The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  Waters’ mouth drew into a tight, narrow line as he scanned the board that listed only fifty-one mission-capable F-4s, a reminder of the losses his wing had suffered in less than ten weeks. The wing had eight other Phantoms with severe enough combat damage to make them of doubtful use. “Steve, use the four Weasels we’ve got left for air defense against the ships; load out twenty-two planes for air-to-air. Hang AGM-65s on the other twenty-five.” He would use Mavericks against the ships.

  Jack felt like a damn spectator as he watched the men go to work carrying out Waters’ orders. Waters kept staring at the big situation map board, which for now was blank. Finally the colonel pushed his chair back and headed for the coffee pot. Jack joined him. “Sir…I want to get back to the squadron—”

  Waters shook his head, then added, “Jack, I’ve been so busy the last few hours trying to bring things together I’ve forgotten about the basics. I want you—”

  “Throwing me a bone, sir?”

  “No. And stop feeling sorry for yourself. We’ve got to keep control of the air over the base. Start working on it and get back to me and Farrell.”

  In the COIC Jack realized the bone Waters had thrown him was keeping air superiority, controlling their airspace. The Air Force hadn’t done that since the early days of World War II. Some assignment…

  Sergeant Nesbit ripped another message off the printer and handed it to Waters. Immediately he summoned Carroll to the Command Post and handed him the message. Carroll sat down, feeling sick. “Much worse than I thought,” he said. “They’ve got four assault landing ships and three small coastal freighters escorted by two frigates and three large Sherson-class torpedo boats coming our way. There must be another dozen or so small, fast boats they’ve mounted a machinegun or grenade-launcher on, running along with them. Colonel, that’s a good-sized fleet for this part of the world.

  “And we’ve got to stop them from coming ashore…”

  The battle for Ras Assanya had begun.

  5 September: 1205 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1505 hours, Bushehr, Iran

  The squadron commander selected to lead the first attack on Ras Assanya walked around his MiG-23, preflighting the four eleven-hundred-pound bombs hanging on the pylons under the fixed inboard wings. He patted one fondly, pleased that its target was the Americans. His plan was simple: twenty-four bomb-laden MiG-23s would take off in radio silence, fly at low level across the Gulf, avoid early detection and drop their bombs on the base. At the same time sixteen MiG-23s would launch as a CAP and escort them at high level, engaging any Phantoms that came to challenge them. The pilot commander thought it especially appropriate that they were using the Americans’ own method of attack.

  5 September: 1220 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1520 hours. Ras Assanya, Saudi Arabia

  The CAP launched first, as planned.

  Mary Hauser’s GCI radar detected them when they climbed above fifteen hundred feet. She warned the 45th of the inbound bandits and lowered the elevation angle of her search antenna, hunting for bandits on the deck. Her low-altitude coverage was very poor at that long range but improved closer to the radar head. A momentary flicker at one hundred ten miles caught her eye. She hit the sequence of switches that allowed her IFF to query Soviet transponders, and the screen lit up with five responses. “I can’t believe it,” she said aloud. “They won’t turn off their IFF. Just like last time.” Again she sent a warning to the 45th.

  Jack sat next to Steve Farrell watching the board plotters post the MiG warnings. “I’m betting there’s more than five on the deck,” Jack said. “GCI’s radar will get skin paints when they’re inside eighty miles. Don’t be suckered into going after the CAP.”

  Waters nodded and scrambled sixteen of his air-defense craft onto the runway, holding six in their bunkers. The first eight taxied onto the Active and held, waiting for a release from the Command Post, while the second group of eight held on the taxiway.

  Mary’s radar started picking up skin paints at ninety-two miles on the MiGs ingressing at low level. They’re not that low, she told herself, and again warned the 45th.

  The command post’s frequency came alive, launching the waiting Phantoms, committing them against the bandits that were on the deck. Jack sat in the command post listening to the radio traffic and wondering if he could follow the directions he had given the crews: make them jettison their bombs and run like hell, don’t hang around trying for a kill.

  It was against everything they’d been trained for. The only thing he was grateful for was that he couldn’t hear what they were calling him…

  The MiG pilot leading the attackers on the deck saw his radar-warning receiver come to life and scanned the sky at twelve o’clock high, expecting to see the distinctive smoke trails of Phantoms high above them. The warning tone in his headset became louder, indicating the threat was closing in. He momentarily froze when he saw two Phantoms swinging in on him from his left eight-o’clock position and another two doing the same at his right two o’clock position. And they were all below him…it was a classic low-altitude intercept that had been turned into a pincers maneuver…

  The lead Phantom pilot keyed his radio, “Tallyho, the fox,” he called out, telling his flight the MiGs were carrying bombs, the ones they were after. The Flogger pilots, not expecting American low-level engagement, weren’t able to counterturn or evade a fighter below two thousand feet. So they did the only thing they knew: jettison their bombs and make level turns back to base as the Phantoms shot through.

  Five of the Phantoms managed to launch Sidewinders as they made one turn onto the MiGs, and three of the missiles traced their characteristic sideways guidance pattern, like a Sidewinder rattlesnake, through the sky to a target. One F-4 squeezed off a snap gunshot when he turned onto a Flogger, raking the fuselage and sending the MiG tumbling into the sea. For most of the Phantoms it was a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn through the Floggers’ formation before they disengaged and ran for home. And because the Floggers had jettisoned their loads, it was all “one pass, haul ass” for the F-4s.

  The Phantoms reformed into elements of two as they disengaged, the backseaters twisting in their seats, looking for the Floggers they knew were still out there. Mary monitored them as they ran from the bandits and assigned hard recovery altitudes: once inside a five-nautical-mile ring around the base the Phantoms would not leave their assigned altitude until cleared to land by the tower. The Rapier crews also copied the hard altitudes Mary was assigning to the Phantoms and dialed their IFF interrogators to the codes the F-4s would be squawking on recovery.

  They were turning the base into the “flak trap” Jack had planned…

  The MiGs flying CAP were not aware of the Phantoms until their comrades started yelling over the radio. Then they pushed over and headed for the engagement that was eight miles away and thirty thousand feet below them, not happy about engaging in a dogfight on the deck. When the MiG pilots saw the Americans “running away,” four of them, sensing an easy kill, chased after the Phantoms. With the F-4s at known altitudes and their IFF transponders squawking the right codes, it was easy for the Rapier crews to break out the Floggers as they were lured into range. The Firefly radar operator of the Rapier battery at the north end of the runway used the track-while-scan mode to lock onto the leading MiG while placing his secondary-target symbol on the following Flogger. The operator hit the fire-control button and sent two missiles off the round turret toward the MiG, then immediately transitioned to the second target and rapid-fired two more missiles.

  Both MiGs died within eight seconds of each other.

  The other two Floggers lost their enthusiasm, lit their afterburners, dropped down onto the deck and ran for home. The tail-end MiG hugged the water at fifty feet and accelerated to 550 knots, the lowest and fastest the pilot had ever flown, but the Rapier battery at the south end of the runway tracked him down onto the deck and fired. The missiles found their target.

  Nineteen minutes after launching, the first Phantom touch
ed down and taxied rapidly back into its bunker to be refueled and rearmed for its next mission.

  The squares on the board that tracked aircraft launch and recovery rapidly filled up, and there were no open spaces to indicate a plane missing. Waters sank back into his chair, closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He turned to Farrell and Jack. “Judging by the radio chatter, it was a turkey shoot.” There was no elation or pride in his voice, it was a simple statement of fact. The PSI’s best pilots had led the first attack and attrition had reduced their ranks.

  Nesbit caught Waters’ attention and pointed to the transient aircraft board. He had just grease-penciled in the ETA for another C-130 that was five hours out. “We might get out of this one yet,” Waters said as he scanned the situation plot board, noting the position of the ships that were heading directly at the base, trying to estimate when they would be offshore. Such stuff wasn’t his game.

  “I’d like to know what happened to C.J.,” he now said, more to himself than to the waiting Sergeant Nesbit.

  “There’s a chance the PSI might have picked him up…”

  The sergeant deftly typed a series of code words into the classified command communications set in his charge, waited a few moments, then typed in a series of instructions. A voice came over the transmitter, raspy and broken but understandable. “Hey, Reno, this is Nes, how do you copy?” The answering voice from the Watch Center came through much better. “Do me a favor, check with the analysts on the floor and see if they’ve got anything on a Major Charles Justin Conlan. We lost him today and think he might have been picked up by the PSI.” The sergeant broke the transmission and turned in his seat, “Colonel, what you saw was a test of the voice circuits of the command net, only this one didn’t get monitored or recorded.”

  Nesbit had to wait thirty minutes before the printer came to life and spit out that a message from the trawler off Ras Assanya had been intercepted. When Nesbit read it he wished he’d never asked. He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Waters.

  The anger Waters felt did not match the calm in his voice. “Jack, I’ve got a job for you. How’s Thunder with the Pave Spike?”

  Jack was puzzled by Waters’ reference to the laser illuminator. The accuracy of the system was phenomenal but the aircraft carrying the laser pod had to orbit while the wizzo kept the laser’s beam centered on the target until another aircraft could toss a “smart bomb” that would home on the reflected energy. The target had to be relatively undefended for them to hang around that long. “Good, but I imagine he’s rusty. Anyway, I think those ships are too heavily defended—”

  Waters shook his head. “I want you to illuminate that trawler while Bull tosses a bomb into the basket. We’re going to sink that son of a bitch. Without an air cover you shouldn’t have trouble.”

  “But why, Colonel? That trawler isn’t going to help them now and it’s a noncombatant.”

  “It became a combatant when it pulled C.J. and Stan out of the water and turned them over to a PSI patrol boat. The PSI executed them on the spot. I’m going to return the favor.”

  Jack set up a standard pylon turn around the slow-moving trawler, feeling naked, while Thunder illuminated the target. His back seater’s crisp voice came over the radio signaling that he had a lock on and clearing Bull to toss his bomb. Bull Morgan’s precision was legendary, but without some type of smart bomb, hitting the trawler would have been more luck than skill. Jack watched, fascinated, as the two thousand-pound bomb separated from under Morgan’s F-4 and arced downward toward the trawler, and then as it picked up the reflected laser energy and refined its trajectory it showed a series of little jerks and wobbles as it fell toward the trawler. It impacted three feet from the point that Thunder had laid the crosshairs on and penetrated to the keel before its delayed-time fuse activated, and it exploded. The ship buckled upward, splitting in two and sinking a half-minute later. Jack broke out of orbit and headed for base.

  It was twilight when Jack taxied in and swung the Phantom around on the concrete apron in front of the bunker, pointing its tail into the waiting cavern. As soon as he dropped F-4’s arresting hook, one of the waiting crew chiefs connected a tow cable to pull it inside while the other attached a steering bar to the nose gear and signaled for power to the winch, which guided the Phantom into its nest. Since 512’s bunker did not have in-bunker refueling, a fuel truck was waiting for them, hose outstretched and ready. Before Jack or Thunder could climb down, refueling was underway and a dolly had been wheeled under the Pave Spiker laser pod for downloading. A maintenance stand had been pushed up against the tail and a fresh drag-chute was being jammed into its compartment in the empennage. The gun-plumbers pushed a munitions dolly with three Mavericks already hung on a LAU-88 launcher under each wing for upload…The phone in the bunker rang. Jack and Thunder were wanted in the command post.

  “The C-130 will be taking off on its fifth shuttle in a few minutes and will be back in two hours from Dhahran,” Waters told the assembled men in the command post. “I want a hundred bodies on board every time it takes off. Have your people ready to go. We should have a second C-130 shuttling in around 2100. We’ll pick the pace up then and should be able to move two hundred people out every two hours. Okay, that’s it. Get back to your troops, tell them what’s going down and make it happen.”

  “Jack, Thunder,” Waters called, motioning them to follow him, and the three walked over to the COIC, where they found thirty-six aircrews waiting and eager for their chance to be assigned to a mission. Having an extra crew for every two aircraft should now pay off, Waters figured…the fifty-one mission-capable aircraft the 45th possessed were standing loaded and ready to go, but many of the crews had already flown two combat missions and all were dog tired. A fresh and welcome team was about to be rotated into the fight.

  Waters got right to the point: “The ships coming toward us are about halfway here. We’re going after them with twenty birds as soon as it’s dark. You’ll be using Mavericks so you can stand off, launch and leave. The four Weasels we’ve got left will go in with you and try to suppress their air defenses. Intel says they’ve got shipboard SAMs and Triple A. Your job isn’t to sink them but to get them turned away. As long as they keep coming, we keep hitting them. The other twelve crews are CAP, but they’ll sit alert in the bunkers. Any MiGs supporting those ships will have to come to us now. Our GCI will give us warning to scramble on them. Captain Locke will help you plan and coordinate the attack. That’s it. Any questions?”

  There was none, except from Jack: “Sir, can I fly this one?”

  “No, you’ve flown once. You’ll get another chance. For now I want you to hang around while these crews brief; you should be able to help. Then get some rest, it’s going to be a long night.”

  Evening twilight had ended and the quarter-moon would not rise until two in the morning, creating the conditions Waters wanted: use darkness as a cover and at the same time catch the ships away from any coverage the MiGs might give them. Experience told him that Weasel operations forced the PSI missileers to shut their radars off and rely on visual sightings to track and fire, a bad nighttime tactic. Now, at 8:30 P.M., the big blast doors on thirty-six bunkers swung open and twenty-four Phantoms cranked engines. The other twelve crews sat in their cockpits, waiting for a scramble order on any MiGs that might challenge them.

  The Weasels taxied out, the first pair turning onto the active runway, setting their brakes, the caged power of the J-79 engines driving the nose of each bird down, and rolling at the first green wink from the tower. In less than two minutes twenty-two aircraft followed them into the night sky.

  Jack returned to the Command Post, joining Waters in what seemed an interminable waiting game. Both knew the risks without talking about them…The enemy ships mounted SA-N-5, a naval version of the Strela, nasty little missiles, and Intel had established that there were SA-8s and 9s on the decks. But who knew how many Triple A or Strelas they had to throw at the 45th? It was going to be tough, no q
uestion…

  The Phantoms’ pilots didn’t have time for such thoughts as they skimmed the surface, eating up the sixty-five miles to the oncoming fleet. None had any illusions about getting onto the ships undetected and all hoped the eight minutes flying time would be too short a reaction time for the ships to bring up their defenses. Three minutes out, the bear in the lead Weasel reported he was picking up a signal. “Probably an SA-8,” he told his pilot. He studied his radar for a moment. “I’m painting a lot of small craft in front of the big stuff.” The pilot started doing easy jinks back and forth, which at their speed should, he figured, defeat Strelas, the small shoulder-held SAM that might be fired at them from a small boat.

  The Ukrainian on the Shershen-class torpedo boat leading the fleet pressed his headset to his ears, listening to the constant flow of information being radioed by the Sirri, the Alligator-class landing ship that served as the fleet’s flagship. The Soviets had given the PSI the Alexander Tortsev, a four-thousand-ton amphibious assault vessel, and the PSI had renamed it the Sirri, following the Iranian practice of naming assault vessels after islands in the Gulf. Its main cargo deck was loaded with eighteen T-62 tanks and ten BTR-40P scout cars, all capable of wading ashore.

  The radar on the Sirri had picked up the fast-moving attackers and was sending out warnings. When he was sure of the incoming track of the Phantoms, the Ukrainian picked up the small heat-seeking missile and waited. He caught a glimpse of the bird moving toward him at over 500 miles per hour. The man barely had time to swing the shoulder-held missile into the path of the F-4 and pull the trigger. He had time, however, to watch with satisfaction as the U.S.-made Stinger homed on the Phantom’s tailpipe, scoring a direct hit. A small explosion then engulfed the rear-half of the Phantom as it tumbled into the water. The Ukrainian silently thanked his Iranian allies and was pleased to know they had more Stingers.