Battle Born (3 page)

It was not a favorable attack setup for him and his crew, but these Navy air intercept exercises were usually one-sided affairs. Austin One Military Operating Area, or MOA, acted as the “funnel” of airspace that led to the three restricted areas where practice targets were attacked with live weapons. Navy fighters could chase a bomber all the way down as low as it could go in Austin One. Fighters could continue the chase in the restricted areas, but had to fly no less than a thousand feet above the ground to stay clear of bomb explosions. The Ranch MOA at the western end of the run was the “recovery zone,” where the bombers and fighters had to disengage and establish safe altitude separation while the bombers turned around. The bombers were required to fly through the restricted area again and clear their bomb bays of all other weapons before they could exit the range complex.

The Navy pilots knew all this, of course, so all they had to do was wait at the bottom of Austin One for the bomber to enter the restricted areas. It gave the fighter jocks a little less time to intercept before bomb release, but they were almost assured of a kill. The first fighter they encountered was probably a young jock on one of his first fighter-intercept exercises, hoping to score an early kill while the bomber was at high altitude.

Well, the B-1B Lancer was not that easy to kill. It had almost the same agility as a jet fighter, it was just as fast, and it had one-half the radar cross section. Down low, no fighter in the world could keep up with a B-1—if it dared even to fly down close to the dirt.

The pilot released the trigger on his control stick, and the bomber made a relatively gentle thirty-degree bank turn toward the IP, or initial point, the start of the bomb run itself. The air-to-air TACAN read six miles—just
right, about thirty seconds apart. “Lead is two NAP from the IP,” he radioed on interplane.

“Copy,” the wingman replied. “We’re seven NAP. We’re popeye.”

“Bandits at seven o’clock, no range,” the DSO announced.

“Hold steady,” the OSO called out. “Let me get my ACAL and get a patch.”

“Range nine miles, five o’clock,” the DSO shouted. “I think he’s got a lock. Notch right, reference three-zero-zero.”

“Got my ACAL, guys,” the OSO said on interphone. “Clear to notch!” The pilot complied with a sharp right turn. Staying on a straight-line course for more than a few seconds with enemy defenders in the area was deadly for a bomber. The bombing computers needed accurate altitude data to compute bombing ballistics, and the OSO had to fly over a specific point on the route, usually the initial point of the bomb run, to calibrate altitude. There were several ACAL points on the route, but the one prior to the bomb run was the most important.

“AI’s down,” the DSO shouted. The fighter had turned off his radar, knowing he would disappear from the bomber’s radar threat sensors. “He might have a visual on us!”

“ADF zero-three-zero, pilot!” the OSO shouted. The pilot turned hard left back toward the inbound track line to the target. By “ADF’ing” the course, he would return to the original inbound heading to the target, making it easier for the OSO to find the target on radar.

As soon as the pilot rolled out of his turn, the OSO switched to the target itself. Exactly as predicted, the first target appeared right under his cross hairs. “Got you, you bitch!” he crowed. “Pilot, give me twenty right, and I’ll get a patch.” When the pilot rolled out on
his new heading, the OSO moved his cross hairs directly on the box, clicked the left button on his radar controller down twice, then clicked the button up.

The high-resolution synthetic aperture image on his digital display resembled a black-and-white photograph. The clarity was startling—he could actually make out the outline of a large tractor-trailer vehicle. “Hogs, I got a big mother trailer-sized vehicle—looks like a Scud missile reloading operation.” He centered the cross hairs directly on the image. “You’re cleared to the target! Let’s nail that puppy! We’re seven seconds late. Give me twenty more knots, pilot.” The pilot goosed the throttles a bit more—they were now screaming inbound to their target at almost ten miles per minute. “TG twenty seconds.”

“Bandits four o’clock, twenty miles and closing!” the DSO shouted. “Notch right!”

The pilot yanked the control stick right . . .

“No! TG fifteen! Wings level!” the OSO responded. “Stay on the bomb run!”

Suddenly, they all heard a faster-pitched
deedle deedle deedle
tone, no longer playful at all. “SA-6 up!” the DSO shouted. The SA-6 was a mobile Soviet-made medium-range surface-to-air missile system, widely exported all over the world. Its mobility, its top speed of almost three times that of sound, and its all-weather, all-altitude capability made it a deadly threat. The SA-6 fired a salvo of three missiles that were almost impossible to evade. “Three o’clock, within lethal range! Trackbreakers active!”

At the same moment, several white arcs of smoke traced across the sky, the thin white trails aiming right for the B-1, and the warning tone on interphone changed to a fast, high-pitched
deedledeedledeedle.
“Smoky SAMs!” the copilot shouted. Smoky SAMs were little papier-mâché rockets, no threat to the
bomber by themselves, but signifying a missile launch against the bomber crew. It meant the crew hadn’t done their job protecting their bomber.

“Simulated SA-6 launch!” the DSO shouted. “Uplink shut down! Chaff, chaff!” Clouds of thin tinsel shot out of canisters along the Bone’s upper spine, creating a radar target several hundred times larger than the 400,000-pound plane itself.

“Hold heading!” the OSO shouted. “TG ten! Doors coming open!”

The copilot watched as one of the simulated SAMs passed directly overhead. Talk about the “bullet between the eyes,” he thought grimly—if that had been a real antiaircraft missile, they’d have been dead meat. And he would have watched the final stroke all the damned way.

“Ready . . . ready,
now
! Bombs away!” the OSO shouted. One cluster bomb canister dropped free of the aft weapons bay. At the precise instant, it split apart and scattered the bomblets across the target area in a direct hit on the trailer.

“Bomb doors closed!” the OSO shouted. “Clear to maneuver!”

“Pump right,
now
!” the DSO shouted. The pilots rolled the bomber to the right away from the target area and pulled back on the control stick until the stall warning horn sounded, then released the back pressure. The DSO ejected more clouds of chaff behind them, successfully breaking the “enemy” radar locks and allowing the bomber to escape.

“That release looked good from back here, pilots!” the OSO yelled gleefully. “What did you see up there?”

“We saw our shit get blown away by a SAM!” the copilot yelled. “They had us dead-on!”

“I had the uplink shut down,” the DSO protested. “No way that missile would’ve hit . . .”

“Well, then they used an optical tracker or they got lucky,” the pilot said. “But they got us. If one of those smoky SAMs was a real one, we’d’ve gotten nailed. Shake it off, Long Dong. Nail the next one. These Navy pukes aren’t playing fair anyway.”

“Shit!” the OSO cursed into his oxygen mask. A perfect bomb run, a perfect release . . . and they got zilch. All that hard work for nothing. He angrily entered commands into his keyboard to sequence to the next target area. “Steering is good to the next target complex, pilot. We’ll take out the next Scud missile site.”

“What are the defenses in the area?” the copilot asked.

“SA-3s, SA-6s, and Zeus-23s,” the DSO replied.

“All right. Shake it off, guys,” the pilot said. “No more mistakes. Let’s kick some ass this time.”

“I’ve got another SA-6 and an SA-3 up,” the DSO reported. “SA-6 is nine o’clock, moving outside lethal range. The SA-3 is at one o’clock.”

“Where are the fighters?” the pilot asked.

“No sign of ’em,” the DSO replied.

“Clearing turn coming up,” the pilot said. “Back me up on altitude, co.” He banked the B-1 up on its left wing, then strained to look aft up through the eyebrow windows for any signs of pursuit. When he had turned almost ninety degrees, he initiated a steep left turn. “I got it,” he told the copilot. “Find the damn—”

“Aces!” they suddenly heard on the interplane frequency. It was their wingman, five miles somewhere behind them. “Bandit coming down the ramp! I think he’s on you! You see him?”

Both pilots furiously scanned out their cockpit windows. Suddenly, the copilot shouted, “I got him! Two o’clock high! He’s diving right on top of us! He’s got us nailed!”

The pilot swore loudly, then racked the bomber into a steep right turn, jammed the throttles to full military power, pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to the first detent, and zoomed the B-1 skyward.

“What are you doing, Rodeo?” the copilot shouted.

“I’m going nose-to-nose with this bandit!”

“Are you
nuts?
”

“The best way to defeat a fighter on a gun or close-in missile pass is nose-to-nose,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to let this Navy puke get a clear shot on us!”

Both pilots clearly saw the oncoming fighter as it plummeted toward them. It was a Navy or Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet, the primary carrier attack plane, which also had a good air-to-air capability. The Bone’s nose was thirty degrees above the horizon in the steep climb. All they could see was blue sky and the fighter diving down on them.

The sharp zoom maneuver was sapping their speed quickly. “Airspeed!” the copilot shouted—just a warning right now, not an admonition. The aircraft commander was still in charge here, no matter how unusual his actions seemed.

“I got it,” the pilot acknowledged. He pushed the throttles forward into full afterburner power. “C’mon, you squid bastard. You don’t have a shot. You’re running out of sky. Break it off.”

“We better get back down, pilot,” the OSO urged him. “We’re off our force timing!”

“Get the nose
down
, pilot,” the copilot warned.

“You lost us, bub,” said the pilot, addressing the pilot of the Hornet.

The OSO switched his radar display to air-to-air, and the ORS immediately locked onto the Hornet. “Range three miles and closing!” he shouted. “Closure rate one thousand knots! This doesn’t look good!”

“Airspeed!” the copilot warned again. They were
now draining fuel at an incredible three hundred pounds of fuel per
second
and going nowhere but straight up.

“Pilot, we’re off our force timing and three thousand feet high!” the OSO called. “We’re inside the one-mile bubble!” For safety’s sake, the rules of engagement, or ROE, at Navy Fallon prohibited any pilot from breaking an invisible one-mile-diameter “bubble” around all participants. “The ROE—”

“Shut up, co!” the pilot snapped. “We still got three seconds!” Breaking the ROE could put all the players in serious danger—and he was breaking rules one after another. “We’re not going to show ourselves.
He’ll
have to break it off.”

“Get the nose down, dammit!” the copilot shouted again.

Then, seconds before the copilot was going to push his control stick and try to overpower the pilot, the fighter rapidly rolled right. They had lost almost three hundred knots of airspeed—and for what? They saved themselves from the fighter but were now in the lethal envelope for any surface-to-air missile battery within thirty miles.

“Ha! Where are you going, you wussie?” the pilot shouted happily. He was breathing as hard as if he had just finished a hundred-yard sprint. “Keep him in sight, co,” he panted.

“This will work out perfectly, hogs,” the OSO said. “This next target is a Zeus-23. We’ll stay high and nail him! Center up.”

The pilot started a left turn toward the next target. “Where’s that fighter?” he asked.

“Eleven o’clock, moving to ten o’clock, way high,” the DSO reported.

“Zeus-23 at twelve o’clock,” the DSO reported. The real “Zeus-23,” or ZSU-23/4, was the standard Russian
antiaircraft artillery weapon system, a mobile unit with four 23-millimeter radar-guided cannons that could fill the sky with thousands of shells per minute out to two miles away—deadly for any aircraft.

“That’s our target, crew,” the OSO stated. He put his cross hairs on the Zeus closest to the preplanned target area. “Action left forty-five.” When the pilot rolled out of his turn, the OSO took a radar patch on the target. “I got the patch. Steering to the target is good. Give me full blowers, Rodeo!” The pilot shoved the throttles back into max afterburner, and a few seconds later they broke the speed of sound.

“Bandit now at nine o’clock, ten miles and closing!”

“Stand by . . . bombs away!” the OSO yelled. The CBU-87 cluster bomb scored a direct hit.

“Zeus-23’s still up,” the DSO said.

“What?”
the OSO yelled. “That run looked great! We were a little off, but well within the kill zone. Those squids are jacking us around, guys! That was a good kill all the—”

“Forget about it, Long Dong,” the pilot interrupted. “Where’s my steering?”

The OSO called up the last target in the third restricted-area bombing range. “Steering is good,” he said. “Single Scud-ER transporter-erector-launcher with communications van. Supposed to be tucked in between some hills. Max points if we get this one, guys—it’s worth more than all the other targets put together. Gimme a little altitude so I can see into the target area.”

“Scope’s clear,” the DSO immediately reported.

It was clear to see why the OSO needed some altitude. The pilots couldn’t see much more than a few miles ahead, and if they couldn’t see, the radar could see even less. They were several seconds late too, and the faster speed meant even less time to spot the target.
“Get ready for a vertical jink,” the pilot said. He reset the clearance plane switch to one thousand feet, and the bomber responded with a steep climb.

“I got . . . squat,” the OSO reported. The cross hairs went out to a large section of blackness. There were no radar returns yet in the target area. His hesitant voice infuriated the pilots even more. “ADF a one-three-five track, pilots. Clear back down.”

The pilot released the pitch interrupt trigger, and the bomber settled back down to its roller-coaster ride just two hundred feet above the blurred earth zooming by. “You got the target?” he asked.