Afterburners (10 page)

    Signals could emanate from the ground or air. They could be voice or data, encrypted or clear. We relied on our banks of equipment, the system, our ears, and sometimes our guts to help us make sense of it all. It was a difficult task even under the best of circumstances, made even more difficult by the number of variables. The airwaves were cluttered with friendly and hostile comms signals, not to mention comms from outside sources—those considered neither hostile nor neutral.

    Both the MCC and MCS worked on updating the jam list, a list of targeted signals we operators had identified. Each signal was given a priority for jamming based on actual or expected activity for that particular signal. Again, it came down to the operators’ telling the MCC and MCS what we’d identified.

    Suddenly I heard Cosmo’s voice hissing into my ears. He was the spotter on this mission. “Pilot, Spotter, traffic low moving twelve to six.”

    This was the first wave of the strike package heading in. They were five minutes early. To support them, we had to jam before our window came. I guessed they were eager to get in and see if they could spot any of those Scuds.

    Cosmo would call in three more times and I’d only hear his voice among a discord of voices. I had too many other things to listen to at the time to worry about the status of the packages passing by. The only word I listened for was bandits.

    It was a practiced skill to be able to listen to and follow two or three conversations at once, but between the three channels of outside ship chatter, ship’s Interphone, two channels of Private, Select, and the live signals I was active on, I was listening to nine. I liked to know what was going on. More important, sitting Six, I had to be able to back up the MCS, who was to my right, on radios if necessary.

    “Crew, MCC,” hissed Captain Willie’s voice into my headset from Private. “We’re coming out of jam to take a good look around us for one minute. Tell me if you got anything that’s hot and I’ll throw her back into jam.”

    I punched out Interphone and switched off Select, which put me down to seven channels, as I called out a target to the MCC. The target wasn’t an immediate threat so the MCC didn’t put the system back into jam.

    Big John was headed up toward One when Two called out, “MCC, Two, target, immediate threat.” My heart seemed to skip a beat as I keyed into Private A. “Sir, I have an Iraqi tower controller directing fighters to take off.”

    “Two, pass me the signal, give the specifics to Seven,” responded the MCC.

    “MCC, Two, you should have the signal and, sir, he’s about to change frequencies.”

    “Two, I have the new signal. Crew, we’re back in jam. Two, MCC, pass the fighter ID to Seven.”

    I switched the settings on my spectrum analyzer to the end of the spectrum I expected the fighter to switch to and watched for a new signal spike to appear. “MCC, Six, I got him up on air,” I called out. “He just switched freqs.”

    All of a sudden, I heard it, the inevitable call I had been waiting to hear, “Bandits five o’clock low. They are a threat,” warned Gypsy, “suggest evasive maneuvers. They’re climbing fast!”

    The AC cut the orbit short and turned the Lady hard. My heart jumped up into my throat as the blood rushed to my head. My hands and arms went heavy as I tried to type onto the keyboard in front of me and then was thrown into the chair as we began to climb. The Lady was by no stretch of the imagination as maneuverable as a fighter, but the pilot was taking her through all the evasive maneuvers she could manage. In this situation, it was prudent to remain a haphazardly moving target so the fighters couldn’t get a missile lock if they were within range.

    My heart was beating nonstop; and my fingers, glued to my keyboard, were trembling. It seemed as if the whole of the Gray Lady from front to aft was covered in silence. At Gypsy’s direction, a two-ship of Eagles, our MiG Sweep, peeled off for intercept, afterburners aglow. The chase was on. The Bandits were coming in strong, and they were hungry.

    Paladin Leader’s remaining two-ship edged forward while Gypsy shifted as far back as possible. Phantom was far enough away today that he didn’t much care. They had plenty in their own area to be concerned about.

    Our packages weren’t even outbound yet, and we still had more than an hour on orbit—Captain Willie was confirming this to the pilot. “Roger, Pilot, no one has called an abort yet. We’ll do our best to get those fighters off our tail and to stay in jam. I don’t know what good it’ll do with us bouncing around like this. I really need you to hold her level for about a minute.”

    The pilot leveled the Lady off. “MCC, Pilot, the clock’s ticking.”

    “Seven, MCC, are you ready? Six, MCC, are you ready? On my mark, you have twenty seconds. Mark!”

    “MCC, Seven, I have their data comms, locking.”

    “MCC, Six, I have their voice comms, locking.”

    “MCC, Seven, sending the details. Ready for jam when you are.”

    “MCC, Six, sending the details for jam. Ready when you are.”

    Everything afterward was intense static as Captain Willie put the system back in jam. Allen continued to work his magic with the fighter’s data signals, tracking and locking new signals. I continued to work on the voice signals, monitoring for the inevitable frequency hopping, tracking and locking as I went.

    Elsewhere in the mission crew area, the other crewers were doing the same. Jammed targets switched to clear frequencies, so we had to constantly keep up with them. I searched as fast as I could. I wanted those enemy fighters to remain confused and without communications.

    As we searched, no few of us were praying. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Big John. He was visibly shaken. His face was pale; there was a look of terror in his eyes. Both he and Cosmo were hugging their chutes. Me, I was more worried about my .38—had I loaded it in all the excitement or not?—and freezing to death if we dropped down into the white caps I knew were below us.

    Seconds ticked by with agonizing slowness as if time itself were nearly standing still. I was conscious of my own breathing and everything around me. I took in a breath. Let it out. I felt my fingers tap the keyboard. My eyes moved between the CRT in front of me and the banks of equipment to the left and right.

    Captain Willie called out, a note of concern playing in his deep voice, “Pilot, MCC, first wave is egressing. Are we going to stay on orbit to support the second when they go in or not?”

    “MCC, Pilot, what’s their ETA to ingress?”

    “Fifteen mike.”

    “Roger that, we’ll drop back to the edge of box.”

    “Pilot, MCC, roger that.”

    “Did he follow?” Bobby called out, accidentally switched onto Interphone and not Select.

    “We’ll sure find out,” I answered, keying Select to remind him what channel he was on.

    “Thanks,” he whispered, switching onto Select.

    I said, “I think it’s safe to say they’re singing solo into their mikes if nothing else.”

    As the Lady turned, I glanced over my shoulder at Big John. He was sitting at his position with this blank, wide-eyed expression. His wide eyes made him look like a deer that’d just been caught in the beam of a flashlight. Cosmo, the newlywed, was in the back tossing up whatever he’d eaten in the hours since or before the flight. I knew this because Thomas pointed it out on Private B.

    It took a few minutes after we leveled off for my thoughts to catch up with my racing heart, for the world to come back to normal. I flashed my eyes at PBJ and dialed into his station on Select. “MCS, Six, Select. Did they get him?”

    “Gypsy’s not saying anything; guess we’ll find out in debrief.”

    What PBJ meant by “Gypsy wasn’t saying anything,” wasn’t that Gypsy wasn’t squawking, but that they were too busy to reply. She was screaming so loud I had punched off her station. Besides, on another channel I was trying to find out what Paladin Leader had to say.

    I concentrated on finding signals. It seemed the second wave was over target forever. The adrenaline rush just wasn’t lasting as long as it had in previous days, but there was no denying that the tension threshold was peaked. We still didn’t know what had happened to the Bandits. We only knew they weren’t an immediate threat to us at the moment.

    My headset went through a high-low tone sequence, and I knew someone had dialed up Select and connected in with me. “I hope they got him,” Allen said.

    After a pause, I replied, “I bet they splashed that bandit. They’ll owe us a MiG under those flags they’re promising.” I was referring to the painted on flags that symbolized the number of combat missions a particular plane had flown. The fighter symbolized an assist in a shoot-down.

    I sighed and relaxed a bit in my chair as Captain Willie’s voice tweaking into my headset told me it was almost over. “Crew, MCC, the second wave has successfully egressed. Excellent job today, way to stay on it!” He paused, and then switched to Interphone. “Pilot, MCC, stations. We’re clear off orbit when you’re ready, sir. Hell of a fly job.”

    “Roger. Crew, we’re on our way home!”

    There was silence again while we listened to the radios. Gas Station was headed home and so was Gypsy. Phantom was turning south.

    “Who was that on Interphone earlier?” asked the navigator.

    “Nav One, that was me,” admitted Bobby.

    “I guess bravos are on you. You know the rules: screw up on radio, you buy the bravos.” It was another crew dog rule: don’t screw up on radio, or you buy the beer, a case was the usual payment. “I only say this because tomorrow we’re going to have time to catch some wind.”

    “Nav, One, I got the first case.”

    “Roger that, One.”

    A number of heads were nodding. Most of us could already taste that first icy cold beer. We were sure looking forward to some down time and an hour more than eight was all we needed to be able to drink a few beers.

    The Nav’s mike had just tweaked off Interphone when the wings began to rock back and forth. What the hell was going on? I twisted my seat around to face front and checked shoulder straps to make sure they were in the unlocked position, remembering then that I had pushed in Gypsy’s squawk. I pulled it out just in time to hear Captain Smily’s response, “Roger that, splash one confirmed.”

    Paladin-3 had confirmed a hit and a kill. We’d find out in tomorrow’s tallies for sure. At the moment we were all elated, and none of us recalled how terrified we had been just a few short minutes ago.

    I jumped out of the seat with the others and slapped out a round of high fives.

    Time passed. We were thirty miles out from base. With the Iraqi border and the enemy behind us, we could all afford to relax in our seats.

    The only channel I had pulled was ship’s Interphone so I could hear the front-end chatter as we approached base. The pilot and the copilot were going back and forth about the air traffic and I listened in, “Co, we’re bottlenecking here. I don’t think we’ll beat the KCs in today. Let me see if I can get clearance around them, or else we’ll be stuck on the pad for an extra thirty. God knows it’s been one hell of a long day already.”

    The copilot called Tower, and soon afterward I heard Tower’s reply for the go-ahead. Accordingly, the pilot increased the throttle. I closed my tired eyes and rubbed them, then groped for my helmet bag and the bottled water within. I’d already finished one liter bottle, so I had to uncap a new one. Just as I popped the cap, a loud squeal came into my headset and then the plane banked hard to the left. Water went everywhere.

    “What the hell was that?” I heard the pilot say on Interphone, “Did you see that explosion, Co?”

    “I did. Holy shit,” responded the Nav. “What was it?”

    “I don’t know; but whatever it was, it was aimed at us or that KC. Get the pilot on radio. I’ll try Tower.”

    “It looked like a missile, but how the hell? We’re within visual of Tower.”

    “Pilot, Co, Tower’s redirecting us; they want us to circle wide and come in from the other side.”

    “Did you ask them what the hell’s going on?”

    “No, I didn’t. Didn’t have time to,” responded the copilot.

    Tower began re-directing all inbound traffic.

    “As near as I can tell from all this chatter,” began Captain Willie on Ship’s Interphone, “that was a Patriot or at least that’s what Gas Station said after the explosion.”

    Suddenly a look of extreme shock returned to our eyes. We all realized just how close we had come to death’s door once again. Two close calls in one day were more than enough to bring us back into the dizzying spiral of confusion and frenzy. I swallowed my heart back down my throat along with a big gulp of water that I nearly choked on.

    During debrief we found out that it had indeed been a Patriot missile. It had been accidentally triggered by an erroneous IFF transponder. We were just glad the missile had such an elaborate fail-safe system that it hadn’t plucked us from the sky.

The story continues with

Imminent Threat: Air War #2.

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AAA

Anti-Aircraft Artillery. Most Iraqi AAA ranged from short range 23mm to long range 130mm artillery. Small caliber weapons fire vast amounts of rounds and rely largely on this high number of shells to destroy the target. Large caliber weapons fire large shells, which contain an explosive charge (detonated at altitude) to scatter a great number of fragments. Most AAA systems rely on command and control communications and radar to help target enemy aircraft and are largely mobile.

AAM

Air-to-Air Missile. Most fighters are equipped with AAMs, which are used to destroy enemy aircraft.