Parsons finally shook himself out of his panic, grasped the wing sweep handle, and shoved the wings forward past the 54-degree lockout and all the way to 24 degrees. He also eased up on the back pressure on the control stick. The Aardvark’s nose was still ungainfully high in the air — it was as if they were on final approach to landing, and flying almost that slow. The stall-warning horn was still blaring, but the plane felt solid and stable again. “Find that fighter!” Parsons shouted.
Mace checked the RHAWS scope — it was clear, with no symbols except for intermittent “S” symbols denoting the search radars at Subakhu, now several miles behind them. He switched the RHAWS briefly to IRT mode, looking for a small white dot that would be the system tracking the fighter, but it was clear. Just to be certain, he scanned the dark skies outside the cockpit, although he knew it was impossible to see a fighter out there at night unless he was just a few feet away. “We’re clear,” he told Parsons.
“When I say ‘chaff,’ Daren, you better give it to me,” Parsons said irritably. “Get your head out of the radarscope and you won’t get airsick. If you punch out chaff and flares while we’re in the turn instead of before we turn, the missile will fly right up our ass.” Mace was too dazed and dizzy to argue, but he continued monitoring the threat scope and scanning the skies as they continued at two hundred feet above the desert floor toward the launch point.
The numbers of ground-based early warning and missile radars decreased rapidly — south of Baghdad there didn’t seem to be any at all. But Mace had no time to think about that — once they headed west and crossed the Tigris, they were on the missile launch run.
“Missile select switch to ‘all,’ status check … all missiles powered up, prearmed, and ready. Racks unlocked and ready,” Mace reported as he ran the Before Missile Launch checklist. “Missile target data checked. Launch mode switch in manual. Bomb door mode switch auto. Consent switch.”
“Consent switch up, guard closed,” Parsons reported.
“Copy. Checklist complete. Three minutes to launch point.”
It was less than one hour to sunrise, and the brightening sky began to reveal more and more details of the battle-scarred country below, and more details of the raging battle that was Desert Storm. One by one, Mace could see the gleaming office buildings and towers of Baghdad far to the north, the ancient city of Al Hillah, the ruins of Babylon ahead — and, to his complete amazement, aircraft filling the skies overhead. “Bogeys, one o’clock high,” Mace reported. “More at ten to eleven o’clock high. All heading northbound. Nothing on the RHAWS — they must be friendlies.” He paused for a moment, then said, “They’re heading north, Bob — they’re heading right toward the target. Right towards Karbala.”
“I’m standing by for the safe-in-range light, Mace. You got the launch point fix?”
Parsons was ignoring the obvious — there were friendlies flying within the lethal zone of a nuclear blast. Obviously someone had screwed up, and it wouldn’t be too great to nuke a bunch of Coalition aircraft. “What time do you have, Bob?” Mace asked.
“Jesus, Mace …” Parsons scowled.
“Dammit, Bob, there’s got to be a reason all these other aircraft are here. Maybe I screwed up the time. When I thought we were late before, maybe I got it backwards and we’re really early.”
“You didn’t screw up anything,” Parsons said. He pointed at the SATCOM clock on the forward instrument panel, which had Zulu time set for satellite synchronization. “That time checks with my watch. Now, unless we both got bad time hacks, we’re dead on time. But if you got a bad time hack and set a bad time in the SATCOM receiver, we wouldn’t have gotten anything on SATCOM. We received a message, you sent a message, and it was received and acknowledged. Everything’s on schedule. I don’t know why those other planes are up there, but it’s not my problem — this mission, and getting my butt back on friendly territory in one piece, is my only concern right now. Now, get back on the damn bomb run.”
“Whatever you say,” Mace muttered. Mace took his eyes off the nearby Coalition aircraft and went back into the radarscope: “Stand by for launch point fix.” Mace stepped the bombing computers to the launch point fix and selected the first offset aimpoint. After refining his aiming, he selected a second aimpoint, a tomb fifteen miles south of the dry lakebed. A semicircle of seven forts and tombs surrounded the lone tomb, so identification was positive.
Mace switched the radar to GND VEL to magnify the radar image, carefully laid the crosshairs dead on target, then reduced the range and selected offset three, a transmission tower just west of another lone tomb just twenty miles southeast of Karbala. The transmission line could be seen on radar as a thin, silvery sparkling line across the scope, making a definite jog southwestward where the right transmission tower was. The crosshairs were dead on. “I got the lead-in aimpoints,” he told Parsons as he reconfigured the radar to wide field-of-view. “Checking switches. Launch mode switch is in.”
Suddenly, on the international emergency GUARD channel, they heard, “Breakdance, Breakdance, this is Nightmare. Stop launch, stop launch. I repeat, Breakdance, this is Nightmare, stop launch. Time one-seven-zero-three-two-five, authentication poppa-juliett. Acknowledge. Over.”
It was an incredibly eerie feeling to hear your call sign, which was supposed to be a secret from most of the Coalition, being broadcast in the clear over an international emergency channel. The cloak of invisibility they felt by being part of a secret mission was shattered — it felt as if everyone in the entire world, bad guys as well as good, could see them now. Mace didn’t recognize the call sign Nightmare — they had a top secret codebook that would tell them who Nightmare was, but Mace had no time to look — but “stop launch” was a standard range director’s order to cease all missile firing activities. “What in hell was that?” Mace cried out. “That can’t be for real.”
“Ignore it,” Parsons said nervously. “It’s, uh, a message in the clear, and we don’t respond to clear-text messages. Take the fix and let’s go.” He turned to his radar navigator and found him furiously digging through an AQK-84 tactical decoding card. “Mace, I said ignore it.”
Mace ignored him. “It checks, Bob,” Mace said. “Jesus Christ, it checks. Someone just gave us a stop-launch order.”
“We don’t accept clear-text messages,” Parsons repeated, “and we sure as hell don’t accept a ‘stop-launch’ order, whatever that means.”
“It’s a standard range order,” Mace said. “You hear it on live-fire exercises all the—”
“This is not an exercise, Major,” Parsons snapped. “We’re probably being MIJIed by the Iraqis — they might have captured the Raven, its crew, and their classified documents and devised a phony order to keep us from launching.” MIJI, which was an acronym for Meaconing, Intrusion, Jamming, and Interference, was a standard tactic to try to divert aircrews from their mission or issuing false orders by the enemy. Aircrews had specific procedures for dealing with MIJI, and they had to be followed to the letter.
Mace knew that, but this still did not make sense — somebody was trying to tell them something.
“What are you doing now?” Parsons asked.
“If we get a recall or termination message,” Mace replied, “it’ll be on this page in the decoding book. I want to be ready.”