Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  But one rater, a year before he left his first PCS assignment, had only rated him “Above Average,” not “Outstanding.” He didn’t have a “firewalled” OER. One of his last raters at his first assignment had said “A few improvements will result in one of the Air Force’s finest aviators.” Translation: He had problems that he apparently wasn’t even trying to fix. He wasn’t officer material, let alone a candidate for early promotion! He wasn’t even promotable, let alone leadership material! How in the world did he even get promoted to major?

  What else? A master’s degree, yes, but only Squadron Officer School done, by correspondence—no advanced leadership schools. What in hell was he doing with his time? One temporary assignment with the U.S. Border Security Force—which went bust before the end of its third year, disgraced and discredited. His OERs at his second PCS assignment in Las Vegas were very good. His last OER had one three-star and two four-star raters—the four-star raters were the chief of staff of the Air Force and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a very impressive achievement. But there were very few details of exactly what he did there to deserve such high-powered raters. He had some of the shortest rater’s comments Norman had ever seen—lots of “Outstanding officer,” “Promote immediately,” and “A real asset to the Air Force and the nation” type comments, but no specifics at all. His flying time seemed almost frozen—obviously he wasn’t doing much flying. No flying, but no professional military schools? One temporary assignment, totally unrelated to his primary field? This guy was a joke.

  And he didn’t have a runner’s chin. Norman could tell immediately if a guy took care of himself, if he cared about his personal health and appearance, by looking at the chin. Most runners had firm, sleek chins. Nonexercisers, especially nonrunners, had slack chins. Slack chins, slack attitudes, slack officers.

  Norman marked Patrick S. McLanahan’s BTZ score sheet with a big fat “No,” and he couldn’t imagine any other panel member, even Harry Ponce, voting to consider this guy for a BTZ promotion. Then, he had a better idea.

  For the first time as a promotion board member, Norman withdrew an Air Force Form 772—“Recommendation for Dismissal Based on Substandard OSR,” and he filled it out. A rated officer who didn’t fly, who was obviously contently hiding out at some obscure research position in Las Vegas twiddling his thumbs, was not working in the best interest of the Air Force. This guy had almost nine years in service, but it was obvious that it would take him many, many years to be prepared to compete for promotion to lieutenant colonel. The Air Force had an “up or out” policy, meaning that you could be passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel twice. After that, you had to be dismissed. The Air Force shouldn’t wait for this guy to shape up. He was a waste of space.

  A little dedication to yourself and dedication to the Air Force might help, Norman silently told the guy as he signed the AFF772, recommending that McLanahan be stripped of his regular commission and either sent back to the Reserves or, better, dismissed from service altogether. Try getting off your ass and do some running, for a start. Try to act like you give a damn …

  Mother Nature picked that night to decide to dump an entire week’s worth of rain on Diego Garcia—it was one of the worst tropical downpours anyone had seen on the little island in a long time. The British civilian contracted shuttle bus wasn’t authorized to go on the southeast side of the runway, and Patrick wasn’t going to wait for someone to pick him up, so he ran down the service road toward the Air Force hangar. He had already called ahead to the security police and control tower, telling them what he was going to do, but in the torrential storm, it was unlikely anyone in the tower could see him. Patrick made it to the outer perimeter fence to the Air Force hangar just as one of the security units was coming out in a Humvee to pick him up.

  Patrick dashed through security in record time, then ran to the hangar to his locker for a dry flight suit. Inside he saw maintenance techs preparing both Megafortress flying battleships for fueling and weapons preloading. Patrick decided to grab his thermal underwear and socks too—it looked as if he might be going flying very soon.

  “What happened?” Patrick asked as he trotted into the mission planning room.

  “An American guided-missile cruiser, the USS Percheron, was transiting the Strait of Hormuz on its way into the Persian Gulf when it was attacked by several large missiles,” Colonel John Ormack said. “Two of them missed, two were shot down, two were near misses, but two hit. The ship is still under way, but it’s heavily damaged. Over a hundred casualties.”

  “Do they know who launched the missiles?”

  “No idea,” Ormack replied. “Debris suggests they were Iraqi. The missiles were fired from the south, across the Musandam Peninsula over Oman. The warhead size was huge—well over five hundred pounds each. AS-9 or AS-14 class.”

  “The Percheron couldn’t tag the missiles?”

  “They didn’t see them until it was too late,” Ormack reported. “They were diving right on top of the cruiser from straight overhead. They were already supersonic when they hit. No time to respond. The Percheron is a California-class cruiser, an older class of guided-missile cruiser—even though it was fitted with some of the latest radars, it wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.”

  “I thought every ship going into the Gulf had to be updated with the best self-defense gear?”

  “That’s the Navy for you—they thought they had cleaned up the Gulf and could just waltz in with any old piece of shit they chose,” Lieutenant General Brad Elliott interjected as he strode into the room. He glared at Patrick’s wet hair and heavy breathing, and added, “You don’t look very rested to me, Major. Where’s Tork?”

  “On her way, sir,” Patrick replied. “I didn’t wait for the SPs to come get me.”

  “I guess it’s not a very good night for a romantic stroll on the beach anyway,” Elliott muttered sarcastically. “I could’ve used both of you an hour ago.”

  “Sorry, sir.” He wasn’t really that sorry, but he tried to understand what kind of hell Brad had to be going through—stripped of the command that meant so much to him—and he felt sorry for Brad, not sorry that he wasn’t there to help out.

  “The Navy’s officially started an investigation and is not speculating on what caused the explosions,” Elliott went on. “Defense has leaked some speculation to the media that some older Standard SM-2 air-to-air missiles might have accidentally exploded in their magazines. Hard to come up with an excuse for an abovedeck explosion in two different sections of the ship. No one is yet claiming responsibility for the attack.

  “Unofficially, the Navy is befuddled. They had no warning of the attack until seconds before the missiles hit. No missile-launch detection from shore, no unidentified aircraft within a hundred miles of the cruiser, and no evidence of sub activity in the area. They were well outside the range of all known or suspected coast defense sites capable of launching a missile of that size. Guesses, anyone?”

  “How about a stealth bomber, like the one we ran into?” Patrick replied.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Brad said. “The Defense Intelligence Agency has no information at all about Iran buying Blackjack bombers from Russia, or anything about Russia developing a bomber capable of launching air-to-air missiles. They got our report, but I think they’ll disregard it.”

  “I wonder how much DIA knows about us and our capabilities?” Wendy asked.

  “I think we’ve got to assume that Iran is flying that thing, and it’s got to be neutralized before it does any more damage,” Patrick said. “One more attack—especially on an aircraft carrier or other major warship—could spark a massive Middle East shooting war, bigger and meaner than the war with Iraq.” He turned to Brad Elliott and said, “You’ve got to get us back in the fight, Brad. We’re the only ones that can secretly take on that Blackjack battleship.”

  Elliott looked at Patrick with a mixture of surprise, humor, and anger. “Major, are you suggesting that we—dare I even say it?—la
unch without proper authorization?” he asked.

  “I’m suggesting that perhaps we should follow orders and return the Megafortresses to Dreamland,” Patrick said. “But I don’t recall any specific instructions about a specific route of flight we should take.”

  “You think it makes any sense for us to fly from Diego Garcia all the way to the Strait of Hormuz and tell the Pentagon we were on the way back to Nevada?” Brad asked, a twinkle of humor in his eyes.

  “We always file a ‘due regard’ point in our flight plans, which means we disappear from official view until we’re ready to reenter American airspace,” Patrick said. Classified military flights, such as spy plane or nuclear-weapon ferry flights, never filed a detailed point-by-point route flight plan—they always had a “due regard” point, a place where the flight plan was suspended, the rest of the flight secret. In effect, the flight “disappears” from official or public purview. The flight simply checks in with authorities at a specific place and time to reactivate the flight plan, with no official query about where it was or what it did. “Even the Pentagon doesn’t know where we go. And our tankers belong to us, so we don’t have to coordinate with any outside agencies for refueling support. If we, for example, fly off to Nevada and, say, develop an in-flight emergency six hours in the mission and decide to head on back to Diego Garcia, I don’t think the Air Force or the Pentagon can blame us for that, can they?”

  “I don’t see how they can,” John Ormack said, smiling mischievously. “And we very well can’t fly a Megafortress into Honolulu, can we?”

  “And in five hours, we can be back on patrol over the Strait of Hormuz,” Wendy Tork said. “We know what that Blackjack looks like on our sensors. We keep an eye on him and jump him if he tries to make another move.” Everyone on the crew was getting into it now.

  “In the meantime, we get full authorization to conduct a search-and-destroy mission over the Strait of Hormuz for the mysterious Soviet-Iranian attack plane,” Patrick said. “If we don’t get it, we land back here at Diego, get ‘fixed,’ and return to Dreamland. We’ve done all we can do.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Brad Elliott said, beaming proudly and clasping Patrick on the shoulder. “Let’s work up a weapons list, get our guys busy loading gas and missiles, and let’s get this show on the road!” As they all got busy, Brad stepped over to Patrick, and said in a low voice, “Nice to be working together with you again, Muck.”

  “Same here, Brad,” Patrick said. Finally, thankfully, the old connection between them was back. It was more than reestablishing crew connectivity—they were back to trusting and believing in one another again.

  “Any idea how we’re going to find this mystery Iranian Megafortress?” Brad asked. “We’ve only got one chance, and we have no idea where this guy’s based, what his next target is, or even if he really exists.”

  “He exists, all right,” Patrick said. He studied the intelligence reports Elliott had brought into the mission-planning room for a moment. “We must have a couple dozen ships down there protecting the Percheron.”

  “I think the Navy’s going to move a carrier battle group to escort the cruiser back to Bahrain.”

  “A carrier, huh?” Patrick remarked. “A cruiser is a good target, but a carrier would be a great target. Iraq made no secret of the fact they wanted to tag a carrier in the Gulf. Maybe Iran would like to claim that trophy.”

  “Maybe—especially if they could pin the blame on Iraq,” Brad said. “But that still doesn’t solve our problem: How do we find this mystery attack plane? The chances of him and us being in the same sky at the same time is next to impossible.”

  “I see only one way to flush him out,” Patrick said. “It’ll still be a one-in-a-thousand chance, but if he’s up flying, I think we can make him come to us.”

  At over three hundred tons gross weight and with a wingspan longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the Tupolev-160 long-range supersonic bomber, code-named “Blackjack” by the West, was the largest attack plane in the world. It carried more than its own empty weight in fuel and almost its own weight in weapons, and it was capable of delivering any weapon in the Soviet arsenal, from dumb bombs to multi-megaton gravity weapons and cruise missiles, with pinpoint precision. It could fly faster than the speed of sound up to sixty thousand feet, or at treetop level over any terrain, in any weather, day or night. Although only forty Blackjack bombers had been built, they represented the number one air-breathing military threat to the West.

  But as deadly as the Tu-160 Blackjack was, there was one plane even deadlier: the Tupolev-160E. The stock Blackjack’s large steel and titanium vertical stabilizer had been replaced by a low, slender V-tail made of composite materials, stronger but more lightweight and radar-absorbing than steel. Much of the skin not exposed to high levels of heat in supersonic flight was composed of radar-absorbent material, and the huge engine air inlets for the four Kuznetsov NK-32 afterburning engines had been redesigned so the engines’ compressor blades wouldn’t reflect radar energy. Even the jet’s steeply raked cockpit windscreens had been specially shaped and coated to misdirect and absorb radar energy. All this helped to reduce the radar cross section of this giant bird to one-fourth of the stock aircraft’s size.

  The only thing that spoiled the Blackjack-E’s sleek, stealthy needlelike appearance was a triangular fairing mounted under the forward bomb bay and a smaller fairing atop the fuselage that carried the aircraft’s phase-array air and surface search radars. The multimode radar electronically scanned both the sky and the sea for aircraft and ships, and passed the information both to allied ground, surface, and airborne units, as well as automatically programming its attack and defensive weapons.

  The Blackjack-E and its weaponry were the latest in Soviet military technology—but that meant little to a starving, nearly bankrupt nation on the verge of total collapse. The weapon system was far more useful to the Soviet Union as a commodity—and they found a willing buyer in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Still oil-rich—and, with the rise in oil prices because of the war, growing richer by the day—but with a badly shavedback military following the devastating nine-year Iran-Iraq War, Iran needed to rebuild its arsenal quickly and effectively. Money was no object. The faster they could build an arsenal that could project power throughout the entire Middle East, the faster they could claim the title of the most powerful military force in the region, a force that had to be reckoned with in any dealings involving trade, commerce, land, religion, or legal rights in the Persian Gulf.

  The Blackjack-E was the answer. The bomber was capable against air, ground, and surface targets; it was fast, it had the range to strike targets as far away as England without aerial refueling, and it carried a huge attack payload. After watching the Americans destroy nearly half of the vaunted Iraqi army with precision-guided weapons, the Iranians were positive they had spent their money wisely—any warplane they invested in had to be stealthy, had to be fast, had to have all-weather capability, and had to have precision-guided attack capability, or it was virtually useless over today’s high-tech battlefield. The Russians were selling—not just the planes, but the weapons, the support equipment, and Russian instructors and technicians—and the Iranians were eagerly buying.

  The USS Percheron was the first operational test of the new attack platform. A large American warship, transiting the shallow, congested, narrow waters of the Strait of Hormuz alone, was an inviting target. The Percheron was a good test case because its long-range sensors and defensive armament were highly capable, some of the best in the world against all kinds of air, surface, and subsurface threats. If the Blackjack-E could penetrate the Percheron’s defenses, it was indeed a formidable weapon.

  The test was a rousing success. The Blackjack-E’s crew—an Iranian pilot as aircraft commander, a Russian instructor pilot in the copilot’s seat, two Iranian officers as bombardier and defensive-systems officer, and one Russian systems instructor in a jump seat between the Iranian systems officer
s—launched their entire warload of six Kh-29 external missiles—painted and modified with Iraqi Air Force markings—from maximum range and medium altitude. The missiles dived to sea-skimming altitude, then popped up to five hundred meters when only five kilometers from their targets and then dived straight down at their target. Two of the missiles missed the cruiser by less than a half a kilometer; two made direct hits. The explosions could be seen and heard by observers twenty kilometers away. Although the Percheron was still able to get under way, it was certainly out of action.

  This time, however, the Blackjack-E would have a full weapons load. This would be the ultimate test. On this flight, the Blackjack-E was loaded for a multirole hunter-killer mission. In the aft bomb bay, it carried a rotary launcher with twelve Kh-15 solid-rocket attack missiles. Each missile had a top speed of Mach 5—five times the speed of sound—a range of almost ninety miles when launched from high altitude, and a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound high-explosive warhead. The missiles, covered with a rubbery skin that burned off while in flight, were targeted by the Blackjack’s navigator by radar, or they would automatically attack large ships using its onboard radar, or home in on preprogrammed enemy radar emissions. Designed to destroy target defenses and attack targets well beyond surface-to-air missile range, the Kh-15s were unjammable, almost invisible to radar, and almost impossible to intercept or shoot down.