Lions of the Sky

by Paco Chierici

  Dingle was most likely barely hanging on in the back. For sure the student WSO had never been this low and fast before and was probably alternating between panic, terror, and resignation.

  “Switches are set, sir. On time. Let ’er rip!”

  Slammer smiled. Wrong again. From the sound of Dingle’s voice, he was having a blast.

  He noted the symbology in his cockpit change from Air-to-Air to the Ground Attack mode, indicating that Dingle had depressed the A/G master button in the rear cockpit. “Excellent. This is how we do it every day in the Fleet, buddy,” he said as he threw the plane into a sharp turn.

  “Can’t wait!” Dingle Berry whooped.

  Silvers pressed the intercom button. “Wedge, thirty seconds. You want to set me up?” So far, so good. Things were unfolding pretty much as she’d expected. She just needed her WSO to put the system into Ground Attack mode while she kept them out of the weeds.

  From a dark room back in El Centro, the controller who was tracking their progress transmitted a status change. “Roman Two, bandits now ten northwest your target. You’re still undetected.”

  Wedge’s voice immediately followed over the intercom. “Shit. Just stay low till we pop to drop. Then the gig’s up and we fight our way home.”

  “Got it.” Up in the front, she smiled, unfazed, even pleased by the scenario unfolding. She took a moment to mentally rehearse. She would pull the Rhino into a violent, oblique pop, climbing to about 1,500 feet, roll aggressively inverted until the nose pointed back at the ground, then roll back upright. She would visually acquire the bullseye as her plane raced toward the earth at 500 miles per hour, gently maneuver the sight in her Heads-Up-Display till it superimposed the target, mash the button to drop the bombs, then pull a 5G escape maneuver to get her nose away from the rapidly rising terrain. It was called a low-pop and it was the most dynamic and intense way to deliver a bomb you could imagine. The only problem was, once they were in the pop, away from the safety of the radar masking ground, they would be exposed immediately to the bandit—the bandit who was circling like a hungry shark just ten miles away. She needed to be perfect to nail all of the mission objectives. Stay low, pop, drop, fight, cruise home like a boss.

  In the Heads-Up-Display she noticed her symbology change to Ground Attack mode, then flash back to Air-to-Air. “Fuck,” Wedge cursed and the Heads-Up-Display symbology flickered back and forth again. “Hey Silvers,” he said. “You’re gonna have to hit the button up front. Mine isn’t working.”

  “Okay.” She forced herself to look inside the cockpit to find the button. She knew it was on the left side of her panel, about halfway down in a cluster of similar looking buttons. As her eyes flashed back and forth, outside to inside, she instinctively put the slightest back pressure on the stick; at this speed and altitude, impact with Mother Earth was just a blink away and her brain unconsciously compensated. In the second and a half it took to locate the A/G button and mash it, her jet climbed through 500 feet.

  “Silvers! Heads up, we’re climbing.”

  She jerked her head up and shoved the stick forward, but it was too late. “Roman Two, bandits have you, ten miles west. Hot, medium, fast.”

  Busted.

  She was just two miles from her pop point. Fifteen seconds. The target would be on her nose a couple of miles beyond that. “Oh, man. I can still drop on the target,” she pleaded with Wedge. “I can see it!” But she knew the answer before she released the intercom switch.

  “No way. The bandit’s only ten miles away. They’d be on us in the dive. Abort target run. Climb and face the threat. We’ve got to fight our way home. NOW!”

  “FUUUCK!” she screamed silently as she jammed the throttles to full power, pulling the jet almost pure vertical. Then she arced west to face the bandit head on.

  Two valleys over, racing toward a different target, Dusty was absorbing the controller’s transmissions like body blows. “JT, we’ve got to get out of here. Remember the number one priority!”

  She drifted right, leaning toward the known quantity of home base like a horse eager to get back to the barn. Instantly her radar warning gear sounded an ominous warble. She jerked her head to the right as a Smoky SAM launched at her 2 o’clock with a huge plume of white smoke. She felt herself give up, like it was a game of tag and she’d been spotted. Game over.

  “Break left!” JT commanded, and she snapped back into action.

  Dusty slammed her Rhino into a hard left turn. The fake missile shot straight up two hundred feet before running out of energy and tipping over harmlessly. As Dusty exited the SAM ring, the radar warning silenced. But she was well frayed.

  “The bandits are in the north target area,” JT coached from the backseat. “We’re fine. Keep pressing.”

  Dusty shook her head attempting to regain focus. Just keeping the plane out of the dirt required her full concentration, which meant that her tactical awareness had been reduced to one dimension. She drifted left into another SAM ring, and another Smoky SAM launched while the warning blared in their ears again.

  “Dusty, tighten the fuck up. They’re just Smokys. Stay on course and get your head back in the game.”

  “No, we’ve been made. I’m out of here!” She pulled back hard on the stick and kept her pull through a perfectly executed Immelman. As she leveled off at 10,000 feet, heading back in the opposite direction toward base, she was flooded with a sense of relief.

  “Dusty, NO!” JT implored from the back.

  “Roman Four. Observe your abort.” The transmission from the controller filled their ears almost immediately. “Green south. Nearest threat, two minutes north.”

  Back in Silvers’ cockpit the same transmission was received, but completely ignored as background noise. She was too busy with her own problems to process someone else’s. As she and Wedge punched through 15,000 feet she pointed directly toward the threat sector while the radar scraped a path in front like a blade on a snow plow. Almost instantly it grabbed a lock on the bandit on their nose. “Got it, Wedge!” Her heart raced as she thumbed the radio switch. “Roman Two has contact; target, three-zero-zero at ten, seventeen thousand, hot; declare.”

  The controller came back the moment she released her switch. “That’s your bandit.”

  “Copy.” As she made the transmission and fingered the trigger to simulate shooting a missile, her radar warning screamed high warble indicating Air-to-Air radar lock on her Rhino. She was being targeted. The visual display showed a solid ugly strobe on her nose. “Roman Two, spiked!” she broadcast while simultaneously slamming the stick to the right and pulling hard. When the strobe was exactly down her wing line she reversed into an easy left turn to hold the bandit at her 9 o’clock. It was a nervous game of chicken; she was only ten miles away from an adversary intent on shooting her from the sky, but while she was perpendicular to his flight path, at this range, his radar would be unable to hold a lock. With no radar-lock, the missiles wouldn’t be able to guide against her. That was the plan at least.

  She and Wedge were glued eyes-left outside the cockpit, searching the sky for the tiny spec that would be the F-5 at eight to ten miles. It would be nearly impossible to spot, skinny as a needle homing in on them. She gimbaled her head inside the cockpit every couple of seconds referencing the radar warning screen, confirming she was holding the strobe at exactly 9 o’clock. With every fiber of her body she fought the urge to pull hard to the left to face the threat head on. Her hands twitched on the stick.

  As if he could read her mind Wedge shouted from the backseat. “Not yet! He won’t hold much longer.”

  Sure enough, a heartbeat later the warble abruptly ceased and the strobe disappeared from her screen. “I’m in!” She pitched back 90 degrees left, pulling hard to get her nose in the proper piece of sky as rapidly as possible. She and Wedge both groaned as the Rhino was subjected to over 7Gs. Halfway through the turn her radar snapped a lock again. 30 degrees to the left at 3.5 miles. “Got him!” she yelled to Wedge.
>
  The bandit was flying a vector that would take him past her left side. He had obviously lost her in the turn and hadn’t picked her up visually yet. She marveled at the fact, staring at the F-5 in the left corner of her Heads-Up-Display. She was entranced by the strange magic of finding an unfamiliar jet in this huge piece of sky. The details were mesmerizing, and coming into focus as she streaked ever closer: single tail, missiles on both wingtips, foreign-looking paint scheme.

  Wedge’s voice broke her study. “Shoot it!”

  She pulled hard once again to get the target directly on her nose. A ‘SHOOT’ cue appeared and she simultaneously pulled the trigger while broadcasting “Fox-three, bandit seventeen thousand, left hand turn.” A digital counter appeared in her Heads-Up-Display at trigger squeeze, marking the seconds before calculated missile impact. The F-5 finally spotted her and banked hard to face her just as the counter reached zero.

  “Kill bandit, seventeen thousand,” she transmitted, fighting the urge to yell in victory. Act like you’ve been here before.

  “Nice job!” Wedge shouted from the back, but the celebration was brief. “Break right! One more coming, two o’clock high.”

  She snap-rolled her head, and the Rhino. “Got him.” She thumbed out countermeasures to decoy any missiles as her radar locked onto the new bandit. “Fox-3 on bandit at 23,000 feet.” She pulled the trigger then stared at the counter until it reached zero. “Kill two.” The second bandit flashed by her right wing 200 feet away at nearly 900 miles per hour combined speed.

  On cue, the controller picked up his cadence. “Roman Two, copy splash two bandits. Green south. Nearest threat fifteen miles north.”

  “Roman Two copies,” she keyed her radio. “Heading south for home.”

  As she cleaned up the switches in her cockpit for the now-mundane act of flying home, Wedge’s voice came through her headset, “Nice job, Silvers.” She nodded silently, flushed with excitement and adrenaline, and forced herself to concentrate on flying the Rhino the short fifty miles back to El Centro. It was funny, something that would have thrilled her to the core just a few weeks ago now barely held her attention as she replayed the details of her engagement over and over. All too quickly the Rhino touched down, leaving her struggling to wipe the grin from her face before the canopy came up and the dry desert heat roiled into the cockpit.

  An hour later, after the last of the second wave had landed, the Ready Room was pulsing with the energy of the post-flight buzz. Slammer watched from the side, leaning on a counter sipping an ice-cold soda. His hair was a sweaty tangle and his flight suit unzipped to half-mast. He counted them all, one by one, just to make sure. Twenty sweaty bodies, including his, all safe on deck. More planes were lost in training than actual combat; fight like you train meant the margins for error were skinny.

  He watched the students milling about, trading stories and hand flying, glancing around the room self-consciously making sure they weren’t being laughed at. Dusty was in a small group with Bud and a couple of WSOs. She affected a subdued smile and didn’t contribute much, just shrugging occasionally.

  JT pulled a soda from the fridge then leaned against the counter next to him. He was dryer than average, having been first plane back, and he gave off a prickly aura.

  “How’d it go?”

  JT tipped his head back and took a deep swig. “Fine.” He pointedly avoided eye contact, scanning the action in the room.

  This, Slammer thought, is going to be an interesting debrief. He stood, giving JT a little jab in the stomach as he walked away. He strode by a crowd of excited faces surrounding Silvers. She would make a lousy poker player. As usual, her face told the real story, contradicting her words, “…no, it was cool. They flew right in front of me. I didn’t do shit.” He made a mental note; someday he would win a lot of money at cards off her.

  “Butts in chairs everybody,” he said, reaching the front of the room. “Let’s get to it.” As the students and instructors took their seats, he couldn’t help but notice that JT sat by himself in the last row.

  Slammer had scrawled the names of each crew in descending order on the left side of a large whiteboard. Across the top he had written the three objectives and underlined them. RTB for Return to Base, Target and lastly, Bandits. To the right of the crew names, and under the objectives, he had drawn little boxes. “You’ll get into the specifics of your flight with your instructor but we’ll do an overall debrief before we break up.”

  He looked over at his WSO as he moved his marker over the first box. “Dingle, how’d we do?”

  Dingle smiled, then wiped it away, trying his best to appear professional. “Yessir, we made it home alright.” Slammer placed a check in the RTB box then hovered the marker over the next while Dingle spat brown goop into his ever-present dip can. “And we were on time, on target.” If he were wearing his cowboy hat he would have tipped it back in self-congratulation.

  Again, Slammer checked the box and slid to the next. “And the egress?”

  Dingle grinned, little flecks of chewing tobacco sticking to his teeth. “Only one bandit dumb enough to get in the way. One kill.”

  He checked the last box. “Excellent work Dingle. Hundred percent success.” He moved back to the left side of the board next to Silvers and Wedge. “Silvers?”

  She sat in the front row, her earnest game-face back on. “Yes, sir. We made it back.” Slammer checked that box and moved to the second. “And we were on time.”

  His hand remained poised over the second box as he turned to look at her. “And the target?”

  He saw some color rise in her face but she spoke with a strong voice. “Ah..we were exposed. We were forced to abort and fight our way out.”

  He dropped his arm, turning to face the room. “Okay, how was that?”

  “Well, we killed two.”

  He could tell she was proud yet fighting not to show it, and this sparked a kernel of irritation in his belly. He pressed the point.

  “No, how were you exposed? Second to making it back in one piece, the target was your main priority. You heard the brief right?” He took two steps toward her as he was speaking. His irritation had burst into a conflagration and he was full-on pissed now.

  “In this scenario the ammo in the dump’s got to be destroyed before the ground offensive starts.” He felt the temperature in the room drop.

  Silvers sat straighter, fumbling to vocalize what had happened, clearly afraid her next word would set him off further. “I… I climbed when I was hitting my Air-to-Ground switch. We popped up on their radar.”

  He turned. “Wedge?”

  Wedge sat with his arms crossed. “All true, Slammer. Our bust.”

  He circled the empty Target box a few times with his marker then turned back toward the group of students, all of whom had lost every last ounce of cheer they carried from the flight. Silvers sat still as a pale statue, mute and unmoving. He skipped her last objective, Bandits, altogether and poised his marker over the next crew’s box, working hard to tamp down his surge of anger. “Rogers?”

  Even the class clown seemed to have lost his sense of humor. “On time, on target, no opposition on the way out.” But then he blurted, “Silvers must have killed ’em all.”

  Slammer took a deep breath, feeling his ire rekindling. He slowly capped the dry erase marker as he turned to face the group. He looked directly at Rogers, calming himself and forcing a crooked smile he truly didn’t feel. “That may be true, Ensign. But now we have to launch another strike to take care of that ammo dump, putting lives at risk again. And the next time we go in, they’ll know we’re coming. You want to go on that mission?”

  He half-turned to the board and called out, “Dusty?”

  From the back row JT preempted Dusty’s answer, standing and walking for the exit. Over his shoulder he called out, “Nothing to report. The target was swamped with bandits so we aborted. We accomplished the number one objective. Everyone came home.” JT left the Ready Room before Slammer could
launch a follow-up.

  He turned to face Dusty. “That so, Dusty?” She nodded silently. From the corner of his eye he noticed Silvers turn away in disgust. “All right, then. Nice job. Sometimes it takes more discipline to recognize when it’s time to quit. The abort criteria exist for a reason. If you’re in an impossible situation and you abort, you win. If you screw up a good situation…” He shrugged, letting the implication hang in the air.

  Silvers jumped to her feet and spat out, “Understand the debrief is over, sir?”

  Goddamn, this group was so NKR it drove him crazy. Who the hell was running this show? But he knew at this point nobody would learn anything from a couple more checks in boxes. “Yes. The students are free to go. We’ll catch the second wave after chow.”

  Silvers joined the shuffling group as they made their way down the center aisle. Slammer saw Moto, right behind her, place his hands on her shoulders and give a quick squeeze. Then he watched as she shrugged her buddy off and elbowed her way around Pig till she was just behind Dusty. Leaning in low and covering her mouth, Silvers whispered something he couldn’t hear. Dusty continued her slow walk with the others, ignoring the comment.

  He continued to watch the procession with a dour look until Wedge sidled up next to him. “She did get two kills. And the Air-to-Ground tile didn’t work in the back. She got distracted pushing the one up front.”

  His eyes followed Silvers as she exited. “Wedge, you know as well as I do that she fucked up. You can’t have a lapse like that and expect to be a fighter pilot. I don’t give a shit who’s pushing the buttons.”

  Wedge shrugged as if to say ‘I’ve seen worse’ but instead he said, “What about that bullshit with Dusty?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to JT.” That’s for damn sure, he added silently. Fucking NKR.

  Chapter 10

  12 January

  Manila, Philippines

  It was a hot muggy night made all the worse by the environs the commando had squeezed himself into. Like a contorted magician’s assistant waiting to be sawn in half, he’d folded himself into the tight confines of the electrical compartment of a large private airplane. For six hours he slowed his breathing, his heart, and his mind as the plane sat poaching in the steamy hangar. He turned off each individual muscle starting at his lower back, which was bent double. Then his hamstrings, which desperately wanted to pull his kneecaps from where they were planted into his forehead. Lastly each toe, powering them down in pairs from the little to the hallux. When it finally came, he was barely aware of the jerk from the tug as it pulled the Gulfstream 650 from the shade into the blazing afternoon sun.