Parsons’ contingent included four bombers, sixteen crewmembers, forty aircraft maintenance and weapons handling personnel, thirty security troops, and five support personnel, but officially his small provisional unit did not exist — in more ways than one. The two F-111G (what had then been known as the FB-111A bomber) bases in the northeast United States had both been closed and the bomb wings disbanded, the result of severe budget cuts enacted long before the Persian Gulf War. The FB-111A supersonic bombers of the Strategic Air Command, in service since 1970, had been transferred to USAF’s Tactical Air Command, upgraded, and redesignated the F-111G, so officially the FB-111A bomber itself did not exist. The four bombers deployed during Desert Storm had been kept in mothballs in storage hangars at McClellan Air Force Base, an aircraft maintenance depot in northern California, when Operation Desert Fire had been executed.
This mission was possibly the last flight of the F-111G. It was no longer the unstoppable supersonic avenger: the winner of more bombing trophies than any other bomber in history, the hero of Operation El Dorado Canyon, the bombing mission against Muhammar Quaddafi of Libya in 1986, and of thousands of successful, precision air raids in Vietnam that forced North Vietnam to the negotiation table. Now it was the advanced warplane no one wanted, the twenty-year combat veteran forgotten in the U.S. military’s current budget crunch, the orphaned stepchild that had never even been given an official nickname.
Even the bomber’s forward operating base in Turkey was a secret. Batman was a Turkish army air base being used by the United States for special operations missions into Baghdad — inserting Special Forces troops deep within Iraq, mounting rescue missions within enemy lines to retrieve downed aircrews, eavesdropping on or jamming Iraqi radio messages, even dropping leaflets with surrender instructions printed on them over Iraqi military bases or over cities. All the American aircraft there, including Parsons’ four orphan “swing-wing” supersonic bombers, were concealed in carefully guarded hangars. The F-111s had flown in directly from California after a grueling twenty-two-hour-long nonstop flight, always flying apart from other Coalition aircraft, to make sure their presence was a strict secret.
Although no one would ever officially know they were there, the tiny unit was destined to play one of the most important — and deadly — roles in this war.
“Spin out our LLEP times so we can arrange to get our last refueling,” Parsons ordered.
“Right,” Mace replied. Using the reference date-time group in the execution message, Mace computed the bombs-away times for their two assigned targets, then backed that time through the flight plan and came up with a time to cross the LLEP, or low-level entry point, then back to the end air-refueling point, then to the air-refueling control point, or ARCP.
The TOT, or time over target, was so close that he would have to hustle to make the air-refueling control time as well as the time over target good within fifteen seconds. No leeway in this flight plan at all.
“Toad One-Five, Toad One-Five, this is Breakdance. CT at 1255. Repeat, ARCT at 1255. How copy?” asked Mace. It took three attempts, fighting through the horrible maze of accents and languages of the Coalition aircraft using the channel — American, British, French, Arab, Australian, even South American — before his tanker’s navigator acknowledged the new rendezvous time.
“This is the shits, Bob,” Mace said. He punched commands into the flight computer, and a box-shaped bug on the heading indicator, called the “captain’s bars,” swung to a northwesterly heading. “Captain’s bars on the ARCT. We gotta be there in fifteen minutes.”
Parsons glanced at the TIME TO DEST readout on the Multi-Function Display on his instrument panel, made a quick mental calculation, and shoved the throttles up nearly to full military power. He then selected HEADING NAV on his autopilot, and the F-111G Aardvark bomber obediently banked left and automatically rolled out on the new heading. “We gotta go balls to the wall to make the LLEP, then push it up to 540 on the low-level. That leaves us very little leeway for … stuff.”
“Stuff” on a low-level combat mission usually meant countering enemy air defenses. Circumnavigating antiaircraft artillery, dodging surface-to-air missiles, and outrunning enemy fighters at treetop level usually gulped a lot of extra fuel, which was rarely accounted for in fuel calculations on a flight plan.
“If we can’t make it, we abort,” Parsons said. “You got the flight-plan range estimates?”
“Right here.” Mace compared the flight-plan fuel calculations with the new fuel-burn figures in his performance manual for the higher airspeeds necessary in the low-level route. “If we get this air refueling, we have plenty of gas,” Mace said. “No abort. We have to abort if we can’t get both external tanks to take gas or if they won’t feed.”
Parsons turned to his partner, gave him a wry smile, and asked, “Praying for a busted boom or bad feed, Daren?”
Answering his squadron commander’s question was a Catch-22: he’d be lying if he answered no, and a coward if he answered yes. Instead, he replied, “If the -117’s had done their job, we wouldn’t be talking about this in the first place, sir.”
The hotshot F-117A stealth fighter jocks from supersecret Tonopah Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, the ones who were flown to and from work in plush airliners and who got promoted just by shaking a few hands and showing their unit patches to gaga-eyed generals, had apparently missed their assigned targets. Just like Panama in 1986: the nonsense about the stealth fighters being used just to “disorient” the Panamanian Defense Forces was hogwash. They missed their targets then, and they missed them again now. That did not sit well with the young F-111G crewdog.
The tanker was late to the air-refueling control point. Parsons and Mace had to wait for their companion aircraft: an EF-111 Raven tactical jamming aircraft, which was a modified F-111 fighter-bomber loaded with state-of-the-art electronic jammers, from the 42nd Electronic Combat Squadron, RAF Upper Heyford, England, deployed to Incirlik. Normally the F-111Gs were accustomed to going into a target alone, but the importance of the mission dictated that it be accompanied by the supersophisticated robin’s-egg-blue jamming aircraft; the EF-111 could fly as far, as fast, and as low as the F-111G, so it would follow Parsons and Mace all the way to its target and back.
All aircraft completed their air refuelings — all tanks refueled and all tanks were feeding, Mace noted with private disappointment, negating an abort — and they turned toward the Iraqi border and made preparations to attack. The EF-111 Raven had its own flight plan, carefully choreographed with Parsons’ and Mace’s, that would both deconflict the two aircraft and put it in position to best defeat any enemy radars that might highlight the Aardvark bomber. That was okay with Mace — he didn’t like having to worry about watching a wingman during night formation flying anyway.
They had ten minutes to fly to the low-level entry point, and they did so at just below the speed of sound to try to get their time pad back. On this mission, timing was not just important — it was a matter of life or death. Not just for Parsons and Mace, but for the hundreds of other aircraft that would be airborne over southern and central Iraq when Mace completed his bomb release. The ten minutes to the start-descent point was wall-to-wall checklists: TFR (Terrain-Following Radar) Confidence Check, cockpit check, route briefing, and fuel tank jettison checklists.
“Tanks gone,” Mace announced. He refigured all switches to normal, then announced, “Weapons coming unlocked.”