El Centro, California
Day finally broke in California, injecting a gray light into Slammer’s room and dissipating the memory of his troubled dreams. He climbed out of bed and twisted open the cheap white Venetian blinds. Standing in his boxers stretching his stiff back, he spotted the three amigos, Silvers, Moto, and Pig, strolling to one of the rental vans. They reached the parking lot and Silvers turned in the middle of a lively story. She was using her right hand as a plane, reaching it as high into the sky as she could before flipping it over, snapping into a hard left descending turn.
He couldn’t help but smile. Even though he couldn’t hear a word she was saying, he was captivated. She lived the story, the flying, all over her face.
He spied on them from the top floor as the dawn changed rapidly to morning, illuminating the utilitarian collection of buildings making up the base. There was no real green to be found for miles. The tan, squat buildings were surrounded by crabgrass lawns and cement paths connected doors to parking lots. The beauty of El Centro wasn’t in the architecture, it was in the flying.
His body was eager to start the day even though the flight schedule didn’t kick in for another couple hours. The warm water from the shower ran over his head, spilling down his shoulders and back as he leaned against the cool ceramic wall, reflecting on the previous six weeks. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s had all rolled through with nary a bump. From an objective viewpoint, there was a glimmer of hope he’d be able to dispose of this damn class and be on his way without any extra weirdness.
But he sensed trouble lurking just beneath. Though he couldn’t put his finger on it yet, he was sure it would surface. Pressure had a way of exposing even the tiniest of structural flaws. And they were here in California to dial the stress up further.
The past few weeks hadn’t been without their bright moments, though. Holiday gifts came early for his class. He had ridden in the back seat with Silvers and a couple of the other pilots when they took their first actual Rhino flights, shedding the safety of the simulator like fledglings plunging from the nest. It was never his favorite thing to do, to relinquish the front cockpit to another pilot, especially a novice. But the students’ enthusiasm was infectious. Experiencing a first flight in a Rhino through them was like watching seven-year-olds run downstairs on Christmas morning—still pure, still all about Santa and wrapping paper. The early weeks of real flying mirrored the same sequence they had followed in previous planes: familiarization flights followed in rapid succession by formation, night flying, and then tactical formation flying. They were all pretty good sticks. But concern over flying skills wasn’t what woke him up at night, interrupting his dreams. Good hands were a given at this stage. It was the other stuff that really mattered.
El Centro, California was home to a small naval air facility tucked between the Mexican border and the Salton Sea, a little over a hundred miles east of San Diego as the Rhino flies. Its low desert mountains and valleys formed the floor of an aerial playground of restricted military airspace stretching east to the Arizona border, an airspace that offered plenty of options for complicated multi-plane training scenarios. Hidden bombing and gunnery ranges, in continuous use for more than sixty years, were scattered in the scrubby hills in every direction. It was in El Centro, or “El Sweato” as it was called by all those who had the pleasure of perspiring their way through it, that he and his fellow instructors would begin shaping the pilots and WSOs into warriors. The crawling and walking was done. It was time to run.
Two hours later he stood at the front of the small, almost expeditionary Ready Room. His whole class would be flying—five pilot and five WSOs—but one was still missing. Silvers was sitting dead center in the first row on the student’s side flanked, as usual, by her buds.
He tipped a small nod to JT and Chewie, seated a couple rows back on the instructor side across from Dusty. Just like back at home, the Ready Room was segregated by some unwritten law, the students on one side of the aisle, the instructors on the other. Like a wedding.
He was surrounded by photos and charts clipped crudely to three easels. The physical facilities in El Centro were stuck somewhere in the 1950s—no PowerPoint and high-end projectors here. Colored lines drawn on the first large chart detailed the upcoming mission’s routes. A second easel displayed enlarged photos of the target areas, and on the third, a final chart with a series of grim-looking red rings indicated the furthest reach of the simulated Surface-to-Air Missile sites.
Chewie’s eyes opened wide and he sneezed, a big, wet, loud explosion into the air.
JT leaned away from him, disgust on his face. “Die already!” He pulled a red bandana from his flight suit and held it over his nose like a bandito.
Chewie kept right on sneezing, barely containing the spray with his hands. “Pollen. I’m not contagious, calm down.” He motioned to JT’s bandana. “Gimme that.”
“No! I just washed it.” JT held the rag as far from Chewie as he could. “There’s no pollen here, it’s January! Use your sleeve, you fucking pig.”
“Then I’m allergic to cactus, goddammit. Just let me use it, I’ll wash it for you.”
“Dude, not a fucking chance.”
Chewie sniffled, sticking his nose in the crook of his arm like a three-year-old. “Please?”
JT ignored him, turning to the front of the room shaking his head in disbelief. Chewie punched him in the arm, then wiped his nose across his sleeve.
Slammer laughed. His buddies, bright, highly trained, hardworking young naval officers, were the best of the best—and otherwise unfit for public consumption. He couldn’t believe that Chewie had even asked to borrow the bandana. It was JT’s combat rag, and he flew with it clipped to his harness, as they all did, to mop their faces in the intense heat before the jet got airborne and the air conditioning kicked in. JT’s had seen him through more than forty combat missions and he wasn’t about to let Chewie stick his nasty nose in it. Despite their intimate relationship with physics and aerodynamics, or maybe because if it, aviators were a superstitious bunch. On the only mission JT and Slammer had flown without JT’s rag—it hadn’t made it back from the ship’s laundry—they had lost an engine. Normally not a big deal, but 700 miles inside bad-guy country it felt like they were walking a tightrope on a windy day without a net.
After they landed, Slammer had marched down to the ship’s laundry, dug out the bandana, and personally tied it onto JT’s harness. They never spoke of it—who knows what makes the luck run out?—but they’d made it through the rest of the deployment without so much as a paper cut.
Slammer checked his watch, and as the second hand swept past 6:59:45 he looked up. Rogers came bounding in just under the wire with a look of comic panic on his face, zipping up his flight suit and carrying his flight bag.
“Sorry, had to dump down to fighting weight,” Rogers said, rushing to the front row. “I miss anything?” The Ready Room cracked up and Rogers grinned.
As Rogers swung to get past Slammer, bowing to acknowledge the sarcastic golf claps from his fellow students, his bag caught the chart on the first easel, tearing it from the clip. Slammer reached to steady it as a flustered Rogers spun around to help. The student’s momentum carried him into the middle easel, which fell to the ground with a metallic clatter.
“Stop!” Slammer commanded. He grabbed Rogers by the shoulders. “Sit. Now.” He couldn’t help but crack a smile with the rest of the room as Rogers slunk to his seat. “We don’t have a call sign for you yet, do we?” Rogers shook his head, a look of consternation on his face.
Slammer spoke over his shoulder as he reattached the map and righted the easels. “Well, don’t worry, man. I feel it coming. Soon.”
Once the material was again presentable, Slammer turned to face the group. “Attention to brief.” There were twenty-one aircrew seated before him. Five student pilots, an equal number of student WSOs, nine instructors to ride with the students—he was the tenth—and two representatives from to
day’s adversaries, the Bandits. Each Gladiator jet would carry either a student pilot with an instructor WSO or a student WSO with an instructor pilot. He’d given this brief and flown in this event dozens of times, but it never got old for him. Ten Rhinos and an unknown handful of bandit planes, at least twenty-five souls and roughly 700 million in hardware in the sky. Fifty or sixty ground troopers to help prep, launch, and recover the planes and half as many more to monitor the airspace and ranges. It was a game, but it wasn’t. It was training, but very real just the same. Every bag of flesh in the room felt the excitement and responsibility. They all knew, even the students, that this was just a few steps removed from the real thing.
He loved the old maxim all servicemen heard a million times: “Fight like you train, train like you fight.” He knew firsthand how valuable that threadbare aphorism truly was. And the soup of adrenaline, nerves, and excitement mixed with a hint of fear gave off a particular Big Game pheromone that found its mark in his core. This was the hit he toiled for. This was the gateway drug of his world.
“Today we combine the component skills you have been learning into a single mission. We’ll be flying a low-level, coordinated strike against practice targets here,” he pointed to the appropriate charts, “and here. We’re going in low and we have to stay low to avoid detection until we drop our bombs.”
He moved to the threat ring chart. “We have actual radar sites searching for you and if you trip one of these rings, Smokey SAMs will be launched.” The Smokey SAMs were military-grade bottle rockets intended to hone the aircrew’s ability to spot the telltale smoke plume of a real Surface-to-Air Missile launch. They were simple, unguided, and they packed nearly the same impact on the central nervous system as the real thing.
He moved to the target area photos. “Once you get to your target area, find the target, destroy it, and fight your way out.” He pointed to the two adversary pilots in the back of the room. “Bandit opposition today is being provided by the VFC-13 Saints flying F-5Ns. They will be simulating MiG-21s and 23s. I trust you are all familiar with the weapons and tactics on those aircraft. Fight accordingly.”
In the front row Silvers elbowed Pig and Moto on either side of her in silent excitement. She sat on the edge of her seat, envisioning the forthcoming action as Slammer briefed, “Your objectives are simple; it’s the execution that counts. Number one, everybody comes home. Zero acceptable loss. Two, find and destroy your assigned targets. And lastly, destroy any MiGs that pop up on your way out.”
The last few weeks had been fine for her. She’d kept her head down and stayed out of trouble. But the shine was off the apple. She had thought she would finally be among her own here, but instead she felt like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, never really at ease. “For the first group of four, Silvers, you and Wedge.” She met Slammer’s gaze, her face impassive. She’d heard him, but she wouldn’t give him the pleasure of a reaction. Instead she looked over at her instructor WSO, Wedge, and nodded to him.
She turned back to Slammer as he continued with the pairings. “I’m with Dingle. Truck, you’re stuck with the goofball, Rogers. Good luck with that. Dusty and JT are together.” She shifted sideways in her seat and looked back. JT was absently scratching his nose with his bandana. Silvers’ was folded in her thigh pocket; it was new and stiff and loud with the logo of her alma mater, the True Blue background and gold script of UCLA. Rogers and Dingle exchanged a little skin, both obviously pleased with their pairings.
She faced forward, perking up as Slammer got to the heart of the brief. “Our game plan is as follows…”
The radar altimeter readout on Silvers’ Heads-Up-Display fluctuated between 180 and 220 feet as the terrain undulated below her jet. She was screaming over the boulders and scrubby brush at 480 knots, or 8 nautical miles per minute, just over 550 miles per hour. Each time she blinked, she travelled the length of a football field. Her body was covered in a light sheen of sweat and her heart beat strong and fast, like she was running for distance. She rolled a little to the left and pulled, ducking around a knoll protruding from the gentle slope of the valley she was flying along.
She couldn’t remember being happier.
It was a crystal clear, cloudless day. Temperatures along the rocky hillsides and shallow valleys would peak around ninety-five degrees later in the afternoon. She glanced to her left and there was Slammer, her flight lead, about a mile abeam down on the valley floor. She checked her position against him. Just a hair too forward. She edged the throttles back the slightest amount, waited two breaths, and edged them back up. Perfect, just down her shoulder line at 9 o’clock exactly. She’d be a good wingman if nothing else. She keyed the intercom with her left thumb. “Looking good, Wedge. Three minutes till we split and head for the ammo dump.”
His voice piped in through the earcups of her helmet, cutting through the constant background roar of the twin motors. “Don’t be too disappointed. This dump’s just a pile of old tires.”
“Disappointed! Any more pumped and I’m gonna have to slam espresso to bring me down.”
Inside Slammer’s jet the view was mirror image. Silvers’ plane was at his 3 o’clock, out the line extending from his right shoulder, in perfect position. He and Silvers were leading the first wave of four F-18s. Truck and Dusty formed the back half a few miles behind them. The rest of the students were in a flight of six jets in the second wave; they would launch thirty minutes later.
He scanned the terrain fifteen to thirty seconds ahead of his path and then out at her plane, watching as her shadow chased just beneath her, rising and falling erratically with the ripples of the earth.
Dingle’s voice piped up. “Two minutes, Slammer. So far so good. Scope’s clean.”
“Just don’t get us lost, Dingle.”
The controller transmitted from his console back in El Centro to the entire strike group every thirty seconds. His commentary provided a God’s-eye update to the continuously evolving scenario so all the players could build a mental picture. Now the eight aviators in the four planes heard him simultaneously, right on schedule. “Roman flight, picture clear into target area. Green range.”
“Romans copy,” Slammer, as the strike leader, responded for the group. He keyed the intercom to speak to his WSO. “Keep working that scope, Dingle. Any second the sky’s going to be shitty with bandits.”
In a parallel valley, Dusty raced her shadow in an identical abeam formation with Truck as her lead.
“Okay, Dusty,” JT spoke from her back seat. “Slammer’s three minutes ahead, so he and Silvers should soak up any MiGs. All we gotta do is drop our load and squirt out of town.”
Dusty jerked her head once in assent. “No sweat.” She was in perfect position. She had prepared for this mission like no other and she knew the route and the threats cold. It was what she didn’t know that made her heart skip a beat every time they came around a bend. She hated not knowing where the pitfalls lay. She hated surprises.
“You okay? You with me?”
She could hear JT’s concern in his voice. “Yeah. I’m all here.” She took another deep breath and squeezed the stick tighter.
Silvers felt herself float in the seat as she nosed over a small ridge. As the plane settled back to treetop level, she gently pulled the stick back a feather, feeling her bottom plant firmly into the election seat. Slammer’s voice came over the radio, “Silvers, split point. Break, break.”
She snapped over, executing a hard bank to the right as she and Wedge changed course for their target. “Show time! Hang on Wedge.”
“Let’s get some! We’re about ten seconds late, pump it up a little.”
She maneuvered her throttles to give them a few more knots of groundspeed. “Got it. Two minutes till time-on-target.”
“Roman flight, new picture,” the controller’s voice broke in. “Bandits flowing your direction from the north. Anticipate merge in three minutes.”
“Roman Two, roger,” she acknowledged. “This’s going to
be tight, Wedge. What do you think?”
“Keep going,” he said, giving her the answer she wanted to hear. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”
Dusty did not appreciate the picture update in the same way.
“You hear that JT! The target’s going to be swamped.” She was sucking in quick, shallow breaths and her heart was banging in her chest.
“Easy, Dusty. Their target’s farther north than ours. We’ve got extra time. They won’t see us till we’re on our way out.” Despite her rising anxiety she could still spare some neurons to get annoyed at his tone. He was speaking to her like a father afraid his toddler was about to have a meltdown.
Her irritation affected her flying, and Truck let her know. “Dusty, we still got two minutes. Tighten up that formation.”
“Roger,” she acknowledged immediately, banking to redress her position.
Slammer heard the same update from the controller and grinned. He banked the jet aggressively, flowing like water through the smallest dip and dry creek to keep them low, well below the SAM radar’s search envelope. And also because he couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. Low and fast was where he was at home. Hidden behind his oxygen mask, his grin widened in anticipation of the dogfights. Once he destroyed the target, he was going hunting. Was it wrong to enjoy your work so much?
They crested a small knoll marking the end of the valley and he snapped the jet inverted, pulling hard to prevent his Rhino from ballooning too far above the ground. He and Dingle were upside down at 250 feet, both heads craning up, looking earthward at the rush of terrain coming at them while pulling 5Gs. Madness. Once he felt the plane settle back to his desired trajectory, the path that would keep them low and skimming the nap of the earth, he snapped the stick, rolling upright in a flash. He settled them back down at 110 feet and noted the time counting down in his Heads-Up-Display.
“One minute, Dingle, you all set?”
Lions of the Sky Page 8
