The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  “What you want me to do about that?” the crew chief said, pulling the doors shut with his partner’s help.

  “Control says we’re scrambling as soon as they can knock it out with a TOW missile. Stand by.”

  “That’s all they ever say—stand by.” The crew chief could hear the clank of tank tracks and sporadic cannon fire moving toward his bunker. “They’re going to stand-fuckingby too long,” the crew chief said, disappearing into the back of the bunker. He rummaged around, finding two glass jars that he used for collecting fuel samples out of his Phantom. Hurrying up to the power cart, he twisted a valve and filled both jars with gasoline from the cart’s fuel tank. He tore strips from the rag he had been using, soaked them with gas and stuffed one into the neck of each jar. He held up his handiwork for Jack to see. “Got a match?” Jack reached into the leg-pocket of his G-suit and tossed him a container of survival matches.

  The crew chief dropped his webb belt with its heavy canteen and ammo pouch and shoved three matches between his teeth. Bending low, he peered out the access door, then ran toward the oncoming tank, making for the cover of the next bunker. He ran inside and set his jars down, unbuttoned his pants and urinated against the wall. Explosions and shell fire were coming from the tank’s direction. He crept around the wall of the bunker on all fours, looking at the tank. It was firing point blank into a bunker about seventy-five yards away. “Not my bird, you don’t.”

  The tank pivoted on its left track and moved toward the next bunker on the other side of the taxiway not fifty yards away. “Oh, momma,” he whispered, “the angles are right.” He struck a match and lit the rags of both bottles, picked them up and ran toward the tank. The flames burned his hands, nearly making him drop the jars.

  The gunner in the tank saw the light from the burning Molotov cocktails and swung the turret toward the running figure of the chief as he hurled them against the tank. The bottles shattered, the rags ignited the gasoline, the tank was enveloped in flames. Now an internal explosion sent a tongue of fire out of a hatch that had popped open.

  The crew chief picked himself up, surprised he was still alive, and ran back to his Phantom, partially opening the big blast doors to the bunker.

  Jack keyed his radio. “Control, Wolf Zero-Nine. 512’s crew chief knocked the tank out. The taxiway is clear.”

  The guards at the Security Police bunker recognized Waters immediately and waved him inside. Chief Hartley was lying on his stomach on a table while a corpsman put a fresh bandage on his thigh. The crew chief sat up, pointed at the chair next to him. “You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped at the colonel, “but the gesture is appreciated.”

  Waters searched for a way to tell the chief how he felt about what they had accomplished. He could only think of tired phrases, all of them wrong. “No gesture, Chief. How much longer can you hold your ditch?”

  “Not long. They’re using tanks like a bulldozer to build a causeway. That’s one reason the shelling has stopped. They don’t want to nail their own troops.”

  Waters stared at the wall in front of him. “Chief, I can’t ask your men to do any more…I’ve got to…I’m going to surrender before the shelling starts again. Maybe we can scramble our last birds out of here before that—”

  “Sir”—there was hurt in the crew chief’s voice—“a tank waded ashore about five minutes ago and is on the taxiway. You must not have heard.” He paused, startled by the look on Waters’ face. “Don’t worry, my men will knock it out.”

  He hoped it wasn’t an empty boast.

  “Roger, Wolf Zero-Nine.” Stansell’s voice was firm. “Scramble. Repeat. Scramble. Wolf Zero-Nine, you are now Wolf Zero-One. Recover at Dhahran. Repeat, recover at Dhahran. Good luck.”

  The crew chief and his partner pushed the blast doors open and fed power into the Phantom when Jack signaled them for engine start. They worked furiously buttoning up panels as the bird came to life. Finishing the last panel, the two men jerked the chocks from the wheels and gave Jack thumbsup. The chief ran to the front of the bunker and motioned them forward. Gunning the engines, Jack taxied out. As they rolled past, the crew chief came to attention and threw them a salute, the only way he knew to say good-bye to his warbirds.

  Jack returned the salute, hoping he saw it.

  “Hey, pard,” the crew chief said. “The ragheads are coming from the north. I’m going south. Coming?” And the two men ran from the empty bunker.

  Doc Landis looked at the beams over his head, visualizing the five Phantoms he heard taking off. He bent back over the wounded Security Policeman, trying to stop the flow of blood from a gaping wound in his back. “Bill, it won’t be nice when they find out you are an intelligence officer,” the doctor said. “I don’t need you here. Doctor’s orders…”

  “Thanks,” Carroll said, “but I’m not going anywhere. Waters’ orders…” He had disobeyed his colonel once and wasn’t about to do it again.

  The Security Police radio net came alive with warnings of landing craft and tanks in the water moving toward the beach at the north end of the runway. Chief Hartley shook his head. “I guess this is it. Well, we’ve come a long way together, Colonel.”

  “Chief, we sure have…” He began looking for something to make a white flag out of.

  Hartley wouldn’t let it go. “You’re the best damn boss I’ve ever had.” And he started to weave, dizzy from the effort. Waters reached out and steadied him. “You made me want to do things I never thought I could. I appreciate that…”

  The men still in the bunker looked up as they heard the sound of jets taking off. Waters counted them. In his mind’s eye he could see his five warbirds lifting off, reaching into the clear desert night, their afterburners leaving pulsating beacons of blue light behind them. And Waters knew with a certainty now that Jack Locke was, no question, Wolf Zero-One.

  The men reflexively ducked when they heard the shrill incoming whistle of artillery. Most of them heard the chief say, “Sweet Jesus,” before the rounds walked through the bunker, tearing them apart, and killing the commander of the 45th Tactical Fighter Wing.

  7 September: 0230 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 6 September: 2230 hours, Washington, O.C.

  The President was standing in the War Room deep in the Pentagon, leaning over the table in front of his chair, propped on his arms. His jaw moved slowly, the only sign of his distress as he listened to the colonel standing in front of the situation map at the front of the room. The colonel’s gray hair belied his youthful good looks, and his slow southern accent masked a quick, intense intelligence.

  “The base at Ras Assanya has been overrun,” the colonel said, using an electronic pointer.

  A pain cut through the President’s gut.

  “A Navy reconnaissance plane is stationed over the area and reports that all fighting has stopped…”

  “How old is that information?” National Security Adviser Cagliari said.

  “Less than twenty minutes, sir. The United Arab Command is reinforcing a line between the Getty oil refinery at Mina Azure”—the colonel traced a line six miles south of the oil refinery located on the Persian Gulf—“and the beachhead the People’s Soldiers of Islam have carved out.” He circled the spot where the PSI had come ashore.

  The pain in the President’s stomach got worse. “Has the PSI attacked the oil refinery?”

  “No, sir, their objective was the base.”

  “Oil…it always rears its ugly head.”

  The room was silent. Then the colonel picked it up: “Our fleet is moving into position, the vanguard, two destroyers and a frigate, passed through the Strait of Hormuz an hour ago. They’re moving at flank speed toward Ras Assanya. The rest of the fleet is on-station in the Gulf of Oman.” He pointed to an area southeast of the strait. “The Carrier Air Group is on standby waiting for the Go to launch a strike at the PSI.”

  The President wanted to be alone, have a little time to think before he acted. But time was what he did not have. The pain was turning to a
nger. He had, after all, the means to destroy the PSI. Give the order and send more people into harm’s way. He turned to Cagliari, who was now sitting next to him. “If I brought us up to DEFCON Two, would they get the signal how serious we are?”

  “Wrong signal, sir. That would be announcing we’re on the verge of a major war. The Russians couldn’t ignore it; they’d increase their state of alert. They might even opt for preemptive moves…”

  “Mr. President”—Cyrus Piccard, Secretary of State, broke into the conversation—“I’ve some room to negotiate here and try to stabilize the situation, the region…But I need a restrained military response.” He waited, anxious to see if the President would consider other options.

  “What do you need, Cy?” the President asked. The Secretary of State was a master at hiding his sharklike nature behind a facade of courtly manners and polite words.

  “If you use the Navy and the United Arab Command, you can trap the PSI at Ras Assanya. Which makes them a bargaining chip.”

  “But they’re holding over three hundred of our people prisoners,” Cagliari said.

  “True, which makes the situation more delicate,” Piccard told him. “My people are in contact with the International Red Cross. We’re asking for them to monitor the status of the prisoners. If you bring the Rapid Deployment Force to full alert and start moving advance elements toward the Gulf, that will send the signal we’re considering military intervention. But we can send other messages. The Soviet ambassador is waiting for me in my office. The channels are open. Mr. President, if we do this right, we can hope to achieve our immediate objective: an end to the fighting.”

  “And that’s a victory?”

  “It’s the best we can get without a war.”

  “But the cost…” The President’s pain would not go away. Or his anger. It seemed so much for so little…

  7 September: 1400 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1700 hours, Moscow, USSR

  The men waiting in the ornate room the Kremlin reserved for Politburo meetings could hear the new General Secretary’s footsteps echo down the hall, and they all stood and applauded when he entered the room.

  Viktor Rokossovksy, formerly the youngest and now the first among them, nodded, acknowledging the applause, and walked to the chair at the head of the table. He nodded again and sat down while the men continued to clap. He swept the table with an appreciative eye, stopping when he saw his old seat, now empty. Soon, he thought, one of my people will be sitting there. He could see the hard, satisfied look on Rafik Ulyanoff’s face. Even Kalin-Tegov, the party’s theoretician, looked pleased.

  “Thank you, comrades,” Rokossovsky said; his first official words as General Secretary. “Please be seated. We must not waste valuable time.” The applause slowly died as the men sat down. “I’m concerned about the American reaction to their defeat in the Persian Gulf.”

  Ulyanoff leaped forward. “We’re getting mixed signals. They’ve placed their Rapid Deployment Force on full alert but are not moving in mass. Our ambassador in Washington reports that the President seems to be looking for a negotiated settlement. There is a growing concern in the American press over the prisoners taken by the People’s Soldiers of Islam. The situation is fluid.”

  “And the KGB?” Rokossovsky asked.

  The pleasant-looking man who headed the KGB smiled. “Our agents report that the Iranians must negotiate. They no longer have the means to continue fighting.”

  “I’m considering that it would be in our interests to stabilize the Persian Gulf for now,” Rokossovsky told them. “Especially if we can participate in the negotiations for a peace treaty. Your thoughts, please.”

  “That would be consistent with our philosophy,” Kalin-Tegov said, “but we must reinforce any expansion of our influence in the diplomatic area with concrete developments inside Iran. Perhaps more non-military support to the Tudeh Party.”

  He did not add, nor did he need to, “For the time being.”

  Rokossovsky listened carefully to what Kalin-Tegov said. As the party’s theoretician, he had made it possible for Rokossovsky to depose the former General Secretary. “Then this is an opportunity to show the world that we can be peacemakers.”

  “When it suits our needs,” the party theoretician said.

  EPILOGUE

  9 September: 0905 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1005 hours, Stonewood, England

  Cunningham had to walk. The protocol officer at Stonewood had set up a welcoming brief, a tour and a luncheon to keep the general occupied until the F-4s arrived, and out of politeness he had sat through the welcome by Brigadier General Shaw. But during a coffee break he sought out Mort Pullman. “Chief, let’s walk over to base Ops.”

  The general walked in silence, reflecting on the irony of the situation. The fighting had ended and the antagonists were scrambling to find a new way to live with each other while the press looked for scapegoats to blame for the “defeat.” Yes, the PSI had overrun Ras Assanya and taken over three hundred prisoners, but now with the fleet standing offshore they couldn’t give them back quick enough. The Saudis wanted the remnants of the 45th out of Dhahran, but were demanding the U.S. fleet remain in the Gulf. Most of the press in Europe was claiming that the U.S. had started World War III, but the NATO governments were mightily pleased that oil was still flowing. And then a newly promoted Vice Air Marshall, Sir David Childs, had appeared in his office, telling him that the Prime Minister was under attack in Parliament because of British involvement in the Persian Gulf. But Her Majesty’s government would not object if five F-4s happened to recover at Stonewood under routine training operations in the next few days. The general had thanked Childs and scheduled a C-137B to take him to Stonewood.

  As they made the short walk to the flight line, a staff sergeant saluted them, saying, “Forty-fifth, sir.” It was not the loud shout of the Army’s “Airborne, sir,” but a quiet statement of pride. More men and women passed them, each demanding a salute.

  “Your people look sharp, Pullman. How do you do it?”

  “I don’t. They do it, General. They’re proud of what they did.”

  The general shook his head. “I almost destroyed them and they’re proud of it…”

  “They don’t see it that way, sir. You gave them a job to do without starting World War III, and they did it. The fighting has stopped. They’re ready for next time.”

  Shaw met them as they entered base Ops saying the fighters were ten minutes out. The three men went out onto the flight line.

  “General,” Shaw said, “can we do something more for them?”

  “You have something in mind?”

  “I was thinking of a memorial…”

  “You mean like the Arizona in Pearl Harbor? Something to remember a defeat? Lest we forget?” Even his own generals did not understand that for the last forty years his Air Force had not won a war. “No. A memorial marks the end to something. This is not over. Death and waste and stupidity don’t need memorials, only memory so we won’t underestimate an enemy again. I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing wrong with my memory. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “Will we have a second chance?” Shaw asked.

  Cunningham was silent. He was fifty-eight years old, beyond normal retirement age, serving only at the pleasure of the President, who did not seem overly pleased with him. He studied Shaw, trying to fathom what was behind his troubled eyes.

  “I was thinking of Waters, the others. Their chances are gone.”

  “Yes, and we don’t have many like them left. Waters was a real combat commander. He could lead and people would follow. Do you know how rare that is? I had to tell his wife about his death. It was something I couldn’t let anyone else do. You know, she was more understanding and stronger about it than I was. She said, ‘Anthony understood the risks. He wouldn’t have it any other way.’”

  An honor roll of names scrolled through Cunningham’s mind: Fairly, Nelson, Gomez, Conlan, Benton, Luna, D’Angelo, Belfort, Henderson,
McCray, Morgan…He felt a deep personal accountability that he couldn’t shove into a bureaucratic niche. Human beings had been killed because of the decisions he had made…

  “No, I was wrong,” he said. “They do need a memorial. Maybe not now, but in a few years when time has put this mess in perspective. When we can remember them for who they were and what they did.”

  The three men stood there together, silently committed to making it happen.

  Jack sharply rocked the wings of his Phantom, signaling his flight to rejoin into close formation. The four jets started to collapse together into finger-tip formation when Jack’s words broke the radio silence. “Echelon right.” Smoothly and with precision the two wingmen on the left joined up and slid under the other three. The four wingmen then stretched out to Jack’s right, each slightly behind the Phantom on his left, their wing tips almost touching.

  Without scanning his flight, Jack checked in with Eastern Control. “Eastern, Poppa Kilo with four…” He stopped. He wasn’t a Poppa Kilo on a routine training mission. Who was he kidding? And why? To appease the politicians? He was a Wolf, leading the 45th.

  “Go ahead, Poppa Kilo, you are coming through broken,” Eastern replied, a voice Jack recognized from a long time ago. Now he remembered the face that went with the voice, a warm, humorous man with the deep-seated professionalism characteristic of a British controller.

  “Correction, Eastern. This is Wolf Zero-One with four. Request clearance direct to Stonewood for an overhead recovery.”

  Inside the control center every controller looked at the man directing the five fighters. They had, of course, heard what had happened to the 45th. They understood the political implications of acknowledging that now famous call sign. It would be one thing for Her Majesty’s government to explain the transit of five fighters under normal operations; it was an entirely different matter giving aid to five of the combatants in a war that was being widely condemned by the opposition party in Parliament. The thought of what the press would do to the RAF was sobering.