Phantom Strike

by William H. Lovejoy

  Bucky Barr was in charge of decorations for this party, and he had made certain that the red stripes and logos, on adhesive-backed tape, were perfectly aligned and straight.

  And after five days, the six F-4 Phantoms were simply shells parked in Hangar Four. Norm Hackley, Karl Gettman, Ben Borman, and Lucas Littlefield had climbed through and around them with air-powered die grinders, attacking any serial number they came across, burnishing it into near-oblivion. A number of fuselage and wing panels had been removed, also, in order to access hidden numbers identified by Demion as requiring obliteration. Exposing the interior ribs also gave Demion a chance to evaluate the structural members. Because of the high hours on all of the airframes, there were a few stress fractures, and Demion and the airframe technicians designed reinforcement repairs.

  While their method of eradicating serial numbers wouldn’t stand up to the latest developments in forensic examinations, where high-powered X rays and computers and acid-washes might raise an old serial number, it was sufficient for standard replacement parts not particular to an airplane. For those parts that might be traceable by serial number to a specific aircraft — an oleo strut, a Martin-Baker ejection seat — the area around the former serial number was heated with an acetylene torch to make the molecules dance around and perhaps totally eradicate an important number or two.

  Almost all of the removed panels had now been reattached in their proper locations.

  When Barr slipped through the Judas door into the hangar at noon, he found the two pilots and two technicians sprawled in one comer, sucking on soft drinks and munching on thick chicken salad sandwiches built on homemade bread. He figured the heat inside the hangar was in the low nineties, a welcome relief from the heat on the tarmac. The five-gallon jug of iced tea parked against one wall was about half empty.

  “You guys taking another break?” he asked.

  Norm Hackley flipped him a finger. Hackley, who was short and dark and had flown F-4s in one Vietnam tour, was closing on fifty years of age. His light eyes were as sharp as ever, and Barr estimated he had lost fifteen pounds in the last week, which he wouldn’t miss.

  Karl Gettman also had F-4 time, though he was too young for Vietnam. Gettman had been a weapons system operator, the GIB — Guy in the backseat. In his mid-thirties now and certified as a pilot in a dozen jet types, he was black as night, with a mini-Afro, and a ready smile.

  “You want to break something, Bucky,” Gettman said, “take a walk over by the airplanes. Better yet, take a run.”

  Barr turned to look at the planes. Two five-horse-power air compressors and a commercial wet/dry vacuum stood near them, and air hoses snaked around the floor. The concrete was littered with the fine, dry sand used in the sandblasters. The sand was vacuumed up to be used again. About half of the insignia and camouflage paint had been stripped from three of the planes, and the aluminium skin was shiny and virginal. He could smell the sour aroma of the liquid paint remover being utilized in addition to the sandblasting.

  “You’re not the neatest housekeeper I ever met, Karl,” Barr said.

  “Me? Lucas is in charge of floors.”

  Littlefield, a bulky man with huge hands and an impressively bald and large head, grinned. “Thing I like about this outfit, everybody gets to be in charge of something. I drew sand.”

  With eight years in the Air Force and another eight at Lockheed in California before that aerospace giant folded its West Coast operations and retreated to Georgia, Littlefield was a top-rated airframe technician. When he made a suggestion, the pilots yielded to it without complaint.

  Ben Borman was another big man, with a Swedish heritage apparent in his colouring and blue eyes. He had put twenty years of his life into the Air Force before signing on with Aeroconsultants. His specialty had been ordnance, and he was now learning to be a fuel boom operator.

  “What are you in charge of, Ben?” Barr asked.

  “I’m in charge of Norm. He needs all the direction he can get.”

  Barr squatted in front of the group, resting his forearms on his thighs. “What’s the schedule look like?”

  “There’s a schedule?” Gettman asked.

  “We’re damned near as close as we can be,” Hackley said. “Day after tomorrow, we’ll be ready for paint. Then, we’ll take on the tanker.”

  “Thank God we only have to strip insignia off it,” Littlefield said. “She’s got about two acres of skin, and if she’d been painted, I’d go out to the highway and raise my thumb.”

  Barr grinned at him. “Before you go, you want to patch the holes in the E models?”

  “Hey, guy, I already fabricated my pieces. I’m waiting on these slow bastards to get the paint off.”

  The early models of the F-4 had not had an internal gun, a design failing that had raised complaints from Vietnam-era pilots who, as far as Barr could figure, only wanted the guns to prove themselves as hot-shit pilots on their glorious way to ace status. Of course, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hadn’t been very effective at the time, either. The complaints had been met with gun pods slung beneath the centre-line for the early models, then the internal M-61A rotary-barrel cannon mounted in the nose of the F-4E.

  Barr had always been a firm believer in missile technology, engaging battles with about twenty miles between the hostile aircraft. If one had to use a cannon one was too damned close. After some serious reconsideration and discussion about their mission, he and Wyatt had elected to remove the twenty-millimetre cannons from the E models. It not only saved a great deal of weight, though it changed the centre of gravity, it precluded pilots from relying on the gun for close combat. If one was out of missiles, the prudent course was to turn tail.

  Littlefield had fashioned new fittings which would lock the gun port doors in the closed position.

  Barr pushed himself back to his feet. “You need anything from Albuquerque?”

  “You’re going to Albuquerque?” Gettman asked. “I thought Andy was going.”

  “He’s got another appointment.”

  “I need about ten more gallons of paint reducer and five quarts of catalytic hardener,” Littlefield said.

  Barr pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote it down. “How come? I thought we had it figured.”

  “We did, but we forgot about later.”

  “Gotcha. Anything else?”

  “I’d ask you to call my girl,” Gettman said, “but you’d probably go see her in person.”

  “I’ll do that,” Barr said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  Barr left the hangar, crossed the dry steam of the tarmac, and entered Hangar Five.

  Here, too, the lunch break was underway. The pilots and technicians were gathered at the back of the hangar, around the old wooden workbenches. In front of the benches, in twelve maintenance cradles, were the engines from the Phantoms. The Hercules engines had been pronounced fit by Demion and Hank Cavanaugh, the primary engine specialist, though the nacelles had to be removed in order to grind off serial numbers.

  Each of the F-4 turbojets, however, was being fully disassembled, examined, shorn of identifying numbers, and rebuilt with new seals, bearings, and subassemblies where necessary. That was the primary reason for Barr’s trip, to pick up parts. It wasn’t an unexpected development, he thought. It was one of the laws of mechanics. Whenever he started a mechanical restoration, he always had to run back to the store a dozen times for forgotten parts. And he wasn’t alone, judging by the number of NAPA Auto Parts or Checker Auto Parts delivery trucks he saw running to the Ford and Chrysler and GM service centres in any city in the nation.

  Scattered around the hangar were toolboxes on casters, small lifting cranes, air compressors, start carts, a small sheet-metal roller, an arc welder, and a couple oxy-gen/acetylene dollies. A big electronic diagnostics unit was shoved against the sidewall.

  The two trailers he and Jordan had picked up at Nellis were parked in one corner, still covered with canvas and packed with cardboard boxe
s. The boxes contained all of the avionics and electronics, and they weren’t yet ready to dig into that pile. Wyatt wasn’t ready, though Tom Kriswell and Sam Vrdla, the electronics wizards, were itching to get their hands into those boxes.

  Barr hiked the long trail to the back of the hangar, approaching Demion, Kriswell, and Wyatt.

  “I think I’ve lost five pounds just walking around these damned hangars,” he said.

  “Doesn’t show yet,” Demion said.

  “You sure you want to fly with me today, Jim?”

  “But I have noticed your face seems thinner,” Demion said. “Don’t you think he’s better-looking, guys?”

  “Julie seems to think so,” Kriswell said. “How you making out there, Bucky?”

  “You know she’s carrying a three-point-six grade average in high school? She’s a smart kid. Debate, FHA, and thespians, too.”

  “I noticed she’s carrying about, what, thirty-four, twenty-two, thirty-four?” Demion said.

  Barr gave him a pained expression. “Get off it, James. She wants to go to Chadron State College and become an English teacher. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “So she’s a candidate?” Wyatt asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I’ll know more in another week.”

  Only Demion, Kriswell, and Wyatt knew about Barr’s foundation because they were on the board of directors, fulfilling the number required by the regulations governing tax-exempt corporations. Barr was the executive director and the screening committee and the entire unpaid staff. He poured some of his excess cash into the foundation each year, and each year he personally found one or two kids — usually girls — for whom the foundation provided college scholarships. The unadvertised educational foundation was currently supporting eleven college students. Barr didn’t want every girl he met to grow up and become a money-grubbing Raylene Delehanty Barr.

  “The guns on board the Herc?” Wyatt asked.

  “We got guns,” Barr said. “Captain Dinning will be a happy man when he see them come back.”

  Barr and Demion were making a stop at Davis-Monthan to return the M61-A cannons. Since they had decided against them for the mission, they had also decided to turn them in. It might lower the stress levels of the local Air Force types at Davis-Monthan, and it might preclude having the Treasury’s Bureau of Firearms get excited, just in case some of that paperwork fell through the cracks and actually arrived at the Bureau.

  “I’ve got my shopping list,” Demion said.

  “And I’ve got a couple things to add to it,” Barr said, ripping the page out of his notebook.

  “And I’ll take off for Washington,” Wyatt said.

  “What do you suppose they want?” Kriswell asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” Wyatt said. “They’ve probably decided to call it off.”

  “Personally,” Barr said, “I think that’d be a real shame.”

  “You’re just bloodthirsty,” Demion said.

  “That’s me, the New Hampshire vampire.”

  *

  “One-and-a-half million dollars,” Martin Church said.

  “A steal,” George Embry, who was standing at Church’s window enjoying the view, told him.

  “From us, maybe. What do we get for it?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Damned right,” the DDO said.

  The North African desk chief turned from the window and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “How come you get the best view in the house, Marty?”

  “Come on.”

  Embry dug a ragged-edged piece of notepaper from his pocket and scanned it.

  “Let’s see. There’s four ALQ-72 countermeasures pods. That presupposes some airborne resistance, you know?”

  “I know. Wyatt’s being overly cautious, maybe.”

  “Wyatt wants to get out of there with the same number of people he takes in,” Embry said. “Can’t say as I blame him.”

  “What else?”

  “There’s thirty-six Mark 84 five-hundred-pound bombs. That’s the ground attack complement. For the fun stuff, we’ve got twenty-four AIM-9L Super Sidewinders. Like I said, a bargain.”

  “Do we need it all?”

  “You’re trying to save money?” Embry asked.

  “It’s a new era.”

  “You want to start a war, Marty, you got to pay for it. There’ll be more bills coming in.”

  Church sat silently for a moment. He, and others, were committed to the operation, and he didn’t know why he was quibbling over what amounted to peanuts in the total scheme of things. Perhaps because in the back of his mind was a ghastly image of the results.

  “What about Cummings?” he asked, to shift the subject from dollars and cents.

  “Marianne? She’s spending a lot of time on the beach, enjoying herself. No further contacts with al-Qati.”

  “Why don’t you have her make some calls? Maybe she can run him down somewhere.”

  “Marty.”

  “Yeah, I know. Okay, just have her cross her fingers.”

  “There is one little thing,” Embry said.

  “Which you’ve saved for last?”

  “I always save the best for last, Marty.”

  “Well, damn it, tell me!”

  “This is kind of third-hand, but then, since we’re so short of assets there, everything we get out of Libya is third-hand. Cummings doesn’t have corroboration yet.”

  “George.”

  “Ahmed al-Qati has been promoted to lieutenant colonel and attached to Ibrahim Ramad’s command.” “This tells you what, George?”

  “You remember Ramad? He’s air force, and he disappeared from the Tripoli military staff when they got the Sukhoi bombers. The consensus at the time, though never substantiated, was that he’d been given responsibility for developing a long-range bombing program. That was reinforced when our French friends gave them the aerial re-fuelling technology.”

  “Do we know where he’s located?”

  “We have a good idea that he’s at Marada Base, the one they buried in the sand. That’s where the bombers are flying from, anyway.”

  “So what’s al-Qati got to do with Ramad?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Goddamn it, George.”

  “Ahmed al-Qati is a superb tactician and strategist in ground warfare. My people think that marrying the two of them means they’re developing a coordinated air-and-ground attack scheme.”

  “So it’s just good military planning,” Church said. “Contingency planning.”

  “Except that we also know that Marada Base is located thirteen miles from what the Leader describes as his agricultural chemical plant.”

  Church thought about that for a moment, then said, “You want to send me the dossiers on those two people, George?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  *

  Ibrahim Ramad glanced sideways at al-Qati who was sitting in the bombardier/navigator’s seat next to him. With the helmet and the oxygen mask, very little of his face was visible. His eyes were unreadable; they stared straight ahead at the onrushing desert.

  The undulating desert unrolled before them with amazing, dizzying speed. The velocity indicator stood at Mach 1.1. The aircraft bounced lightly upward and downward as the terrain-avoidance radar instructed the automatic pilot to maintain a one-hundred-meter ground clearance above the sand dunes and wadis. The E-Scope on the instrument panel, with its “ski-tip” line imposed over the computer-generated drawing of the terrain ahead, showed how close the Su-24 approached the tips of dunes. The Head Up Display currently displayed the symbol for the bomber in the centre of the screen, the symbol rising and falling as the aircraft responded to commands from the computer to change its vertical position.

  They were so low that the horizons had pulled in on them, making their world much smaller and more isolated. Ramad could see nothing outside the canopy that bespoke of life. Looking backward and down, he could see the snouts of the missiles on the o
utboard pylons. The wings were in their swept-back configuration, and the missiles were mounted on the pivoting pylons. The bombs were shorter and not visible from his position. They were attached to the inboard pylons, which were fixed to the solid, inner portion of the wing. Four more missiles were affixed to fuselage hard-points.

  As always in the cockpit of an airplane, Ramad was entirely comfortable. He rarely became nervous, and if he did, he never demonstrated the condition to observers. He knew that he exuded confidence, even arrogance in regard to his talents. That was as it should be. His talents had brought him the command of an entire air base at the tender age of thirty-five.

  He was more than a little disappointed at al-Qati’s reaction to supersonic, ground-hugging speed. Others from Tripoli, from military staff, who had taken the orientation flight with Ramad, had paled significantly and allowed the fear to cloud their eyes. Some had gallantly attempted to retain their previous meals for minutes before ripping off the oxygen masks and spilling vomit over their borrowed flight suits.

  Ahmed al-Qati’s hands rested lightly and unclenched in his lap. Not even his shoulders betrayed an elevated sense of tension. This was a man, Ramad decided, who filled the large cup of his reputation.

  He was not to be underestimated.

  But then, neither was Ibrahim Ramad to be underestimated.

  He had no illusions about the reasons for al-Qati’s presence at Marada Base.

  Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed al-Qati was there to spy on him.

  Ramad knew that Kamal Amjab, the Leader’s closest advisor, and Colonel Ghazi, chief of the army, considered him brave but untrustworthy. He had never done anything to invoke their distrust, and he suspected that they were jealous of his rapid rise in rank and responsibility as well as envious of his abilities and his close relationship with Farouk Salmi, head of the air force. So they had sent an army man to watch over him, though not as a guardian angel.

  It was all right; Ramad could adapt.

  He began to ease back the throttles for the Lyulka turbojet engines. The velocity readout flickered, then the numbers began to descend.

  “Twenty-two kilometres to target, Ahmed,” he said over the internal communications system.