Stephen Coonts - Combat

The largest and southernmost island in the BIOT was Diego Garcia, a V-shaped stretch of sand, reefs, and atolls about thirty-four miles long, with a thirteen-mile-long, six-mile-wide lagoon inside the V. The British Navy claimed Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the late eighteenth century and established copra, coconut, and lumber plantations there. The island was an isolated and seldom-used stopover and resupply point for the British Navy until after the independence of India, when it began to languish. Native fishermen from the African nation of Mauritius claimed Diego Garcia, citing historical and cultural precedents, and it appeared as if the British might hand over the island to them.

The United States stepped into the fray in December of 1966. Eager for a listening post to monitor Soviet Navy activity in the Indian Ocean during the height of the Cold War, the United States signed a bilateral agreement to improve and jointly administer the BIOT for defensive purposes. The native Iliots on the islands were relocated back to Mauritius with a promise that if the islands were no longer needed for defense, they would be returned to them. The U.S. Navy immediately landed a Seabee battalion on Diego Garcia and began work.

Seven years later, the U.S. Navy commissioned a “naval communications facility”—an electronic and undersea surveillance post — on Diego Garcia, along with limited naval-vessel support facilities and an airstrip. Five years later, the facility was expanded, making it a full-fledged — albeit still remote — Navy Support Facility. The few dozen sailors assigned there — donkeys, left over from copra and coconut-harvesting operations, far outnumbered humans — lived in primitive hootches and lived only for the next supply ship to take them off the beautiful but lonely desert island.

But the facility took on a more important role when the Soviet Navy began a rapid buildup of forces in the region in the late 1970s, during the oil crisis, and during the Iranian Revolution of the early 1980s. With Western influence in the Middle East waning, Diego Garcia suddenly became the only safe, secure, and reliable port and air facility in southwest Asia. Diego Garcia became a major forward predeployment and prepositioning base for the U.S. Central Command’s operations in the Middle East. The facilities were greatly expanded in the early 1980s to make it “the tip of the spear” for American rapid-deployment forces in the region. The U.S. Navy began flying P-3 Orion antisubmarine patrols from Diego Garcia, and several cargo ships loaded with fuel, spare parts, weapons, and ammunition were permanently prepositioned in the little harbor to support future conflicts in the southwest Asia theater.

There was only one highway on the island, the nine-mile-long main paved road leading from the Naval Supply Facility base on Garcia Point to the airfield. Until just a few years ago, both the road and the runway were little more than crushed coral and compacted sand. But as the importance of the little island grew, so did the airfield. What was once just a lonely pink runway and a few rickety shacks, euphemistically called Chagos International Airport, was now one of the finest airfields in the entire Indian Ocean region.

With the advent of Operation Desert Shield, the rapid buildup of forces in the Middle East to counter the threat of an Iraqi invasion of the Arabian Peninsula, Diego Garcia’s strategic importance increased a hundredfold. Although the tiny island was almost three thousand miles away from Iraq, it was the perfect place to deploy long-range B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which have an unrefueled range in excess of eight thousand miles. As many as twenty B-52G and — H model bombers and support aircraft deployed there. When the shooting started, the “BUFFs”—Big Ugly Fat Fuckers — began ’round-the-clock bombing missions against Iraqi forces, first using conventionally armed cruise missiles and then, once the Coalition forces had firm control of the skies over the region, pressing the attack with conventional gravity bombs. One-half of all the ordnance used in Operation Desert Storm was dropped by B-52 bombers, and many of them launched from Diego Garcia.

The lone runway on Diego Garcia was eleven thousand feet long and one hundred and fifty feet wide, only four feet above sea level, on the western side of the island. At the height of the air war against Iraq, the aircraft parking ramps were choked with bombers, tankers, transports, and patrol planes; now, only days after the Coalition cease-fire, only a token force of six B-52G and — H bombers, one KC-10 Extender aerial-refueling tanker/cargo plane, and three KC-135 Stratotanker aerial-refueling tankers remained, along with the usual and variable number of cargo planes at the Military Airlift Command ramp and the four P-3 Orion patrol planes on the Navy ramp. Things had definitely quieted down on Diego Garcia, and the little atoll’s peaceful, gentle life was beginning to return to normal after months of frenetic activity.

Before the war there was only one aircraft hangar on the island for maintenance on the Navy’s P-3 Orion subchasers — the weather was perfect, never lower than seventy-two degrees, never warmer than ninety degrees, with an average of only two inches of rain per week, so why work indoors? — but as the conflict kicked off the U.S. Air Force hastily built one large hangar at the southernmost part of the airfield complex, as far away from curious observers in the harbor as possible. Many folks speculated on what was in the hangar: Was it the stillunnamed B-1B supersonic intercontinental heavy bomber, getting ready to make its combat debut? Or was it the rumored supersecrect stealth bomber, a larger version of the F-117 Goblin stealth fighter? Some even speculated it was the mysterious Aurora spy/attack plane, the hypersonic aircraft capable of flying from the United States to Japan in just a couple of hours.

In reality, the hangar had mostly been used as a temporary overflow barracks during the Persian Gulf War, or used to store VIP aircraft out of the hot sun to keep it cool until just before departure. Since the cease-fire, it had been used to store dozens of pallets of personal gear for returning troops before loading on transport planes. Now, it held two aircraft — two very special aircraft, tightly squeezed in nose to tail.

The two EB-52 Megafortress bombers had arrived separately — Brad Elliott’s plane was returning from its patrol near Iran, while the second bomber had been en route to replace the first when it had been diverted to Diego Garcia — but they had arrived within minutes of one another. The airfield had been closed down and blacked out, and all transient ships in the harbor had been moved north toward the mouth of the harbor, until both aircraft touched down and were parked inside the Air Force hangar. A third Megafortress bomber involved in the ’round-the-clock aerial patrols near Iran remained back at its home base in Nevada, with crews standing by ready to rotate out to Diego Garcia if a conflict developed. Roving guards were stationed inside and outside the hangar, but the lure of the island’s secluded, serene tropical beauty and every warrior’s desire to escape the stress and strains of warfighting combined to keep all curious onlookers away. No one much cared what was inside that hangar, as long as it didn’t mean they had to go back to twenty-four-hour shifts to surge combat aircraft for bombing raids.

Patrick McLanahan had spent all night buttoning up the Megafortress, downloading electronic data from the ship’s computers, and preparing a detailed intelligence brief for the Air Force on the strange aircraft they had encountered near the Strait of Hormuz. Now it was time to summarize their findings and prepare a report to send to the Pentagon.