Flight of the Intruder jg-1

by Stephen Coonts

  The missile warning lit up again. Jake checked the strobe indicator on the detection gear, which told him the radar was at five o’clock. He swung hard maintaining his altitude, and searched the blackness. Two missiles were in flight, and a third lifted off as he watched.

  The missile light hashed and the aura warning “Three SAMs up.” A warning wailed. A grunt was the only reply.

  The pilot held the turn until the missiles were inbound at One o,clock, still low but climbing On the missile ignited and raced skyward.

  “Point the plane at the radar and gimme fifteen degrees.” he said. As the pilot complied, the missiles nosed up, hidden by the nose of the plane, and disappeared from their view. “Hold it,” said Cole.

  The falsetto screech of the missile warning made his heart beat wildly. Shoot Cole said, and the pilot squeezed the trigger with his finger and pushed the pickle button with his thumb. Cole told him to hold both buttons for a second-the time delay was a safety thing-and reduced the chances of an inadvertent firing.

  An age later a white fireball erupted under the right wing with a “whoosh.” Jake saw the bombardier outlined in the brilliant light, which rocketed forward and faded to nothing in a fraction of a second.

  “Split S,” Cole ordered when the pilot didn’t react as expected with sufficient speed. Blinded by the brilliance, Grafton instinctively jammed the stick to the left, spun the plane what he hoped was 180 degrees, then he blinked rapidly and pulled hard toward the earth because he had lost his night vision. “Chaff,” Cole reminded him. jake pumped the button.

  His vision was coming back. He could make out the panel and the vdi.

  Now he could read the vdi. The plane was seventy degrees nose down, inverted. The missile light still flashed.

  Why hadn’t the gomers shut down? He shoved the stick forward, rolled upright, and pulled the nose up while he searched the sky for the incoming missiles.

  He saw them strung out in a trail, the first one way high and arching down, but it would overshoot.

  “More behind us,” Cole said. Jake dropped the left wing and clawed the plane around. He checked the indicator. The radar they had fired at had finally cease transmitting, but another radar behind them was now guiding missiles. He found the oncoming pinpoints of light and continued his turn, dropping the nose slightly to keep his airspeed from bleeding off. He wanted to dive more steeply to pick up speed as he was moving at only 300 knots, but he was down to 12,000 feet and if they launched another SAM when he was below 10,000, he might be forced to descend almost to the surface.

  The missiles were at two o’clock and at his altitude when Jake leveled the wings and shoved the stick forward until he and Cole floated weightless against the restraining straps at zero G. The nose fell slowly as they flew the parabola, but the engines’ thrust was more effective without the induced drag from the wings-they weren’t making lift at zero G-and the airspeed quickly increased to more than 400 knots. The left missile appeared to be overshooting, but the trailer was correcting. The pilot squeezed chaff, rolled right, and yanked the stick hard.

  Now! The second missile was also overshooting. The missile warnings ceased as the second SA2 detonated in a flash of white light about a thousand feet away.

  Jake climbed and turned toward the northwest. His body trembled in the sudden hush. The aural warning was silent, the missile light was dark, but for how long? To the south, fifteen or twenty miles away, antiaircraft guns clefted the night. “Looks like our bomber friends have arrived,” said Jake over the ICS to Cole.

  On the radio, Jake asked, “You up on this freq, Sammy?” With his gloved hand, he wiped the perspiration from his brow.

  “Roger.” Lundeen’s voice.

  “Five Oh Three?” he asked as he noticed another flak concentration a little farther north.

  “We’re up,” Rabbit Wilson said.

  Jake heard Cole key the mike. “Five Oh Six, how far from your target are you?”

  “About forty miles out,” Lundeen replied.

  “Pop up to fifteen hundred feet and stay there a bit,” Cole suggested.

  “We’ll use you as bait.” Lundeen clicked his mike.

  Well, Jake thought, weren’t they all bait?

  “If they shoot at Lundeen out of Hanoi,” Cole said to Jake, “we’ll fire the Standard missile as soon as we see the first SAM. There’s a site there that has been peeping once in a while and I’ve slaved the STARM to his signal.” With luck, the STARM would be locked in on the Fansong even if it went off the air before the missile arrived. With luck.

  Grafton reached 18,000 feet and reined in the power to ninety percent RPM. They had to save fuel somewhere. He pointed the nose toward Hanoi and let the airspeed decay as he climbed. Attitude could always be converted to airspeed simply by diving. “About five degrees nose-up, no more,” Cole advised him.

  Flak sparking in the darkness below marked Sammy’s progress across the night sky. When would another SAM launch? Jake wiped his eyebrows again with a gloved finger. “Man, we’re having fun now,” he muttered.

  Cole looked at him.

  “Morgan liked to say that,” Jake explained.

  Cole pointed. The pilot saw the tiny pinpoint at one o’clock.

  This time he closed his eyes as he squeezed the buttons on the stick. He heard the whoosh as the missile ignited and felt the brightness of the STARM fireball behind his closed eyelids. perhaps three seconds had passed since the first SAM was launched.

  “You have a SAM in the air and a STARM,” Cole told Lundeen. “Stay at fifteen hundred as long as you can.” By the time he had finished speaking a second SA2 had been launched and was following in the wake of the first.

  “They’re guiding,” Cole informed Grafton as he consulted the gear on his panel.

  Their own early warning system remained silent because the Fanson radar was not pointed in their direction.

  “Stay up, baby,” Cole whispered over the ICS. Jake knew he was really whispering at the enemy radar operator who was sitting in a dark semitrailer van an watching the blip that was Devil 506. A few more seconds …

  Jake’s attention was riveted on the place in the darkness from which the two SAMs had been launched. He forced himself to ignore the exhaust plumes of the enemy missiles streaking along parallel to the invisible earth, streaking toward Sammy and Marty Greve.

  “I’ve been up here long enough,” Lundeen an announced over the radio.

  “It’s off the air,” Cole said.

  The STARM was invisible because it had exhausted its fuel just before it began homing in on the emission of the Fansong.

  The pilot saw a faint flash. Grafton told Cole about it. The bombardier shrugged. “Maybe we got it.” He manipulated the switches on the armament panel to put the second STARM in readiness.

  The pilot turned and let the nose slide down. He stabilized at 18,000 feet.

  The search radars continued to paint them and a Firecan locked them up momentarily Jake saw the rippling twinkles that were Lundeen’s bombs, and a minute later, somewhat closer, a similar string of fireworks where the XO”s target must be. Tracer fire smeared the darkness near the bombers’ tracks.

  Jake and Cole continued to orbit as the bombers crossed the delta toward the coast. The missile-control radars were silent. Lundeen finally called “feet wet,” and, a minute later, Rabbit Wilson as well.

  They flew southeast toward the waiting ocean, steady at 400 knots at 18,000 feet. They heard a Fansong in the area of Haiphong, off to their left.

  It came on the air for several seconds, shut down, then repeated the cycle a half-minute later. Jake searched the darkness below for the moving points of light that betrayed the flight of SAMs. Nothing.

  He was looking at the Fansong light on the indicator panel, now on again, when he noticed another light also lit: I-band. He examined the circular dial on the threat-direction indicator and, sure enough, a weak I-band strobe pointed behind them. When the Fansong fell silent he could even hear the
other radar, a two-tone, high-frequency pulse. As he listened, he heard the audio separate into three distinct, clicking, rhythmic tones that repeated about once a second. Virgil Cole cocked his head at the direction indicator. He, too, seemed to be listening.

  “Sounds like we have a Mig-21 on our tail,” he announced. “Doesn’t that sound like a conical scan to you?”

  Mig! Even as Cole said it, Jake thought he could now hear the intermittent clicks. If it were a Mig, it was getting closer. Grafton jammed the throttles full forward and punched the chaff button three times as fast as he could, then slammed the stick full left and forward in one fluid motion.

  The nose tucked down and the plane flipped on its back, 180 degrees of roll in one second. In a continuation of the same motion he brought the stick aft and center, and the nose of the inverted warplane dropped through to the vertical where he stabilized in a straight-down dive. The altimeter spun insanely as Jake listened for the beat of the conical scan, mixed in with the wail of the Fansong now back on the air in the target-acquisition mode. If the Mig saw the false target the chaff created and went after it, he could escape out below. Near the ground the Mig couldn’t acquire him. He hoped.

  He rolled ninety degrees about the longitudinal axis and at 7000 feet began a hard, five-G pull in the direction of Haiphong, punching chaff all the way.

  The primary gyro tumbled, apparently, because the l still indicated a vertical descent. He ignored it an included the standby gyro in his scan. Virgil Cole said “Pull up to twenty degrees nose up, ten degrees right and we’ll shoot the STARM.”

  “Are you crazy?” The radar altimeter dipped below. 3000 feet, the nose still five degrees below the horizon His right arm tightened slightly, six Gees, 540 knots indicated. The I-band warning was gone, the earphones silent. The Mig had lost them.

  Cole’s fist slammed into his right biceps. “Do like I told you!”

  They bottomed out at 2000 feet and Jake kept the nose coming up. Stabilizing in a twenty-degree turn he waited for Cole to ready the missile. The airspeed dropped below 480 knots, then 460.

  “Come on, you crazy bastard,” Jake shouted at Cole “Let’s shoot and get the fuck outta here before the Mig figures out which way we turned.”

  “Just a sec … almost…. Shoot! Jake heard the Fansong kick in his earphones as the last standard missile ignited under the right wing an shot forward, trailing a dazzling sheet of fire. They were in trouble again unless that Mig pilot was blind Grafton turned hard right to run for the coast.

  “Black Eagle, Devil Five One One,” Cole said over the radio. “We have a bandit on our tail. Get the BARCAP headed this way. Buster.”

  “Buster” meant hurry, bust your ass.

  Jake was at 5000 feet, 510 knots when he again heard the beat of the Mig’s Spin Scan radar. It was out to his right, at four o’clock. He had to get down, near the ground. The Mig was coming in at an angle and he wouldn’t have time to turn.

  “Devil, this is Mustang. We’re coming! State your posit.”

  “Thirty miles south of the lighthouse, fifteen miles inland,” Cole said.

  Jake selected the station for the remaining Shrike and held the buttons down. The missile shot forward toward the earth. Now to give the Mig a real false target, not just a chaff cloud. He depressed the emergency jettison button above the gear handle. The empty missile racks and belly tank were kicked away with a whump. The Mig was closing fast from the side. Two thousand feet above the ground.

  “Devil, don’t let him get away!”

  “Fuck you!” Grafton shouted and chopped the throttles to idle and deployed the speed brakes as he shoved the nose over.

  A missile raced across the windscreen above and in front of him. He pulled up to avoid the ground. He pushed on the throttles but they wouldn’t move! Then the cockpit went dark.

  Mother of God! He had inadvertently pulled the throttles past the safety detents and had shut down the engines. The speed brakes were still out, but they should come into trail with the loss of electrical power. He desperately groped behind him for the handle to the ram-air turbine, the emergency generator. He had to have electrical power for a restart.

  Where was it? Oh, God, no!

  His fingers closed on the handle in the darkness and he pulled with the strength of the damned.

  The lights came on. The left wing was down.

  He picked it up.

  Two hundred fifty knots! He advanced the throttle on the left engine as he held the emergency ignition button on the throttle down with his thumb. Wings level, 400 feet.

  Warning lights were erupting on the annunciator panel: both generators, fuel, oil pressure. It looked like a Christmas tree. Without the background noise of the engines the cockpit was quiet as a coffin.

  “Light off!” he screamed at the recalcitrant engine he checked the standby gyro. If the circuit breaker the emergency igniters had popped, the engine would never light. The breaker was on a panel beside his left foot and he didn’t have time to check it. He kept the ignition button firmly depressed.

  210 knots. At the weight, without flaps or power, they would quit flying at maybe 180 knots.

  The engine lit with an audible moan. The RPM ran up toward the sixty percent idle range agonizing slowly. Sweet Jesus! There! Sixty percent. He advance the left throttle to the forward stop and reached for the right to repeat the procedure. One hundred ninety-five knots on the dial.

  ‘Only a hundred feet,” Cole advised. A glance again at the altitude - stable at 195. Left engine still winding up, passing eighty-five percent. He slipped in more back stick and trimmed. As the left engine reached full power, the right lit off.

  When both throttles fully forward, he reset them. The radar-warning indicators were dark Nothing in his earphones. The annunciator panel lights were all extinguished. Two hundred knots and increasing.

  “Black Eagle, Devil’s feet wet,” Cole said.

  “Where were you? You didn’t answer.”

  “Uh, we had a little mechanical problem back there, Black Eagle,” Cole said. “Where’s the bandit?”

  “The Mustangs are after him.”

  “Glad I’m not driving that Mig with those Phantoms after me,” Cole said over the ICS.

  Jake climbed to 500 feet and stayed there, weaving erratically- They were thirty miles out to sea before Jake decided his heart might not after all beat itself out of his chest. Only then did he establish a climb and pull the throttles back off the stops.

  As Cole talked on the radio, Jake took off his oxygen mask and wiped the sweat from his face. Lordy, lordy!

  Jake Grafton told Cole he was a crazy fucker. “How come you wanted to shoot that last STARM?”

  “That Fansong was providing altitude and position info to the interceptor pilot. They were vectoring him enough to lock us up. That’s how the until he got close enough Red Baron knew just where to find us.”

  “How come you shot that last Shrike into the ground?”

  “I figured if he was working on an infrared lock-up for a missile, the Shrike would give us a few seconds. And I was gonna jettison the racks and didn’t want to give the gomers an unfired missile to play with.”

  “You know, Grafton, you’re the only pilot I know who’d intentionally shut down the engines in combat. And that close to the ground.”

  “You know goddamn well that was a screw-up, an accident. I made a mistake. How come you didn’t eject’?”

  “And have you pull your chestnuts out of the fire and go back to the ship without your bombardier) They’d laugh me out of the navy.”

  ‘We damn near bought the farm.”

  “Well, we didn’t. That’s what counts.” The bombardier put his head back in the headrest and closed his eyes.

  Jake Grafton climbed down the ladder from the cockpit, holding on carefully with both hands. His leg felt wobbly as he followed the tall figure of Virgil Cole. Too spent to remain standing, he asked Cole to do the intelligence debrief and went straight to the ready ro
om where he collapsed into a chair. After a minute he decided he needed a cigarette, so he moved enough to retrieve the packet from his left sleeve pocket.

  When Lundeen came in he fell into the chair next to Jake’s. Grafton sketched out the Mig encounter. He was soon surrounded by half a dozen men who fire questions and laughed nervously at his answers.

  “The Mustangs got that Mig,” Marty Greve said.

  “‘Don’t let him get away!”‘ Lundeen shrieked. They all thought this was hilarious.

  “Now I know how Jonah felt just before the whale swallowed him,” Jake said.

  “And how did Cole do” Lundeen asked when the laughter faded.

  “The fucking guy’s a tiger,” said Jake.

  The nickname “Tiger” became firmly attached to the quiet bombardier. “It fits him,” Jake would say to his military friends with a smile.

  SIXTEEN

  When the movie started, Jake went down to his state room and undressed, then headed for the shower. The water felt good, and he was tempted to let it run while he soaped up but thought better of it.

  Lathered from head to toe, he opened the taps again The water squirted, slowed to a trickle, then to individual drops. Someone, somewhere on the ship had secured the water. Jake sagged against the side of the stall. The soap suds on his body made little popping noises.

  Back in his stateroom, he sponged off the soap wit water from the sink.

  After he used his towel to mop up the puddles around him, _he put on clean underwear and sat down at his desk.

  He held his hands under the light; they trembled like those of an old man.

  He had paperwork to do but couldn’t summon up the energy or interest to do it.

  He looked into the shadows of the room and thought of Callie. What was she doing tonight? Dancing with some congressman? Their worlds were so different. Someday he would take her to the hills of Virginia, where the air was clean and smelled of pine.

  Back in Virginia, winter would have closed in. The trees would be bare, the leaves on the ground sodden after the late autumn rains. The cold would keep the squirrels in their nests until midday.