It was as simple as that.
SEVEN
Rebecca Furness didn’t have a chance to see the F-111G the first time — the other boom operators and the rest of her crew were already in the pod watching — so she waited patiently, watching the Tornado through the starboard porthole, until the breakaway call. She asked her copilot in the pod to switch with her, and he complied immediately — that close call, with the bomber coming only inches away from smacking into the tanker, had rattled him, and he scrambled out of there in a hurry. Furness waited for her tight-lipped, white-faced copilot to climb out, then took a short, steep ladder down into the boom operator’s pod in the aft belly of the KC-10.
Before her was a huge window, four feet by three feet, which was the largest one-piece glass panel in any pressurized aircraft. The senior boom operator on board, a chief master sergeant, was in the instructor’s seat, while Furness’ crew boomer was in the other seat, so she took a position between them and donned a headset.
“Oh … my … God …” she gasped when the F-111G hovered into view. She had seen lots of Aardvarks coming in for refueling, some even with emergencies on board, but in her eight years in the service she had never seen one as bad as this. The pilot looked as if he was hanging out in space, being held in place only by the relentless windblast pounding on his body. The entire left front side was blackened, and huge gashes of torn metal were clearly visible. It looked as if a giant clawed hand had tried to rip the pilot bodily out of the plane and had almost succeeded. The Tornado fighter-bomber was so close now that she could see it, too, close enough so that either one of them could plug into the boom.
“The nav looks scared shitless,” the boom operator, Technical Sergeant Glenn Clintock, said on interphone. “He can hardly keep it straight.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” the senior master sergeant asked. He was the air refueling wing’s senior enlisted adviser and still an active boom operator. “If he stays fixated on the nozzle, he’ll ram us for sure.”
“What’s he doing?” Furness asked.
“He’s staring at the boom nozzle,” Clintock replied. “It’s a typical new-guy reaction. You can’t help but watch the boom nozzle because it’s so close to your head just before it plugs you. When you stare at the boom you unconsciously fly the airplane up into it, and when you realize what you’re doing you jerk the plane away too fast and waste time. He’s got to concentrate on his visual cues and let us worry about the nozzle — except most navs don’t know what the visual cues are. He’s really in a world of hurt.”
“So tell him.”
“Can’t. We’re still over Iraq. One squeak from us and we’ll get hosed by SAM sites or fighter patrols. We’re also still within triple-A gun range — one lone Zeus-23 unit that gets a bead on us could eat our lunch.”
As Clintock explained the problem, Furness concentrated on the figure of the navigator. She could barely see his hands working the control stick and throttles — rather, the throttle, because the left engine was obviously dead — and his visored eyes nervously watching the boom and the tanker. She could somehow feel his fear, sense his anxiety. “What’s his fuel state?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” the chief replied. “We’re supposed to be radio-silent until after contact.”
“He’s clean configuration … does he have any stores on board at all?”
“Don’t know that either,” the chief said.
Furness watched in horrible fascination as the F-111G unsteadily made its way closer.
“This guy’s not going to make it in,” the chief said. “I recommend we call it off and let him find a flat piece of ground to land on.” The chief master sergeant turned to Furness and said, “You’re senior officer on board, Captain. What do you think?”
Furness didn’t reply right away. Of all the aircraft in the Kuwaiti theater of operations, the aerial refueling tankers, especially the Air Force models, were the most important. No bombing missions could be conducted, unless by long-range bombers like the B-52 or F-111G, without refueling, and even the bigger jets, because they were based so far away, needed at least one refueling en route. Tankers were force multipliers. One tanker not only serviced dozens of other aircraft every hour, but they refueled other Navy and Air Force tankers, which in turn refueled dozens of planes. That meant that losing one tanker was akin to losing several dozen strike aircraft. Losing one tanker like the KC-10, which could gas up USAF, Navy, and allied aircraft as well as carry cargo for long distances, was probably equivalent to losing one hundred strike aircraft. What commander, even at flag or general officer rank, in this day and age, could sustain the loss of a hundred combat aircraft at once? His career would be over instantly.
It was Furness’ responsibility to make sure her aircraft was safe and mission-ready — if this was going to be a long war, and there was every indication that it would be so, the KC-10 was probably the most important aircraft in the Coalition fleet. The chief was right: risking the KC-10 like this, with the bomber crew so inexperienced and rattled, was not only unsafe but operationally improper. The chief master sergeant was reminding her of her responsibility: some two- or three-star general could ask them to try to refuel this stricken plane, but it was her job, and hers alone, to protect her aircraft and her crew.
“Captain? He’s moving in again. What do you want to do?”
Furness unplugged her headset from the interphone cord and into the boom operator’s observer’s cord, then flipped the switch to radio one. “Pilot of the F-111, this is the commander of Shamu Two-Two. How do you hear me?”
“Open channel!” someone shouted on interphone. “Check switches!”
“Captain, we’re supposed to be radio-silent,” Clintock said, his eyes wide. “You’re on interplane.”
“I know,” Furness replied. “But we’ve got to talk this guy in or he won’t make it.”
“But you’re going to get us all killed!”
Furness wasn’t listening: “F-111 pilot, this is Shamu Two-Two. How do you read?”
“This is Breakdance. I read you loud and clear, lady. Have we broken radio silence? Acknowledge.”
“Yes … and no,” Furness said. “I can give you one more shot, and this time we’ll do it, or else I have no choice but to send you to an alternate recovery strip.”
“Then let’s do it,” the voice from the F-111G said. “I’m running on fumes. Clear me in to contact position.”
Furness nodded with satisfaction. She was expecting a scared, totally out-of-control nav on the radio, but instead found a determined, realistic fighter. She nodded to Clintock and said, “Clear him in and let’s get it on, Glenn.”
“You got it, Captain,” Clintock said. On interplane, he said, “Breakdance, this is Shamu Two-Two, cleared to contact position, Two-Two is ready.”
“No, no, not that way, Glenn,” Furness said. She motioned for the senior master sergeant to get out of his seat beside Clintock — he had no choice but to comply, but he was obviously perturbed about it — then strapped herself in and got on the radio: “Okay, guy, c’mon in. What’s your first name?”
“Say again?”
“I asked you, what’s your first name — or do you want to be called Breakdance all morning?”
That got his attention: “Daren,” he replied with obvious humor in his voice.
“Okay, Daren, I’m Rebecca. My friends call me BC. We’re going to dispense with the normal radio calls and do this my way. It’s just you and me, cowboy. I’ve got the juice, so come get it.”
“Okay, BC,” Mace replied with a hint of amusement. “Here I come.”