The restriction made sense, considering the skies over Iraq were now more congested than the New York air traffic control area. They were crammed with coalition warplanes, all hell-bent on shooting something—anything—as long as it might be an enemy.
The problem was, the Iraqi fighter pilots suffered no such restrictions. They could point their missiles in almost any direction and be sure they were aimed at a coalition warplane.
Which explained, at least in the Hornet pilots’ minds, what happened to Scott Speicher the night before. Inbound to their target, Speicher’s flight leader had reported obtaining a radar lock on a “bogey.” The bogey was coming head on. On the Hornet’s air-to-air radar, the bogey showed up electronically as a supersonic MiG 25.
That wasn’t good enough to mark the stranger as hostile. According to the ROE, they had to obtain a confirmation from the AWACS. Or they had to make a visual identification, which was not possible in the pitch blackness over the desert.
The bogey, therefore, was not a bandit. Not legally. No one took a shot. Within seconds, the bogey, whoever he was, passed behind the flight of Hornets and disappeared.
Minutes later, the Hornets arrived over their target. But now there were only three in the formation. Scott Speicher, who had been Number Four, was missing. He was never seen again.
The next day the coalition command issued the report that Speicher had “probably” been downed by a Russian-built SAM-6 surface-to-air missile.
The pilots knew better. They knew in their guts what really happened: The “bogey” was a real-life “bandit”—an Iraqi MiG-25—who performed what was called a “stern conversion.” He had executed a well-timed turn to fall directly behind the flight of Hornets. He locked on to the number four Hornet and fired an AA-6 air-to-air missile.
And took out Scott Speicher.
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All this was on Mongo’s mind now. The flight of Hornets was inside the Iraqi border. Thirty miles to the target. Mongo’s head was moving like it was on a swivel—left, right, up, down, sweeping the sky, the desert, the horizon. There were nasty things out there, things that would kill them: SAMs, anti-aircraft, enemy fighters, friendly fighters.
They were going like hell now, nearly supersonic. Mongo had to keep “tapping” his afterburner—jamming the throttles past the full power detent—to stay up with the formation. In combat, speed was your best friend. Speed was life. The more, the better.
The babble on the radio was getting worse. It sounded like feeding time at the monkey zoo.
And then through the clutter of radio transmissions came a call from strike control. It cut through the babble like a knife:
“Quicksand 400, two bandits on your nose at fifteen.”
A spike of adrenaline surged through Mongo. The controller had said bandits. Not bogeys. Bandits.
Or had he? Mongo felt a stab of uncertainty. In the radio garble, could he have heard wrong?
Mongo forced himself to switch his attention inside the cockpit—something he hated doing at this critical moment—just for a second. He switched his mission computer to air-to-air mode.
Two sweeps later, there on his radar display, he could see one of the “bandits.” The radar was electronically identifying the target as a MiG-21 Fishbed fighter. The MiG was at supersonic speed, two thousand feet below.
It was coming directly at him.
Twelve miles range. The bandit was well inside the range of the Hornet’s Sparrow anti-aircraft missiles. No one in the flight was shooting. Why the hell not? Had he heard wrong? Hadn’t the controller in the Hawkeye said Bandits? Or did he say something else?
Mongo selected a radar-guided Sparrow missile on his arming display. His finger went to the trigger on his control stick.
For a millisecond, he wrestled with his conflicting thoughts: Maybe he heard what he wanted to hear. Maybe it wasn’t a MiG. . .
If it was a MiG, the Iraqi pilot would be taking his shot. Just like the MiG did last night on Speicher.
Mongo squeezed the trigger.
Whoom! The five-hundred pound Sparrow missile left its rail like a runaway freight train. Mongo watched the missile accelerate. It was flying in an arc toward—there it was—a speck, growing larger. . . the MiG!
They were closing fast. Mongo got one good glimpse of the fast-moving Soviet-built fighter—just in time to see it erupt in a bright flash. The Sparrow hit its target.
Mongo rolled up on his right wing. He could see it clearly—the tan, desert-colored paint scheme, the insignia of the Iraqi Air Force. The MiG was a mess, crumpled in the middle, burning fiercely, trailing thick smoke, descending like a shotgunned pigeon.
“Splash One!” Mongo called on the radio.
“Splash Two!” called someone else.
Two? Mongo had forgotten for a moment: The Hawkeye called out two bandits. Someone had just taken out the second one. Over on the opposite side of the formation, the second MiG was trailing fire and smoke, going down like a gutshot crow. Lieutenant Commander Mark Fox, who was Dash Four out on the right flank of the formation, had reached the same conclusion as Mongo: Shoot. Shoot the bastard before he shoots us.
Two MiGs, two kills. No one saw parachutes from either of the stricken MiGs. That meant a couple of Iraqi fighter pilots that day were keeping an appointment with Allah. And no one in the flight of Hornets was feeling any particular remorse about it. It was an outcome that suited the squadronmates of Scott Speicher just fine.
How did it feel?
It felt GLORIOUS. . .
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Three minutes. That’s how long it took, from the initial “bandits” call of the E-3 AWACS ship until the missiles dispatched the MiGs. Three minutes of air-to-air action.
And less than two minutes after that came the air-to-ground action. The Hornets hit their real target—an airfield in western Iraq. Each of the F/A-18s rolled in on the complex of buildings and hangars. Their Mark 84 two-thousand pound bombs ripped through the roofs of the complex like an ax through an orange crate. When they pulled off the target and headed toward the Saratoga in the Red Sea, they could look back and see the smoke from the ruined Iraqi airfield billowing into the desert sky.
Their success in obliterating the airfield, however, was quickly eclipsed by the greater event. The big news—as reported by Ms. Amanpour and her CNN crew—was the air-to-air, High Noon shoot out with the MiGs.
As it turned out, the two MiGs they downed that day were the only air-to-air kills achieved by Navy fighters in the Gulf War. Air Force pilots accounted for several more. But after the first week or so of war, MiG-hunting became a fruitless activity. There were no MiGs, at least none in the sky. The pilots of the Iraqi Air Force displayed a keen interest in self-preservation by taking off and hauling ass out of the country.
Thus did Mark Fox and Nick Mongillo become instant cult heroes around the ready rooms of the Navy. The MiG killers! Each was decorated with a Silver Star. Mark Fox was ultimately promoted and given command of his own squadron.
As for Mongo, the nugget fighter pilot, the Navy had something equally appropriate. He would return whence he came. He would be assigned as an instructor back in the strike fighter training squadron—the place where fighter pilots were made.
CHAPTER ONE
ROAD
First Lieutenant Ilya “Road” Ammons, U.S. Marine Corps, returned the gate sentry’s salute. He drove the old Porsche on through the main gate of the Cecil Field Master Jet Base, down the long, straight Avenue “D,” between the stands of Florida pines toward the base complex and the great beige-painted jet hangars. On the left he passed the row of retired Navy warplanes, parked on display like artifacts from another era.
Halfway down the long avenue, Road Ammons heard them. Even with the windows up in the Jeep, he heard the sound rising in pitch like an approaching tornado. Ammons looked up and—there they were! Four of them, F/A-18 Hornet fighters, tucked together in a tight right echelon formation, screeching over the runway at six hundred feet. They
were doing, Ammons guessed, something over four hundred knots.
Ammons pulled over and stopped. He watched the lead Hornet in the formation break abruptly to the left in a hard turn. Vapor from the moist morning air spewed from each wing. At three second intervals each of the fighters banked hard to the left and followed the leader into the landing pattern. As they passed low over where Ammons sat in his parked car, each jet made a howling, air-ripping noise like an enraged beast.
Sitting there by the roadside, ears ringing from the thunder of the passing fighters, Ammons felt a glow of satisfaction. A grin spread over his round face. Well, Grandpa, I made it. I’m gonna be a fighter pilot!
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Whenever he wanted, Road Ammons could close his eyes and freeze with perfect clarity that instant back in time when he knew that someday he would be here. It was an image he carried around in his head, like a secret talisman.
He had been nine years old. His grandfather had taken him to visit the Marine Corps air station at Beaufort, South Carolina. The boy was introduced to a man named Frank Peterson, who was a major in the Marine Corps, a fighter pilot, a decorated hero from the Vietnam war.
Peterson was an African-American, like Road and his grandfather. The boy stared at the officer. He had never seen so handsome a human being, black or white. Major Peterson’s perfectly tailored uniform had creases like razors down each breast. Six rows of campaign ribbons covered the left side of his chest. His close-cropped hair carried flecks of gray, like ocean foam, on each temple. He looked like he had been cast for his role by Hollywood. But Frank Peterson was no actor. He was the real thing.
The officer took the nine-year-old out to the flight line. Rows of F-4 Phantom jets, the hottest warplanes in the world at the time, were poised like killer angels on the tarmac, sleek noses aimed at an invisible enemy. Emblazoned on one of the fuselages, just beneath the canopy rail, was the pilot’s name: MAJOR FRANK PETERSON.
They climbed the access ladder, and the major hoisted the boy inside the cockpit of the Phantom fighter. It was a world of magic—consoles loaded with luminous dials, an instrument panel that displayed everything about the jet’s path of flight, throttles that commanded the two mighty engines, a control stick bristling with buttons, switches, and a trigger for the Phantom’s nose-mounted cannons. The kid breathed the sweet intoxicating cockpit smells, a redolent mix of oil, gun metal, leather, jet fuel, parachute cloth, canvas, sweat.
The kid’s eye caught something loose in the cockpit. Lying on the right console of the cockpit was the pilot’s flight vest. It was an SV-2 harness containing survival gear—rations, flares, flashlights, emergency radio—all the gear a downed combat flyer would need to stay alive.
And then he saw it. . . something dark and shimmering and beautiful. Buckled to the survival vest was the most impressive objet d’art that any kid had ever gazed upon. He was staring at Frank Peterson’s personal sidearm—a holstered, nickel-plated, pearl-handled .45 pistol.
Holeeeee cow! The kid stared, transfixed. At that instant, there in the oil-leather-gun metal-sweat-smelling cockpit of Frank Peterson’s jet fighter, the kid glimpsed his destiny: Someday. . . I’m gonna grow up and be a Marine fighter pilot. . . just like Frank Peterson. . . and in my cockpit I’m gonna have a pearl-handled pistol. . . JUST LIKE THAT ONE.
The image never left him. And now he was almost there. Road Ammons was an officer in the Marine Corps. And here he was at Cecil Field, about to fly the hottest damned fighter in the world.
All he needed now was the pearl-handled .45.
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Teeth. That’s what you noticed when you first met Road Ammons. Road had a grin like a Yamaha keyboard. In a room full of flight suits and short haircuts, you’d look for some distinguishing feature, and it would jump out at you like a beacon. There would be good ol’ Road Ammons, grinning that big toothsome grin that told you, shucks, man, I’m nothin’ special, just another Marine like all the others, just here to do a job.
Road was twenty-six years old. He had the burly structure of a running back, which he had been for four years at Tennessee State University, where he earned a degree in computer science. Briefly, but only briefly, he had deliberated over an offer to play professional football. Instead, he went into the Marine Corps. And he married his college sweetheart.
With the possible exception of professional sports, the military was the most equal of all equal opportunity employers. The volatile subjects of race and discrimination and ethnicity, at least around the ready rooms of naval aviation, had dissolved into such non-issues that the color of one’s skin was scarcely noticed. As a burning issue, race relations had been replaced by the hot button subjects of the nineties—gender integration and homosexual rights.
But still, you didn’t see many black faces in fighter cockpits. No one could say exactly why. It had mostly to do with the fact that, still, an appallingly small percentage of black kids were graduating from universities, and an infinitesimally smaller percentage of those were applying for military flight training.
So there was good ol’ Road Ammons, the only black face in sight. Road was so congenial, so non-controversial, so middle-of-the-road, that he was practically imperceptible. Colorless. It got to be a joke back among the instructors back in flight training. It was enough to make them wish that Road would come out with something, anything outrageous, some in-your-face epithet to identify himself as one pissed off black dude who wasn’t taking any shit from the system. People would try to engage Road in the controversies of the day—affirmative action, Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, O. J. Simpson.
Not Road. He wouldn’t take the bait. He’d just flash the Yamaha grin and go about his business. It was almost as if someone had briefed Road to keep his head down and stay focused.
In fact, someone had.
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It would have been a very long shot for any black kid from a town like Greenwood, in the delta flatlands of Mississippi, to grow up to be a military officer and fighter pilot. About as remote as flying off into space. It would have required an inordinate amount of luck.
Road Ammons had something better than luck. He had mentors and role models. Chief among the mentors was his grandfather, the one who had taken him to meet Frank Peterson.
Grandpa Ammons knew something about being a fighter pilot. During World War two, he had been one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, and had flown P-51 Mustangs in combat over Europe. And he remained active in the Tuskegee Airmen Association, an organization that fostered aviation training for black kids. Grandpa Ammons saw to it that Road spent every summer after his thirteenth birthday at a camp run by the Tuskegee Airmen. Road learned to fly, and by his seventeenth birthday he had earned his private pilot’s license.
Another role model, since that day when Road was nine years old, was Major Frank Peterson, who became Colonel Frank Peterson, and who continued to ascend to the rank of Lieutenant General and to the status of “Silver Eagle,” the senior aviator in the Marine Corps. Frank Peterson, with the pearl-handled .45, represented everything Road Ammons wanted to be.
Road had another connection. He had a mentor named Charles Bolden, whose own father had been a Tuskegee Airman and had flown with the senior Ammons in the war. And now Charles Bolden, who held the rank of colonel in the Marine Corps, had just come down from space. Literally. After making five shuttle flights as an astronaut, Bolden had resumed his military career and had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general. And he maintained a keen interest in the career of his protégé.
So there was more behind the toothy grin and the congenial manner. It took a while to figure it out. You had to know Road Ammons before you understood that behind that keyboard grin and colorlessness and the aw-shucks-I’m-just-doin’-the-best-I-can manner was an ambition as huge as outer space.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FINE MESH
There was a sameness to naval air stations. If you could close your eyes and be transplanted from one air station to another, it
would be difficult when you opened your eyes to say where you were. They all had the same enormous slab-sided hangars with arching roofs, painted either standard Navy gray or an indefinable hue the sailors called puppy piss yellow. The hangars were half a block long. Inside the structures, along each two-story wall, would be the resident squadron’s working spaces—maintenance shops on the bottom deck (floor, for the un-nautical) and administrative offices on the upper deck (second floor). From the upper deck you could look down from an open passageway (hall) onto the spacious hangar deck and the maintenance crews working on the jets.
VFA-106 occupied such a hangar at the southeast corner of the Cecil Field Master Jet Base, five miles west of Jacksonville, Florida. “Master Jet Base” was a suffix applied to Cecil back in the Cold War days to distinguish it from all the lesser Navy jet bases around the southeastern United States. It meant that Cecil Field was the center of a galaxy of outlying bases, target complexes, and operating areas. Cecil had four intersecting runways, one an incredible 13,000 feet long, with arresting gear and all the accouterments for tailhook-equipped jets. It was also the shore-based home to half the carrier air wings that deployed from the east coast.
The designation “Master Jet Base” used to have a certain cachet, but it didn’t mean much any more. In the Incredible Shrinking Navy, Cecil Field was the only jet base, Master or otherwise, in that part of the world. And even that was about to change. The word had just come down that Cecil was on the “hit list” of the Pentagon’s base closure committee.
The Hornet training squadron’s official label was Fleet Replacement Squadron, or FRS. But nobody called it that. In the perverse way that the Navy renames its institutions, then continues to call them by the old name, almost everyone still called the FRS the “RAG.” It stood for the now-obsolete Replacement Air Group. Never mind that the signs on the buildings, the letterhead stationery, the covers on the manuals all said “FRS.” If you wanted to get there, you asked anyone in uniform how to find the RAG.
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