Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  “Should be,” Sandra replied. “But if we lose number-two generator, we’re down to batteries.”

  The sudden roll of the aircraft to the right punctuated her words, Will and Doug both grabbing the control yoke and rolling it left as the sickening orange glow through the right window increased in intensity.

  “What … now?” The voice was Will’s.

  Bill Backus had been kneeling in the right window for what seemed like forever. His knees and feet hurt, and he was losing feeling in his toes, but none of that mattered. He had been watching the fire’s progress on the right wing and willing it to go out as the pilots flew as fast as possible to the south. Now, suddenly, something new had happened, and in the glow of the right wingtip area, he thought he knew what.

  “Pilot, we’ve lost the right aileron. I mean, the mother is literally off the airplane.”

  Doug looked at the hydraulic flight-control switches on the overhead panel. “We’d better get the right side on tab op … hell, if it’s gone, that’s worthless.”

  “Turn the system-two aileron off,” Will ordered. Doug repositioned the switch immediately, feeling nothing in the response of the yoke. That meant the scanner was right: they had only the left aileron to control the roll of the airplane, and only one hydraulic system powering that.

  “Where are we, Doug? Anyone know?” Will asked.

  Doug looked at the FSAS screen again, scanning the error messages the protesting INS systems had thrown at them for trying to move too soon. It wasn’t trustworthy.

  “Just a second,” he said, toggling the transmitter to Crown, then turning back to Will as the controller on the special four-engine Boeing AWACS measured their position on her scope and reported it back in the clear.

  “We’ve come about fifty miles south, Will. We’re about sixty north of the border. She says there’s another highway strip off to the left about thirty miles, but it’s still Iraqi. There’re a couple of Saudi fields ahead. If we can keep her coming south, she says to steer two-zero-zero degrees magnetic.”

  “Pilot, scanner! We’re losing chunks of the right wingtip!”

  Will had felt it too; the heavy weight of the left wing, which had substantially more fuel than the right wing, had been somewhat balanced by the excessive force from the two engines on the left wing. But lift was another matter. The right wing was beginning to shorten, and the 141 was rolling even more to the right. Will looked down at the yoke and realized they were about out of time. He was almost full to the left with the control wheel. Any more loss of lift on the right, and they’d be uncontrollable.

  Will took a deep breath and looked in Doug’s direction. “Okay, crew, this is the pilot. I want everyone’s ideas right now. If we try to make it across the border, we may lose lateral control and be unable to land without dragging a wing and breaking up. If we go down now, we have to set it in the desert in Iraqi territory. I’m almost out of left aileron. Scanner, you first.”

  “Sir, we’re coming apart. Let’s get down.”

  “Engineer?”

  “Concur, pilot.”

  “Loadmaster?”

  “Yes sir. I concur. If we land intact, we can drive out. I’ll open the doors before we touch.”

  “Roger. Copilot … Doug?”

  Doug was already nodding his head. He pulled the interphone switch to sum it up. “No choice, old buddy. Let’s do it.”

  Will lowered the nose as Doug radioed their intentions to Crown. Iraqi forces to the contrary, they would keep the transponder operating all the way down so that Crown and the choppers could locate them. The American F-15s were already on their tail, Crown said, confirming the trail of fire from the right wing. More U.S. fighters were launching, and two A-10 Warthog tank killers were being scrambled to deal with any ground interference. The challenge was to make an intact landing and get everyone out.

  Doug coordinated with the loadmaster to get Moyer’s and Johnson’s people ready for the crash landing, and pre-positioned to get out once they came to a stop on the ground—hopefully intact. They would toggle open the pressure door and clamshell doors while still in flight, and land with the ramp down to a horizontal position, with the landing gear down and full flaps. When they came to a halt, then, the troops could get the vehicles out even if they had to smash through the upper tail structure to do it, and with any luck they could get safely clear and be waiting for the choppers within a few minutes.

  They were down to a thousand feet now and slowing, the fire getting worse as the airflow diminished over the ragged remains of the right wingtip. With hydraulic system two, the landing gear came down without trouble, as did the flaps. Doug brought on all landing and taxi lights as Backus called off radar altimeter readings starting at five hundred feet above the desert.

  “Wish us luck,” Will said.

  “Piece of cake, pilot,” Doug responded, noting with pleasure that the pilot was wincing.

  “You know I hate that expression, copilot.”

  “Yep. I know.”

  “Two hundred.” Backus’s voice again.

  The plan was to stabilize at fifty feet and increase power, using only approach flaps until they saw a likely-looking stretch of desert. Such a spot seemed to loom just ahead now, flat and barren, with just a hint of a small rise to the left.

  “Center the rudder trim,” Will commanded, Doug’s hand doing just that.

  The throttles were back to idle now, the speed down to 130 knots, just above marker, as Will let the nose down a bit.

  “Flaps landing.”

  “Roger, flaps landing.” Doug’s hand ran the flaps to the final setting, the barn-door appendages slowing the 141 even more.

  “I’m going to try to touch at around stick-shaker speed,” Will said.

  Backus had already relocated to the increased safety of the navigator’s chair, leaving the rickety jump seat empty.

  “Twenty feet, ten feet …” Backus stopped the callouts. They were so close now, any more were unnecessary.

  The wheels touched, unlike any landing Will had ever made, the sound of rocks and debris peppering the underside of the fuselage reaching his ears immediately as he called for the spoilers and slammed on the brakes, bringing engines one and two into idle reverse. At least they were on hard surface. The ship decelerated through 120 knots, bouncing and bucking as the uneven ground shot by beneath. Will transitioned to nosewheel steering at last as they came through 100 knots, hope alive that they might really pull it off without bending the aircraft.

  The change from hard-packed desert floor to shifting sand was impossible to see in the landing lights until they plowed into it, the deceleration throwing them all forward into the shoulder harnesses, the 141 pitching forward as the nose landing gear broke away with a loud report, followed by the sound of sheet metal scraping over the ground. The right wing dipped down suddenly, and the ragged remains of its right outboard structure caught the ground for the second time in an hour, yawing the Starlifter to the right. The fuselage rolled left and dipped the left wingtip in the onrushing sand, causing an even more violent yaw back to the left as the battered Starlifter heeled into a modified ground loop and shed the left outboard engine. Once again the right wing dug in, the ravaged right outboard engine number four ripped away from its mounting. At fifty knots, engine number three dug into the sand like an anchor, violently slowing the aircraft until the fuselage came to a stop sideways in a towering cloud of dust and debris, the right wing all but disconnected from the wing root, and fuel spilling everywhere.

  There was silence at first, then the sounds of powerful engines from behind them as Doug and Will realized the APC drivers were following orders and trying to get out at all costs. Somehow they had stopped with the fuselage rolled no more than fifteen degrees to the right. Will lifted the PA microphone and shouted, “EVACUATE NOW! EVACUATE NOW!” The echoes of his voice boomed back from the cargo compartment. He considered hitting the overhead bailout horn, but it was hardly necessary and probably too loud. Sho
uting and the sound of heavy boots pounding metal floors, hatches opening and closing, and sheet metal being shoved out of the way could be heard behind them as the vehicles roared away.

  Will reached up and pulled the fire handles for engines one and two in coordination with Doug as Sandra switched off the battery. Doug thrust the night goggles up on the glare shield in the front window to get them out of the way as he pushed out of his seat. The roaring of the fire that was now openly consuming the right wing increased, accompanied by the sounds of tracked vehicles moving away to the right.

  Bill Backus had slammed his head into the navigator’s panel as the aircraft lurched across the sand. He was conscious, but moving slowly, as Will worked to get him out of the seatbelt, which was jammed.

  The orange glow through the right windows became a transference of intense infrared heat, telling all of them there were mere seconds left. Doug and Sandra joined Will in trying to get Backus out. The belt finally came open, and the four of them turned at last toward the cockpit door. Doug leaned back toward the side window for one last second, trying to see whether the others had made it clear. Suddenly, a small but violent flash of hot orange light from the cargo compartment froze all of them in their tracks.

  Major Moyer had made sure the cargo bay was empty before he leaped on the Bradley and motioned to his driver to floorboard the machine. They had reassembled some four hundred feet forward and to the right of the fuselage. Moyer was astounded at how fast the flames were growing.

  “Is everyone out?”

  “No sir. I can’t find the cockpit crew. They may still be in there!” The speaker was at a dead run back toward the aircraft. Moyer recognized the loadmaster, Sergeant Casey, and took out after him, literally tackling him within fifty feet.

  “Are you crazy, man?” Moyer said. “It’s gonna blow up.”

  “My crew is still in there. Let go!” Casey struggled to break away, and Moyer considered letting him, but at that moment the major’s eyes landed in the vicinity of the copilot’s window. The image of someone—or was it several people?—became silhouettes for a moment as the interior flared bright orange. A small fireball incinerated the crew compartment a split second before the perfect fuel-air mixture in main tank number three detonated and brought the remaining fuel tanks on the right wing into the explosive conflagration, the 141’s main wing box and center fuselage disintegrating into shrapnel, the upper portion of the left wing cartwheeling far above the wreckage, fire and flame and smoke billowing up in all directions.

  “NO-O-O-O!”

  “DOWN!” Moyer grabbed Casey and pulled him into the sand as the wave of heat and the whistle of fragments tore past them, something potentially lethal skimming lightly over his back. He looked up then, expecting to see the deadly rain of metal falling in their direction as well, but most of it seemed to be coming down on the left side of the wreckage near a small rise that was flickering a garish orange in the dying light of the now-dissipated fire. The half-musical sounds of large sections of sheet metal thonging, thunking, and clanging into the ground as they fell from where they’d been propelled overhead completed the surreal scene.

  “Jesus … they were in there when it blew …” Casey was somewhere between tears and shock, staring in utter disbelief at the ruined aircraft.

  “I’m … afraid you’re right. I saw them in the cockpit.”

  Moyer was stunned too. Why were they still aboard? How could three large tracked vehicles, all those troops, and a Humvee have made it out and the cockpit crew hadn’t?

  Yet he knew what he had seen in the window, and there would have been no surviving that blast.

  “Come on.” Moyer pulled Casey to his feet, but the sergeant couldn’t tear his eyes away. “We’ll take the Bradley around and make sure.”

  Moyer had to pull Casey most of the way back. Sergeant Johnson joined them then, and Moyer briefed him on what he had seen. They piled inside the Bradley as Moyer checked by radio with the other drivers, ordering them to stay put, and directing one of his men to make contact with the AWACS to coordinate the rescue.

  Moyer took the controls himself and ran the Bradley back to the wreckage, circling slowly, as the radio crackled to life.

  “Sir, the AWACS says to get all survivors and boogie south right now. Joint-Stars is picking up Iraqi vehicles, maybe even tanks, headed south toward our position. They want us out of here, now.”

  Moyer acknowledged and stopped the Bradley, thinking rapidly. The remaining fire was still intense, but it was obvious that the fuel tanks had all fragmented, and there was nothing left to explode.

  He searched on all sides, especially where the crew entrance door had been, crunching over all sorts of debris, but seeing nothing resembling a body or a survivor. He jumped out one last time and ran to the remains of the cockpit, now little more than the front windscreen frames and the forward floor, one charred control yoke twisted but still attached. He even tried yelling into the night and listening for anything resembling a human voice. There were plenty of sounds, but no voices.

  No one in there could have survived.

  He looked back to the east at the small sand hill, now embedded with fragments large and small, and covered with tank-tread marks from several circuits back and forth.

  “Sir!” The voice of the radio operator again. “They’re really yelling at us to move. Range of the other force is two miles!”

  It was decision time. Sergeant Johnson was standing beside him, but he was the leader, and this was a potential battlefield.

  “Anywhere we haven’t looked, Sarge?”

  The Air Force combat support specialist looked at the field of debris with disbelief, the image of the four cockpit crew members fresh in his mind.

  “Yes sir. Everywhere. There are large pieces of the wing over there, and back behind us. But if the crew was in the cockpit when it blew …”

  “They were. I saw them.”

  “Then there’s nothing left to save.”

  Moyer stared at him for a split second, then nodded. They scrambled back aboard the Bradley and accelerated toward the other vehicles as he relayed the word to bug out. He had living charges to get to safety.

  The dead would have to wait.

  9

  Crown (E-3 AWACS—Airborne Warning and Control System)

  Thursday, March 7, 1991—5:12 A.M. (0212 GMT)

  Captain Margaret Ellis acknowledged the radio check-in from Porky 22, a flight of two Air Force A-10s, and gave them a heading perpendicular to the oncoming column of Iraqi vehicles as reported by the airborne Joint-Stars radar aircraft some fifty miles away. The crash site of Scorpion-1 was tagged electronically by a small symbol in the upper quadrant of her radar display. Bambi 52, a flight of two Air Force F-15s, had been shadowing the C-141 since just before their crash landing. They were now setting up to shoot a warning barrage of rockets in front of the Iraqi force.

  Margaret had worked the Bambi flight before. Their slogan always tickled her: “Where Bambi goes, nothing grows.” She was glad to have their firepower on the scene, but if the vehicles moving toward the crash site were Iraqi Republican Guard, this would probably be a job for the A-10s, and Bambi flight would simply be there to keep Porky from getting jumped.

  Not that Saddam had anything left of an aeronautical nature to jump them with.

  Things had been quiet in the AOR for the past few days with the so-called end of hostilities. She still wondered whether someone had thought up the phrase “area of responsibility” in order to get the acronym AOR, or vice versa. “War zone” made more sense, though it wasn’t supposed to be a war zone anymore.

  The strange mission of Scorpion-1 had brought the crew of the modified Boeing 707 AWACS back to the same adrenaline levels as before. Whatever it was they were doing landing in the middle of Iraq in the middle of the night with a high level of CENTCOM and Pentagon interest, the mission had turned to shit, and lives had already been lost.

  “Delta one, you still with me?” Marga
ret asked, envisioning someone in an armored vehicle sticking the antenna of his handheld radio out a hatch to reply.

  It was highly unusual for an AWACS to be controlling ground traffic, but the contingent of Coalition vehicles from the crashed C-141 was racing south, and it was up to the AWACS controller—her—to marshal the airborne force to give them time to reach safety. Without the amazing picture of ground forces and vehicles generated aboard Joint-Stars, however, her electronic eyes in the rotating, saucerlike AWACS antenna would be her only source of information—showing her only the airborne picture. There would have been no way an AWACS controller could direct air cover to precisely target moving ground forces without the C3 radio relay from the new system.

  “Crown—Jolly twelve—confirm your instructions, please.” The rescue helicopter leader interrupted her thoughts as she attempted to take a sip of cold coffee.

  “Jolly twelve, roger, hold quad forty-eight, stay up this frequency. What’s your bingo fuel time?”

  “Bingo at zero-three-thirty Zulu.”

  Okay, she thought. He’ll have to start returning to base no later than 0330 GMT. The two big rescue helicopters that had been assigned to stand by to protect this mission would just have to keep orbiting for now. CENTCOM was calling some of the shots on this one, and they wanted those vehicles back across the border if possible. She had suggested they abandon the vehicles and airlift the people out, but she had been overruled.

  That was always the way it went when the damned Puzzle Palace got involved.

  Margaret leaned over to the hastily assembled radar screen on her right and scanned the ground picture once again. The information was streaming at light speed in real-time format from the Joint-Stars radar, which was a boatlike antenna array mounted on the belly of a once-retired, now refurbished, commercial Boeing 707. Like nothing ever used before in warfare, Joint-Stars could paint a living, moving picture of what was happening on the ground hundreds of miles behind enemy lines using Doppler-shift principles and high-speed computers. It wasn’t even supposed to have been ready for combat use. She shook her head and snickered quietly, remembering the amazed and excited expressions on the faces of the civilian technicians who had been quietly developing Joint-Stars as a multi-year project and who had suddenly found themselves in effect drafted into immediate service in the middle of a shooting war.