Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing tcml-3

by Tom Clancy

  Five hours later, the general was awakened in his hooch by the Operations Chief and Major Goldberg, a particularly disheveled-looking officer, even for an intelligence weenie. After rising and turning the overworked air conditioner to its maximum setting, the general sat down across a small table from the two officers and said, "This had better be good."

  Goldberg pushed a book across the table. The paper binding was yellowed and stained, and the edges of the pages were ragged. It was in French:

  LES CAVES DE TONKIN,

  INVESTIGATIONS PRELIMINAIRES GEOLOGIQUES,

  ARCHAEOLOGIQUES ET ZOOLOGIQUES, 1936

  "What the hell is this, Major. I don't speak Frog," the General snarled, realizing he would have to stop saying that when their French coalition partners arrived.

  "The Caves of Tonkin, sir. Back in the thirties, a French geographer named DuBois did a thorough exploration of the karst caverns near Hanoi. I figured that's where they might be hiding their command and control infrastructure, so I called… an… old friend in Paris. She tracked this down for me. Please be careful with the fold-out maps in the back, sir. The paper is kind of brittle, but they're better than anything that NRO, DMA, or USGS could come up with."

  The general picked up the book, leafed through it, and unfolded the first map as carefully as he would have treated the original manuscript of the Constitution. After two hours of study with Goldberg translating — as the first rays of sunlight began to light the eastern sky — he handed it back, almost reverently. "Get this all translated, and get the maps digitized and correlated to our datum references. Also, get access to someone who's an expert on the geology of limestone karsts. Now. That means right now, Major!"

  A sigh of relief passed around the room. "We got 'em," the three officers muttered simultaneously. As the trio broke up, another thought about the French came to Major Goldberg, and he decided to make another phone call.

  U-Tapao Royal Thai AFB, May 9, 2000, 2300 Hours

  The twelve F-117s lifted off from U-Tapao, topped off their tanks from a pair of 22nd ARS KC-135Rs well out of radar coverage, and headed northeast. Through their FLIR imaging equipment, not a few pilots looked down on Thud Ridge, the karst finger pointed southeast towards Hanoi, which had guided their fathers and grandfathers in daylight on their own missions "downtown." But this was a different time, and the new USAF preferred to fight at night, when the optically aimed AAA batteries were largely useless. One of their targets was the Paul Doumer Bridge, proof that at least one colonel who had experienced the Vietnam War on the CBS Evening News had a sense of humor. The mission was to turn Hanoi into a darkened, isolated city, and do it in a single night. The whole purpose of the mission was deception, albeit deception with highly desirable effects. The missiles were still there, the SA-2s and -3s from the 1970s, and a few newer systems were in place, bought from Russia or cash-strapped clients of the now-defunct Soviet Union. Hanoi thought it still had a formidable air-defense system, remembering how many American aircraft had fallen in its rice paddies. Indeed, there was a large museum of such trophies. It is often said that countries prepare to fight the last war. But in the case of Hanoi, the war they planned to fight was two wars back.

  Two hours later, the lieutenant colonel flying the lead Nighthawk looked with satisfaction on the image of the Paul Doumer Bridge as he began his attack run. A generation earlier, at the dawn of the age of precision guided weapons, his father had led a flight of four F-4Ds with Paveway I LGBs against this same bridge. Now he was flying serenely over Hanoi, with not a shot flying up at him, lining up on the same structure his dad had nearly died for exactly twenty-seven years ago this day. His target was a bridge piling, which provided structural support for the center of the bridge, in the deepest part of the Red River channel. The two GBU-27/Bs with their BLU- 109/B warheads dropped accurately and hit the target with a pair of huge explosions. When the FLIR screen cleared, he smiled at the result. On either side of the piling, the bridge was down, like a giant V into the river. The piling itself looked as if it had been chopped off by a meat cleaver, the support tower having been completely destroyed. It would be a while until this link in the Hanoi-Hue railroad would be fixed.

  Ten seconds after his bombs hit, he saw the flash off to his right of two more LGBs taking out the air defense command center at Gia Lam Airfield. Seconds later, the Party headquarters went up. Other targets went up as well. The thermal power plant took two GBU-27/Bs into the foundation of the turbine room, throwing the delicate mechanisms out of alignment, tearing them apart like lunatic pinwheels from hell. In all, ten targets in the Hanoi area went up in a matter of just three minutes. Meanwhile, two additional F-117s took out the "Dragon's Jaw" Bridge at Thanh Hoa and the hardened Vietnamese II Corps command post at Hue. As the city went dark and panic erupted among the junior officers and bureaucrats left behind to supervise the functions of the government, the real targets of tonight's strike began to pay the price for their arrogance.

  The Caves of Tonkin, Northwest of Hanoi, May 10, 2000, 0055 Hours

  The rule was that nothing would go into the caves that could not be hand-carried to the entrance on a narrow footpath. Six champion athletes of the People's Army had the honor of carrying the 300 kg./660 lb. steel blast door almost 10 miles/16.3 km. from the nearest road. The engineers calculated that it would withstand the overpressure from any conceivable near-miss by a conventional weapon, and it was located far enough down a twisting passage that any guided weapon would have to be as agile as a Habu to negotiate the two right-angle turns. The Sergeant of the Guards at the entrance to the blast door was startled when he turned and saw the Defense Minister, General Truong Le, standing before him. "Comrade General, you cannot go outside."

  "Comrade Sergeant, they won't let me smoke down there. I appeal to your fraternal revolutionary spirit. Take pity on an old man who is dying for a cigarette."

  The general had been a recruit in Giap's army at Dien Bien Phu. He had led a battalion in the bitter street fighting in Hue during Tet. He had commanded a division during the final liberation of the South in 1975, then a corps on the Chinese border during the 1979 war with their hated Chinese neighbors. He might be Chief of Staff for the People's Army of Vietnam, but he was still close to his peasant roots. A big man by Vietnamese standards, he lived simply, and had refused to use political influence to get his sons cushy jobs in the Party. The soldiers loved him. His request was a breach of discipline, but the general and the sergeant stepped outside the cave entrance together into the cool night air for a smoke, carefully closing the blast door behind them. This ensured that they would be the only survivors of what was about to happen.

  The two RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft were working with a C-130 Hercules equipped with a Senior Scout clip-on SIGINT system to isolate the final locations of what were now being called "the leadership caves" from the minute emissions of the French-supplied cellular phone equipment used for their communications. The idea had come to Major Goldberg when he remembered a small notice he had seen on an Internet newsgroup several months before about a French firm in Toulon selling several million francs' worth of satellite cellular equipment to the Vietnamese government. He talked the situation over with the newly arrived French liaison officer, sent ahead to scout for the squadron of Rafale fighters that was due to arrive in three days. A phone call was made to the electronics firm and the company controlling the satellite cellular service contract for the Vietnamese. After finding out that the service had been almost unused until a few days earlier, and exactly what frequencies the phones transmitted on, it was a simple matter to have one of the NSA SIGINT satellites identify a rough location for the cellular activity.

  The three aircraft refined their positions, then handed them off, via their own MILSTAR satellite links, to an inbound strike force of 366th Wing aircraft. The Vietnamese leadership was in the 366th's sight, and the gun was cocked.

  General Perry was flying this one himself in his own F-15E Strike Eagle, known as Wing King.
Tonight's mission had it flying at 16,000 feet/4,876.8 meters, loaded with four GBU-24/B penetrating 2,000lb./ 909.1 kg. bombs. He had ordered a maximum effort for this evening's mission, and the maintenance chiefs had done themselves proud, getting sixteen of the complex birds into the air. The real kudos, though, had to go to the enlisted ordies from the bomb shops, who had switched plans for the evening and managed to build up the necessary LGBs to arm the dark grays, as well as getting the necessary mines into the B-1Bs for their last night of mining.

  "Final update coming in over the MILSTAR link, sir," said Captain Asi "Ahab" Ontra, the general's personal WSO, over the intercom. The general smiled in his oxygen mask at the report. Ontra was one of the growing number of Moslems making a career for themselves in the U.S. military. Born in the Detroit area, with its large population of Lebanese immigrants, he may have been a bit too "dry" on Friday nights at the officers' club, but a better operator of the LANTIRN system was not to be found in the 366th. Now they were on their way to kill a government.

  "How many of the caves have they identified?" asked the wing commander.

  "Nineteen so far, sir. Major Goldberg seems to feel that may be all of them, sir," replied the young WSO.

  "Have they told us what our target for tonight is?" the general inquired.

  "They're not sure, sir… maybe some kind of military command center," the young man speculated.

  "Okay. How long to target?" the general asked.

  "Two minutes, sir. Your steering cue is up!" came the curt reply. It was all business now.

  The Defense Minister shared a Camel with the young sergeant and sucked in the smoke and night air. Any other time, it would have been a beautiful night. Now his country was at war again, fighting for its pride… its self-respect… its identity… though he himself was beginning to question all of that. He looked over at the young soldier sharing a smoke with him and wondered what kind of nation he and the rest of the Party Leadership Council were going to hand over to this brave man.

  "Target in sight, sir. Ten seconds to drop," Ahab called to General Perry, the green glow from the FLIR image on the Multi-Function Display lighting his face as he worked the two hand controllers to set up the LGB delivery.

  "Roger, Master Arm on. Your pickle is hot. Stand by!" called General Perry over the intercom. As he did, the AAQ-14 LANTIRN targeting pod fired a short laser burst at the top of the karst to establish the range to target. This done, the time-to-drop clock counted down to zero. Then the four GBU-24/Bs dropped in rapid succession. They fell quickly, speeding up to over 900 fps./274.3 mps. When they were fifteen seconds from impact, Captain Ontra fired the laser again at the top of the limestone mountain, painting it with laser light. Again, a countdown clock in his FLIR MFD counted down to zero.

  It was the memory of a younger man that saved him at that moment. There was only time for General Truong Le to yell, "Get down!" to the sergeant, before the four bombs impacted the top of the karst. For a moment, the old man thought that the weapons has been duds, though that illusion was rapidly dispelled when the delayed-action fuzes fired the charges in the BLU- 109/B warheads. There was no way the weapons could fully penetrate the limestone strata to reach the caves below. They did not have to. The tail-mounted fuzes had been set to detonate at the same moment, setting up the equivalent of a small earthquake within the soft rock. At once, a vertical shear wave was formed, heading down into the karst. It collapsed the cave tunnels below, like eggs under an elephant. Everyone inside was killed instantly. Meanwhile, the sudden collapse of the caves caused a huge overpressure of air in the tunnel entrance, blowing the blast door off its hinges with a "bang" and a "whoosh." The rogue door was flung out of the twisting cave tunnel like a sheet of paper. It missed the Defense Minister and his young comrade by inches as it careened off into the jungle. As the silence returned to the night, the old general heard other dull explosions, as twelve more targets were hit in exactly the same way. Instinctively knowing what was happening, he stood transfixed as the distant flashes announced the end of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

  He was still standing when the young sergeant asked, "Shouldn't we report this to someone, Comrade General?"

  The old man thanked the darkness for not showing his embarrassment to the young soldier. Then he replied as the last of the rolling thunder of the bombs died away, "Yes. And Sergeant, thank you for reminding me of my duty. Would you care to accompany me, please?" With that, they headed down the trail, back to the road, and hopefully, to Yen Bai Airfield some 20 km./12 miles away.

  Yen Bai Airfield, Northwest of Hanoi, May 10, 2000, 1412 Hours

  The Party Military Committee's study of the 1991 Gulf War had derived one important lesson about air power: Use it or lose it. The VNPAF would not cower in shelters waiting to be destroyed. It would go down fighting from dispersed airstrips like this one. So it was that Colonel Nguyen Tri Loc, formerly the chief political officer of the VNPAF, found himself commanding the remains of the 931st Fighter Regiment, following the death of its commander from a Yankee AMRAAM missile three days previously. The 931st now consisted of just nine flyable MiG-29Cs and a rugged antique AN-2 biplane. These had narrowly escaped from the burning and exploding rubble of the air defense command center at Gia Lam Airport northwest of Hanoi only hours ago. The colonel had realized that the Americans were not making his planes a target unless they were actually flying. The unit's first attempt to break the aerial blockade had resulted in the loss of five of his precious MiG-29s to long-range AMRAAM shots. Since that time, they had been whittled down to the survivors that resided in the earth and concrete shelters surrounding the airfield's perimeter.

  The colonel had almost lost his own life two nights before, while trying to intercept one of the big B-1B bombers on a mining mission. He had flown alone that night, trying to hide in the clutter with his IFF transponder off, just in case they were trying to use that against him also. He had just sighted the black monster in the mouth of the Red River near Nam Dien when he saw the flash of a Sidewinder missile coming at him from an escorting F-16. Only a quick snapshot with one of his own R-73/AA-11 Archer missiles and a rapid run behind a nearby karst saved his life.

  At the time, the incident severely shook him, though now he was just furious, angered by his regiment's impotence against the aerial invaders. He and the surviving planes and pilots lived at the discretion of a hostile opponent, only as long as they did not threaten them. That was the reason why the Yankees wiped out the surface-to-air rocket batteries that protected his base here in the Vietnamese highlands valley from which it drew its name. When the survivors of the four rocket batteries returned, they were cursing the HARM missiles that destroyed their engagement radars like thunderbolts from the blue. Despite this loss, the People's Army was still providing base defense, in the form of a few well-hidden S-60 57mm AAA guns, and some shoulder-fired missile teams equipped with the Chinese version of the SA-16, dug in on hilltops to the south and west.

  Just finding the American intruders was almost impossible. Every intercept radar site in North Vietnam had been taken out in the first few days of the American intervention. So for early warning the colonel had only an Inmarsat-P satellite phone that connected him to agents on the ground in Thailand. He knew when a strike or patrol left Takhli or U-Tapao, but he could only guess where it was headed; and more than once he had scrambled his handful of fighters, wasting precious fuel and alerting the ever-vigilant AWACS planes, only to discover that aircraft had doglegged somewhere too far for him to have a chance at interception.

  But today would be different. Several flights of F-15Es had just struck one of the last of the leadership cavern complexes, and an urgent coded message on the satellite phone told him that their return route would pass almost directly over his position. The odds for once were more than two to one in his favor. He would have the advantage of surprise, and this might be the last chance for the 931st Regiment to strike a blow before it was targeted and wiped out for good. He headed to his
MiG, strapped in, and gave the order for the rest of the regiment to start engines. As the last of the howling Klimov RD-33 engines came to life, Colonel Nguyen Tri Loc taxied his MiG out for what would be the last air battle of the Vietnam People's Air Force.

  General Perry brought the Wing King away from its target run and pulled into the standard Strike Eagle trailing formation. This had two pairs of F-15Es, with the trailing pair up to four miles behind the first two. Because he and his wingman had hit a large leadership cave complex that was close to the old PRC/Vietnamese northwest rail line, they had wound up as the trailing pair in the formation for the return leg of the mission, which would take them within five miles/8.2 km. of the Yen Bai Airbase. The Gunfighters' commander was elated. The last of the leadership caves had been destroyed by a total of eight GBU-24/Bs. Amazingly, the last of the Leadership Council had insisted on staying in their own private grave complex, even when warned about the imminent danger posed by the 366th's penetration bombs. It was as if they'd realized their time was up… like old elephants going off to die. General Perry smiled. For once, those responsible for making war on innocent people had themselves paid with their lives. Justice. His eyes were scanning the cockpit, looking for signs of mechanical and systems problems, when they fixed on the moving map display, and froze.

  "Ahab," the general snapped, "get me an SAR picture of the runway at Yen Bai. Do it now!"

  The young captain immediately slewed the big dish of the APG-70 radar around to the left and painted the airfield, just coming into sight now about 20 miles/32.8 km. distant. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mode gave them photographic-quality images of ground targets from many miles away; targets as small as 8 feet/2.4 meters in size could be imaged. Both men stared tensely at the image in their MFDs. What they saw chilled them both, for on the screen were eight or nine small targets, clearly identifiable as aircraft. General Perry saw that most of them were clustered at what he remembered from satellite photos of the base as an arming and fueling pit. Two others were clearly getting ready for a takeoff roll. Immediately, he yelled over the intercom for Captain Ontra to take another sweep with the APG-70 in SAR mode, and saw that two more of the aircraft were missing from the arming pit. From the back seat, he heard his WSO mumble, "Oh, Allah!" They were in trouble.