by Dale Brown
In a nutshell, Norman observed, careers were made or destroyed by a simple numbers game. The Selection Board Secretariat's staff members wheeled in a locked lateral file cabinet on wheels with almost four hundred Officer Selection Reports, or OSRs, in them. Although there was supposedly no time limit on how long each panel member considered each OSR, the board members were asked to finish up the first round of scoring in the first week. That meant they had no more than about five minutes to score each candidate.
Five minutes to decide a career, Norman thought as he opened the first file. Five minutes to decide whether this person deserved to be promoted, or should stay where he was, or even if he or she should even be in the Air Force to begin with.
Well, maybe it won't be that hard, Norman thought as he scanned the OSR. The first thing he saw on the right side of the folder was the candidate's photo, and this guy was a mess. Hair too long, touching the ears. A definite five o'clock shadow. Cockeyed uniform devices. Norman had a chart available that showed the proper order ribbons should be displayed on the uniform, but he didn't need to refer to it to know that the Air Force Training Ribbon was not placed over the Air Force Achievement Medal.
Each board member had a checklist of things to look for in a personnel jacket, along with a sheet for notes or questions and a scoring summary block. Each jacket was given a score between 6.0 and 10.0 in half-point increments. The average score was 7.5. Norman decided he would start at the maximum score and deduct half points for every gutch. So this guy was starting out with a 9.5, and he hadn't even gotten to the job performance and effectiveness reports and ratings yet. Below the photo was a list of the officer's decorations and awards and an officer selection brief, outlining the candidate's duty history. This guy was not wearing a ribbon he had been awarded, so Norman deducted another half point. How inept could one officer be?
And yes, Norm noted that he was a flyer.
On the left side of the OSR were the candidate's OERs, or Officer Effectiveness Reports, starting with the most recent. Norman scanned through the files, paying close attention to the three rater's blocks on the back page. Each OER was endorsed by the officer's three sequential superior officers in his chain of command. He received either a "Below Average," "Average," "Above Average," or "Outstanding" rating, plus a block below for personal comments. An OER with all "Outstanding" ratings was called a "firewalled" OER, and all officers seeking promotion aspired to it.
After filling out hundreds of OERs in his career, Norman knew that anything short of an "Outstanding" rating was cause for concern, and he dinged a candidate for any "Above Average" or lower ratings. But since some commanders always "firewalled" OERs, Norman had to take a quick glance at the rater's comments, even on "firewalled" OERs. He looked for examples of deficiencies or nuances in the wording to suggest what the rater really thought of the candidate. Most all raters used the word "Promote" in his comments, so if the word was missing, that was a big ding-the rater obviously did not think the candidate was worthy of promotion, so why should Norman? If the candidate was really good, the rater might put "Promote ASAP" or "Promote without fail;" if the candidate was exceptionally good, he might say "Promote immediately" or "Promote ahead of contemporaries." Some were more creative: They sometimes wrote "Promote when possible," which was not a strong endorsement and earned a ding, or "Promote below the zone immediately without fail" for a really outstanding candidate. Sometimes they just said "Promote," which Norman considered a big ding too.
By the first lunch break, Norman was slipping right into the groove, and he realized this was not going to be a really difficult exercise. Patterns began to emerge right away, and it soon becomes clear who the really great officers were and who were not. Out of thirty or so OSRs, Norman had only marked a few above 8.0. Most of his scores drifted below the 7.5 average. No one was ranked over 8.5-not one. Norman had to adjust his own scoring system several times because he started to read better and better OERs and realized that what he thought were good comments were actually average comments. Occasionally, he had to ask the flyers what this school or that course was. Norman disliked acronyms on OERs and dinged a candidate for them if he couldn't understand what it meant-especially if he or she was a flyer.
So far, Norman was not too impressed. Some of the candidates they were reviewing were above-the-primary-zone candidates, meaning they had not been promoted when they should have been, and they seemed worse than the others. It was as if they had already given up on the Air Force, and it showed-missing or outdated records, snotty or whining letters to the board attached to the record, old photos, and evidence of stagnated careers. Most were in-the-primary-zone candidates, meeting the board at the proper time commensurate with their date of rank, and most of them had a polished, professional, well-managed look.
Most all of the flyers' OERs were "firewalled," and Norman scrutinized those even more closely for telltale signs of deficiency. The non-flying line officer OERs always seemed more honest, forthright evaluations. The flying community was indeed a closed fraternity, and Norman took this opportunity to take some chips out of their great steel wall every chance he could. If a flyer's OER wasn't firewalled, Norman mentally tossed it aside, taking big dings out of the score.
The chips he was breaking off flyers' OERs quickly became chunks, but Norman didn't care. If a flyer was really great, he would get a good rating. But just being a flyer wasn't a plus in Norman's book. Everyone had to earn their score, but the flyers would have to really shine to pass Norman's muster.
The British Indian Ocean Territories, or BIOT, was a chain of fifty-six islands covering twenty-two thousand square miles of the Indian Ocean south of India. The total land area of the BIOT was only thirty-six square miles, about half the size of the District of Columbia. Located only four hundred miles south of the equator, the weather was hot and humid year-round. The islands were far enough south of the Indian subcontinent, and the waters were colder and deeper, so typhoons and hard tropical storms were rare, and the islands only received about one hundred inches of rain per year. If there had been any appreciable land-mass or infrastructure in the BIOT, it might be considered an idyllic tropical paradise. The tiny bits of dry land and coconut groves on the islands had saved many hungry, storm-tossed sailors over the centuries since the islands were discovered by Western explorers in the late seventeenth century, although the reefs had also claimed their share of wayward sailors as well.
The largest and southernmost island in the BIOT was Diego Garcia, a V-shaped stretch of sand, reefs, and atolls about thirty-four miles long, with a thirteen-mile-long, six-mile-wide lagoon inside the V. The British
Navy claimed Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the late eighteenth century and established copra, coconut, and lumber plantations there. The island was an isolated and seldom-used stopover and resupply point for the British Navy until after the independence of India, when it began to languish. Native fishermen from the African nation of Mauritius claimed Diego Garcia, citing historical and cultural precedents, and it appeared as if the British might hand over the island to them.
The United States stepped into the fray in December of 1966. Eager for a listening post to monitor Soviet Navy activity in the Indian Ocean during the height of the Cold War, the United States signed a bilateral agreement to improve and jointly administer the BIOT for defensive purposes. The native Iliots on the islands were relocated back to Mauritius with a promise that if the islands were no longer needed for defense, they would be returned to them. The U.S. Navy immediately landed a Seabee battalion on Diego Garcia and began work.
Seven years later, the U.S. Navy commissioned a "naval communications facility"-an electronic and undersea surveillance post-on Diego Garcia, along with limited naval-vessel support facilities and an airstrip. Five years later, the facility was expanded, making it a full-fledged-albeit still remote-Navy Support Facility. The few dozen sailors assigned there-donkeys, left over from copra and coconut-harvesting operations, f
ar outnumbered humans-lived in primitive hootches and lived only for the next supply ship to take them off the beautiful but lonely desert island.
But the facility took on a more important role when the Soviet Navy began a rapid buildup of forces in the region in the late 1970s, during the oil crisis, and during the Iranian Revolution of the early 1980s. With Western influence in the Middle East waning, Diego Garcia suddenly became the only safe, secure, and reliable port and air facility in southwest Asia. Diego Garcia became a major forward predeployment and prepositioning base for the U.S. Central Command's operations in the Middle East. The facilities were greatly expanded in the early 1980s to make it "the tip of the spear" for American rapid-deployment forces in the region. The U.S. Navy began flying P-3 Orion antisubmarine patrols from Diego Garcia, and several cargo ships loaded with fuel, spare parts, weapons, and ammunition were permanently prepositioned in the little harbor to support future conflicts in the southwest Asia theater.
There was only one highway on the island, the nine-mile-long main paved road leading from the Naval Supply Facility base on Garcia Point to the airfield. Until just a few years ago, both the road and the runway were little more than crushed coral and compacted sand. But as the importance of the little island grew, so did the airfield. What was once just a lonely pink runway and a few rickety shacks, euphemistically called Chagos International Airport, was now one of the finest airfields in the entire Indian Ocean region.
With the advent of Operation Desert Shield, the rapid buildup of forces in the Middle East to counter the threat of an Iraqi invasion of the Arabian Peninsula, Diego Garcia's strategic importance increased a hundredfold. Although the tiny island was almost three thousand miles away from Iraq, it was the perfect place to deploy long-range B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which have an unrefueled range in excess of eight thousand miles. As many as twenty B-52G and-H model bombers and support aircraft deployed there. When the shooting started, the "BUFFs"-Big Ugly Fat Fuckers-began 'round-the-clock bombing missions against Iraqi forces, first using conventionally armed cruise missiles and then, once the Coalition forces had firm control of the skies over the region, pressing the attack with conventional gravity bombs. One-half of all the ordnance used in Operation Desert Storm was dropped by B-52 bombers, and many of them launched from Diego Garcia.
The lone runway on Diego Garcia was eleven thousand feet long and one hundred and fifty feet wide, only four feet above sea level, on the western side of the island. At the height of the air war against Iraq, the aircraft parking ramps were choked with bombers, tankers, transports, and patrol planes; now, only days after the Coalition ceasefire, only a token force of six B-52G and — H bombers, one KC-10 Extender aerial-refueling tanker/cargo plane, and three KC-135 Strato-tanker aerial-refueling tankers remained, along with the usual and variable number of cargo planes at the Military Airlift Command ramp and the four P-3 Orion patrol planes on the Navy ramp. Things had definitely quieted down on Diego Garcia, and the little atoll's peaceful, gentle life was beginning to return to normal after months of frenetic activity.
Before the war there was only one aircraft hangar on the island for maintenance on the Navy's P-3 Orion subchasers-the weather was perfect, never lower than seventy-two degrees, never warmer than ninety degrees, with an average of only two inches of rain per week, so why work indoors? — but as the conflict kicked off the U.S. Air Force hastily built one large hangar at the southernmost part of the airfield complex, as far away from curious observers in the harbor as possible. Many folks speculated on what was in the hangar: Was it the still-unnamed B-1B supersonic intercontinental heavy bomber, getting ready to make its combat debut? Or was it the rumored supersecrect stealth bomber, a larger version of the F-117 Goblin stealth fighter? Some even speculated it was the mysterious Aurora spy/attack plane, the hypersonic aircraft capable of flying from the United States to J^pan in just a couple of hours.
In reality, the hangar had mostly been used as a temporary overflow barracks during the Persian Gulf War, or used to store VIP aircraft out of the hot sun to keep it cool until just before departure. Since the ceasefire, it had been used to store dozens of pallets of personal gear for returning troops before loading on transport planes. Now, it held two aircraft-two very special aircraft, tightly squeezed in nose to tail.
The two EB-52 Megafortress bombers had arrived separately-Brad Elliott's plane was returning from its patrol near Iran, while the second bomber had been en route to replace the first when it had been diverted to Diego Garcia-but they had arrived within minutes of one another. The airfield had been closed down and blacked out, and all transient ships in the harbor had been moved north toward the mouth of the harbor, until both aircraft touched down and were parked inside the Air Force hangar. A third Megafortress bomber involved in the 'round-the-clock aerial patrols near Iran remained back at its home base in Nevada, with crews standing by ready to rotate out to Diego Garcia if a conflict developed. Roving guards were stationed inside and outside the hangar, but the lure of the island's secluded, serene tropical beauty and every warrior's desire to escape the stress and strains of warfighting combined to keep all curious onlookers away. No one much cared what was inside that hangar, as long as it didn't mean they had to go back to twenty-four-hour shifts to surge combat aircraft for bombing raids.
Patrick McLanahan had spent all night buttoning up the Megafortress, downloading electronic data from the ship's computers, and preparing a detailed intelligence brief for the Air Force on the strange aircraft they had encountered near the Strait of Hormuz. Now it was time to summarize their findings and prepare a report to send to the Pentagon.
"We need to come up with a best guess at what we encountered last night," Brad Elliott said. "Wendy? Start us off."
"Weird," Wendy said. "He had a big, powerful multimode X-band surface-search radar, which meant it was a big plane, maybe bomber-class, like a Bear, Badger, Backfire, Nimrod, or Buccaneer attack plane. But it also had an S-band air-search radar, like a Soviet Peel Cone system or like an AWACS. He was fast, faster than six hundred knots, which definitely eliminates the Bear and AWACS and probably eliminates a Badger, Nimrod, or Buccaneer attack plane. That leaves a Backfire bomber."
"Or a Blackjack bomber," Patrick offered, "or some other class of aircraft we haven't seen yet." The Backfire and Blackjack bombers were
Russia's most advanced warplanes. Both were large intercontinental supersonic bombers, still in production. The Backfire bomber, similar to the American B-l bomber, was known to have been exported to Iran as a naval attack plane, carrying long-range supersonic cruise missiles. Little was known about the Blackjack bomber except it was larger, faster, more high-tech, and carried many more weapons than any other aircraft in the Communist world-and probably in the entire world.
"But with air-to-air missiles?" John Ormack remarked. "Could we have missed other planes with him, maybe a fighter escort?"
"Possible," Wendy said. "But normally we'd spot fighter intercept radars at much longer distances, as far as a hundred miles. We didn't see him until he was right on top of us-less than forty miles away. In fact, we probably wouldn't have detected him at all except he turned on his own radar first and we detected it. He was well within our own air-search radar range, but we never saw him."
"A stealth bomber!" Patrick surmised. "A stealthy Backfire or Blackjack bomber?"
"There's nothing stealthy about a Backfire," Wendy said, "but a Blackjack bomber-interesting notion. Armed with air-to-air missiles?"
"It's the equivalent of a Megafortress flying battleship, except built on a supersonic airframe," Patrick said. "Three years after we first flew the EB-52 Megafortress, someone-probably the Russians-builds their own copy and sells it to the Iranians. Remember we thought we heard a Russian voice on the radio before we heard the Iranian pilot respond in English? The Russians built a Megafortress flying battleship and sold it to the Iranians."
"Hol-ee shit," Brad Elliott murmured. "It would sure keep the Russians in th
e Iranians' good graces to sell them a hot jet like a Megafortress. That would be worth a billion dollars in hard currency, something I'm sure the Russians need badly. It would be the ultimate weapon in the Middle East."
"We know how capable our system is-we know we can sneak up on any ship in the U.S. Navy and launch missiles and drop bombs before they know we're there," John Ormack said. "If the Iranians have a similar capability…"
"The entire fleet in the Persian Gulf could be in danger," Brad Elliott said ominously. "With Iraq all but neutralized and the Coalition forces going home, this could be Iran's best chance to take over the Persian Gulf. I want an abbreviated after-action and intelligence summary ready to transmit in thirty minutes, and then I want a detailed report prepared and ready to send out to Washington on the next liaison flight. Let's get busy."
The crew had the report done in twenty minutes, and they were hard at work on the after-action report when a communications officer brought in a message from the command post. Brad read it, his face darkened, and he crumpled it up into a ball and stormed out of the room, muttering curses.
John picked up the message form and read it. "We've been ordered to stand down," he said. "Apparently the Iranians filed a protest with the State Department, claiming an American warplane tried to violate Iranian airspace and attack a patrol. Almost every Gulf country is demanding an explanation, and the President doesn't have one…"
"Because he didn't know what we were doing," Patrick said. "The President must be ready to bust a gut."
"We've been ordered to bring the Megafortresses back to Groom Lake immediately." He gulped, then read, "And Brad's been relieved of duty." Patrick shook his head and made an exasperated sigh, then closed his classified notebook, collected his papers, and secured them in a catalog case to turn back in to the command post. "Where are you going, Patrick?"