Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘AEO to Captain,’ Bunny Carmichael’s voice suddenly broke into Amos’s reflections. ‘We’re two hundred nautical miles off New York City. We’ll have been under surveillance from their early warning radars for some time now. I’ve gone to Red Shrimp and Blue Diver. Both on line and normal.’

  ‘Thanks, Bunny,’ said Muffin.

  Red Shrimp was a powerful noise jammer that would hopefully confuse the ground radars, while Blue Diver was designed to do the same to missile-guidance systems. Although no-one was going to launch missiles today, the radar technicians at the sites would nevertheless be doing their best to achieve lock-on and additional ECM noise would reduce their chances.

  ‘We’re about to trigger the Texas Towers L-band early warning, Skip,’ said Carmichael. ‘And we’re just joining the bomber pack.’

  ‘Roger.’

  The Texas Towers stood in treacherous waters far offshore, one on the Georges Shoal, east of Cape Cod, the other on the Nantucket shoals, south-east of Rhode Island. Both radar stations were directly linked to USAF bases, so quite shortly the incoming bombers could expect attention from jet fighters out of bases like Montauk on Long Island.

  ‘What aircraft do we have below us now?’ asked Muffin.

  ‘Four layers. B-52s at flight level three hundred, B-47s at two hundred and one hundred, and more B-52s down at about twenty. My guess is those big guys at the bottom of the heap will go down still further and try to sneak in on the carpet. Yes – they’re losing height. Down to fifteen hundred feet now.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘Christ, these scopes are a mass of contacts. It looks like Piccadilly Circus on Cup Final night,’ Carmichael said. ‘Deploying chaff now.’

  Amos knew that the AEO would be releasing packets from the launcher beneath the port wing together with reels of ‘rope’, lengths of metal foil that unwound and floated upright in the air, held vertically by a little square of paper that acted as a miniature parachute. Beside him the wing commander triggered his intercom switch.

  ‘Captain here. Good luck everybody. You heard what Air Marshal Cross said the other night. Today we’re the bad guys, so let’s give the Yanks something to think about while 83 Squadron take care of the Canucks up north. Bunny, keep us informed as we go.’

  The briefing had warned the crews out of Bermuda to expect radar contacts by defending American interceptors once they had crossed longitude 65º W. Yet that was a good four hundred and fifty miles out into the Atlantic from New York City, a return trip to base of at least a thousand miles: a great distance for a single-seat fighter even without having to climb to meet the Vulcans at their level. Amos didn’t imagine that the layers of SAC bombers beneath them were any more worried yet than he was. When they did come, the first fighters would be those with the longest range: F-101 Voodoos from bases like Dover in Delaware, Suffolk on Long Island and Otis on Cape Cod. As the bombers neared the coast the Voodoos would be reinforced by F-102 Delta Daggers (known as ‘Deuces’) and F-106 Delta Darts (‘Sixes’) from Westover in Massachusetts and McGuire in New Jersey.

  From the AEO’s regular updates the layers of bombers beneath the Vulcans were increasingly engaged as they neared the coast. It was not easy to guess what was going on with any precision since the mass jamming of the radar and radio frequencies was so intense. Bomber pilots counted themselves as ‘downed’ if the radars of either an interceptor or a ground missile battery achieved ‘lock-on’ for more than ten seconds. It was not until they were less than thirty miles from New York City that Bunny reported radar contact by a fighter coming up very fast behind the Vulcan but still some eight thousand feet below. He switched on the radar in the aircraft’s tail that warned of anyone closing in from behind while putting out a fresh barrage of chaff. Almost immediately contact was lost.

  ‘He’ll have us on visual, though,’ Muffin said to Amos. ‘But he’ll be closing quite slowly now. Less atmosphere up here and he’ll be aware of all the fuel he’s already burned from a scramble start.’

  ‘We’re currently at flight level five-sixty,’ said Amos. ‘Voodoos, Deuces and Sixes can all get above fifty thousand feet.’

  ‘Worried?’ asked Mewell with a sidelong smile.

  ‘He’s quite close,’ broke in Bunny. ‘He’s about half a mile to port, a couple of thousand feet below. He’ll be able to see us.’

  ‘Mark 1 eyeball,’ was the captain’s rejoinder. ‘Best of all systems. In real combat he could try to shoot us down with his cannon. Let’s depress him a little.’

  With that Mewell put the Vulcan into a tight turn to starboard and began jinking this way and that. The vast delta wing got enough purchase on the thin atmosphere for everyone aboard to feel the Gs building up. Almost at once there came a triumphant cry from the AEO.

  ‘You’ve lost him, Chief. We’ve out-turned him easily. OK, confirmed, he’s now seven miles away and descending fast. Just falling out of the sky.’

  ‘Bingo’d, I’ll bet. He’ll be watching the fuel gauges every mile of the way,’ said Muffin with satisfaction. ‘Viv, give me a course to take us back round and directly over the city and then pick up our route to Boston. Rusty, I want to bomb New York.’

  ‘OK, Chief.’ This was Maurice Irons, the nav radar, the third man in the back whose job was essentially that of the old-fashioned bomb aimer, aided by some highly sophisticated radar targeting equipment. ‘There’s too much jamming going on to get a good fix.’

  ‘Can you do a visual with your T.4 sight?’

  ‘Roger. Good vis today. Long Island to the right. Manhattan coming up . . . Yup. Right on target. I’ve got a picture of that.’

  ‘Captain, stand by for new course.’

  As the Vulcan swung away to starboard to follow the coast Muffin said, ‘Bloody good, Rusty. That’ll give the Yanks something to worry about. We’ve just dropped a hydrogen bomb plumb spang on Central Park. Think of us as radical landscapers. The twentieth century’s answer to Capability Brown.’

  ‘Who?’ said a voice.

  ‘Three contacts closing fast from behind,’ broke in Bunny. ‘Two a couple of thousand feet below, one on our level. No lock-ons.’

  ‘Can I break right?’

  ‘Go-go-go.’

  Once again the wing commander threw the aircraft into a steep bank.

  ‘He’s overshot. He’ll never get back. Mach 1.4. His turning circle up here will be forty miles if he’s lucky.’

  There was unmistakable boyish elation in the young man’s voice to which Amos felt himself respond. Bloody hell, it wasn’t every day that you won a dogfight high over New York with the best fighters the USAF could deploy. Over the ruins of New York, too, since your aircraft had just blotted the city from the map . . . It was definitely not the moment to worry that big Soviet bombers like the Tu-16 ‘Badger’ and the Tu-95 ‘Bear’ might in theory also do what they had done, even though neither aircraft could climb as high as the Vulcan and nor were they anything like as manoeuvrable. The chances were they would be shot down. But then, in the general confusion it only needed one to get through.

  ‘AEO, any sight of our own lads?’

  ‘Hard to tell, they’re putting out so much rope and chaff. Two were behind us, eleven and fifteen miles, I’ve lost the other. It could be this blip I’m getting way up at sixty thousand. Must be. Nobody else can get up there except for one of their Canberras or B-57s or whatever they’re calling them, and this is a bigger return. Has to be a Vulcan but it could be a rope image and they’re some way off now. They’re all jamming like mad. Probably helped our own approach.’

  ‘Thirty miles to Boston, Skip,’ called Viv.

  ‘Right, we’ll bomb that, too. Get that, Rusty?’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘AEO to Captain,’ Bunny broke in. ‘I’m in contact with Loring. We’ve got a divert, we’ve got a divert. Loring’s no go, socked in, mist and rain. Vis twenty per cent and falling. We’re diverted to Plattsburgh. Course correction coming up.’

  ‘Roger t
hat. But we’ll just wipe out Boston first.’

  ‘Where’s Plattsburgh?’ Amos asked Muffin.

  ‘Northern New York State on Lake Champlain, up near the Canadian border. About eighty miles south of Montreal, as far as I remember. I’d guess a couple of hundred miles north-west of here. SAC station, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Just bombers. Dropped in there once a few years ago on some exercise or other. So many bloody exercises you can’t remember where the hell you have been.’

  ‘Or why.’

  The wing commander shot Amos a glance, his eyes above the oxygen mask unreadable. ‘There is no why, Pins. You just do it.’

  Uncertain as to whether he had just been upbraided, and mildly unnerved by his superior’s sudden use of the nickname that had followed him from his student days at Cranwell after an embarrassing episode involving an ejector seat, Amos was relieved when Viv broke in at this point with the course correction and warned Plattsburgh of their approach. The air traffic controller there would give them altitude instructions a hundred miles out. This was the distance from their original destination where the exercise would have been deemed to finish for the Vulcans.

  ‘All ECM suspended, Skip,’ said Bunny. ‘No hostiles near us. I think they’ve called it off.’

  Twenty minutes later XJ786 touched down beside the lake on runway three-five at Plattsburgh AFB. The other three Vulcans followed in the next fifteen minutes, their white triangles emerging from the clouds as traffic control slotted them between returning B-47 bombers and Boeing KC-97 tankers. There were even some fighters screaming down to land with puffs of tyre smoke.

  ‘Strewth, what a caper,’ said Muffin as he let Amos taxi in and park. The men swiftly completed their post-flight checklists. ‘I’m knackered. Getting old.’ Yawning, the wing commander removed his cloth helmet and ran his hands through hair that was already showing silvery strands. ‘Well done, lads. Good stuff. One day you can tell your kids you wiped out New York City and Boston – but not before the Official Secrets Act expires or you’ll be sent to the Tower. Right, we’re unexpected guests here, so best behaviour and all that jazz. And don’t rub their noses in it – we’re all on the same side, don’t forget. Plus we’ve still got a lot more flying to do in this country in the next few days.’

  In the excitement of Skyshield Amos had almost forgotten that before they could return to England they would be flying sorties in an exercise called Big Photo. They hadn’t been briefed on this yet but had gathered they would be pitting the Vulcans’ ECM equipment against ground radars that the Americans had set up to mimic Soviet SAM missile sites. Well, tomorrow was another day. As they disembarked they could see that Plattsburgh was unmistakably a bomber base. The B-47s were coming home like weary crows at the end of a long day. They learned later that some of the crews had flown in for Skyshield from Europe as well as from bases all over the US, and thanks to air-to-air refuelling many had been airborne for the best part of twelve hours. They, too, were disembarking unsteadily and filing into buses. Beneath the grey sky a cool breeze blew the scent of burned kerosene and carried with it the sundry moans and blasts of aero engines. It was a scene familiar to airmen everywhere. XJ786’s crew handed each other’s flight bags down before themselves climbing stiffly down the yellow ladder to the stained concrete.

  ‘The thing about life in the RAF which the adverts don’t mention,’ observed Bunny, ‘is that you never know where the fuck you’re going to be sleeping from one day to the next. Life’s just one long camping trip.’

  ‘Never mind the sleeping – oh wow!’ said Rusty Irons with a sigh of pleasure as he pissed against a still-hot tyre. A small cloud of vapour drifted up. ‘Bloody desperate, I was. You can’t beat a Jimmy Riddle after a sortie.’

  Just then, to everyone else’s relief, a crew bus drew up and they climbed aboard.

  *

  Once they had showered and changed out of their flying gear, the crews of all four Vulcans met up to compare notes. The results surprised even them. Each of their aircraft had registered radar hits but none for a lock-on long enough for them to be ‘downed’. All had successfully evaded their attackers by effective use of ECM. They had just heard that the four Vulcans from 83 Squadron had also been diverted from Loring, in their case to Ernest Harmon AFB in Stephenville, Newfoundland. There was no news yet of how they had got on in the exercise, but the results of the flights up from Bermuda were both triumphant and sobering. The four bombers had managed to ‘invade’ the seaboard of north-eastern America and, in a real war, could have obliterated several of its major cities.

  ‘Shit-a-brick, it’s back to the drawing-board for someone,’ Mewell observed. ‘Not for us, though, and definitely not tonight. Time to sample SAC’s hospitality, don’t you think?’

  The next day RAF and USAF crews alike were amused by the reports on the mess TV of what Skyshield Saturday had looked like from the ground. It had evidently been plane-spotter’s heaven as the waves of bombers at varying heights were met by the milling gnats of fighters. The sky had echoed to the constant thunder of jet engines and sonic bangs. More than one panicky radio station had reported a Soviet invasion. Citizens old enough to remember Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds swore they had seen squads of short, squat creatures in metallic uniforms massing in the fields of Connecticut. When Sunday morning dawned it looked as though Christmas had arrived early. The countryside and hedgerows of the eastern United States glittered and sparkled beneath many tons of the tinsel-like filaments of chaff and strands of ‘rope’ that the hundreds of aircraft had deployed.

  On Monday the 16th came news that the weather at Loring had cleared, and Amos and his crewmates regretfully left Plattsburgh for the next exercise. They made sure the four Vulcans put on a bit of a show for their poor benighted SAC friends by doing what B-47s couldn’t do, which was to take off in pairs, fighter style, leap into the air and climb steeply out at an angle that would not have disgraced a single-seat interceptor. They turned to starboard over Lake Champlain for the short hop to Loring leaving trails of dark smoke that disappeared into the grey overcast.

  At Loring they met up with their colleagues from 83 Squadron, who had themselves just flown in from Newfoundland to take part in the next exercise. It emerged that one of their Vulcans had been ‘downed’ by an F-101 Voodoo over Canada on Saturday; the other three had got through. In all, seven of Bomber Command’s aircraft had successfully penetrated North American airspace. Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Montreal and Ottawa: gone. The men looked at each other.

  ‘I blame the Founding Fathers,’ said Bunny Carmichael. ‘America was colonised from the east, so most of their principal cities are strung out along this side of the continent, aren’t they? Big mistake. As my old nan used to say, ‘Never put all your eggs on one seaboard.’

  ‘What was she, then, chorus girl at the Pentagon?’

  ‘Nah, she couldn’t kick high enough because of the arthritis.’

  The jocularity concealed a slight feeling of anti-climax among the men from Scampton. It was further intensified by the complete absence of any kind of official debriefing. This was most unusual in the wake of an exercise. Apart from their own success, how had all the others done? The hundreds of B-52s and B-47s and B-57s, any of which was capable of delivering nuclear weapons? Silence. Like Plattsburgh, Loring was also an SAC station, and the only information the Britons could glean came from chatting with their opposite numbers from the American bomber crews. Not surprisingly, a lot of the bombers at lower altitudes had been intercepted and ‘killed’, but many hadn’t, in particular some of the B-52s that had gone in lowest of all.

  ‘I’m not surprised you guys got through if you were up at fifty-six thousand, for Pete’s sake,’ said one B-52 captain. ‘That’s gotta be cheating.’

  ‘That’s the height we were told to fly at,’ Wing Commander Mewell said pacifically.

  ‘Yeah, sure, I didn’t mean you were out of order, just that it was unrea
listic. Those Vulcans of yours can fly far higher than anything the Russkies have. We’re told no Bear or Badger can make more than about forty-five thousand.’

  ‘Maybe the Soviets have something in the pipeline we don’t know about.’

  ‘Well, I sure hope to Christ you Brits aren’t going to sell them Vulcans like you sold them jet engines after the war.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  One of 83 Squadron’s pilots reported that he’d been chatting to an F-102 pilot in a bar at Ernest Harmon. The Vulcan man, in common with all his fellows, had made no visual sightings himself but the pilot of the Deuce had spotted a Vulcan from below. ‘He was tracking a B-52 and saw us about twenty thousand feet above him. His reaction was “What the eff is that effing thing up there?” and tried a snap-up attack but said he just about fell out of the sky in the attempt.’

  ‘Theoretically we could have gone higher, you know,’ said Mewell mildly. ‘One of our guys tells me he managed to slide up to around fifty-eight before getting within early warning cover.’

  The USAF man merely shook his head before brightening. ‘Sure, but if that had been a real attack we’d have gone to missiles. This base, Loring? We’re the biggest in SAC. We store nukes here and we’re ringed with Nike Ajax sites. You stick a nuclear warhead on one of those mothers and it doesn’t matter if it misses you by a few hundred feet. It’s still going to make your eyes water, right? Anyway, we all showed up on their screens from the moment we were airborne on Saturday.’