Chains of Command

ONE

U.S. Air Force major Daren J. Mace stripped off his oxygen mask and cursed in a voice loud enough to be heard over the scream of the engines and the high-speed windblast just a few inches away. “The damned stealth fighters missed. They fuckin’ missed. Our mission’s been executed.” Mace waved a slip of paper he had just pulled from a satellite communications printer. His aircraft commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons, sitting to Mace’s left in the close confines of their fighter-bomber cockpit, wore a stunned expression.

It was not the news they had been waiting to hear.

Mace and Parsons were at twenty thousand feet in an F-111G “Aardvark” fighter-bomber, holding in a “parking” orbit over the city of Elazig in eastern Turkey. They had launched two hours ago from a small air base called Batman, in eastern Turkey, two hundred miles east of the main Coalition air base in Incirlik. The radio channels were filled with the excited, jabbering voices of men going to war.

Now, it appeared, Parsons’ and Mace’s turn had come as well.

It was the opening hours of the largest air invasion since World War II. Operation Desert Storm. The only thing that was definite about the war so far was the intense level of confusion that reigned.

Dozens of aircraft were departing Incirlik Air Base to the west, sweeping across Syria, and hundreds of others were racing northward from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. All were directed to use the radios only in an emergency, but it seemed as if half the fleet had emergencies, because the channels were jammed. Aircraft from earlier raids on Baghdad were returning, and a lot had suffered battle damage — which didn’t help the tension levels. Reports of sheer curtains of triple-A — antiaircraft artillery — and hundreds of radar- and infrared-guided surface-to-air missile launches were echoing through the radio channels in a dozen different languages. The full might of the Iraqi military, with some of the world’s most sophisticated air defense weapons on-line, was being brought to bear against the coalition of countries aligned against it.

Once airborne, Daren Mace and Robert Parsons were cut off from communications except for two vital radio links: one was a discrete UHF link to their tanker for the precious fuel they would need; the other, a special UHF link to a Strategic Air Command satellite twenty-two thousand miles in space, which would relay messages from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters or from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The last message the crew had received, printed on a tiny thermal printer on the navigator’s right-side instrument panel in the cockpit, was not from Schwarzkopf or Horner at CENTCOM — the addressor said “NCA,” the National Command Authority. It was from the President of the United States himself, relayed from the White House to the Pentagon directly to Parsons and Mace.

There was only one kind of message that would come directly from the President himself.

“Gimme the entire message, Daren,” Parsons asked his radar navigator nervously, “then let’s go through the authentication together. Show it to me step by step so I can be sure.”

“I don’t like the smell of this,” Mace mumbled. He opened the red-covered decoding booklet, onto which he had clipped the Air Force Satellite Communications printout and recopied the encoded message. Pointing to each section block in the decoded message so Parsons could follow along, he read: “NCA sends, actual message, reference date-time group, SAC Eighth Air Force units, operation code X-Ray-Bravo.”

Mace opened a second folder marked top secret and flipped it open to the proper page, as indicated by the date-time group in the decoded message. “Page sixty-three, XB decodes to Operation Desert Fire.”

Parsons nodded.

The code book had listings for dozens of preplanned missions involved in the opening morning of Desert Storm, but only one pertained to Parson and Mace: Desert Fire. If it decoded out to any other mission name, even if the authentication was correct, the message would be invalid.

Mace continued: “Here’s the code for the flight plan set, the weapons unlock code, and here’s the authentication code and sequence.”

Using a third top secret code book, Mace looked up the proper document letter from the authentication code and withdrew a thin, stiff card from his secrets bag. After Parsons confirmed that he had the right one, Mace snapped the card open and laid a series of uncovered alphanumerics next to the last six characters in the decoded message. They matched and were in exact sequence.

“Message authenticated,” Mace said. “We’re going in. Shit.”

Parsons sighed in resignation while Mace began composing a reply message. Parsons was silent, thinking about the challenge that lay ahead. It was a challenge no one ever wanted to really face, but it was part of the job. He’d faced them before, though not on this scale, in Vietnam, Libya, Panama. But he was an older breed of flyer. He glanced over at Daren Mace and wondered how this talented hotshot navigator would handle what they were inevitably going to do.

Not much younger that Robert Parsons’ own forty-five years, Daren Mace was typical in so many ways of what one would expect an Air Force officer to look like: tall, blond hair, good-looking chiseled features, pearly white teeth, and a hint of a tan. But Daren Mace was atypical in many other ways, his attitude a sharp contrast to his appearance. He hated exercise (and didn’t need it, being that rare breed who neither gains nor loses, but maddeningly stays the same year after year), and preferred lifting mugs of Coors and chasing women to anything resembling sports. The Air Force’s 391st Bomb Wing kept a close eye on Mace, who vocally scoffed at the monthly fitness tests as a waste of time and delighted in pencil-whipping them simply to aggravate the flight surgeons. When the Air Force began using additional duties to evaluate its officers instead of real yardsticks — like job performance, for example — Mace rolled his eyes, usually muttered that it was a “bunch of shit,” and challenged any rule that did not involve flying. For in Daren Mace’s mind, flying ruled the day. Period. No ifs, no ands, no buts.

Despite his attitude, which was a constant thorn in his superiors’ side, no one could deny that Daren Mace was the best. It was why on this day, the opening hours of Desert Storm, Mace was Robert Parsons’ partner. Mace could navigate the hell out of the F-111G bomber, and nobody knew the Aardvark bomber better than he.

Because of his abilities, Mace usually flew the “newbies,” the new pilots in the squadron, until they had enough hours under their belt, usually getting assigned to work with the lower-rated “R” (ready) crews, not the “E” (experienced) or “S” (superior) ones. His independent attitude usually lost him consideration for the more high-profile sorties or exercises. The wing commanders knew where their bread was buttered, and as talented as Mace was, one bad impression on the brass could destroy an entire wing’s reputation … and their careers. So, in effect, Mace was kept in the closet.

“I really can’t believe this,” Mace muttered as he composed, encoded, and keyed the reply message into the AFSATCOM terminal keyboard. “Those stealth fighters were supposed to be such hot shit, and they can’t even hit the target.”

“Take it easy, Daren,” Parsons said to his radar navigator. “What do you expect when the rag-heads have a triple-A on every rooftop in Baghdad? The Goblins aren’t supersonic, you know.”

“Tell me about it,” Mace said. “They couldn’t hit anything in Panama, either. What a waste! If Schwarzkopf wanted the job done right, he should have sent the F-111s in right away.”

“Hey,” Parsons said, “what’s done is done. The -117s had their chance. They blew it. Now it’s up to us.”

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons was the commander of the 710th Bombardment Squadron (Provisional), a Strategic Air Command F-111G medium bombardment squadron secretly deployed to Batman, Turkey. Parsons’ thin gray hair and baggy eyes attested to the high degree of thinking and planning he did in preparation for every mission, from the easiest “cakewalk” training sortie to the toughest combat mission. He had been flying various models of the USAF/General Dynamics F-111 medium bomber for nearly twenty years, but he studied, planned — and, yes, worried — like a cherry lieutenant.

Parsons’ contingent included four bombers, sixteen crewmembers, forty aircraft maintenance and weapons handling personnel, thirty security troops, and five support personnel, but officially his small provisional unit did not exist — in more ways than one. The two F-111G (what had then been known as the FB-111A bomber) bases in the northeast United States had both been closed and the bomb wings disbanded, the result of severe budget cuts enacted long before the Persian Gulf War. The FB-111A supersonic bombers of the Strategic Air Command, in service since 1970, had been transferred to USAF’s Tactical Air Command, upgraded, and redesignated the F-111G, so officially the FB-111A bomber itself did not exist. The four bombers deployed during Desert Storm had been kept in mothballs in storage hangars at McClellan Air Force Base, an aircraft maintenance depot in northern California, when Operation Desert Fire had been executed.

This mission was possibly the last flight of the F-111G. It was no longer the unstoppable supersonic avenger: the winner of more bombing trophies than any other bomber in history, the hero of Operation El Dorado Canyon, the bombing mission against Muhammar Quaddafi of Libya in 1986, and of thousands of successful, precision air raids in Vietnam that forced North Vietnam to the negotiation table. Now it was the advanced warplane no one wanted, the twenty-year combat veteran forgotten in the U.S. military’s current budget crunch, the orphaned stepchild that had never even been given an official nickname.

Even the bomber’s forward operating base in Turkey was a secret. Batman was a Turkish army air base being used by the United States for special operations missions into Baghdad — inserting Special Forces troops deep within Iraq, mounting rescue missions within enemy lines to retrieve downed aircrews, eavesdropping on or jamming Iraqi radio messages, even dropping leaflets with surrender instructions printed on them over Iraqi military bases or over cities. All the American aircraft there, including Parsons’ four orphan “swing-wing” supersonic bombers, were concealed in carefully guarded hangars. The F-111s had flown in directly from California after a grueling twenty-two-hour-long nonstop flight, always flying apart from other Coalition aircraft, to make sure their presence was a strict secret.

Although no one would ever officially know they were there, the tiny unit was destined to play one of the most important — and deadly — roles in this war.

“Spin out our LLEP times so we can arrange to get our last refueling,” Parsons ordered.

“Right,” Mace replied. Using the reference date-time group in the execution message, Mace computed the bombs-away times for their two assigned targets, then backed that time through the flight plan and came up with a time to cross the LLEP, or low-level entry point, then back to the end air-refueling point, then to the air-refueling control point, or ARCP.

The TOT, or time over target, was so close that he would have to hustle to make the air-refueling control time as well as the time over target good within fifteen seconds. No leeway in this flight plan at all.

“Toad One-Five, Toad One-Five, this is Breakdance. CT at 1255. Repeat, ARCT at 1255. How copy?” asked Mace. It took three attempts, fighting through the horrible maze of accents and languages of the Coalition aircraft using the channel — American, British, French, Arab, Australian, even South American — before his tanker’s navigator acknowledged the new rendezvous time.

“This is the shits, Bob,” Mace said. He punched commands into the flight computer, and a box-shaped bug on the heading indicator, called the “captain’s bars,” swung to a northwesterly heading. “Captain’s bars on the ARCT. We gotta be there in fifteen minutes.”

Parsons glanced at the TIME TO DEST readout on the Multi-Function Display on his instrument panel, made a quick mental calculation, and shoved the throttles up nearly to full military power. He then selected HEADING NAV on his autopilot, and the F-111G Aardvark bomber obediently banked left and automatically rolled out on the new heading. “We gotta go balls to the wall to make the LLEP, then push it up to 540 on the low-level. That leaves us very little leeway for … stuff.”

“Stuff” on a low-level combat mission usually meant countering enemy air defenses. Circumnavigating antiaircraft artillery, dodging surface-to-air missiles, and outrunning enemy fighters at treetop level usually gulped a lot of extra fuel, which was rarely accounted for in fuel calculations on a flight plan.

“If we can’t make it, we abort,” Parsons said. “You got the flight-plan range estimates?”

“Right here.” Mace compared the flight-plan fuel calculations with the new fuel-burn figures in his performance manual for the higher airspeeds necessary in the low-level route. “If we get this air refueling, we have plenty of gas,” Mace said. “No abort. We have to abort if we can’t get both external tanks to take gas or if they won’t feed.”

Parsons turned to his partner, gave him a wry smile, and asked, “Praying for a busted boom or bad feed, Daren?”

Answering his squadron commander’s question was a Catch-22: he’d be lying if he answered no, and a coward if he answered yes. Instead, he replied, “If the -117’s had done their job, we wouldn’t be talking about this in the first place, sir.”

The hotshot F-117A stealth fighter jocks from supersecret Tonopah Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, the ones who were flown to and from work in plush airliners and who got promoted just by shaking a few hands and showing their unit patches to gaga-eyed generals, had apparently missed their assigned targets. Just like Panama in 1986: the nonsense about the stealth fighters being used just to “disorient” the Panamanian Defense Forces was hogwash. They missed their targets then, and they missed them again now. That did not sit well with the young F-111G crewdog.

The tanker was late to the air-refueling control point. Parsons and Mace had to wait for their companion aircraft: an EF-111 Raven tactical jamming aircraft, which was a modified F-111 fighter-bomber loaded with state-of-the-art electronic jammers, from the 42nd Electronic Combat Squadron, RAF Upper Heyford, England, deployed to Incirlik. Normally the F-111Gs were accustomed to going into a target alone, but the importance of the mission dictated that it be accompanied by the supersophisticated robin’s-egg-blue jamming aircraft; the EF-111 could fly as far, as fast, and as low as the F-111G, so it would follow Parsons and Mace all the way to its target and back.

All aircraft completed their air refuelings — all tanks refueled and all tanks were feeding, Mace noted with private disappointment, negating an abort — and they turned toward the Iraqi border and made preparations to attack. The EF-111 Raven had its own flight plan, carefully choreographed with Parsons’ and Mace’s, that would both deconflict the two aircraft and put it in position to best defeat any enemy radars that might highlight the Aardvark bomber. That was okay with Mace — he didn’t like having to worry about watching a wingman during night formation flying anyway.

They had ten minutes to fly to the low-level entry point, and they did so at just below the speed of sound to try to get their time pad back. On this mission, timing was not just important — it was a matter of life or death. Not just for Parsons and Mace, but for the hundreds of other aircraft that would be airborne over southern and central Iraq when Mace completed his bomb release. The ten minutes to the start-descent point was wall-to-wall checklists: TFR (Terrain-Following Radar) Confidence Check, cockpit check, route briefing, and fuel tank jettison checklists.

“Tanks gone,” Mace announced. He refigured all switches to normal, then announced, “Weapons coming unlocked.”

Using the unlock code from the execution message, Mace used yet another decoding book, broke out the six-digit weapons prearming code, and entered it into a code panel. Two minutes later, a green ENABLE light illuminated on the weapons arming panel. He then accomplished a weapons connectivity and continuity check on the weapons, checking that full electrical and data transfer capabilities were intact, then put the weapon arming panel from OFF to SAFE.

“Gimme consent,” Mace said.

Parsons reached around to his left instrument panel, twisted a thin wire seal off from a red switch guard, opened the guard, and flipped the lone switch up. “Consent switch up.”

Mace clicked the interphone, reached to his weapons arming panel, twisted a similar safety wire off a sliding silver switch, and moved the switch to CONSENT. In nuclear-capable aircraft, as in all American nuclear launch systems from sixty-pound battlefield shells to hundred-ton intercontinental ballistic missiles to two-thousand-ton nuclear submarines, two physically separate switches had to be activated before the weapons could be prearmed. Mace moved the large knob on the weapon arming panel from SAFE to GND RET. Two white switchlights on the weapon status panel illuminated; both read AGM-131X. He moved the missile select switch on the missile control panel to ALL and the silver arming switch from its center OFF position up to ARM. The status indication on the panel changed from SAFE to PREARM.

“If this shit wasn’t so serious,” Mace said to Parsons, “I’d swear I could hear ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ right now, just like in Dr. Strangelove.”

“Right,” Parsons said, his voice low and tense. “What have you got?”

“Weapons prearmed, racks locked,” Mace replied. “Double-check my switches.” He swiveled a small reading lamp down to the weapons arming panel so Parsons could check the indications, then he began composing another coded message to inform the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command headquarters that he had successfully prearmed his weapons…

… Two thermonuclear AGM-131X Short-Range Attack Missiles.

“Checked,” Parsons said uneasily. He sank back into his seat, and realized that he had just witnessed an historical event — this was the first time that a combat aircraft had prepared thermonuclear weapons for use since World War II. Plenty of aircraft had launched with nuclear weapons aboard during the Cold War, and there had been accidental releases and airplane crashes with atomic weapons on board, but this was the first time that a thermonuclear weapon had been prearmed and made ready for attack. It was all because the twelve F-117 stealth fighters, with their load of two-thousand-pound bombs, had failed to destroy one single building near the provincial capital city of Karbala, about fifty miles southwest of Baghdad and thirty miles west-northwest of the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. Along with a large military base, railroad yard, warehouses, and a large military airfield, Karbala was the site for one of the world’s most sophisticated military command posts. It was a deep underground reinforced-concrete bunker that reportedly controlled all of Iraq’s fixed and mobile offensive rocket forces — nearly three hundred medium-range SS-1 Scud missiles, over one hundred short-range SS-7 Frog missiles, and an unknown number of SS-12 Scaleboard missiles, a tactical nuclear-tipped surface-to-surface missile purchased from the USSR after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the United States. Each weapon could carry a high-explosive warhead — or biological, chemical, nerve agent, or even nuclear warheads — that could quickly devastate Coalition forces.

Karbala had to be destroyed early in the conflict, before Iraq could mount a heavy missile assault on Saudi Arabia, or the Coalition airfields near the Iraqi border, or Israel. If Saddam was foolish enough to launch Scud missiles against Israel, she would almost certainly use nuclear weapons to stop the Iraqi war machine. It was so important that Karbala be destroyed, that Iraq not launch any Scuds on Israel, that Israel not enter the war, that the United States planned the ultimate contingency mission — employ a low-yield nuclear device against Iraq.

Except for the standard nuclear strike weapons on board Navy ships, the two AGM-131X missiles aboard Mace and Parsons’ bomber were the only thermonuclear weapons deployed as part of Desert Shield and now fielded as part of Desert Storm. The warhead of each missile was a “subatomic device,” a very low-power weapon with a yield of less than one kiloton, or one thousand tons of TNT — about one-twentieth the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but still packing the same explosive power of fifty fully loaded B-52 bombers carrying non-nuclear weapons.

Mace knew the delivery procedures — he had practiced them often enough back home. The missile would be launched from low altitude, climb to fifty or sixty thousand feet with the power of its dual-pulse solid rocket motors, then follow a ballistic path to its target, steered by its inertial navigation system and the superaccurate, satellite-based Global Positioning System. The missile would fly for about forty miles — plenty of room for Mace and Parsons to escape the blast effects.

Only one missile was planned to be launched; the second missile was a backup. Mace had seen charts predicting the fallout path, likely contaminated areas, and a list of things that might happen when the electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) hit, but the bottom line was much simpler — there was going to be widespread, global fear, panic, and a bloody outcry directed against the United States, the Pentagon, the Air Force, and him.

The Pentagon planned, and the White House hoped, that Iraq would sue for peace immediately after that attack.

While speeding toward their low-level entry point, Mace had tuned his HF (high-frequency) radio to the Israel National Radio broadcasts from Tel Aviv — everyone stationed in the Middle East knew the INR’s HF single sideband frequency, 6330, by heart, as well as the Voice of America (2770) and the BBC (3890) — and a few minutes later they got the confirmation they had been dreading: “Fuck. Just heard it on the INR, Bob,” Mace told Parsons. “ ‘VIPER SNAKE.’ Tel Aviv and Haifa were hit by Scud missiles.” VIPER SNAKE was the Israeli code word to all its military posts of a mass attack against the country. “Report says that the missiles that hit in Tel Aviv were carrying chemical warheads. Israel is launching attack aircraft.”

“You’re shitting me,” Parsons said. He knew that civilian news broadcasts should never, never be used as sources of official information, but the report only seemed to confirm the orders they had already received from the Pentagon. “Boy, never thought they’d do it.”

“One thing about ol’ Saddam,” Mace pointed out, “is that he’s never failed to do something he said he’d do. He told everyone he’d destroy Israel if Iraq was invaded. I hope he’s under this SRAM when we cook it off.” Mace checked his bomber’s chronometer: “The Scud missiles hit shortly after four A.M. We got our execution message about ten minutes after the missiles hit. Christ, the brass didn’t waste any time.”

“Looks like we were primed to do this mission right from the start,” Parsons pointed out. “We haven’t heard much from Israel during the military buildup — we must be Israel’s secret guarantee that Saddam won’t destroy her.”

Mace was silent for a moment, then said over interphone, “Well, that’s typical of the brass — do a fucking back-door deal and keep us in the dark, then let us drop the nuke and bear the guilt of obliterating thousands while they sit back, smoke their cigars, and slap each other on the backs for a job well done. Then it’s off to the White House for victory cocktails with the Old Man. The bastards.”

Parsons knew the aggravation Mace was going through. He was feeling it himself, as well as a slow, sinking queasiness in his stomach that he hadn’t felt for some time — not since ’Nam, when he’d seen little Vietnamese children running through the rains of fiery napalm — ordered by the brass — burning their flesh to the core. It had sickened him then, as this sickened him now. But he was an officer serving his country, with a job to do. The President — their Commander in Chief — had ordered it and they would do it.

“Daren, I don’t like the thought of it any more than you do. But we are going to do it. You’ve trained for this. You knew there was a chance we’d have to when you stepped into the cockpit.”

“Christ, but I never …”

“Listen to me,” Parsons snapped. “You signed on for this just as I did. Nobody put a gun to your head. If you’re gonna flake out on me, say it now, before we head into Indian country.”

“And what if I don’t want to?” fumed Mace. “Killing thousands upon thousands of people …”

“Then we turn around. Our careers will be over. We’ll spend ten years in prison breaking big rocks into little rocks, and then we’ll receive dishonorable discharges. No one in their right mind would launch a nuke, but we’d be treated as cowards and pariahs for the rest of our lives because we refused to follow orders.” He turned to his radar navigator and added, “After all these years in the Air Force, are you so afraid to die that you would give up all you have, all you’ve accomplished …?”

“I’m not afraid to die, Colonel,” Mace answered firmly, “and I’m not afraid of becoming a pariah. What I don’t like doing is something completely abhorrent simply because I’ve received a message to do so.”

Parsons said, “You know, Major, you should’ve sorted out all that before you stepped into the cockpit, before you volunteered for duty overseas, before you joined the bomb squadron. Sixty minutes from our TOT is not the time to have second thoughts. But let me tell you something: I’m not going to risk my life flying in combat with someone who’s not giving me one hundred percent. I don’t want to spend ten years in prison, but I don’t want to die needlessly because my nav is having a guilt attack. We either both say ‘go,’ or we abort and pay the piper back home. Do we go — or do we turn back?”

Mace looked at the time-to-go indicator on his Multi-Function Display — only three minutes to the LLEP. The EF-111 Raven would have already zipped out ahead, scanning for enemy threats and shutting down enemy SAM sites and long-range fighter-intercept radars.

The war is on, Mace thought. The Iraqis invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia and Israel. He was committed long before he had received that execution message.

“We go,” Mace said.

“You sure, Daren?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.” He fastened his oxygen mask in place, slipped on his fingerless Nomex flying gloves, and nodded to his aircraft commander. “ ‘Before TF Descent’ checklist when you’re ready.…”

While still one hundred miles from the Iraqi border, the crew of the F-111G fighter-bomber, call sign “Breakdance,” began a rapid descent to terrain-following altitude.

They were still thirty miles in Turkish airspace when the AN/APS-109B radar homing and warning receiver (RHAWS) blared, and an “S” symbol appeared at the top edge of the circular RHAWS display. The unit had been displaying several “H” symbols, arrayed along the border — these were American-made Hawk antiaircraft missile sites, operated by the Turkish Army. The line of H symbols clearly outlined the border. But the S symbol was new, and it was not friendly.

“Search radar, twelve o’clock,” Mace reported. “Threat detection system is on, trackbreakers off.” The bomber’s internal AN/ALQ-137 internal electronic countermeasures system, called trackbreakers by the crews, was an automatic noise/deception jammer system that was effective on short-range, low-power radars like airborne missile guidance radars and mobile surface-to-air missile systems, but virtually powerless against big, heavy, ground-based radars like enemy search or fighter-intercept control radars — that was the reason Mace kept it off. The EF-111 Raven electronic-warfare aircraft escorting them was designed to jam these radars anyway. “Ready to step it down?”

“Give me four hundred,” Parsons said.

Mace twisted the terrain-following knob two clicks to the left, and the big F-111G bomber nosed gently toward the dark, unseen ground below. They were now flying only four hundred feet above the rugged terrain, screened from view of all but the closest and most powerful enemy radars. Seconds later, they crossed into enemy territory — and the real terror began.

The border region between Turkey and Iraq was one of the most heavily fortified in the world, with over 120,000 troops spread out on both sides along the two-hundred-mile frontier. As the friendly Hawk radar symbols disappeared on the radar warning receiver, they were replaced by “A” and “3” symbols — these were Iraqi antiaircraft artillery units and Soviet-built SA-3 mobile surface-to-air missile batteries, deployed with the Iraqi border army units to guard against hostile aircraft. Neither was a great threat to the fast, low-flying F-111G, but there seemed to be a solid wall of A symbols ahead. “We can’t go around them,” Mace said. “C’mon, Raven buddy, don’t let us down.”

“Give me two hundred, hard ride,” Parsons shouted over the continuous deedle deeedle deeedle of the radar warning system. Every time a new triple-A system appeared on the scope, the warning tone blared. Soon there were five, ten, then more than a dozen A symbols on the RHAWS scope, aligned straight ahead. Occasionally they could see intermittent bursts of heavy-caliber gunfire slicing the darkness outside, but it was random and just sweeping aimlessly across the sky — obviously the EF-111 was doing its job. Mace clicked the TF switch twice to the left, then moved the large center RIDE knob from NORMAL to HARD — this would command steeper climbs and descents over the mountains. At night, in rugged terrain, and while under attack, this was the most difficult flying imaginable for a bomber crew.

“Two hundred hard ride set,” Mace reported. “High terrain, six miles, not painting over it … five miles … four miles … give me twenty left to go around this sucker.”

In his attack radar, a high mountain peak resembled a yellow ripple across the screen, with black beyond it. The black indicated how high above the bomber’s flight path the terrain was: if the black receded as they approached, the bomber was climbing over the peak; if the black grew larger and began to stretch toward the top of the scope, the bomber would eventually hit the hill. At two hundred feet aboveground, there was a lot of black on the scope.

Parsons thumbed a button on the control stick, which briefly disconnected the heading control portion of the autopilot to allow for minor course corrections (without disabling the critical terrain-following and fail-safe flyup features of the autopilot), and edged the control stick left. When they were clear of the hill, Parsons released the NWS/AP HOLD switch, and the bomber automatically swung right toward the next turnpoint.

“We got triple-A at two o’clock, just outside lethal range,” Mace announced. “SA-3 search radar, one o’clock, outside lethal range. Sirsenk army air garrison.” Sirsenk was the northernmost air base in Iraq, but more importantly Sirsenk protected the northern edge of the Torosular mountain range. “High terrain, eleven miles, not painting over it.”

Parsons did not acknowledge all those important calls.

“Sirsenk now at three o’clock. Still got an SA-3 up, but it’s not locked on,” Mace reported. It was Mace’s job to coordinate the terrain outside — which Parsons could not see with the naked eye — with Parsons’ only terrain indicator, the “E-scope” on the forward instrument panel. The E-scope painted a distorted one-dimensional picture of the terrain ahead, with a squiggly line depicting the bomber’s flight path; if the terrain broke the line, they would hit the ground. Mace would call out terrain ahead until Parsons saw it on the E-scope and could confirm that the bomber’s terrain-following autopilot was responding properly. Also, Mace had to coordinate all that with the radar threat scope and with the flight plan route — it wouldn’t do any good to successfully avoid a hill only to fly right into lethal range of an SA-3 missile or “ack-ack” artillery battery, or fly so far off course as to get off time or miss the target area completely.

Suddenly, just a few miles ahead, a streak of antiaircraft artillery fire lit up the sky. Streams of tracer bullets seared the darkness. Parsons unconsciously swung farther left to fly away from the tracers, and the bomber’s nose zoomed upward.

“Don’t turn left!” Mace shouted. “High terrain to the east!”

Parsons’ throat turned dry — he thought he could feel the jagged, frozen rocks scraping the bomber’s belly as they crested yet another ridgeline. The hard-ride TF autopilot yanked the bomber’s nose into the darkness of a crevasse so abruptly that both crewmembers felt light in their seats, as if they were momentarily weightless.

“Those tracers looked like they were firing well to the south of us,” Mace pointed out. “It must be the Raven beating the bushes for us. Those guys will never buy another beer in their lives as long as I’m around.” As the radar warning receiver scope cleared, Mace deselected the four jammer switchlights, shutting off the ECM system until the next threat.

The first half of the Torosular mountain range was one hundred nautical miles long, and at nine miles per minute it was the hairiest ten-minute ride of Mace’s life. The tops of the ridges were sometimes two thousand feet higher than the bomber’s flight level, and some mountain passes narrowed to less than twelve thousand feet wide or ended abruptly with a one-thousand-foot sheer wall of rock. Parsons had to go to zone 3 afterburner a few times to safely clear a ridgeline — losing an engine while climbing fifteen thousand feet per minute over a jagged ridge would mean certain death — and they knew that the bright afterburner plume only increased their chances of detection, even in these desolate mountains.

“Better step it up to one thousand feet,” Parsons said. “We’re safe for now in these mountains, and we can’t afford to use blowers to help us get over these ridges.”

“Amen to that,” Mace said, quickly resetting the TF ride switch to the higher clearance plane. As they inched higher above the rugged mountains, he could breathe a bit easier as the effective range of his radarscope expanded from just a few miles to almost twenty miles. “Got a three-hundred-foot FIXMAG on the last fix,” Mace said to Parsons. “System’s running pretty well.” The FIXMAG was the difference between the radar position fix and the computer’s position — a three-hundred-foot difference after thirty minutes of hard maneuvering was very good. With a new, accurate radar update in the system and the bomb-nav system running well, Mace could afford to take his mind off the navigation system for a while and concentrate on getting ready for the missile launch run — the most important one of his life.

Things were quiet in the cockpit at the moment, and they were at the higher clearance plane setting, so Parsons said, “Good. Station check, oxygen and switches.”

“Roger.” A station check was a quick but thorough and coordinated check of all the cockpit instruments and systems, and all the personal systems in use.

The entire check took about thirty seconds: “Checks over here,” Parsons said as he checked the autopilot and flight controls by “stirring the pot” with the control stick and jockeying the throttles.

Mace nodded and gave his partner a thumbs-up. “Everything looks—”

He never finished his short sentence. A loud, fast deedledeedledeedledeedledeedle erupted in the interphone, and a circle with a flashing “9” was centered in the middle of the RHAWS radar warning receiver. At the same time, bright-yellow MISSILE WARNING and MISSILE ALERT lights on the forward instrument panel illuminated.

TWO

“Jesus!” Mace shouted, “SA-9 missile launch!”

He reached up to the ECM panel with both hands, depressing the jammer switchlights; at the same time, he used three fingers of his right hand and hit the L CHAFF and R CHAFF and FLARE buttons, which would pop white-hot magnesium flares and bundles of tinsel-like strips of metal from the AN/ALE-28 dispensers to decoy radar- and heat-seeking missiles fired at them.

“Chaff! Flares!” Mace shouted. It was vital to make the SA-9’s “Dog Ear” surveillance radar break lock, because once the SA-9 missile launched it almost never missed. “Break! Accelerate! Descend! I’m ready on the TFs!”

“Two hundred hard ride!” Parsons shouted. As Mace twisted the TF clearance plane knob back to two hundred feet, Parsons swept the wings back to 72 degrees and cobbed the throttles to full military power, then into zone 5 afterburner. “Clear my turn!”

“Go right!” Mace shouted. Parsons threw the bomber into a 120-degree bank turn to the right and the bomber knifed downward. As the bank angle exceeded 45 degrees, the automatic safety fly-up feature of the terrain-following radar system commanded a full pitch-up maneuver, but because they were nearly upside down, the fly-up only helped to drag the nose earthward — Parsons used that fly-up to quickly lose altitude. He held that altitude for three full seconds, then abruptly rolled upright and pulled the throttles out of afterburner and back to military power.

“Chaff! Flares!” Parsons shouted, after he was sure the TFs were in control of the bomber’s altitude. When he saw Mace punch the ejector buttons, he made another hard bank, this time to the left, pulling on the control stick and letting the fly-up pull the nose left so hard that the bomber began to stall. When the stall-warning horn blared, Parsons relaxed the back pressure on the stick. “Find the missile!” he shouted.

Mace was practically climbing up the back of his ejection seat and onto the canopy, searching behind and to all sides for any sign of an SA-9 missile in flight. But the missile weighed only seventy pounds and was only six feet long, and unless you were very lucky it was impossible to acquire it visually. “Nothing!” Mace shouted. The blinking 9 and the MISSILE WARNING light were still going, so Parsons had to assume that the SA-9 missile was still in flight and still tracking them. He shouted for chaff and flares again, and threw the bomber into a gut-wrenching break to the right so hard that Mace’s head slammed against the center cockpit beam.

The flashing 9 was still on the radar warning receiver. “Radar’s still up!” Parsons shouted. “Check the trackbreakers!”

Mace ran his fingers across the ALQ-135 control switches and found two buttons had not been depressed. As soon as he pressed them in fully, their XMIT (transmit) lights came on, meaning that they had detected the SA-9’s tracking radar and were jamming it.

The 9 symbol in the radar warning receiver scope went out a second later — right in the nick of time. Mace saw the rapid flash of light above and to their left as the SA-9 missile careened past them and exploded harmlessly about fifty feet away. “Fuck! It just blew up to the left! One more second and we would’ve been toast.”

“Get ready for another launch!” Parsons said. “Those SA-9s got four rounds per unit.” He had just finished that sentence when the 9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light illuminated once again. Parsons pushed the throttles to zone 3 afterburner, yelled, “Chaff! Flares!” and made a hard jink to the right as Mace pressed the ejector buttons. He then checked the trackbreaker buttons and noticed the XMIT lights on, indicating that their jammers were working. Seconds later the MISSILE WARNING light and 9 symbol on the threat scope went out. “I think we lost it.”

“I see it! I see the missile!” Mace shouted. Far off to the right and behind them, a streak of light from the tiny splash of light that was Bashur army air base raced across the darkness, crossing ahead of them from right to left. It was followed a split-second later by two more shots. Just before the F-111G bomber ducked behind a ridgeline, Mace could see a stream of tiny blobs of light fly off into space. “Flares!” he shouted. “It must be the Raven! He’s dropping flares!”

“Clear my turn, Daren,” Parsons said. He wanted back into the protective radar clutter of the mountains right now.

Mace checked his radarscope. “Very high terrain to the left,” he said. “Get your nose up to clear it. One ridgeline and then we’ll be down in the next valley and away from Bashur.”

“How much do I have to climb?”

“It’ll be about a thousand feet, but we’re really close … nose up, Bob, and give it some juice … high terrain three miles, not painting over it … check your fuckin’ wing sweep.”

The AN/APQ-134 terrain-following radar system was issuing its audible climb/descent cues, a low-pitched boop boop boop in a descent and a high-pitched beep beep beep when signaling a climb was necessary, and the rate of the sound was commensurate with the rate of climb or descent. Right now the TFR audio was beeping so fast that it sounded like one continuous tone. Parsons had to shove in zone 5 afterburner and move the wings from 72 degrees (full aft) to 54 degrees, then to about 30 degrees, to get the heavyweight bomber over the ridge without stalling.

They ballooned over the ridge traveling less than three hundred knots — only about a hundred knots above their stall speed. The TFR audio switched to a steady boop boop boop and the nose eased over. For a moment the SA-9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light came on, but it went out almost immediately as they nosed lower. “Steering’s good to the next point, Bob. Gimme thirty.”

There was a bright flash of light and a fiery streak not more than five or six miles ahead. The winks of flames could be seen clearly, like a big, slow meteor. At the same moment they heard on the tactical command radio channel, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Windfall, we are hit, we are hit. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”

Then there was nothing. Mace could not see the streak of fire impact before the terrain blocked his view.

“God damn …”

“They got out,” Parsons said quickly. “I thought I heard the pyros going off in the background.”

Mace heard no sounds of the EF-111’s escape capsule blowing free of the stricken jet, but he wasn’t going to argue. “They took a missile meant for us,” he said soberly. “I’m sending a Glass Eye report. Better step it to a thousand feet.” As Parsons gently climbed the bomber to a safer altitude, Mace recalled a canned Glass Eye aircraft-down report from his AFSATCOM computer, inserted the EF-111’s approximate position and time, and transmitted the report. The report would go to Washington first, but the brass in Washington would eventually flash the message to Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia so they could arrange a rescue sortie. Normally an E-3 AWACS radar plane would be tracking the planes and would call in a search and rescue mission, but Mace and Parsons and the crew of the EF-111 from Incirlik had no AWACS following them. “Message sent.”

Parsons checked his BNS time-to-go readout: “I’ve got thirty minutes to the IP. Station check.”

Mace called up the “SRAM Air Operations Page” on the CDU (Control and Display Unit) on his right-side instrument panel and double-checked that both missiles were prearmed and ready to fly. “Weapons unlocked,” he told Parsons.

“Copy,” Parsons said. “Daren, make sure those suckers are in manual.”

Mace bristled. He paused a bit, then touched the floor-mounted interphone switch with his left foot: “I got it, Bob.”

“Just check the damned switch,” Parsons snapped.

“I said I got it.”

“Check the fucking switch!” Parsons shouted.

Mace had never seen Parsons this rattled. Normally the weapons belonged to the nav, and the aircraft belonged to the pilot, and rarely did either one question the other’s responsibilities — but one look from the pilot made Mace hold his tongue. Parsons was obviously still hoping that this deadly mission would be called off, and the last thing he wanted was the nuclear-tipped missile to launch before the White House had a chance to terminate it.

“Hey, you keep the damned plane out of the rocks and I’ll worry about the weapons,” Mace said. But if the pilot wanted to double- and triple-check switches, that was fine with him. Mace put his hand on the launch mode switch — it was in MANUAL, and the bombing system switch was OFF. “Manual and off, Bob,” Mace said. He paused for a moment, then added, “I got this bomb run wired, Bob, so ease up.”

“I want full control of those missiles, Daren,” Parsons said. “Full control. That switch doesn’t leave manual under any circumstances.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Mace replied. “Chill out.”

Parsons nodded, then flexed his right hand on the control stick as if to relieve the tension in his arm and hand. “Sorry, Daren. Station check.”

This time the cockpit and instrument check found a malfunction, and a serious one: “Shit. The fuel totalizer is reading zero. I’ve got the fuel feed selector switch in ‘wing,’ “ Mace reported.

“What?” Still at terrain-following altitudes but one thousand feet above ground, Parsons checked the total fuel gauge — it read zero, with both body tank needles at zero. “Dammit, jettisoning the tanks must’ve shorted out the fuel gauge electronics.”

“Shit, we’ve been dumping fuel overboard,” Mace interjected. The automatic fuel management system worked off the gauge’s needles, automatically maintaining a proper center-of-gravity balance between the forward and aft fuel tanks. If the forward-tank needle was too low, pumps would transfer fuel to the forward tank to prevent a dangerous aft center of gravity — but if the needle had malfunctioned and the forward tank was in reality already full, fuel would spill overboard through overflow vents. “It’s been a long time since we punched the tanks off.”

“Three minutes, at five hundred pounds per minute — that’s fifteen hundred pounds of fuel we could’ve lost,” Parsons figured. “How does that work on the fuel curve?”

Mace had been copying down the fuel readings on almost every turnpoint on the flight plan, comparing the flight plan’s fuel figures to their actual ones. “We were two thousand short the last time I took a reading,” Mace said. “This puts us three point five below the curve. We were flight planned to recover with six thousand.”

“And we can recover with no less than two thousand, according to the mission directives,” Parsons said. “We’re still five hundred pounds on the ‘go’ side.”

“Five hundred pounds ain’t spit, Bob,” Mace retorted. “The gauges can be off by a thousand pounds at least. We’ve got a no-shit emergency here. If we start losing body tank pumps or lose the generators, we can have an aft CG problem so fast—”

“But we haven’t lost any pumps,” Parsons insisted. “The system’s working fine in manual. We got no choice but to continue.”

“Maybe so,” Mace said, “but I’ll report the malfunction on SATCOM and ask for instructions. They can still abort us.”

“No one makes a decision to abort this mission except me,” Parsons snapped.

Mace turned to his pilot in absolute surprise.

“The Pentagon can either recall or terminate this mission, but it cannot order us to abort because of a systems malfunction. You got that, Major?”

“Hey, Colonel, “ Mace said. “This plane didn’t come with just one seat. It came with two. It’s a crew decision to abort.”

“I decide where this warplane goes and when,” Parsons declared. “Your job is to maintain the navigation and bombing systems and assist me.”

“Hey, don’t tell me what my job is,” Mace retorted. “I don’t know when you developed this emperor complex.”

“About the same time you chickened out,” Parsons shot back. “You’ve wanted to turn tail and run ever since we got executed. You probably noticed that gauge malfunction a long time ago.”

“That’s bullshit,” Mace said angrily. “I don’t dump my computers or roll weapons on purpose, and I’m sure as hell not afraid to do this mission. We have instructions to transmit status messages anytime we have a serious aircraft or weapons malfunction, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He immediately began composing a status message and transmitted it to the Pentagon via AFSATCOM; Parsons could do nothing but monitor the instruments.

The bomber’s flight path took them just east of Dukan Reservoir in eastern Iraq, then directly south between the cities of Kirkuk and As-Sulaymaniyah, but no missile launch indications were received.

They were now out of the Torosular Mountains and into the endless desert plains, only fifteen minutes to the missile launch point. Without the mountains to hide them, it seemed as if the entire Arabian Peninsula was visible to them — and, in turn, every fighter pilot, radar operator, and gunner in Iraq could see them, yet no dangerous radar emissions locked on to them.

A yellow light marked SATCOM RCV blinked on the forward instrument panel, and Mace waited impatiently as a thin strip of thermal paper rolled out of the printer. Parsons’ attention was riveted on the instruments as they zoomed around low, rocky outcroppings and dove into dry riverbeds, but every now and then he sneaked a peek at his partner as Mace decoded the message: “Acknowledging our rescue and aircraft status messages,” Mace said a few moments later. “No other orders.”

Parsons said nothing.

The bomber skirted the Iraq-Iran border east of the As Sa’ Diyah Reservoir, and it was here, near the city of Tolafarush, that they were “tapped” by their first fighter. A search radar with a height-finder from Subakhu found them and locked on. “Search radar … height-finder item of interest. Descend and accelerate.”

“Clear me on those power lines and a left turn,” Parsons said. “Stand by on chaff.”

“Clear left and clear for two hundred feet,” Mace said, checking the radar. Power lines and transmission towers showed up fairly well on the AN/APQ-114 attack radar, but the AN/APQ-134 terrain-following radar sometimes had trouble with them. He switched the TFR clearance plane to two hundred feet and punched out chaff as Parsons banked steeply left. “More power lines at twelve o’clock. We gotta climb in about sixty seconds. Twelve minutes to the launch point. We accelerate to six hundred in two.”

“I’m already at six hundred,” Parsons reported. The exasperated tone in his voice told Mace that he was thinking the same thing — the earlier they went to higher power settings, the farther behind they’d be on the fuel curve. Their five-hundred-pound fuel margin to bingo would be eaten up in no time, and then he’d have no choice but to abort the mission — but by then they’d be in the center of the air defense beehive of Baghdad, risking their necks for nothing. But Parsons had already made his decision, and he wasn’t about to give the likes of Daren Mace the opportunity to be right. Parsons took a firmer grip on the control stick, swallowed hard, and added, “We’re continuing. Gimme a countdown on those power lines.”

Boy, Parsons would rather bust the minimums than do a fuel abort now, Mace decided. Something really serious was going to have to happen before Parsons would call this mission off.

Resigned to keep his mouth shut and press on, Mace turned back to the attack radar: “Roger. Range five miles. Thirty—” Just then an inverted “V” symbol appeared on the RHAWS scope, along with a high-pitched fast warbling tone. “Fighter at our three o’clock,” Mace said. The symbol stayed on the scope and moved from the three to four o’clock position. At the same time, a yellow warning light marked MISSILE WARNING illuminated, and an “I” symbol appeared on the RHAWS scope, indicating that the AN/AAR-34 infrared warning receiver, a supercooled heat-seeking eye that scanned behind the bomber looking for enemy aircraft, was tracking the fighter. “He’s locked on … Jesus! Climb now!”

He had almost forgotten about the power lines, and the TFR radar had not commanded on them. Less than two seconds before impact, Parsons hauled back on the control stick. Mace was slammed back in his seat, then slammed into the centerline rail as Parsons executed a steep right bank, then pressed down into his seat as the TFR system pulled them out of the steep descent back to two hundred feet above ground. Parsons was yelling “Chaff! Chaff!” as the radar warning tone continued to sound.

“Unload, dammit!” Mace shouted. The G-forces from the violent turns were preventing Mace from reaching the ejector buttons.

Parsons decreased his bank angle slightly, allowing Mace to reach the chaff/flares ejector panel, but Parsons was reaching for it first: “Dammit, Daren, punch that chaff out before I turn!” The fighter “bat-wing” symbol was still present and still locked on to them, so Parsons hit two chaff buttons and then reversed turn and jinked left. The bat-wing symbol disappeared — they had successfully broken the fighter radar’s lock. It only made Mace feel even more helpless and edgy to watch his pilot activating the switches he, not Parsons, was responsible for. “I’ll kick your ass all the way back to New Hampshire if you don’t get with it,” yelled Parsons.

“Fuck y—” Another high-pitched warbling tone erupted in the interphone, followed by a red MISSILE LAUNCH light. When the AN/AAR-34 infrared threat sensor was locked on to a target behind them and then detected a second pulse of energy, it interpreted that second flash as a heat-seeking missile launch. As it notified the crew, the system automatically ejected chaff and flare decoys. Parsons shoved the throttles to max afterburner, banked left, and pulled on the control stick, squishing Mace into his seat. The sudden, rapid-fire changes in direction made Mace’s head spin, and for the first time he found himself completely disoriented — his inner ear was telling him he was turning, his seat told him he was not turning but descending, and his eyes were believing both of them. For the first time in his flying career, he felt an uncontrollable wave of nausea wash over him, and he ripped his oxygen mask off just before vomiting on the control console between his legs.

“Flares! Flares!” Parsons screamed as he reversed his turn. The stall-warning horn was blaring — even though they were careening through the night sky at well over seven miles per minute, the wings at full-aft position, and. the airspeed bleeding off during the tight turns meant a drastic loss of lift. Mace jabbed his thumb at the flare ejector button, then gripped tightly to the glare shield and stared at the standby attitude indicator on the front instrument panel to reorient himself.

Although the engines were roaring, in and out of afterburner power, Mace could feel the aircraft sinking as Parsons held the bomber right on the edge of the stall — the airplane wasn’t flying anymore, it was wallowing. “Stall horn!” Mace shouted over interphone. Parsons looked as if he was fighting the stall-inhibiting system, which was trying to lower the nose to regain flying speed. “Get the nose down! Wing sweep!”

Parsons finally shook himself out of his panic, grasped the wing sweep handle, and shoved the wings forward past the 54-degree lockout and all the way to 24 degrees. He also eased up on the back pressure on the control stick. The Aardvark’s nose was still ungainfully high in the air — it was as if they were on final approach to landing, and flying almost that slow. The stall-warning horn was still blaring, but the plane felt solid and stable again. “Find that fighter!” Parsons shouted.

Mace checked the RHAWS scope — it was clear, with no symbols except for intermittent “S” symbols denoting the search radars at Subakhu, now several miles behind them. He switched the RHAWS briefly to IRT mode, looking for a small white dot that would be the system tracking the fighter, but it was clear. Just to be certain, he scanned the dark skies outside the cockpit, although he knew it was impossible to see a fighter out there at night unless he was just a few feet away. “We’re clear,” he told Parsons.

“When I say ‘chaff,’ Daren, you better give it to me,” Parsons said irritably. “Get your head out of the radarscope and you won’t get airsick. If you punch out chaff and flares while we’re in the turn instead of before we turn, the missile will fly right up our ass.” Mace was too dazed and dizzy to argue, but he continued monitoring the threat scope and scanning the skies as they continued at two hundred feet above the desert floor toward the launch point.

The numbers of ground-based early warning and missile radars decreased rapidly — south of Baghdad there didn’t seem to be any at all. But Mace had no time to think about that — once they headed west and crossed the Tigris, they were on the missile launch run.

“Missile select switch to ‘all,’ status check … all missiles powered up, prearmed, and ready. Racks unlocked and ready,” Mace reported as he ran the Before Missile Launch checklist. “Missile target data checked. Launch mode switch in manual. Bomb door mode switch auto. Consent switch.”

“Consent switch up, guard closed,” Parsons reported.

“Copy. Checklist complete. Three minutes to launch point.”

It was less than one hour to sunrise, and the brightening sky began to reveal more and more details of the battle-scarred country below, and more details of the raging battle that was Desert Storm. One by one, Mace could see the gleaming office buildings and towers of Baghdad far to the north, the ancient city of Al Hillah, the ruins of Babylon ahead — and, to his complete amazement, aircraft filling the skies overhead. “Bogeys, one o’clock high,” Mace reported. “More at ten to eleven o’clock high. All heading northbound. Nothing on the RHAWS — they must be friendlies.” He paused for a moment, then said, “They’re heading north, Bob — they’re heading right toward the target. Right towards Karbala.”

“I’m standing by for the safe-in-range light, Mace. You got the launch point fix?”

Parsons was ignoring the obvious — there were friendlies flying within the lethal zone of a nuclear blast. Obviously someone had screwed up, and it wouldn’t be too great to nuke a bunch of Coalition aircraft. “What time do you have, Bob?” Mace asked.

“Jesus, Mace …” Parsons scowled.

“Dammit, Bob, there’s got to be a reason all these other aircraft are here. Maybe I screwed up the time. When I thought we were late before, maybe I got it backwards and we’re really early.”

“You didn’t screw up anything,” Parsons said. He pointed at the SATCOM clock on the forward instrument panel, which had Zulu time set for satellite synchronization. “That time checks with my watch. Now, unless we both got bad time hacks, we’re dead on time. But if you got a bad time hack and set a bad time in the SATCOM receiver, we wouldn’t have gotten anything on SATCOM. We received a message, you sent a message, and it was received and acknowledged. Everything’s on schedule. I don’t know why those other planes are up there, but it’s not my problem — this mission, and getting my butt back on friendly territory in one piece, is my only concern right now. Now, get back on the damn bomb run.”

“Whatever you say,” Mace muttered. Mace took his eyes off the nearby Coalition aircraft and went back into the radarscope: “Stand by for launch point fix.” Mace stepped the bombing computers to the launch point fix and selected the first offset aimpoint. After refining his aiming, he selected a second aimpoint, a tomb fifteen miles south of the dry lakebed. A semicircle of seven forts and tombs surrounded the lone tomb, so identification was positive.

Mace switched the radar to GND VEL to magnify the radar image, carefully laid the crosshairs dead on target, then reduced the range and selected offset three, a transmission tower just west of another lone tomb just twenty miles southeast of Karbala. The transmission line could be seen on radar as a thin, silvery sparkling line across the scope, making a definite jog southwestward where the right transmission tower was. The crosshairs were dead on. “I got the lead-in aimpoints,” he told Parsons as he reconfigured the radar to wide field-of-view. “Checking switches. Launch mode switch is in.”

Suddenly, on the international emergency GUARD channel, they heard, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Nightmare. Stop launch, stop launch. I repeat, Breakdance, this is Nightmare, stop launch. Time one-seven-zero-three-two-five, authentication poppa-juliett. Acknowledge. Over.”

It was an incredibly eerie feeling to hear your call sign, which was supposed to be a secret from most of the Coalition, being broadcast in the clear over an international emergency channel. The cloak of invisibility they felt by being part of a secret mission was shattered — it felt as if everyone in the entire world, bad guys as well as good, could see them now. Mace didn’t recognize the call sign Nightmare — they had a top secret codebook that would tell them who Nightmare was, but Mace had no time to look — but “stop launch” was a standard range director’s order to cease all missile firing activities. “What in hell was that?” Mace cried out. “That can’t be for real.”

“Ignore it,” Parsons said nervously. “It’s, uh, a message in the clear, and we don’t respond to clear-text messages. Take the fix and let’s go.” He turned to his radar navigator and found him furiously digging through an AQK-84 tactical decoding card. “Mace, I said ignore it.”

Mace ignored him. “It checks, Bob,” Mace said. “Jesus Christ, it checks. Someone just gave us a stop-launch order.”

“We don’t accept clear-text messages,” Parsons repeated, “and we sure as hell don’t accept a ‘stop-launch’ order, whatever that means.”

“It’s a standard range order,” Mace said. “You hear it on live-fire exercises all the—”

“This is not an exercise, Major,” Parsons snapped. “We’re probably being MIJIed by the Iraqis — they might have captured the Raven, its crew, and their classified documents and devised a phony order to keep us from launching.” MIJI, which was an acronym for Meaconing, Intrusion, Jamming, and Interference, was a standard tactic to try to divert aircrews from their mission or issuing false orders by the enemy. Aircrews had specific procedures for dealing with MIJI, and they had to be followed to the letter.

Mace knew that, but this still did not make sense — somebody was trying to tell them something.

“What are you doing now?” Parsons asked.

“If we get a recall or termination message,” Mace replied, “it’ll be on this page in the decoding book. I want to be ready.”

“Forget about that and get back on the bomb run.”

Mace silently muttered a “Fuck you.” The crosshairs tracked perfectly as well, which meant the heading and velocities in the bombing system were perfect. “Got the final aimpoint… taking the fix.” He set the right side MFD to the NAV Present Position page, checked that the update mode was in RADAR, then pressed the ENTER FIX Option Select Switch. The reverse video on the ENT FIX legend went out, and the FIXMAG readouts went to zero, indicating a successful position update. Mace switched his right side MFD from the Present Position page to the SRAM Air page and placed the Bomb Data page on the left MFD. “Got the fix. I need—”

“Holy Mother of God!” Parsons suddenly heeled the bomber into a steep right turn, then rolled left again to stabilize. Mace looked up from the radarscope and saw two American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers streak away to the north. The Strike Eagles were two-man versions of the F-15 Eagle fighter, modified for precision low-level bombing but retaining their air-to-air intercept and dogfighting capability. They had crossed the F-111G’s path less than five hundred feet away. “Jesus!” Parsons shouted. “Where did they come from?”

“Those were F-15s!” Mace said incredulously. “They had Sparrows and bombs on board! Why are they heading toward the target area?”

“What difference does it make? We’re on the bomb run.”

“Bob, this attack should have been deconflicted,” Mace said. “Any aircraft within twenty miles of ground zero will probably get blasted out of the sky. Those guys will be practically right over the target when the SRAM detonates.”

“Jesus, Mace, we got a valid launch message … just punch that fucking missile out,” Parsons said. “Put the launch mode switch in ‘auto’ if you got any problems. When I see the ‘safe-in-range’ light, I’ll start a turn and head outbound. When I roll out of the turn, the missile will launch.”

“Parsons, don’t you get it? Something’s wrong here!” Mace snapped. “Somehow I think we decoded an invalid message. I don’t know how, but something’s really wrong.”

Parsons said, “It’s impossible to validate an incorrect message. Either the message doesn’t make sense or the authentication doesn’t check. Both were correct. Stay on the missile run.”

“We’ll be killing our own guys!”

“You don’t know that, Mace!” Parsons shouted. “Those guys can be heading anywhere. All we know is the orders we’re given. Now stay on the goddamn bomb run!”

But Mace kept on looking across the gradually brightening sky, and the more he looked the more he was shocked to see dozens of other aircraft passing nearby, going in all directions — but mostly going north into Baghdad.

“Safe-in-range light,” Parsons reported. “Countdown to turn started.” The SAFE IN RANGE light indicated that the SRAM missile was within its launch envelope, or “footprint,” and capable of hitting its target. The SRAM footprint extended not only ahead of the bomber’s flight path but behind it as well, so Mace and Parsons could accomplish an “over-the-shoulder” launch. They would fly westbound until they were about fifteen miles from the target, then turn 180 degrees away from the target and launch the missile after rolling out of the turn. At detonation, the F-111G would be at least forty miles from ground zero, safe from the blast and EMP effects.

The sixty-second high-speed run toward the turnpoint was the most frightening of Mace’s young life. “Thirty seconds to turn …”

It was sheer luck that Mace was looking right at the very spot on the ground — he saw a bright flash of light, like a searchlight or beacon light, then a long streak of yellow light. The spot of bright light began spiraling toward them at incredible speed. He had never seen one before, but he knew exactly what it was: “SA-7, three o’clock!” he shouted. He hit the FLARE button, then shouted, “Break right!” It was a Soviet-made, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, as common as ants in Iraq, and they were deadly at this close range.

Parsons did not hesitate — he rolled into a 90-degree bank turn and pulled on the control stick. Mace stopped popping decoy flares as soon as he felt the G-forces hit. He lost sight of the missile in the break — he was lucky enough to stay conscious, let alone maintain visual contact on a Mach-two missile — but as soon as Parsons rolled out of the break, Mace saw more flashes of light on the ground. “More SA-7s, two and three o’clock!” He popped more flares as Parsons did another right break.

Parsons had to sweep the wings forward once again to keep from stalling — two hard-break maneuvers in a row bled off a lot of airspeed very quickly. In just a few seconds the wings were forward to 26 degrees, he was in full military power, and the angle of attack was still just 5 degrees below the stall. “I’ll roll wings level,” he said to Mace. “Punch out the missile! Do it!”

“Keep at it, Bob,” Mace shouted. “Level turn back left to the launch point. Still twenty seconds to the turn.”

Just then they heard on the GUARD channel, again in the clear, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Nightmare, abort your missile run, repeat, abort your missile run. We show you ninety seconds to launch time. Do not fire your missile. Repeat, do not launch. Acknowledge.” They then gave another date-time group and a new authentication code. Mace flipped open the code book he had already opened to the proper page, and in just a few seconds he discovered it was another valid message — valid, but still not acceptable to the Aardvark crew.

But the voice was definitely American, and the messages were real messages. Either it was a very clever, very well trained Iraqi, or it was for real and meant for them. But they had no choice in the matter — they had to ignore clear-text messages … they had to! But how could anyone else but the Pentagon know their launch time? “Christ, Bob, they know our launch time — down to the fucking second!”

This time Parsons hesitated, and it was obvious that he was scared and worried. Someone, anyone, could fake the first clear-text message they’d received — the second was impossible. They had indeed named their target time down to the second. Parsons shouted, “I’m rolling out for a few seconds to get our smash back. Get on GUARD and talk to someone. We’ve gotta stay on the missile run, but try to get confirmation. Clear my left turn, then get on the radio.”

After making sure there were no missiles nearby being fired at them, Mace cleared Parson’s left turn, then used the IFF/COMM page on his CDU and switched his radio to UHF 243.0, the international emergency channel that the voice who called itself Nightmare was using. The SA-7 missile was no match for an F-111G bomber at high speed and low altitude, and they had avoided or decoyed all the missiles fired at them so fair. But they were down to about a dozen flares remaining, enough for two or three more attacks.

“Nightmare, Nightmare, this is Breakdance. We copy your message, but we cannot comply. We need a coded message to authenticate. Over.” There was no reply. Maybe it was a fake radio message. “Nightmare, this is Breakdance, how copy? We need a coded message over our tactical network to authenticate. We will not respond to clear-text messages. Over.”

Parsons turned hard left and rolled out, carefully watching his airspeed tapes. “Those damn SAMs are all around us,” he said. “I’ve seen at least six so far! We’re right in the middle of a damn Republican Guard division or something!” The airspeed was building rapidly, and he was able to sweep the wings back to 54 degrees to build up even more.

“I’ve got us at the turnpoint,” Parsons shouted. “Coming right.

Stand by for missile launch.” The SAFE IN RANGE light began blinking — the missile countdown would hold until he rolled wings-level. “Verify launch mode in auto.”

“It’s in auto,” Mace replied.

“Forty degrees to roll-out,” Parsons said. “Stand by on missile launch. Stand by on bomb doors. Check cockpit lights up full and PLZT down. Close the curtains.”

No one knew for sure what it would be like to fly in the vicinity of a modern-day nuclear explosion. There would be no fallout and less total energy released, but the effects on a “hardened” jet aircraft were just impossible to predict. They had had briefings on EMP and blast-shockwave effects, and they had their game plan laid out — radar fixpoints to re-initialize the navigation computers if they dumped, which circuit breakers to pull if the flight control computers went haywire, even small radiation dosimeters taped next to their skin to check for the amount of radiation they had been exposed to. They had lowered their special PLZT (Polarized Lead-Zirconium-Titanate) goggles in place and checked to make sure they were operating. PLZT goggles were electronic visors that would instantaneously darken to protect their eyes from serious damage from a nuclear flash. The PLZT goggles were like wide, bug-eyed sunglasses, so Mace and Parsons had turned up the cockpit lights not only to see the instruments before the burst, but to help see them after the burst as their eyes readjusted.

They had metal curtains and shields to cover the canopy and windscreen, and just seconds before roll-out they unclipped the curtains and pulled them across the canopies, then raised the windscreen shields and locked them into place. They were flying blind now. Every bit of skin was covered — gloves were on, collars were pulled up, zippers were up and tight; their oxygen supply was turned off to prevent any chance of fire; and their shoulder straps and lap belts were as tight as they could make them. One of the last items on the checklist was to shut the radios off to prevent the EMP from traveling through the energized external antennas and frying the electronic circuits. He reached down to his CDU to set all the radios to OFF—

— and just then the SATCOM RCV light blinked on the forward instrument panel and the thermal printer clattered to life. Mace heard it and gasped aloud. “Jesus fucking Christ, Bob, a SATCOM message.”

“Coming up on missile launch.”

Mace waited an interminable, spine-tingling thirty seconds for the printer to finish, then tore a long strip of thermal printer paper out of the printer, his hands and lap filled with decoding documents. He ran down the phonetic names one by one against the correct page of the decoding book. “Actual message … all Eighth Air Force units … I’ve got a SATCOM message for us, Bob.”

The F-111G bomber rolled wings-level, and the SAFE IN RANGE light stayed on steady. “Screw it, Mace. The missile’s gone. Turn off the radios, lower your PLZT goggles, and stand by on bomb doors.”

THREE

It was a termination message. He knew it was, without even decoding it. The clear-text messages were for real, meant to warn them that the termination order was on the way. The Pentagon, the White House, did not want them to launch this missile.

He knew what he was doing was wrong — until he decoded the message and authenticated it, he was obligated to carry out his current orders and launch the SRAM, but Mace didn’t feel he had a choice. He reached down to the weapons control panel and moved the bomb-door mode switch from AUTO to CLOSE.

When the SAFE IN RANGE light stopped blinking, the AGM-131X missile computer activated the MSL POWER light, and it began blinking as inertial guidance information was transferred from aircraft to missile. It took only two-tenths of a second for a complete computer dump; then the computer would command the bomb doors to open. The MSL POWER light continued to blink as the computer tried to open the bomb doors, but Mace had seen to those. The computer could not override the position of the bomb-door switch. It would wait about thirty seconds for the doors to respond; then the computer would automatically shut down the first missile, power up the second missile, and attempt to launch it. By then Mace thought he would have the message authenticated with Parsons, and he would either allow the second missile to launch automatically or just manually power it down.

But he had to decode this new message.

The timer in Parsons’ brain ran out: “Standing by on bomb doors… safe-in-range light steady … doors … check doors, Mace …” He looked over to his radar navigator and saw him, his PLZT goggles off and his shoulder straps loosened, furiously checking data from the SATCOM printer. His lap and glareshield were full of decoding documents. “What in hell are you doing?” Parsons screamed.

“We got a SATCOM message. I’m decoding it.”

“Why didn’t the bomb doors open? Why didn’t the missile launch?”

“I got the doors closed until I—”

“You what?” Parsons screamed. He leaned over and saw the bomb-door mode switch. “Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind? Open those damn bomb doors now! That’s a damned order!”

“I know it’s a recall order, Bob,” Mace said, pleading with his aircraft commander. “I know it is. It’ll just take me a second.”

“Dammit, I’ll have you fucking court-martialed! Open those—”

On the computer control panel, the MSL POWER light stopped blinking and the red MASTER MAL and MSL MAL lights came on. At the same time, the SAFE IN RANGE light on Parsons’ panel went out — and he knew why. Since they were doing an “over-the-shoulder” SRAM launch, they had been flying away from the target. Now, thirty seconds past the launch point, they were out of range. They would not get a SAFE IN RANGE light unless they turned back toward the target — and now all of the Iraqi air defense units on the ground were alerted to their presence and ready for them.

“Jesus, Mace,” Parsons cried out, “we lost the safe-in-range light! We have to turn back.”

“Just wait,” Mace argued. “If this is a recall message, we don’t have to turn.”

“And if it’s not a recall, we have to fly over that infantry formation out there again,” Parsons said. He snapped open his PLZT goggles and opened the flashblindness curtains on his left-side canopy with an angry wave of his hand, scanning carefully for any more enemy SAMs coming at them before jabbing an angry finger at his radar navigator. “You son of a bitch, you fucked up big-time. Your flying career is history, Mace. You chickened out and screwed up. I’m coming left. We’ll launch the second missile as soon as we get a safe-in-range light — no over-the-shoulder launch this time. Make sure the second missile is powered up and ready to—”

Mace saw it out Parsons’ left cockpit canopy, a bright burst of light from the ground, a stream of yellow fire, and a bright ball of light spiraling right toward them, and screamed “Shit! SA-7! Break left!” The large spot of light with a long, bright yellow tail climbed over Parsons’ canopy sill, then descended straight at the hot leading edge of the F-111G’s left wing.

The warhead of the SA-13 man-portable SAM is only two point two pounds, but the explosive energy is directed forward into a round cylinder designed to punch a hole through titanium- and ceramic-armored attack helicopters — against glass, thin steel, and aluminum, it found little resistance. The left cockpit canopy shattered, the entire left side of the windscreen disintegrated, and the blast blew a three-foot hole in the left side of the bomber just aft of Parsons’ seat.

Parsons’ steel seat took the entire force of the explosion, but the sheets of shattered Plexiglas windscreen battered his body, and the sudden force of the six-hundred-mile-per-hour windblast drove him unconscious and almost ripped his left arm out of its socket. The only thing holding his shattered body in the plane was a few bits of metal and the remnants of his right shoulder-harness strap.

Mace was knocked to the right by the blast, but Parsons’ body, and the hard left bank that shielded his body with the aircraft, protected him from the worst of the explosion. His front windscreen cracked, but it did not disintegrate. His body felt as if it was on fire, then instantly it felt bone-numbing cold as six-hundred-miles-per-hour winds pounded into the cockpit. Mace needed to get on the controls and climb for lifesaving altitude before the engine shelled out.

F-111G navigators are not required to fly the plane and they are not permitted to log second-pilot time, but all navigators must know the emergency procedures just as well as the pilots, and most experienced navigators like Mace were frustrated or hopeful pilots themselves and take the controls and fly the plane whenever possible. The bomber heeled sharply left, threatening to enter a flat spin and hurl itself like a twenty-ton Frisbee into the desert, but Mace immediately applied full right throttle and full right rudder, and was able to thumb in full right rudder trim before the FIRE lights came on in the left engine.

Mace accomplished the engine-fire emergency procedures without thinking and without even consciously remembering he had done them.

The airspeed had dropped from six hundred to two hundred knots in just a few seconds. But for now they were flying and they were upright — that was the important thing.

Parsons was in really bad shape, but Mace thought he was still alive. The left side of Parsons’ face and body were black, and his left arm was shredded below mid-bicep; he could not see his legs or much of his torso, but Mace guessed his injuries below the waist were thankfully minor. The windblast was streaking fresh blood from his chest across his helmet and up onto the aft bulkhead. Mace ripped the first-aid kit off the Velcro attachment point behind his seat, fumbled with it with one hand in the dark, and tried to stuff a handful of gauze and a large combat dressing pad into the worst of Parsons’ wounds near his chest, but the windblast was too great and the gauze went flying. He was more successful in placing a flight jacket over him and taping it in place. Parsons’ helmet was cracked, but the visors and oxygen mask were still in place and intact, and Parsons had suffered no injuries to his face or neck, so Mace decided to leave the mask and visors in place. Mace checked that Parsons’ oxygen was on 100-percent oxygen and flowing, tightened Parsons’ last remaining shoulder strap, then used the last of the medical tape to secure Parsons to his seat. If they had to eject, Parsons had to be as straight in the seat as possible or the G-forces would snap his spine in two.

Mace then returned his attention to flying the plane. A safe landing was probably impossible. He had a low-fuel situation, wings stuck at 24 degrees or greater, and one engine was out, with all the related hydraulic and electrical malfunctions. He had major structural damage, a blown windscreen, and an injured crewmember. He had no navigation systems, no engine monitoring systems, no computer assist for any function, and no primary flight or performance instruments. He nosed the bomber southward, determined to at least get away from Baghdad and across the Iraqi border before he punched out. The controls felt mushy and unresponsive — soon they would give out altogether. Mace decided to gain a little more altitude, cross the border if possible, then eject. The F-111G bomber was the best plane in the world to punch out from. The entire cockpit section was a winged capsule, complete with its own parachutes, rocket motors, stabilization fins, and landing shock absorbers — it would even float, and the pilot’s control stick was a handle for a manual bailing pump. He was at two thousand feet now … plenty of altitude for a safe ejection … just grab the yellow handle by his left knee and pull …

But not with two fucking nuclear missiles on board.

The mission directives said do not bail out until at least thirty miles into Turkish or Saudi airspace, and then jettison the weapons safe over the Arabian Sea or Red Sea, or let the weapons crash with the aircraft. It was possible that the weapons would not be destroyed in a crash, and letting two SRAM-X missiles fall into Saddam Hussein’s hands was unthinkable. No, he had to fly the machine a little longer, find a Coalition airfield, maybe get some gas from an aerial-refueling tanker, then try to set the thing down.

Straining against his shoulder harness to see the console between Parsons’ legs, he checked the electrical systems panel. The indicator read EMER — that meant that both hydraulically powered electrical generators had kicked off-line and he was running on battery power alone. He flipped over to the emergency checklist for electrical malfunctions, checked the circuit breaker panel near his head between the two seats, made sure the autopilot was off, checked that the battery switch was on, then flipped the generator switch from ON to OFF/RESET, held it there for a few seconds, then switched it to RUN. The indicator read TIE instead of NORM, but with one engine out, TIE was a good indication — it meant that one generator was successfully energizing both electrical systems. Several lights popped on in the cockpit … and the radios came alive.

He completed the electrical system malfunction checklists, shutting down unnecessary electrical systems and the autopilot, then switched the IFF, or Identification Friend or Foe, thumbwheels to 7700, the emergency code, and the number one radio knob to the emergency GUARD position. Over the howl of the windblast in the shattered cockpit, he yelled into his oxygen mask microphone: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, any radio, any radio, this is Breakdance, 7440 Provisional, squawking emergency. Position south of Karbala, heading southwest at five thousand feet, declaring an emergency, injuries and weapons on board, requesting refueling and vectors to divert airfield. Come in. Over.”

He then remembered the earlier radio transmissions and, forgetting proper radio procedures, yelled, “Nightmare, goddammit, this is Breakdance. You must be monitoring my position by now. My pilot is injured and I’m in deep shit. Give me a vector and help me get this thing on the ground now!”

FOUR

On board an E-3C AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) radar plane, a converted Boeing 707 airliner with a thirty-six-foot-diameter rotating radome atop the fuselage, there were fourteen radar controller consoles, each scanning a specific segment of sky and watching every aircraft in their sector, enemy as well as friendlies, all throughout southern Iraq, Kuwait, the entire Arabian peninsula, western Iran, Syria, and eastern Jordan. Nine consoles were for air controllers, two were set aside to monitor sea vessels, two were tasked to monitor commercial and other noncombatant air traffic along the periphery of the Kuwaiti theater of operations, and one was set aside for the task force commander or other special operations missions. This fourteenth console was manned that morning by a special task force of Army and Air Force general officers who were representatives of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself. Their call sign was “Nightmare.”

The two general officers and their aides had seen Mace’s F-111G dodge enemy fighters and missiles, had watched in horror as it began its missile run, then watched it turn away from its launch point without the nuclear explosion they all feared. “Sir, the F-111G crew is calling,” the radar controller said to the two-star general in charge of the task force. “He says the pilot is injured and he has aircraft damage.”

“Give them a southwest vector clear of known triple-A sites and tell them to climb to ten thousand five hundred feet,” Air Force brigadier general Tyler Layton of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command replied. “He’ll get chewed alive by triple-A if he stays at five thousand feet.” The short, rather stocky and barrel-chested officer had been listening to the GUARD channel and had heard the call. Layton normally looked very boyish when surrounded by his taller, more powerful-looking colleagues from the Army, especially when a smile came to his lips as it often did, but right now his gentle, friendly features were etched with concern. There was no doubt this Aardvark crewdog had to get down now. Layton, the former commander of Eighth Air Force, in charge of all SAC bomber units in the eastern half of the United States, was an old B-52 and F-111G bomber pilot and was familiar with the tactics and procedures used by the supersonic fighter-bombers. He knew navigators didn’t have very much stick time, so he was going to need all the help he could get.

“I’ll send them over to the frontier, over Seventh Corps,” Layton said to his task force commander, Army major general Bruce Eyers of U.S. Central Command. Eyers was the former chief of intelligence for U.S. Central Command, assigned to the Pentagon specifically to mastermind Operation Desert Fire. “We’ll have to have Seventh watch out for him and cover their six,” said Layton. The U.S. Army VII Corps in northern Saudi Arabia — they called it a “Corps” but in fact it had only about twenty thousand troops, about division size, scattered across a seven-hundred-mile frontier — were responsible for Coalition ground-based air defense. “Thank God the crew didn’t launch the SRAM. We got to them in time.”

“But they should have launched,” Eyers said angrily. Eyers was an experienced airborne infantry officer and knew little about the world of aviation, but he did know about success and failure — from Vietnam to Grenada, he was familiar with both. Given a set of tools to work with, he expected nothing less than perfection and performance. Operation Desert Fire was his creation; it was he who pitched the idea to Schwarzkopf, Powell, and then SECDEF Cheney himself, and it was he who was given the honor of overall on-scene command of the operation by Schwarzkopf. Eyers was fifty-one years old, five feet ten, 220 pounds, with short dark hair, dark eyes, broad shoulders, and a “fireplug” build. He was a West Point graduate who was very political, with substantial aspirations for higher promotion. Rumor was he was good at conceptualizing, but not good with details or managerial skills. Still, he was popular with senior NATO commanders as an “idea man” but very poor with field work.

In less than an hour after execution, Eyers had seen his perfectly planned mission unravel. The order terminating Desert Fire was received in the AWACS plane, but not in the F-111G bomber. Only the President, through the Pentagon, could direct the employment of nuclear weapons, and that was true for halts as well as execution orders. That message was not relayed to the crew until very, very late, well after the appointed launch time. Still, for some reason, the crew did not or could not launch the Short-Range Attack Missile. Now he had a crippled plane on his hands with nukes on board — and the mission was not accomplished. One by one, the Air Force was screwing up. “You said the launch time had come and gone — the crew should have launched,” Eyers said to Layton.

“I radioed to them to stop launch.”

“But even you said they shouldn’t respond to that call,” Eyers said in exasperation. “The crewman, whoever the hell he is, verified it himself. The recall didn’t reach them until after launch time, so what happened? Why didn’t they cook it off?”

Layton sat staring at the console in front of him, not believing what he was hearing. Slowly, with deep suspicion burning in his eyes, he turned to Eyers. “You mean you wanted that nuke to go?”

Eyers looked at him as if he were a moron. “No, I want a long protracted ground war so we can get our asses kicked all over the place. Of course I wanted it to go. Launch it and the war’s over in an hour. Done, finis. Nice and tidy. God knows if we’d done it in ’Nam, the gooks wouldn’t have piled up our body count the way they did. In Libya, we should have done the same thing. We still have Qhadaffi to fucking deal with. And now, thanks to your fly-boys, we still have Saddam.”

Layton swallowed hard, thinking: this is the problem with some of these honchos. They’re so self-absorbed in the military, they forget about the real world. Eyers probably modeled himself after the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now. Worse, the guy was in his military. It sent a shiver down his spine.

“Have you considered,” Eyers was now asking smugly, “that perhaps our President wanted to launch the missile? That that’s why the termination order came after launch time? He really wanted it to go, but had to place a termination on record so he could defend himself later? Think about it.”

Layton did. And concluded that Eyers was nuts. Operation Desert Fire was executed only because they believed Israel had been hit by chemical weapons. When that report proved to be false, the termination message was sent. Bruce Eyers, not the President, wanted to launch the nuclear missiles.

“The point remains, the recall message was received after the launch time. The damn bomber crew should have launched.”

For Layton, the question was moot right now — his problem was to get Mace and Parsons safely on the ground. “Sir, I think we should recover that -111 first, then worry about the whys later,” Layton said.

“You’ve made your point, Layton,” Eyers said. “We’ll find out how they screwed up later.”

Obviously Eyers’ mind was made up and the court-martials were already in the mail, Layton thought.

“All right, General, where are you going to set them down?”

“Bandanah would be perfect. Only forty miles from the border, about an hour flying time for the F-111G. We could scramble a tanker and fighter escort from King Khalid Military City and—”

“Bandanah doesn’t exist,” Eyers snapped. “And I don’t want any other aircraft joining on that -111.”

“Bandanah does exist, only not officially,” Layton said. “We know it’s a special-ops staging base for gunship crews penetrating into Iraq and setting up forward refueling bases in the desert. It’s only a highway, but it’s wide enough, lighted, and isolated enough in case there’s a … crash.”

“Can the crew bring that plane back or not?” Eyers asked impatiently. “If not, we’ll send it out over the Red Sea and ditch it.”

“I’ll talk to the crew,” Layton said. “I think the navigator is flying the jet.”

Eyers’ eyes opened wide in shock at that news.

“If that’s true,” Layton said, “he’ll have real problems bringing it in.”

“You mean navigators aren’t trained in flying those things? They have a stick and throttles, but they can’t fly it …?”

“About as well as a tank commander can drive an M1A1,” Layton replied. “They can start it up and buzz around in good conditions, but they aren’t trained to drive it in combat or emergency conditions. But we’ve got experienced crews on these planes, so we might just bring it back in one piece.” Eyers waved his hand impatiently, telling Layton to just get on with it. “And,” said Layton, “I’m ordering an F-111 escort and a KC-135 tanker to refuel the bomber.”

“Disapproved,” Eyers said. “It’ll draw too much attention to the mission. With your flaky nav flying the thing, he’s likely to hit someone.”

“More fuel gives us more options,” Layton explained. “It may be that they can’t refuel, but we have to try.”

“All right, Layton,” Eyers relented. “Just try to keep this quiet, all right? Don’t screw it up. I’ll call CENTCOM and advise them of what you want to do.”

“Yes, sir,” Layton said, thankful that Eyers finally wanted out of this business. With his precious “final solution” mission in shambles, he was looking for ways to cover his ass, forgetting that he still had men and machines to return safely. He said to his radio operator, “Okay, Lieutenant Cassenelli, let’s bring that rascal home:

“I want a KC-135 from refueling orbit HOLLYWOOD to set up a point-parallel rendezvous with Breakdance.” A point-parallel rendezvous was the standard join-up procedure for aircraft coming from different directions; the tanker would offset itself a few miles off the receiver’s nose, then turn in front of the receiver, putting the receiver a mile or two behind the tanker and ready for hookup.

“A whole lot of receivers coming off targets aren’t going to like losing their tanker,” Cassenelli pointed out.

“They can get another strip-alert tanker from King Khalid Military City to cover,” Layton said. He didn’t know that for sure, but the Strategic Air Command had sent half of its entire fleet of aerial refueling tankers to the Kuwaiti theater of operations, and he knew that standby tankers were available. Even so, Layton added, “Try to find one that won’t have too many receivers scheduled with it — but get one. If the crew needs confirmation, refer them to General Eyers immediately.

“Then I want an F-111 from Tabuk scrambled immediately to join on Breakdance for emergency recovery … nope, cancel that last.” There were no F-111s at Tabuk — the closest base was Incirlik to the north, but it would have to fly through heavily defended west Iraq to rendezvous with Breakdance. The other F-111 base was Taif to the south, but it would take several hours for a plane to get that far north.

“We could get an F-15 from Tabuk to join on him,” Cassenelli suggested.

“If we need to, we will,” Layton said, “but to get Breakdance back safely I’d like a more similar aircraft, and one with a second set of eyes to look our guy over. Pull up the ATO for Tabuk.”

The second monitor on console fourteen showed the computerized version of the ATO, or air tasking order, the “game plan” for the entire Coalition air armada in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations. Broken up into three eight-hour blocks, the ATO showed what each and every aircraft would be doing — what time and from where it would launch, when and where it would refuel, what targets it would hit and when, which poststrike refueling it would make and where, and its approximate recovery time. Only with a computerized ATO, and with well-disciplined crews, could the Coalition ever hope to get two-thousand-plus combat sorties per day — half of which were armed aircraft striking targets in Iraq or Kuwait — off and safely home again.

Tabuk Air Base, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, was home to mostly allied air defense units guarding the northern part of the Red Sea and the southern portion of the Suez Canal, as well as keeping an eye on one of Iraq’s few allies in the region, Jordan, should they or the Iraqis try to open a second front into Saudi Arabia or stage an attack on Israel. Tabuk had USAF F-15 fighters, Royal Air Force Tornado Gr.Mk 1 fighter-bombers, Royal Saudi Air Force F-5E fighters, and U.S. Navy HH-60 rescue and assault helicopters — Tabuk was the Navy’s main abort base for planes that couldn’t land on the carriers in the Red Sea. By checking the ATO, Layton found that the F-15s were scheduled for air patrols all day, escorting the British Tornado bombers on attack missions. The F-15s were scheduled for “hot turns”—land from a sortie, rearm, refuel, and take off again, all within ten to twenty minutes and with the pilots never leaving the cockpit.

“I think we got something, George,” Layton told his radar operator. “Several Tornados are coming off targets at Al Asad, Al Taqaddum, H2, H3, and H4 airfields in western Iraq right now.” The British Tornado was very similar to the F-111G bomber — both had started out as fighters (the British still had an air interceptor version, the F.Mk 3, in service in the Gulf); both had two engines and two crewmembers; they were of similar size and weight; and both had variable geometry “swing wings” and similar flight control and high-lift surfaces such as all-moving tailplanes, spoilers, flaps, and slats. Could this really work …? “Can you call up these Tornados on the radar and find out where they are?”

Cassenelli punched in the sortie numbers from the ATO and asked the computer to locate the aircraft — there were hundreds of aircraft on the screen right now, all with data blocks showing their sortie number and flight data, and finding one particular aircraft manually would have been impossible. Seconds later he had his answer: “Got ’em, sir. Coming off targets now, at Breakdance’s three o’clock position, sixty-one miles, climbing to one-five thousand feet. The ATO shows four flights of four, but I see only three flights. They’re scheduled to tank at track Hollywood.”

“Shit, this may work,” Layton said. “Put in a call to those Tornados and ask them to divert toward Breakdance.”

“Might be difficult, sir,” Cassenelli said. “Those Tornados will need to refuel first, and there’s”—he counted aircraft on the ATO scheduled to refuel in Hollywood aerial refueling track—”at least fifty planes scheduled to tank in the next hour. If they do their refueling, they’ll be far behind Breakdance, and they’ll have to hustle to catch up. I don’t think you can afford to make Breakdance wait.”

Cassenelli checked the ATO for the roster of tankers at the refueling orbits in northern Saudi Arabia, clapped his hands excitedly, and said, “Wait, sir, I have the answer. Shamu Two-Two, a KC-10 with buddy pods. They’re supposed to exit the refueling track for a crew swap now, then climb to a higher altitude in the block. I can divert them to MARVEL to meet up with Breakdance. I’ll just send the Tornados over and have them hook up with Two-Two. If it gets close, they can even hook up together.”

“Perfect.” Layton grinned. “Give them a call.” The KC-10 refueling tanker was a converted DC-10 airliner, configured for aerial refueling and cargo transport. Unlike the KC-135, the KC-10 could do two different types of refueling in one mission, but normally not both kinds at once. But with “buddy pods”—pods attached to the wingtips with refueling hoses and rogues — the KC-10 could do both types of refueling at one time, with a boom-type receiver on the boom and a probe-and-drogue receiver on each wingtip. It could refuel both the F-111G and the Tornado at the same time. “I’ll get on the horn to CENTAF and to Vice Marshall Wratten in Riyadh.” Wratten was in charge of all British air assets on the Arabian Peninsula; although General Horner of USAF’s Central Air Forces (CENTAF) was the Coalition’s overall air commander, it was proper and expeditious to give the British counterpart a “heads-up” before committing his forces to a mission.

“Get the CO of Bandanah highway airstrip on the line and let me talk to him,” Layton continued. “Let’s get a mobile aircraft-recovery team heading out from Taif or Tabuk, preferably with an arrester cable crew. Everything on a secure scrambled channel — if it has to go unsecured, let me know right away.” He paused, then added, “And let’s get Admiral Mixson of the Red Sea naval task force on the carrier Kennedy on the line. We may need his help to recover the -111 and the weapons if we have to ditch Breakdance in the drink.”

FIVE

Air Force captain Rebecca C. Furness grasped a handhold and tried to pull herself out of the pilot’s seat in the cockpit of her KC-10 Extender tanker. “Jeez, my ass thinks my legs have been cut off. They’re like Jell-O.” She stepped over the wide center console, gave the new first lieutenant copilot a crewdog pat on the shoulder, slid between the pilot and copilot seats, and eased out of the cockpit. She felt wobbly and weak and tried to rub her legs to restore some circulation. She’d been sitting in that one seat, without a break, for eight hours.

Captain Sam Marlowe, the oncoming pilot, passed Furness and said, “Trouble with your legs? Let me help you.” He gave her a wink, then reached down and ran a hand along her left leg. Marlowe, thirty-eight, with dark hair and a constant five o’clock shadow and one of two full crews on board, was rested and feeling cocky, which was always trouble.

Rebecca Furness took the word “professional” seriously. But in the time she’d spent in the Air Force, she’d learned very quickly that for all the lip-service the brass gave about nondiscrimination and harassment, the reality was, women in service faced both almost every day. Grimly, she put up with it as part of the job, but that didn’t mean she had to put up with assholes like Marlowe who thought she’d be impressed with their fly-boy swaggering. The fact that they were in wartime was all the more appalling, but not surprising, to Furness.

“Sam,” she oozed in her best, breathy voice.

“Yeah, babe?” he asked, patting her thigh.

Furness smiled, suddenly flicked her hand upwards, catching the tip of Marlowe’s nose. She twisted it hard. He yelped, his head jerked back, bumped into the flight engineer’s overhead pane, which startled his copilot, who was hand-flying the big jet, and the 590,000-pound tanker burled and shook as the copilot fought to regain control.

The boom operator, a chief master sergeant in the tail section, who had more years in the Air Force than all of the cockpit crew put together, felt the jolt, but not before his coffee went all over his flight suit. “Hey, pilot, what the hell is going on up there?”

Everyone’s attention was on the two pilots now.

“You know, Sam, it’s a shame your ego isn’t as small as your cock probably is. If it were, it would make everyone’s life on this plane a lot easier.”

The flight engineer, a senior noncommissioned officer sitting at his console behind the copilot, turned and smiled at Marlowe, who was rubbing his nose, wincing in pain. But the smile disappeared and he turned back to his instruments when he caught a disapproving glare from Furness. She exited the cockpit and shut the door behind her with an exasperated bang.

Rebecca Furness—”the Iron Maiden,” as she was known — visited the lavatory (for the first time in eight hours), then poured herself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the galley, curled up on two empty front seats in the airliner-like forward passenger cabin of the KC-10 Extender, used a wadded-up flight jacket as a pillow to rest her head, and opened a four-day-old issue of the Los Angeles Times. It was a hell of a way to go to war — comfortable seats, modern airplane, pressurized cabin, relief crews, bunk beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, a newspaper, and, most importantly, staying far from the front lines. The fighter pilots got all the glory, but they had to be shoehorned into a tiny, uncomfortable cockpit, pee into a plastic bag, and suck oxygen through a mask strapped to their face for hours at a time — and there were bad guys shooting at them out there. The “tanker war” was not as glamorous, but it had much better working conditions.

She tried to read the Times, tried to forget about the incident in the cockpit, but her mind kept drifting back to it. She was seething. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened — there had been plenty of others — and it wouldn’t be the last, but the idea of it happening in the middle of a damned war.… What would the men think if enlisted women were suddenly coming up and grabbing crotches in the middle of an operation, when their concentration needed to be totally focused on the task at hand? she wondered. The jerks. She sighed and wanted to forget about it, returning her attention to the Los Angeles Times.

She ignored the mission radio headset on the overhead console of her seat and stuck a pair of earplugs in her ears to blot out the gentle roar of aircraft noises. The two seats on which she lay were not wide enough for her to stretch out on, so she had to curl her long legs up to keep her boots from dangling into the aisle. Furness was tall, an athletic one hundred and thirty pounds, and if Marlowe could have gotten a good feel of her thigh, he undoubtedly would have found it nice and firm, a result of her almost-daily exercise regimen. She had below-shoulder-length brown hair, but no one on her crew really knew that because she always wore it pinned up and off her collar when in uniform, which was almost all the time. They did notice her dark-brown almond-shaped eyes, her strong nose and jaw, and her habit of talking rapidly and in a very officious pilot’s monotone, which was how she had acquired the boys-only nickname of the Iron Maiden. She knew about the nickname and didn’t give a damn.

Well, she conceded, that wasn’t exactly true. The moniker did bother her, but not because she was tough and professional in the cockpit, which was why most people assumed she had the name. No, she’d earned it for an entirely different reason: her steadfast refusal to date anyone on the base or in her wing. She hadn’t really thought much about the rule, until she’d heard the nickname. She wasn’t even sure why she’d made that policy for herself other than wanting to maintain distance from the men she might ultimately have to go to war with.

But her policy had generated a lot of gossip, especially after her polite but consistent refusals for dates. She’d hear the word “dyke” whispered more than once in passing. She shook her head in exasperated amusement. That was rich. If they only knew about the men she’d had in her life. Some truly wonderful guys, and none in the military. Men who could have run circles around these fly-boys in bed.

But her private life was her own. If they wanted to think she was gay, that was their problem. Another typical, arrogant male assumption. Like little boys, trying to show the girls who had the larger member. And if you didn’t want to play with it, well, you must be …

Rebecca sighed. Now that she thought about it, having just one to play with now and then wouldn’t be so bad, but her time at home was usually focused on recurrent training and simulator sessions.

Not that she really minded, of course. Flying was in her blood, and she spent most of her free time building her flight experience outside her military duties. The military was cutting back flying hours, eliminating squadrons, and closing bases, and the civilian airlines were still hiring, so she turned her attention to a future outside the Air Force. To make herself more marketable to the major airlines, she had accumulated almost a thousand hours of civilian flying time in the past six years — which was quite impressive, seeing that she was away from home for nearly five months every year — and had earned her civilian commercial and airline transport pilot licenses and instrument, flight instructor, multiengine, and even seaplane ratings.

But if life was tough for women pilots in the military, it was equally tough in the civilian world, and although American Airlines and United had practically set up recruiting offices at March Air Force Base, nobody had called her — not even the smaller regional airlines like America West or Southwest, for whom she was probably overqualified with all her multiengine heavy-jet time. Male KC-10 pilots were being actively and aggressively recruited by the airlines at March because Air Force KC-10 pilots got the world’s best heavy-jet training at no cost to the airlines. Some had letters of commitment from a major airline two years before their tour of military duty was up. The airlines were hiring, all right, but not women.

Becky Furness made a few inquiries and got the runaround every time. Women pilots, they said, were paid less to start because they were given more time off and had to be replaced or retrained and requalified more often than men. Bullshit. As a senior squadron flight instructor, she had access to her fellow pilots’ flight records, and she knew that a lot of the guys leaving the squadron who ended up flying in the majors had fewer total hours, fewer pilot-in-command hours, and fewer civilian hours than she did.

She also knew her résumé was a lot more impressive than most.

Born in Vergennes, Vermont, in 1955, she was a 1977 graduate of the University of Vermont at Burlington, majoring in biology, and received a commission in the U.S. Air Force through ROTC that same year after going through a two-year scholarship program. She attended pilot training at Williams AFB in 1978, graduating in 1979 in the top 5 percent of her class. In 1979 Rebecca graduated from KC-135 Combat Crew Training at Castle AFB, Atwater, California, and was assigned to the 319th Bombardment Wing, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, in 1980, flying the KC-135A tanker on strategic combat alert. After upgrading to aircraft commander and instructor pilot, she transferred to the 22nd Air Refueling Wing, March AFB, California, in 1988, flying the KC-10A Extender tanker. She also upgraded to aircraft commander just before Operation Desert Storm.

Yeah, it was a pretty good résumé, she thought, but what good was it doing her?

Just then, to Furness’ surprise, Sam Marlowe emerged from the flight deck, noticed her sitting by herself, and came over to her. She was surprised, not because he dared to approach her after his embarrassing dressing-down earlier, but because she had been so busy since takeoff that she had no time to get up for relief — now, only minutes after taking over, Marlowe was roaming around. “What’s going on, Sam?”

By unspoken consent, they both were determined to ignore the previous incident.

“We got a call to do an emergency refueling farther north,” Marlowe said. “An F-111 and a Tornado.”

“An Aardvark and a Tornado? We gonna do a buddy refueling?”

“Buddy refueling — one-eleven on the boom and Tornado on a pod — then escort all the way to his divert base,” Marlowe said. “All we got was a set of coordinates for the base — no name. Probably a desert strip for the special-ops guys. We rendezvous in about ten minutes at ten thousand feet.”

“Cool,” Furness said. The refueling altitude, ten thousand feet, was an indication of what the emergency was — a decompressed cockpit, probably from battle damage. Aircrews flying with no cabin pressurization would stay at or below ten thousand feet to avoid oxygen starvation. The strange mix of aircraft was a puzzle, which made the situation that much more interesting. “So which one’s broken?” she asked.

“I don’t know … I didn’t catch the whole thing,” Marlowe replied. “All I know is, we’re going into Indian country.”

“We’re what?”

“They’re sending us over the border to go get the -111,” Marlowe said. “Only about fifty miles or so, but we’ll be over enemy territory. That means a Bronze Star at least, maybe even a Silver Star.”

So much for a cool, safe, secure little world on board the KC-10 tanker. This plane was a big, slow, inviting target for enemy gunners or missiles even at its best performance — at low altitude with a crippled aircraft on the boom, it was a real sitting duck. Even the world’s worst fighter pilot could down a tanker with one arm tied behind his back. Dread went up and down Furness’ spine. This could really get hairy.

She heard herself say, “I’ll be in the boom pod. I gotta see this.”

“Lucky dog,” Marlowe said. “Maybe you’ll see a really chewed-up fighter jock out there. Take some pictures for me.”

SIX

Mace examined Parsons carefully. His face was sheet white from the cold, but his oxygen indicator was still blinking, which meant he was breathing. Fresh blood was still oozing into his mask. Good, his heart was still beating. Holding the control stick between his knees, Mace wiped the stuff out of his mask to keep it from clogging and suffocating him. Parsons’ head rolled to the right, and it appeared that he was trying to tell him something, but in the howl of the windblast thundering through the broken windscreen it was impossible to hear him.

Mace shouted, “Hang tough, Colonel. We’re almost home!” then reattached Parsons’ oxygen mask and strapped him in tight.

Back on the controls, Mace surveyed the instrument panel. Without an operable fuel gauge and with an electrical emergency, he had to manually control the fuel flow to the right engine, and that required almost constant monitoring. The wing fuel had burned down to zero, so now he had to maintain the longitudinal balance by burning fuel from the forward body tanks. But without boost pumps the forward body would never keep itself filled, so Mace followed an emergency checklist and had to pop a fuel-dump-valve circuit breaker, backflow fuel from the aft body tank to the forward body tank through the fuel-dump system, then push in the circuit breaker and watch the angle-of-attack gauge to make sure they weren’t too tail-heavy or nose-heavy.

Normally the F-111G fuel management system was automatic and he rarely thought about it, but it was amazing what a no-shit inflight emergency sometimes did for your memory — he was able to remember all the funny spaghetti diagrams, the fuel-pump relay logic, even the specific tank quantities and boost-pump flow rates. When it came to life or death, the human mind kicked into overdrive.

Once the fuel panel was set up, Mace got on the radio. “Nightmare” had sent him over to a discrete UHF channel, unsecure but assigned all to themselves, so he knew the bozos in charge — and probably half the Iraqi military command staff — were listening in: “Nightmare, what’s the fuckin’ plan? My pilot is still alive, but he looks like Dracula on a bender, and I need some gas or I’m likely to be walking.”

“Breakdance, this is Nightmare.” The irritated voice of General Eyers (although Mace didn’t know that) came on the line. “Unless you have a specific request or emergency that we need to be notified of, keep off the radio. And use proper radio procedures and terminology on this channel. Over.”

“Hey, asshole,” Mace exploded on the radio, “I haven’t heard squat from you guys in over fifteen minutes. You want some emergency info? I figure if I don’t have any more holes in me, I got about twenty minutes’ worth of gas, at most. My pilot’s hurt bad, and he needs attention. I figure I can’t punch out because of structural damage to the capsule, so I gotta set it down. Now I can see lots of nice, straight paved roads down there, so unless you want to come get me and my car-go,” emphasizing the nukes in the bomb bay, “you better fuckin’ talk to me. Over.”

There was a rather long, silent pause; then a different and far less official-sounding voice came back: “Breakdance, this is Nightmare. We’re doing everything we can. You’re still in Indian country, there are border air-defense units all around you, and this is an unsecure channel, so we can’t tell you too much, but we’re going to bring you down soon. Just hang in there. We’re watching you and your airspace very carefully. If there are any bandits nearby, we’ll tell you immediately. Do your best to avoid SAMs. Otherwise, if you see any aircraft approaching you, maintain your last assigned heading and don’t try to evade. Let us know if your a.c.’s condition looks worse. Stay off the air unless it’s an emergency. We’re right here with you.”

The channel went silent.

The voice sounded like he knew what he was talking about, like a former Aardvark driver. The other guy was a southern Army grunt all the way, probably a general, maybe even Schwarzkopf himself. Well, he was still an asshole for not talking to him. Mace was able to take a deep breath to help some of the tension flow out of his body.

Mace was scanning the skies around him when he saw a small speck of an aircraft. The speck’s position on the canopy did not change, which meant it was on a collision course. At six to eight miles it looked like another F-111, but when it got within five miles Mace recognized it as a Panavia Tornado, Western Europe’s most advanced fighter-bomber.

At first Mace thought the Tornado was joining too fast, and he was ready to dodge away, but the big aircraft swooped quickly but easily into place, about fifty feet away from Mace’s right wing. He could see that it was a British Tornado — the UK, Germany, Italy, and Saudi Arabia all flew Tornados — and that it carried two Sidewinder missiles and two fuel tanks, with all of its underbelly weapon stations empty.

The RAF backseater gave Mace a thumbs-up, then gave him a signal Mace did not recognize. Seconds later, the Tornado dipped under Mace’s F-111G, appeared briefly on the left side, then, in a very dramatic display of expert airmanship, rolled inverted and flew atop the stricken Aardvark so the British backseater could look up through his cockpit canopy and get a good look at any damage on the top side. He was giving Mace a visual inspection; now he felt bad because he was too surprised to give the Tornado as thorough an inspection, because Mace knew he must be coming back from an attack against Iraq. The Tornado then moved away from Mace and, as Mace watched in sheer fascination, the British crew jettisoned its external fuel tanks, leaving only the two Sidewinder missiles. He then moved in close again, and the backseater gave Mace another thumbs-up. To his surprise, Mace noticed the very large portrait of a nude woman sitting atop a bomb painted on the left side of the Tornado, along with the name “Gulf Killer” and the names of its ground crews. The Brits had obviously wasted no time putting nose art on their combat aircraft.

“Pretty slick moves, Gulf Killer,” Mace said aloud, being careful not to talk on the radio. As if he had heard him, the Tornado backseater clasped his hands over his head in self-congratulation.

A few minutes later the Tornado backseater pointed above Mace’s head, and the sight astounded him: the huge, looming fuselage of a KC-10 Extender tanker appeared as if out of nowhere, accelerating easily ahead of the crippled bomber. It was at least two thousand feet above him, but it still looked as big as a thundercloud. The Extender’s air refueling boom was already lowered into the contact position, the nozzle extended all the way into the yellow region, and the buddy pod refueling hose and drogue was extended on the tanker’s right wingtip.

The tanker descended and decelerated a few moments later, so now it was only five hundred feet above Mace’s altitude. A white flashing light appeared on the tanker’s right wingtip and the basket-like drogue was extended, a signal that the Tornado was cleared in for refueling. The RAF Tornado backseater waved as the Tornado hungrily moved up and, a few seconds later, slid his refueling probe effortlessly into the round white drogue. Then Mace saw two white flashing lights on the director lights along the tanker’s belly, the signal that he was cleared in to the boom.

He’s going to do it, he thought grimly, flipping his checklist to the “Before Air Refueling” and “Before Pre-Contact” pages. He’s going to do a single-engine refueling with a KC-10 tanker at low altitude over enemy territory. The checklist did not take long because he could not do most of the items: exterior lights were not working, wings wouldn’t move, autopilot was already off, fuel system was dead, radar was dead. Mace flipped the air-refueling-door switch and was relieved to get a green AR/NWS light, meaning the air refueling system was ready for nozzle contact.

Slowly, carefully, Mace eased the throttle forward and inched the nose upward. The F-111G responded sluggishly, rumbling in protest as it climbed. The airspeed did not want to increase at all, it seemed, and Mace nudged the throttle forward some more. Before he realized it, he was at the military-power throttle stop, ready to go into afterburner. He knew he couldn’t do that — lighting the ’burners with structural damage and an engine out could start a fire. He could do nothing else but remain patient and hope his crippled bird could catch up.

It took several long minutes, but Mace finally climbed up behind the KC-10 and was inching toward the refueling boom. He was still a good fifty feet from contact, but the huge underside of the tanker blocked his view of everything else. He was now even with the nozzle and moving toward it. The open end of the nozzle was dark, like the barrel of a cannon aimed right at him. The tanker’s director lights urged him forward and up. God damn, he wished he could talk on the radios! Someone please talk to me!

The nozzle was now directly over the shattered windscreen, less than two feet above Parsons’ head. It was huge, eight inches in diameter, with colored markings along its length to visually indicate the distance between aircraft. Mace could see every scratch, every mark, every little word stenciled on the boom and nozzle. It seemed as if it was going to come right inside the cockpit with him.…

The nozzle was hovering right over Parsons’ head, less than a foot away. The wind rumbling around the boom’s control vanes and under the big tanker’s belly seemed to suck the bomber right up into it. Mace watched it slide aft, getting closer, closer, closer …

Suddenly all of the lights on the tanker’s director-light system flashed rapidly on and off — the breakaway signal. Mace didn’t react very fast — he was watching the boom instead of the tanker and didn’t notice anything wrong until the boom started to move away — but the tanker reacted immediately: it accelerated ahead like a shot and climbed as if it was on an express elevator. The sudden acceleration and the roar of the KC-10’s three huge engines quadrupled the noise in the bomber’s cockpit, and the smell of burning jet fuel was overpowering. For a moment Mace thought he had been struck by the boom and his jet had caught fire. Mace automatically pulled the throttle back, but almost immediately the stall-warning horn blared, so he shoved power back in. When he did so, the F-111G swerved violently to the left and Mace almost lost control.

Just when Mace was about to give it up and try to eject, he glanced over his right shoulder and saw the RAF Tornado tucked in close on the right wingtip as if he was cemented there. Normally a wingman stayed with the tanker on an emergency breakaway, but the Tornado crew chose to stay with the crippled bomber. The presence of the Tornado really helped steady his hand, and several minutes later he had his airspeed and wits back. Mace steered toward the tanker, determined to get it right this time — and then the MASTER CAUTION light, a large yellow light right in the front center of the instrument panel, snapped on.

Mace quickly scanned the instruments and found the problem: the FUEL LO PRESS light was on. The boost-pump lights for the aft body and fuel-dump system were on, indicating no flow, and two of the four forward body-pump lights were on. That meant less than one thousand pounds of fuel remaining. About five to ten minutes, less if he had really bad fuel leaks, until the last engine flamed out. And there was only one step in the “Double Engine Failure” checklist, and he knew it by heart: EJECT. But with all the damage they had sustained on the left side, the capsule might not separate from the plane, and even if they made it, Parsons would probably not survive the impact.

Mace had one more chance: plug the tanker this time or die.

It was as simple as that.

SEVEN

Rebecca Furness didn’t have a chance to see the F-111G the first time — the other boom operators and the rest of her crew were already in the pod watching — so she waited patiently, watching the Tornado through the starboard porthole, until the breakaway call. She asked her copilot in the pod to switch with her, and he complied immediately — that close call, with the bomber coming only inches away from smacking into the tanker, had rattled him, and he scrambled out of there in a hurry. Furness waited for her tight-lipped, white-faced copilot to climb out, then took a short, steep ladder down into the boom operator’s pod in the aft belly of the KC-10.

Before her was a huge window, four feet by three feet, which was the largest one-piece glass panel in any pressurized aircraft. The senior boom operator on board, a chief master sergeant, was in the instructor’s seat, while Furness’ crew boomer was in the other seat, so she took a position between them and donned a headset.

“Oh … my … God …” she gasped when the F-111G hovered into view. She had seen lots of Aardvarks coming in for refueling, some even with emergencies on board, but in her eight years in the service she had never seen one as bad as this. The pilot looked as if he was hanging out in space, being held in place only by the relentless windblast pounding on his body. The entire left front side was blackened, and huge gashes of torn metal were clearly visible. It looked as if a giant clawed hand had tried to rip the pilot bodily out of the plane and had almost succeeded. The Tornado fighter-bomber was so close now that she could see it, too, close enough so that either one of them could plug into the boom.

“The nav looks scared shitless,” the boom operator, Technical Sergeant Glenn Clintock, said on interphone. “He can hardly keep it straight.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” the senior master sergeant asked. He was the air refueling wing’s senior enlisted adviser and still an active boom operator. “If he stays fixated on the nozzle, he’ll ram us for sure.”

“What’s he doing?” Furness asked.

“He’s staring at the boom nozzle,” Clintock replied. “It’s a typical new-guy reaction. You can’t help but watch the boom nozzle because it’s so close to your head just before it plugs you. When you stare at the boom you unconsciously fly the airplane up into it, and when you realize what you’re doing you jerk the plane away too fast and waste time. He’s got to concentrate on his visual cues and let us worry about the nozzle — except most navs don’t know what the visual cues are. He’s really in a world of hurt.”

“So tell him.”

“Can’t. We’re still over Iraq. One squeak from us and we’ll get hosed by SAM sites or fighter patrols. We’re also still within triple-A gun range — one lone Zeus-23 unit that gets a bead on us could eat our lunch.”

As Clintock explained the problem, Furness concentrated on the figure of the navigator. She could barely see his hands working the control stick and throttles — rather, the throttle, because the left engine was obviously dead — and his visored eyes nervously watching the boom and the tanker. She could somehow feel his fear, sense his anxiety. “What’s his fuel state?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” the chief replied. “We’re supposed to be radio-silent until after contact.”

“He’s clean configuration … does he have any stores on board at all?”

“Don’t know that either,” the chief said.

Furness watched in horrible fascination as the F-111G unsteadily made its way closer.

“This guy’s not going to make it in,” the chief said. “I recommend we call it off and let him find a flat piece of ground to land on.” The chief master sergeant turned to Furness and said, “You’re senior officer on board, Captain. What do you think?”

Furness didn’t reply right away. Of all the aircraft in the Kuwaiti theater of operations, the aerial refueling tankers, especially the Air Force models, were the most important. No bombing missions could be conducted, unless by long-range bombers like the B-52 or F-111G, without refueling, and even the bigger jets, because they were based so far away, needed at least one refueling en route. Tankers were force multipliers. One tanker not only serviced dozens of other aircraft every hour, but they refueled other Navy and Air Force tankers, which in turn refueled dozens of planes. That meant that losing one tanker was akin to losing several dozen strike aircraft. Losing one tanker like the KC-10, which could gas up USAF, Navy, and allied aircraft as well as carry cargo for long distances, was probably equivalent to losing one hundred strike aircraft. What commander, even at flag or general officer rank, in this day and age, could sustain the loss of a hundred combat aircraft at once? His career would be over instantly.

It was Furness’ responsibility to make sure her aircraft was safe and mission-ready — if this was going to be a long war, and there was every indication that it would be so, the KC-10 was probably the most important aircraft in the Coalition fleet. The chief was right: risking the KC-10 like this, with the bomber crew so inexperienced and rattled, was not only unsafe but operationally improper. The chief master sergeant was reminding her of her responsibility: some two- or three-star general could ask them to try to refuel this stricken plane, but it was her job, and hers alone, to protect her aircraft and her crew.

“Captain? He’s moving in again. What do you want to do?”

Furness unplugged her headset from the interphone cord and into the boom operator’s observer’s cord, then flipped the switch to radio one. “Pilot of the F-111, this is the commander of Shamu Two-Two. How do you hear me?”

“Open channel!” someone shouted on interphone. “Check switches!”

“Captain, we’re supposed to be radio-silent,” Clintock said, his eyes wide. “You’re on interplane.”

“I know,” Furness replied. “But we’ve got to talk this guy in or he won’t make it.”

“But you’re going to get us all killed!”

Furness wasn’t listening: “F-111 pilot, this is Shamu Two-Two. How do you read?”

“This is Breakdance. I read you loud and clear, lady. Have we broken radio silence? Acknowledge.”

“Yes … and no,” Furness said. “I can give you one more shot, and this time we’ll do it, or else I have no choice but to send you to an alternate recovery strip.”

“Then let’s do it,” the voice from the F-111G said. “I’m running on fumes. Clear me in to contact position.”

Furness nodded with satisfaction. She was expecting a scared, totally out-of-control nav on the radio, but instead found a determined, realistic fighter. She nodded to Clintock and said, “Clear him in and let’s get it on, Glenn.”

“You got it, Captain,” Clintock said. On interplane, he said, “Breakdance, this is Shamu Two-Two, cleared to contact position, Two-Two is ready.”

“No, no, not that way, Glenn,” Furness said. She motioned for the senior master sergeant to get out of his seat beside Clintock — he had no choice but to comply, but he was obviously perturbed about it — then strapped herself in and got on the radio: “Okay, guy, c’mon in. What’s your first name?”

“Say again?”

“I asked you, what’s your first name — or do you want to be called Breakdance all morning?”

That got his attention: “Daren,” he replied with obvious humor in his voice.

“Okay, Daren, I’m Rebecca. My friends call me BC. We’re going to dispense with the normal radio calls and do this my way. It’s just you and me, cowboy. I’ve got the juice, so come get it.”

“Okay, BC,” Mace replied with a hint of amusement. “Here I come.”

Furness watched as the F-111G began moving closer. She could see the long black nose bobbing a bit as the nav made rather large pitch changes — too large for being less than fifty feet away: “Use nice, easy power and stick changes,” she said. “Nothing drastic, nothing sudden. Forget about your fuel state, forget about your pilot, forget about everything. Relax. It’s like pulling your big Jaguar into your garage and parking it. Concentrate on slipping that big Aardvark nose right under my tail. We’ll tell you when to stop.”

“You’re starting to turn me on, BC,” Mace radioed back.

The F-111G eased itself gently into position, the tip of its long black fiberglass nose all the way under the boomer’s pod, the refueling receptacle less than ten feet from the nozzle.

“Look at the plane, not the nozzle, Daren,” Furness said, ignoring his last remark. “Look at me. Start developing a picture of the underside of the plane in relation to your canopy rails. Don’t look at the nozzle — that’s our job. Keep coming … keep coming …”

Suddenly, Mace’s radar warning receiver came to life: a loud deedledeedledeedle came on the interphone, and a bat-wing symbol appeared on the right side of the indicator. He automatically started to back away in preparation for a breakaway maneuver. “Two-Two, I’ve got a bandit at three o’clock,” Mace shouted on the interplane frequency. “Repeat — bandit at three o’clock. Stand by for evasive action.”

“Wait! Hold your position, Daren,” Furness said. “You’ve got a fuel emergency. Get on the boom and get your gas, then we’ll do a separation.”

This time, before the chief master sergeant could react, Sam Marlowe shouted on interphone: “Furness, that’s not the SOP! If we come under attack, we do a breakaway and begin evasive maneuvers. That fighter can be on top of us in no time!”

“I’m not losing this guy.”

“But you’re willing to get our asses killed!” Marlowe thundered. “I’m calling a breakaway.”

“Like hell!” Furness shouted. “This is my aircraft and my sortie!”

A calm but determined British voice said on the refueling frequency, “Shamu, Breakdance, this is Elvis Three-Ought-Seven, we have a bogey at our three o’clock, turning starboard to engage. We’ll be back shortly, Elvis Three-Ought-Seven.” The Tornado suddenly banked sharply right and climbed steeply, with afterburners glowing brightly and its wings tucked all the way back against its fuselage.

“Daren, continue in to contact position, and do it quick,” Furness said. “If my crew gets a visual on the bandit, we’ll begin evasive maneuvers.”

“I copy,” Mace replied. “Coming in.”

But it wasn’t going to happen. The Tornado had disappeared from sight, the radios were silent, and the bat-wing symbol on the threat scope kept on closing. “Shamu, the threat’s approaching lethal range, and I can’t see the Tornado. You better—” just then, they heard a calm British voice on the refueling frequency: “Lousy bugger … don’t try it … yes, thank you … lovely … lovely … missile away, missile away.” There was no sign of excitement, no sign of stress at all in the voice — except for a bit of strain against the G-forces. The bat-wing symbol disappeared from the threat scope. “Splash one MiG, chaps. Elvis Three-Ought-Seven, splash one. Coming in on the rejoin.”

Furness found she was holding her hands to her face in absolute, sheer horror. Just like that, as if it was a simple stroke of a pen or a brush of a hand, the Tornado crew had killed an Iraqi pilot and shot down his plane. It was only now that the threat was gone that she realized the threat to herself — had it gone any other way, she could have been the one crashing to the desert floor in pieces.

Even now, she could see a small column of smoke rising from the ground, not that far away. Death was that close for all of them, but especially for the crew of the KC-10 Extender tanker. The F-111G could descend to hill-hugging altitude, fly faster than most fighter-interceptors, use jammers, and dispense decoy chaff and flares to protect itself; the Panavia Tornado could do all that and launch air-to-air missiles itself. But the KC-10 was powerless, as vulnerable as a newborn baby. The KC-10 could not even detect nearby threats, unless the pilots got lucky and saw the missile or fighters coming — at night or in bad weather, they would be dead long before they saw the threat. Flying these behemoths over enemy territory was crazy, simply insane. Aircraft flying in combat needed to be able to fight. More than that, she wanted to fight. She wanted to be the one in the F-111G dropping bombs, or the one in the Tornado shooting down bandits. Refueling was fine, and it was a necessary mission, but if she was going to fly, she wanted to fight.

“Thank you, Elvis,” Furness said shakily to the Tornado crew as they maneuvered their jet up beside the F-111G again.

“My pleasure, mademoiselle,” the Tornado pilot replied in the very same voice he used to announce that he was blowing away the Iraqi.

“Okay, Daren,” Furness said, “you’re cleared back in. Remember, nice and easy. There’s a little bump when you get inside, but don’t try to anticipate it or try to smooth it out. Ride the bump and keep moving in.”

Mace again eased the crippled F-111G into position. He struggled momentarily with the bow wave, overcompensating for the push by pulling back on the stick, then fluttering dangerously close to the tanker’s belly when he broke free, but he managed to stay in position through the momentary oscillation and moved slowly but steadily into contact position. “Okay, right there,” Furness called out. “That’s perfect. You don’t have to look up, just get your bearings from the markings on the belly … I said don’t look up, Daren, just remember the picture you see right now.”

She saw the signal from Clintock that he was ready to plug the F-111G. “Here we go, Daren … a little push from the boom … don’t try to help it or back away from it, just hold your picture.”

Clintock carefully eased the boom down a bit lower and extended the nozzle. It scraped only a few inches against the slipway, then plugged into the bomber’s receptacle with a satisfied ch-clunk! The green AR/NWS light went out, indicating that the toggles had made contact and the nozzle was locked in place. “I’ve got contact,” Mace reported.

“Contact, Two-Two,” Clintock reported. “Taking fuel.”

The director’s lights on the tanker’s belly automatically illuminated, and Mace found himself right in the middle of the envelope, with the UP-DOWN elevation marker and IN-OUT boom-extension markers both right in the center.

“Okay, Daren, good job. Now just ignore the director lights. Maintain that last picture you see through the canopy. You can glance at the lights every now and then as a crosscheck, but they’ll just confirm what you should already see. Relax your hands, take a deep breath. You’re taking fuel, and we don’t see any leaks. Good job, guy.”

Mace was afraid to breathe, afraid to move, but he tried to do as the tanker commander said and relax. He found that, once it was trimmed up and at the proper aimpoint, it was very easy to stay in the contact position — the KC-10 practically dragged the bomber along. One by one, the forward-body low-pressure lights and the LO FUEL PRESS caution light went out. “Thanks, BC,” he said on interplane. “You really saved our bacon. I’m grateful.”

“Don’t mention it,” Furness said. “Give me a ride in your plane someday.” If she ever had her choice of planes to fly, without any women-in-combat restrictions, the F-111 would be it.

“You got a deal.”

After over three minutes on the boom, the nozzle suddenly popped out and Clintock pulled it quickly away from the bomber. “Pressure disconnect, Breakdance,” Clintock reported.

“We can’t give you any more fuel because your system says it’s full, Daren,” Furness added. “What have you got?”

“My fuel system is dead, so I don’t know what I got,” Mace said. “I can try manually transferring fuel, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You took on fifteen thousand pounds of fuel,” Furness reported, “and I see no leaks up here. We’ll follow you all the way to landing.”

“This should do me for at least three to four hours,” Mace said. “I think I’m done for now. Thanks again, BC.”

“Don’t mention it,” Furness said as she saw him wave at her. “See you when I see you.” Furness removed the headset, slumped in the seat, took a deep breath, and let it out in one expansive sigh.

“Good job, Captain,” Clintock said, then added with a mischievous smile, “For a lady, you got a lot of balls.”

“I just hope the brass sees it that way,” the chief master sergeant said as he took his seat beside Clintock again after Furness got out, “when they review those radio transmissions. And thank God we had a fighter out there with missiles on board, or else we’d be a flaming hole right now.”

“We got the -111 and the Tornado its gas,” Furness said. “That’s what we were ordered to do. Any other problems they have with my procedures are moot if the Aardvark makes it back in one piece.”

The chief shook his head but said nothing else.

Furness made her way back up to the forward passenger cabin to get back to her newspaper when she met up with the flight engineer and the pilot Marlowe again coming out of the cockpit. The engineer looked as white as a sheet, and specks of white and a large stain spread over the front of his flight suit. “Hey, Pete, what’s the matter?” The engineer made no reply, but avoided Furness’ eyes and hurried over to the lavatory. “What’s with him, Sam?”

Marlowe made sure the engineer made it, then turned angrily toward Furness. “He’s sick, that’s what, Furness,” Marlowe snapped. “He can barely stand up.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You’re what happened,” Marlowe said. “That attack by the fighter … it really rattled him. He’s scared shitless, all because of you. I was coming back here to advise you that I’m making a full report of this incident to the wing,” he said.

Furness’ smile disappeared in a fraction of a second. “You’re … what …?”

“You think you’re some kind of hero for refueling that bomber with enemy fighters in the area? Bullshit. I say you’re an egotistical prima donna that gets her kicks from breaking the rules when it suits her.”

“Well, you go right ahead and make your report, Marlowe,” Furness seethed. “I was ordered to refuel that bomber, and that’s what I did.”

“And you broke technical, procedural, and tactical rules to do it — not to mention putting this entire crew and this aircraft in jeopardy.”

“I didn’t put anyone in jeopardy,” Furness said. “In emergency situations we can continue the rendezvous.”

“We saw the damned fighter, Furness,” Marlowe said grimly.

Furness’ jaw dropped open in surprise. “You what …? How far? When …?”

“He was right there, less than three, maybe four miles away,” Marlowe said. “He was rolling in on us … Jesus, he fired on us, Furness, we saw him launch a missile at us! We couldn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t try to evade? You didn’t say anything?”

“It was too late to do anything,” Marlowe said. “By the time we saw him, he was coming at us and the missile was in the air. God, I don’t know how it missed us. The Tornado dropped a flare, and I think it went after the flare.”

“So the bandit was firing on the Tornado.”

“It was firing at us, Furness!” Marlowe shouted. “It shot at us! You set us up like a sitting duck for that bandit to shoot us down!”

Furness was completely speechless — she had no idea the fighter was so close: “Greg, the bomber reported the bandit outside lethal range.”

“That doesn’t mean shit, Furness. We don’t know from lethal or nonlethal range — we know ‘attack.’ We were under attack, and you ordered us not to evade.”

“You were on the flight deck, Marlowe,” Furness said. “You saw the bandit. You should have called a breakaway and begun evasive maneuvers.”

“Hey, that’s good, lady, that’s real good,” the stunned pilot retorted. “Blame it on me now. Just what I expected. You are the senior officer and the mission commander, you were talking on the radios over enemy territory when we were told to maintain radio silence, you ordered me not to evade, you told the receivers to stay in contact position — but now you’re blaming me for not doing something.”

Marlowe turned away, a look of resigned defeat on his face, and said, “Well, I was the pilot-in-command at the time, and I know I’m in charge when I’m in the left seat, so they’ll take me down too …” But then he snapped a look of pure anger at her and added, “But I’m going to make sure you go down with me, you bitch. And if they don’t bust you, I’ll make sure no one in the Command ever flies with you again.”

EIGHT

“Emergency-gear extension handle — pull,” Mace said half-aloud. He unwrapped the stainless steel safety wire from the yellow handle on the center forward instrument panel and pulled. Immediately the main gear-down lights came on steady green, but the nose-gear light was still out. Mace didn’t panic — yet. The emergency gear extension system used very high-pressure air to shove the gear out into the slipstream and throw the downlocks into place, but the book said that it might take much slower airspeeds, higher angles of attack, or as long as five minutes for the nose gear to come down because its shocks were so big.

“Your nose gear looks like it’s halfway down, my friend,” the British pilot aboard the Tornado chasing Mace radioed. They were just a few miles inside Saudi Arabian airspace, but no Iraqi fighters had dared to fly this far south yet so they were given permission to use the radios. The Tornado crew had configured their fighter-bomber to look exactly like Mace’s plane — clean wings (they had used their last two remaining Sidewinder missiles to kill the Iraqi fighter, which turned out to be a MiG-29—a very impressive kill considering that the MiG-29 was a front-line Soviet-made fighter, similar to the American F-15 Eagle, and the Tornado was a “mud-pounder” that happened to carry air-to-air missiles), gear down, and wings swept back to about 30 to 35 degrees. The Tornado was about thirty feet from Mace’s right wingtip, accomplishing some of the steadiest “welded-wing” formation flying Mace had ever seen.

“Yeah, I know,” Mace radioed back. “Fuckin’ thing is falling apart around my ears. I’ll give it a few more minutes.”

“Right,” the Tornado pilot replied skeptically. Judging by the tone of his voice, he strongly believed in Murphy’s Law—”if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”—and Mace’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law: “Emergency-Gear Extension Handles won’t.”

“Breakdance, this is Ramrod,” a new voice on the radio announced a few minutes later. “How do you hear?”

“Loud and clear,” Mace replied. Ramrod was a standard call sign for a maintenance officer at most Air Force bases, a sort of on-site foreman who coordinated all repair, supply, and emergency activities at a base during aircraft launch and recovery.

“Roger. We have an emergency recovery team in place to assist you. The landing zone will be marked by vehicles, and we have a mobile BAK-6 arresting cable set up with a line of trucks marking its location. Land well short of the cable. Check hook extended now.”

Mace reached across Parsons and pulled a yellow hook-shaped handle. With all the other warning and caution lights illuminated on the front panel, Mace almost missed the new one: HOOK EXTEND. “Hook is down,” he radioed.

“Confirmed,” the Tornado crew added.

“Say gross weight, Breakdance.”

“Estimating five-five thousand.”

“Status of weapon bay stores.”

“Unknown,” Mace replied. “One store may be hot.”

“We copy,” Ramrod replied. There was a long, strained pause; then: “Breakdance, do you require assistance to complete your checklists?”

“What I need is to get this beast on the ground,” Mace replied. He took a few deep breaths, trying to flush the nervousness out of his eyes and hands, then said, “No, I think I got everything I can. I’m flying upright, the gear is down, and I’m cool for now. Over.”

“We’re about thirty miles out,” the pilot aboard the RAF Tornado radioed. “Let’s try a controllability check, shall we? Slow to your computed approach speed and let’s have a go.”

“Let’s,” Mace replied curtly.

His computed approach speed of 195 knots — about 60 nautical miles per hour faster than normal — wasn’t that much slower than the airspeed he was flying right now, but the effect on his control just by pulling off a little power was dramatic. Immediately the nose came up, the stall-warning buzzer sounded, and the F-111G sank like the anchor on an aircraft carrier. He had to shove in military power to get his airspeed back up above 185. Through it all, the Tornado stayed on his wing, matching his airspeed swings and threatening to send himself crashing in the desert. “Sorry about that,” Mace offered as he climbed back up to two thousand feet and accelerated back to a comfortable, stable 220 knots.

“Pulled off a bit too much too fast, I think,” the Tornado pilot said. “Not recommended for a normal approach, but keep it in mind if you have a short-field approach. Any serious vibrations or directional control problems?”

“No.” Mace replied. “Let’s give it another shot — can’t do much worse. Ready?” No reply. “Elvis, you ready?” Still no reply. Then he saw the Tornado pilot point to the side of his helmet, tapping his earpieces, and Mace knew what had happened even before he looked back into the cockpit. He punched the MASTER CAUTION light out and found the RGEN and UTIL HOT caution lights illuminated. With one engine running, the primary hydraulic system from the one good engine had to supply power to the entire aircraft. Because of this, it was easy to overload it, as Mace had obviously done with his recovery efforts.

Now the system was in “isolate,” which meant that the backup hydraulic system had activated and only a few vital systems were getting hydraulic power — namely, the stabilators, which controlled pitch and roll. Since the electrical generators ran on hydraulic power as well, all electrical systems were out now. Mace tried switching to battery power only, which powered radio one, but when he keyed the mike, nothing happened. The game was just about over. It was all up to the Tornado crew now to get him to the recovery base.

A few minutes later they did reach the recovery base — except it wasn’t a base. They had descended to one thousand feet and had first aimed right at a group of trucks parked alongside a highway. But when the Tornado began a right turn and started to parallel the highway, Mace knew what was happening — the highway was his recovery base. He was going to land on the highway!

The Tornado pulled ahead of Mace’s F-111G for the last two left-hand turns, keeping his airspeed up to two hundred knots for maximum controllability in the turns and making sure the maneuvers were gentle and easy. They lined up perfectly on the highway after the last turn on final. Three trucks on either side of the highway marked the BAK-6 arresting cable location, and off in the distance a few more trucks blocked the highway just before a curve — a little less than two miles available.

Once they turned onto final, all Mace had to do was keep up with the Tornado. The backseater was watching him intently for any other signs of danger.

Mace couldn’t keep the damn throttle steady. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t find a power setting that maintained the proper glide angle. Every tiny pitch change required a power adjustment, which changed his altitude, which required another pitch and power change to compensate. Several times he found himself well above the Tornado, and once he was so high that he lost sight of it. While the Tornado’s approach was a straight line, Mace’s approach was a series of roller-coaster hills that—

Suddenly the pilot pointed forward. Mace looked up. He was still twenty, maybe thirty feet above the highway — well above the touchdown point. Mace tried a last-ditch dive for the cable, yanking the nose up just before the nose gear hit, but the hook bounced off the pavement and missed the arresting cable.

“Breakdance, negative cable! Negative cable!” Ramrod shouted on the radio. “Go around! Go around!”

Mace didn’t hear the warning, but he knew his landing attempt had gone horribly wrong. He shoved the power back in on the good engine and tried to raise the nose, but the control stick felt as heavy as an iron girder and the nose wasn’t moving up. He had no choice — he was going to land.

The line of trucks blocking the highway at the curve seemed to be right in front of him. Although they were still at least a mile and a half away, at his speed he would close that distance in a hurry. Mace tried to ease the big bomber down with small power changes, but thermals coming off the highway were buoying him up, refusing to let him settle gently to earth. He was high and fast, with no highway left. When he reached the trucks ahead, both he and Parsons would die in a spectacular ball of fire. He had only one chance left to save himself… Please, God, he prayed silently, don’t let the nukes blow.…

Mace chopped the throttle to idle and pulled the wing-sweep handle back to the 54-degree lockout. That dumped every last erg of lift remaining in the F-111G, and it sank tailfirst almost straight down. The sudden power loss shut down the backup hydraulic system, and Mace suddenly had no directional control at all — he was at the hands of the gods, the same ones that Daren Mace had been pissing off almost all his life.

The tail feathers surrounding the engine exhaust nozzles hit first, crunching the metal against the destroyed engine and instantly igniting some fuel or hydraulic fluid and starting a black, smoky fire in the aft engine section. The main trucks hit hard, blowing the right tire and starting a small fire in the aft wheel well. The nose hit third, the partially extended nose gear collapsed instantly, and Mace was thrown so hard against his shoulder straps that he lost his breath. The fiberglass radome snapped, broke free, and crashed into the windscreen, destroying what was left of it before flying off.

Still traveling well over 150 miles an hour, the F-111G left the highway and careened out into the desert, threatening to tumble like a mobile home caught in a tornado. The bomber began to spin on its blown right wheel, then on its nose digging into the sand, and finally came to rest nearly a mile past its touchdown spot, buried up to the cockpit in sand.

It took several long moments for Mace to get his wind back — the sudden smell of burning fuel and rubber immediately invaded his half-conscious senses and quickened his recovery. The bomber, with two AGM-131X nuclear-tipped missiles and about fifteen hundred gallons of jet fuel on board, was on fire.

Mace’s first impulse was to run, to get away from the burning plane before something blew — but his pilot, Robert Parsons, was also on that plane. He might be dead, especially after the crash, but he couldn’t just leave him in the plane to fry. Instead, he hobbled around the decimated nose to Robert Parsons. His restraints had failed on impact and he was slumped over his lap, blood covering his legs and chest, but with the bomber tipped over onto its left side it was easy to pull him free of the plane. With strength he didn’t know he possessed, Mace dragged the pilot out across the desert nearly a hundred yards before his strength drained away and he collapsed on the sand.

Laying Parsons down, he carefully removed his battered helmet. Parsons’ face was deeply scarred and covered with blood, and all of Mace’s bandages had torn off in the windblast. His left shoulder appeared dislocated and shattered. The bandages on his chest were intact but soaked through with blood. The wound across the left side of his chest looked the worst, and Mace had nothing to cover the gaping, bloody wound with except his hands. He applied pressure on the exposed tissue — and to his surprise a low moan escaped from Parsons’ lips. Was it just air from his dead lungs being expelled through his — No! Parsons was still alive! “Oh, Jesus,” Mace murmured as he saw Parsons move his head and lips. “Bob, can you hear me? We’re okay. We made it. Help will be here in a minute.” Parsons’ lips moved, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he struggled to speak.

“Don’t try to talk, man. You’re okay. Don’t try.”

But Parsons gasped again, leaning forward to get closer to Mace. Over the sounds of the approaching rescue crews and the fire extinguishers being activated against the fires creeping toward the bomb bay, Mace leaned closer to Parsons. “What is it, Bob?” he asked his pilot.

“Nuke … you didn’t … launch … nuke.”

Then he heard one word from his pilot, but it was a word that was going to change his life:

“Traitor,” Parsons coughed. “You’re … a fucking traitor.”