Stephen Coonts - Combat

That was the biggest problem Norman saw in the Air Force, the one factor that dominated the service to the exclusion of all else, the one specialty that screwed it up for everyone else — the flyers.

Sure, this was the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Accountant Force — the service existed to conduct battles in the national defense by taking control of the sky and near space, and flyers were obviously going to play a big part. But they had the biggest egos and the biggest mouths too. The service bent over backward for their aviators, far more than they supported any other specialty no matter how vital. Flyers got all the breaks. They were treated like firstborns by unit commanders — in fact, most unit commanders were flyers, even if the unit had no direct flying commitment.

Norman didn’t entirely know where his dislike for those who wore wings came from. Most likely, it was from his father. Naval aircraft mechanics were treated like indentured servants by flyers, even if the mechanic was a seasoned veteran while the flyer was a know-nothing newbie on his first cruise. Norman’s dad complained loud and long about officers in general and aviators in particular. He always wanted his son to be an officer, but he was determined to teach him how to be an officer that enlisted and noncommissioned officers would admire and respect — and that meant putting flyers in their place at every opportunity.

Of course, it was an officer, a flyer, who ignored safety precautions and his plane captain’s suggestions and fired a Zuni rocket into a line of jets waited to be fueled and created one of the biggest noncombat disasters at sea the Navy had ever experienced, which resulted in over two hundred deaths and several hundred injuries, including Norman’s father. A cocky, arrogant, know-it-all flyer had disregarded the rules. That officer was quickly, quietly dismissed from service. Norman’s unit commanders had several times thrown the book at nonrated officers and enlisted personnel for the tiniest infractions, but flyers were usually given two, three, or even four chances before finally being offered the opportunity to resign rather than face a court-martial. They always got all the breaks.

Well, this was going to be different. If I get a flyer’s promotion jacket, Norman thought, he’s going to have to prove to me that he’s worthy of promotion. And he vowed that wasn’t going to be easy.

“Let’s hit the deck,” Patrick said.

“Damn fine idea,” Brad said. He yanked the Megafortress’s throttles to idle, rolled the plane up onto its left wing, and nosed the big bomber over into a relatively gentle six-thousand-foot-per-minute dive. “Wendy, jam the piss out of them. Full spectrum. No radio transmissions. We don’t want the whole Iranian air force after us.”

“Copy,” Wendy said weakly. She scrambled to catch flying pencils and checklists as the negative Gs sent anything unsecure floating around the cabin. Switching her oxygen regulator to “100 %” helped when her stomach and most of its contents threatened to start floating around the cabin too. “I’m jamming. He’s …” Suddenly, they all heard a fastpitched “DEEDLEDEEDLEDEEDLE!” warning, and red alert lights flashed in every compartment. “Radar missile launch, seven o’clock, twenty-five miles!” Wendy shouted. “Break right! ”

Elliott slammed the Megafortress bomber into a hard right turn and pulled the throttles to idle, keeping the nose down to complicate the missile’s intercept and to screen the bomber’s engine exhaust from the attacker as much as possible. As the bomber slowed it turned faster. Patrick felt as if he were upside down and backwards — the sudden deceleration, steep dive, and steep turn only served to tumble his and everyone’s senses.

“ Chaff! Chaff! ” Wendy shouted as she ejected chaff from the left ejectors. The chaff, packets of tinsel-like strips of metal, formed large blobs of radar-reflective clouds that made inviting spoof targets for enemy missiles.

“Missiles still inbound!” Wendy shouted. “Arming Stingers!” As the enemy missiles closed in, Wendy fired small radar- and heat-seeking rockets out of a steerable cannon on the Megafortress’s tail. The Stinger airmine rockets flew head to head with the incoming missiles, then exploded several dozen feet in the missile’s path, shredding its fuselage and guidance system. It worked. The last enemy missile exploded less than five thousand feet away.

It took them only four minutes to get down to just two hundred feet above the Gulf of Oman, guided by the navigation computer’s terrain database, by the satellite navigation system, and by a pencil-thin beam of energy that measured the distance between the bomber’s belly and the water. They headed southwest at full military power, as far away from the Iranian coastline as possible. Brad Elliott knew what fighter pilots feared-low-altitude flight, darkness, and heading out over water away from friendly shores. Every engine cough was amplified, every dip of the fuel gauge needles seemed critical — even the slightest crackle in the headset or a shudder in the flight controls seemed to signal disaster. Having a potential enemy out there, one that was jamming radar and radio transmissions, made the tension even worse. Few fighter pilots had the stomach for night overwater chases.

But as Wendy studied her threat displays, it soon became obvious that the MiG or whatever it was out there wasn’t going to go away so easily. “No luck, guys — we didn’t lose him. He’s closed inside twenty miles and he’s right on our tail, staying high but still got a pretty good radar lock on us.”

“Relaying messages to headquarters too, I’ll bet,” Elliott said.

“Six o’clock, high, fifteen miles. Coming within heater range.” With the enemy attacker’s radar jammed, he couldn’t use a radar-guided missile — but with IRSTS, he could easily close in and make a heat-seeking missile shot.

“Wendy, get ready to launch Scorpions,” Brad said.

“Roger.” Wendy already had her fingers on the keyboard, and she typed in instructions to warm up the Megafortress’s surprise weapon — the AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAM, or Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. The EB-52 carried six Scorpion missiles on each wing pylon. The Scorpions were radar-guided missiles that were command-guided by the Megafortress’s attack radar or by an onboard radar in the missile’s nose — the missiles could even attack targets in the bomber’s rear quadrant by guidance from a tail-mounted radar, allowing for an “over-the-shoulder” launch on a pursuing enemy. Only a few aircraft in the entire world carried AMRAAMs — but the EB-52 Megafortress had been carrying one for three years, including one combat mission. The enemy aircraft was well within the Scorpion’s maximum twenty-mile range.

“Twelve miles.”

“When he breaks eight miles, lock him up and hit ’em,” Brad said.

“We gotta be the one who shoots first.”

“Brad, we need to knock this off,” Patrick said urgently.

Wendy looked at him in complete surprise, but it was Brad Elliott who exclaimed, “What was that, Patrick?”

“I said, we should stop this,” Patrick repeated. “Listen, we’re in international airspace. We just dropped down to low altitude, we’re jamming his radar. He knows we’re a bad guy. Forcing a fight won’t solve anything.”

“He jumped us first, Patrick.”

“Listen, we’re acting like hostiles, and he’s doing his job — kicking us out of his zone and away from his airspace,” Patrick argued. “We tried to sneak in, and we got caught. No one wants a fight here.”

“Well, what the hell do you suggest, nav?” Brad asked acidly.