Warriors by Barrett Tillman (46 page)

       Bennett sat down and pulled a mint from the pack in his shirt pocket. In a few minutes he would return to his small room and complete packing his bags. He would hop a ride with one of the

       Jordanians in an F-5F in the morning and be in Riyadh in time to book an airline seat to Rome the following day. A stop at Saudi Air Force headquarters to check out, then he would be on his way home.

       Home. Not long ago he had planned on making a new home with Claudia. That dream had ended violently. Meanwhile, there still could be some good years ahead with Paul and his family. Angelina was over three now, and she had been without her granddaddy for too long. John Bennett, warrior, decided to spoil her as no grand-daughter had ever been spoiled.

       He stood up to go, then an arcing line of white light caught his attention out to the northwest. At first he thought it might be a shooting star, but it was rising, not falling.

Balhama Air Base

      
The six sorties had departed on staggered schedules to reach their targets simultaneously. First off, at 1915, had been Major David Ran with his two F-15 escorts. The pilots assigned to each target had briefed together and knew the procedures so each mission could be flown under minimal communications. Ran's two Eagles checked in with terse calls on the discrete frequency and set up in trail, one on either quarter at staggered altitudes. Their radar search pattern was planned for irregular intervals, alternating quadrants.

       Ran's initial leg took him northeast to Bar Yehuda on the western shore of the Dead Sea, allowing good radar identification of the hook on the opposite shore. Then it was straight southeast nearly 400 nautical miles, radar off but ECM activated.

       Another Kfir and four reconnaissance Phantoms, which possessed a strike capability, also launched that evening. The night was clear, not requiring infrared goggles for the pilots. Since the Israelis were intimately familiar with the geography surrounding their borders, navigation was not difficult.

       Ran penetrated Saudi airspace at low level. Rarely topping 500 feet, he streaked along the desert at 400 knots, navigating mostly by dead reckoning. As he approached his target he would accelerate more. The trick was a fast run--one pass in and out.

       On the centerline was a special-purpose bomb cradle weighing 70 pounds. The silver-and-orange weapon it carried weighed 760 pounds, measuring nearly twelve feet long and thirteen inches in diameter. Ran, always a methodical pilot, rechecked his precombat list. There had been no opposition thus far, and he had heard nothing from his two F-15s. So far, so good.

       Ran's gloved hand engaged the master armament switch, then checked the settings marked FUSING and YIELD. The indicators showed IMPACT and 400, respectively. The latter was adjustable from 100 to 500. The automatic release sequence was timed so the intervalometer would induce weapon separation in a few seconds after pitch-up from the 3,000-foot desert floor.

       When his elapsed time showed five minutes remaining to target, Ran pushed his throttle to the stop, selecting afterburner. In minutes he was making nearly Mach 1. Despite the speed and altitude, he felt calm and controlled in the dim red light of his cockpit. He had practiced for this mission many times. But one aspect was different. When the operations order came through listing the two Kfir targets, Ran had exercised his rank. He wanted this sortie for himself, and relegated the adjacent assignment to the captain selected for the mission.

       A crisp call came through Ran's headset. "Jehovah Four, Eagle Seven. All clear. Will meet you as briefed. Out." Ran keyed his mike twice in acknowledgment. The F-15s would withdraw along an alternate route to avoid retracing the ingress. If all worked as planned, the three jets would rendezvous along a course back toward the Red Sea. David Ran was now on his own.

              ..**..       ..**..       ..**

       JOHN BENNETT STOOD IMMOBILE ATOP HIS COMMAND post. Another missile lifted off, then another. Three launches in a few seconds. There had been no advance warning. He wondered if it was a jittery antiaircraft unit. He decided to stay and watch a little longer. Airbase defense was the realm of the Saudi lieutenant colonel.

       TO HIS RIGHT, AT ABOUT TWO O'CLOCK, DAVID RAN was startled by the ignition of a rocket booster some twenty miles away. He watched the tail of the SAM as it arced high into the dark sky, then began to turn and come down toward him. He glanced at his electronics panel and noted his RHAWand ECM gear were activated. Then he saw two more missiles rise from the dark and follow the trajectory of the first.

       The French-designed countermeasures package in the Kfir worked on two independent but related strategies. It attempted to deceive the SAMs' radar guidance, while affecting the fusing of the missile warhead by electronically picturing the target aircraft as closer than it actually was. The black box picked up the radar tracking signals and in milliseconds fed them back to the Saudi fire-control radar. The Israeli watched the missile arcing down and, when the red light pulsed on his warning panel, he started a hard right climbing turn into the missile. He wrapped up the delta-winged bomber in a high-G barrel roll to the right. Completing the roll over the top, he saw the SAM explode harmlessly beyond a range of 350 feet.

       Though his night vision was degraded by the blast, Ran resumed his high-speed dash toward the target. The second missile passed well behind him, and he evaded the third with a less violent maneuver.

       Two miles out, David Ran yanked back on his control stick and arced the Kfir into a zoom climb. Pulling into the pure vertical, he held that attitude momentarily. He felt the lurch of weapon separation, then continued the arcing pull-up until he was inverted.

       Topping out of his four-mile-high Immelmann, Ran pulled the nose down through the horizon before rolling right-side up and diving away to the north.

       The Israeli's aiming point was midway between Ha'il's two runways, 800 yards apart. The Kfir pilot knew from long practice that he had made a good release, and he was confident the weapon would land within 200 yards of either runway.

       BENNETT SENSED MORE THAN SAW THE JET DESCRIBE its startling pull-up and arc over the top. He picked up the tiny fast-moving mote of light which was the American-built ]79 engine in afterburner.

       Involuntarily, he shivered and wrapped his arms about himself.

       The dream came rushing back-the elevated platform, the jet exhaust in the night sky, the bomb which must now be on its way. He knew to a mortal certainty that the fast jet now diving away to the northwest was a delta wing.

      
Five minutes,
Bennett said to himself.
If it's ground burst it'll be a bit more.

      
He sat down and waited.

       The bomb, released at 530 miles per hour, immediately deployed its Kevlar drogue chute and two seconds later was drifting downward at 35 miles per hour. From release it would take almost six minutes to reach the ground. By that time the Kfir's headlong plunge would take David Ran 60 miles away.

       The Israeli weapon was similar to the American B61 Mod 5, with a permissive action link safety system. All models of this type are one-point safe, meaning that in an accidental detonation in its high-explosive components, the probability of a yield greater than four pounds of TNT is not over one in one million.

       Though the bomb weighed over 700 pounds, it contained less HE than an eight-inch artillery shell. Its nose shrouded a package of electronic safety, arming and fusing devices. In the middle of the casing stood two geometric solids--a sphere and a cylinder---composed of the lightest and heaviest elements in the universe. Their architecture resembled a fifty-pound globe on an eighty-pound pedestal, the cylinder resting in a plastic foam structure and the sphere covered with wires.

       BENNETT SAT WITH HIS ARMS FOLDED ABOUT HIS KNEES. He had time to think of the course of his life, and he was glad of that. One of his friends, a Marine lieutenant colonel, had said that dying should be neither too fast nor too slow. Now Bennett knew what the officer meant. One wanted time to ponder it--but not too much time.

      
How did I get here?
Bennett mused.
What sequence of events set
me
on the path that led to the middle of the Arabian desert this night?
He hugged his knees, drawn up under his chin, and then he remembered.

       He had been sitting in this same posture that wonderful day at Jacksonville Naval Air Station the first time he saw a Navy airplane up close. His uncle, recently returned from combat, had taken the ten-year-old enthusiast out to the flight line to watch pilots practice carrier landings. The hour that young John Bennett sat alongside the runway, legs drawn up to his chest, had passed like seconds.

      
Uncle Phil,
Bennett thought.
It began with him.
A tall, glamorous fighter ace wearing wings of gold who indulged a nephew's passion. The boy had only seen him fly two or three times, but the image lingered: one of the original pilots of the team known as the Blue Angels, looping and rolling in gloss-blue Hellcats the next year. Then Korea, and Uncle Phil didn't return.

       But the mold had been formed. John Bennett followed his idol into naval aviation and seldom had cause to regret the choice. It had been a wonderful career, with all but two of twenty years spent in the cockpit. That seldom was possible anymore. Bennett reflected on his carrier deployments--the Mediterranean cruises with fabulous liberty ports, and even his four combat tours in the Tonkin Gulf. Vietnam had been fraught with pain and frustration, but combat flying had its own challenges and rewards as well.

       Bennett remembered his backseat ride in Dave Edmonds's Phantom. Dave had been one of the aggressive, experienced F-8 pilots transitioned to F-4s to impart air combat knowledge to the Phantom community. After an extremely low practice mission, Bennett had climbed from the rear seat on unsteady legs. ''That was just a might low, Dave. If an engine had coughed we'd be dead."

       His friend had shrugged fatalistically. "Beats the hell out of cancer."
Well,
Bennett reflected,
at least now I'm not going to die of cancer, or drift along with Alzheimer's or be a burden to anyone. It's not so bad
. . .
not so bad.

      
THE FUSION WEAPON DRIFTED·DOWNWARD. IN ANOTHER three minutes its electronic fuse circuit would close on impact with the ground, detonating a ring of high explosive surrounding a hollow sphere precisely machined from eight pounds of South African plutonium, together composing the bomb's round primary stage. Though only one-fifth the diameter of "Far Man," this arrangement of perfect geometry and rare matter differed little from the architecture of the twenty-kiloton bomb that flattened Nagasaki half a century before. That weapon had missed by a mile. This thermonuclear device, with twenty times the yield, would land within 600 feet of its aiming point fifty percent of the time.

       Bennett remembered that during his retirement ceremony at Miramar, somebody had asked him the inevitable question: What did he most enjoy about the Navy? And he had given the usual answer-the people. It was a cliche, but it was true.

       Certainly the hardware had been a big factor. Nobody was more devoted to the F-8 than Bennett had been, and in the past few years the Tigershark had become the icon of his soul. But sharing a life in the air with other men of similar motivation had been the genuine reward: Dave Edmonds, Ed Lawrence, Masher Malloy, and so many more.

       There had been others, of course. Bennett thought of Elizabeth and how he missed her those long years after the drunk driver took her from him. He thought with satisfaction that he had provided for Paul's future, and the future of little Angelina, whom he would never hold again.

       And he thought of Claudia.

       THE IMPACT-INITIATED DETONATION COMMAND PASSED through a series of stolen American timing switches and ignited forty pounds of plastic-bonded PBX 9404 high explosive in 32 places. The detonation wave raced through the HE lenses at 29,300 feet per second and interacted with embedded lenses of slightly slower-burning explosive, turning from convex to concave to match the curvature of the surrounded plutonium ball.

       After ignition the high explosive burned concentrically, imploding the subcritical sphere of South African Pu-239 inward upon itself, symmetrically crushing the seven-inch ball to the size of a small fist. Nanoseconds--billionths of a second--after the mass of fuel went supercritical, a stream of neutrons shot into the plutonium ball to initiate the rapid chain-reaction that is nuclear fission. The freed neutrons then fissioned other nuclei to produce more neutrons and more energy. Billions of plutonium nuclei were split in half a microsecond, unleashing the energy that bound together their 94 protons and 145 neutrons--energy equal to nearly forty kilotons.

       X-rays from the fission trigger reaction super-heated the plastic foam surrounding the cylindrical secondary stage into a plasma momentarily denser than lead. The process fused twelve pounds of lithium deuteride into helium, releasing some 200 kilotons--the power of 200,000 tons of TNT-and billions of fast neutrons. These high-speed particles were absorbed by a sixty-pound mantel of U-235 around the core of lithium deuteride, producing over 160 kilotons more of explosive energy from the fission of billions of uranium nuclei. The 400 kilotons generated by this fission-fusion-fission bomb theoretically could be produced with one-third as much nuclear fuel. But the assembly was blown apart before all the fuel was used.

       BENNETT'S THOUGHTS TURNED TO TIGER FORCE. HE wondered whether the IPs would hold reunions in later years. He hoped so, for reasons at once egotistical and sentimental. As long as Tiger Force was remembered,
he
would be remembered. But he hoped the fliers would cling to one another as well. Maybe the Saudis would participate--his few hundred sons. Bennett thought of Rajid.
Gosh, I hope he makes it through this. At least he's away from here. He deserves to make it. Good little guy.