“No. I’ve lost sight. Do you have the angel headed this way?”
“Yes. Why did the pilot eject?”
“Not sure,” Chicago said, “and, for some reason, my transponder is acting up.” She turned it off.
The controller let that go by… for now. “Can you get underneath the clouds and find the pilot in the water?” she asked.
“I’m going down now.” She wasn’t, but she didn’t think the Iranians would know that if they were listening, and they probably were. Grafton said they monitored these freqs, and he should damn well know.
She was thirty miles from the coast when War Ace 305 began the gentlest of right turns, into her.
O’Hare gently eased her left wing under the right wing of the other plane and held it there. She didn’t want it to make contact-but to allow the air slipping between the two wings to exert upward pressure on the right wing of the other plane, and that was what happened. War Ace 305 returned to level flight. The heading change had been about ten degrees.
She could live with that, she decided. She moved several yards aft and sat monitoring the empty jet’s flightpath.
***
Lampert’s ejection from War Ace 305 would have caused the transponder in his aircraft to began broadcasting an emergency code, had the transponder been turned on. The emergency code would have been picked up by the radar in the airborne E-2 Hawkeye and by the big search radars aboard the carrier and the guided missile frigate only fifty miles southeast of the place where Lampert would enter the ocean. Since Harry had secured the transponder before his ejection-after all, the Iranians could receive the transponder codes on their radars, too-and there was no transponder code, some hurried radio exchanges between the Hawkeye and the frigate occurred before the frigate began the launch sequence for her ready helo. A long ten minutes would pass before the chopper was airborne, yet this bird would reach Lampert before the angel from the carrier. If he was on the surface of the sea and hadn’t been pulled under by his chute. And if the chopper could find him.
In United States’ flag portion of the Combat Direction Center, Jake Grafton saw and heard the news of the ejection, and heard the communications that diverted a flight of Hornets from their scheduled mission to the site of the ejection to search for the survivor. Air Ops also ordered the angel helo on deck scrambled and talked to the CDC aboard the frigate on one of the ship-to-ship voice circuits.
All this took less than a minute, almost a reflex action.
Harry Lampert’s parachute opened with an audible bang and his ejection seat fell away toward the cloud deck, which was right under his boots. He inspected the chute, which looked blessedly full of air and intact.
Then he fell into the clouds.
Chicago O’Hare’s nudge of the pilotless Hornet seemed to work. The wings stayed level as it closed with the Iranian coast. The Black Eagle controller came back on the radio, informing her that her transponder was malfunctioning and asking for a location. O’Hare turned the volume on the radio down as low as it would go and ignored it.
She watched the coastline march down her radar display toward the apex. Fifteen miles, ten, five… She could hear the deep beep of an Iranian search radar as it swept her plane periodically.
At two miles her ECM warnings lit up. A fire control radar was looking. Chicago turned on her ALQ-199. This black box should fool the Iranian radars and protect both planes until War Ace 305 ran out of gas.
The fire control radar failed to achieve a lock. After a moment it went off the air. The search radar continued to sweep. The two Hornets crossed the coast and continued northwest into Iran.
When he came out of the clouds, Harry Lampert was unsure of his height above the water. He took off his oxygen mask and threw it away, then deployed his seat pan, which fell on a lanyard until it dangled about twenty feet below his feet. His life raft fell out of the seat pan, inflated and hung below it. He got a firm grip on the parachute riser release fittings on his harness and watched the life raft. It would hit the water first, signaling him he had twenty feet to go until he went in.
He realized he could see whitecaps, then swells, then the life raft splashed, and he had time to draw exactly one breath before he went under.
He was still underwater when he toggled the riser releases. The emergency life vest on his harness inflated, squeezing him like an anaconda. In seconds he felt himself bobbing to the surface.
The chute was still in the air, within a foot or two of the water, safely downwind. Lampert spit water and gagged and tried to draw a breath. He didn’t see the parachute go into the ocean.
He was floating with his head well out of the water, still wearing his helmet. He began looking for the seat pan and life raft. Not finding either due to the height of the swells, he felt around for the lanyard and started pulling. Eventually the seat pan, then the life raft, appeared in front of him.
Now to get in the damned thing. He tried pushing it under him and working himself over it. Fell off twice. This was always so easy in the pool during refresher survival training, he thought.
The third time was the charm.
He was sitting in the thing, wet and cold and happy, when he heard the first jet. Now he needed his flares. He fumbled in his survival vest until he found one, lit it and shouted as orange smoke began pouring out. The jets were running under the clouds and apparently didn’t see him.
Two minutes later they were back, working on a different track, when one of them peeled away from the formation and came diving toward him. He waved the flare, which was spewing a tremendous amount of smoke.
The two jets set up an orbit over Harry, and it was only then that he remembered his survival radio, which was in his vest. He tossed the flare into the water, got out the radio, turned it on and squeezed the transmit button.
“Hey, this is War Ace Three Oh Five,” he shouted into the thing.
“Hey yourself, shipmate. We saw your smoke and decided to drop in. A helo is on the way. You okay?”
“Yeah yeah yeah. I’m okay.” Actually he was shivering uncontrollably and felt his first twinge of nausea, but he wasn’t going to say that. He was so very happy.
“You sit right there and behave yourself while we get on the horn to the guys on the big boat. Okay?”
“Yeah yeah yeah.” Harry Lampert sat in his tiny life raft, with his ass partially submerged, shivering and smiling. Life was good, he decided. And he wasn’t parting with his anytime soon. Yeah! He vowed then and there to buy a bottle of the best whiskey he could find for the guys and gals in the parachute shop. Yeah!
He raised his helmet visor so he could see better and waved at the circling jets.
The Iranian search radar was still beeping in Chicago’s ears when War Ace 305 ran out of gas. It was 110 miles deep into Iran. Chicago realized the fire had gone out when the plane began to decelerate and its nose came down.
It seemed to find a new equilibrium as it descended, something like eight degrees nose down. The wings stayed level.
She was in a level turn by then, watching the descending jet fall away.
Chicago O’Hare leveled out heading back the way she had come and got on the radio. She sent a prearranged code over the two-way, secure Link 16 to Black Eagle and the carrier, where it would reach Jake Grafton.
War Ace 305 came out of the clouds several thousand feet above the desert floor. The autopilot had disengaged, and the plane was in a shallow left turn, its nose about eight degrees down. It was still in that attitude when it met the earth and began sliding along. The plane shed a cloud of pieces as the wreck decelerated. Finally the largest piece, the engines and the remainder of the airframe, came to rest and the remainder settled to the ground. The dust cloud drifted away on the wind and dissipated.
***
Chicago O’Hare was twenty miles from the coast when she saw the two MiG-29s at least five thousand feet above her and to her right. They were crossing from right to left, heading generally east.
Uh-oh!
She advanced her throttles from cruise to full military power. Her airspeed began to build. The jets crossed in front of her, and then the nearest one began a left turn. He’s looking me over, she thought. The second one turned behind the first.
Chicago O’Hare didn’t want to engage either of them, but trying to run away was probably begging to get shot down, and that had no appeal whatsoever.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought and slammed the throttles forward into burner while she pulled up and into the wingman. She was wearing a joint helmet-mounted cueing system (JHMCS) today, so she designated them both as targets. The F/A-18 used a hands on throttle and stick (HOTAS) system for managing the plane’s armament, so she didn’t even have to take her hands off the stick or throttle to arm the AIM-9Xs, the Super Sidewinders, she carried on the wingtips. These employed a focal-plane array seeker and a thrust-vectoring tail control package, so they were fire-and-forget short-range dogfight weapons with the capability of turning square corners.
Chicago turned into the lead, which meant the wingman was out on her right. She got a tone in her ears: Her right ’winder was locked onto the wingman.
The Iranian wasn’t a good fighter pilot. He continued as if she weren’t there, following his leader. Maybe she wouldn’t have to shoot.
Perhaps he hasn’t looked to see what I’m doing. Perhaps he thinks his leader will take care of me.
But right in front of her the leader was pulling Gs, turning hard, trying to get his nose around toward her.
At a push of a switch, the missile designated for the leader came alive, locking on. She pulled the trigger, and it left in a flash of fire. She turned hard into the wingman, who was proceeding straight ahead, obviously not into the fight.
The safe thing to do was to just zap him, but maybe he wasn’t a real threat.
Even as that thought went through her mind, she saw the flash as the Sidewinder she had fired impacted the leader.
Chicago O’Hare rolled down and into the wingman, pulling smoothly right up to five Gs, and kept going until her nose was vertical, pointed straight down. Only then did she ease off on the G. Her burners were still lit, so the airspeed built quickly.
Then the clouds surrounded her and she came out of burner and off the throttle and began pulling for all she was worth. Passing fifteen thousand, six Gs. ALQ-199 flashing green. Now that Iranian was trying for a radar lock, but it wasn’t happening for him.
She pumped off some flares from her chaff box, just in case the guy behind her triggered a heat-seeking missile into the clouds, and kept the G on until her nose was back to the horizon. She was down to four thousand feet, still in the clouds.
Weren’t there some mountains on this coast?
She pulled hard and rocketed back up toward ten thousand. There she stabilized and began an eighty-degree turn toward the coast.
As the coast went under her nose she broke out of the clouds, which seemed to be dissipating. No Iranians in sight. She came out of burner, checked her fuel, turned on her transponder and called Black Eagle on an encrypted frequency.
“I need Texaco,” she said. “Send him toward me.”
“And where are you?”
She gave the controller her position. He didn’t say a word.
After a last look behind her, she pulled off a glove and used it to wipe the perspiration from her face. Too bad about that MiG, but…
“Black Eagle, War Ace Three Oh One. Did they find my playmate?”
The helo pilot had Harry Lampert pop another smoke so he could see the wind direction and get a good idea of its velocity as he made his approach. Lampert lowered his helmet visor to keep spray raised by rotor wash out of his eyes. The pilot circled to approach him into the wind, then came into a hover over him. The horse collar was already in the water.
Lampert grabbed for it and fell out of his raft. He managed to get the thing around him and give a thumbs-up to the man in the door. He felt himself being pulled out of the water. The rhythmic pounding of the rotor wash reminded him that he was completely alive.
The winch raised him up beside the helo’s door; then the operator grabbed his parachute harness with both hands, pulled him in and relayed that to the pilot on the ICS.
“We have him,” the pilot told the controller in the E-2 Hawkeye, and she relayed the news to Chicago O’Hare in War Ace 301.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Three days after the F/A-18 Hornet crashed in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced at a news conference that Iranian fighters had destroyed an American navy fighter over Iran. While print reporters scribbled furiously and cameras rolled, Ahmadinejad motioned to two men behind him. They whisked away a large cloth, revealing what appeared to be a panel from an airplane wearing the U.S. Navy’s low-viz paint scheme. On the panel were the words, uss united states, and a squadron number, VFA-196. The panel, irregular in shape, was dented, and one side appeared to be torn, as if a piece had been ripped off.
Ahmadinejad entertained his audience with an account of how this airplane had illegally and provocatively penetrated Iranian airspace and been intercepted. After a short air battle, he said, it was shot down.
“Where is the pilot?” one of the international reporters shouted, and was ignored.
Other pieces of the plane were produced, a half dozen, with the largest being the tail hook. It took four men to carry it into the room. The shank of the hook was slightly bent, and the whole thing was dirty.
The president regaled the reporters for another twenty minutes with some aerial fiction, and then he turned serious. “This airplane was obviously in Iranian airspace to spy upon the Islamic Republic.” He continued in this vein. Its presence was a serious breach of international law, and the government of Iran expected an abject and humble apology from the Great Satan.
The story shot around the world at the speed of light. In Washington a Pentagon spokesperson told the press that the matter was under investigation. She added, “If there has been an inadvertent penetration of Iranian airspace, of course we will apologize. However, until the investigation is complete, I am unable to say what the facts are. I seriously doubt that anyone intended to violate the sovereignty of Iran. We are querying the USS United States battle group commander. We will have an announcement in due course.”
At Naval Air Station Oceana, the home of VFA-196, the pilots’ spouses and significant others had already been notified that the squadron had lost a plane and the pilot was safe. Press inquiries were rebuffed by the Oceana public affairs office.
In Tehran, the chargé, Eliza Marie Ortiz, trooped over to the Foreign Ministry and offered an official apology for the inadvertent violation of Irani an airspace and requested that the wreckage of the U.S. Navy plane found in Iran be returned to the U.S. authorities. The request, which was in writing, was taken under advisement.
The Iranian government showed the document to the press, but the story died anyway. The Iranians had some airplane pieces and a far-fetched tale of how they got them. No living pilot or dead body was produced. The U.S. Navy wasn’t talking. The public went on to other things. After all, the news from the Middle East was always bad.
Two days later Janos Ilin, of the Russian SVR, stood in the desert looking at the Hornet’s wreckage from a distance of about fifty feet. He was certainly no expert on airplane crashes, but this one looked remarkably intact. It seemed to have struck the ground in a flat attitude, skipped and plowed along shedding bits and pieces, then went up a little hill and got airborne again. On the other side of the hill the nose hit hard, almost crushing it; then the thing turned ninety degrees and skidded sideways to a stop. The remains of the crushed belly tank could just be seen about two hundred yards away.
Two of the men Ilin had brought with him did indeed specialize in the examination of crashed planes, and they began poking and prodding the wreck as the Iranians conducted their own examination. There were a dozen or more Iranian air force technicians, armed with a variety of tools and
test equipment. The workers were supervised by at least a half dozen officers, who conferred, moved to another portion of the wreck and conferred again.
Habib Sultani and his nephew Ghasem stood beside Ilin, watching the entire evolution.
The most obvious thing about the plane was the shattered canopy and the missing ejection seat. The next thing Ilin noticed was that there were no bullet or cannon holes in it that he could see. Or holes made by shrapnel.
He turned so he could look back up the path the airplane had plowed as it decelerated, a path that pointed almost straight east. Not a trace of fire.
The airplane didn’t burn.
He looked at the wings. One of them had been nearly wrenched away from the fuselage and was bent at an angle.
There was no fuel in the plane when it crashed.
Ilin sighed and got out his cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep drag. The smoke from the cigarette zipped away on the stiff breeze.
“Would you like to inspect more closely?” Ghasem asked.
“No, thank you. This is close enough. Where is the pilot?”
“Not here,” Ghasem said abruptly.
“Obviously. The ejection seat is missing. Is he still running around out here in this desert, or do you people have him in custody?”
Ghasem said nothing.
“How far are we from the ocean?” Ilin asked.
Ghasem knew the answer to this one. “One hundred and sixty kilometers.”
Ilin nodded and puffed on his cigarette. He was on his third one when the two Russian experts came over to him. “No fuel in the plane. The engines were only windmilling when it struck. They are essentially intact.”
“Why did the plane crash?”
“The pilot ejected. Without a pilot…”
The Disciple Page 22