Matt concentrated on his attack run. “Skid,” he called his wingman, “take the lead, we’ll lase. Ripple two.” Matt had told his wingman to lead the attack and pickle both his bombs on the first pass. Matt would take spacing and follow on theopposite arm of the B’nai attack and do the lasing. “Then get the hell out of Dodge,” he ordered.
“Roger, copy all,” Skid answered.
“Sounds good,” Martin’s voice said.
My God! Matt thought. How can he keep what he’s doing sorted out and still pay attention to what’s going on down here?
The two fighters started their run in. The TEWS scope was a mass of symbols and the audio was deafening him with chirps and wails. He turned the audio off and would rely on Furry to do his job. Now he could clearly see the compound housing the nerve gas plant and storage bunkers on the Nav FLIR. Furry worked the Target FLIR and told him, “Target identified.” It amazed Matt how familiar the target complex looked.
Sweat poured off him as he concentrated on the run. A string of tracers from a ZSU-23-4 arched across the sky in front of him. He heard himself breathing hard. “Piece of cake,” Furry said, his voice rapid and high-pitched. More tracers crisscrossed in front of him and he saw the bright flash of two Gadflies launching. Now Matt “paddled” off the autopilot and hand-flew the jet as they swung in on their side of the pincers.
Then: “Bombs gone.” It was Skid coolly announcing that he had gotten his bombs off onto their target, the main production plant. Matt had lost sight of him when they split up for the attack and it was reassuring to hear from him.
A Gadfly exploded, lighting the sky. In the bright flash, Matt could see Skid escaping underneath the fireball and more tracers reaching toward him. The second Gadfly exploded, but this time, there was no trace of his wingman.
“Lasing,” Furry shouted. Matt was concentrating on the Nav FLIR, using it to fly around the target. It was a good run and all systems were working perfectly. A Gadfly streaked by less than a hundred feet above the canopy. For some reason, its proximity fuse didn’t work and the missile went ballistic.
The plant erupted in an explosion as the first bomb hit within inches of where Furry had laid the laser. The bombs were fuse-delayed and the first one penetrated to the first basement before it exploded. The second bomb flew right through die explosion and burrowed through to the thirdbasement, burying itself in four feet of concrete before it exploded. The labs and test chamber where the nerve gas had been developed disappeared in a fiery blast. But the scientists who had given Iraq die deadly weapon had been paid off long before and were safe in their homes in Europe and China. Only two technicians were on duty. A series of secondary explosions turned the plant into an inferno and flames belched and mushroomed over three hundred feet into the air.
Furry shouted, “GO!” as a wall of tracers mushroomed in front of the F-15. Matt broke hard left, still below a hundred feet. He flew around a radio tower and headed for safety as Viper 07 and 08 hit the first of the storage bunkers.
Then it was all behind them and Matt became aware of the chatter over the radios. He had effectively tuned it out. Still, he had been conscious of what was going on around him throughout the attack. It was called situational awareness. He reengaged the autopilot and coupled it to the TFR. He checked his fuel and ran a cockpit check, making sure they had not taken battle damage. Then it hit him, the simulator rides the Gruesome Twosome had put them through had been worse.
“Skid,” Matt radioed, “say position.”
“North of target,” his wingman replied, his words staccato-quick. “Heading for home plate. Battle damage. Took a hit after we pickled. ZSU-Twenty-three.”
“Need help?” Matt queried.
“Negative, I can handle it. This bird’s a tank.”
Matt hit the transmit button and called the AWACS. “Aldo, any trade?” He was asking if there was a bandit in the area he could engage.
“Negative Zero-Three,” Aldo replied. “Are you continuing to your second target?”
“Affirmative,” Matt answered. They headed to the northwest and Mosul.
Martin’s voice came over the radio. “Sean, say position.” There was no reply. “Aldo, do you have a paint on Viper Zero-Two?” Martin asked.
“Affirmative,” the AWACS replied. “Viper Zero-Two is returning to base, com out.” Martin relaxed—Leary was simply having radio problems and hightailing it back to Diyarbakir.
The second part of Trinity called for Matt to drop anyremaining GBU-24s on the air base at Mosul as he egressed. Other Vipers would do the same or hit the air base at Kirkuk. Since Mosul was a secondary target, they would use the great glide capability of the GBU-24, stand off from the base, toss the bomb, and lase as best they could. But they would not press in like they had on the nerve gas plant.
Furry took control of the radar and made another patch map to update their position. Then he checked his systems for battle damage. “Damn,” he muttered, “I don’t believe it.” The TEWS had gone strangely quiet and was only detecting the periodic sweep of a search radar. “The SAMs, the triple A, have gone off the air,” he explained.
“They’re still out there,” Matt answered. “Probably got their radars in standby and will bring them up when they get a visual. I don’t like it.” An inner alarm bell was going off, warning him that the Iraqis were using a new tactic. “Amb, radar delivery only on this one. Toss the damn bomb as far out as we can. It’s time to get the hell out of Dodge while we still can.”
“Roger,” Furry answered. He went to work using the highvolume radar and computer. While he updated their position again, Matt set them up for an air-to-ground radar delivery. After he had updated their nav system, Furry placed the radar cursors over the base, which was now inside thirty nautical miles. “Going for the runway,” he said. He refined the cursor placement. Then: “Designating.” Man stroked the throttles and pushed them up to just below the Mach. They were a well-trained team.
Matt’s inner alarm bell was now gonging at him. He paddled off the autopilot when they closed to inside twenty nautical miles. “It doesn’t feel right,” he mumbled, primed to react at the first hint of trouble.
“Ready, ready,” Furry said as they bore down on the release point where the system would automatically release the bomb. Matt mashed the pickle button and held it.
The TEWS erupted with symbols and its audio went wild just as they felt the bomb separate from the right pylon. The night exploded with tracers, engulfing them. “SAM three o’clock!” Furry yelled. But Matt had already seen it and jerked the big fighter into a tight turn barely a hundred feet above the ground, bringing the missile to his nose. Tracers were now passing directly in front of them. Matt brought thenose up and watched the SAM commit on his upward vector, hoping the tracers would pass underneath him. Then he wrenched the Eagle into a hard downward turn, leveling off at seventy-five feet. His heart pounded as he saw the missile follow him, and for a fraction of a moment, he knew he was dead. But the missile could not follow him through the turn at such a close range and broached sideways before it tumbled onto the ground. He concentrated on the HUD, relying on the Nav FLIR to give him the visual clues he needed to fly so close to the ground at night, and escape to safety. Only that strange sixth sense had kept them alive.
“Goddamn flak trap!” Furry shouted, venting the intense pressure of the short engagement. “No radar warning on that bastard. Probably an SA-Nine.”
Great, Matt thought, they’re backing up Gadflies and the ZSUs with SA-9s. The SA-9 was a short-range SAM that used passive infrared guidance and was reported to be effective below a hundred feet. He keyed his radio, “Viper flight, secondary targets are flak traps. RTB. Repeat, RTB.”
“Border in nine minutes,” Furry said, getting back to business.
When they crossed into Turkey, the tension from the mission started to shred. Both men could feel it wash off them as they climbed to twelve thousand feet for the last sixty miles to Diyarbakir. Matt jotted a few
notes down on his knee pad as he thought of them. “Hey, Amb, what was all this shit over Kirkuk about it being a piece of cake?”
“I lied,” Furry answered.
26
Johar and Samir were standing outside the entrance to the squadron watching the remnants of their squadron recover. “I can’t believe it,” Samir said, his eyes glued to the wall of flames and smoke on the runway. “One bomb did all that.”
The lone GBU-24 had hit the runway at the halfway mark, blasting a deep crater thirty feet across. Frag from the bomb had reached out over a half mile, killing people and destroying trucks caught in the open. Two Flankers had also died in the blast. One was rolling out after touching down and its tail had been blown off before it exploded. The other Flanker had been on short final and had taken the full force of the blast head-on and had pitched into the ground, spreading wreckage and burning fuel along two thousand feet of runway.
The two Iraqi pilots were silent as a Flanker touched down on the unpaved surface that paralleled the main runway. They dissected the landing with a professional eye, appreciating the Soviets’ near-fanatical obsession with designing aircraft that could take off and land from poor surfaces. “That’s the last one,” Johar said. “I didn’t see Mana land. Think he bought it?” Samir shrugged. Neither felt any great sense of loss.
Samir couldn’t take his eyes off the flaming runway and the wreckage of the two Flankers. “You think they’ve got some new type of smart bomb?”
“Maybe,” Johar allowed. “Or it was a golden BB.” A hard edge clipped his words. The two pilots incinerated on the runway had been his friends. “Only two made it back,” he said. His eyes squinted and his jaw hardened as a burning desire for revenge consumed him. He wanted to even the score.
When the crews had finished debriefing intelligence, they straggled into the office at the back of the hangar at Diyarbakir that had been turned into a makeshift command post. Most of them sat on the floor against the wall and drank Cokes or coffee while Martin paced the floor like a caged tiger. One of the radio operators in the next room looked around the corner and told him that Duster, the RC-135, was coming in to land. “It must be important if it’s landing here,” the colonel mumbled. He ordered the security team that had deployed with them out of Stonewood to establish a perimeter guard around the highly classified aircraft when it parked.
“What the hell is going on?” Martin barked. “That was a fuckin’ milk run.” Matt shot Furry a look, wondering how the veteran wizzo would react to that pronouncement. Furry’s face was impassive.
“If that was a milk run,” one of the pilots mumbled, “I don’t want to see the real thing.” Matt agreed with him. The mission had been much tougher than the attack he and Furry had flown against the Syrian First Army in Lebanon. The Iraqis had learned much from the Kuwait war.
“Okay,” Martin said, “let’s get to it.” For the next few minutes, they recaptured the mission, discussing results and what had gone wrong. It looked like they had hit and destroyed the nerve gas facility as planned. “Let’s hope the recce pukes confirm the BDA you’re claiming,” Martin said. He knew how overenthusiastic crews could be in reporting bomb damage assessment. “Fumble Nuts”—he turned to Matt—“did you get a bomb on Mosul?” Matt told him yes, but that the results were unknown. Then he described the flak trap he and Furry had run into as they approached the base. Martin was nodding his head.
“Calling Off the secondary attacks was a good decision,” he said. “Obviously, they’ve got a damn good ground observer net around their air bases. SA-Nines are a perfect complement to the Gadfly—gives them low-altitude coverage. They’ve got their act together.”
A very confident Sean Leary related how his Have Quick radio went “tits up” in the middle of an engagement at the exact moment he hosed down a Flanker. For a moment, he thought he had taken battle damage but it was a system malfunction. His crew chief had cannibalized a good black box out of Skid’s badly damaged F-15 and Leary was ready to go again. Skid’s F-15 wasn’t going to be flying for a long time.
The major running the maintenance team came into the command post. He told them that two other jets had taken battle damage and would be out of commission for a few days. The remaining nine aircraft were turned and ready for the hop back to Stonewood. “Who told you we were finished here?” Martin barked. “Find out what type of ordnance is available here.” The crews sat in shocked silence as the major beat a hasty retreat.
“Sir”—it was the command post controller—“Duster is landing now.” Martin gestured at Matt and Furry to follow him and stomped out of the room.
“Shit-oh-dear,” Furry said, sotto voce for the crews to hear, “his fangs are still out.”
Bill Carroll was standing in the open crew entrance of the RC-135 when the three officers reached the ramp. He yelled at one of the security guards who always flew on the aircraft to let them board. The guard checked their line badges and escorted them past the rope that had been strung around the recce bird. Carroll led them back through the maze of equipment racks and stations to a small open area near a buffet where meals could be heated. The mission commander, the colonel in charge of the technicians, joined them.
“Bad news,” Carroll said. “A truck convoy escaped before you hit the arsenal.”
“Why didn’t the AWACS detect the traffic like they did when the trucks went into the arsenal?” Matt asked. “We could have gone after them.”
The mission commander shook his head. “They had optimized their radar to detect aircraft and had turned the moving target indicator up to sixty miles an hour to reject any stationary or slow-moving returns. They’re painting the traffic now.” He produced a map that showed the convoy’s location on a highway ninety miles southwest of Kirkuk. “At least twenty-five trucks, all westbound. Be sure they’re hauling nerve gas.” The colonel couldn’t tell them that the RC-135 had monitored ground communications that reported the nerve gas was on the way.
The pieces started to fit for Matt. “So that’s why the bandits out of Kirkuk were holding thirty-five miles southwest of Kirkuk—they were in a CAP to protect the convoy.”
“That fits with the radio traffic we monitored,” Carroll added.
Martin grabbed the mission commander’s map and stared at it. “What’s this?” He poked at a spot on the map sixty miles in front of the convoy.
“A ferry crossing over the Euphrates River,” Carroll explained. “The convoy should reach there in about an hour and forty-five minutes.”
Martin erupted with orders. “Matt, you and Furry work out an attack on that convoy, try to take out the ferry and back ‘em up on the eastern side of the river. Make it look like we’re going back after the arsenal. But that’s a feint to open up the corridor. Use some of the jets strictly for air-to-air and nail any raghead that takes off from Mosul or Kirkuk. Colonel, you and Carroll are going to have to work wonders and convince the clueless wonders in the Puzzle Palace thatwe need a go for a reattack. We ain’t got a hell of a lota time.”
“I’ll try, Mike, I’ll try.” Both colonels knew how slow the wheels of command could turn.
Martin stared at them for a moment, “Give it your best shot. We’ve got to be airborne in seventy-five minutes to catch ‘em before they cross the river. I’ve got to find us some bombs and kick Maintenance’s ass to get ‘em uploaded.” Then he was out of the aircraft, running.
“Time is of the essence,” National Security Adviser Cagliari was saying, pointing out the obvious to the men in the White House’s Situation Room. “We must destroy that convoy before it crosses the Euphrates River.”
Only Bobby Burke, the DCI, was not convinced. “Mr. President, we’ve taken out the nerve gas facility. Now is the time to wait for Iraq’s reaction. We may have well accomplished our objective. And we can’t be sure that those trucks are transporting nerve gas.”
Pontowski leaned back in his chair, thinking. Burke was always the cautious one. Time to listen to the other side.
“General Cox, your views.”
The general rose and walked to the map on the wall in front of the President. He pointed to the ferry crossing. “Once across the Euphrates, they are still four hundred miles away from the fighting. It doesn’t make sense for them to convoy. They should be using airlift.” Then the general’s eyes fixed on A1 Sahra Air Base located twenty miles south of where the Iraqis had established their CAP to protect the escaping trucks. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Sir, there’s a damn good chance some of those trucks may have gone here,” he jabbed at A1 Sahra, “for airlift. Maybe the AWACS has monitored something. Let me get in contact with them.”
“Go ahead,” Pontowski said. Cox hurried into the communications room next door to talk directly to Aldo via satellite communications.
“Sir”—it was Burke—“we’re starting to chase ghosts here. We need to wait for hard intelligence. Also, we must take the Soviets’ reaction into account. I’m certain that the hardliners inside the Kremlin are going to come out on top. It’s going to be the cold war all over again if Marshal Stenilov and his thugs win.”
“Do you think so?” Pontowski said. “I wonder …”
The light on the telepanel in front of Cagliari blinked. He picked up the phone and listened before handing it to Pontowski. “Sir, it’s Melissa, from the hospital …” The President took the phone and listened. He thanked the woman and handed the phone back to Cagliari as Cox returned.
“The AWACS has been monitoring a great deal of activity around Al Sahra,” Cox told them. “Two aircraft landed a few minutes ago. Trucks are still on the highway headed for the ferry.”
Pontowski stared at the wall map and then slowly pushed himself to his feet. “Order the Forty-fifth to attack the convoy and the air base. Please tell my helicopter to stand by, I’m returning to the hospital.” He walked out of the room.
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