Mace was knocked to the right by the blast, but Parsons’ body, and the hard left bank that shielded his body with the aircraft, protected him from the worst of the explosion. His front windscreen cracked, but it did not disintegrate. His body felt as if it was on fire, then instantly it felt bone-numbing cold as six-hundred-miles-per-hour winds pounded into the cockpit. Mace needed to get on the controls and climb for lifesaving altitude before the engine shelled out.
F-111G navigators are not required to fly the plane and they are not permitted to log second-pilot time, but all navigators must know the emergency procedures just as well as the pilots, and most experienced navigators like Mace were frustrated or hopeful pilots themselves and take the controls and fly the plane whenever possible. The bomber heeled sharply left, threatening to enter a flat spin and hurl itself like a twenty-ton Frisbee into the desert, but Mace immediately applied full right throttle and full right rudder, and was able to thumb in full right rudder trim before the FIRE lights came on in the left engine.
Mace accomplished the engine-fire emergency procedures without thinking and without even consciously remembering he had done them.
The airspeed had dropped from six hundred to two hundred knots in just a few seconds. But for now they were flying and they were upright — that was the important thing.
Parsons was in really bad shape, but Mace thought he was still alive. The left side of Parsons’ face and body were black, and his left arm was shredded below mid-bicep; he could not see his legs or much of his torso, but Mace guessed his injuries below the waist were thankfully minor. The windblast was streaking fresh blood from his chest across his helmet and up onto the aft bulkhead. Mace ripped the first-aid kit off the Velcro attachment point behind his seat, fumbled with it with one hand in the dark, and tried to stuff a handful of gauze and a large combat dressing pad into the worst of Parsons’ wounds near his chest, but the windblast was too great and the gauze went flying. He was more successful in placing a flight jacket over him and taping it in place. Parsons’ helmet was cracked, but the visors and oxygen mask were still in place and intact, and Parsons had suffered no injuries to his face or neck, so Mace decided to leave the mask and visors in place. Mace checked that Parsons’ oxygen was on 100-percent oxygen and flowing, tightened Parsons’ last remaining shoulder strap, then used the last of the medical tape to secure Parsons to his seat. If they had to eject, Parsons had to be as straight in the seat as possible or the G-forces would snap his spine in two.
Mace then returned his attention to flying the plane. A safe landing was probably impossible. He had a low-fuel situation, wings stuck at 24 degrees or greater, and one engine was out, with all the related hydraulic and electrical malfunctions. He had major structural damage, a blown windscreen, and an injured crewmember. He had no navigation systems, no engine monitoring systems, no computer assist for any function, and no primary flight or performance instruments. He nosed the bomber southward, determined to at least get away from Baghdad and across the Iraqi border before he punched out. The controls felt mushy and unresponsive — soon they would give out altogether. Mace decided to gain a little more altitude, cross the border if possible, then eject. The F-111G bomber was the best plane in the world to punch out from. The entire cockpit section was a winged capsule, complete with its own parachutes, rocket motors, stabilization fins, and landing shock absorbers — it would even float, and the pilot’s control stick was a handle for a manual bailing pump. He was at two thousand feet now … plenty of altitude for a safe ejection … just grab the yellow handle by his left knee and pull …
But not with two fucking nuclear missiles on board.
The mission directives said do not bail out until at least thirty miles into Turkish or Saudi airspace, and then jettison the weapons safe over the Arabian Sea or Red Sea, or let the weapons crash with the aircraft. It was possible that the weapons would not be destroyed in a crash, and letting two SRAM-X missiles fall into Saddam Hussein’s hands was unthinkable. No, he had to fly the machine a little longer, find a Coalition airfield, maybe get some gas from an aerial-refueling tanker, then try to set the thing down.
Straining against his shoulder harness to see the console between Parsons’ legs, he checked the electrical systems panel. The indicator read EMER — that meant that both hydraulically powered electrical generators had kicked off-line and he was running on battery power alone. He flipped over to the emergency checklist for electrical malfunctions, checked the circuit breaker panel near his head between the two seats, made sure the autopilot was off, checked that the battery switch was on, then flipped the generator switch from ON to OFF/RESET, held it there for a few seconds, then switched it to RUN. The indicator read TIE instead of NORM, but with one engine out, TIE was a good indication — it meant that one generator was successfully energizing both electrical systems. Several lights popped on in the cockpit … and the radios came alive.
He completed the electrical system malfunction checklists, shutting down unnecessary electrical systems and the autopilot, then switched the IFF, or Identification Friend or Foe, thumbwheels to 7700, the emergency code, and the number one radio knob to the emergency GUARD position. Over the howl of the windblast in the shattered cockpit, he yelled into his oxygen mask microphone: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, any radio, any radio, this is Breakdance, 7440 Provisional, squawking emergency. Position south of Karbala, heading southwest at five thousand feet, declaring an emergency, injuries and weapons on board, requesting refueling and vectors to divert airfield. Come in. Over.”
He then remembered the earlier radio transmissions and, forgetting proper radio procedures, yelled, “Nightmare, goddammit, this is Breakdance. You must be monitoring my position by now. My pilot is injured and I’m in deep shit. Give me a vector and help me get this thing on the ground now!”
FOUR
On board an E-3C AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) radar plane, a converted Boeing 707 airliner with a thirty-six-foot-diameter rotating radome atop the fuselage, there were fourteen radar controller consoles, each scanning a specific segment of sky and watching every aircraft in their sector, enemy as well as friendlies, all throughout southern Iraq, Kuwait, the entire Arabian peninsula, western Iran, Syria, and eastern Jordan. Nine consoles were for air controllers, two were set aside to monitor sea vessels, two were tasked to monitor commercial and other noncombatant air traffic along the periphery of the Kuwaiti theater of operations, and one was set aside for the task force commander or other special operations missions. This fourteenth console was manned that morning by a special task force of Army and Air Force general officers who were representatives of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself. Their call sign was “Nightmare.”
The two general officers and their aides had seen Mace’s F-111G dodge enemy fighters and missiles, had watched in horror as it began its missile run, then watched it turn away from its launch point without the nuclear explosion they all feared. “Sir, the F-111G crew is calling,” the radar controller said to the two-star general in charge of the task force. “He says the pilot is injured and he has aircraft damage.”
“Give them a southwest vector clear of known triple-A sites and tell them to climb to ten thousand five hundred feet,” Air Force brigadier general Tyler Layton of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command replied. “He’ll get chewed alive by triple-A if he stays at five thousand feet.” The short, rather stocky and barrel-chested officer had been listening to the GUARD channel and had heard the call. Layton normally looked very boyish when surrounded by his taller, more powerful-looking colleagues from the Army, especially when a smile came to his lips as it often did, but right now his gentle, friendly features were etched with concern. There was no doubt this Aardvark crewdog had to get down now. Layton, the former commander of Eighth Air Force, in charge of all SAC bomber units in the eastern half of the United States, was an old B-52 and F-111G bomber pilot and was familiar with the tactics and procedures used by the supersonic fighter-bombers. He knew navigators didn’t have very much stick time, so he was going to need all the help he could get.