Phantom Strike

by William H. Lovejoy

  The clatter of the twin Isotov turboshaft engines made conversation impossible. Shummari handed him a spare headset, and al-Qati removed his helmet and slipped it in place.

  “All accounted for, Ahmed?” the major asked.

  “I start with eighty-five, Khalil. How many will be left when we are done, do you suppose?”

  In the expanding light of dawn and the red overhead light of the cabin, Shummari studied his face for several seconds before answering.

  “Do you really want a response, Ahmed?”

  “Please.”

  “Ninety percent would be a good number.”

  Al-Qati bent over to peer out the door as helicopters began taking off. Through the open portals of the cabins, he saw the men who trusted him to provide them with as much safety as was possible for professional soldiers.

  He thought that Shummari was probably correct. Eight or nine of them would be carried home, it was an acceptable number in wartime, though not in peace.

  He would argue his position against the live exercise yet again.

  But he did not think that he would prevail.

  *

  By the evening of the following Wednesday, the first revitalized F-4 was complete. It was an E model, carrying the number N20677. If their luck held, nine-three would be finished by the next day.

  While Wyatt agreed with Barr that the external appearance of the Phantoms was impressive, he was happier with what Demion and Kriswell had accomplished on the interior.

  Behind the nose radome was a Hughes attack radar scanner. It fed the APG-63 pulsed-Doppler radar which had a search range of 120 miles. A network of sensors installed in various places on the fuselage and wings were coupled to an ALR-56 radar warning system. The ALQ-128 launch warning and Identify Friend or Foe system was installed. The internal countermeasures system from the F-15 was designated ALQ-135. To protect the tail, the pilot’s blind spot, ALQ-154 radar warning and AAR-38 infrared warning systems had been added.

  The black box containing the programmable signal-processing computer had been mounted on the rear bulkhead in the aft cockpit. That computer processed information from the radar, and possibly from data links with an Airborne Warning and Control aircraft, then displayed the filtered information on the HUD, now mounted on the top of the instrument panel. Radar echoes from aircraft flying at similar or higher altitudes were simple, but the computer was sophisticated enough to pick up the faint returns of aircraft near the ground, eliminate the ground return, and display only the targets on the HUD. Instead of continuously looking down to check a cluttered radar screen, a busy pilot scanning the skies around him for hostile aircraft and missiles had all the information he needed directly in his line-of-sight. The HUD reported the true position of a target, along with its range and closing speed. The display also prompted the pilot when the distance to target was safe for missile firing.

  The cockpit had been substantially revised. Circuit breakers, armament and radio panels, and switches were in new positions. There were two eight-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) displays set into the instrument panel.

  All sixteen of the Noble Enterprises team were gathered near the front hangar door admiring their work before locking up for the night.

  Barr pulled a handful of half-dollars from his pocket. He was probably the only person in the nation with a ready supply of half-dollars. He liked the heft, he said. Wyatt saw his move and said, “No, Bucky.”

  “Ah, shit, Andy! We at least ought to let the God of odds become involved.”

  “No way. I’ll do the first test hop in the morning. You can fly chase with the Citation.”

  “How thrilling,” Barr said.

  “If you get the first trial, Andy,” Hackley said, “that eliminates you from the next five.”

  “That’s only fair,” Gettman agreed.

  Barr passed out coins. “Let’s settle it now.”

  Kriswell grabbed a coin.

  “Forget it, Tom,” Barr told him. “You’ve got to land a Cessna with prop and gear intact first.”

  They flipped coins in odd-man-out until they had a roster for the test flights of the remaining five aircraft: Jordan, Zimmerman, Barr, Hackley, and Gettman.

  With the priority of risks settled, Hank Cavanaugh shut off the lights and locked the door, and they all crawled into the Jeeps for the drive into Ainsworth.

  The closer they got to completion of the aircraft, the more celebratory was the mood. Everyone was in good spirits when they filed into the Rancher’s Cafe and Lounge and started to place orders. Barr engaged Julie Jorgenson in a discussion of educational priorities. He was insidiously leading her into the belief that every student should be able to write well before an English teacher pounded Shakespeare and Dickens into them. She had become very easy with Barr, perhaps somewhat awed by his command of the pressing issues in education. He knew about test results and national comparisons of ability.

  Wyatt twisted the top off a bottle of Budweiser and carried it to the short hallway between the dining room and the semi-darkened lounge. There were two couples at tables and three single men at the bar. He lifted the receiver from the wall-mounted telephone and used his CIA-funded calling card to place his call.

  There was no answer at Kramer’s number. He didn’t leave a message on the answering machine.

  The machine answered at Aeroconsultants, but didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.

  For the fifth time, he tried Kramer’s father in Seattle.

  “Mr. Kramer, this is Andy Wyatt.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Wyatt.”

  George Kramer had always been very formal with Wyatt, perhaps because from the first he had resented Wyatt taking his little girl away from Seattle. Or maybe because he knew more about Wyatt’s relationship with his little girl than Wyatt thought he knew.

  “Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Kramer, but I wondered if Jan had checked in with you?”

  The first time he had called Seattle, Wyatt had had to use the excuse that Jan was on vacation and he needed to get in touch with her.

  “Why yes, Mr. Wyatt, she sure did.”

  “Great! Is she there? Or do you know where I could reach her?”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  George Kramer sounded positively gleeful.

  Eight

  The Director of Central intelligence was not only the chief executive of the Central intelligence Agency, but also head of the other agencies in the intelligence community — Defence Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the military and cabinet-level intelligence services. He split his time between offices at Langley and in the District. It kept him busy enough that Martin Church and the other three deputy directors — Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration — had little day-to-day contact with him, though they all got together for monthly staff meetings.

  Church reported directly to the Executive Director who reported through the Deputy Director for Central Intelligence to the DCI. That process was all right with Church because he didn’t particularly care for the director, a seemingly cold man with political in-fighting ability who could get stubborn about his own viewpoints.

  The Executive Director called him in mid-afternoon. “You busy right now, Marty?”

  “Nothing I can’t toss in the drawer.”

  “The DCI would like to talk to you.”

  “Me? Alone?”

  “Go on over to his office now.”

  The director’s office suite was lavish and spacious, with its own conference and dining room. His two overburdened secretaries were working feverishly at computer terminal keyboards and fielding constantly chiming telephones. He was pointed in the direction of the dining room.

  He knocked on the door before opening it.

  “Come on in, Martin.”

  The DCI was in the kitchenette making himself a cheese sandwich. He ate half-a-dozen times a day, probably because his caloric intake couldn’t keep up with the frenetic pace he maintained. />
  “Do you want a sandwich?” he asked. “Or maybe a piece of apple pie?”

  “No, sir. Thanks, anyway.”

  He came out of the kitchenette, swigging from a can of 7UP, and plopped in one of the soft, castered chairs at the big table.

  “Sit down, Martin. I’ve got about ten minutes before I leave for the District.”

  Church sat across from him.

  “I read the intelligence estimate you sent up this morning. The Libyan thing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any reservations about it? About the eight thousand figure for the warheads?”

  “No,” Church said. “Embry’s playing it right down the middle of the road. They could well have a few more than we’re projecting.”

  “Okay. I’m going to bring it up at the NSC meeting. Then, I’m going to spring the Icarus Project on them. What’s Wyatt’s state of preparation?”

  Church managed to keep his face immobile, but his mind reeled as if he had been slugged. For the past two months, he had been proceeding with Wyatt’s mission — codenamed Icarus — under the impression that the National Security Council had already signed off on it. The DCI was capable of that deception, though. He was fond of building up his pet projects in secrecy for weeks at a time while concurrently spiking conversations with hints about the future, then springing the projects on people. It made him appear as if he was always prepared for any eventuality. His reputation as a Boy Scout hadn’t been tarnished since he took office.

  “Uh, sir, it looks like about ten or twelve days,” Church said.

  The director flipped open his Daytimer. “August four at the earliest?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. The President’s going to be at this meeting, and I want the image of eight thousand warheads to have some impact. I’m going to show that video that Science and Technology put together, the one about toxic effects on humans. I think I can get closure on the project immediately. If I can swing an Executive Order, we can bypass the Congressional oversight committees until the mission’s complete.”

  “Is there a chance they won’t approve it?” Church asked.

  “Very damned little, I think.”

  “What do I tell Wyatt?”

  “You don’t tell Wyatt a damned thing.”

  *

  Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed al-Qati leaned between the two helicopter pilots and squinted at the horizon. They were flying low, though high enough to avoid raising a dust cloud behind them, and the horizons were close. When he saw the miniature sandstorm erupt and the two Sukhoi-24 bombers begin their climbout, he tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

  “Go now, Lieutenant,” he said over the intercom.

  The nose of the helicopter dipped as it picked up forward speed.

  Through the right side window of the Mi-8, al-Qati saw the sister helicopter, some fifty meters away, also increase its speed.

  He turned to the rear and studied the thirty infantrymen poised in their seats. They were already dressed in their shapeless chemical warfare clothing, their packs strapped to the outside of the protective parkas.

  Al-Qati signalled the lieutenant watching him, and the officer passed the signal to his men. The steel helmets came off as gas masks were donned. They pulled their balaclava headwear, constructed of flexible vinyl and extremely hot and uncomfortable, on next, then replaced their helmets. The unwieldy vinyl gloves were next, then they re-gripped their weapons.

  They looked like bug-eyed monsters from some poorly produced Japanese movie, al-Qati thought.

  “Two kilometres, Colonel,” the pilot said. “We’ll be entering into the cloud in a few seconds.”

  “Prepare yourselves,” al-Qati said, pulling the headset from his ears and unsnapping the gas mask case at his waist.

  The pilots took turns adjusting their own masks while al-Qati snugged his into place, blew through his nose to exhaust the air and seal the soft rubber against his skin. As soon as he tugged the hood over his head, his skin erupted in perspiration.

  He always felt as if the mask short-changed him on air supply.

  Leaning forward, he again peered through the windshield. The dust cloud from the exploding 300-kiloton bombs was settling, blowing off toward the east in a light wind. Still, the air was hazy and rippled as a result of the tear gas that saturated it. The exercise called for the use of tear gas in order to simulate near-reality. Ramad had feared that al-Qati’s soldiers would pull off their masks as soon as they were out of sight of an officer. Ramad did not really understand discipline, or how to instil it, al-Qati thought.

  Through the haze, he could see the small sign posts that had been erected. They read, “Radio Transmitter,” or “Ordnance Depot,” or “Fuel Storage.” They were the objectives of his ground advance.

  “Resistance is expected to be nil,” Ramad had laughed at the morning briefing.

  “Well-equipped and trained Israeli soldiers, as an example,” al-Qati had retorted, “will be in their protective CW gear within seconds of the first blast. Resistance can be expected to be fierce. Additionally, civilians have been issued CW masks.”

  The Libyan government did not so equip its civilian populace.

  “That is possible,” Ramad had conceded.

  “It is probable. Your bombs target civilians. Is that what we are rehearsing?”

  Ramad had not answered the question.

  The lieutenant gave another hand signal, and the soldiers slipped out of their seats, kneeling on one knee, facing the rear. Al-Qati could almost hear the clicks above the roar of the turbine engines as the safeties were released on the AK-74 assault rifles. The muzzles of the rifles were fitted with devices to force a build-up of gas pressure in the rifle barrels, which ejected the dummy rounds of ammunition and loaded the next dummy round. There was to be no live ammunition for these first exercises.

  He grabbed a handhold as the Mi-8 flared, than thudded to a landing. The rear doors spread wide, and his soldiers leapt into action, tumbling out the rear, fanning out to either side of the helicopter.

  He followed the lieutenant, dropped to the sandy earth, then jogged to the left and dropped on his stomach.

  The helicopter lifted off, spraying sand in all directions, blanking out the sun.

  The second helicopter, a hundred meters to his right, also took off.

  As the rotor noises died away, al-Qati surveyed his position.

  Typically in Libya, there was very little natural cover. On each end of his skirmish line, squads were digging shallow foxholes to site the heavy machine guns.

  Officers and non-coms shouted orders.

  The hot sand burned into him, and the perspiration gushed beneath the protective clothing. He had estimated in a report the year before that a soldier’s fighting ability was reduced by almost forty percent when he was encased in chemical warfare clothing and mask.

  When the machine guns were emplaced and test-fired, the recon squads moved out of the line, slithering up the dime on elbows and knees.

  The air was pasty with tear gas mist.

  His radio operator splashed into the sand next to him, shouting through his mask, “Second squad is closing on the radio transmitter, Colonel!”

  Al-Qati nodded his approval and checked his watch. One minute and forty-five seconds from touchdown.

  And alarmingly, he thought about how ridiculous this all was. Grown men playing in the sand.

  He would much rather be in the Seaside Hotel, ensconced in clean sheets, holding Sophia’s head to his shoulder, becoming intoxicated by her perfume, talking quietly in the night as the ceiling fan turned lazily.

  He couldn’t even remember what it was that they talked about, but it was unimportant compared to the peace and euphoria she brought him.

  Ahmed al-Qati got his feet under him, and cursing into the privacy of his mask, scrambled up the hill, zigzagging.

  The first squad of the Second Platoon leapt to their feet and came charging up the hill behind him.

&nb
sp; *

  “Think of her as a beautifully and expensively restored ’57 T-Bird, Andy,” Jim Demion said. “We don’t want to scratch the paint, the first time out of the garage.”

  “You’re taking an awfully damned proprietary interest,” Wyatt said.

  “Can’t be helped. She’s reborn under my hands.”

  In the early light of dawn — they had advanced their starting time by an hour to beat the locals to the airfield — the Phantom appeared sleek and fast and — with her weapons pylons removed — less deadly. She did have her outboard fuel tanks slung in place. In her new cream livery, she was sitting on the tarmac outside Hangar 4, her forward canopy raised as Sam Vrdla sat in the cockpit and made some last-minute adjustments.

  Wyatt finished strapping on his G suit, then stood upright. “You ready, Bucky?”

  “The heart’s ready, Andy. The mind will wake up around nine.”

  Barr was flying the Citation as a chase plane, and he and Win Potter trundled off toward it.

  “Who’s going to handle the comm system on this end?” Wyatt asked.

  “That’s me,” Kriswell said, “Old Jockey Joe. You want rock or country?”

  “Something symphonic might be a better omen, Tom.”

  One of the other F-4s had been pushed partway out of the hangar, to clear her antennas of the steel roof. Kriswell would use the airplane’s radios to maintain contact with Wyatt and pass on messages, if necessary, to Barr.

  They were testing the radios as well as the aircraft.

  In addition to the standard NavCom sets, each of the F-4s, and eventually both of the Hercules transports, was to be equipped with a pair of scrambled UHF radio sets. The super-secret black boxes digitally encoded voice transmissions and decoded voice reception as a defence against hostile eavesdropping. A third black box accepted and decoded scrambled datalink signals. In the cockpit, the radios were identified as Tactical One, Tactical Two, and Data One.

  Wyatt and Kriswell agreed on frequency settings for both voice channels, then Wyatt walked out to the aircraft.

  “Hey, Sam! When do I get my airplane?”