Liberty's Last Stand (46 page)

That first night in September, F-16 Falcons from Lackland landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. An hour after midnight, the F-16s were gone again, fanning out to defend the B-52 Stratofortresses, which were beginning their start rituals. They were loaded with JDAMs, two-thousand-pound dumb bombs with a GPS seeker and steering that would guide them to their targets.

JR Hays knew the GPS system was controlled by the United States government, which had the capacity to induce errors into the system, or shut it down altogether, but such an action would affect air navigation all over the earth, no doubt causing a few airliners to crash, and he doubted that the Soetoro administration was ready for the inevitable international political backlash that would cause. Not yet, anyway.

The B-52s came to life—three of them, because another crew volunteered—and slowly taxied to the takeoff end of the duty runway. The wind was still out of the northwest, so the runway was 33.

Elvin Gentry was in the lead bomber. He had flown in at dusk and had a hurried conference with JR and Nate Danaher, then went to the crew briefing.

No doubt Soetoro loyalists all over the area would have liked to alert Washington when the fighters arrived and took off, and burn up the lines when the B-52s serenaded the city on their climb-outs, but the local power company had obeyed Soetoro's orders and the electricity was off in the greater Shreveport area.

B-52s were old airplanes. The first one flew in 1952. Between 1952 and 1962, when the production line was closed, the air force bought 744 of them at a cost of a couple of million dollars each. Informally and affectionately known by their crews as BUFFs, which stood for Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, they carried up to seventy thousand pounds of bombs at high subsonic speeds and were relatively cheap to operate. The design intended to replace them, the B-70 Valkyrie, was too expensive. The variable-geometry B-1 Lancer and the stealth B-2 Spirit, both of which actually made it into service, were also too expensive to acquire in large numbers, and had high operating costs. Despite the air force's institutional predilection for faster, sexier, and newer, economics reared its ugly head; the air force continually upgraded the B-52s and planned to keep them in service until 2045, over ninety years after the first one had flown. The only version still flying was the B-52H. The air force had invested an estimated $100 million into each one, so far, mere peanuts compared with the cost of newer warplanes. Twenty B-2 stealth bombers had cost Uncle Sam $2 billion
each
.

The B-52 crews planned on delivering two JDAMs on a support for each targeted bridge. The hope was the two bombs would drop one span in the water, or at least do enough damage that the bridges would no longer support sixty-three-ton M1A2 Abrams tanks.

And if tomorrow some bridges were still standing, Gentry planned on launching F-16s carrying two one-thousand-pound JDAMs each. He was willing to trade planes for the bridges.

Gentry would have loved to have an airborne early-warning airplane in the sky tonight, but he didn't have one. His F-16s would have to make do by listening to the freqs GCI sites used to control the U.S. fighters. Gentry worried about F-22s, stealth fighters, which could detect and shoot down fighters and bombers of ranges as far as a hundred nautical miles. What he didn't know was that the F-22 wing had sent all the pilots who were willing to fight for Barry Soetoro, all four, to Barksdale. So there were not going to be F-22s in the air tonight. Had he known, he would have been much less apprehensive than he was, and he might even have stayed on the ground tonight. As it was, he thought the risks were so high that he was unwilling to send his aircrews into combat unless he shared the risks with them.

JR Hays, no man to evade risks himself, reluctantly agreed. He didn't want to lose Elvin Gentry, but he had to trust Gentry's judgment and leadership abilities or get someone else. Barry Soetoro would have never understood.

Gentry had never before ridden in a Stratofortress, so the pilot's exercise of the Crosswind Crab Control while they taxied felt spooky. The wheels continued to track the centerline of the taxiway, but the airplane turned to point up twenty degrees to the left, then swung back to point twenty degrees to right.

On the runway, the wind from the right demanded a crab in that direction, so the centerline of the runway was visible out the left side of the pilot's windshield. The BUFF accelerated with all eight engines pulling, they reached decision speed right on time for the load they were carrying, and began rotating five to ten knots before liftoff speed. It wasn't much of a rotation, a bit over five degrees. Then the giant green bomber parted company with the earth.

On climb out the pilot turned to the general, just to see how he was doing. His face was lit by the glow of the red instrument lights. Gentry was struck by his youth. Captain Rogers, flying a bomber from the 1950s, was all of twenty-seven years old. Gentry felt like a fossil.

JDAMs were units that screwed into freefall bombs. They were comprised of a GPS receiver, a small computer, and canards that steered the bomb to its target, which was a preprogrammed bulls-eye defined by GPS coordinates. Accuracy was only as good as the GPS coordinates programmed in, so satellite maps of the earth had to be consulted.

The delivery crew, in this case in a B-52, had to use the onboard weapons system to drop the bomb into an invisible cone with its tip resting on the target and the large open end up in the sky. If the bomb were placed within the cone, it could steer itself to a bulls-eye. If it were released outside the cone, the canards would not be able to get the bomb back into the cone, so it would miss. This nebulous cone was defined by the capability of the canards that steered the bomb, by the prevailing wind, and by the angular velocity imparted to the weapon by the airplane that released it.

Guided weapons were the future of aerial warfare, Elvin Gentry believed. The days of dropping huge numbers of dumb bombs in the hope that one or two would hit the target you wanted destroyed were history.

GPS-guided bombs were a technological leap into the future from laser-guided bombs, which steered themselves to a dot of laser light projecting upon the target, projected by the bombing aircraft or a spotter aircraft, occasionally a person on the ground. Unlike laser-guided systems that were useless in bad weather, GPS-guided bombs hit their bulls-eyes all the time, whether they were falling through clear air, clouds, rain, snow, blowing dust, or smoke—as long as you had the correct coordinates for your target: type in a wrong digit somewhere and you missed.

The cockpit of the B-52 was cramped, almost like a two-seat tactical jet. Gentry sat in the jump seat aft of the pilots, and he didn't have an ejection seat. After everyone else ejected, he was supposed to go to the lower level, or deck, and jump through the hole in the fuselage left by the recently departed navigator or bombardier. It sounded iffy, but if worse came to worst. . . .

The F-16s were out there somewhere ahead on a fighter sweep, looking for bad guys, protecting the bombers from beyond the range of fighter missiles. That was the theory, which was only as good as the fighter pilots. Elvin Gentry consoled himself with the thought that we all have to die sometime. At least, he reflected, he wasn't in a B-17 on the way to Berlin, harassed every mile by flak and German fighter pilots who knew their business. Those B-17 guys had balls, he thought. This little jaunt tonight was a piece of cake.

He keyed the intercom and told the crew, “A piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” the copilot said. “Sir.”

In minutes, as they were still climbing for altitude, the B-52s split up, each headed for its initial fix, to begin a series of bomb runs on bridges. The bombardiers had been plotting their courses and run-ins to their targets, and were now checking their ordnance panels.

Gentry heard the cryptic transmissions on the intercom of his BUFF, heard the pilot and copilot running through checklists, and heard the countdown begin to the first bomb release, on the highway bridge on I-20 at Vicksburg. And on the adjacent railroad bridge. The tops of the cones overlapped, so the BUFF would drop four one-ton weapons on this run. He saw the light on the instrument panel as the bomb bay doors came open, he heard the countdown, then the bombs released and he felt the airplane give a jump upward as it became four tons lighter in a fraction of a second. Felt the plane bank into a turn. The next targets were the bridges at Natchez.

So far, so good, Gentry thought. Then he realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled and forced himself to breathe deeply.

Walter Ohnigian was a career F-16 pilot. Flying fighters was all he had ever wanted to do since he watched the Thunderbirds perform at an air show when he was twelve. He had attended the Air Force Academy, worked like a slave to get into flight school, and once in gave it everything he had to get fighters. He had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, had graduated from two courses at USAF Weapons School, and had served a tour as an instructor on F-16s. Along the way he found time to serve a tour in a Navy F/A-18 squadron, which meant a nine-month cruise aboard an aircraft carrier. He had planned to stay in the air force until they forced him to retire.

The Texas Declaration of Independence changed his mind. Now he was a Texas fighter pilot. His decision had been easy; born and raised in Brady, Texas, he loathed Barry Soetoro and all he stood for.

Susie Ohnigian, from Colorado Springs, was a tougher sell. She had met Walt when he was a cadet and knew the blood, sweat, and tears he had put in to succeed at his chosen profession. Basically nonpolitical, Susie loved her husband. She knew military aviation has its risks, even in peacetime, and she consoled herself with the indisputable truth that God was in charge of our lives, and He would take Walt when it suited His purpose. He hadn't yet, and she prayed that He wouldn't until they were both old and full of years. She took her marriage vows before the altar of God, and thought it her duty to stand by her husband for as long as they both lived, so with some misgivings, she concurred with his choice.

Tonight he was over southeastern Mississippi, listening to the published approach and departure frequencies for Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. Ohnigian thought that by the time the air force figured out that bombers were attacking the Mississippi bridges, it would be too late to launch and catch the bombers, which would be several hundred miles west. On the other hand, if Eglin had fighters on a combat air patrol, they could intercept the BUFFs. Or intercept the Texas F-16s.

So he listened on all the frequencies they might use, and he used the radar in his fighter to sweep the skies for airplanes. Targets. Bad guys. Fighters that might attack the friends in the BUFFs. Fortunately civilian traffic was prohibited by the Soetoro regime. Any targets Ohnigian and Free saw tonight on their radars were enemy airplanes. Or outlaw airplanes whose pilots had decided to roll the dice and take their chances.

The F-16s flown by Walter Ohnigian and his wingman Drew Free had two AMRAAMS (advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles) and two Sidewinders each, an internal M-61A Vulcan 20-mm cannon, and a two-thousand-pound external fuel tank. No doubt if there were Eglin F-16 fighters aloft, they were similarly armed.

The AIM-120C AMRAAM was seven inches in diameter and twelve feet long, flew at Mach four, had an active radar homing seeker, carried a forty-pound high-explosive warhead, and had a maximum range of fifty-seven miles. The AIM-9 Sidewinder was a short-range (up to twenty-two miles) missile with infrared homing; in other words, a heat seeker. It was five inches in diameter and nine feet long and carried a twenty-pound warhead. The latest versions could turn over ninety degrees to chase their targets at speeds up to 2.7 Mach, and could even lock on a target up to ninety degrees off the airplane's boresight. Sidewinder was the perfect dogfight weapon: when it locked on your quarry's tailpipe signature, the hunter squeezed it off and the Sidewinder did the rest. Sidewinder even had a limited head-on capability.

Tonight Walter Ohnigian hoped and prayed that there were no F-22 Raptors aloft. If there were, he would never see them on radar. His first indications of an F-22 would be a Raptor radar locked on him, so he kept his radar warning indicator in his instrument scan. Nothing so far.