Battle Born pm-8

by Dale Brown

  “Two,” the second B-1’s pilot responded. The less a wingman said on the radio, the better.

  On interphone, the B-1’s copilot announced, “We’re cleared in hot, maximum buzzer.”

  “Let’s go fry us up some squid, then!” the pilot shouted again. There was no response. The rest of the crew was getting ready for the action.

  Two systems operators, the OSO and the DSO — the defensive systems officer — sat behind the pilots in ejection seats in a small compartment just above the entry ladder hatch. As his name implied, the OSO handled the bomber’s weapon and attack systems. The DSO’s job was to call out threats as they appeared, monitor the system to make sure it responded properly when a radar threat came up, and take over operation of the defensive gear if the computers malfunctioned.

  A tone sounded over interphone, a slow, almost playful deedle… deedle… deedle. “E-band early-warning radar, gang,” the DSO announced. “Bad guys are searching for us. No height finder yet. Time to go low.”

  “Copy,” the pilot said. On the interplane frequency, he radioed, “Trapper, take spacing. Keep it within eight miles.”

  “Rog, Rodeo,” the wingman’s pilot responded, and began a slight turn, letting the distance between the two bombers increase. Although they would both be flying the same route and attacking the same target, they would fly slightly different paths, separated by at least thirty seconds. This would hopefully confuse and complicate the defender’s task. The two bombers also used air-to-air TACAN to monitor the distance between them, and they had emergency procedures to follow if the distance dropped below three miles and they didn’t have each other in sight. “See you in the winner’s circle.”

  “Radar altimeter set AUTO, bug set to 830, radar altimeter override armed,” the copilot announced on interphone. “Both TFR channels set to one thousand hard ride. Wings full aft. Flight director set to NAV, pitch mode select switch to TERFLW, copilot.”

  “Set pilot.” The pilot was flipping switches before the copilot read each step. The command bars on his center vertical situation display, or VSD, dipped to twenty degrees nose-down. “Twenty pitch-down command. Here we go.” When he pressed the TERFLW, or terrain following, switch on his Automatic Flight Control System control panel, the B-1 bomber dove for the hard desert earth below like an eagle swooping in for the kill. In the automatic TERFLW descent, the 350,000-pound bomber was screaming earthward at over fifteen thousand feet per minute.

  “Min safe altitude nine thousand,” the OSO called out. “Looking for LARA ring-in.” Just as he announced this, the low-altitude radar altimeter locked onto the earth. Now that the bomber knew exactly where earth was, it descended even faster. Dirt, dust, a piece of insulation, and a loose flight-plan page floated around the cabin in the sudden negative Gs of the rapid descent. The OSO felt like breakfast was soon going to follow, and he pulled his straps tighter.

  Suddenly, the DSO shouted, “Bandits eleven o’clock, thirty miles and closing fast! Looks like a Hornet!”

  “Shit!” the pilot cursed. He was hoping they wouldn’t find them so early. “Hang on, crew.” With his gloved right index finger, he pulled the trigger on his control stick to the first detent, then rolled the B-1 up on its left wing until they were almost sideways. The sudden loss of lift from the sleek, blended fuselage made the bomber plummet from the sky even faster.

  “Passing twenty!” the OSO shouted a few seconds later, after pinching his nose through his oxygen mask and blowing against the pressure to relieve the squeezing in his ears. “Passing fifteen! C’mon, Sonny, let’s get down there! Push it over!” The pilot didn’t roll the bomber upside down, but he did increase the bank angle to well over ninety degrees. It roared out of the sky like a lightning bolt.

  Just seconds before it would have hit the ground, the pilot rolled out of his steep bank with a fast yank of the control stick. The big but nimble bomber snapped upright with the speed and agility of a small jet fighter and leveled off less than a thousand feet above the ground. Its AN/ASQ-164 multimode radar displayed a profile of the terrain out to ten miles ahead of the aircraft on both pilots’ VSDs. The B-1 punched through a layer of clouds at six thousand feet — and before their eyes was the high-terrain, snow-encrusted Dixie Peak staring right back at them, nearly filling the windscreen. “Damn!” the pilot shouted, banking left again to fly around the peak. “I hate letdowns over mountains!”

  “That cumulogranite might’ve just put the fear of God into that squid pilot chasing us,” the OSO reminded him. “Let him try to chase us now, with Dixie staring in his face!”

  With the valley floor in clear sight, the rest of the descent went smoothly. The Offensive Radar System electronically scanned ten miles ahead and to both sides, measuring the width and height of the entire terrain and providing pitch inputs to the autopilot so the bomber would clear it by the selected altitude. The pilots first selected TF 1000 and accomplished a fast check of both redundant TFR system channels, then stepped the clearance plane down to its lowest setting of TF 200. They also selected “hard ride,” which would command steeper climbs and descents over the terrain so they could hug the earth even closer.

  Now that they were clear of clouds and could see the ground, after checking the TERFLW system for a few moments, the pilot deactivated automatic navigation and used visual contour procedures to guide the huge bomber. Instead of gripping the control stick, he pushed on the sides of it with an open palm, dodging and cutting down and between any significant terrain features while allowing the automatic TERFLW system to guide them over high terrain. Flying in a straight line only made it easier for defenders to find them. Hugging terrain contours while letting TERFLW keep the B-1B as low as possible was the best and safest tactic. “Where’s that bandit, D?” the pilot shouted.

  “Moving to four o’clock, twenty-five miles,” the DSO replied. “He’s not locked on… wait, he’s got a lock! Notch right, reference heading two-four-zero!”

  “Aces, notching right!” the pilot shouted on the interplane frequency. He then honked the B-1 into a tight sixty-degree bank turn to the right, changing course ninety degrees to their original track and placing themselves on the back side of Dixie Peak. Most modern-day fighters like the F-15, F/A-18, and F-22 used pulse-Doppler attack radars, which acquired targets based on relative speed. Turning ninety degrees to the fighter’s flight path made relative speed equal to the fighter’s speed, causing the fighter radar’s computer to analyze the target as a terrain feature and squelch the target. The turn would also complicate the fighter pilot’s attack geometry and give the bomber a chance to hide behind terrain. The B-1 descended to less than three hundred feet above the desert floor, flying over six hundred miles per hour.

  “Lost the bandit,” the DSO reported. “He’s somewhere at five o’clock.”

  “Rog,” the pilot said. He knew that Dixie Peak was between him and the fighter, and the longer he kept it there, the closer he’d get to his target before the next attack.

  “Clear to the IP, pilot,” the OSO shouted. “Center up, steering’s good.” The pilot started a left turn back toward the target area, drawing a mental picture of the air situation.

  It was not a favorable attack setup for him and his crew, but these Navy air intercept exercises were usually one-sided affairs. Austin One Military Operating Area, or MOA, acted as the “funnel” of airspace that led to the three restricted areas where practice targets were attacked with live weapons. Navy fighters could chase a bomber all the way down as low as it could go in Austin One. Fighters could continue the chase in the restricted areas, but had to fly no less than a thousand feet above the ground to stay clear of bomb explosions. The Ranch MOA at the western end of the run was the “recovery zone,” where the bombers and fighters had to disengage and establish safe altitude separation while the bombers turned around. The bombers were required to fly through the restricted area again and clear their bomb bays of all other weapons before they could exit the range complex.

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p; The Navy pilots knew all this, of course, so all they had to do was wait at the bottom of Austin One for the bomber to enter the restricted areas. It gave the fighter jocks a little less time to intercept before bomb release, but they were almost assured of a kill. The first fighter they encountered was probably a young jock on one of his first fighter-intercept exercises, hoping to score an early kill while the bomber was at high altitude.

  Well, the B-1B Lancer was not that easy to kill. It had almost the same agility as a jet fighter, it was just as fast, and it had one-half the radar cross section. Down low, no fighter in the world could keep up with a B-1—if it dared even to fly down close to the dirt.

  The pilot released the trigger on his control stick, and the bomber made a relatively gentle thirty-degree bank turn toward the IP, or initial point, the start of the bomb run itself. The air-to-air TACAN read six miles — just right, about thirty seconds apart. “Lead is two NAP from the IP,” he radioed on interplane.

  “Copy,” the wingman replied. “We’re seven NAP. We’re popeye.”

  “Bandits at seven o’clock, no range,” the DSO announced.

  “Hold steady,” the OSO called out. “Let me get my ACAL and get a patch.”

  “Range nine miles, five o’clock,” the DSO shouted. “I think he’s got a lock. Notch right, reference three-zero-zero.”

  “Got my ACAL, guys,” the OSO said on interphone. “Clear to notch!” The pilot complied with a sharp right turn. Staying on a straight-line course for more than a few seconds with enemy defenders in the area was deadly for a bomber. The bombing computers needed accurate altitude data to compute bombing ballistics, and the OSO had to fly over a specific point on the route, usually the initial point of the bomb run, to calibrate altitude. There were several ACAL points on the route, but the one prior to the bomb run was the most important.

  “AI’s down,” the DSO shouted. The fighter had turned off his radar, knowing he would disappear from the bomber’s radar threat sensors. “He might have a visual on us!”

  “ADF zero-three-zero, pilot!” the OSO shouted. The pilot turned hard left back toward the inbound track line to the target. By “ADF’ing” the course, he would return to the original inbound heading to the target, making it easier for the OSO to find the target on radar.

  As soon as the pilot rolled out of his turn, the OSO switched to the target itself. Exactly as predicted, the first target appeared right under his cross hairs. “Got you, you bitch!” he crowed. “Pilot, give me twenty right, and I’ll get a patch.” When the pilot rolled out on his new heading, the OSO moved his cross hairs directly on the box, clicked the left button on his radar controller down twice, then clicked the button up.

  The high-resolution synthetic aperture image on his digital display resembled a black-and-white photograph. The clarity was startling — he could actually make out the outline of a large tractor-trailer vehicle. “Hogs, I got a big mother trailer-sized vehicle — looks like a Scud missile reloading operation.” He centered the cross hairs directly on the image. “You’re cleared to the target! Let’s nail that puppy! We’re seven seconds late. Give me twenty more knots, pilot.” The pilot goosed the throttles a bit more — they were now screaming inbound to their target at almost ten miles per minute. “TG twenty seconds.”

  “Bandits four o’clock, twenty miles and closing!” the DSO shouted. “Notch right!”

  The pilot yanked the control stick right…

  “No! TG fifteen! Wings level!” the OSO responded. “Stay on the bomb run!”

  Suddenly, they all heard a faster-pitched deedle deedle deedle tone, no longer playful at all. “SA-6 up!” the DSO shouted. The SA-6 was a mobile Soviet-made medium-range surface-to-air missile system, widely exported all over the world. Its mobility, its top speed of almost three times that of sound, and its all-weather, all-altitude capability made it a deadly threat. The SA-6 fired a salvo of three missiles that were almost impossible to evade. “Three o’clock, within lethal range! Trackbreakers active!”

  At the same moment, several white arcs of smoke traced across the sky, the thin white trails aiming right for the B-1, and the warning tone on interphone changed to a fast, high-pitched deedledeedledeedle. “Smoky SAMs!” the copilot shouted. Smoky SAMs were little papier-mâché rockets, no threat to the bomber by themselves, but signifying a missile launch against the bomber crew. It meant the crew hadn’t done their job protecting their bomber.

  “Simulated SA-6 launch!” the DSO shouted. “Uplink shut down! Chaff, chaff!” Clouds of thin tinsel shot out of canisters along the Bone’s upper spine, creating a radar target several hundred times larger than the 400,000-pound plane itself.

  “Hold heading!” the OSO shouted. “TG ten! Doors coming open!”

  The copilot watched as one of the simulated SAMs passed directly overhead. Talk about the “bullet between the eyes,” he thought grimly — if that had been a real antiaircraft missile, they’d have been dead meat. And he would have watched the final stroke all the damned way.

  “Ready… ready, now! Bombs away!” the OSO shouted. One cluster bomb canister dropped free of the aft weapons bay. At the precise instant, it split apart and scattered the bomblets across the target area in a direct hit on the trailer.

  “Bomb doors closed!” the OSO shouted. “Clear to maneuver!”

  “Pump right, now!” the DSO shouted. The pilots rolled the bomber to the right away from the target area and pulled back on the control stick until the stall warning horn sounded, then released the back pressure. The DSO ejected more clouds of chaff behind them, successfully breaking the “enemy” radar locks and allowing the bomber to escape.

  “That release looked good from back here, pilots!” the OSO yelled gleefully. “What did you see up there?”

  “We saw our shit get blown away by a SAM!” the copilot yelled. “They had us dead-on!”

  “I had the uplink shut down,” the DSO protested. “No way that missile would’ve hit…”

  “Well, then they used an optical tracker or they got lucky,” the pilot said. “But they got us. If one of those smoky SAMs was a real one, we’d’ve gotten nailed. Shake it off, Long Dong. Nail the next one. These Navy pukes aren’t playing fair anyway.”

  “Shit!” the OSO cursed into his oxygen mask. A perfect bomb run, a perfect release… and they got zilch. All that hard work for nothing. He angrily entered commands into his keyboard to sequence to the next target area. “Steering is good to the next target complex, pilot. We’ll take out the next Scud missile site.”

  “What are the defenses in the area?” the copilot asked.

  “SA-3s, SA-6s, and Zeus-23s,” the DSO replied.

  “All right. Shake it off, guys,” the pilot said. “No more mistakes. Let’s kick some ass this time.”

  “I’ve got another SA-6 and an SA-3 up,” the DSO reported. “SA-6 is nine o’clock, moving outside lethal range. The SA-3 is at one o’clock.”

  “Where are the fighters?” the pilot asked.

  “No sign of ’em,” the DSO replied.

  “Clearing turn coming up,” the pilot said. “Back me up on altitude, co.” He banked the B-1 up on its left wing, then strained to look aft up through the eyebrow windows for any signs of pursuit. When he had turned almost ninety degrees, he initiated a steep left turn. “I got it,” he told the copilot. “Find the damn—”

  “Aces!” they suddenly heard on the interplane frequency. It was their wingman, five miles somewhere behind them. “Bandit coming down the ramp! I think he’s on you! You see him?”

  Both pilots furiously scanned out their cockpit windows. Suddenly, the copilot shouted, “I got him! Two o’clock high! He’s diving right on top of us! He’s got us nailed!”

  The pilot swore loudly, then racked the bomber into a steep right turn, jammed the throttles to full military power, pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to the first detent, and zoomed the B-1 skyward.

  “What are you doing, Rodeo?” the copilot shouted.

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bsp; “I’m going nose-to-nose with this bandit!”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “The best way to defeat a fighter on a gun or close-in missile pass is nose-to-nose,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to let this Navy puke get a clear shot on us!”

  Both pilots clearly saw the oncoming fighter as it plummeted toward them. It was a Navy or Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet, the primary carrier attack plane, which also had a good air-to-air capability. The Bone’s nose was thirty degrees above the horizon in the steep climb. All they could see was blue sky and the fighter diving down on them.

  The sharp zoom maneuver was sapping their speed quickly. “Airspeed!” the copilot shouted — just a warning right now, not an admonition. The aircraft commander was still in charge here, no matter how unusual his actions seemed.

  “I got it,” the pilot acknowledged. He pushed the throttles forward into full afterburner power. “C’mon, you squid bastard. You don’t have a shot. You’re running out of sky. Break it off.”

  “We better get back down, pilot,” the OSO urged him. “We’re off our force timing!”

  “Get the nose down, pilot,” the copilot warned.

  “You lost us, bub,” said the pilot, addressing the pilot of the Hornet.

  The OSO switched his radar display to air-to-air, and the ORS immediately locked onto the Hornet. “Range three miles and closing!” he shouted. “Closure rate one thousand knots! This doesn’t look good!”

  “Airspeed!” the copilot warned again. They were now draining fuel at an incredible three hundred pounds of fuel per second and going nowhere but straight up.

  “Pilot, we’re off our force timing and three thousand feet high!” the OSO called. “We’re inside the one-mile bubble!” For safety’s sake, the rules of engagement, or ROE, at Navy Fallon prohibited any pilot from breaking an invisible one-mile-diameter “bubble” around all participants. “The ROE—”

  “Shut up, co!” the pilot snapped. “We still got three seconds!” Breaking the ROE could put all the players in serious danger — and he was breaking rules one after another. “We’re not going to show ourselves. He’ll have to break it off.”