by James Philip
His aircraft was a model A4D-2 from the first main production batch only minimally modernised in the last six years. That was no problem. The type, designated A-4C in service, was fitted with an AN/APG-53A radar and autopilot, LABS (a low-altitude bombing system), two 20-millimeter Colt cannons, and today was loaded with a five hundred pound bomb and a LAU-10 rocket pod under each wing.
Now, that was what a guy called ‘loaded for bear!’
Mission objective: shipping, military concentrations, bridges and infrastructure in and round Chinchew Bay.
‘Chinchew’ reflected that a lot of the charts which had found their way down to the flight room, were Second War or earlier hand me downs. Modern maps showed not Chinchew, the nineteenth century phonetic western bastardization, but ‘Quanzhou’. It was just a minor detail; nevertheless, an irritant as McCain slid into position at the head of the second strike echelon of eight A-4s, when the Enterprise’s birds swung around to a northerly heading to directly overfly the Pescadores Archipelago. Beyond those islands in the Taiwan Strait, the strike force would get down low and come in hot, fast and skipping the waves while the Big E’s F-4 Phantoms cleared the road at altitude for eight B-52s operating out of Guam, in the distant Marianas, to carpet bomb targets farther inland.
All aircraft would maintain radio silence until the attack commenced.
The weird thing was that it was not until John McCain had been strapped into the cockpit that morning that he had stopped to ask himself: “What the fuck are we doing?”
The Navy had lost almost four hundred men when the Berkeley went down and the Goodrich had been crippled by those Chinese STYX ship-killers, and the retaliation, when it had come, had been massive and brutal: three carrier air wings – the Enterprise’s, the Independence’s and the Ranger’s – sinking everything that moved on the Communist side of the Taiwan Strait and targeting every identifiable radar, missile and shore battery withing twenty klicks of the coast in a savage, unrelenting, turn and turn around again, twenty-four hour blitz.
Honour satisfied the Navy had called a halt: and gone back to patrolling and surveillance operations.
The first problem had been that the Chinese had not been willing to give up.
MiGs had risen to investigate the air defence envelopes of the carrier strike groups, Chongqing had proclaimed a ‘no steam zone’ which included all Taiwanese territorial waters out to a notional two-hundred mile limit and had threatened to mine the Taiwan Strait.
Commanding overwhelming air and sea force the US ought to have treated these threats with the disdain they merited.
But no, that was too simple.
Hence the second problem: some genius back home had decided to tweak the tiger’s tail.
The Big E and the Independence – without the Shangri La, which had had to put in to Subic Bay for emergency repairs to her port inner shaft, and the Ranger, which had been ordered back to its station in Japanese waters - had been ordered to mount A-6 Intruder electronic spying missions up to a hundred miles into the mainland interior, F-4s sent to overfly eastern Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan Provinces, and helicopter assault teams of Marines had been landed on Chinese merchantmen in the South China Sea, ostensibly on missions to recover ‘sensitive’ intelligence documentation.
McCain had guessed, idly, that it was all…bull.
And not thought a lot about it because strategy, politics, diplomacy and all that doubletalk was way above his pay grade. Not to mention that as he had flitted disconsolately between unnecessary sick bay check-ups, watches in the carrier’s CIC, or shadowed the CAG in Flight Control up in the island superstructure, or stood in for briefing officers tied up in planning the next day’s ‘aggressive patrolling’, or tried not to let his angst spill over into his daily letters to Lucy back in Canberra, he had not had an awful lot of spare ‘head space’ to devote to the big picture.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘tweaking the tiger’s tail’ game had killed several of the Enterprise’s and the Independence’s aviators within the first forty-eight hours; and that, in turn, had called for payback.
As the strike formation began to bleed off height over the rocky west coast of Taiwan, John McCain, if not his aircraft, was on autopilot and suddenly his head was clear of all extraneous distractions. It was often thus, when he was in the cockpit; he was at one with the controls, the airframe, and the racing jet became an extension of his own body, melded almost mystically with his mind, and in that sublime bubble of intense concentration, so much that was confused, murky on the ground or on the ship, was magically crystal clear in the air.
The ‘big’ mission was supposed to be to guarantee the territorial integrity of the United States’ ally, the Republic of China (Taiwan). The one thing which seriously conflicted that objective was a war with the People’s Republic of China (the Communist mainland). Yet, the US Navy had been knowingly waving a red rag at the Communist tiger for months now; so, nobody ought to have been taken by surprise when the ‘tiger’ finally turned and bared its claws.
Provocation.
Retaliation.
Escalation.
A guy did not need to be a rocket scientist to work it out!
First the Berkeley, then the cycle of counter-strikes. A pause in operations; without any let-up in intelligence gathering and routine, contemptuous violations of Chinese airspace.
And two days ago, the Chinese – or the Koreans, possibly both of them – had come out of their foxholes and bunkers and somehow, nobody knew quite how, mounted a sickeningly damaging sneak attack on the Ranger Strike Group (Task Force 134) in the Sea of Japan as it passed south through the Tsushima Strait.
Overnight, things had gone to Hell.
And somebody ought to have seen it coming!
‘The President has ordered the Chiefs of Staff to make the seas around the Japanese home islands and the Republic of China safe, and to progressively degrade and dismantle the enemy’s capacity to wage war in the air and on the sea in the Western Pacific.’
Leastways, that was what the fleet commander, Rear Admiral Elmo Zumwalt had announced over the Big E’s public address system the day after the disastrous modern-day battle of Tsushima.
Other than that, the men of the carrier’s Air Wing were no better informed as to events going on nearly a thousand miles north of the Big E’s current operational zone, than the lowliest cook or laundryman labouring away in the bowels of the great ship.
However, what little was known, was incredible enough.
The battle had happened in darkness at the height of a storm of such severity as to force the Ranger – weighing in at nearly sixty thousand tons empty and over eighty thousand loaded – to suspend flight operations. TF-134 had been, therefore, operating without a vital component of its air defence umbrella. Not only had there been no CAP, the task force had not been operating a seaborne early warning airborne radar picket but, extraordinarily, in the absence of a carrier-borne airborne command and control platform, there had been an absence of land-based air cover over the fleet.
This was not so much extraordinary, as scandalous.
However, even then, the Strike Group ought not to have been so easily surprised. Whatever the sea conditions radar pickets – ships – should have been deployed with clear radar sight lines out to fifty or sixty miles.
It seemed that if such radar pickets had been on station, that they too, had dropped the ball; although this had not been remarked upon by the Big E’s Intelligence Group, primarily because anybody who could read a chart of the relevant part of the Sea of Japan could work out for themselves the likely cruising stations of the ships of TF-134 as it manouevered to transit the Tsushima Strait. There could not have been any pickets covering the westward approach to the mountainous, forty plus mile-long radar-blocking obstacle presented by the Tsushima Archipelago, which ran approximately north to south through the waters between Korea and the island of Honshu. Had there been a single US Navy vessel on that – western - side of Tsushima there could ha
ve been no ‘surprise’ or ‘sneak’ attack.
Nevertheless, given the firepower and targeting technologies available to the Ranger’s powerful escorting screen; it still ought, by rights, to have been inconceivable that the enemy should so much as laid a finger on the flagship.
And yet the Ranger had been quoted as having been: “Hit hard!”
Scuttlebutt was rife.
Supposedly, a swarm of small, fast missile boats had emerged from the lee of Tsushima and fallen upon the flank of the fleet, which, unable to manoeuvre freely in the relatively confined waters of the Strait, its sensor and targeting radars partially disabled by the appalling sea conditions, had never at any time deployed anything other than a tiny percentage of its crushing firepower in its own defence.
Back in July 1964, John McCain had felt physically sick when he heard the news of the sinking of the Kitty Hawk and the Boston and those other ships in the Second Battle of Kharg Island. But that at least had been in a fair fight against an enemy the US military had understood, and respected. For a second carrier strike group to be crippled – so little real news was being made public it was likely that a lot of ships and sailors had been hit and killed – by a bunch of gooks in fifty-ton fast gunboats was, well, humiliating.
Nobody had been put up against a wall and shot after the Kitty Hawk was lost.
Somebody ought to be this time around!
As the strike force dove below five hundred feet McCain flicked the switch: WEAPONS FREE!
Ours is not to wonder why.
Ours is to do or die…
Chapter 36
Friday 14th June, 1968
Looking Glass 206, 33,000 feet over Prudhoe Bay, Alaska
Major Nathan Zabriski turned his swivel chair to speak to the Battle Staff Commander, for this mission a middle-aged Air Force two-star general who, unusually even though he was new to the role, had still not fully familiarised himself with the identities and functions of his twenty-man team. This irritated Nathan but it was not his job, as the Aircraft Commander, standing in for his boss, a bird colonel who had gone down with jaundice the previous afternoon, to worry about another, vastly more senior officer’s inability to manage his own people.
“This is about as close as we’ll get to Soviet airspace, sir,” he reported matter-of-factly.
They were a little over five hours into a twenty-two hour mission; and still nearly four hours away from the first of two rendezvouses with KC-135 tankers over Hudson Bay. In one sense this was going to be another, boring, uneventful operation, except in Project Looking Glass a man never knew if the next time one took off, if it would be October 1962 all over again.
However, this time around no war simulations or drills were scheduled. This was a routine fly high, listen hard and maintain contact with NORAD deal.
Nathan called through to the cockpit. “Please confirm flight status?”
“We’re good, Nate.”
“What’s it looking like back there, Nate,” the pilot, a dapper thirty-eight-year-old Texan with a brood of four sons – aged between eight and two – back at Offutt drawled.
“The board is clean, Hank,” Nathan re-joined. The other man was a lieutenant colonel but for the duration of this mission, he was just the driver, Nathan was the designated AC.
The thinking was: ‘If Albert Einstein gets into a cab; he wouldn’t expect the driver to explain why Isaac Newton’s laws don’t work so well the closer a given body accelerates to the speed of light!’
Leastways, that was how the Air Force saw it.
Nathan had flown with the currently embarked Battle Staff several times. As always there was a mix of Army, Air Force and Navy specialists. At any one time there were seven ‘staffs’ rostered, although usually one, possibly two, were usually undergoing training or breaking in new specialists. Training never stopped; it was a constant iterative process. The systems on board the Looking Glass fleet were in constant flux; practically everything was always state-of-the-art and the constant installation of new or modified equipment meant the make-up of each Battle Staff could alter radically from mission to mission. The ever-present crew dynamic was that every member was under constant psychiatric evaluation.
That in itself, took a toll.
‘You boys get to play with all the best toys,’ Caro would tease her husband playfully, ‘the Air Force has got to be worried about your states of mind.’
The least hint of strife at home; a sick kid, or an episode of uncharacteristic angst manifesting on base might cause a man to be grounded pending renewal of his flight clearance.
Since joining the Looking Glass program, there had been times when Nathan had wondered if tonight would be the night the world went mad again. Thankfully, not so much lately. It was a litmus test of how much the Sverdlovsk talks had taken the sting out of the post-October War tensions between what was left of the USSR, and the US, that these days, there were rarely any Red Air Force interlopers probing the ‘American Arctic’, and an absence of meaningful electronic jamming activity other than close to Soviet borders. Obviously, the Russians would be listening in to…everything but in terms of Soviet-US relations this was probably as good as it got, and probably as near to what peace looked like as anything he was ever likely to see in his lifetime.
Ceasefire, armed neutrality, or peace, the Polaris boats still crept about the oceans of the globe, the Minutemen still stood ready in their Nebraskan and Dakotan silos and Strategic Air Command’s B-52s carried on flying their missions to failsafe points over the Arctic, the Pacific and the North Atlantic.
The world was still a very dangerous place.
That was the message drummed home at every single pre-mission briefing cycle. The threat vista ranged from ‘rogue operators’ in the Soviet Union – nobody on the Looking Glass Program thought the Russians were anybody’s best buddies, whatever the White House said in public – to a new outbreak of rebellion or terrorism at home. The President might write off the anti-war demonstrations kicking off in cities across America as a ‘load of long-haired anti-patriotic kids high on weed’ or ‘pacifist Democrats making trouble’ but the US Air Force’s analysts cut through the political doublespeak and described those protests for what they were, the unmistakable symptoms of an increasingly deep-seated dissatisfaction with the US Government, and a possible long-term internal security issue which, potentially, effected the mindsets and the lives of ‘program operatives’ and their ongoing efficiency.
The Air Force hierarchy viewed all anti-war protesters as likely enemies within, fifth columnists. After a bloody Civil War in which the Kingdom of the End of Days had infiltrated hundreds, or possibly, thousands of sleeper agents and suicide shooters and bombers into so many areas of ‘normal’ governmental and civil society, before the New Year’s Eve nuking of Manhattan, Saint Paul, Las Vegas, the Philadelphia Navy Yard and Sault St Marie, any hint of civil disobedience or renewed terroristic activity on the mainland United States was red-flagged immediately.
In fact, the most insidious effect of the War in the Midwest, had been that it had bred a quiet paranoia in the military; inculcating an attitude which regarded every citizen was a potential rebel, spy or saboteur. So, when, as had happened in recent days parts of several cities were virtually brought to a halt by protest marches and rallies by a spontaneous coalition of tens of thousands of anti-Nixon and anti-war campaigners, many of them but not exclusively young, including hordes of student activists and agitators, it triggered alarm bells all the way through the Federal machine. Given recent events in the Far East, the climate of suspicion and protest was hardly likely to improve any time soon.
Nathan tried not to invest in the scare-mongering of the Administration, or the jaundiced world-view of the intelligence officers. Yes, there were anti-war protests, there were a lot of people angry about what was going on in the Western Pacific – and probably elsewhere in their name – but there were no politics in the Looking Glass Program. A man had to deal with what he saw with his own
eyes, heard with his own ears, to cut through the background noise which could often be so distracting back on the ground.
“I copy that, Hank,” Nathan acknowledged the pilot’s routine report. “I confirm that I have no mission critical re-scheduling for you at this time. Out.”
Everybody on a Looking Glass aircraft had to understand exactly what was going on all the time; there was no scope for careless ambiguity, and every reason to punctiliously and regularly state the patently obvious.
Just to keep the crews on their toes, every few flights the Command Center at Offutt AFB would radically re-task a given Looking Glass mission. In such cases it was unusual for the reasons to be self-evident to the recipient airborne crew; because real life was like that sometimes.
Threat level: DEFCON 1.
Normal readiness.
Exercise designator: FADE OUT.
In other words, nobody back home thought Armageddon was about to happen in the next few hours!
Nathan tried not to think overmuch about Caro, or Ellen May and Sally Jane at Camp John Reynolds Whitcomb in Minnesota.
Apparently, ‘the girls’ had cheered up when Caro’s nephew, Sam had arrived from Bismarck to keep them company.
That was good.
Ellen May was due to give her testimony to the Senior Tribunal dealing with the worst of the worst in the coming week, and Sally Jane directly afterwards. Many witnesses had cried off when the Army had decided to televise the trials, not Ellen May and Sally Jane, they were real troopers.
Selfishly, Nathan just wanted the whole dreadful business over and done with and the evil bastards in the dock strung up! Admittedly, he was hardly an unbiased bystander: he wanted Caro back. Returning to an empty married billet after a seventy-two hour-long Looking Glass operational cycle got old pretty quickly.
The Battle Staff Commander’s voice was in his headphones.