The Warbirds (4 page)

“Excuse me, Colonel, with all due respect, isn’t our job, like they say, to ‘fly and fight’ and not worry about playing Mickey Mouse games on the ground?”

“Listen, you and I both know there’s no fighting in a peacetime Air Force. We’re trainers. Training to fight. That’s the glitch. You’ll probably never see combat in your entire career. Or if you do, you’ll be in a command position. You’ve got to learn to use good judgment and be responsible in
all
your actions. I’ve teamed you with the best WSO in the wing, maybe the Air Force. Thunder is going to make general because he is good, very good. And not because he is black. Right now he’s serving time as a technician, just like you. As soon as I can, I’m going to move him up to headquarters where he can get more experience in making decisions and get out of the cockpit.

“If there’s a war, he’ll be ready. But for now I’ve entrusted him to you. For some strange reason he likes flying with you and wants to stay in your pit. Now it’s your job to keep him alive and not drag him into trouble with you. That’s what leadership for a lieutenant is all about. Think about what I’ve said and what you want to do in this Air Force.”

Jack returned to the trailer’s lounge, shaking his head. He flopped back into the chair next to Thunder. “Career counseling, no biggy,” he muttered. Thunder visibly relaxed. Jack felt a rising itch of frustration as he recalled
his commander’s words. He didn’t like the implications behind what Fairly had said. All he wanted to do was to fly fighters and avoid all the rest of the Mickey Mouse that Fairly was telling him was so important. To him, the Air Force started and ended in the cockpit, and he was not merely a “technician” his job was what the Air Force was all about. And he didn’t like the idea of losing Thunder as his backseater.

The reality of the Air Force was much different than he had imagined as a fourteen-year-old ninth grader in Phoenix, Arizona. He could always remember seeing jets from nearby Luke Air Force Base maneuver around the cloudless sky, catching his imagination and drawing him out of his everyday world. And then one day in the ninth grade he knew he was going to fly fighters. After that, everything he did had one purpose, to get an appointment to the Air Force Academy. He took all the science and math courses his high school had to offer and went out for sports every semester. An Air Force Academy liaison officer had told him making Eagle Scout would help him in the fiercely competitive selective process and he had dutifully worked on getting the required twenty-one merit badges. He suffered a slight distraction when he discovered girls and sex. Had he been less attractive, a girl might have persuaded him that marriage was preferable to the celibacy offered by the Academy. However, he soon discovered that lack of female companionship would never be a problem.

What bothered him now was that the service was asking more from him than being the best fighter jock that ever strapped on a Phantom.

16 July: 1230 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1230 hours, over the Sahara

The flight deck of the C-130 Hercules was quiet. But with everything that had happened in the last three hours, Dave Belfort couldn’t find the rest he needed. The navigator was sitting in the copilot’s position jotting down notes in the small notebook he always carried in his navigator’s bag. He glanced at Toni D’Angelo, who was sleeping. Belfort was relieved that the co-pilot had been able to catnap for
a few minutes. He looked at the crew bunk at the rear of the flight deck to check on Sid Luna’s condition. The loadmaster, Leonard McCray, was bent over the inert pilot, wearing his headset.

“How’s Sid doing?” he asked the master sergeant over the interphone.

“The bleeding is just oozing. He’s conscious,” McCray answered. The slight improvement in the pilot’s condition helped to buoy Belfort’s sagging spirits.

The exchange on the intercom did not disturb the sleeping flight engineer Riley Henderson. The old sergeant had learned years before how to tune out unwanted noise, doze off in his seat, and be wide awake at the first hint of mechanical trouble on the Hercules.

Belfort decided to let him sleep.

Toni D’Angelo stirred in her seat, then snapped awake in a moment of panic when she realized she was in command of the C-130. “I slept too long,” she said, putting her headset on.

“No problem,” Belfort replied. “Sid’s conscious and his bleeding’s almost stopped.”

“Dave, did I cause the accident because I wasn’t strong enough to hold Sid’s hand on the throttles?”

“I don’t see how. It’s a shitty technique anyway. Besides, the problem was differential thrust. I thought Sid did well to keep us from going all over the place.”

“I never felt us hit the girl,” Toni murmured.

“First time you’ve ever seen a mangled body? It’s always tough. I’ve never seen anyone hit by a prop before. No wonder the villagers attacked Sid. Jeez. Thank God, McCray knew enough of the language to calm them down.”

“This is the second time I’ve been on Grain King,” McCray interjected, “and I had to manage the cargo sheds at Niamey for three months. It sort of rubbed off, you know, associating with the locals.”

“I’m glad you know something about first aid too,” Toni added.

“Hell,” the loadmaster said, “with all that blood from the knife wound, I thought for sure he was dead. They
thought he was dead, too. He’s lucky he was kicked unconscious.”

Both officers became silent, recalling how McCray had quieted the raging villagers by yelling in Berber, telling them the C-130 was carrying food for them. After that, it had been easy for McCray to get the injured pilot onto the flight deck and arrange for the cargo of rice and vegetables to be offloaded.

The high-frequency radio crackled into life. “Grain King Zero-Three, N’Djamena Center. How do you read?”

Belfort answered the call from the Air Traffic Control center, “Read you five-by, N’Djamena. Go ahead.”

“Roger, Grain King,” the heavy French accent replied. “You are cleared as requested. Tripoli Center has cleared you to enter their airspace. Report crossing the FIR. Contact Tripoli on upper high-frequency channels eight-niner six-niner or eight-eight six-two.”

Dave keyed the mike again, “Grain King copies, N’Djamena. Please confirm that Tripoli knows we are a UN food relief flight and diverting to Alexandria South due to weather. Also that we have an injured crewman on board in need of medical attention and are requesting priority handling. Please recheck the weather for us.”

“Stand by Grain King,” N’Djamena answered. The flight deck was quiet while Belfort waited for the reply.

“Grain King, this is N’Djamena,” the flight control center radioed. “Tripoli acknowledges your status. Also be advised that all stations to the south and west are now down due to blowing sand and dust. Alexandria will remain clear for the next eight hours.”

Dave thanked N’Djamena for their help and leaned back in the co-pilot’s seat, still not able to rest. “Never hurts to double check,” he said to no one in particular.

“It’s OK to overfly Libya?” Toni said.

“They’ve given us a clearance,” Dave answered. “We’ve got to go northeast because of this granddaddy of a sandstorm and we need a hospital for Sid. There’s an American hospital at Alexandria South. The weather prophets blew this one big time.” The weather warning they had received after launching from the village was far worse than the first. They had to divert.

“It’ll be OK,” Belfort said as the C-130 approached the extreme southwestern corner of Libya and he started to establish contact with Tripoli Center. I hope, he added to himself.

16 July: 1235 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1235 hours, over the Mediterranean

The U.S. Air Force Reconnaissance RC-135 carved a lazy orbit over the Mediterranean while it monitored and recorded all the high-frequency radio transmissions made by the Grain King flight. As module commander in the rear of the big four-engine Boeing, Colonel Anthony Waters accordingly annotated his log while an old and familiar tingling signaled something was wrong. Experience had taught him not to ignore the warning. He rummaged around in his briefcase and pulled out a map of North Africa. He pressed the button keying his intercom. “Stan, can you play back the tape where Grain King gave N’Djamena Center its route to Alexandria South?”

The radio technician retrieved the transmission Waters wanted and played it back over the interphone.

The colonel frowned as he drew the C-130’s route from Niger, through the southern part of Libya, and on into Egypt. The tingling grew stronger. Again keying his interphone, Waters called the flight deck and directed Captain Kelly to fly to an orbit south of the island of Malta, as close as they could get to Libya. He unstrapped from his seat and walked down the narrow passage to Bill Carroll’s station, stretching and thinking at the same time. “Bill, what’s the Mad Colonel been doing lately?” he said, spreading out his map on the lieutenant’s desk and pointing to Libya.

“Been quiet ever since the F-111 raid on Tripoli in April ’86. He’s got lots of internal problems to keep him busy.”

Waters mulled it over. “We’ve got a Grain King flight crossing the southern part of Libya. Here’s their route. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel right.”

Carroll shrugged. “But Grain King is a UN operation that Libya is backing.”

“I know,” Waters replied, still not satisfied. Waters had not always been in the intelligence-gathering business and had only recently been made a module commander in RC-135s. When his last position had been phased out, colonel assignments at Headquarters Military Personnel had looked hard to find him a last assignment that matched his background before he retired. Unfortunately, there was nothing available and he was plugged into the only available slot.

Waters had accepted the assignment with resignation, unhappy at losing a job he enjoyed. His career had been like that since he returned from his second tour in Vietnam as a captain. His combat experience in F-4s had led him to the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School at Nellis AFB outside Las Vegas. Once there, he had worked his way up from an instructor to become Red Flag’s key project officer—Red Flag was the Air Force’s combat training program that tried to simulate an actual combat arena for its fighter pilots. Waters had become very adept at blending tactics and technology into believable wartime exercises.

Finally he had become too controversial a figure with his constant challenges of testing weapons systems and employment plans in the cold reality of combat scenarios and had infuriated the policy makers when he demonstrated the F-15 should be a two-place aircraft. The SPO (Special Projects Office) that drove the development of the F-15 had been dominated by old-line fighter pilots who believed fighter aircraft had one pilot and one engine. It had been a bitter compromise just to put two engines in the jet. When Waters proved repeatedly that a single pilot would be overwhelmed at low altitude in a high-threat environment, the SPO solved the problem by getting Waters reassigned.

After Nellis, he had been assigned to the fighter wing at Bitburg Air Base in Germany, and again had worked his way up, this time reaching squadron commander when he made lieutenant colonel. But that ended when Bitburg transitioned to F-15s and he had been reassigned stateside to Weapons Testing and Development at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, which led into an assignment in Foreign
Fighter Support at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, where he had met and negotiated with many Arabs.

Through those contacts Waters had learned something of how the Arab mind worked. Rather than move logically from one step to the next until a conclusion was reached, the Arab circled his objective, often going off on a wild tangent or goose chase but always returning to circle—so what was the Libyan leader’s objective this time?

“Bill,” Waters finally said, “I’ve moved our orbit closer to Tripoli. So far, we’ve only picked up routine messenger traffic, nothing to worry about. We may be spinning our wheels, but pay special attention to the Libyans for a while.”

He waved for Stan Cruzak to join them. “Stan, as soon as we start picking up the Libyan’s command net, see if you can crack into their frequency rotation.”

One of the RC-135’s most closely guarded secrets was its ability to break into the method of scrambling radio messages the Russians had provided the Libyans with. The Libyans could not handle encryption, and out of exasperation the Russians had sold them a scrambling system that rapidly rotated voice radio transmissions over many frequencies. The frequency shift was so rapid that the users did not even notice it. The idea was that an enemy could not follow the frequency changes. But a skilled radio operator on the RC-135 could slave the plane’s computer to the monitoring sweeps and lock onto the frequency rotation. He also had to work with a translator to know if what he was receiving made sense and he wasn’t missing frequency changes. Carroll and Cruzak were a well-rehearsed team.

“Tell me when you start to get something,” Waters said. He left the two men and walked back to a sealed compartment in the rear of the module that held the aircraft’s most classified equipment. The man that occupied the small space had jokingly painted the door green in homage to the movie
Behind the Green Door,
reminding the crew that what went on behind the door was none of their business. Only the operator and Waters knew what the equipment did and each held one half the code that activated the self-destruct mechanism that would destroy the sensi
tive equipment, which could, under the right conditions, pick up unshielded landline telephone conversations from as far as one hundred miles. Waters had the Libyans wired for sound. He explained what was happening to the operator and told him to buzz his position if he monitored anything significant.

At first Bill Carroll could not understand the flood of Arabic that started to crackle through his headset. But as the recon bird moved south, and as Stan refined the frequency shifts, the transmissions became stronger and clearer.

“Goddamn,” Carroll said. “The Libyans are acting like they’ve got an intruder!” For five more minutes he monitored the transmission, wanting to be sure he understood exactly what he was hearing, then called Waters.