… but he didn’t call “knock it off” and report the violation. Once he leveled off — at eighteen thousand feet, high enough that he knew he wouldn’t hit any mountains — he had to laugh and, yes, tip his hat to the fucking bomber pukes. They saved their tanker and chased the United States’ most advanced air superiority fighter right out of the damned playground. By the time he got himself turned around, reoriented, and pointed back toward the players, the KC-135 tanker decoy had exited the range complex and was on his way home.
He was never, never going to live this one down.
“Hey, lead, we got you drifting out to eleven miles,” Rebecca Furness radioed to her wingman on the inter-plane frequency. “You defensive?”
“That’s a big negative, Go-Fast,” Rinc responded. “Just had to chase some fighter pukes out of our range. Break. Pioneer One-Seven, this is Aces Two-One, tail’s clear, you are clear to exit the range direct Hokum intersection. Squawk normal and contact Joshua Approach. See you in the patrol anchor. Thanks for your help. We owe you a night on the town.”
“Pioneer Seventeen, roger,” the pilot of the KC-135R tanker replied happily. “Thanks for the pick. We liked flying in the dirt with you guys. Go kick some butt. We’re outta here.”
“Thanks, Pioneer,” Rinc radioed. “Break. Aces lead, you’re clear down the chute. We’ll keep your tail clear. You better drop some shacks, or don’t bother comin’ home. We’re right behind you.” On interphone, he said, “Okay, hogs: we keep our wingman’s tail clear, we drop all zero-zeros, and we don’t screw up. Keep it tight and lean forward. No mistakes.”
Patrick had seen it all happen right before him — he thought he was going to die. He didn’t know — didn’t want to know — how close they came to that F-15 Eagle fighter. It was close enough to see the pilot’s unit patches on his sleeve, see the collar of his flight suit turned up, see the kink in his oxygen hose as he looked out his big canopy and saw the big B-1 barreling down on him. Hell, it had to be close enough to hear that F-15 driver’s asshole slam shut as he saw his windscreen fill up with 400,000 pounds of Bone cracking the speed of heat. Patrick knew it, because he thought he’d heard his own asshole do the same thing!
He would find out exactly how close later from the AWACS guys and the Nellis range controllers, since they had all the planes and the entire fifty thousand square miles of bombing ranges fully instrumented and could re-create every moment of a battle in exquisite computerized detail. When someone is that close to death or disaster, you can feel it coming at you — you don’t need windows or radar or anything. In his eighteen-year career, Patrick had felt that feeling many, many, many times. They certainly busted the ROE big-time, and they probably came within seconds of creating one of the most spectacular midair collisions in the history of aviation. The tiniest of deviations — just a few seconds off, a few miles off, one extra turn, crossing east around a peak instead of west, a half-degree steeper dive or 1 percent more airspeed — could have had disastrous results.
“Center up, steering is good,” John Long announced. His voice boomed over the quiet interphone channel like a gunshot in a tunnel. “Forty seconds to ACAL, sixty seconds to my fix.”
“You see any brown streaks coming out that fighter’s cockpit, sir?” Rinc asked Patrick, his voice light.
“SA-3 at two o’clock,” the crew’s defensive systems officer, Captain Oliver “Ollie” Warren, announced, checking his electronic warfare threat profile display. “Coming from the target area. I’m picking up high PRF and intermittent uplink signals, but not aimed at us — he must be trying to lock onto our wingman.”
“Give ’em a shout, Ollie,” Rinc said. “See if we can’t divert their attention away from our wingman.” Patrick shrugged — pretty good idea, although it would be giving away their position. Warren manually activated the L-band uplink jammer. At this range, the jammer would be only marginally effective, and it would immediately tell the enemy the range and bearing to the new threat. He shut it down after only a few seconds.
It worked. The “enemy” switched from the missile-guidance uplink to a wide-area search, trying to find the newcomer. It didn’t last very long, ten seconds at the most, but that ten seconds could mean the difference between successfully dropping bombs and destroying the enemy, and getting shot down.
Seconds later Rinc and Patrick saw a brilliant sparkle of white-yellow lights in the desert ahead on the horizon, spreading out in a long, wide oval pattern — the unmistakable look of a stick of detonating cluster bombs. At the same moment, the SA-3 search radar disappeared completely. “SA-3 down,” Warren announced.
“Good shooting, guys!” Rinc crowed. Colonel Fur-ness’s crew obviously dropped its bombs close enough to the SA-3 site to score it as a “kill.”
The crew heard deedle deedle deedle in their headphones, and Warren announced, “Fighter at twelve o’clock, fifteen miles, looks like he’s heading down the chute after our wingman.”
“Go-Fast, this is Rodeo, bandit on your tail!” Rinc radioed to their leader.
“We’re on the rail, Rodeo,” Rebecca in Aces Two-Zero responded. “We’re lining up for the second release. Can’t maneuver too much.”
“You son of a bitch,” Rinc swore. “We’re going to fry his butt. Long Dong, we’re going to racetrack around back and you can get your ACAL and a patch on the second pass. We’re ten seconds ahead right now. If we do this right, we’ll lose about thirty seconds time-over-target. We’ll lose points, but not as many as we’d lose if our leader gets shot down.”
“Go for it, pilot,” Long said, but it was obvious he didn’t think much of the plan.
Seaver didn’t hesitate. He punched the throttles into max afterburner and turned sharply right to line up behind the lead F-15 fighter. “Lead, we’re coming up behind you,” he radioed to Furness. “Give me some S-turns so we can catch up. We’ll get those Eagle pukes off your butt.”
Meanwhile, Long switched radar modes on his APG-66 attack radar back to rendezvous mode and locked onto both the F-15 and their wingman in the other Bone. “Got them,” he said. “Twelve-thirty, eight miles, fighter’s at about a thousand feet AGL… range seven miles… six miles… five…”
“Tally-ho,” Patrick shouted, pointing out the windscreen. Rinc followed his gloved hand and saw the fighter, highlighted against the blue sky.
“Gotcha!” Rinc said. They slid through the sound barrier and rapidly closed the distance. “Knock knock, motherfucker…”
“Bullrider flight, you’re cleared to the perch,” the lead F-15 pilot said on his interplane frequency.
“Roger, lead. I’m at your six, moving up. Got you in sight.”
“What the hell happened, Billy? I didn’t hear you call out a ‘guns’ on the tanker.”
“I was three seconds from hosing the tanker and then the second B-1 popped out of nowhere and flew between me and the tanker,” the wingman explained. “I lost sight of both of them and had to bug out before I hit a goddamn mountain.”
Shit! Shit! Shit! the leader swore to himself. This morning was not going well at all. He was angry not only because his wingman failed to kill the tanker but because he couldn’t catch up with the first B-1 before it bombed its first target. He couldn’t see the B-1 down low, but he knew he’d been there — the sight of a bunch of cluster bombs detonating across the desert floor just a few miles in front of him was hard to miss. “Well, why didn’t you call KIO or record a violation?”