The gauges were up to 2,400 psi now, which might be enough—if both accumulators were fired at once. Will and Doug had already headed for the cockpit as the troops began piling out of the APCs. One of the combat support team’s motorcycles was the last to rush aboard, the team members immediately diving into the task of chaining the small convoy to the overloaded cargo floor.
Sandra sat in the engineer’s seat and turned to Will, who had already slid into the pilot’s seat.
“Okay sir, here’s the deal, If we could keep pumping for another five or ten minutes, we could get the pressure high enough in each accumulator to use one for APU start and keep the other in reserve in case the first starting attempt doesn’t work.”
Will nodded, tracking her words carefully.
“Or, with the lower pressure we’ve got now, we’d have to use both accumulators at once, but that probably is good enough to get the APU running. If I’m wrong and we use both and fail, we have to start pumping all over again.”
Sandra watched her commander’s face and waited for a decision. At least, thank you, God, no one seems to be shooting at us! she thought.
Will’s eyes locked on the flight engineer. “What do you recommend, Sandra?”
Major Moyer had already scrambled up to the flight deck, adrenaline pumping through his system, wondering why the engines weren’t already starting. They still had the main cargo doors to close, and for that they needed the APU and hydraulic pressure. He looked back anxiously in the direction of the cargo compartment, then glanced at Sandra and Colonel Westerman, barely restraining himself from asking what the hell they thought they were doing just sitting there.
Sergeant Johnson’s voice echoed suddenly up through the cockpit door. He had come through the crew entrance door at a dead run. “Hey, we’ve got lights out there at two o’clock!”
Doug, in the copilot’s seat, looked to the right, catching instantly the unmistakable sight of headlights shining in the distance over the desert floor.
“There’s someone out there, all right,” Doug confirmed. “He’s quite a few miles away, but he’s moving.”
“Sandra?” Will asked again, this time with urgency.
She surprised herself. There was no hesitation, even though she’d lost the gamble the last time she’d attempted a low-pressure double-accumulator start. Her voice sounded like it came from someone else, but her fingers were already selecting “both” on the hydraulic accumulator switch as she spoke the words, “Let’s try it, sir.”
“Go ahead, then.” Will held up a set of crossed fingers.
“Battery switch on. APU clear, APU start.”
The sound of battery-operated relays was followed by the slow, laborious windup of a turbine wheel halfway back in the aircraft.
“Come on, come on, COME ON!” Sandra watched the APU panel, scarcely breathing, waiting for the sound of ignition. The igniters were firing sparks now into the small combustion chamber.
“Whoever that is,” Doug continued, “he’s headed for the same road we’re sitting on.”
“How far away, do you think?” The question came from Moyer as he leaned over the jump seat and tried to follow Doug’s finger.
“Maybe three miles, maybe a bit closer.”
The sound of the APU catching and winding up on its own filled the airplane, the noisy, diminutive jet engine stabilizing at normal power. Sandra exhaled an unheard sigh of relief as she flipped the electrical power on line, snapping the number-three hydraulic pumps on as Doug began reading the Before Starting Engines Checklist and the loadmaster began closing the ramp and the clamshell doors 160 feet behind them.
“What about the INSs?” Sandra asked. The inertial navigation systems took nearly ten minutes to spin up and stabilize, and they had been running only two minutes so far.
“We’d better not wait for them, engineer,” Will said. Doug looked at the distant lights again, gauged the danger of going with minimal navigation equipment, and nodded.
The lights of the vehicle ahead were now at one o’clock, still headed at right angles to their “runway” as Will punched the starter buttons and toggled the four fuel and ignition switches on one at a time. The Before Taxi Checklist complete and the doors confirmed closed at last, Will snapped the two INS controls to the “Nav” position. They might just align in time, he thought, but if not, they could dead-reckon.
Feeling the pressure to move immediately, yet trying to stay calm and deliberate, Will pulled on his night-vision goggles and released the parking brake, holding the 141 to the center of the road as best he could see it in the black-and-white display. Doug, they had decided, would keep his goggles off, monitoring things with an unaided set of eyes.
“Are we ready?” Will’s voice was steady but strained, fatigue apparent in his breathing.
“Lineup check complete.” Sandra’s voice again, this time in the headsets as Will advanced power on engines two and three—the inboard engines—and keyed the interphone. “As planned, I’m going to use the inboards until we reach sixty knots, copilot, to minimize sucking sand into the outboards.”
“Roger.”
The outboard engines were each hanging over open desert. They all knew that bringing them to full takeoff power at low speed was like thrusting the nozzle of a shop vacuum into a pile of shavings—guaranteed to suck a torrent of abrasive material through the whirling blades. Too much sand and grit could cause an engine to fail, sometimes explosively.
Sandra glanced to her left at the backs of the two pilots, sensing the visceral tension, and feeling it herself.
As they accelerated down the highway, what had been a gentle tailwind suddenly became an insistent crosswind from the left, and by forty knots, Will had to use heavy left rudder to keep the twenty-foot-wide landing gear on the narrow forty-foot-wide roadway, working to track the cockpit and nosewheel to the left of centerline in order to keep the eight massive main wheels in the middle some eighty feet behind him.
The distant vehicle had stopped. Whoever it was seemed to be waiting a few miles ahead by the road, as if he could see the darkened C-141 rushing his way. Certainly whoever was out there could hear the engines by now. The possibility that a shoulder-mounted SA-7 missile could be loaded and cocked, waiting for their passage, was a shared, unspoken thought.
At sixty knots airspeed, Will brought the power levers for engines one and four up to takeoff power, and Doug made the final adjustment, the Starlifter finally gaining speed at the rate they were all used to. It was getting more difficult to see the edge of the road with the 141’s body canted slightly to counter the crosswind. The images were too indistinct in the night-vision goggles, and Will wished he had kept them off and just flipped on the landing lights. Interpreting the fuzzy white images was like driving through a downpour at eighty miles per hour; staying on the road was possible, but not guaranteed.
No matter. They would be at rotate speed in a few seconds, and then be safely airborne.
Computed rotate speed was 128 knots, but at 104 knots the C-141 drifted to the right a bit too much, the movement escaping Will’s notice at first until the tires of the right main landing gear suddenly left the edge of the road and rolled into a section of soft sand, dragging the nose of the Starlifter to the right as the right main wheels began to sink down, plowing twin trenches in the sand and throwing up a monstrous roostertail of debris as Will’s adrenaline level shot to emergency levels. He came left rapidly with the yoke and the rudder while pulling on the control column, trying to lift the right wing, which was now descending with engines three and four and the right wingtip toward the desert floor.
Too late! The impact of something on the right side hitting the sand was marked by a horrendous scraping as Will, praying he had enough airspeed to sustain flight, yanked the aircraft off the ground and rolled it back to the left to wings level, letting it climb a few yards, then leveling, letting it accelerate to full flying speed, thankful that he still had flight controls.
“Pilot, num
ber four’s vibrating …” The remainder of Sandra’s sentence was lost in the noise of a soul-shaking thunderclap as an explosion rocked the entire aircraft, the sight of a fireball on the right side lighting up the cockpit. The Starlifter yawed immediately back to the right as Will hung on, pulling off his goggles with his right hand so he could look at the engine instruments clearly. In a microsecond he considered putting her back down on the roadway, then rejected the idea. They were still deep in enemy territory, although the vehicle that had spooked them had obviously been no threat.
The number-four engine readings were zero, and number three looked unstable. One and two were running normally, and the airplane was flyable, but they had dragged number four in the dirt with disastrous consequences.
One hundred twenty-five knots and accelerating. Enough speed to climb. Will pulled on the yoke and brought up the nose.
“Gear up!” At Will’s command, Doug’s hand lashed out and snapped the gear lever up, the sound of landing gear retraction lost in the overpowering noise of the engine fire warning bell.
The red light was on in the number-four-engine fire handle!
“Engine fire, number four!” Doug announced, his head jerking right almost instantly. “Scanner—pilot. Check engines three and four! Jump seat, turn on the leading-edge lights, please!”
Almost instantly Doug keyed the interphone. “We’ve got a fire, pilot!”
Bill Backus flipped the lights on as he lunged for the right cockpit window behind Doug, pressing his interphone button on arrival. Sandra glanced left in time to catch the garish orange light playing on Backus’s face through the glass.
“It’s on fire, all right, sir!” Backus confirmed, his voice nearly half an octave higher than normal. “Dammit! Number four’s still there, pilot, but it’s on fire and it looks like the cowling’s off. We hit something, sir! I think it exploded!”
Will pulled the interphone switch, trying to keep himself calm and handle it by the numbers.
“Okay … okay, we’re through a thousand feet, let’s come right here to a southerly heading and keep climbing. We have an engine fire on number four, crew. I’m pulling the fire handle and firing the bottle. Copilot, confirm number four.”
Doug turned toward the fire handles located on the glare shield above the center console and monitored Will’s hand as he grabbed the correct fire handle. Doug nodded and Will pulled it all the way out, shutting off all fuel, electrical, and other lines to the ravaged power plant. Will pressed the fire-extinguisher button then for number four as Doug fished for the fire warning bell cutout button and turned off the loud ringing.
The red fire light, however, was still on. The fire-extinguishing agent in the single bottle hadn’t been enough to kill the flames.
“Fire’s still going, pilot.” The scanner’s voice was strained. “It’s roaring out there! We gotta be trailing flames for miles!”
“Okay …” Will began, then stopped, his mind racing through the options as he checked their climb through two thousand feet and toggled the rudder trim to the left. He was aware of his left leg hurting. He had been pressing hard against the asymmetric power on the left wing, trying to keep her flying straight.
“Doug, better shoot the other bottle into that engine.”
“Roger.” Doug snapped the right-side fire-extinguisher bottle switch to the alternate position and pressed the button, the amber light indicating its contents were gone.
“It’s still burning, pilot!” cried Backus, still monitoring in the right-side window, the significance of what was happening—and what might happen if they couldn’t get the fire out—beginning to dawn on him. “We better do something, sir! It’s getting bigger!”
Will toggled the interphone. “Okay, crew, this is the pilot. Think hard and fast. What do we need to do to isolate that engine and that wing from all fuel sources? What can we do that we haven’t already done?”
Will glanced at the altimeter. They were through four thousand now, and climbing nicely. If we can just get the fire out before we explode!
There were no more fire-extinguisher bottles on the right side. The options were fly fast or land.
“Pilot …” It was Backus again, a bit calmer, his years of knowledge of C-141 systems serving him well. “The right wing and that engine are already isolated from the fuel, sir. Sandra’s already done that. The problem is, number-four fuel tank’s breached. I can see all sorts of holes under the wing from the engine where it disintegrated. The right wing itself is starting to burn!”
“The right wing is burning?” Will asked.
Doug was nodding, his head craned back to the right. “He’s right, Will. It’s a goddamn wing fire. We’ve got to put it out or get this bird on the ground!”
The sight of a huge fireball exploding from the desert in the distance off their right wing as the bunker disintegrated went unseen by the crew of Scorpion-1. They had their own fireball to contend with.
“I’m going to try to blow it out with speed,” Will said. He shoved the throttles on the remaining engines up to takeoff power and leveled the aircraft, watching the speed build slowly toward three hundred knots.
“I’m going to take her to red line,” Will added.
“Do it, man. Quickly,” Doug responded. “I know that isn’t av-gas in the wing, but …” Burning kerosene might not be as explosive, but it was quite capable of ending their flight prematurely.
“Copilot, you coordinate checklists and get AWACS up when you’re ready, and I’ll try to keep us in the air. Okay?”
“Sounds like a plan, pilot,” Doug replied. Good procedure, Will.
The speed passed 320 knots as Will kept the nose down and let the aircraft accelerate while Doug ran the checklists with Sandra and tried to find options. With most of the fuel in number-four tank consumed, the flames began to diminish, and within seconds, what had been a fifty-foot trail of fire towed across the Iraqi night sky gradually became a small fire, then an occasional flicker.
Doug looked back at Will at last, almost breathing. “Pilot, the flames are dying down, but they’re not out. I’m going to call Crown, let them know what’s going on … just in case. Take the point for a minute.” Doug checked the frequency on a classified list and clicked the digits into the control head at the same moment the engineer reported excessive vibration on number-three engine. Will jumped back on interphone immediately.
“Could number four have damaged number three, scanner?”
Backus was nodding vigorously in the right-hand window. “Damn right, sir. That looks like exactly what’s happened. Number-three cowling looks like it’s drooping.”
“Pilot, engineer.” Sandra’s voice cut into Will’s thinking.
“Go, engineer.”
“We’re losing it, sir. Exhaust-gas temperature on number three’s climbing, fuel flow’s climbing, my vibration meter is climbing, and N2 RPM is going down. We’d better pull the fire handle before it explodes too.”
Will nodded, his right hand reaching out for the number-three fire handle as a part of his mind screamed at him to slow down and involve the copilot. His fingers closed around the red T-handle as Doug caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, his mind focused on giving the AWACS the vital statistics on what was becoming an increasingly desperate situation. Will yanked the fire handle back, and number three wound down to zero, the aircraft yawing even more precipitously to the right, one half of the flight-control hydraulics now gone with system number one, which was powered by engines three and four.
Doug looked up and let go of the transmit button, hitting the interphone instead. “Jesus, Will! I’m not completely out of the loop. You wanna wait for the rest of us, for God’s sake?”
Will had his hands full of airplane now, with the two engines on the left wing trying to push the aircraft to the right and roll it over. He countered it with left rudder and left aileron and trim. The aircraft could fly just fine on two engines, provided it wasn’t on fire.
Doug w
as shaking his head and Will caught the movement in his peripheral vision. He had known the second he snapped off the engine that doing it that fast was dangerous. But it was done. “Sorry. It was coming apart.”
Doug nodded and went back to the transmit button, knowing there was a wide-eyed controller on the AWACS somewhere over northern Saudi Arabia, holding in mid-heartbeat, wondering whether Doug’s truncated transmission meant the end of Scorpion-1.
Will and Sandra coordinated the emergency checklists for number-three engine and number-one hydraulic system loss as Doug finished with the AWACS and returned to the interphone. Rescue choppers would be headed north to intercept them shortly, and Crown—the AWACS call sign—was sending the two F-15s that had been standing by on fighter combat air patrol duty nearby. Doug dialed in the UHF frequency to talk to the Eagle jocks as he finished the report. Will saw him reach for the radar transponder. “Hey! What’re you doing?”
“They want it on, Will. Sorry, I should have explained before I reached. Same mistake.”
Will ignored the error and the mea culpa. “They forgetting where we are?”
“They’re not sure where we are. That’s why they need us on radar.”
“Along with half of Saddam’s remaining forces.” Will looked disgusted and on the horns of a dilemma. “Oh, hell, do it.”
Doug turned the wafer switch to the “on” position and toggled in the code the AWACS had requested. The little green light went on, indicating radar beams were being received and sent back with specific identification codes. Will could imagine the number of Iraqi radar operators who were also leaning forward in their seats at the sudden activity on their scopes.
“How’re we doing on the right wing, scanner?”
“Diminished, sir. The speed’s keeping it down, but we’re still burning out there.”
“Pilot, engineer. You realize we’re down to one electrical generator?”
Will had forgotten. For that matter, so had Doug and Bill Backus.
“Are we going to be okay on one?” Doug asked.
Scorpion Strike Page 15