Now the ZSU-23 “Shilka”xxxiv four-barreled anti-aircraft gun opened up on Freedom One as it pulled away from the target. “Not a bad ambush” thought Cuco. The gunner had not radiated the F-15 until he was committed to his attack but by then the best the gun could manage was a good burst of rounds at a fleeing aircraft. In a flash of thought it was evident to Cuco that the gun commander wanted to live more than he wanted to shoot down enemy planes. When the MiG’s scrambled he must have moved his gun to this location probably twenty minutes before the attack. He figured the rebels would come in from the south. Better to shoot at the enemy’s tail rather than its nose.
Pepe, following in Freedom Two, was streaking toward the Shilka. The gun dish radar signature made an easy shot for the HARM anti-radiation missile. A very, very easy target with the gun shooting in the other direction. Pepe switched to guns and made the twelve second run to get within strafing range. It was a gamble. The gun could have easily swung its four barrels one-hundred-eighty degrees toward the approaching Phantom but it was concentrating too hard on the fleeing F-15. Pepe lowered his night-vision goggles in preparation of his strafing run. “Fox Three,” Pepe reported as he pulled the trigger on his flight stick. He fired three short bursts of twenty millimeter rounds into the tank chassis. His first burst hit slightly to the right of the vehicle. He walked the rounds over the top of the tank chassis aiming for the radar dish sitting atop the vehicle. His next two bursts flailed the tank viciously, ripping through the thin armor and setting it afire.
Izzy started in again, “OK, we’ve got two MiG-21’s at…”
“I got it!” said Cuco. “Freedom Two, good work guys, two MiG’s at your …uh… southeast, inbound, seventy miles, high, pop up and engage the northern one with one missile, both will scatter, I’ll set up a Fox Three (gun) shot on the other one.
“Two.”
This unconventional and risky maneuver would let Pepe keep one AIM-7 missile in reserve for the long mission ahead. Cuco jealously guarded his two remaining AMRAAM missiles. They had two more air bases to bomb and had the entire Communist air force ready to protect them.
“Izzy, we’re going to fly COLA (low) right past him, this guy has very poor Doppler (look down, shoot down) capabilities. Besides, he’ll be busy dodging Pepe’s missile.”
“OK man, I hope he’s flying as dumb as you think he his,” said Izzy. Freedom One now increased its lead to five miles in front of Freedom Two. Izzy took another laser snapshot to confirm Freedom Two was within missile range. “Freedom Two, two MiG-21’s, eleven o’clock, thirty miles, twenty thousand feet.”
Pepe popped up, radiated the bandits, and fired one AIM-7 missile and engaged his electronic jamming.
True to Soviet doctrine both fighters split up. The southern MiG quickly determined that he was not targeted. He lit his afterburner to charge after the American F-4 Phantom and unknowingly right toward Cuco’s F-15. He was out of range but not for long. Just before the attack he had picked up Freedom One as an intermittent contact with his newly upgraded French-made radar. Even though he was getting heavy jamming the new radar was sophisticated enough to frequency hop and avoid most of it at this range. Then, out of nowhere, there it was, the MiG pilot had a lock-on Cuco’s F-15, good enough for a radar range and firing solution. He quickly selected his PL-7 radar-guided missile (a recent gift from the Chinese) and fired off two.
Izzy nervously watched the MiG stumble right into their flight path closing the distance between the two planes. He stared at the threat-indicator light as the seconds seemed to pass like minutes. As soon as it illuminated, he shouted, “Missile launch! Break right!” while he ejected chaff. Both airmen were smashed into their seats with six times their body weight as Cuco banked to starboard. Izzy’s helmet banged against the canopy but he managed to keep his finger on the chaff button long enough to create a good-sized cloud.
Izzy’s G-suit squeezed painfully as it inflated around his legs and abdomen to prevent blood from pooling there during the heavy G load. He battled the effects by doing the “toilet Grunts,” tightening his stomach muscles as though straining on a toilet in an attempt to stay conscious. Through all this, he struggled to refocus his eyes on his threat display. His automatic jamming system picked out the best frequency range and applied it to the correct antennae for the threat—in this case, a Z3-band uplink signal driven to the tail antennae—and it would pump out chaff as well.
As Izzy tracked the Chinese missile, it seemed to waver from the F-15 to the chaff, not entirely fooled.
Izzy said “Deploying towed array.” From the tail of the F-15 a small aerodynamic cylindrical object extended out in the fighter’s slipstream on an armored fiber-optic cable, quickly going out three hundred feet from the tail. The object was an ALE-55, a transmitter that could broadcast a variety of signals—radar jamming, spoofing, noise, heat, or laser signals. When the array was extended, Izzy called up a program on the defensive system and activated it.
On board the MiG-21, the pilot’s radar warning receivers started to go crazy—it was as if an entire squadron of American F-15 fighters were closing in on him. As he was wondering why he hadn’t seen them coming, suddenly the radar warning receiver told him every one of the F-15s was launching missiles at him! The Americans must be invading he thought. A few more moments was all he needed to bag this American lackey and make it into the history books as the first, and maybe only, pilot to shoot down a F-15 in combat.
As the missile closed the distance to the F-15 the jamming became more effective as the fighter’s uplink to the missile was degraded. Izzy waited for the missile to approach a little closer. “Ready to break right,” Izzy said in an icy calm voice. He overrode the automatic jammers and reduced the transmitter power in half, letting a strong fighter fire control lock on the bleedthrough. The fighter regained a strong communication link with the missile for just a moment. With perfect timing Izzy began pumping out chaff once more. The trailing ALE-55 transmitter was dragged through the chaff cloud leading the missile into the radar decoy then shut down all decoy signals the instant it pulled through the cloud. That same instant the computer resumed full power jamming, cutting off the uplink between the missile and the enemy fighter and destroying the radar picture the missile had of the target. “Break right!” It was a dangerous ballet with timing that was literally quicker than lightning.
The MiG pilot had his hands full just interpreting his picture of the air battle. Through all the false spoofing signals, the attack of the imaginary F-15 squadron and the very effective jamming that made a mess of his radar picture, he had seen three radar targets. The first was obviously a chaff cloud. It had begun dissipating quickly. The PL-7 missiles had wavered slightly but had not been fooled. One more second passed and the missile seemed to get a firm lock on the second chaff cloud, then he lost the missile. The MiG pilot saw both missiles plow through the big radar bright chaff cloud while the F-15 was scooting away to the right at high speed.
The MiG pilot flipped to his heat seeking missiles but could not sift through the swarm of false F-15 radar images and could not get a tone signaling the heat-seeking missile had locked onto the target. “(Expletive, expletive, expletive)” the MiG pilot swore as he broke off his chase. He made a hard one-hundred-eighty degree turn while dispensing chaff and flares and high tailed it back toward his base at Santa Clara, two-hundred-seventy kilometers to the east.
Izzy was still in the mindset of countering the threat. “I’m setting up a Slammer shot,” Izzy said as he activated the LADAR. It was just the next thing on his long list of counters he was going to pull out of his bag of tricks in the next very busy seconds. “Negative, negative, he’s buggin out, let’s go get him,” Cuco said as he initiated another six G bank to port. Cuco lit up the MiG with his radar which again set the MiG’s radar detector screaming. After a short stern chase in full afterburner Cuco closed the distance with the MiG. The MiG-21 started to jink and turn to spoil Cuco’s aim. Like everything on the F-15, the gun sy
stem had been continuously improved. The round that the Vulcan cannon fired was the new improved PGU-28xxxv which had armor piercing, explosive fragmentation, and incendiary effects in each round. The new gunsight—or more properly, the gunsight symbology for the HUD (heads up display) greatly eased the task of aiming and radically improved gunnery accuracy and made the gun a much more dangerous weapon. Cuco worked his way in close, one quarter mile, and put the MiG between the lines of the funnel shaped gunsight. Before Cuco could fire the MiG’s left wing slid downward and the enemy plane seemed to literally drop from the sky. The MiG disappeared below his HUD. Cuco pushed his nose down and followed his quarry into a twirling inverted dive. Cuco’s heart pounded wildly in his chest as his body was being pinched and pulled from the G forces. The dive was getting scary when the MiG’s rear tail fins sailed into Cuco’s targeting pipper.
As the MiG still desperately dove for the ground in an attempt to evade, Cuco squeezed the trigger sending out a stream of cannon shells. At six thousand rounds per minute, the short one second burst ripped a line from the fuselage to the port wingtip exploding the wing in flame. The MiG did not pull out of the dive and plowed straight into the ground creating a thunderous fireball.
“Freedom One, this is Panhandle,” the AWACS called. “Be advised no bandits as far as Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz air base was heavily hit. Multiple bandits, fifteen plus now vectoring toward Santa Clara. Santa Clara Air Base was not hit, repeat, not hit. It is fully operational. All other airbases were hit.”
“One,” Cuco acknowledged.
They were coming up fast on their second target, the smaller airbase of Santa Cruz just east of Havana. Their third and last target was Santa Clara, two hundred kilometers to their east. Now their task of bombing its runways was made nearly impossible. The radar and SAM sites were up and running, they knew they were going to be attacked and every dog in the pack was gathering to the defense.
The Communist airbase of Holguin, far to the east, would have been bombed by now. It looked as though they were abandoning the defense of their eastern bases. The Communist fighters were leaving their sectors and flying to their only undamaged airbase, Santa Clara in the middle of the Island.
“Freedom one to Freedom two, I’m picking up no Surface to Air radar. I want to go in high. I smell MANPADS” (short-range man-portable air defense missile).
“Rodger Kook, I’m going angels seven,” said Pepe as the Phantom streaked skyward to induce any Surface-to-air missile site to come out of hiding. None appeared, so Freedom One climbed high to join his wingman. “LADAR coming on… now”. The laser radar array electronically scanned thousands of cubic miles of space in every direction thirty times per second. It was activated only for a few seconds but its power and tight resolution drew an amazingly detailed picture of all air targets within a hundred miles. Cuco’s real interest right this minute was the military air base at Santa Cruz. The LADAR gave him a crystal-clear high-resolution digital photograph of its runways and taxiways. “Looks good. We got a transport down there. We’re going in,” Cuco said. Just then the threat indicator lit up and Cuco, jumpy from his last dogfight, instinctively banked away from the threat. The computer immediately chimed in “warning, missile launch, SA-18, out of range.” That same instant on the computer screen a green bubble that looked like a giant force field encompassed the missile site showing the limits of the enemy missile’s maximum range. They were flying over a mile above the max range of the shoulder-fired missile. The SA-18 Igla missile could only reach 17,000 feet on a very good day and this was not it.
“It’s a spoiling shot, man. It can’t get us,” Izzy said as he took the control of the stick and brought the plane back on its computer generated bombing path.
As Freedom One approached the target Izzy could see a giant Ilyushin-76xxxvi transport plane taxiing out to the runway. Something sparked near the wing followed by a wave of fire spreading across the ground as hundreds of gallons of avgas poured from the lumbering behemoth and onto the ramp. The transport was sitting atop a small pond of flames in less than ten seconds. One of the thousands of smart mines had found its mark. Three more shoulder fired infrared missiles clawed their way impotently into the sky after them. Izzy held the course steady until the plane lightened as the bombs dropped free.
F.C.N. Martinez
October 1, 2018. 3:12 AM, L Day
Sixty kilometers southwest of Cienfuegos naval base.
Thomas Gomez was a tall lanky machinist’s mate. He was working in the engine room on the Martinez when the explosion knocked him off his feet. The lights went out leaving him in total darkness and in excruciating pain. His ankles and one heel felt like they had been smashed. He found it easier to crawl about to look for a flashlight. He found one and in the process found the chief mechanic sitting at the controls swearing up a storm about two broken legs. The engines were running and sounded fine but were nearly idling, making barely enough speed for steerage.
Thomas turned on the walkie-talkie holstered on his belt. “Turn on your walkie-talkie, Chief. I’m going to take a look topside.”
The chief mechanic turned his flashlight on Thomas “I’m gettin the blank out of here. Get over here and give me a hand.”
“Negative, Chief. There is no abandon ship order. We all need you there at the controls. I won’t forget you down here. I’ll be back for you.”
“Now wait Gomez, there’s no abandon ship order because everyone above us must be dead or wounded.”
“No. You stay here!” Thomas yelled at the man, now firmly taking control. Thomas crawled up a few gangway ladders to find increasing amounts of smoke and debris strewn everywhere. Thomas decided to put some weight on his feet.
He could stand but only with severe pain in both ankles. On his way topside he found two more walking wounded, a few working light bulbs and a choking pall of smoke. It was evident the Captain and everyone on the bridge was dead. Anyone in the superstructure would not have survived either. Looking around he counted six more men fighting fires and doing a rather good job of it. The fires were not serious and were not spreading anyhow. Not finding anyone with any higher naval rank, a non stop torrent of orders poured from his mouth to anyone upon whom his flashlight alighted.
“You, go below and try to staunch any leaks. You, bring up some containers of diesel fuel. You, bring up those fifty cals (machine guns) and all the ammo. Put them on the bow facing forward but keep them out of sight until I say. You, get some mattresses or seat cushions…” The orders sounded nonsensical but were obeyed. The men were eager to have leadership especially with an enemy ship bearing down on them ready to finish them off. Thomas grabbed the walkie-talkie at his side and yelled into it, “Gomez to engine room.”
The irritable reply came. “Quit screaming, I’m only one-hundred feet away.”
Thomas calmed his voice. “We will run the engines ten more minutes then shut them down. We will go on battery power. When I give the word I will need you to fire them up and give me full power. You will use the steering override. The bridge is destroyed. I will give you a bearing from here, Over.”
“Rodger,” came the reply. Thomas could hear the pain in the Chief’s voice. It was a blessing he did not have to go into long drawn out explanations with him.
Within ten minutes the well trained crew had the fires out on the debris covered deck.
Thomas could see a three-man team was already busy patching the leaks in the hull. One man had rappelled down the side of the ship with a SCUBA tank, a dive mask, headlamp and special magnetic booties and gloves. Also attached to the line was a four-foot by two foot carbon fiber plate patch. It was very light, and very strong. It looked like an oversized Band-aid strip. The rupture in the hull was not very hard to find. It was a split that started at the feet of the men holding the rope and extended straight down into the water. The diver stripped off the protective back of the patch exposing the super strong adhesive. He grabbed the handles attached to the others side of the patch, hit the qu
ick disconnect buttons with his thumbs and freed the plate from the rappelling line. The crack in the hull was no more than two inches wide but it was long. The team lowered two more plates down the rappelling line. Within four and a half minutes from the diver entering the water three plate patches had staunched the leak that threatened the ship.
Free Cuban Armed Forces - North invasion force, Guantanamo Cuba
October 1, 2018. 10:43 AM “L” Day or Liberation Day.
Any Communist target that could be identified was soon taken out by Free Cuban artillery. The outskirts of Guantanamo city now looked like a ghost town. The Free Cubans moved down the highway in staggered column file along each side of the road toward the city. They spread out along the edge of the city and advanced in fire team rushes in classic hit & roll fashion. They cleared the outlying shantys and secured the area for the next wave. Their plain M16 rifles were in sharp contrast to the Land Warriorxxxvii combat system. The ‘Team Warriors’ as they were called were held in reserve, anxiously awaiting their turn in battle near their Striker APC’s - Armored Personnel Carriers, too valuable to be risked in daylight and on an unknown situation. They were randomly advanced toward the forward edge of battle as the Grunts pushed forward. Not once in the 20 km push from Gitmo to Guantanamo City were they employed. Sporadic gunfire periodically erupted at the front of the advancing column only to be answered by Free Cuban small arms fire in return and the inevitable pinpoint artillery dropped on the Communist position. There were no seriously contested objectives along the route that were not already spotted by U.S. satellites or spy drones and pummeled by artillery. Members of the Fightin’ Fourth Infantry division invested the outskirts of the city. The roaring whine of the M-1 Abrams tanks backed them up. The Free Cuban tanks peeled off from the main road and took up supporting positions as the first incoming enemy tank round ricocheted off of an M-1. In the milliseconds it took for the round to hit the Free Cuban tank its infrared signature was detected, the weapon was identified and its location was displayed on a hearty little computer pad. The new “WeaponWatch”xxxviii detection system had proven far superior to the old “Boomerang” detection apparatus that used an array of microphones to identify enemy fire. Its infrared signature gave away the enemy firing position even before the M-1 tank commander saw the surrounding dust from its muzzle blast. The Communist tank was cleverly hidden inside of a building not much bigger than the tank itself. Only a few inches of the muzzle of the hidden tank could be seen as it protruded from the building. Sergeant Luis Segrera swung the turret toward the disembodied gun barrel “target-tank, Sabot, in the building.”
The Cuban Liberation Handbook Page 5