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He turned to his monitor. Their radar was off, but he could watch other, active radars with his system, picking up the Iranian EWs as they arrowed from the coast. He began to log each one for the future. Someday, he thought, all of this will be done by a computer. Christine, however, couldn’t handle the math of multiple radar cuts.
Alan found that he didn’t like what he saw. His divided self tossed the information back and forth, TACCO to 10 to TACCO, and what they agreed on was that there was an unusual amount of Iranian radar activity. It indicated what they both saw as a very high degree of preparedness. Alan hadn’t expected to surprise the Iranians; the Persian Gulf is too small for that. But he had watched the IADS from routine flights, and he knew what it looked like on an ordinary night—a lot of bored operators flicking on and off, some sites never coming online in a whole seven-hour hop. This looked more like a carnival; everybody was up. Everybody but the SAM sites; they were asleep, while the EW net seemed to have insomnia.
He looked at his watch. The strike was due to go feet-dry (over the coast) in two minutes.
Somewhere out there was his father, doing the glory thing. He knew his father well enough for that. He knew the slightly husky tone when he spoke that word, glory, the refusal to elaborate. Glory had magnetism for Alan now, too, although when he had been a teenager he had thought it was bullshit, something old men invented to get young ones to die for them. Now he lived with men who believed that glory was the goal of life: men of a certain kind—real men, they would have said—went where it drew them. He was not yet sure what kind of man he was, but he knew he felt that pull.
But you could think about glory and continue to massage data for only so long. Then something in the data fell together and you forgot about the glory. Now, a disquieting pattern showed: even in EMCON, one of the E-2C Hawk-eyes was running the datalink, and a series of neat diamonds, denoting friendly aircraft and ships, lay over the screen like coarse mesh. What was now clear was that the activity of the IADS matched the diamonds. It did not take the Intel half of his head to tell the TACCO that the Iranians had this raid pegged.
That’s what the Nav gets paid for, he thought. Better equipment and better training ought to do the job. No sweat. Right?
POI Sheldon Bonner sat in the head and felt his entire gut shiver, as if there were ice there instead of the fire that seemed to explode under him. It had been getting worse for days, diarrhea like something you picked up in some godawful liberty port where you couldn’t drink the water or eat the fruit. Sick bay had given him pills. Christ, what a joke.
“Jeez, Boner,” a voice said from the next stall. “What’d you do, swallow some of the ordnance? Christ, if I smelled like that I’d kill myself.”
“Fuck off. I’m sick.”
“I’d tell you to blow it out your ass, Boner, but that seems to be your specialty. Whoo-hoo! Jesus Christ, ask for a transfer, will you?”
His hands were still shaking. He had seen the pilot look at him and he had forced himself to go on setting the IFF code, when what he wanted to do was drop the gun and run. The guy had looked right at him. Fucking skipper of the squadron, helmet all fluorescent orange tape, one of the joy-boys, guts and glory, all that shit. Fuck him. Let him see what it was like when he got to Iran.
He felt his bowels let go again. It would be like this for another week.
It’s worth it, he told himself. He tried to see the boat he would buy. He had a mental picture he called up at night before he went to sleep, him and his boy on the new boat. Fishing on the St John’s. Beer in the cooler. Then he’d tell the boy about the scheme and the money and how they were going to be partners. Together. Just the two of them. It would be wonderful. It would.
His insides heaved and squirted and he groaned aloud.
2315 Zulu. The Iranian Coast.
Franci worked with the intensity of a man at last able to do what he understood—tracking contacts, passing data, answering the telephone—using technology. He was one of the very few who understood how the electronic fortress works, and he had created his own informal phone link with others like him. For the duration of the raid, he was alive.
Now, he knew that a rain of anti-radiation missiles had begun. To turn a radar on was to invite death; he did not. Yet, through the eyes of a radar on a hill thirty miles behind him, he was able to watch the Americans come on.
The trailer door opened; a surprisingly courteous voice said, “Who is in charge, please?” It was a Revolutionary Guard full colonel. Everybody but Franci’s officer pointed at Franci.
“I am in charge,” the officer said.
“Show me the situation.”
The officer turned smoothly to Franci. “Show the colonel the situation.”
Franci didn’t care who got the credit or what the pecking order was; he was caught up in the pleasure of doing the job. “They are coming in two strikes from the carriers, about forty miles apart. Northern strike will pass directly over us—unless we’re the target, Allah forbid. Seven minutes to arrival.”
The colonel handed him a cellular telephone. “Pass course and speed data to my shooter. No radar illumination until you are so ordered.”
Franci was enthusiastic about not illuminating the radar: why make themselves a target?
The colonel left the trailer; Franci’s officer teetered on his toes and watched the clock; Franci passed data and plotted vectors. Six minutes. Five minutes. Four. Three.
The Revolutionary Guard detachment fired their mysterious missile at six miles. Radar recorded one plane falling below the formation—an evident hit. Franci reported it on the cellphone.
“Illuminate your radar. Fire all missiles, whether targeted or not. This is a direct order from the colonel.” It was like an order to commit suicide.
His fire-control radar stayed on for less than ten seconds before a HARM missile, launched minutes before, identified it as a first-priority target and zeroed in.
Franci felt the earth heave, and God reached for him.
2322 Zulu. The Gulf.
A new signal had just lanced out from the mainland. Alan hooked it and read its stats. Weird—not anything he remembered. He leafed through his notes and didn’t find it. Then, too quickly, it disappeared and he was left to log it. Somewhere in the parameters of a Chinese early warning radar, he thought. It had been on only eight seconds. Maybe somebody had shot it with a HARM. Maybe its operator had panicked at what he saw and shut down.
It had gone on within seconds of the feet-dry time and within four miles of the northern target group’s route. It must have seen the whole northern strike package. Alan dialed up Strike Common, the radio frequency on which most chatter would occur when EMCON was dropped.
“Touchdown,” a voice in his helmet said. EMCON was over.
“Packers!” another voice cried, and the plane seemed to drop out from under him.
Packers were unfriendly aircraft that had leaked through the forward screen. To four men riding a big, fat grape, the word meant danger. Alan had a brief recall of an argument in CVIC about whether the tankers would be too close to the coast. We are, we are.
Rafe had the plane in a dive for the surface.
Alan punched up his datalink display. Christine gave a faint whine.
The display died.
“Shit, Senior! We lost the back end,” Alan groaned. Without conscious thought, he reached up, toggled the system switch off, counted ten, and toggled it on again.
Christine continued to dive.
As Alan tried to urge a glimmer from Christine’s brain, he checked and rechecked the chaff and flare counters above his head.
“Dumped the load,” he said into the mike. His anxiety showed in his voice. When you do a cold dump in an S-3 you lose a lot—not least the ability to see if the Packer is after you.
Rafe came on the line. He had long since got his confidence back after the double bolter, and four months of flying had made his decisions crisper. He was busy just then, but this was what he was trained for, no bullshit, just flying. “Masks on. Spy, get that fucking computer up and tell me what’s happening. Chaff and flare are armed.”
Alan reached up and fired a chaff/flare sequence. The numbers counted down; three chaff, two flares down, plenty to go. “Chaff/flare checks good, Senior’s got a reinit.” Alan’s fingers flew. He input the vital data—targets and known SAM sites—while Senior struggled to restore the datalink. Alan had to reinput his hotlist of radar contacts. When he hit the input button he saw that Senior had the datalink back up—and the news was bad.
Senior Chief Craw was drawling into the headset, “One bandit southeast nineteen NM and heading right at us. About 540 knots.”
“Spy! What is it? MiG-29?”
If it is we’re dead, he thought. Where the hell is our CAP? We had an F-14 out here ten minutes ago; his wingman had a hydraulics failure, but—
Alan found their missing CAP just as Narc did. “Fucking REO!” Narc shouted. Their protection had done his job and made a run at the intruder, but a nervous NFO and an inexperienced pilot had ended in a missed intercept and a bad shot. Narc had their Fighter Common on his comm and was trying to get the Tomcat back.
The intruder continued to bear down on them.
Why didn’t he turn and engage the Tomcat? He didn’t even seem to know that the fighter was there. Alan looked at his datalink and got a radar cut that ran like a sword through the unid box. The cut was rare; in effect, it was unknown, not present in the laundry list of radars and attached planes flown by threat countries. His head, however, unlike the datalink, was stuffed with such unconsidered trifles: he knew what it was.
“Chinese-built A-5 Fantan! Two Atoll AA missiles, shitty little radar. Rafe, get below eight hundred feet and he can’t get a tone with his birds.”
Rafe liked knowledge. He also liked certainty, and Alan sounded absolutely certain. And it was better than nice that it was a third-world pilot in a first-generation piece of shit chasing him, not some Russian mere in a MiG-29—an F-18 in drag—looking for a score.
“Okay, got it, we’re going through two thousand and I’d really like to know his stall speed and has he got a gun?”
Alan had his kneeboard packet open and the A-5 card was glaring at him, printed for some reason on fluorescent orange card stock. “Two 20-millimeters. 165 knots clean. Worse for this guy, he’s got to have a drop.”
He looked at the screen; Christ he’s close, Alan thought, and all hell broke loose.
“Chaff flare!” shouted Narc, and he fired the sequence himself from the front. Narc’s RAW gear showed a launch somewhere behind him. Alan leaned forward against the power of the dive and tried to read their altitude. “Below 1000!” he said, and Rafe pulled hard to the right, worse than the hardest break Alan had ever seen, and moonlit sea reached up hungrily toward the Senior’s porthole to pull Christine down. The altimeter was now at two hundred feet: Christine did not believe in registering lower altitudes. Alan forced his arm up against the G force and put the chaff on automatic. He suddenly didn’t trust all the data ingested at intel school. Had anybody ever actually fought an A-5? Fuck, what if all the intelligence was bullshit? Wasn’t that the point Peretz had tried to make to him?
Rafe rolled the plane 180 degrees and started a more comfortable turn. A flash went by Alan’s porthole. “Missiles timed out,” Alan said, mostly sure that he was right. Craw was shouting on Strike Common, but nobody was going to save them; they were too far from the strike package and too far from the ship. In five minutes, every Tomcat and Hornet in naval aviation would be crisscrossing this airspace in search of air medals, but five minutes is an age in aerial combat and this was now.
“He’s on top of us,” Alan said.
Christine bucked savagely. He felt a slap at his left elbow, and a star-edged hole appeared in the windscreen.
They knew Christine had been hit by the 20-millimeter. They felt the rounds go into her and waited for disaster; at two hundred feet, any glitch and they were dead.
Rafe tightened his turn and dumped more speed. Christine was such a peculiar bird, he muttered, that he swore she flew better with the damage. “Nice shooting, Tex,” Rafe murmured, and he eased off on the speed again and Christine was almost standing still in the air.
The last chaff pod emptied with a clunk. Another round hit Christine’s wing and she started to leak fuel and pull to the right. The airspeed indicator registered 165. Rafe tilted the wings savagely and suddenly tightened his turn. His crew could not see the death’s-head grin that clutched his face, an expression of vengeance and anguished hope and a desperate anxiety that came from seeing the whitecaps, not so much below his window as next to it. He was muttering a fat-grape pilot’s prayer: Follow me, you mother, follow me, down and around and down and—
A brief, violent flare lit the rearview mirror.
The silence of the cockpit seemed so profound to Alan that the whistle of air through the hole in the canopy was somehow outside it. He saw Christine’s interior with unearthly clarity—Craw’s silhouette, the screens, the gleam of his thermos.
Then he knew they had levelled off and were starting to climb.
The radar cuts from the A-5’s gun were gone.
Abruptly, Rafe punched his fist into the air over his head and gave a whoop. “Gotcha!”
Then, calmly, into the mike, he drawled, “Guardian, this is Gatoraid 2, splash one bandit, over,” and he laughed. And laughed. “We got him. I mean, we fucking got him!” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing.
Later, when he would tell this story to explain his Air Medal, he would lay his hand flat on the table and he would say, “You want to know how low I was? I was so low—I was so low that they had to scrape barnacles off Christine at the next maintenance check.” And he would pause, and smile, and a little of this same delighted laughter would burble out. “And you wanta know how low that A-5 Fantan was? On the bottom, ba-bee!”
“That was beautiful!” Narc crowed. There was no fawning in his voice. “Fucking beautiful.”
“What happened?” Senior Chief Craw asked. “Tomcat get him?”
“Rafe fuckin’ dumped him in the water,” Narc said. Rafe had managed to stop laughing. “He just went lower and slower till the raghead stalled.”
Rafe chuckled—not the release of tension any more, just amusement. “We got a kill,” he murmured. “An S-3 got a kill!”
They all began to laugh. More, and louder, and then Alan was pounding on Craw’s shoulder, and he realized what they had done. Rafe’s flying, yes, but also his knowledge and Craw and Narc.
Christine climbed the night, bullet holes whistling, content that she had killed again.
2335 Zulu. The Gulf.
Strike Common was a tangle of voices. Southern Iran was covered in a net of radar cuts, AAA, and SAM radars coming on and off. The IADS had done well for the first few minutes; Alan had missed the climax, when their AAA and SAMs came online; but the HARMs and the jamming were beating them now. He saw no more hostile aircraft; their leaker had been a loony or a lone night patrol.
Millions of dollars were spent in seconds as he heard HARM shots called on Common and watched radar sites go off the air. Most of the strike package was still over the target, but some A-6s had already turned for home, and Alan found one only twenty miles southeast of them. He hooked it and found that it was limping along at only a thousand feet.
“What’s happening out there?” Rafe asked. He and Narc had assessed their damage and decided they could still give gas. That they were there, flying, doing routine, seemed an anticlimax; yet, astonishing as the attack and their survival had been, it was for the routine that they were there.
“We got one wounded bird coming in,” Alan said, “eighteen miles out and wrong IFF but he’s low and slow and on his radial. Try and raise him on Common. Maybe needs gas to land.”
Narc got the Hawkeye on comm. Alan’s guess was confirmed: northern strike lead in a wounded bird, thought he could land it, needed gas at a low altitude. Rafe nodded; after going almost underwater to down the Fantan, he figured he could give gas while taxiing, and Christine’s fuel leak didn’t worry him. They rogered up and turned southeast, headed to intercept.
Alan was entranced with the electronic images of the raid, rapt, watching the Iranian IADS fall apart. The target EW sites and their protective SAMs went down under the strike packages and did not come back up as the strike came off target. There was a two-hundred-mile gap in the IADS. If they could get a plane that far, Alan thought, the Bahrainis could bomb Tehran now.
“Hey, Spy, get the FLIR online. I want to know how bad off this guy is. He doesn’t have radio.”
The FLIR is an infrared camera for watching surface targets, particularly surfaced submarines, at night. Bored S-3 crews on training hops use it to watch junior fighter jocks make fools of themselves trying to get their fuel probes into the basket at the end of the refueling hose. Now, Alan switched to it from the raid with regret. He couldn’t watch the strike and FLIR at the same time; they both came up on the same screen.
Air-to-air refueling is an art at the best of times. Pilots try to perfect the technique against the day they really need the gas. Good aircrews practice no-comms refueling, using signals passed by flashlight and by aircraft lights. Yet, it is hard enough to maneuver a high-speed aircraft so that the attached fuel probe locks into the much slower tanker’s basket; with the plane damaged, the pilot injured, it becomes torture.
Rafe made a good rendezvous with the wounded aircraft, an A-6 with a gash up the starboard side that went right through the cockpit.
Narc said, “He’ll need about five thousand,” and started to work the refueling computer. “Spy, have I got a basket out there?”
Alan got the basket dead center in the FLIR. “Bigger than life.” He was still thinking of the raid. The urgency of the A-5 attack on them, the abrupt release, had left him unfocused.
He did not hear the change in Narc’s voice as he cut the lights and said, “Oh, shit.” Then, “He’s hit bad. Losing power.” His tone was odd, but Alan did not register it. Only later would he learn that both men in the front end had seen the injured aircraft’s side number and knew who it was.
Rafe growled, “Soon as he’s in the basket, we’ll descend a little, give him some more airspeed, start a slowwww turn toward the boat. We’ll get him home.”
Poor sonofabitch, he was thinking. He meant Alan, not the wounded pilot.
Alan saw an infrared image of the A-6 pull into his field of view and realized that it was missing part of its canopy. The shock of it pulled him from his apathy, and he thought, This guy is hurt bad, and he began to function again. He was so intent then trying to figure out if the BN was still in the cockpit that seconds passed before he caught the glow of the pilot’s helmet, the head bent far forward.
Volleyball net. A-6.
Dad.
The wounded bird plowed forward toward the basket but lost altitude. The probe missed, and the basket banged the A-6 windscreen. Invisible to Alan in the dark, Craw flipped on the camera attached to the FLIR.
Alan, cold, said, “He’s losing it. He can’t hold his altitude.” The A-6’s movements had a dreamlike quality now, too slow, silent, eerily altered by the FLIR’s infrared. It seemed impossible that he was watching his father try to save himself. It seemed impossible that they were not back on the carrier, the mission over. Where was routine?
Rafe took Christine into a shallow dive. He was sure he could still save this one, get him his gas, get them all home. Fourteen hundred feet now; he had almost a minute to get him in the basket. He crawled. Surely bad things could not happen now.
Alan watched his father try again. In the slow dive, he came on straight and sure, but fifty feet from the basket something happened and the A-6 gave a shudder and disappeared from the screen again.
Alan whirled the FLIR back and forth until he found the aircraft again, now off to the left and right wing high. Slowly he tracked its attempts to try another pass.
Closer.
