud’s receiving bay. To get fuel from the basket meant the receiving airplane had to have a probe, a long metal pole to stick into the basket to make connection with the female receptacle at the center. Once plugged in, fuel would flow back through the pole into the receiver’s main fuel tank. The system was called probe-and-drogue. It was the method used by the F-100 and all the Navy and Marine airplanes in the air. Only the USAF had airplanes that needed a flying boom to plug into its innards and transfer fuel. The F-4 was rigged that way as well as the F-105, and all SAC bombers.
The boom method required someone to lie down in the rear end of the tanker facing aft and fly the boom tip into the gizzard of the receiver. There could be only one on a KC-135, or any other tanker. The probe-and-drogue method didn’t need a boomer, just a big pod from which to reel out the hose with the basket on the end. A tanker could carry three pods, one under each wing tip in addition to the one under the tail. The call sign of any tank with a basket always had the letter P as in “papa” affixed to it. Many times Court had refueled with two other F-100’s at the same time on the same tank. Now here they were, Court thought to himself, too low on gas to go any place while flying next to a truck full of it, but from which they couldn’t tap.
Then he felt a hydraulic system activate, followed by a roaring sound to the left side of the front cockpit. It was a probe hydraulically moving out from its stowed position. Court hadn’t known the Thud had both systems installed. He wondered briefly why no one referred to it as bisexual. He heard Frederick clear his throat again.
“Ah, Bannister,” he said in a voice like a rich man required to ask a beggar for a dime to place a phone call, “you do this probe-and-drogue business all the time in the F-100. Get us a little gas, will you?” Court leaned his head against the left side of the canopy and saw the probe extended into the breeze. He took the controls. By kicking right rudder he could see the basket. He slid up to it, straightened out at the last minute and stuck the probe into the basket without rippling the hose. He was extremely gratified to hear the boomer, who had nothing else to do except monitor the situation, say, “Nice hookup, Pintail. You’re receiving.”
“Run that by me again,” the wing commander said, “about the one you claim to have spun in.” The crowd had gathered in the intelligence room when Ted Frederick and Court Bannister started their debriefing. No one else from Tahkli had gotten any MiG’s that day. The wing had, in fact, lost two of their own, Pintail Four and Waco Two, and had had one so badly shot up the pilot barely made it to a safe recovery at Udorn, a base close to Laos. Now a pilot was claiming three MiG’s shot down.
MiG shootdowns were a great occasion, since only twenty-two had been shot down so far for a loss of sixteen USAF and Navy aircraft to MiG’s. The ratio was not good. In Korea, it had been 12 to 1; twelve MiGs shot down for the loss of each friendly airplane.
Current Pentagon policy makers were beginning to dimly perceive what fighter pilots had been trying to tell them for years: To run an aggressive fighter program that turns out top-level fighter pilots, the air combat maneuvering (ACM) portion must be realistic. To be realistic meant procuring airplanes that looked and flew like MiG’s, and accepting the peacetime crashes that invariably are a part of realistic ACM training. So far the USAF had done neither, despite the reports from pilots like Boyd, Suter, and Kirk, top jocks from the fighter school at Nellis Air Force Base by Las Vegas who didn’t have enough horsepower to change the system, but who had the skill and guts to push for change.
The U.S. Navy had already received Captain Frank Ault’s report detailing the needs and was starting to act on his recommendations for more realistic fighter training at its fighter school at Miramar near San Diego.
Frederick again told of the low-level pass at the landing MiG again. Court corroborated the story.
“Your gun camera film will confirm your first two shoot-downs,” the wing commander said, “but we need another source to confirm your third. Two crew members from the same plane can only file the claim; to corroborate it, film or an independent party must provide confirmation. As it stands, when your film comes back, Frederick will get credit for one and a half, Bannister for one half.” He turned to Court. “You’re not doing so bad, considering you are only supposed to be flying with us for flak and SAM experience.”
His expression became stern. “But that’s it. No more chasing MiG’s.” He looked at Frederick and shook a finger in his face. “You are forbidden to fly Bannister anyplace but where the orders call for. He is here to learn our tactics, not chase MiG’s, and you damn well will teach them to him, or I’ll bust you back to flying Blue Four for the rest of your tour. You understand, Frederick?” Major Ted Frederick informed his full-colonel wing commander that he understood. He had had his turn as Blue Four, the position flown by brand-new pilots, as a second lieutenant.
COREY FORD
BUYS THE
FARM
FROM FLIGHT OF
THE INTRUDER
by STEPHEN COONTS
During the Vietnam War while I was flying A-6 Intruders from USS Enterprise, the thought occurred to me that the world of modern, high-tech naval aviation in the jet age would make a good novel. After a divorce in 1984, I got serious about writing the flying tale, as I called it. By that time I had thought up a tiny plot about a pilot who tried too hard to house my little collection of flying stories.
Here is one of those stories, designed to take you, the reader, flying on a low-level day attack mission against a heavily defended target. A friend of mine flew a mission similar to this; I fictionalized his experience in an attempt to capture the human truths of that time and place. Regardless of the politics of the Vietnam War, the men who fought there in American uniforms were Americans serving their country, doing the best they could under difficult circumstances. I am proud that I was one of them.
Jake Grafton was strapping himself into the cockpit one cloudless morning when Cowboy Parker ran across the flight deck toward the aircraft. Grafton and Tiger Cole had briefed a strike on a suspected fuel dump with Little Augie and Big Augie, who were manning the machine next to Grafton’s. They planned to set this target afire with the sixteen Rockeyes each plane carried. Boxman and his pilot, Corey Ford, were manning the spare, armed with sixteen Mark 82 500-pounders, which would go only if one of the other bombers had a mechanical problem before launch. Grafton watched Parker with a sinking feeling. Not a hurry-up target!
Cowboy climbed the boarding ladder. “You got a new target, Jake. Forget the fuel dump.” Holding up a piece of a chart, he pointed to a crude triangle drawn in pencil. Jake saw it was a North Vietnamese airfield.
“What’s there?”
“MiGs,” Parker said. “One or two, maybe three. They landed less than two hours ago and the decision’s been made to try to bag them before they sortie again. You have the lead. We’re going to launch the spare so there’ll be three of you. Brief on squadron tactical after you rendezvous.” Cowboy handed him the strip of chart and several aerial recon photos of the airfield. He took one step down the ladder, paused, and looked back at Grafton. “This’ll be a tough one. It’s heavily defended.”
“Tell the other guys to meet me at ten grand overhead.”
Cowboy nodded and disappeared down the ladder.
Jake examined the chart with Tiger. “Shit,” Cole muttered. “The son-of-a-bitch is in Laos.” The target airfield lay five or six miles across the Laotian border on the far side of Barthelemy Pass, which the chart showed at 3937 feet above sea level. Jake remembered from the weather brief that low clouds covered the mountains.
How should they approach? If they flew all the way to Hue, then west to Laos and north to the airfield—
what was the name?—Nong Het, the trip would be long and the bad guys would have a lot of warning. Fuel would run low only if they elected to return by the same route. If they flew straight in, across North Vietnam, they’d attract flak en route, but there would be less time for the North Vietnamese to prepare a reception at the airfield. If the MiGs were bait to lure the lion, the less warning the better.
Jake Grafton rubbed his chin and stared at the swells on the sea. He thought about the flak and the airfield in the bottom of a valley. Maybe they should go straight in. “What do you think, Tiger? Straight in?”
“Yep.”
The plane captain signaled for a start. Jake gave the chart and pictures to the bombardier and busied himself with the starting procedure. He was too preoccupied to enjoy the cat shot when it came.
They rendezvoused over the ship at 10,000 feet. When all three planes had joined, Jake took the lead, and Corey Ford flanked him on the left with Little Augie on the right. Jake then used his hand to signal the switch to the squadron tactical frequency and began a gentle climb to altitude.
“Two’s up.” Little’s voice.
“Three’s up.” That was Corey.
“Let’s go covered voice.” All three turned on their scramblers, which encrypted the voice transmissions. To a listener without a scrambler with the daily code properly set, the conversation would be merely an incomprehensible buzz. “Okay, guys. We’re going straight at it. Coast in north of Vinh, find the right valley, get under the clouds, go through the pass, and drop down on that airfield like the angel of doom. Any gripes?”
On Glorious Wings Page 33
