Flash Point (60 page)

The night weather had taken a turn for the worse, the sea rougher than it had been in many days. The other aircraft on the diversionary strike were to launch after them, except for the dedicated S-3 tanker, which would go off cat four just before they took off. Woods and Big were to take all the fuel their planes could hold.

In the darkness, Woods released the parking brake and moved forward slightly. The yellow shirt directing him moved his wands slowly, then crossed them quickly. Woods hit the brakes and felt the launch bar drop over the catapult shuttle as he had hundreds of times before. The yellow shirt saluted and passed him to the catapult officer. Woods found himself reassured by the familiarity as he thought of going down the catapult, accelerating to one hundred thirty-five knots in about two seconds carrying a howitzer barrel filled with high explosives under his belly, and being the first person in history to do it.

The catapult officer faced Woods, raising her right hand slightly and slid her left hand quickly to the bow of the ship. The shuttle moved forward and grabbed the Tomcat’s launch bar. She signaled to run up the engines. Woods went to full throttle and finished his cockpit checks with Wink. They were ready. Woods moved the throttles and flames shot out of the F-14 as the engines went to afterburner. Flipping the switch, Woods turned on his exterior lights. The catapult officer saluted, signaled, and the catapult fired.

Woods, Wink, and their howitzer barrel rocketed down the catapult track, the acceleration throwing them back in their seats harder than usual. The Tomcat reached the end of the catapult stroke and they were pushed forward. The ship was done helping them fly.

The wheels cleared the deck and the aft half of the Tomcat rotated downward, lifting the nose of the plane above the horizon. Woods quickly scanned the instruments.

“We’re flying,” Wink called from the backseat after watching the airspeed indicator carefully.

“Head 076,” Wink said.

“Roger,” Woods replied. He put the Tomcat into a gentle right turn as they continued to rise. The rest of the strike group launched behind them and climbed after them.

They could see the formation lights on the other airplanes heading east with them. The two carrier Battle Groups had switched targets for the night so Woods’s flight could be better camouflaged. They wanted to be seen on the radar of whoever was watching with the airplanes heading east. After that they would simply vanish. It would take a truly special radar operator to pick them out of the clutter once they peeled away from the group.

The radios were silent as the ten airplanes broke over the beach together. There had been some talk that Syria was going to actually send up fighters against this strike, but so far, no sign.

The pilots in the formation had been briefed by the Air Wing Commander, who had chosen to personally lead this diversionary strike. He had been a lukewarm convert to the strike plan against Alamut. When he found out there would be “someone” on the ground to laser designate the exact spot, and that the Air Force had actually parted with two of its private reserve of perfectly aged GBU-28s, and that the DOD had actually signed off on letting two untested Tomcat crews carry them into Iran, he figured who was he to stand in the way? A great military leader, like a great politician, is great sometimes because he discerns a trend and gets in front of it.

Some of the pilots were hoping that the Syrians would in fact have the nerve to fight them tonight. Down deep, not one of them believed they would, but there was always the hope. . . . The idea of air combat at night with lights off was almost too exciting, especially against someone who didn’t practice. For those not accustomed to night fighting it was disconcerting and disorienting. The chance of a mid-air or of shooting down the wrong airplane in the general pandemonium was extremely high. It was not an environment into which the poorly trained strode happily.

“Any bogeys?” Woods asked.

“Negative,” Wink said. The PTID was blank except for the strike aircraft. They crossed over the Syrian border and accelerated to five hundred knots. Woods glanced down to see if he could make out the coastline. A few small towns glittered below, but nothing substantial. He couldn’t tell where the Mediterranean stopped and Syria started. It was one great sea of blackness, with a few lights in the easternmost part.

The strike group continued east, deep into Syria. On a radar it would look as if the strike group had gone far inland to begin the attack from the east to avoid the SAMs. As they approached the break-off point Woods flew over to the S-3 tanker that was escorting the strike just to refuel Wink and Big. Tankers rarely went overland, but without getting fuel at the last possible moment, the Tomcats would never make it back to the ship.

“Hundred knots of closure,” Wink called.

Woods retarded his throttles slightly as he closed the distance.

“Fifty.”

Woods raised his right wing to slow the closure and increase his turn. He was a few hundred yards from the tanker. He controlled his rate of climb, closure, and turn instinctively as he rendezvoused on the tanker.

“Ten,” Wink said quietly.

Woods joined on the tanker’s left wing, slightly below, perfectly. He never took his eyes off the plane. He’d done it hundreds of times, even at night, but he was always careful. He glanced quickly left to confirm that Big was on his wing, right where he should be. Big had been in loose trail, a quarter mile behind. He had gone off the catapult just seconds after Woods and had followed him the whole way.

The S-3 tanker pilot signaled, and Woods flipped a switch. The refueling probe climbed out of the right side of the Tomcat and made its customary loud noises as it rose hard and rigid into the two-hundred-fifty knot airstream. Woods slid back and approached the S-3 from behind. The refueling basket bobbed along at the end of the long invisible hose waiting for the Tomcat to pull up. Woods lined up behind the S-3 and accelerated straight ahead. The probe caught the basket and drove home, hitting right in the center. The basket squeezed the probe and the green light flickered. Good seat.

Woods pulled the throttles back slightly to enable him to fly formation on the tanker ahead of him. He glanced down at the fuel indicator. No change. He looked at the lights. Good green light over the drogue. “What’s up?” he asked Wink.

“Don’t know. I’m showing no transfer. Push it up a little. Give him a little slack.”

Woods adjusted his speed to drive the drogue toward the tanker, then away. No change. They weren’t getting any fuel. “Tell ’em.”

Wink transmitted, “
No transfer. Check your switches
.”

“Switches are fine. Pull out and try it again.”

“Arrr,” Woods said as he pulled the throttles back a little quicker than he needed to. The Tomcat slowed and the drogue came free. He accelerated again to catch it, and approached the drogue exactly the same way as the time before. “If we don’t get fuel, we’ve got to abort. We can’t get back without it.”

Wink didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. He looked at his fuel indicator. They were already behind where they expected to be in their fuel specs. The bomb must have more drag than they had calculated.

Woods plugged in again and got another green light from the drogue. Then an amber, a red, then green again. He watched the fuel indicator stop decreasing and reverse itself and head up. “Good transfer,” he said to Wink.

“Roger,” Wink said, relieved.

They watched the digital fuel readout march upward until the Tomcat was completely topped off, over nineteen thousand pounds of fuel. They had replaced all the fuel they had used in start-up, taxi, takeoff, and climb. As Woods backed away from the basket, banking to his right and coming up to the right side of the tanker, Big moved over quickly to top off. When he was done he pulled out and joined on Woods’s right wing. They pulled away from the tanker and banked right, toward the remainder of the strike group.

The planes on the strike had reached the point of separation. They split up to approach the target from different directions, making the air defense calculations immeasurably harder for the defenders — not just one piece of sky to look for.

The breakup was Woods’s cue. “Goggle up,” he said to Wink. They took their NVDs out of the cases and clipped them to the brackets on their helmets, folding them down and turning them on. Woods could now see everything, the horizon, the mountains, the puffy cloud twenty miles away, and every airplane within ten miles. Everything was green. He immediately pushed the nose of the Tomcat over and headed toward the deck, watching his instruments carefully to ensure he stayed under thirty degrees of nose-down attitude. The airplane felt heavy and sluggish. Wink turned his radar to standby. They were going in totally EMCON, emissions controlled — no electronic signals emanating from the plane at all — until near their target. They didn’t want anybody picking up on them heading toward Iran with their radar blasting away, detectable for hundreds of miles.

He eased the stick back to slow his rate of descent as they neared the ground — gullies, bushes, and rocks were now clearly visible. He pulled harder and brought the nose up to the horizon, steadying out two hundred feet above the ground. Low enough that no radar would pick them up outside of thirty miles or so, and high enough that he was unlikely to hit most obstacles. They had the wires and cables of each area emblazoned on their chart.

Big joined on his wing in comfortable trail formation about a quarter of a mile behind him and slightly higher.

The radar warning detector was quiet. No surface to air missiles or AAA were trained on them as they started their race through eastern Syria. The Tomcat bounced slightly as the desert air rose from hills causing minor turbulence.

In the back, the LANTIRN god was fine-tuning his picture from the FLIR, the passive forward-looking infrared that was such a significant part of the LANTIRN system. It was working perfectly. Wink settled into his navigation and was comfortable with everything he saw. One of his favorite things about LANTIRN was it had a self-contained GPS unit that confirmed its position from satellites. It gave them their position three dimensionally.

“How we looking, Wink?”

“Coming up on our turnoff,” Wink replied. “See the bridge just to the right?”

“Yeah.”

“Stand by.” As they came upon it Wink called, “Come port to 065,” and Woods turned northeast toward the mountains of Iran.

Woods pushed the nose of the Tomcat over slightly following down a hill as he stayed at two hundred feet above ground level. He increased his speed to five hundred fifty knots. Wink had his head buried in the infrared LANTIRN system and watched for any sign of the launch of a surface-to-air missile or AAA. Wink glanced at the green-glowing radar warning indicator by his right knee. It was completely quiet.

Woods checked his fuel. They were below their consumption ladder again, burning more fuel than they should be. He checked his speed and fuel flow again. The fuel flow was slightly higher than projected. His calculations had been wrong. Bark had told them to check their fuel carefully. If they weren’t close, they were to abandon the mission. The last thing Bark said he wanted was to lose two Tomcats from fuel starvation. They were already burning through their Bingo fuel — the cushion they relied on when returning to the carrier to fly to a nearby airfield if they couldn’t get back aboard. Wink checked their projected time on target with the LANTIRN system.

“Crossing into Iraq,” Wink reported.

“This just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?” Woods replied. He glanced at his engine instruments, the fuel flow, the turbine inlet temperature, the wing position, and engine rpm’s. Everything was as smooth as silk. “You see Big?”

Wink grabbed the steel handle on top of the radar panel in front of him and twisted around to look between the tails of the Tomcat. “Yep,” Wink said with some difficulty due to his contortions. “Got his formation lights. About a quarter mile behind us. Stacked right.” He glanced at his PTID again. “Time to target is thirty-six minutes.”

“Roger,” Woods said. His hands were beginning to sweat inside his gloves. The green landscape flashed by smoothly. The desert air was mercifully quiet with few pockets of turbulence or intense heat rising into the cool night sky.

“Approaching way-point three,” Wink said. He had chosen an intersection as the way-point, something that they could check visually to make sure they were on course. “Stand by to come port to 049. Check for intersection.”

“Roger.” Woods watched the distance to the way-point count down in tenths of miles. He strained to see an intersection. He hadn’t even seen a road in thirty minutes. The desert had a way of rejecting roads unless they were well maintained. He had a feeling the chances of this intersection being well maintained were not high. He scanned the horizon for anything suspicious. There were no signs of life at all.

“Mark. Come port, 049,” Wink said crisply.

Woods banked the F-14 left and pulled up slightly to make sure the turn didn’t bring them closer to the ground. He checked the radar altimeter, the only emission they were making that might be detected by the enemy. It was a small radar beam that was projected directly down, beneath the Tomcat, to measure its height above the ground with amazing accuracy. The accuracy would cause the numbers to jump around even if they were level because of the changing elevation of the ground. He steadied on the new heading. Woods had found himself watching the sky even more carefully after they’d passed into Iraq. He couldn’t believe they were flying through Syria, Iraq, and Iran all in one night. He started to wonder how smart his plan had been. It was fraught with potential for disaster, not the least of which was the longest night low-level he had ever flown. He wouldn’t put it past Iraq to try to come up and stop them. Not that he was worried about Iraq’s ability to find them and shoot them down at night with one of its fighters, but he didn’t have enough gas for even one turn with a fighter.

The air grew unfriendly as they entered a mountain valley. They started bouncing noticeably in the mountain air. Woods was worried about maintaining his heading and altitude without running into something. He followed the valley through the jagged rocks and tried to maintain his course, beginning to breathe audibly.