Battle Born pm-8

by Dale Brown

  Now desperate to make up for lost time, Rinc enrolled in the University of Nevada at Reno and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. He turned down dozens of offers from companies all over the world — a young engineer with a commercial pilot’s license was rare indeed — and applied for and won a place at the Air Force Officer Training School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. After that came a pilot training slot, one of only a handful awarded to OTS “ninety-day wonder” graduates.

  He graduated with honors and was one of the first Air Force second lieutenants to be selected to fly the coveted FB-111A Aardvark supersonic bomber for the Strategic Air Command. The FB-111 was an elite showpiece assignment — there were fewer than fifty line Aardvark pilots in the entire U.S. Air Force. But the SAC version of the F-111 fighter-bomber never went to fight in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, so Seaver never saw any combat. And his FB-111 assignment ended less than two years later, when the Aardvarks were retired from service, a victim of budget cutbacks.

  There were no other flying slots open during the steep force drawdowns of the early nineties, so Seaver transferred to the Aeronautical Systems Division, Special Projects Office, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, working as a project officer and weapons design engineer for the B-1B Lancer bomber. He helped develop a series of high-tech, almost science-fiction-like weapons for the bomber, earning accolades and high-ranking attention throughout the Air Force as a forward-thinking, innovative designer. But the Lancer was in danger of being unceremoniously retired as well, and funding for advanced weapons and upgrades was slashed. Seaver’s job was eliminated virtually overnight. He attended Squadron Officer School and was promoted to captain, but his prospects were looking poor for the career in the military that he longed for.

  Without a regular commission or any recent flying experience, the young captain left the active-duty force, went home to Reno, and transferred to the Nevada Air National Guard. The Guard unit in Reno was one of the last to fly the RF-4 Phantom tactical reconnaissance jet, and Seaver saw his opportunity to fly a fast-mover once again. But he was a victim of the same old pattern that had dogged him before: the aged RF-4 was soon doomed to retire. When the Reno Guard got C-130 Hercules cargo planes, Seaver, disappointed but thankful to be back in the sky once again, accepted a part-time pilot assignment, flying one or two missions a week out of Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

  In between, he worked as a flight instructor and charter pilot in Reno, earning his Airline Transport Pilot rating and quickly accumulating more commercial flight time. He piloted every charter assignment that came his way, got as much sleep as he could, then worked equally hard as a C-130 “trash-hauler.” He completed Air Command and Staff College and received his master’s degree, both achievements very unusual for National Guard officers. Everyone thought he was crazy for chasing an unattainable dream: to someday be called back to active duty and fight in the mythical air battle he still dreamed about.

  But Rinc Seaver proved them all wrong. When the Reno Air National Guard transitioned from the C-130 to the B-1B Lancer bomber, he applied and was immediately accepted for pilot transition training and a fulltime Guard assignment. He was back in his element, and his star quickly rose. He was promoted to major three years below the zone and became the squadron’s senior standardization/evaluation pilot. To top it all off, he led the fledgling 111th Bomb Squadron in winning the LeMay, Dougherty, Ryan, Crumm, and Fairchild Trophies in Air Combat Command’s biennial long-range Bombing and Navigation Competition. “Aces High” became the first Air Force Reserve Component unit in history and only the second B-1B unit to win the coveted Fairchild Trophy.

  But Seaver’s promotion and success did not sit well with most of the other Reno Air Guard crewdogs. Although he was clearly the most technically knowledgeable flier in the squadron — his pilot skills rivaled those of some of the veteran aircraft commanders — almost everyone saw him only as a young, cocky, know-it-all junior major with no life other than flying. What made him think he was so great? He had relatively little total military flying time, very little Bone time, and no combat experience. Some of the pilots he gave evaluations and check rides to had thousands of hours and many more years in service, and had flown combat missions in Desert Storm and even earlier conflicts, such as Operation Just Cause over Panama. As far as they were concerned, Rinc Seaver was an outsider and would always be one — forget that he was a native Nevadan and one of the first members of Aces High. Even after winning Bomb Comp, the old heads still considered him a mere systems operator, not a real aviator.

  Rinc Seaver’s answer to them was simple: go piss up a damned rope. He worked hard to be the best. He did his job with skill and dogged determination, just as he did everything else in his life, and he took no crap from anyone regardless of rank or flying time. Even in the Nevada Air National Guard, where politics, influence, and family name meant almost as much as skill and dedication, Rinc Seaver — the name meant “determined warrior” in Welsh — took a backseat to no one. He developed a reputation as a brash, determined loner who liked to push the envelope as much as possible at every opportunity.

  Now he sat in the B-1B Part-Task Trainer, a computerized B-1 flight simulator, with a pilot and OSO/DSO compartment side by side in nonmoving but otherwise fully realistic cabs, ignoring Long’s glare. “Watch this,” he said to Furness, about to recap the doomed flight. “Okay, Neil, hit it.” Furness suppressed her irritation and nodded to him to continue. The PTT had full visual displays out the cockpit windows and a worldwide radar and threat display database, so the crews could fly anywhere in the world and get realistic terrain and geographic displays and readouts. A control console was manned by two instructors and a computer technician. The instructors could program thousands of different scenarios into each simulator session, re-creating the simplest orientation flights or the most complex wartime emergency procedures scenario imaginable. The simulator operated twenty hours a day, six days a week. Like most military units in this age of steep budget cuts, the simulator had more “flying” time than all of the unit’s aircraft combined.

  The computer-generated visual display out the cockpit windows showed a vast expanse of desert, dotted with tall, jagged, rocky peaks. “Here we are at the Scud-ER target at Navy Fallon,” said Seaver. “We hit two targets, but the damned squids jerked our chains and kept the emitters on and didn’t simulate a kill, so we thought we missed. Chappie is ready to spit nails because he thinks he shut down all the threats, which he did, but the Navy kept on transmitting like they never got hit, the bastards.” Chappie was Al Chapman, his dead defensive systems officer.

  “Seaver…”

  “Hold on, boss,” Seaver said, pushing on. “We’re yanking and banking and jammin’ and jivin’ our asses off. Everyone’s pissed at me because they thought we missed the first two targets and because I wasn’t doing enough for bomber defense. That’s bullshit too — we shacked all three targets — but…” He stopped, ashamed that he had patted himself on the back and then said something negative against the dead. He could feel the icy stares on the back of his neck and knew the others, Furness too, resented it.

  “Anyway, we nail the third target. Dead-on. We fly right into a SAM and triple-A nest on the other side of the ridge. A shitload of SAMs and triple-A — the smoky SAMs are everywhere, a couple dozen of ’em. We scram left away from the trap. We’re at two hundred hard ride. I put the spoiler override switches into OVERRIDE, pop the speedbrakes and pull ’em into idle power, and start our two point five Gs pull to cornering velocity. Speed comes down nicely. Override switch back to normal, speedbrakes down. Now watch.”

  The visual display showed the steep bank, with more and more earth replacing sky in the cockpit window. Seaver pushed the throttles to max afterburner and pulled the stick right, but nothing happened — the steep bank stayed in, and they dipped earthward. Seconds later the simulator crashed with a sound resembling Wile E. Coyote hitting the ground in a Road Runner cartoon.

&nb
sp; “Seaver, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove…”

  “I know why we crashed, boss,” he said. “Look: over ninety degrees of bank, airspeed slowing…”

  “You cross-controlled your jet,” Furness told him. “You know you’re not supposed to do over ninety degrees of bank while TF’ing.”

  “But look at the speedbrakes,” Seaver said insistently. “Just like the Powder River accident a couple years ago. Low altitude, steep bank angle, tight turn, and the speedbrakes are still extended. Sink rate builds up…”

  “But you said you retracted the speedbrakes.”

  “They had to be still extended, boss,” Rinc said.

  Long rolled his eyes in disbelief. “So you say.”

  “I know I did,” Rinc said. “Either they didn’t retract, or they stuck extended. But they didn’t retract.”

  “CITS said they did,” Long told him. CITS, the Central Integrated Test System, was a monitoring, recording, and troubleshooting device on the B-1 bomber that acted like a flight data recorder. The CITS was heavily armored and designed to withstand a crash. They had recovered the stricken bomber’s CITS module, and its memory was successfully retrieved and analyzed by the Air Force.

  “I think something happened, something that prevented the speedbrakes from retracting, or retracted them too late,” Rinc insisted. “The smoky SAMs were all around us — it’s possible one of them got stuck in the spoiler wells. In that case, CITS would report them retracted even though they were still deployed. But that’s the only way that crash makes any sense.”

  All he saw were blank faces staring back at him hostilely.

  Seaver knew his arguments were falling on deaf ears. Since he had initiated the ejection sequence and punched everybody out long after the Bone had departed coordinated flight, they were putting the blame squarely on him.

  Several long awkward moments passed. Then Rebecca Furness turned to the systems officers and simulator operators behind them and said, “Excuse us for a minute, guys.”

  Seaver got to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me for a minute, boss, I’m going to take a leak, and then I’m going to get all the sim data together and upchannel it to Air Combat Command. We’ll need to independently verify what we found and give this information to the accident board.”

  “Save your own butt by blaming the dead, huh, Seaver?” Long said under his breath, but loudly enough for the other squadron members to hear. Furness scowled.

  Seaver inwardly winced at the remark but simply said, “It happened, John. It was some kind of technical malfunction. We can prove it.” Looking about, he saw no sympathy in the faces around him.

  Within a few moments, everyone had departed but Furness, Long, and Seaver. “So. You saw the flight surgeon today?” Furness asked. “What did he say?”

  Seaver proudly produced a sheet of paper. “He signed me off for flying,” he replied. “I know the squadron is getting ready for the pre-D. I realize I have a bunch of training to catch up on, but I know I can get back up to speed in time to recertify along with the rest of the squadron.”

  Furness examined the paper with a rueful shake of her head. The flight surgeon had given Seaver full medical clearance for flight duties, even though he was still undergoing physical therapy. The sign-off usually meant that the crew member was off all medications and was observed to be free of any apparent psychological or emotional difficulties as a result of the crash. More important, for Seaver, was the sign-off that allowed him to train for the predeployment certification, or pre-D.

  The pre-D was the unit’s biggest gauge of its combat effectiveness. Air National Guard bomber squadrons were “replacement” units, not frontline combat-ready units. In the event that the bombers were needed, the squadron would be “federalized,” or transferred from the command of the Nevada state adjutant general to the Air Force and “gained” by an active-duty bomb wing. The Guard aircrews would be tasked to ferry the aircraft to the deployment base, either in the United States or overseas; and the best crews might fly actual combat missions if there was a shortage of active-duty crews. In order to prove they were ready for full integration into the active force, twice a year the squadron was sent either to Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota or Dyess AFB in Texas to undergo a grueling two-week drill to demonstrate their combat readiness.

  Fail the pre-D, and you could be dismissed from the squadron. If too many crews failed, the entire unit could be decertified. The unit already had one big black mark against it — Seaver’s crash. Having even one crew fail a pre-D could bring the entire squadron down.

  Furness put the paper aside, glancing at Long. “You know you’re not supposed to go to the flight surgeon or ask him for any sign-offs without asking me first,” she said to Seaver.

  He narrowed his eyes quizzically. “No, I didn’t know that, boss. I must’ve filed that piece of info in the ‘Like I give a shit’ folder when the President briefed it.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Seaver.”

  “But I didn’t go to the doc to ask for a sign-off — I went for a scheduled rehab follow-up. He asked me how I felt, poked and prodded, and then said I looked okay enough to go back to work. He did the sign-off. I didn’t ask him for shit. If he’s out of line with you, that’s his problem, not mine.” He looked hard at his squadron commander, then asked, “It sounds like maybe you don’t want me flying or participating in any pre-D work-ups. There a problem here, boss?”

  “I don’t know, Seaver,” Furness said. “I don’t like seeing you in here when you’re supposed to be recuperating, that’s all.”

  “I’m all right, Beck,” Rinc said. “I’m ready to get moving.” He looked at her, then at Long’s scowl. “What else, guys?”

  “Start by telling us the real reason you lost it, Seaver,” Long said acidly.

  “Excuse me?” Seaver asked incredulously. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You heard me, Seaver,” Long retorted. “The wreckage and the bodies are still warm and you already want another crew and another plane…”

  “Those ‘bodies’ were my friends, Long Dong,” Seaver said bitterly.

  “They were my friends too,” Long said. “But I for one don’t think you deserve another chance until you fully explain what really happened out on the range.”

  “Like I told you and the accident board,” Seaver said, “we were in trouble. We were scramming away from the SAMs. I popped speedbrakes to get us down to cornering velocity. I admit I went over forty-five degrees of bank, but I had the TERFLW paddled off and I was flying it visually — if we were in the clouds, I would’ve kept TERFLW on and done forty-five. But we were under attack, dammit! I tried to roll out but couldn’t straighten her out. I knew something was wrong, so I gave the command to eject—”

  “Bullshit you did,” Long said.

  Seaver looked angrily at Long and finally nodded. “Okay, maybe I didn’t give the command,” he said. “But the plane was in a bad skid, a high angle-of-attack, a steep bank, and we were still at two hundred hard ride with TERFLW doing an inverted fly-up. I was trying to fly it out, but I lost it. When I couldn’t get it back, I didn’t think. I just reacted.”

  “You’re damned right you didn’t think. You screwed up,” Long shot back. “Did you ever think to give us a yellow light?” There was a yellow PREPARE TO EJECT and a red EJECT light that were manually activated by the pilots in a controlled ejection situation. Normally during a flight, the crew’s ejection mode switches were set to AUTO, which allowed either the pilot or the copilot to eject the rest of the crew. Even on the ground, Long and most other crew members couldn’t actually say the word “eject,” as in the “red EJECT light.” He and every other flier knew it was a command that demanded an instantaneous response. Seeing the red EJECT light was the same as issuing the “Eject! Eject! Eject!” order verbally.

  “No. There was no time.”

  “There could have been, if you didn’t have your head so far up your ass,” Long said angrily.<
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  The memory of his dead fellow crewdogs hit Rinc Seaver hard, and the anger welled up out of his body like air out of a popped balloon. Seaver had been training both Chappie and his wife, Daphne, to fly — Daphne had already soloed and was just a night cross-country from her check ride. Rinc was godfather of one of their kids, even though none of them were very good Catholics. They were the closest friends — no, the closest family—Seaver had. Chappie left his wife and two kids, a son and daughter, behind.

  “You’re damned right. No one else went. No one else even initiated the sequence,” Long said bitterly. “You know what I think, Seaver? I think you couldn’t handle it. You were getting hosed by the Navy, you were confused, you were disoriented, and you were scared, so you panicked and hit your handles!”

  “We were in a skid, we were headed down, and I thought I could save it.”

  “That crash was your fault, Seaver!”

  “No it wasn’t,” he cried out. “I proved what happened. I tried to fly it out, but the left bank was still in and we never leveled out. I knew I lost it, and I went. I did the best I could.”

  “You caused that accident, Seaver! There was no reason for that crash except for your stupidity.”

  “John…,” Furness said softly, as if trying — not very convincingly — to tell Long to stop arguing.

  “You oughta be grounded, Seaver,” Long dug in, jabbing a finger at the OSO. “You oughta be kicked out of the Guard. You oughta be kicked in the fucking ass!”

  “You don’t have the balls to try it, Long!”