Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (8 page)

“Two Dogs . . . Slapshot SA-3 . . . Mosul,” Orca barked.

This time, much more deliberately, I turned in, refined my aim, and hosed off my remaining HARM. Pulling up and rolling toward the F-4, I was surprised to see that he continued pointing at Mosul only six miles away.

“TORCH . . . Magnum . . . Magnum . . .”

I frowned under the mask. What the hell was he doing? Neither of us had weapons remaining and he kept jabbing at the SAM batteries.

“Magnum . . . Magnum SA-3 . . . Mosul.”

But then I learned another combat lesson. The Iraqis didn’t know we were out of missiles, and we knew they listened to our radio traffic. Maybe his bogus radio calls would force a SAM down. Orca was covering the last two-ship of strikers as they re-attacked the airfield. He was making them look and shoot at us instead of the strikers—he was Weaseling. I floated a bit high and aft so I could keep him in sight and watch the ground. Five thousand feet below me, I saw the vapor from an F-16 wingtip as it pulled off-target.

“LASER’s off-target . . . north for the egress.”

“TORCH has you in sight. Come off zero-three-zero.”

As I watched Orca, he pulled the Phantom’s nose up and did a big barrel-roll over the airfield. Several little orange balls zipped past and exploded just like corn popping. But after the last ten minutes, it didn’t seem like much to worry about.

As we headed north in a slow climb, I realized that we were probably the last fighters heading for the border. The Weasels have another motto—First In, Last Out. And that’s exactly what we were doing. I turned and looked back as the funnel-shaped clouds spread out over the airfield. Wispy, gray SAM contrails still hung in the air.

On the common strike frequency, I heard a pair of F-15s up above us, thumping their chests over splashing some Iraqi fighters, and I wished I’d gotten to shoot a MiG. We zoomed up above 20,000 feet and headed north toward Turkey. It was an amazing sight. The mist had burned off, and the dark green peaks along the border jutted upward against the blue sky. To the west, the light brown of the Syrian plain stretched as far as I could see. To my right, past the Zagros Range, was the blue-green smudge of Iran. Way off toward the north loomed the enormous, white-crowned peak of Mount Ararat, beyond which lay the Soviet Union.

I was exhilarated. Dropping my mask, I wiped off my face and wished I’d remembered to bring a bottle of water. And food. Tomorrow, I told myself, and jotted that down on my lineup card that had become quickly cluttered with lessons. NEVER FLY IN A STRAIGHT LINE. CHANGE ALTITUDES RANDOMLY. ATTACK WITH THE SUN BEHIND YOU IF POSSIBLE.

These things hadn’t changed since World War I. I’d been taught all of them but nothing sears in life-preserving habit patterns like combat.

Suddenly a thin, pole-shaped object shot up exactly between the F-4 and myself. For a second, I was too surprised to react. But Orca instantly weaved away to the west and I saw a string of glowing flares drop away from his tail section.

“Shit . . .” Weaving the other way, I also thumbed out some flares. Rolling up on my left wing, I stared down and realized what had happened. The Iraqis had lugged some shoulder-launched missiles, MANPADS, onto the 12,000-foot peaks, and they were shooting at our contrails.

Orca knew it, too, because he shoved the nose over and descended below the layer of air that caused contrails. And then we were past the peaks and into Turkey. More lessons. Don’t ever fly in the contrail layer unless you want to be seen, and never relax in enemy territory.

Exhaling, I shook my head as we headed for the air-refueling tanker track over Lake Van. What a morning. But we were back in Turkey, relatively safe and—

“CONAN One . . . pop-up threat . . . Bogey . . . nose fifteen . . . low.”

CONAN was the flight of F-15s above us.

What the fuck?

“TORCH flight . . . bracket . . . bracket!” Orca snapped and instantly rolled hard away to the west. Reflexively, I cranked away from him to the east, and we were set in a classic pincer maneuver that was supposed to force an enemy fighter to pick a side. This would expose him to the jet he didn’t attack—and then he’d die.

“CONAN . . . this is CHAINSAW . . . say again?” The AWACS controller sounded incredulous.

But we were in Turkey. How in the hell did a MiG slip past and get behind us? The tankers, I realized, as I fumbled with my mask and tried to pull my head out of my ass. The MiG must be attacking the tankers! There was no time for a radar search, so I pushed in with my left thumb and instantly brought up the “Slewable Air Combat Maneuvering” mode. This was a quick-reaction mode, utilized to point the radar at threats less than ten miles away: it would automatically lock on whatever it found.

I glanced up, saw the Eagles making contrails and eyeballed where the threat must be. Slewing the pointing cross left and down in the HUD, I let go and waited as the two F-15s began their attack. They’d called it a “Bogey” instead of a “Bandit” which meant they couldn’t positively identify it as hostile. Identification could be done with a variety of electronic systems on both the F-16 and F-15, but there hadn’t been time. So the aircraft would remain “unknown” until it could be visually identified or committed a hostile act. Like shooting at one of us.

“LOCK . . . LOCK . . .”

To my astonishment, the radar actually grabbed a contact. I stared, wide-eyed, at a dark speck coming straight down the “snot locker”—between us—at over 500 knots. It was eight miles away and charging up at us from below.

I snapped the master arm back to
ARM
and strained forward against my straps to see over the F-16’s nose. The Target Designator (TD) box was there, sliding over the mountaintops as the strange jet raced toward us.

“CONAN One is visual . . . bogey . . . ten o’clock low!”

“CONAN . . . CHAINSAW . . . say again?”

AWACS was doing its normal bang-up job. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of sunlight on something shiny and saw the Eagles, about four miles in front of me, sweeping down from the north. The F-4 and I were split apart by about five miles but now beginning to turn in. This unknown fighter was sandwiched in three dimensions. It was the perfect intercept.

He was screwed, whoever he was. It was just a matter of who would kill him first.

I grinned and uncaged my AIM-9 Sidewinder. This let the missile’s infrared seeker to try to track whatever target I was locked to. It just growled at me though, unable to tell jet from earth, so I’d have to get closer. That wasn’t a problem at these speeds, since we’d close the eight miles to shooting range in about fifteen seconds.

There! In the TD box, I could see an aircraft. It was tiny and its exhaust left a smoke trail. With the exception of the Phantom, no U.S. aircraft smoked. And this was no Phantom. I kept trying to lock the Sidewinder but it wouldn’t.

Shit.

If an Eagle killed this MiG in front of me, I’d never forgive myself. Probably spend all my money in therapy.

I’d descended a few thousand feet when we broke apart so I wouldn’t give this asshole a nice, look-up shot at me. I’d also been able to pull my power back as I’d glided down, and this cooled my engine off so any infrared missile shot against me would have a tough time. I didn’t put out any preemptive flares, because if he hadn’t seen me yet, flares would certainly give away my position. It was risky though, because if he shot, I’d have only a second or two to pop the flares. I didn’t like thinking defensively.

Fuck it. Shoving the throttle up to mil power, I pulled back and up toward the oncoming jet.

He was about four miles in front of me and slightly high, so I uncaged the Sidewinder and the clear, steady tone said it finally liked what it saw. With a good firing solution and a visual on the bogey, this was almost perfect. Squinting against the sun and the Gs, I still couldn’t tell what it was except that it was painted brown. I grunted and moved my right thumb just over the pickle button. That about clinched it. We didn’t have any brown aircraft.

For a long count of two, I waited. Waited for a smoke trail coming off his jet. Waited for the Eagles to identify it.

“CONAN One . . . ID Friendly! Repeat . . . ID Friendly.” The Eagle pilot sounded disappointed.

What in the hell . . .

My thumb came away from the pickle like it was hot. But I continued pulling into the other jet, carefully avoiding the two F-15s that had settled in behind the thing. As they all flashed past me, barely a mile away, I caught sight of a brown cylinder with incredibly stubby wings.

MiG-21!
my brain screamed.

“It’s a fucking MiG-21,” I yelled into my mask, and my thumb came back down above the pickle. My first shocked thought was that the Eagles had made a colossal blunder. The Iraqi Air Force had MiG 21s, and this was exactly where you’d expect to find one. Close to its home base and hiding in the mountains.

Then I saw the red flag with the white crescent and star on the tail, and my thumb again came quickly away from the pickle button.

Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable.

Türk Hava Kuvvetleri.
Turkish Air Force. My brain clicked on again and I remembered why the jet was familiar. It was an American-made F-104 Starfighter, and I’d seen one in a museum once. Shaking my head as the thing zipped by, I very carefully moved the master arm to
SAFE
. What kind of idiot would be out trolling the border
today
in front of a hundred armed fighter pilots? I shrugged my shoulders against the seat straps and took a deep breath. A Turkish idiot, that’s who. As we continued north, the F-15s stayed with the F-104 and were voicing the same sentiments to the still bewildered AWACS.

Air-refueling was always satisfying. Every time was different and yet each instance required absolute precision to bring it off. In peacetime, in normal airspace, air-to-air refueling was tedious and very rigid. But combat refueling was more straightforward. Each track usually had a cell of three KC-10 or KC-135 tankers flying in trail of each other. They were about three miles apart and stacked at different altitudes, so we creatively named them the High, Medium, and Low tankers. The Low tanker was usually leading the cell. This was done for several reasons. The other tankers, which had no air-to-air radars, could fly off him visually during the day or night if the weather was clear. If it wasn’t, then they were de-conflicted by altitude and wouldn’t hit each other. Lastly, with the Low tanker in the lead, his jet wash, which could be considerable, didn’t affect the aircraft behind him. Flying through invisible turbulence while you’re impaled on a boom twenty feet from a jet filled with jet fuel isn’t much fun.

You had to find the tanker on your air-to-air radar and talk to him. You had to run a three-dimensional intercept to wherever he was, watching out for the remaining tankers and dozens of other fighters. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it; slowly sliding up behind the big plane and watching the boom come down was always a thrill. Unless it was nighttime, or the weather was bad, and you were running out of gas—then it was a sweaty nightmare, like a monkey fucking a skunk.

But not this morning. This was a bright, clear day over an exotic corner of the world that seemed even more beautiful because I’d survived my first combat mission. After getting our gas, we slid back and pulled away low to the southwest. Our home base was about 200 miles away on the Gulf of Iskenderun.

A half-hour later, we were overhead Incirlik Air Base. Normally, there were well-established procedures for getting into and out of an air base, like overhead patterns and instrument approaches for bad weather. There were also “minimum risk” procedures, designed to get as many jets as possible off the ground or down to land without exposing them to ground fire. In retrospect, it was fairly silly to worry about shoulder-launched SAMs and small-arms fire. This being the first day of the war, no one knew what to expect and, until sanity prevailed, we could do whatever we wanted. Besides, it was fun to fly up the runway at 500 knots or do the “Stack.”

The Stack was basically a long glide in idle power down from 20,000 feet to the overhead landing pattern. You could see everything below, and it kept your engine cool to thwart an infrared threat. Besides, as I said, it was fun. Orca and I were almost the last aircraft at the top of the stack. The two F-15s that had followed us out of Iraq were somewhere behind us, and two KC-135 tankers were orbiting at 25,000 feet until all the fighters landed.

“TORCH One . . . High Stack.”

He made the call and went into a sharp, descending turn. I was supposed to wait until he called “mid-stack,” and then I’d start down. Dropping the mask again, I loosened my seat straps, wiped my face, and actually relaxed a bit. And why not? What else could happen?

Under normal circumstances, that’s a risky thought to have. Under these circumstances, it was downright cocky. And stupid.

As I watched the jets spiral down and cross the runway threshold, a wholly unbelievable plume of white smoke lifted off from the north side of the base. My mouth dropped open. Really.

SAM.

Holy shit . . . I was trying to think of what to say and fumbling for the mike button.

SAM!

But an extremely excited voice beat me to it.

“Mi . . . Missile . . . Missile launch! Launch at . . . EXXON 21!”

EXXON was one of the orbiting tankers, and the pilot sounded like he was getting an enema.

Suddenly, the amazingly fast missile detonated in the middle of the stack with fighters swirling all around it. For a long, long moment, there was dead silence and then the tower frequency exploded.

“Tower . . .”

“LIK Tower . . . TARZAN Three . . . there was a missile launch from the base.”

“What the hell was . . .”

“ . . . North of the base . . . exploded at . . .”

“ . . . About 7,000 feet.”

“Two . . . are you all right . . .”

We found out later that the Patriot base defense missile battery was in auto-mode. Among other things, this meant that if it detected jamming, then it would lock onto the jamming source and fire. No one had foreseen the effect that a hundred jets, all with jamming pods, radios, and electronic equipment would have on the Patriot. It saw all that and interpreted everything as hostile, locked the biggest thing it could see, and fired. The poor tanker pilot had probably wet his pants, and who could blame him?