“I see it! I see the missile!” Mace shouted. Far off to the right and behind them, a streak of light from the tiny splash of light that was Bashur army air base raced across the darkness, crossing ahead of them from right to left. It was followed a split-second later by two more shots. Just before the F-111G bomber ducked behind a ridgeline, Mace could see a stream of tiny blobs of light fly off into space. “Flares!” he shouted. “It must be the Raven! He’s dropping flares!”
“Clear my turn, Daren,” Parsons said. He wanted back into the protective radar clutter of the mountains right now.
Mace checked his radarscope. “Very high terrain to the left,” he said. “Get your nose up to clear it. One ridgeline and then we’ll be down in the next valley and away from Bashur.”
“How much do I have to climb?”
“It’ll be about a thousand feet, but we’re really close … nose up, Bob, and give it some juice … high terrain three miles, not painting over it … check your fuckin’ wing sweep.”
The AN/APQ-134 terrain-following radar system was issuing its audible climb/descent cues, a low-pitched boop boop boop in a descent and a high-pitched beep beep beep when signaling a climb was necessary, and the rate of the sound was commensurate with the rate of climb or descent. Right now the TFR audio was beeping so fast that it sounded like one continuous tone. Parsons had to shove in zone 5 afterburner and move the wings from 72 degrees (full aft) to 54 degrees, then to about 30 degrees, to get the heavyweight bomber over the ridge without stalling.
They ballooned over the ridge traveling less than three hundred knots — only about a hundred knots above their stall speed. The TFR audio switched to a steady boop boop boop and the nose eased over. For a moment the SA-9 symbol and the MISSILE WARNING light came on, but it went out almost immediately as they nosed lower. “Steering’s good to the next point, Bob. Gimme thirty.”
There was a bright flash of light and a fiery streak not more than five or six miles ahead. The winks of flames could be seen clearly, like a big, slow meteor. At the same moment they heard on the tactical command radio channel, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Windfall, we are hit, we are hit. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”
Then there was nothing. Mace could not see the streak of fire impact before the terrain blocked his view.
“God damn …”
“They got out,” Parsons said quickly. “I thought I heard the pyros going off in the background.”
Mace heard no sounds of the EF-111’s escape capsule blowing free of the stricken jet, but he wasn’t going to argue. “They took a missile meant for us,” he said soberly. “I’m sending a Glass Eye report. Better step it to a thousand feet.” As Parsons gently climbed the bomber to a safer altitude, Mace recalled a canned Glass Eye aircraft-down report from his AFSATCOM computer, inserted the EF-111’s approximate position and time, and transmitted the report. The report would go to Washington first, but the brass in Washington would eventually flash the message to Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia so they could arrange a rescue sortie. Normally an E-3 AWACS radar plane would be tracking the planes and would call in a search and rescue mission, but Mace and Parsons and the crew of the EF-111 from Incirlik had no AWACS following them. “Message sent.”
Parsons checked his BNS time-to-go readout: “I’ve got thirty minutes to the IP. Station check.”
Mace called up the “SRAM Air Operations Page” on the CDU (Control and Display Unit) on his right-side instrument panel and double-checked that both missiles were prearmed and ready to fly. “Weapons unlocked,” he told Parsons.
“Copy,” Parsons said. “Daren, make sure those suckers are in manual.”
Mace bristled. He paused a bit, then touched the floor-mounted interphone switch with his left foot: “I got it, Bob.”
“Just check the damned switch,” Parsons snapped.
“I said I got it.”
“Check the fucking switch!” Parsons shouted.
Mace had never seen Parsons this rattled. Normally the weapons belonged to the nav, and the aircraft belonged to the pilot, and rarely did either one question the other’s responsibilities — but one look from the pilot made Mace hold his tongue. Parsons was obviously still hoping that this deadly mission would be called off, and the last thing he wanted was the nuclear-tipped missile to launch before the White House had a chance to terminate it.
“Hey, you keep the damned plane out of the rocks and I’ll worry about the weapons,” Mace said. But if the pilot wanted to double- and triple-check switches, that was fine with him. Mace put his hand on the launch mode switch — it was in MANUAL, and the bombing system switch was OFF. “Manual and off, Bob,” Mace said. He paused for a moment, then added, “I got this bomb run wired, Bob, so ease up.”
“I want full control of those missiles, Daren,” Parsons said. “Full control. That switch doesn’t leave manual under any circumstances.”
“It’s not supposed to,” Mace replied. “Chill out.”
Parsons nodded, then flexed his right hand on the control stick as if to relieve the tension in his arm and hand. “Sorry, Daren. Station check.”
This time the cockpit and instrument check found a malfunction, and a serious one: “Shit. The fuel totalizer is reading zero. I’ve got the fuel feed selector switch in ‘wing,’ “ Mace reported.
“What?” Still at terrain-following altitudes but one thousand feet above ground, Parsons checked the total fuel gauge — it read zero, with both body tank needles at zero. “Dammit, jettisoning the tanks must’ve shorted out the fuel gauge electronics.”
“Shit, we’ve been dumping fuel overboard,” Mace interjected. The automatic fuel management system worked off the gauge’s needles, automatically maintaining a proper center-of-gravity balance between the forward and aft fuel tanks. If the forward-tank needle was too low, pumps would transfer fuel to the forward tank to prevent a dangerous aft center of gravity — but if the needle had malfunctioned and the forward tank was in reality already full, fuel would spill overboard through overflow vents. “It’s been a long time since we punched the tanks off.”
“Three minutes, at five hundred pounds per minute — that’s fifteen hundred pounds of fuel we could’ve lost,” Parsons figured. “How does that work on the fuel curve?”
Mace had been copying down the fuel readings on almost every turnpoint on the flight plan, comparing the flight plan’s fuel figures to their actual ones. “We were two thousand short the last time I took a reading,” Mace said. “This puts us three point five below the curve. We were flight planned to recover with six thousand.”
“And we can recover with no less than two thousand, according to the mission directives,” Parsons said. “We’re still five hundred pounds on the ‘go’ side.”
“Five hundred pounds ain’t spit, Bob,” Mace retorted. “The gauges can be off by a thousand pounds at least. We’ve got a no-shit emergency here. If we start losing body tank pumps or lose the generators, we can have an aft CG problem so fast—”
“But we haven’t lost any pumps,” Parsons insisted. “The system’s working fine in manual. We got no choice but to continue.”
“Maybe so,” Mace said, “but I’ll report the malfunction on SATCOM and ask for instructions. They can still abort us.”