Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (49 page)

Andersen Air Force Base,
Guam

26 APRIL 1997
,
1625 HOURS LOCAL

 
          
Jon
Masters didn’t knock—he never knocked. He always burst into a room, day or
night, and started talking as if the conversation had already started minutes
before. This time, it was in the middle of a briefing being given by Colonel
Dominguez on the maintenance status of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber.

 
          
“Okay,
so we got them. What we did, General,” Masters said breathlessly, "was
simple: we launched two NIRTSat boosters, each carrying four Pacer Sky digital
photo intelligence satellites, over Iran. We targeted each and every Iranian
airfield, civilian or military, longer than forty-five hundred feet long and
one hundred fifty feet wide, capable of handling something like a Tu-22M
Backfire bomber. We took pictures of each airfield every sixty to ninety
minutes. Of course, the Iranians didn’t know we launched these satellites—heck,
nobody
knew we launched them except
you and me. We hit pay dirt.”

 
          
Griffith
and Dominguez leapt to their feet and followed Masters down the hall of the
fourth floor of the Thirteenth Air Force headquarters building, which was now
occupied by the members of the Air Intelligence Agency and Future Flight for
the B-2A missions against
Iran
. When everyone was in place and the door
closed and locked behind them, Masters clicked the button on his display
controller. The large-screen computer monitor showed an overhead view of a very
large airport. “They can run, but they couldn’t hide,” Masters said proudly.
“Sky Masters comes through again.”

 
          
Jon
Masters’s NIRTSats (Need it Right This Second Satellites) were small devices,
smaller than a washing machine, but capable of photographing a dog from 200
miles in space clearly enough to discern the breed. Four photo-reconnaissance
NIRTSats, code-named Pacer Sky, could be loaded aboard a small two-stage
scissor-winged rocket booster Masters called ALARM (for Air-Launched Alert
Response Missile), and two such ALARM boosters could be loaded aboard Masters’s
specially designed DC-10 aircraft. The DC-10 would take the ALARM boosters up
to 40,000 feet, then drop them one by one. The DC-10 acted as the boosters’
first-stage engine—the booster’s two stages would fly the missile up as high as
400 miles in space, where the satellites would be inserted in their proper
orbit. In this way, Masters could give almost any battlefield commander a
complete reconnaissance, surveillance, and communications satellite network in
a matter of hours.

 
          
Today,
however, Masters wasn’t under a government or commercial contract to launch
NIRTSats over Iran—this he was doing for himself.

 
          
“Beghin
Airport, near Kerman, Iran, about two hundred fifty miles north of Bandar
Abbas,” Masters went on. “Two hours after the attack on the
Lincoln
carrier group, we photographed
this.” He directed a laser-beam pointer on the screen, then clicked another
button, which zoomed the image down around the laser-beam point. Magnified in
the image was the unmistakable outline of a B-1B Lancer-type aircraft, with a
long, pointed nose, slender body, and thin wings swept back very close to its
fuselage.

 
          
“There’s
your Tupolev-22M bomber base, folks: Beghin Airport—at least it’s one of them.”
Masters zoomed the image out until the entire airport could be seen. “With the
wings folded, those hangars there can accommodate six Backfires, two per hangar,
so we’re still missing at least six more. I’m setting up round-the-clock
surveillance on Beghin, and I’m still beating the bushes for the other six
bombers.”

 
          
“Thank
you, Jon,” Major General Brien Griffith, commander of the U.S. Air Force Air
Intelligence Agency, said. “Good work.”

 
          
“My
extreme friggin’
pleasure
, sir,”
Masters said acidly. “The data’s been relayed to McLanahan and Jamieson via
MILSTAR, fed right into their attack computers. They’ll be over the target in
ten hours.”

 
          
Such
ferocity looked so out of place for a young-looking guy like Masters, Griffith
thought, but he had undergone much in the last few days—including nearly losing
his life at the hands of the Iranian navy. This young man had the technology,
the money, and the desire to make
Iran
pay dearly for what they had done.

Riverside
,
California

THAT SAME TIME

 
          
First
Lieutenant Sheila MacNichol was just returning from her sixth trip to the
ladies’ room that afternoon—her sixth month of pregnancy seemed like one
endless trip to the bathroom—and was returning to her desk in the 722nd Air
Refueling Wing commander’s office, where she was “flying a desk,” grounded from
her regular job as an Air Force Reserve KC-10 copilot and now acting as the
wing executive officer, when she noticed the scared, almost panicked look on
the face of the wing commander’s civilian secretary. Instantly her throat
turned dry, and the baby kicked, and she felt as if her knees were going to
give way.

 
          
Even
before the secretary got to her feet and headed toward her; even before she saw
the door to the wing commander’s office open and the general emerge, his face
ashen and drawn; even before she saw the base chaplain and the squadron
commander recognize her and open their mouths in surprise and dread—she knew Scotty
was dead.

 
          
Sheila’s
husband Major Scott MacNichol was one of the best, most experienced KC-10
Extender tanker pilots in the U.S. Air Force, a veteran of over four hundred
sorties, some over enemy territory, in the “tanker war” during Desert Shield and
Desert Storm, a dedicated, knowledgeable flight commander and instructor pilot.
No mission was too tough or impossible. The unspoken rule “never volunteer” was
unheard of in Scotty’s lexicon—he volunteered for everything. He enjoyed,
relished,
rejoiced
' in putting his
600,000- pound tanker-transport plane in the tightest spots, the most difficult
missions, the shortest runways, the most hazardous jobs.

 
          
He
had been awarded the Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters for his service in
Desert Storm—very, very unusual for an aircraft that was never supposed to be
in enemy territory. Scotty would go in and get his receivers if there was the
slightest hint of trouble. There were only forty KC-10 tankers in the world,
but as a “force multiplier,” able to refuel both Air Force, Navy, Marines, and
many foreign aircraft, it was worth a hundred times its number—too valuable to
risk over Indian country. But Scotty went there.

 
          
Damn
him, Sheila cursed silently, he did this on purpose! When the baby came, she
thought, he knew he was going to be asked to give up all the TDY, all the long
weeks of traveling to exotic foreign destinations, all the secret missions, the
sudden midnight phone calls, the hastily packed mobility bags—packing
cold-weather gear when it was ninety degrees out. She knew he wasn’t going to
have fun in Hawaii while she stayed home with the backaches and swollen feet
and hemorrhoids. He wanted to get all his excitement, all his heroics in before
he was asked to settle down and be a regular dad, a regular guy, for the first
time in his life.

 
          
The
wing commander motioned her inside his office and helped her sit down. Sheila
knew the chaplain and the squadron commander, of course, so she got right to
it: “Scotty ... is dead?”

           
“His plane suffered an unknown,
catastrophic failure of some kind over the Gulf of Oman,” the wing commander
said. “His plane was lost with all aboard. I’m so sorry, Lieutenant.”

 
          
Sheila
tried not to cry, but the tears came unbidden, and then the sobbing. She didn’t
mean to do
that,
in front of the wing
king and the squadron commander and the chaplain, but it was happening, and she
couldn’t stop it until she heard the wing commander ask his secretary to call
for an ambulance to stand by out front, and Sheila decided she wasn’t going to
have any of
that,
so she stopped.

 
          
“A...
a catastrophic failure, sir? What kind? A bird strike? Compressor failure?
Fuel-system malfunction?” Everyone in this room was an experienced KC-10 driver
except for the chaplain, and even
he
had a couple hundred hours in one—why was he being so obtuse? Probably because
the plane had crashed in the ocean— not much chance to do an accident
investigation with the pieces scattered across the seabed. The wing king was in
his “comfort the grieving survivors” mode, too, so maybe he wasn’t trying to be
so evasive—he wasn’t accustomed to talking to widows about compressor stalls,
center-of-gravity violations, or in-flight emergencies.

 
          
“We
don’t know yet, Lieutenant. . . Sheila,” the general said. “An investigation is
under way.”

 
          
“The
Gulf of Oman? Why was Scotty out there?” Sheila asked. “I heard temporary
flight restrictions were in effect for all airspace within five hundred miles
of Iran. What was he doing over the Gulf of Oman?”

 
          
The
wing commander looked at the chaplain, who let go of Sheila’s hand and stepped
away. “Sheila, please, let’s not focus on where Scotty’s plane went down right
now, all right? I just want you to know how sorry we are, and that we want to
help you through this terrible tragedy.”

 
          
“This
has to do with Iran, doesn’t it?” Sheila asked, the hurt turning into
stone-cold anger. “All the things the government has been saying about how
great, how wonderful everything is over in the Middle East, it’s not true, is
it... ?”

 
          
“Lieutenant...”

 
          
“The
Iranians shot him down, didn’t they, sir?” Sheila asked hotly. “The Iranians
shot down my Scotty, flying in an unarmed, vulnerable tanker.”

 
          
“Lieutenant,
please, I know you’re upset, and I’m sorry, truly sorry, but I’m asking you to
keep your opinions to yourself, please!”

           
“I hope we went in there to bomb
the
crap
out of those ragheads!”
Sheila cried. The paramedics were rushing into the wing commander’s office with
a gurney, trying to get her to relax, but Sheila’s heart felt as cold, as heavy,
and as still as the child in her womb did right now, and the anger she was
releasing felt good, felt
right.
“I
hope my Scotty helped us get those damned Iranian terrorists, dammit. I hope
they all burn in
hell!
ⁿ

BEGHIN
REGIONAL
AIRPORT
,
KERMAN
PROVINCE
,
IRAN

27 APRIL 1997
,
0206 HOURS LOCAL

 
          
According
to law, all flights landing in Iran had to be on the ground and at their
arrival gate by midnight; the last flight into Beghin Regional Airport in
central Iran had arrived at ten P.M., and shortly thereafter the airport was
all but shut down, leaving only maintenance crews at the airport until sunrise.
By two A.M. the airport appeared totally deserted ...

 
          
...
except at the extreme southern end of the airport, south of the 11,000-foot-long,
150-foot-wide northwest-southeast running concrete runway that had been closed
to commercial and civil traffic two years earlier. Three large and rather
shabby-looking hangars and several smaller buildings sat near that closed
runway, in front of a large, completely deserted aircraft parking ramp. Weeds
growing up through the cracks on that parking ramp suggested that the ramp had
not supported an aircraft in quite some time.

 
          
This
was the secret Iranian base for one squadron, six planes, of Iran’s most deadly
military aircraft, the Tupolev-22M bomber, NATO code-named “Backfire.” The
Russian-made supersonic Backfire bomber could reach any target in the Middle
East within an hour or, refueled from an Iranian C-707 aerial refueling tanker,
could reach targets as far away as Italy or Germany in two hours. It carried a
devastating 53,000-pound payload of gravity bombs, antiship missiles, or land
or sea mines. The presence of Tu-22M Backfire bombers in the Islamic Republic
of Iran’s air force had been rumored since 1993, but had been constantly
refuted because no Backfires had ever been spotted in Iran.

 
          
“For
a secret bomber base, this place looks like shit,” Tony Jamieson muttered. He
and Patrick McLanahan had been orbiting over the base for twenty minutes now,
“shooting” the base with the synthetic aperture radar every few minutes and
comparing the SAR images with past images, trying to piece together enough
information to verify that the deadly Backfire bombers were really here. They
had looked at every crack in the concrete, every skid mark, every vehicle on
the airport grounds—nothing. No sign of one of the world’s most advanced
bombers. “We’ve only got twenty minutes left in our orbit.”

 
          
“Something
will show,” McLanahan said. “Jon Masters’s NIRTSats never let us down before
... well, maybe once before ...”

 
          
“Great,”
Jamieson groused. “And I’m getting tired of always carrying these so-called
non-lethal weapons on board my plane, too, McLanahan. The ragheads want to
fight—let’s start carrying some weapons that have a little punch. At least a
couple JSOWs with high- explosive warheads would be useful—that’s not too much
to ask ...”

 
          
“SAR
coming on,” McLanahan announced. “SAR shot, ready, ready... now ... SAR in
standby, antenna secure.”

 
          
“Well,
hot damn, there they are—a regular ‘baby elephant walk,’” Jamieson exclaimed as
he studied the SAR image on McLanahan’s supercockpit monitor. As clear as a
black-and-white photograph, the long, thin body of a Tupolev-22M Backfire
bomber had appeared from one of the hangars on the south side of the airport.
Another bomber was exiting the same hangar, behind and slighdy to one side of
the first, while a third bomber had just poked its nose outside the doors of
the middle hangar, obviously waiting its turn to taxi. By using cursor
commands, McLanahan was able to electronically “twist” the SAR image until they
were actually looking
inside
the
hangars, as if they were standing right on the ramp, and they found all three
large hangar doors open, with two Tu-22M bombers in each hangar. The rear of
the hangar was open so the bombers could run their engines while inside, safely
under cover. “Bingo,” Jamieson said. “Shit, they
are
there! ”

 
          
“And
it looks like they’re going hunting again,” McLanahan said. “We can take care
of that.” And just a few moments later six AGM-154 JSOW missiles were on their
way toward Beghin Airport, their autopilots programmed to fly an attack course
just fifty feet over the runway.

 
          
As
the JSOW missile flew toward the runway, an electronic low- light TV camera
activated, sending real-time TV images back to McLanahan in the B-2 A Spirit
stealth bomber flying 45,000 feet overhead. McLanahan used his cursor to lock
an aiming reticle on one of the bombers, and the JSOW’s autopilot flew the missile
to its quarry. As it passed overhead, two of its four bomb bays opened, and it
ejected a sixty-pound blob of a thick, gooey substance that landed on the upper
surface of the bomber. As the JSOW missile flew away, McLanahan programmed the
missile to fly to a secondary target—in the first case, the airport’s
power-transformer substation—and drop the last two globs on that. The missile
then automatically flew itself thirty miles farther west, where it crashed in
the middle of the Bahlamabad Reservoir and sank quickly out of sight. One by
one, each JSOW missile dropped one-half of its unidentifiable load on top of a
Tu-22M bomber, then on top of another target somewhere else on the south side
of the base—the regional air-traffic-control radar dome, a communications
antenna farm, another power transformer farm, and three JSOWs dropped their
gooey mass on the south base’s POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricant) tank farm.

 
          
“Well,
that was exciting,” Jamieson muttered as McLanahan programmed the last of the
JSOW missiles. He steered the B-2 A bomber south along the Afghanistan and
Pakistan borders and out over the Gulf of Oman once again.

 
          
The
air-traffic-control radar was the first to feel the effect. The two large blobs
hit the thin reinforced Fiberglas radar dome and immediately burned through,
then scattered on the rotating antenna and control cabin inside. Within
minutes, the thin metal antenna began to twist out of shape because of the fast
twelve-revolutions- per-minute speed, and the antenna quickly failed and
collapsed.

 
          
The
metal-eating blobs of acid that struck the first Tu-22M bomber hit squarely on
the upper fuselage and on the non-swiveling outboard portion of the left wing
glove; on the second bomber, they hit on the fuselage just aft of the cockpit
windows and on the very upper lip of the right engine intake, spattering across
the guidance and warhead sections of the AS-4 cruise missile mounted under the
right wing glove. As the first two bombers taxied out onto the active runway
and picked up speed for takeoff, the globs spread across the airframe, eating
away inside the left wing pivot section and spreading across the fuselage fuel
tanks, the upper engine compartments, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers,
and the rudder.

 
          
When
the acid ate through the Backfire’s thin aluminum skin, the first bomber was
already 3,000 feet above ground and passing through 300 miles per hour. Just as
the pilot began sweeping the wings of his Backfire bomber from the
twenty-degree takeoff setting to the thirty-degree cruise setting, the wing
pivot mechanism failed, and the left wing uncontrollably folded all the way
back to its aft-most sixty-degree setting. The bomber immediately snap-rolled
to the left, quickly losing altitude.

           
The pilot applied hard right rudder
to keep the bomber upright, and with the copilot’s help he was able to keep the
bomber level at 500 feet above ground and accelerate to a safe emergency cruise
speed—until the acid blob finally ate through the thicker, stronger titanium
lining the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer. The bomber began an
uncontrolled left roll, immediately lost all lift, and plowed into the Iranian
countryside just south of the city of Kerman.

 
          
The
second Backfire bomber’s fate was decided much quicker. The Tu-22M had just
rotated and its main landing gear had just left the runway when the entire
cockpit canopy failed, ripping a thirty- foot section of the fuselage directly
over the crew compartment off the fuselage like an orange peel. At the same
time, the electronics section of the right AS-4 Kitchen anti-ship missile
sparked, ignited the acid, and detonated the missile’s 2,200-pound warhead,
blowing the 300,000-pound warplane into bits with a spectacular cloud of fire
that illuminated the entire airport.

 
          
Luckily
for the third and fourth Backfire bomber’s crews, they had not yet left the
runway, and the damage to their planes was localized and not so dramatic. Blobs
of caustic acid burned through into fuselage fuel tanks and flight controls,
starting fuselage and engine fires. Both four-man crews safely evacuated their
planes and watched helplessly as their $200 million bombers burned. Soon, the
lights of burning Backfire bombers were the only ones on the entire airport,
for the JSOWs’ deadly cargos had destroyed the main power grids . . . but those
lights were soon followed by the brilliant mushroom of fire that erupted as the
POL farm exploded, sending sheets of flame a thousand feet into the sky.

 
          
In
minutes, one entire squadron of Iranian heavy bombers had been effectively
destroyed, and their base rendered heavily damaged and unusable.

 
          
As
they got closer and closer to the Gulf of Oman, the B-2A

 
          
Spirit
stealth bomber’s threat scope became littered with dozens of Iranian threats,
mostly MiG-29 and F-14 fighters—McLanahan was so concerned that he enlarged the
threat display to cover almost the entire supercockpit display. The threat
scope graphically depicted the position of each fighter and estimated range of
each fighter’s search radar; green, yellow, or red colors showed whether or not
the radar was in a search, target-tracking, or missile-guidance mode. A few of
the Iranian fighters’ radar beams swept across the B-2A bomber, depicted in the
center of the threat display, but the color of the radar cone never changed,
indicating that the radar never locked on. Along with the extensive fighter
patrols, there were two Iranian A-10 Mainstay airborne warning radar aircraft
in the area, plus the normal array of ground-based radars and radar-guided
antiaircraft sites.

 
          
“Jesus,
there’s got to be a half dozen flights of fighters up tonight, just over this
one section of Iran,” McLanahan said. “Guess they’re pretty upset about what we
did to Chah Bahar the other night, huh?”

 
          
“Hey,
they deserved to get their asses kicked,” Jamieson said, “and I was glad that
it was
us
who helped ’em. How long
till feet- wet?”

 
          
“Fifteen
minutes,” McLanahan replied uneasily.

 
          
He
fell silent again; Jamieson could tell that something was bugging McLanahan.
“Problem, MC?”

 
          
“Nah
.. . well, it’s just the arrangement of these Iranian aircraft .. . it’s
changed since we went feet-dry on the bomb run,” McLanahan said, pointing at
the supercockpit screen. He expanded the ratio on the threat display until the
entire region, from Bandar Abbas to the extreme eastern part of the Gulf of
Oman, could be seen. The radar range circles from Chah Bahar, from the carrier
Khomeini,
and from the two Iranian A-10
airborne radar planes could be seen, forming a “basket” all along the southern
and southwestern portions of Iran—and they were headed right for that basket.
“Two AWACS radar planes practically side by side across the
Gulf
of
Oman
—that’s weird. Everybody’s clustered around
each other. Not a very efficient use of their air defense assets.”

           
“Whoever gave the ragheads a lot of
credit for smarts?” Jamieson said. “Just keep an eye out for yellow or
red—we’re clean as long as the threats stay green, right?”

 
          
Something
was still nagging at McLanahan’s head. This looked too strange. The Iranians
had showed much better deployment of their forces before—even four hours
earlier, as they were heading into the target area, they had set up their
defenses very effectively. Now they were bunching up, with many more fighters
aimlessly buzzing around. Was it a bit of confusion following the attack on
Beghin Airport? Were they a little disorganized, trying to catch a shadow and
screwing their valuable assets up even further in the process? Maybe . . .