Flash Point

by James W. Huston

Sami hadn’t even touched his espresso. He had sounded stupid, like some conspiracy theorist. He hadn’t thought it through all the way. Still, it was possible.

  The Washington Battle Group steamed northward two hundred miles off the coast of Lebanon. Woods and Wink had waited anxiously for the final word. They were sure that at some point, someone would cancel their flight. That’s what always happened. When it came time to pull the trigger, politicians and Admirals wanted everything to be perfect, and it never was. So they had waited, certain the strike would be called off at the last possible moment.

  They went up the small ladder that rose from the catwalk to the flight deck, leaning backward into the wind automatically as they moved aft toward the fantail and their waiting Tomcat. Woods glanced up at the night sky through the dim red floodlights that lit the deck. He could see the stars faintly. A perfect, crisp night for flying.

  Wink started around the Tomcat counterclockwise as Woods began his preflight clockwise. Woods looked for leaking hydraulic fluid the way an ER doctor would look for blood. Both red, and both would mean death if the bleeding wasn’t found. Only Woods had to look for his in the dark. It was one of the most important things in his life tonight. The fluids inside the titanium and composite skin were more important to him now than the blood running through the veins of a lot of people in the world.

  Woods wanted the people who had killed Vialli so much he could taste it. Their mission was to drop laser-guided bombs on the fortress where they thought the Sheikh was most likely to be. He wished he could ride one of the bombs like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove—but without dying.

  Woods walked underneath the F-14 and saw the dark shadows of the GBU-10s underneath. The ordies had already placed the laser guidance noses on the massive, two-thousand-pound bombs.

  Wink stared at the bombs. “Know what I like about these bombs?” he asked Woods.

  “What?” Woods said.

  “They just make shit go away. Just vanish. That’s so cool.”

  Woods smiled at Wink, who was being much more talkative than usual. “Probably should be carrying the GBU-24s, though.”

  Wink agreed. “Bunker busters. Maybe on our next hop.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Woods ran his bare hand along the underbelly of the Tomcat and turned on his mini Maglite flashlight now and then to check for the telltale red hydraulic fluid. He went as far aft underneath the F-14 as he could until he came up to the edge of the flight deck. He shone his flashlight as far back as the light would reach out where the tail of the plane was hanging over the water that was eighty feet below, examining it carefully.

  He turned back, going forward, until he was by the left jet intake. Now he was in a hurry. He could feel the tension building throughout the ship as launch time grew closer. No one had canceled it. It might actually happen.

  He slipped into the front cockpit and Benson hurried over to stand next to Woods on the access step. He reached over, grabbing the shoulder harness fittings and handing them to Woods, one at time. Benson connected Woods’s G-suit to the environmental system that fed air in direct proportion to the G forces experienced.

  “All set, sir?” Benson asked, already knowing the answer.

  “All set, Benson. Thanks. Wish us luck.”

  “Be safe, sir,” Benson said.

  “Roger that,” Woods answered, checking the switches in the cockpit of the Tomcat and pulling the elastic strap of the knee board around his right thigh.

  Wink watched Benson climb down and fold the ladder up into the Tomcat. Wink checked both sides of the plane and looked up at the large canopy that stuck into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle. “Clear!” he announced in a loud voice.

  “Clear,” Woods said.

  Wink pushed the handle of the canopy forward and it closed.

  The engines were turning beautifully, the engine instruments hovering in the middle of acceptable ranges. Woods signaled Airman Benson, who disconnected the huffer and power cable. Wink ran through his checklist carefully. Woods’s hands darted back and forth, instinctively moving switches and knobs until the cockpit was set up perfectly and the systems all checked out. He could almost do it without thinking, a risk he was particularly aware of tonight. His mind wasn’t worrying about cockpit switches—he was thinking about SAMs and the Syrian Air Force, which would like nothing better than to be able to engage him, and ideally, ask him a few questions.

  He put his feet on the top of the rudder pedals to hold the brakes as Benson took the tie-down chains off and moved the chocks away from the wheels. Benson glanced at Woods and Wink and saluted sharply. Woods returned his salute in the dark, then saw that the yellow shirt was ready to start him taxiing toward the catapult.

  “Hot mike,” Woods said as they moved toward the bow catapult. He glanced down at the clock on his dashboard and saw that it was ten minutes before the time for his launch. It was also five minutes before the scheduled launch of the Tomahawk missiles. No one knew what Syria would do. All they had was a warning from the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations. He had called a press conference immediately after the declaration of war by the United States and had told the Americans in unequivocal terms that any attack on Syrian soil would be perceived as an act of war against Syria. This had given the politicians some pause. The reaction in the VF-103 Ready Room had been: Excellent! Come on up.

  Woods squinted at an enormous flash that lit the horizon to his left. As he watched, a fireball climbed into the sky and suddenly another, then another, all of them coming from the vertical launchers of the destroyers that surrounded the carrier. Five more glowing, burning missiles flew up from the ships and headed east after the first.

  “Holy shit,” Wink said, almost speechless as he too watched the Tomahawks head inland. “We’re really going to do this.”

  “Sure looks like it. You ready?” Woods asked, his heart racing, now in full sprint. The Tomahawk launch had caught him off guard, a let’s-go-to-war exclamation point.

  “Ready.”

  “Lights on.” Woods flipped the light switch on the outside of the throttle with his left hand and the exterior lights of the F-14 illuminated. It told everyone on the flight deck they were ready. The aircraft suddenly jerked down and was ripped forward accelerating almost instantly. They were pulled along the length of the catapult and thrown off the bow of the carrier at one hundred thirty-five knots.

  “We’re flying,” Wink said, his eyes locked on the altimeter and airspeed indicators, watching for any sign of loss of altitude or speed. He wanted to make sure that he had enough time to eject if they started down. He had about three seconds to make the decision if things went badly.

  “Gear up. Flaps up,” Woods said as he threw the levers. More Tomahawks flew up into the sky from a distant destroyer, the last group of the unmanned land attack missiles that would get there long before the Air Wing and soften up the approach to their targets.

  Woods heard Fungo, Lieutenant Commander Lyle Tourneaux, the Admin Officer who was also Bark’s RIO, call airborne as Bark flew the second Tomcat into the dark sky three miles behind.

  Wink checked out the systems and turned on all his sensors. The radar was picking up everything in the sky. The huge wattage output of AWG-9 radar was unparalleled in aviation. It could pick out a bomber-sized target a hundred twenty miles away, and calculate launch solutions on twenty-four targets at once. It displayed them all on the PTID, the clear and understandable display screen in the backseat.

  He trained the radar around to the starboard side of the Tomcat as they completed the turn waiting for the rest of the airplanes in the strike. The radar swept over Syria. Go ahead, Wink thought. You want F-14 radar energy to talk about? Have some of this. He looked anxiously for the fighters that might come from Syria to stop them. Nothing but airline traffic.

  Woods glanced at Wink’s radar picture, which was repeated on his Visual Display Indicator. “Looking for Syrian fighters?” he asked.

  “You can always
hope.”

  “The day Syria sends fighters up after American planes at night will be the day you and I have simultaneous heart attacks.”

  “Don’t think they’ll come?”

  “You heard the intel brief. I don’t think they’ve even flown at night, let alone fought anybody at night. Plus after we hit their SAMs and blow up the Sheikh they’ll be able to bluster about it. If we whack a bunch of their fighters to boot, they’ll just look stupid.”

  “So all we need to worry about are the long skinny ones without pilots.”

  “Right. The SAMs.”

  Simultaneous flashes illuminated the horizon.

  “Look at that! SAMs trying to hit the Tomahawks. Good luck.”

  “I love that!” Wink exclaimed. “One stupid missile trying to shoot down another stupid missile!”

  To his left Woods saw Bark rendezvousing on him from across the circle. Woods and Bark both had their anticollision lights off for the night hop. They could see each other only by the green, rectangular formation lights. Bark slid toward Woods expertly at exactly the right closure rate. Woods eased his turn a little to make the rendezvous even less difficult. “Bark’s joining on us,” he told Wink, who had his head buried in the charts and mission planning.

  “Roger,” Wink said absently, and then looked at the time. “We’ve got to head inland in ten minutes.”

  “Rog,” Woods replied. “How’s your data link picture?”

  “EA-6B’s ten miles ahead. The two F-18 HARM shooters are on his wing.” The EA-6B was to jam every radar of consequence on the way in and out for the strike. The F-18s were waiting for a fire control radar—a surface to air missile or AAA to turn on. “Looks like the guys off the Eisenhower are ready to go into Syria. Everybody’s in place.”

  As Bark slid under Wood’s F-14 and moved out to his right, Woods saw the sky being peppered with tracers and glowing missile flames. “Check that out.”

  Wink’s eyes shifted from his radar and his navigation to focus inland. “That’s where we’re going.”

  “Combat checklist,” Wink prompted.

  “Okay,” Woods replied. He started reciting the checklist from memory.

  Wink knew that Woods had the checklist memorized but he always turned to the written checklist he carried on his knee board. He didn’t trust himself or anyone else to remember everything when combat approached. He swore by the adage that when the balloon goes up, 90 percent of your brains go to your butt to squeeze it off as tight as it will go.

  Woods pushed the throttles forward to military power and started the F-14 up to their ingress altitude of forty thousand feet to avoid most of the SAM envelopes.

  The LANTIRN pod under the right wing of the Tomcat was the key to the strike. The F-14 had proved itself to be one of the best night attack fighters in the world once it had learned to use the LANTIRN pod. It stood for Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting for Night. When night-vision devices were worn the LANTIRN allowed the F-14 to fly very low, very fast, and drop bombs at night with deadly accuracy.

  Woods leveled off at forty thousand feet. Bark, on his wing, had taken a trail position, flying loosely behind Woods, headed inland.

  “Ten seconds,” Wink said.

  “Roger.”

  Wink watched their symbol cross over the way-point on his PTID exactly on time. “Three, two, one. Take heading 083,” Wink said.

  Woods steadied the Tomcat on the new heading.

  “Set five hundred fifty knots,” Wink said.

  Woods pushed the throttles forward to the stops, short of afterburner. Wink studied the display on his PTID as he watched the EA-6B and the F-18 HARM shooters fifteen miles in front. They were at thirty thousand feet, hunting SAM radars. They would head down the corridor for the attack and hope that Syria, or Lebanon, or the Hezbollah, or whoever ran the SAM sights surrounding the Bekáa Valley, would be unwilling to allow the Americans to just strike with impunity, unable to resist turning on their SAM radars at least to see what was coming. As soon as the radars went on, the EA-6B would lock on to their position, then launch their HARM missiles or the F-18s would launch theirs. Even if the radar shut down, the missiles would remember where they were. It was a very hungry missile.

  The radios were silent. The Tomcat passed through five hundred knots to five hundred fifty. The air streamed by their two-thousand-pound bombs so quickly that it made a slight buzz, or hum, underneath the plane.

  Woods felt odd being in the lead with his Commanding Officer on his wing. It was all because of Wink, the top RIO in the squadron, the one who was without a doubt the best at running an attack with the LANTIRN system, the one sure to put the bombs on the target. Everybody knew it, including Bark. So Wink was taking them in and showing them where to go.

  “Feet dry,” Wink called as they passed over the beach of Lebanon and headed inland. “Good thing we got that stealth paint,” he cracked.

  “You wish. See any airplanes?”

  “Negative.”

  “Push over in ten minutes.”

  “Glad Lebanon’s small.”

  Wink’s voice suddenly raised slightly in pitch. “We’ve got a SAM site at nine o’clock lighting us up. Fire control radar.”

  Woods quickly lowered the left wing to look for a SAM launch. Nothing but darkness.

  “See anything?”

  “Not yet. They’re just tickling us.”

  “EA-6B should be reading him. Bomb switches set?”

  “Yeah. We’re set. LANTIRN system checks good.”

  “Everyone else in position?”

  Wink checked his PTID. “Yes. We’re set—“ Suddenly a very distinctive warble pierced their ears. “SAM launch, SAM launch!” Wink cried.

  Woods searched the sky. “Where?”

  “Two o’clock!” Woods dipped his right wing and looked beneath the plane. He saw a red ball tearing up from the ground toward them. It was the missile motor burning as it pushed the weight of the surface-to-air missile uphill.

  “Chaff!” Wink urged.

  Woods hit the white button on the stick with his thumb and fired off a preprogrammed series of chaff. Underneath the tails at the back of the airplane small cylinders of tightly packed metal foil fired down from the F-14. They immediately burst into small clouds of falling metal strips to attract the radar’s attention away from the Tomcat, which made an excellent radar reflector in its own right.

  The best radars, though, looked not only for reflected energy, but reflected energy that moved. The chaff stopped dead behind the Tomcat, as the airplane continued forward. If it was a newer radar, or upgraded, it would track the plane through the chaff release. Woods turned to his left to put the missile directly on his right wing as it continued to climb up after them. It had nothing else on its mind except to have a collision with Woods and Wink. As soon as the missile was ninety degrees off, Woods rolled the Tomcat over on its back and pulled down hard toward the earth. He leaned harder still, using the added acceleration of gravity to move them down quickly, to achieve the maximum possible change in position from the missile. As the nose of the Tomcat dropped and the missile peaked and headed down after them, Woods rolled level and headed up in a 7-G pull away from the earth. Woods watched the missile continue to close on them.

  “They’re still locked on!” Wink said grimly.

  A bright flash lit the horizon in front of them. Woods tore his eyes from the missile momentarily to see whether an airplane had fired on them. It was a missile, but from the EA-6B. A HARM—a High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile— luxuriating in the energy that was guiding the SAM toward Woods. The HARM raced down toward the source of the energy, ready to explode on the transmitter. The HARM gave the SAM site operator two choices—leave the radar on and eat the HARM, or shut down the radar, and lessen his chances of dying.

  Wink watched the strobe on the ALR-67 radar warning indicator that showed where the SAM had come from. They maneuvered up, then down, as the missile continued to track them, but then suddenly diverte
d its attention from the Tomcat, appearing to lose interest. Woods watched the missile fly straight again. “Strobe?”

  “Gone,” Wink said, glancing down at the indicator. “We’re clear.”

  “He saw the HARM coming,” Woods said, steadying out on his original course.

  Bark rejoined in loose trail on Woods’s wing and they pressed on toward the target.

  “Fifteen miles to the target,” Wink announced, forcing himself to walk through the bombing run. “Everything looks good.”

  “SAM! SAM! SAM!” someone yelled over the radio. It chilled Woods and Wink, who had yet to settle down after their close call. They both jerked their heads around searching for a new SAM. Wink checked the radar warning screen but it was uncluttered with fire control radars.

  Wink called to Woods. “Come starboard hard to 070. Beginning release run.” In the backseat he checked the switches on the AWG-15 weapons panel to ensure he hadn’t changed the drop settings for the bombing run.

  Woods responded immediately to Wink’s request. “How’s the LANTIRN system?” he asked, concerned about the high G maneuvering the pod had endured during the attempt to evade the SAM.

  “Sweet. I’ve got a good picture.” He looked at the infrared image on the screen. “Clear as a bell. It made it easy to pick a target. There it is, Trey. The fortress, bigger than shit. One minute,” Wink warned, watching the precalculated release point timer count down.

  Woods checked his switches and prepared for the release.

  Wink was focused on making the bombing run perfect. He didn’t know what the bomb would do by way of damage, but he sure could say where it was going to hit. “Three, two, one.” Woods pressed the release button on the panel and the two laser-guided bombs dropped off the Tomcat and headed silently toward the earth.

  As soon as Woods felt the release, he pulled up and left, ensuring that the laser designator stayed on the target.

  “Good release!” Wink exclaimed. The hop was all worth it now to Wink. They had done their job, and Bark was dropping right behind them. “Good target,” Wink said, seeing the image of the crosshairs on the exact place where he had designated the bombs to hit, just at the base of the fortress, calculated to do the most damage to the structure. “Five seconds to impact,” Wink said. He stared at the image waiting anxiously for the explosion. Suddenly the screen lit up at the same time the sky did five miles away when the two enormous bombs slammed into the centuries-old fortress in Lebanon.