The Warbirds (35 page)

1 July: 0930 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0530 hours, Washington, D.C.

Cunningham scanned the message and threw it into his out folder. He chewed his cigar to a ragged pulp and spat it into a waste basket. He called his aide. “The press will be looking for a statement about our first loss. Give ’em the standard answer and when they ask if we will stop flying missions or withdraw, tell them that is a decision above our level.” He banged the phone down, shoved another cigar into his mouth.

The President dropped the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, onto his desk and spun his chair around to face the three windows behind him in the Oval Office. He focused on the pin oak planted in the President’s Park by Dwight Eisenhower. To the left and further back he could see a white oak credited to Herbert Hoover. The office, the park, the trees…they would endure long after he left his place. It made one think about the so-called larger picture…

“It’s developing as expected,” he told Michael Cagliari, his National Security Adviser.

“The press is starting to talk about another Vietnam, sir. They’re going to use us as shark bait.”

The President almost grinned. “I think you mean you, not ‘us.’ Besides, you know the press, ready to go into an instant feeding frenzy at the first scent of a good story.”

“Some senators and congressmen are beginning to circle as well. The conflict in the Gulf is turning into a classic set-piece limited war,” Cagliari said. “It’s got the potential to blow up in our faces.”

“What doesn’t, in this job? Mike, we can’t lose sight of our objectives. I want to
stabilize
the region, keep the oil flowing our way and block the growth of Soviet influence. If by standing tough we can stop the fighting, which the Soviets exploit, we’ll have made real progress on our long-range objectives.”

“A lot of Congressmen are going to be reelected by beating you over the head on this. The press is going to help them.”

“Screw the press. They want an issue that will dominate the headlines tonight. I got elected to worry about tomorrow. The government is supposed to make policy. The press is supposed to report it. Let’s stop wringing our hands about the
reactions
to what we do…”

“Mr. President, you’re confusing me. You started out sounding like Winston Churchill, now you’ve switched to Charles deGaulle.”

The President leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Don’t flatter me. They’re in their own league.”

The worry was back on Cagliari’s face. “Mr. President, remember Nicaragua. There’re some lessons there. The world’s changed. Too many players can move independently of the major powers—”

“Mike, I understand you’re worried we may not be able to control events in the Gulf. So am I.
If
that happens we’ll just have to take our lumps and withdraw. History tells us democracies don’t like to fight long wars. Right now, though, we have to gut it out. But I did not become President to be remembered for getting us into a major war. We are not in one. We’ve committed an Air Force wing to help the UAC stabilize the situation. That’s all.”

The President walked over to a carved chest, raised the lid and a small bar lifted up. “Let’s have a drink. Your usual?” Without waiting for an answer he poured Mike
Cagliari a straight sour mash whiskey over the rocks and scotch for himself. He handed Cagliari the drink and sat down beside him on the couch.

“There’s still the problem of the press, Mr. President. They want a news conference—”

“Not yet, damn it. Let ’em stew a little.”

“They’re not going away and your press secretary is taking a helluva beating.”

“Okay, okay…it’s an Air Force wing doing the fighting—let Cunningham handle it. About time he earned his four stars.”

Cagliari downed his drink, got ready to leave.

“Mike, what kind of tree should I plant in the park?”

“Ironwood, sir,” Cagliari said, not missing a beat.

Cunningham submitted to the press conference at the direction of his Commander in Chief.

“General, can you tell us who decides what targets the 45th will strike?” a reporter asked.

“The President, through the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said, starting to work a cigar.

“Does that mean the President selects or only approves the targets?”

“The President approves the overall operations.”

“Who recommends the operations or targets to the President?”

“The JUSMAG, the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group, to the United Arab Command in Dhahran. It coordinates the requests of the UAC and transmits them to the Joint Chiefs for presentation to the President.” Cunningham braced himself for the next question.

“Do you mean the
Arabs
are picking our targets?”

“I wish that you would read the background papers we supply before you come to these conferences. I think that question has already been answered. Here goes again. We are providing the UAC, the United Arab Command, with military support in critical areas where they are weak. It’s their job to pursue the war, ours to make sure that the gaps are plugged. For example, we mostly provide them with intelligence and logistical support. The Navy is ensuring, as it has for some time, that the Strait of Hormuz stays open. And
the 45th flies interdiction and suppression missions against selected targets the UAC can’t hit. Until the UAC can fly its own tactical air missions, we want to prevent their ground forces from being overrun. That’s why the UAC coordinates its requests through JUSMAG. We want to keep the participation of the 45th to a minimum and only use them when and where they are needed…” Cunningham glanced at his watch, noted that he had gone three minutes past the scheduled end of the conference. “I’m sorry but we’re out of time. You’ll have to excuse me; thank you for your attention.” He stomped off the stage. No wonder, he thought, Reagan played deaf with reporters, blaming helicopter noise.

3 July: 0200 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0500 hours. Ras Assanya, Saudi Arabia

Jack found himself deep into it when he turned to the task of blending tactics and mission planning for the 379th. The situation on the ground was simple enough: the People’s Soldiers of Islam were trying to push across the Shatt-al-Arab into the city of Basra, the Shatt being formed at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, where they joined to empty into the Persian Gulf. Swamps on each side of the wide river formed a natural barrier between Iraq and Iran, and only at Basra, sixty miles upstream from the mouth of the Shatt-al-Arab, did a narrow isthmus of hard ground and sand provide a corridor through the swamps and into the Arabian Peninsula. The UAC had thrown up a strong defensive line centered on Basra, and as long as that line held, the People’s Soldiers of Islam were stalemated on the eastern side of the river.

Bill Carroll pointed out how critical it was to interdict any buildup on the eastern side of the river and how the targets that had come down for their first missions had supported that goal. “Someone at JUSMAG has their act together,” the Intelligence officer said. “They want us to cut into the muscle of the PSI deep enough to make sure the UAC can hold at Basra. But the PSI is regrouping and bringing in SAMs, most SA-6s, 8s and 9s. It’s going to get hairier out there. The PSI hasn’t committed MiGs against us yet, but they will. And we’ve established that
the fishing trawler Thunder reported is a Soviet intelligence-gathering ship out there to monitor our radio transmissions. As long as it stays in international waters, our Rules of Engagement say we can’t touch it.”

So the pieces for a war were all in place as indicated on the board, Jack realized, envisioning an updated military chess board spread across the desert of Arabia. He and his buddies were among those pieces, and just as in any chess game, strategy could dictate that they be sacrificed for the sake of a checkmate.

3 July: 1000 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1300 hours. The Saudi Arabian Desert

Mashur Ibn Aziz al-Darhali, a first cousin of Prince Reza Ibn Abdul Turika, was also thinking about sacrifice and survival as he drove his Mercedes 500 SEL along the lonely desert road running southwest from Dhahran. His contact had been most insistent that he make this rendezvous, and when he had refused, as befitted a prince of the royal family, the swarthy foreigner had asked him if his son was old enough to assume responsibility for his family. Mashur had ignored the remark but carefully noted the time and place of the meeting. As he approached the one hundred-seventy-kilometer marker he slowed to meet a rapidly approaching silver Mercedes. Both cars stopped at the kilometer marker on opposite sides of the road. The rear door of the silver Mercedes opened, and he was signaled to join the occupant in the rear seat.

The man was most polite and thanked Mashur for understanding his need to meet on such a lonely stretch of highway. The two men worked through the protective labyrinth of indirection and double meanings the Arabic language provided until Mashur divined the man’s simple request: he wanted a list of the targets the 45th would be ordered to strike twenty-four hours in advance.

Mashur protested that he was only a minor functionary in the United Arab Command and did not have access to such information.

The man smiled and asked him if King Fahd would be interested in Mashur’s backing of the fundamentalists who
seized Mecca’s Grand Mosque in November of 1979 and had seriously threatened the monarchy.

Thoughts of a beheading in a public square with a short sword on sand-covered ground churned Mashur’s stomach. He had only been an immature youth at the time, rashly dabbling in politics. Nonetheless, he carefully noted the time and place to pass on the information to his contact. On the drive back to Dhahran, Mashur rationalized that he was not betraying his family or his king, only punishing the infidel Americans for their worship of false gods. Indeed, he would be serving his king, his country and above all his God…

5 July: 0200 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0500 hours. Ras Assanya, Saudi Arabia

Some
frag
order, Jack thought, as he tried to decipher the long message detailing the targets for the wing’s next missions. He had been through the message twice and still had not made sense out of many sections. Thunder had tried to help, only to find himself equally at a loss. Jack then had gathered up their notes with the message and searched through COIC until he found the sergeant he was looking for. “Hey, Casey, can you interpret this stuff for us?” The phlegmatic sergeant heaved his bulk into a chair and had the message sorted out in less than ten minutes.

Thunder marveled at the speed of the sergeant and how he added words and meaning to the seemingly garbled text. Jack was equally impressed. “Hey, Sarge, I thought a frag order was supposed to be short, a fragment.”

“Yeah, it’s supposed to only be a fragment of the day’s total Operations Order. In Nam a wing would only get the part that applied to them. Over here we get the whole damn thing.” He pointed out the part of the frag order that tasked the Saudis to fly a Combat Air Patrol to protect the 45th from any MiGs that might jump them.

Again the sergeant impressed the men as he plotted the six targets on the briefing boards, double-checked the accuracy of each plot and told them to check his work while he searched his files for reconnaissance photos and materials for each target. He then queried Intel’s computer by
entering the latitude and longitude of the center point of the target area, and a high-speed printer spat out information updating the defenses in the area. The sergeant whistled as he read the printout. “SAMs and Triple A are growing like weeds. Looks like the PSI is getting serious about the war.”

Carroll’s face was a mask as he bent over the reconnaissance photos and measured the distance from the FEBA, the Forward Edge of the Battle Area, in front of Basra, to the six targets. “These look like good targets.” He let out his breath, satisfied the wing was getting worth-while frag orders. “We’re going after artillery batteries, a decent troop concentration and two supply dumps. All of this stuff has been recently moved up. I’m willing to bet the PSI is getting ready for a major push against Basra.” The 45th was being used for tactical interdiction, precisely as Cunningham had explained to the reporters.

Jack planned to attack each target with six aircraft divided into flights of two. The men worked backward, first selecting three IPs around each target area. They wanted to find a feature on the ground a pilot and wizzo could easily find and recognize, one that would point them into the target and still help them avoid the growing number of SAMs. Once the points were identified, Jack assigned two crews to each IP and let them plan their own low-level route.

The number of red rings on the map that signified known SAM sites worried Jack. After mulling it over he decided to use a “get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge” option. “I want to saturate Gomer’s command and control network and give ’em too many threats to sort out at one time,” he told the men. “We get everyone in and out fast while the Wild Weasels open the front door by keeping the air defenders busy. We’ve got to keep our time in bad-guy land to a minimum.” Together the men decided on the timing for each flight to ingress the target area and coordinated their TOTs.

They finished by selecting their escape routes and turning it over to C.J., who agonized his way through the plan, making sure his Weasels would be in position to suppress
the enemy’s ground defenses that would be brought to bear on the attacking Phantoms. “I can’t knock them all out,” he said to Jack. “But I can get their heads down while you’re in the area, especially if I can get Colonel Gomez to buy your idea. Then I’ll be able to cover you better.”

“C.J., you’ve get a screw loose somewhere. You’re going to have the Weasels all over them like stink on shit.”

C.J. accepted the compliment.

When the planning was completed they briefed Waters and Gomez on the mission. Waters listened carefully, calculating the wing’s chances of success. The timing of the raid made him think of the Ahlhorn training exercise that Jack had planned. Doubts started to nip at the edge of his mind, and the thought of losing more crews nipped even more. “Has Intel run this through their computer and come up with an expected attrition rate?” he finally asked.