Flight of the Intruder

FIFTEEN

After dinner that evening Jake went to the ship’s library.

Approaching the sailor at the desk he said I’m interested in seeing what you have on North Vietnam.”

“Oh, we get that request all the time,”

“Well,” the pilot said, “do you have any maps of the North?”

“As a matter of fact, National Geographic ran a article with a map a few years ago.” The sailor opened a drawer and produced a well-thumbed copy of this waiting-room staple. “The map’s in the back.”

Jake signed for the magazine and tried not to look enthusiastic. “Any books or anything like that?”

“Well, you might try Inside Asia, by John Gunther It’s pretty old but a lot of people check it out.” The librarian reached for the volume on a shelf beside him “We get SO many requests that we can only let you have it for a couple days.”

Back in his stateroom, Jake examined the map first It was colorful and showed the relief well, but it lacked the latitude and longitude grids necessary for measurement. The waste was also far too small. The map contained no city insets, not even of Saigon. Disappointed, he refolded it and laid it aside.

Inside Asia, published in 1939, divided Asia into four regions: Japan, China, India, and the middle East. When the table of contents revealed no listing for Indochina, he flipped to the index. There it was, with two page numbers indicated. The author had devoted a page and a half to all of Indochina. Jake closed the book in disgust and read the Vietnam article in the National Geographic. Written in 1967, it quoted several military sources as stating that we were winning the war. Well, maybe they thought differently after Tet. Then again, maybe not.

He would need better data than this to plan a raid. He would need access to the charts and photos of Hanoi that Steiger had not brought forth last night. He had no doubt that Steiger had access to better stuff, and he would have to have the air intelligence officer’s cooperation, as well as Cole’s.

But would Cole agree to help? He gathered up the library materials and returned them.

The pilot met Cole in the ready room to brief a night tanker hop. There the duty officer told them that the only available A-6B-qualified crew had been scrubbed from the night schedule because they had not had a day trip.

Like most of the rules governing the aircrews’ lives, the requirement that a pilot make a day landing before landing on the carrier at night after each in-port period was written in the blood of experience. “So,” the duty officer said, “you two jaybirds get to fly the B.”

“Hey,” Jake protested, “I’m not B-qualified. I’ve never even sat in one of the damn things.”

“Well, Cole has, and you two are all we have, so you fly. Cowboy says.”

Cole reassured him with a slight movement at the corners of his mouth. “I used to be an instructor on the B. I’ll tell you what to do.”

The A-6B was an Intruder that had been converted to a launch platform for antiradiation missiles, or ARMS. In place of the navigation/attack computer, the A-6B had sensitive electronic equipment that identified an enemy radar so that the guidance system in the ARM could be slaved to the radar’s frequency before the missile was launched. The squadron had two of these specialized machines.

The A-6B was capable of carrying two kinds of missiles, the Shrike and the Standard ARM, or STARM. The Shrike horned in on the target radar an could be defeated by the radar operator simply turning off the target radar while the missile was in flight. The North VietNamese had quickly realized that. But the Shrike was useful anyway because it caused the Enemy to shut down its radars.

The STARM contained the computer and inertial navigation system that enable the missile to memorize the location of the target radar antennae and to fly to that place even if the radar stopped operating. The Standard ARM was deadly effective and very expensive.

While Jake and Cole were knocking around in the A-6B, Sammy Lundeen and Harvey Wilson would be roaming the Red River Delta on bombing missions. Virgil Cole drew Jake over to the corner of the room and briefed him on the specialized equipment in the missile-shooter. As for tactics, the bombardier advised “We’ll just cruise along at altitude where everyone can see us and let it happen. Might be interesting.”

Indeed it might, Jake thought. As he left the ready room, Sammy joined him for the short jaunt to the flight-gear lockers. “Notice ol’ Rabbit Wilson has a night trip scheduled?”

“Yep. Must be a scorcher of a moon out there.”

“Or a Silver Star.”

They crossed the North VietNamese coast at 18,000 feet with search radars beeping in their ears. The prevailing wind had pushed the low rain clouds of the afternoon westward against the mountains, and only the high cirrus layer was left to block off all starlight. The two bombers were not due to cross the coast for five more minutes. “Let’s mosey in and get the gomers’ attention before the other guys sneak in,” Cole said, and Jake acquiesced because he knew so little of A-6B tactics.

Both the bombers were targeted against suspected truck parks on the eastern edges of Hanoi. Cole suggested an orbit about twenty miles to the east of the North VietNamese capital so they could lob their missiles at the heavy concentration of enemy missile sites that guarded the approaches to the city.

They carried two Standard missiles on the inboard wing stations and two Shrikes on the outboard. On the flight deck Grafton had examined the white missiles carefully. The Standard missiles were huge, fourteen inches in diameter and about fifteen feet long, packed with solid propellant and carrying a warhead designed to destroy with shrapnel rather than by blast. The Shrikes were smaller, about eight inches in diameter and nine feet long, and were steered by canards-tiny wings-mounted in the middle of the tubular fuselage.

“You’ve fired rockets before?” Cole asked.

“Not at night.”

“When these missiles light off at night, they’ll blind you if you look outside. All the gomers will see the ignition, too, if the air is clear. Spectacular.”

They were now set up to launch the Shrike on station five, which was outboard on the right wing. The pilot glanced back at the left wing stations, but the missiles were invisible in the gloom. They were there, though and ready.

All the crew had to do was find a target. The final nibble came from a gun-control radar behind them, the type that NATO code-named “Firecan.” It acquire them and stayed locked up. Jake began weaving random to make it harder for the large-caliber artillery which the Firecan usually directed, to find the “Swing around and take a look,” said Cole. Jake held the left turn and searched the darkness where the enemy radar had to be. He picked up flashes from the muzzles of the big guns. He also saw small-caliber weapons immediately beneath the plane shooting tracers in streams.

“All the backyard stuff just shoots at noise,” said Cole. “Only the big stuff-the eighty-five and one hundred millimeter-is hooked into the radar net and can reach us up here.” Varying the altitude by up to 500 feet, Jake swung back toward the planned orbit. Off to his left he saw white flashes. Those would be shells from the big guns exploding at preset altitudes.

They heard the bombers give their coast-in calls, Jake checked the clock and saw that Sammy and Rabbit were running a few minutes late.

Ahead a glimmer caught his eye. “I think a SAM just lifted off,” he told Cole and turned on the master armament switch. He knew the Soviet-built surface-to-air missile that the North VietNamese usually used was a two-stage missile that had to be guided from the ground because it lacked an active seeker-head.

For its first seven seconds of flight, the missile was unguided as the first stage burned. When the second stage ignited, the first stage fell away and exposed a receiver on the rear of the second stage that could pick out the guidance commands embedded in the emissions from the Fansong missile-control radar. When the A-6’s E C 2S equipment heard the Fansong radar, as NATO called this type of missile-control radar, it presented a steady missile-warning light and a continuous tone in Jake’s ears. When the equipment detected guidance signals, the missile-warning light would flash and the tone in his ears would warble.

Jake turned right to increase the crossing angle as he watched the continuous light far below in the darkness, small but brilliant. The missile was flying but the Fansong was not yet guiding it. Then the missile light on his glare shield began to flash, and he heard the warble warning. The signal-detection indicator now told him there was a Fansong at eleven o’clock, which he already knew. He looked back at the SAM and saw a second missile ignite and lift off.

“Want to shoot?” he asked Cole.

“Naw, let them shoot up some of their expensive stuff before we show our cards.”

Jake popped some chaff to confuse the Fansong. He watched the telltale fire from the missile exhausts and knew the missile was traveling at about two thousand miles per hour. He would have to let the missiles get close, but not too close, then maneuver to avoid them.

The missiles were traveling too fast to turn with the Intruder. The wait was anything but easy.

When he could stand it no longer, he pumped the chaff button three times, then rolled the plane almost upside down.

“Not yet,” Cole told him.

Jake pushed the stick forward and held the nose up. The fireballs were bigger and obviously closing. “Now!” Cole told him.

The pilot pulled until four Gees registered on the G meter. The nose came down and they were turning into and under the oncoming missiles. The missiles were now turning down toward them, but the lead missile would overshoot and fail to intercept the plane. Jake watched the missiles, The first streaked overhead at least a half mile away and exploded, probably detonated by the ground crew when they realized it would miss. The second one was correcting to intercept, so the pilot changed direction and dropped the nose further to increase the change in course required of the missile The missile was just beginning to turn when it swept overhead. The missile light went out. Jake rolled the aircraft upright and used the excess airspeed to zoom back up to 18,000. The Firecan still had them.

“Hokey dokey,” Cole said.

“You make it sound like this is more fun than watching your alma mater score at homecoming.”

“More interesting, anyhow. Now if the gomers get about four missiles or so in the air at once, we’ll give them the Shrike we’ve set up. If they shut down they’l lose all the missiles, and if they don’t-” Jake Grafton drew a ragged breath. One avoided SAMs by trading altitude and airspeed for angle-off, as they had just done, thereby placing the missile in position where it could not make the turn required to intercept. If enough missiles were in the air, an aircraft could run out of altitude and airspeed before it had outmaneuvered all the missiles. Cole knew the facts of aerial life as well as he, probably better.

“Where’d you get all this confidence in my ability?” Jake asked.

“I had an uncle with a nose like yours.”

The Firecan went off the air now, leaving only the pulse of search radars to break the silence. A Fanson painted them for several seconds, then it too fell silent. Waiting is the toughest part, he thought. You wait for the brief, you wait for the cat shot, you wait to get shot at. It’s an old complaint, as old as the first warrior, but knowing that doesn’t make the waiting any easier.

The missile warning lit up again. Jake checked the strobe indicator on the detection gear, which told him the radar was at five o’clock. He swung hard maintaining his altitude, and searched the blackness. Two missiles were in flight, and a third lifted off as he watched.

The missile light hashed and the aura warning “Three SAMs up.” A warning wailed. A grunt was the only reply.

The pilot held the turn until the missiles were inbound at One o,clock, still low but climbing On the missile ignited and raced skyward.

“Point the plane at the radar and gimme fifteen degrees.” he said. As the pilot complied, the missiles nosed up, hidden by the nose of the plane, and disappeared from their view. “Hold it,” said Cole.

The falsetto screech of the missile warning made his heart beat wildly. Shoot Cole said, and the pilot squeezed the trigger with his finger and pushed the pickle button with his thumb. Cole told him to hold both buttons for a second-the time delay was a safety thing-and reduced the chances of an inadvertent firing.

An age later a white fireball erupted under the right wing with a “whoosh.” Jake saw the bombardier outlined in the brilliant light, which rocketed forward and faded to nothing in a fraction of a second.

“Split S,” Cole ordered when the pilot didn’t react as expected with sufficient speed. Blinded by the brilliance, Grafton instinctively jammed the stick to the left, spun the plane what he hoped was 180 degrees, then he blinked rapidly and pulled hard toward the earth because he had lost his night vision. “Chaff,” Cole reminded him. jake pumped the button.

His vision was coming back. He could make out the panel and the vdi.

Now he could read the vdi. The plane was seventy degrees nose down, inverted. The missile light still flashed.

Why hadn’t the gomers shut down? He shoved the stick forward, rolled upright, and pulled the nose up while he searched the sky for the incoming missiles.

He saw them strung out in a trail, the first one way high and arching down, but it would overshoot.

“More behind us,” Cole said. Jake dropped the left wing and clawed the plane around. He checked the indicator. The radar they had fired at had finally cease transmitting, but another radar behind them was now guiding missiles. He found the oncoming pinpoints of light and continued his turn, dropping the nose slightly to keep his airspeed from bleeding off. He wanted to dive more steeply to pick up speed as he was moving at only 300 knots, but he was down to 12,000 feet and if they launched another SAM when he was below 10,000, he might be forced to descend almost to the surface.

The missiles were at two o’clock and at his altitude when Jake leveled the wings and shoved the stick forward until he and Cole floated weightless against the restraining straps at zero G. The nose fell slowly as they flew the parabola, but the engines’ thrust was more effective without the induced drag from the wings-they weren’t making lift at zero G-and the airspeed quickly increased to more than 400 knots. The left missile appeared to be overshooting, but the trailer was correcting. The pilot squeezed chaff, rolled right, and yanked the stick hard.

Now! The second missile was also overshooting. The missile warnings ceased as the second SA2 detonated in a flash of white light about a thousand feet away.

Jake climbed and turned toward the northwest. His body trembled in the sudden hush. The aural warning was silent, the missile light was dark, but for how long? To the south, fifteen or twenty miles away, antiaircraft guns clefted the night. “Looks like our bomber friends have arrived,” said Jake over the ICS to Cole.

On the radio, Jake asked, “You up on this freq, Sammy?” With his gloved hand, he wiped the perspiration from his brow.

“Roger.” Lundeen’s voice.

“Five Oh Three?” he asked as he noticed another flak concentration a little farther north.

“We’re up,” Rabbit Wilson said.

Jake heard Cole key the mike. “Five Oh Six, how far from your target are you?”

“About forty miles out,” Lundeen replied.

“Pop up to fifteen hundred feet and stay there a bit,” Cole suggested.

“We’ll use you as bait.” Lundeen clicked his mike.

Well, Jake thought, weren’t they all bait?

“If they shoot at Lundeen out of Hanoi,” Cole said to Jake, “we’ll fire the Standard missile as soon as we see the first SAM. There’s a site there that has been peeping once in a while and I’ve slaved the STARM to his signal.” With luck, the STARM would be locked in on the Fansong even if it went off the air before the missile arrived. With luck.

Grafton reached 18,000 feet and reined in the power to ninety percent RPM. They had to save fuel somewhere. He pointed the nose toward Hanoi and let the airspeed decay as he climbed. Attitude could always be converted to airspeed simply by diving. “About five degrees nose-up, no more,” Cole advised him.

Flak sparking in the darkness below marked Sammy’s progress across the night sky. When would another SAM launch? Jake wiped his eyebrows again with a gloved finger. “Man, we’re having fun now,” he muttered.

Cole looked at him.

“Morgan liked to say that,” Jake explained.

Cole pointed. The pilot saw the tiny pinpoint at one o’clock.

This time he closed his eyes as he squeezed the buttons on the stick. He heard the whoosh as the missile ignited and felt the brightness of the STARM fireball behind his closed eyelids. perhaps three seconds had passed since the first SAM was launched.

“You have a SAM in the air and a STARM,” Cole told Lundeen. “Stay at fifteen hundred as long as you can.” By the time he had finished speaking a second SA2 had been launched and was following in the wake of the first.

“They’re guiding,” Cole informed Grafton as he consulted the gear on his panel.

Their own early warning system remained silent because the Fanson radar was not pointed in their direction.

“Stay up, baby,” Cole whispered over the ICS. Jake knew he was really whispering at the enemy radar operator who was sitting in a dark semitrailer van an watching the blip that was Devil 506. A few more seconds …

Jake’s attention was riveted on the place in the darkness from which the two SAMs had been launched. He forced himself to ignore the exhaust plumes of the enemy missiles streaking along parallel to the invisible earth, streaking toward Sammy and Marty Greve.

“I’ve been up here long enough,” Lundeen an announced over the radio.

“It’s off the air,” Cole said.

The STARM was invisible because it had exhausted its fuel just before it began homing in on the emission of the Fansong.

The pilot saw a faint flash. Grafton told Cole about it. The bombardier shrugged. “Maybe we got it.” He manipulated the switches on the armament panel to put the second STARM in readiness.

The pilot turned and let the nose slide down. He stabilized at 18,000 feet.

The search radars continued to paint them and a Firecan locked them up momentarily Jake saw the rippling twinkles that were Lundeen’s bombs, and a minute later, somewhat closer, a similar string of fireworks where the XO”s target must be. Tracer fire smeared the darkness near the bombers’ tracks.

Jake and Cole continued to orbit as the bombers crossed the delta toward the coast. The missile-control radars were silent. Lundeen finally called “feet wet,” and, a minute later, Rabbit Wilson as well.

They flew southeast toward the waiting ocean, steady at 400 knots at 18,000 feet. They heard a Fansong in the area of Haiphong, off to their left.

It came on the air for several seconds, shut down, then repeated the cycle a half-minute later. Jake searched the darkness below for the moving points of light that betrayed the flight of SAMs. Nothing.

He was looking at the Fansong light on the indicator panel, now on again, when he noticed another light also lit: I-band. He examined the circular dial on the threat-direction indicator and, sure enough, a weak I-band strobe pointed behind them. When the Fansong fell silent he could even hear the other radar, a two-tone, high-frequency pulse. As he listened, he heard the audio separate into three distinct, clicking, rhythmic tones that repeated about once a second. Virgil Cole cocked his head at the direction indicator. He, too, seemed to be listening.

“Sounds like we have a Mig-21 on our tail,” he announced. “Doesn’t that sound like a conical scan to you?”

Mig! Even as Cole said it, Jake thought he could now hear the intermittent clicks. If it were a Mig, it was getting closer. Grafton jammed the throttles full forward and punched the chaff button three times as fast as he could, then slammed the stick full left and forward in one fluid motion.

The nose tucked down and the plane flipped on its back, 180 degrees of roll in one second. In a continuation of the same motion he brought the stick aft and center, and the nose of the inverted warplane dropped through to the vertical where he stabilized in a straight-down dive. The altimeter spun insanely as Jake listened for the beat of the conical scan, mixed in with the wail of the Fansong now back on the air in the target-acquisition mode. If the Mig saw the false target the chaff created and went after it, he could escape out below. Near the ground the Mig couldn’t acquire him. He hoped.

He rolled ninety degrees about the longitudinal axis and at 7000 feet began a hard, five-G pull in the direction of Haiphong, punching chaff all the way.

The primary gyro tumbled, apparently, because the l still indicated a vertical descent. He ignored it an included the standby gyro in his scan. Virgil Cole said “Pull up to twenty degrees nose up, ten degrees right and we’ll shoot the STARM.”

“Are you crazy?” The radar altimeter dipped below. 3000 feet, the nose still five degrees below the horizon His right arm tightened slightly, six Gees, 540 knots indicated. The I-band warning was gone, the earphones silent. The Mig had lost them.

Cole’s fist slammed into his right biceps. “Do like I told you!”

They bottomed out at 2000 feet and Jake kept the nose coming up. Stabilizing in a twenty-degree turn he waited for Cole to ready the missile. The airspeed dropped below 480 knots, then 460.

“Come on, you crazy bastard,” Jake shouted at Cole “Let’s shoot and get the fuck outta here before the Mig figures out which way we turned.”

“Just a sec … almost…. Shoot! Jake heard the Fansong kick in his earphones as the last standard missile ignited under the right wing an shot forward, trailing a dazzling sheet of fire. They were in trouble again unless that Mig pilot was blind Grafton turned hard right to run for the coast.

“Black Eagle, Devil Five One One,” Cole said over the radio. “We have a bandit on our tail. Get the BARCAP headed this way. Buster.”

“Buster” meant hurry, bust your ass.

Jake was at 5000 feet, 510 knots when he again heard the beat of the Mig’s Spin Scan radar. It was out to his right, at four o’clock. He had to get down, near the ground. The Mig was coming in at an angle and he wouldn’t have time to turn.

“Devil, this is Mustang. We’re coming! State your posit.”

“Thirty miles south of the lighthouse, fifteen miles inland,” Cole said.

Jake selected the station for the remaining Shrike and held the buttons down. The missile shot forward toward the earth. Now to give the Mig a real false target, not just a chaff cloud. He depressed the emergency jettison button above the gear handle. The empty missile racks and belly tank were kicked away with a whump. The Mig was closing fast from the side. Two thousand feet above the ground.

“Devil, don’t let him get away!”

“Fuck you!” Grafton shouted and chopped the throttles to idle and deployed the speed brakes as he shoved the nose over.

A missile raced across the windscreen above and in front of him. He pulled up to avoid the ground. He pushed on the throttles but they wouldn’t move! Then the cockpit went dark.

Mother of God! He had inadvertently pulled the throttles past the safety detents and had shut down the engines. The speed brakes were still out, but they should come into trail with the loss of electrical power. He desperately groped behind him for the handle to the ram-air turbine, the emergency generator. He had to have electrical power for a restart.

Where was it? Oh, God, no!

His fingers closed on the handle in the darkness and he pulled with the strength of the damned.

The lights came on. The left wing was down.

He picked it up.

Two hundred fifty knots! He advanced the throttle on the left engine as he held the emergency ignition button on the throttle down with his thumb. Wings level, 400 feet.

Warning lights were erupting on the annunciator panel: both generators, fuel, oil pressure. It looked like a Christmas tree. Without the background noise of the engines the cockpit was quiet as a coffin.

“Light off!” he screamed at the recalcitrant engine he checked the standby gyro. If the circuit breaker the emergency igniters had popped, the engine would never light. The breaker was on a panel beside his left foot and he didn’t have time to check it. He kept the ignition button firmly depressed.

210 knots. At the weight, without flaps or power, they would quit flying at maybe 180 knots.

The engine lit with an audible moan. The RPM ran up toward the sixty percent idle range agonizing slowly. Sweet Jesus! There! Sixty percent. He advance the left throttle to the forward stop and reached for the right to repeat the procedure. One hundred ninety-five knots on the dial.

‘Only a hundred feet,” Cole advised. A glance again at the altitude - stable at 195. Left engine still winding up, passing eighty-five percent. He slipped in more back stick and trimmed. As the left engine reached full power, the right lit off.

When both throttles fully forward, he reset them. The radar-warning indicators were dark Nothing in his earphones. The annunciator panel lights were all extinguished. Two hundred knots and increasing.

“Black Eagle, Devil’s feet wet,” Cole said.

“Where were you? You didn’t answer.”

“Uh, we had a little mechanical problem back there, Black Eagle,” Cole said. “Where’s the bandit?”

“The Mustangs are after him.”

“Glad I’m not driving that Mig with those Phantoms after me,” Cole said over the ICS.

Jake climbed to 500 feet and stayed there, weaving erratically- They were thirty miles out to sea before Jake decided his heart might not after all beat itself out of his chest. Only then did he establish a climb and pull the throttles back off the stops.

As Cole talked on the radio, Jake took off his oxygen mask and wiped the sweat from his face. Lordy, lordy!

Jake Grafton told Cole he was a crazy fucker. “How come you wanted to shoot that last STARM?”

“That Fansong was providing altitude and position info to the interceptor pilot. They were vectoring him enough to lock us up. That’s how the until he got close enough Red Baron knew just where to find us.”

“How come you shot that last Shrike into the ground?”

“I figured if he was working on an infrared lock-up for a missile, the Shrike would give us a few seconds. And I was gonna jettison the racks and didn’t want to give the gomers an unfired missile to play with.”

“You know, Grafton, you’re the only pilot I know who’d intentionally shut down the engines in combat. And that close to the ground.”

“You know goddamn well that was a screw-up, an accident. I made a mistake. How come you didn’t eject’?”

“And have you pull your chestnuts out of the fire and go back to the ship without your bombardier) They’d laugh me out of the navy.”

‘We damn near bought the farm.”

“Well, we didn’t. That’s what counts.” The bombardier put his head back in the headrest and closed his eyes.

Jake Grafton climbed down the ladder from the cockpit, holding on carefully with both hands. His leg felt wobbly as he followed the tall figure of Virgil Cole. Too spent to remain standing, he asked Cole to do the intelligence debrief and went straight to the ready room where he collapsed into a chair. After a minute he decided he needed a cigarette, so he moved enough to retrieve the packet from his left sleeve pocket.

When Lundeen came in he fell into the chair next to Jake’s. Grafton sketched out the Mig encounter. He was soon surrounded by half a dozen men who fire questions and laughed nervously at his answers.

“The Mustangs got that Mig,” Marty Greve said.

“‘Don’t let him get away!”‘ Lundeen shrieked. They all thought this was hilarious.

“Now I know how Jonah felt just before the whale swallowed him,” Jake said.

“And how did Cole do” Lundeen asked when the laughter faded.

“The fucking guy’s a tiger,” said Jake.

The nickname “Tiger” became firmly attached to the quiet bombardier. “It fits him,” Jake would say to his military friends with a smile.