“Daren, I don’t like the thought of it any more than you do. But we are going to do it. You’ve trained for this. You knew there was a chance we’d have to when you stepped into the cockpit.”
“Christ, but I never …”
“Listen to me,” Parsons snapped. “You signed on for this just as I did. Nobody put a gun to your head. If you’re gonna flake out on me, say it now, before we head into Indian country.”
“And what if I don’t want to?” fumed Mace. “Killing thousands upon thousands of people …”
“Then we turn around. Our careers will be over. We’ll spend ten years in prison breaking big rocks into little rocks, and then we’ll receive dishonorable discharges. No one in their right mind would launch a nuke, but we’d be treated as cowards and pariahs for the rest of our lives because we refused to follow orders.” He turned to his radar navigator and added, “After all these years in the Air Force, are you so afraid to die that you would give up all you have, all you’ve accomplished …?”
“I’m not afraid to die, Colonel,” Mace answered firmly, “and I’m not afraid of becoming a pariah. What I don’t like doing is something completely abhorrent simply because I’ve received a message to do so.”
Parsons said, “You know, Major, you should’ve sorted out all that before you stepped into the cockpit, before you volunteered for duty overseas, before you joined the bomb squadron. Sixty minutes from our TOT is not the time to have second thoughts. But let me tell you something: I’m not going to risk my life flying in combat with someone who’s not giving me one hundred percent. I don’t want to spend ten years in prison, but I don’t want to die needlessly because my nav is having a guilt attack. We either both say ‘go,’ or we abort and pay the piper back home. Do we go — or do we turn back?”
Mace looked at the time-to-go indicator on his Multi-Function Display — only three minutes to the LLEP. The EF-111 Raven would have already zipped out ahead, scanning for enemy threats and shutting down enemy SAM sites and long-range fighter-intercept radars.
The war is on, Mace thought. The Iraqis invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia and Israel. He was committed long before he had received that execution message.
“We go,” Mace said.
“You sure, Daren?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.” He fastened his oxygen mask in place, slipped on his fingerless Nomex flying gloves, and nodded to his aircraft commander. “ ‘Before TF Descent’ checklist when you’re ready.…”
While still one hundred miles from the Iraqi border, the crew of the F-111G fighter-bomber, call sign “Breakdance,” began a rapid descent to terrain-following altitude.
They were still thirty miles in Turkish airspace when the AN/APS-109B radar homing and warning receiver (RHAWS) blared, and an “S” symbol appeared at the top edge of the circular RHAWS display. The unit had been displaying several “H” symbols, arrayed along the border — these were American-made Hawk antiaircraft missile sites, operated by the Turkish Army. The line of H symbols clearly outlined the border. But the S symbol was new, and it was not friendly.
“Search radar, twelve o’clock,” Mace reported. “Threat detection system is on, trackbreakers off.” The bomber’s internal AN/ALQ-137 internal electronic countermeasures system, called trackbreakers by the crews, was an automatic noise/deception jammer system that was effective on short-range, low-power radars like airborne missile guidance radars and mobile surface-to-air missile systems, but virtually powerless against big, heavy, ground-based radars like enemy search or fighter-intercept control radars — that was the reason Mace kept it off. The EF-111 Raven electronic-warfare aircraft escorting them was designed to jam these radars anyway. “Ready to step it down?”
“Give me four hundred,” Parsons said.
Mace twisted the terrain-following knob two clicks to the left, and the big F-111G bomber nosed gently toward the dark, unseen ground below. They were now flying only four hundred feet above the rugged terrain, screened from view of all but the closest and most powerful enemy radars. Seconds later, they crossed into enemy territory — and the real terror began.
The border region between Turkey and Iraq was one of the most heavily fortified in the world, with over 120,000 troops spread out on both sides along the two-hundred-mile frontier. As the friendly Hawk radar symbols disappeared on the radar warning receiver, they were replaced by “A” and “3” symbols — these were Iraqi antiaircraft artillery units and Soviet-built SA-3 mobile surface-to-air missile batteries, deployed with the Iraqi border army units to guard against hostile aircraft. Neither was a great threat to the fast, low-flying F-111G, but there seemed to be a solid wall of A symbols ahead. “We can’t go around them,” Mace said. “C’mon, Raven buddy, don’t let us down.”
“Give me two hundred, hard ride,” Parsons shouted over the continuous deedle deeedle deeedle of the radar warning system. Every time a new triple-A system appeared on the scope, the warning tone blared. Soon there were five, ten, then more than a dozen A symbols on the RHAWS scope, aligned straight ahead. Occasionally they could see intermittent bursts of heavy-caliber gunfire slicing the darkness outside, but it was random and just sweeping aimlessly across the sky — obviously the EF-111 was doing its job. Mace clicked the TF switch twice to the left, then moved the large center RIDE knob from NORMAL to HARD — this would command steeper climbs and descents over the mountains. At night, in rugged terrain, and while under attack, this was the most difficult flying imaginable for a bomber crew.
“Two hundred hard ride set,” Mace reported. “High terrain, six miles, not painting over it … five miles … four miles … give me twenty left to go around this sucker.”
In his attack radar, a high mountain peak resembled a yellow ripple across the screen, with black beyond it. The black indicated how high above the bomber’s flight path the terrain was: if the black receded as they approached, the bomber was climbing over the peak; if the black grew larger and began to stretch toward the top of the scope, the bomber would eventually hit the hill. At two hundred feet aboveground, there was a lot of black on the scope.
Parsons thumbed a button on the control stick, which briefly disconnected the heading control portion of the autopilot to allow for minor course corrections (without disabling the critical terrain-following and fail-safe flyup features of the autopilot), and edged the control stick left. When they were clear of the hill, Parsons released the NWS/AP HOLD switch, and the bomber automatically swung right toward the next turnpoint.
“We got triple-A at two o’clock, just outside lethal range,” Mace announced. “SA-3 search radar, one o’clock, outside lethal range. Sirsenk army air garrison.” Sirsenk was the northernmost air base in Iraq, but more importantly Sirsenk protected the northern edge of the Torosular mountain range. “High terrain, eleven miles, not painting over it.”
Parsons did not acknowledge all those important calls.
“Sirsenk now at three o’clock. Still got an SA-3 up, but it’s not locked on,” Mace reported. It was Mace’s job to coordinate the terrain outside — which Parsons could not see with the naked eye — with Parsons’ only terrain indicator, the “E-scope” on the forward instrument panel. The E-scope painted a distorted one-dimensional picture of the terrain ahead, with a squiggly line depicting the bomber’s flight path; if the terrain broke the line, they would hit the ground. Mace would call out terrain ahead until Parsons saw it on the E-scope and could confirm that the bomber’s terrain-following autopilot was responding properly. Also, Mace had to coordinate all that with the radar threat scope and with the flight plan route — it wouldn’t do any good to successfully avoid a hill only to fly right into lethal range of an SA-3 missile or “ack-ack” artillery battery, or fly so far off course as to get off time or miss the target area completely.