Flash Point

38

Woods pushed the nose of the Tomcat over slightly following down a hill as he stayed at two hundred feet above ground level. He increased his speed to five hundred fifty knots. Wink had his head buried in the infrared LANTIRN system and watched for any sign of the launch of a surface-to-air missile or AAA. Wink glanced at the green-glowing radar warning indicator by his right knee. It was completely quiet.

Woods checked his fuel. They were below their consumption ladder again, burning more fuel than they should be. He checked his speed and fuel flow again. The fuel flow was slightly higher than projected. His calculations had been wrong. Bark had told them to check their fuel carefully. If they weren’t close, they were to abandon the mission. The last thing Bark said he wanted was to lose two Tomcats from fuel starvation. They were already burning through their Bingo fuel — the cushion they relied on when returning to the carrier to fly to a nearby airfield if they couldn’t get back aboard. Wink checked their projected time on target with the LANTIRN system.

“Crossing into Iraq,” Wink reported.

“This just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?” Woods replied. He glanced at his engine instruments, the fuel flow, the turbine inlet temperature, the wing position, and engine rpm’s. Everything was as smooth as silk. “You see Big?”

Wink grabbed the steel handle on top of the radar panel in front of him and twisted around to look between the tails of the Tomcat. “Yep,” Wink said with some difficulty due to his contortions. “Got his formation lights. About a quarter mile behind us. Stacked right.” He glanced at his PTID again. “Time to target is thirty-six minutes.”

“Roger,” Woods said. His hands were beginning to sweat inside his gloves. The green landscape flashed by smoothly. The desert air was mercifully quiet with few pockets of turbulence or intense heat rising into the cool night sky.

“Approaching way-point three,” Wink said. He had chosen an intersection as the way-point, something that they could check visually to make sure they were on course. “Stand by to come port to 049. Check for intersection.”

“Roger.” Woods watched the distance to the way-point count down in tenths of miles. He strained to see an intersection. He hadn’t even seen a road in thirty minutes. The desert had a way of rejecting roads unless they were well maintained. He had a feeling the chances of this intersection being well maintained were not high. He scanned the horizon for anything suspicious. There were no signs of life at all.

“Mark. Come port, 049,” Wink said crisply.

Woods banked the F-14 left and pulled up slightly to make sure the turn didn’t bring them closer to the ground. He checked the radar altimeter, the only emission they were making that might be detected by the enemy. It was a small radar beam that was projected directly down, beneath the Tomcat, to measure its height above the ground with amazing accuracy. The accuracy would cause the numbers to jump around even if they were level because of the changing elevation of the ground. He steadied on the new heading. Woods had found himself watching the sky even more carefully after they’d passed into Iraq. He couldn’t believe they were flying through Syria, Iraq, and Iran all in one night. He started to wonder how smart his plan had been. It was fraught with potential for disaster, not the least of which was the longest night low-level he had ever flown. He wouldn’t put it past Iraq to try to come up and stop them. Not that he was worried about Iraq’s ability to find them and shoot them down at night with one of its fighters, but he didn’t have enough gas for even one turn with a fighter.

The air grew unfriendly as they entered a mountain valley. They started bouncing noticeably in the mountain air. Woods was worried about maintaining his heading and altitude without running into something. He followed the valley through the jagged rocks and tried to maintain his course, beginning to breathe audibly.

“You okay?” Wink asked.

“Yeah.”

“Entering Iran,” Wink announced casually.

Woods was busy scanning back and forth with his night-vision goggles. His field of vision was much more limited than usual. He had to turn his head to see the gullies and valleys that were flashing by. He saw what looked like a tent settlement directly ahead and wanted to pull up to avoid them, but he had to stay low. He held his altitude and flew right over the dark tents. He could only imagine what those in the tents thought as they were awakened in the middle of the night by nearly instantaneous and overwhelming jet noise from one hundred feet away. Their animals probably all had heart attacks.

“We’re getting close, Trey. Thirty miles out. We’ll start up at ten miles.”

Woods climbed over a small hill and pushed the nose over to stay low to the ground.

“Twenty miles,” Wink said, his excitement growing. “Oh, shit!” he added. “I’m getting a SAM indication. An SA-6!”

“They’re waiting for us,” Woods said. “We’ve got to stay low and do a pop-up bomb run.”

“We can’t! We told them it would be a mid-altitude drop! Our laser guy is waiting for us to come in high!”

“No way, not in the middle of an SA-6 envelope. I just hope like hell the laser guy keeps that laser on target or this is all for naught.”

Both their voices had risen as the intensity and speed of the mission had tripled and their brains tried to make innumerable calculations simultaneously. Woods looked to his right and forward in the direction the SA-6. He was surprised to see snow reflecting on the top of the mountains. He pushed the airplane over and flew lower to the ground, his radar altimeter bouncing around due to the unevenness of the ground, but hovering mostly around fifty feet.

The two F-14s raced through the long valley, hugging the ground on their way to the point where they would pull up and lob their enormous bombs at Alamut, a flight they had flown many times in practice, but never with a five-thousand-pound bomb underneath.

They came to the end of the long valley and stared at a small mountain right in front of them. Woods aimed the Tomcat a little left of the peak and pulled up slightly to match the rising terrain. He maintained his altitude above the ground as he climbed up the mountainside, the accelerometer needle showing negative two Gs as the Tomcat headed down the other side of the small mountain, still close to the ground. Woods checked their fuel one last time. They were now two thousand pounds low. It was getting critical.

The Tomcats bottomed out after the hill and headed across another small valley toward Alamut.

“The SA-6 is still tickling us from right nine o’clock,” Wink said, as he checked their bombing solution. “Just over that hill.”

“Let me know if he locks us up,” Woods said.

Just as they steadied at fifty feet above the deck on the valley floor Woods pulled back on the stick to climb up the next summit. They headed up the hill, which was steeper than they had initially thought. As they reached the top of the ridge line Wink slaved his LANTIRN to the GPS latitude and longitude for Alamut. The forward-looking infrared immediately locked onto the fortress ten miles ahead as the Tomcat continued to climb. “Holy shit,” Wink exclaimed. “There it is!” he marveled. “Clear as day.” He worked his target designation crosshairs to where he thought the illumination should be. He glanced up at the clock on the instrument panel that he had double checked before launch and looked at his digital G-shock watch. They both said 0358. “Laser should be coming on any minute. One minute to drop. Weapon systems check good — GBU-28 selected.” He looked at the infrared image and studied the fortress as they prepared to utterly destroy it. It was strange to be looking up at a target. But the target stood clearly on the top of the steep mountain, large and solid against the cool night sky. He placed the targeting crosshairs right where he thought the laser energy should be coming from already. Nothing. “Thirty seconds!” he called.

Big was right behind him with Sedge seeing exactly the same thing. A perfect FLIR picture of the fortress, and a clear crosshair on his designation of where he thought the 1.06 micron ground laser designator energy should be. But he too, saw nothing. Someone hadn’t kept his promise.

“We’re going to have to light this guy up ourselves,” Wink said, trying not to panic. The SA-6 indicator was warbling in his ear. The SAM targeting radar had them. “Chaff!” Wink called. “I’m going active on our laser!” Wink’s hands flew to the switches.

Woods watched their airspeed drop off at an alarming rate, down through five hundred knots, then four hundred as they climbed through five thousand feet, three-fifty, as they approached ten on their way to fifteen thousand feet. Woods tapped the burner to get the rate of climb back where it needed to be, knowing he couldn’t afford the fuel.

“No!” Wink yelled, feeling the burners light off. “An IR SAM will see us!”

“We’ve got no choice, Wink!” Woods said. “We’ll fall out of the sky.”

“Fifteen thousand feet!” Wink said. They were going to toss the bomb in a high parabola so it would have the right angle and energy to penetrate. “Still no laser. I’m going active!” he said too loud as he flipped the switch that would ensure their failure — the entire mission turned on someone on the ground guiding the bomb into the underground hideout. At best, Wink was just guessing.

Wink watched the crosshairs remain steady on the target point he had selected. “Three, two, one, pickle!” Wink called as he released the bomb while they were still climbing steeply. They could both feel the airplane jump up as the enormous bomb dropped off and headed toward Alamut. The computer had calculated the right release point to lob the bomb the correct distance. Once heading down, the wings on the silent bomb would maneuver it to hit at the point of the reflected laser energy. “Let’s get out of here,” Wink called. Woods pulled the Tomcat hard left and brought the nose down through the horizon as they sought the safety of lower altitude from the SAM energy that continued to illuminate them.

Woods banked even harder, almost rolling upside down in the darkness.

“Keep it illuminated!” Wink screamed.

Woods glanced at his display to keep the line representing his maximum bank angle and aim point on the screen. They passed back through ten thousand feet toward the safety of the ground, then five thousand feet.

Wink stared at the aim point on his FLIR display on the PTID waiting for the impact of their huge bomb. But a new sound in the small speakers tore his eyes away. His head jerked to see what the new fire control radar was. “AAA has us locked up!”

Woods’s instincts worked faster than Wink’s mouth. He had already nosed over hard to get down to the lowest possible altitude. He hit the white button on the left side of the stick to release a chaff program. Small canisters of metal were ejected by shotgun-shell-sized blasts out of their receptacles in the back of the F-14 to deceive the radar. As soon as they hit the airstream they formed a cloud of reflective metal the size of an airplane to encourage the radar to lock onto the aluminum instead of the real plane.

But the mobile ZSU-23-4 below them was too hungry to be deceived by chaff. It was a nasty wheeled vehicle that carried its own radar and four-barreled antiaircraft battery. It was the most feared ground antiair weapon in the world. The Iranians had the Russian upgrade, which detected a sudden deceleration — chaff instead of an airplane — and didn’t take the bait. The 23-millimeter bullets leapt into the action for which they had been waiting all night. They raced up from the four barrels toward Woods’s F-14. The red tracer bullets tore into the LANTIRN pod, then into the belly of the F-14.

Woods pushed the nose over harder and banked left, not caring whether the target was still illuminated. More bullets ripped into the tail of the F-14 and the left engine exploded. The left wing buckled at its root and bent up as the left tail came off entirely.

“Eject! Eject! Eject!” Woods shouted as he reached for the ejection handle between his legs.

Wink reached for his ejection handle at the same time and both pulled. The canopy locks were blown off by detonation cord and the canopy flew up and back off the airplane. Wink’s ejection seat rocketed up the rail as the airplane slowly began to come apart and plummet toward the earth. Woods’s seat fired 1.2 seconds later. The Tomcat broke into pieces as Woods cleared the burning hulk. Twenty-three-millimeter bullets continued to rip into the pathetic airplane as it looked for a place to die.

Before Woods could even focus on what was happening he felt a jerk in his crotch as his parachute’s ballistic spreader deployed the silk and grabbed the air to slow his descent. He swung back and forth and steadied slightly. He looked around for anything recognizable. Suddenly an F-14 flew by not five hundred feet away. It flashed its lights to acknowledge his presence. It was Big. He had dropped his bomb and was keeping Alamut illuminated. Woods’s night-vision devices had been ripped off his face in the ejection and he couldn’t see much else. He looked toward Alamut and saw the mountain in the distance, maybe three miles away. He heard a deep rumbling explosion, then another, but saw no flash or fire. Woods jerked involuntarily in his parachute, trying to drive his five-thousand-pound bomb deeper into the hidden fortress, into the face of the man who had killed his best friend.

Woods searched the sky for Wink, also mindful of where he was going. Nothing like parachuting into the valley of the Assassins right after having bombed the hell out of them. He hung helplessly under his parachute, horrified by how long it was taking to get down to the ground. He unhooked his oxygen mask. His breath came quickly as he drew in the cool night air, his mask hanging off his helmet. Without warning he suddenly slammed into the hard-packed ground and tumbled head over heels, skidding to a stop. His parachute filled with the small late night breeze and began to pull him again. He tried to release the shoulder harness fittings but had trouble getting his gloved fingers under the covers. Struggling to lift the flaps, he finally worked his hands into the fittings and released the parachute. It drifted away from him, driven by the wind.

Woods knew he had to hide, but he couldn’t move. He was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of failure. Suddenly, he knew how it was going to end. He had succeeded only in arousing the Sheikh, who would now come and find him, torture him, and kill him.

He scanned the ground around him for Wink. He couldn’t see anyone. He looked in amazement at the place where his Tomcat had plummeted. It was between him and the mountain fortress of Alamut, burning away in the darkest part of night. The base of the mountain on which Alamut sat seemed mysteriously quiet. The deep explosions had produced no visible evidence of damage.

“Trey!”

Woods’s heart jumped as he heard his name. He looked behind him. “Wink!”

“You okay?”

“I think so,” Woods, said standing up for the first time. He reached into his survival vest and pulled out his 9-millimeter Beretta.

“Put that thing away!” Wink said as he limped toward Woods. “You’ll probably shoot me.”

“We gotta get out of here,” Woods said. He put his gun back in its holster in his survival vest. “This place is probably crawling with men looking for us. We’ve got to get to the hills and radio for help.”

“I can’t,” Wink replied.

“Why not?”

“I tried to use my radio when we were in our chutes. I dropped it.”

“You didn’t have it on a lanyard?”

“No.”

“Nice preflight,” Woods said.

“Your radio okay?”

“I sure hope so.” Woods looked down at his survival vest, unzipped the large pocket, and felt for his Motorola PRC-112 radio, which was in its place. He was reassured. “We’ve got to move. They probably saw us come down.” As they started to walk he noticed Wink was limping. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just twisted my knee on the landing. It hurts, but I can walk on it.”

They suddenly heard loud shooting from a mechanized large-bore gun.

“Holy shit!” Wink whispered as they kneeled next to a boulder. “That’s the guy who got us,” he said, alarmed. “He’s on the other side of this hill!”

Woods pulled out his radio. He had to make a move. He turned it to the SAR frequency, 282.8, plugging it into his helmet so he could hear it without it making any audible noise. He pressed the transmit button. “Big! You up?” Woods waited for a reply. Nothing. “Big! You up?”

“Yeah. Chasing snakes. You okay?”

“Yeah. Both on the ground safe. We’ll be doing a little E&E.” Escape and evasion.

“We’re out of here. Stay out of sight. We’ll send someone back for you.”

“When?” Woods asked, feeling foolish as soon as he asked the question.

There was a pause as Big tried to imagine a way to convey a time to Woods without someone else who might be listening knowing immediately what the time was. “Stay up on this freq. Out.”

“Roger, out,” Woods replied.

“What did he say?” Wink asked.

“He’s okay. They’re heading back. He said they’d send someone to get us.”

“Like who? An H-60? They can’t fly this far.”

“I don’t know.” Woods slipped the radio back into his survival vest. “I don’t know,” he repeated.

“When?”

“That’s what I asked him.”

“And?”

“He said to stay on this freq. Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Big couldn’t believe what had happened. He kept his Tomcat level on the way out, turning as little as he possibly could. He didn’t want to know what might happen if he tried to turn with the left wing tip of his Tomcat shot clean off. What the hell had happened? He was frustrated with himself, with the Navy, with intelligence, with the Sheikh, with everything and everybody. He tried to contain his rage as he flew away from danger toward safety. They had gotten satellite imagery yesterday at last daylight. There wasn’t any AAA. There hadn’t been any air defense anywhere near Alamut. There were no soldiers, no AAA, and no SAM sites. There was no indication anyone knew they were coming at all. Now they were heavily defended by well-handled air defense systems. Unbelievable.

They passed out of Iraq into northern Syria. He couldn’t stay as low as he wanted anymore. His Tomcat was too hard to handle. It felt unhappy with three feet of its left wing gone. It wanted to roll left and yaw. He’d been able to control it with trim so far, but he couldn’t hug the ground all the way back in his condition. He climbed to three thousand feet and slowed to three hundred knots, there for any competent radar operator to see from a hundred miles away. They needed protection and help. They had to risk being heard and located by the Syrians.

Sedge called the E-2. “Blue Door 32, this is Watchmaker 09.”

“09. Blue Door 32. Go ahead.”

“Go secure,” Sedge said.

“Roger, secure.”

Sedge looked down to his left and turned the dial on his secure UHF encryption box. “32, you up?” Sedge asked.

“32’s up. Go ahead, 09.”

“They were waiting for us. They got our wingman. He went down at the target site, just southwest of the mountain. He landed in the valley — the airplane crashed just short of the base of the mountain. Alert whoever is in charge of SAR.” Search and Rescue.

“Roger, 09. Say your posit.”

Sedge looked at his PTID and read off the bearing and range to where the carrier was when they left. “We’re 083 for 230 from home base.”

“Roger. You inbound?”

“Affirmative, but we’ve been hit. We may not make it.”

“You need assistance, 09?”

“Just have a SAR chopper near the coast in case we can’t make it to the ship. We’re missing about three feet from our left wing.”

“Wilco. You see any chutes at the target?”

“Affirmative. Two good chutes, and positive radio contact with them on the ground.”

“Roger. We’ll check on what SAR assets are available.”

“Roger, 09 out.”

Wink rubbed his knee. “We can’t stay on this hill with the ZSU on the other side. When they find our chutes, this’ll be the first place they look. We’ve got to get to the hills on the north end of the valley. Probably a mile across. It’s our only chance.”

Woods hated the idea of walking across the floor of a valley with no trees, no rocks to speak of, and some unknown number of people looking for them. But Wink was right. If they stayed where they were, they would certainly be caught. His desire for self-destruction had faded as quickly as it had come.

They headed across the small valley floor to the hill north of them. Their intention was less to ease their chance of getting picked up than to find a place to hide. Elevation seemed to indicate safety for some reason.

Woods thought back to his SERE school days. They had thrown him out into the California desert at Warner Springs in northern San Diego County, and made him — and forty or fifty others — survive with nothing. No food, no shelter, and no chance of being rescued. They taught you to eat prickly pear cacti, and live in the desert, and where to find water in dried-up riverbeds. They taught you to move at night and stay hidden during the day. They taught you to be able to resist torture and how to be an effective prisoner of war. He had really hoped never to have to use that part of his training.

Woods whispered to Wink over his shoulder. “Didn’t the parachutes blow this way?”

“Yeah,” Wink said quietly, looking around. “But they won’t expect us to go in the same direction.”

They walked as quickly as they could, Wink wincing on every other step, and crossed the dusty valley floor to the distant hill where they hoped to find a place to hide out until whenever they were supposed to be picked up. Woods didn’t like not knowing the plan. As impulsive as he could be, he always operated on a plan, even if it had been his plan only for a few minutes.

They reached the base of the hill and Woods stopped to look at it. His eyes ran over the entire visible face of the hill, checking for anything unusual, or any signs of life. He saw nothing. He took off his helmet and breathed the cool air deeply. “You think the ZSU was here all the time?” he asked Wink. “Think the intel people just missed it?”

“They weren’t on the satellite photos. We looked at them ourselves.”

“They may have just been camouflaged.”

“No way. They weren’t there.”

“That means they were brought in last night.”

“Right.”

Woods put his skull cap in his survival vest to keep from dropping it. “That means they knew we were coming.”

“How would they know that?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“What about the SA-6?”

“We never saw an SA-6, did we? Just the radar.”

That had never even occurred to Wink. “A radar but no SAMs? Why?”

“Cheaper. And to drive us down. We’d have been above the ZSU’s range otherwise. If we see a SAM radar, we stay low and fly right into the heart of the ZSU envelope.”

“That’s pretty shitty,” Wink said, grimacing. His right knee was swelling up from the impact with the ground.

“Come on,” Woods urged. They started up the hill. It was steeper than they had expected and there were large boulders over the entire face that made an assent in the dark very tricky. Woods pulled himself through a crevice between two rocks and stood up straight on the uphill side.

They both glanced over their shoulders toward Alamut, which remained silhouetted against the night sky. “Looks intact.” Woods said, disheartened. He continued to climb the rocks heading for the top. The hill turned out to be more of a mountain than a hill. It was twice as high as Woods had thought when he’d seen it from across the valley floor. He looked back down from where they had come. Where they had been standing, Woods saw flashlights. He squinted. He could see several men standing around examining the ground for tracks. “They’re onto us.”

“Shit,” Wink said.

“We gotta find us a hiding place right now,” Woods said, surveying the surrounding area quickly. There were hundreds of boulders, but not one tree or large bush. Just hard ground, and harder rocks.

“At least they don’t have dogs,” Wink said. “At least I hope they don’t.”

Woods stood looking at a rock formation above them. He stepped toward it tentatively. “This way,” he directed.

Wink limped along behind him. They knew if they didn’t find some place to hide in the next five minutes they’d be dead in ten.