The Warbirds (37 page)

Margaret, her oldest-in-service employee, asked her why she didn’t talk to her American friend Francine; surely she’d heard from Thunder. But, of course, she would have done that if she could have…Francine had gone back to the States, not able to stand the waiting and anxiety. Gillian had no place to go, no place to hide her emotions. How much longer, she wondered, could she take it…?

9 July: 0925 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1225 hours, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

The sergeant laid the folder on General Mashur Darhali’s ornate desk. The United Arab Command in Dhahran had assigned Darhali an office with furniture and staff that befitted a prince of the Saudi Arabian royal family. “The list you asked for, sir.” The sergeant stood back from the desk at attention and waited for the general’s next order.

“I need a map to understand this. Get one and an intelligence officer up here to explain this moving target.”
When the sergeant had bolted from his office, Mashur walked over to the copying machine in the far corner and ran a copy of the only target the 45th would be receiving in forty-eight hours. Prince Mashur Ibn Aziz al-Darhali calmly folded the copy and buttoned it into the breast pocket of his tailored uniform shirt, then sat and waited for the sergeant to return as he scanned the list. He wondered why his contact wanted the list so far in advance. When the sergeant returned with the intelligence officer he directed the man to plot the target on the map, playing out his charade. He briefly scanned the map before turning both list and map over to the sergeant and dismissing the two men. He noted it was one
P.M.
, the time he normally quit for the day.

That afternoon Mashur made his way through a fashionable jewelry store to a table displaying heavy gold chains and necklaces. The casual disarray on the table did not indicate the value of each chain, most of which cost more than a car. He fingered one after another until he was joined by his contact. They did not speak to each other but examined the chains. When Mashur left, a folded note was lying under a chain. The contact picked the note up with the chain and made his way to the counter, casually throwing sixty thousand
riyals
on the counter and not bothering to wait for his change. Neither Mashur nor his contact noticed the women who followed them out of the store.

10 July: 0600 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0930 hours, Teheran, iran

The men gathered around the table did not have the crisp look associated with high-ranking officers, and the chaos in the villa they were occupying bore little resemblance to a military headquarters. But their determination matched that of any professional soldier in the Middle East. “It’s a good plan,” the commander of the PSI said. “As Allah wills, tomorrow the Americans will attack the slow-moving convoy we have prepared as a lure. We must use this opportunity to destroy them. Prepare the Fedayeen for battle as the Americans will inflict casualties among our martyrs. But these for
eigners will in turn be destroyed.” Carefully the men selected locations for their SAMs and Triple A, creating a trap for any aircraft that might attack the convoy.

The air-group commander was the only pilot among them and approved of the overlapping rings of defensive fire surrounding the trap they were setting. “Your missileers and gunners must not fire after the Phantoms come off the convoy,” the pilot repeated, worried that his pilots would fall victim to their own ground defenses. He had been insistent that the ground defenses work separately from his Floggers.

The men surveyed their handiwork. Every air-defense resource they possessed was marshaled in defense of the long convoy carrying men and supplies southward to the Strait of Hormuz. The commander of the PSI spoke in a low voice. “We will lose some of our soldiers and valuable trucks when the Americans attack. I know many will penetrate our rings of fire. But they will come and we will be waiting. We will receive messages when the Americans take off and our MiGs will be able to launch at the proper moment to meet and attack them.” He did not tell the hushed men that one launch-warning would come from the Soviet trawler and another from a coastal watch-team that was moving into place disguised as fishermen. Some things were better kept secret even from the faithful.

11 July: 0400 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 0700 hours. Ras Assanya, Saudi Arabia

Because the 45th had three air crews for every two Phantoms, Waters had established a rotation order for assigning crews to fly combat sorties. Jack’s and Thunder’s name had not come up for the wing’s fourth mission against the convoy and so they found themselves sitting on the sidelines. Jack had suggested they try using corridor tactics, his only input to the mission. He and Thunder occupied their time by working on Jack’s latest idea for a small group of aircrews to roam at night and prey on selected targets. He was thinking of calling it “Wolf Flight.”

When the crews had moved to the aircraft Jack walked into the makeshift command post at the rear of the COIC
and found an empty seat next to the acting DO, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Farrell. His impatience grew as the crews checked in on status, ready to start engines and taxi. He admired Waters’ cool and tried to imitate his relaxed attitude. He glanced at the big situation plot map, where two airmen were marking the location of friendly and hostile aircraft along with the day’s targets. His worry even slackened a notch when one airman plotted an orbit over the Gulf and marked it “CAP-UAC.”

“It’s nice to know our Arab allies are flying a Combat Air Patrol today,” Jack said.

“They’re up,” Waters said. “The UAC tells me we have a dedicated CAP for this mission. I’ll believe it, though, when it happens. The crews have been briefed to jettison their loads and abort the mission if they see or hear MiGs in the area and no friendly CAP is around. It’s one hell of a target, Jack. A major convoy strung out for over twenty miles along a narrow road and headed for the Strait of Hormuz.” Jack nodded and wished he was going.

The Long Track radars that fed early-warning information to the SA-6’s fire control first detected the inbound Phantoms. The missile operators slewed the target-tracking antennas of the Straight Flush fire-control radar toward the attackers and raised the triple-mounted missiles into a launch position. The first Wild Weasel detected the H-band frequency of the tracking radar and sent a Shrike down its beam, destroying the tracking radar and control van. Neighboring sites immediately placed their radars on standby and went to a visual launch mode. The string of Phantoms behind the lead Weasel dropped to two hundred feet above the ground, below the minimum altitude of an SA-6. The Weasel and his wingman were blasting open a corridor onto the convoy.

Two soldiers on the ground fired shoulder-held SA-7 Strelas at the F-4s as they flew past. But the fast-moving F-4s were doing jinks back and forth and hoped the 1.5-Mach missiles could not match their turns and catch them before running out of fuel.

Radio communications warned close-in defenders the attack was underway and three batteries of ZSU-23-2 Triple A came active. The gunners of the rapid firing, two-
barrel twenty-three-millimeter guns spewed the sky the moment they saw the aircraft, not waiting to establish a tracking solution. Before a Weasel’s wingman could pepper the area with CBU, driving the open-gun pit crews to cover, one ZSU laced a Phantom with a short burst. The big fighter cartwheeled into the ground and the next bird in the stream of attackers had to fly through its fireball. The wingman rolled in and pickled two canisters of CBU onto the ZSU-23-2, creating seventeen Shiite martyrs.

Twelve self-propelled ZSU-23-4s manuevered into position with the convoy. The four-barreled guns, mounted on a tank chassis, had kept pace with the trucks, providing them with running protection. The tracking radar on the ZSU’s fed tracking data to SA-9 SAMs, a small missile with an infrared seeker-head similar to the SA-7 Strelas. But the SA-9 was mounted on a scout vehicle, had a larger motor and warhead and was a far more lethal weapon…

The 45th started to work the convoy, hitting the lead truck first, bringing it to a grinding halt. The SA-6s behind them kept the Phantoms from popping too high for a bombing run, and the twenty-foot missiles streaked overhead whenever the operators thought they could launch. The second flight’s lead Phantom started his pop and was raked by a ZSU-23-4. But only two bullets struck the left wing. The pilot jettisoned his load on the way up and ballooned as he checked for battle damage. His wizzo detected a new threat on his RHAW gear, an SA-8. He called for the pilot to turn twenty-degrees off the threat so as to visually acquire the missile. The pilot shouted “Tallyho” as he turned into the missile and pulled up, generating an overshoot when the ten-foot-long SA-8 could not turn with him—the missile’s command guidance tried to make the turn, but the missile broached sideways and tumbled out of control.

The pilot searched for the second missile he knew was coming—SAMs were always launched in pairs or triplets—and found it. Again he turned into the missile, causing it to overshoot as he slammed the Phantom back down onto the deck. But he had bled off his airspeed to 300 knots in avoiding the two missiles. The wizzo jabbed at the chaff-and-flare button, shooting flares and small canisters of chaff from the dispensers on the wing pylons, leaving a
trail behind the plane in an effort to deceive the missiles. But a ZSU-23-4 gunner now had the relatively slow-moving Phantom visually and mashed his fire-control trigger, sending over five hundred rounds at the F-4 just as an SA-6 exploded three feet under the fighter’s belly. The one-hundred-seventy-five-pound warhead broke the Phantom in two and the warbird vanished in a burst of smoke and flames. The second SA-6 that had been launched at the Phantom could not find a target and went ballistic.

“Bandits two o’clock high on me!”

“Abort!”

“Jettison!”

These calls wracked the radio frequencies as the first MiGs were sighted rolling in onto the lead F-4 coming off the head of the convoy. A Phantom pilot turned hard into an oncoming Flogger and selected guns while his wingman tried to maneuver into a sixty-degree cone behind his lead to provide him protection. The wingman never saw the Flogger that popped up at his own six o’clock and launched an Aphid air-to-air missile at its minimum range of sixteen hundred feet. The missile leaped off its pylon under the glove of the variable swept-wing and was still accelerating when its infrared heat-seeking head found the Phantom’s right tailpipe, exploding, destroying the aft section. A classic air-to-air kill: the victim never saw his killer.

Bull Morgan was leading the last flight of four and twisted in his seat, looking for the bandits and his CAP. When he couldn’t find the promised friendly CAP, he ordered his flight to jettison their loads hot, hoping for luck to destroy a chance target. They cross-turned one hundred-eighty-degrees and headed for the Gulf. As they did, Bull ordered his flight into a “fluid four”…The second lead pilot moved into a line-abreast position roughly six thousand feet away from Bull; each wingman flew two thousand feet away from his lead on the extreme outside of the formation, slightly back, porpoising to a high-and-low position.

“Fox Three.” Bull ordered his flight to select the only air-to-air weapon they were carrying. His flight was at least in a good defensive formation for maintaining a vi
sual lookout for bandits as they ran for feet-wet. And Bull kept cursing the missing CAP under his breath as he searched the sky. He finally found the sons of bitches orbiting over the Gulf, well clear of any threat.

The first Mayday call reaching the Command Post jerked Waters, Farrell and Jack to their feet and out the door, piling into the wing commander’s pickup. Jack rolled into the truck’s bed as Waters gunned the engine and sped for the approach end of the runway. They skidded to a halt beside a crash truck, the UHF radios inside the trucks tuned to the control tower’s frequency. An ambulance with Doc Landis soon joined the three waiting men, worry written on the doctor’s face. Slowly, they counted the returning Phantoms.

Bull’s flight came down final, the first to land. “We launched thirty-six,” Waters said, and each man started an internal count. The colonel visibly flinched when the third recovering flight checked in with three. The stranglehold of tension eased some when the straggler appeared, declaring a Mayday. They scanned the sky as eight more birds entered the pattern. “That’s twenty,” Waters counted. The lone ship called the tower, declaring he was going to eject. “Nothing wrong with a nylon approach and landing,” Waters said. They watched the aircraft turn inland before pointing out to sea, crossing the runway at four thousand feet.

Jack offered Waters binoculars he had found in the pickup, but the wing commander only shook his head. The lieutenant then focused them on the Phantom, examining it for battle damage. Half of the vertical stabilizer had been shot away and both tail pipes had major damage. Heavy smoke was streaming from the right engine. Immediately after crossing the runway both canopies flew off, and in quick succession the back and then the front seat rocketed above the dying F-4. The Phantom continued its glide out to sea, curling to the left while chutes streamed behind the men, snapping open as the seats fell away. The parachutes drifted back to the runway while crash crews ran toward them and the plane crashed into
the Gulf. “The Martin-Baker wins again,” Waters said, referring to the ejection seat and grateful for the results.

A flight of three checked in with the tower, but this time there was no straggler and any sense of relief Waters felt was quickly swept away. “Twelve more to go, twenty-three accounted for,” Waters intoned. Two more flights of four called the tower as the men heard a calm voice on the UHF declare a Mayday—it was Sooner from the 379th. Jack held out the binoculars for Waters and this time he took them, scanning the sky. He found the Phantom’s characteristic smoke trails, marking the path of two returning aircraft. Waters reached into the truck and grabbed the radio’s mike. “Tower, this is Zero-One.” The control tower acknowledged, recognizing the standard call sign of a wing commander. “Are those two the last inbounds?”