It was not the news they had been waiting to hear.
Mace and Parsons were at twenty thousand feet in an F-111G “Aardvark” fighter-bomber, holding in a “parking” orbit over the city of Elazig in eastern Turkey. They had launched two hours ago from a small air base called Batman, in eastern Turkey, two hundred miles east of the main Coalition air base in Incirlik. The radio channels were filled with the excited, jabbering voices of men going to war.
Now, it appeared, Parsons’ and Mace’s turn had come as well.
It was the opening hours of the largest air invasion since World War II. Operation Desert Storm. The only thing that was definite about the war so far was the intense level of confusion that reigned.
Dozens of aircraft were departing Incirlik Air Base to the west, sweeping across Syria, and hundreds of others were racing northward from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. All were directed to use the radios only in an emergency, but it seemed as if half the fleet had emergencies, because the channels were jammed. Aircraft from earlier raids on Baghdad were returning, and a lot had suffered battle damage — which didn’t help the tension levels. Reports of sheer curtains of triple-A — antiaircraft artillery — and hundreds of radar- and infrared-guided surface-to-air missile launches were echoing through the radio channels in a dozen different languages. The full might of the Iraqi military, with some of the world’s most sophisticated air defense weapons on-line, was being brought to bear against the coalition of countries aligned against it.
Once airborne, Daren Mace and Robert Parsons were cut off from communications except for two vital radio links: one was a discrete UHF link to their tanker for the precious fuel they would need; the other, a special UHF link to a Strategic Air Command satellite twenty-two thousand miles in space, which would relay messages from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters or from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
The last message the crew had received, printed on a tiny thermal printer on the navigator’s right-side instrument panel in the cockpit, was not from Schwarzkopf or Horner at CENTCOM — the addressor said “NCA,” the National Command Authority. It was from the President of the United States himself, relayed from the White House to the Pentagon directly to Parsons and Mace.
There was only one kind of message that would come directly from the President himself.
“Gimme the entire message, Daren,” Parsons asked his radar navigator nervously, “then let’s go through the authentication together. Show it to me step by step so I can be sure.”
“I don’t like the smell of this,” Mace mumbled. He opened the red-covered decoding booklet, onto which he had clipped the Air Force Satellite Communications printout and recopied the encoded message. Pointing to each section block in the decoded message so Parsons could follow along, he read: “NCA sends, actual message, reference date-time group, SAC Eighth Air Force units, operation code X-Ray-Bravo.”
Mace opened a second folder marked top secret and flipped it open to the proper page, as indicated by the date-time group in the decoded message. “Page sixty-three, XB decodes to Operation Desert Fire.”
Parsons nodded.
The code book had listings for dozens of preplanned missions involved in the opening morning of Desert Storm, but only one pertained to Parson and Mace: Desert Fire. If it decoded out to any other mission name, even if the authentication was correct, the message would be invalid.
Mace continued: “Here’s the code for the flight plan set, the weapons unlock code, and here’s the authentication code and sequence.”
Using a third top secret code book, Mace looked up the proper document letter from the authentication code and withdrew a thin, stiff card from his secrets bag. After Parsons confirmed that he had the right one, Mace snapped the card open and laid a series of uncovered alphanumerics next to the last six characters in the decoded message. They matched and were in exact sequence.
“Message authenticated,” Mace said. “We’re going in. Shit.”
Parsons sighed in resignation while Mace began composing a reply message. Parsons was silent, thinking about the challenge that lay ahead. It was a challenge no one ever wanted to really face, but it was part of the job. He’d faced them before, though not on this scale, in Vietnam, Libya, Panama. But he was an older breed of flyer. He glanced over at Daren Mace and wondered how this talented hotshot navigator would handle what they were inevitably going to do.
Not much younger that Robert Parsons’ own forty-five years, Daren Mace was typical in so many ways of what one would expect an Air Force officer to look like: tall, blond hair, good-looking chiseled features, pearly white teeth, and a hint of a tan. But Daren Mace was atypical in many other ways, his attitude a sharp contrast to his appearance. He hated exercise (and didn’t need it, being that rare breed who neither gains nor loses, but maddeningly stays the same year after year), and preferred lifting mugs of Coors and chasing women to anything resembling sports. The Air Force’s 391st Bomb Wing kept a close eye on Mace, who vocally scoffed at the monthly fitness tests as a waste of time and delighted in pencil-whipping them simply to aggravate the flight surgeons. When the Air Force began using additional duties to evaluate its officers instead of real yardsticks — like job performance, for example — Mace rolled his eyes, usually muttered that it was a “bunch of shit,” and challenged any rule that did not involve flying. For in Daren Mace’s mind, flying ruled the day. Period. No ifs, no ands, no buts.
Despite his attitude, which was a constant thorn in his superiors’ side, no one could deny that Daren Mace was the best. It was why on this day, the opening hours of Desert Storm, Mace was Robert Parsons’ partner. Mace could navigate the hell out of the F-111G bomber, and nobody knew the Aardvark bomber better than he.
Because of his abilities, Mace usually flew the “newbies,” the new pilots in the squadron, until they had enough hours under their belt, usually getting assigned to work with the lower-rated “R” (ready) crews, not the “E” (experienced) or “S” (superior) ones. His independent attitude usually lost him consideration for the more high-profile sorties or exercises. The wing commanders knew where their bread was buttered, and as talented as Mace was, one bad impression on the brass could destroy an entire wing’s reputation … and their careers. So, in effect, Mace was kept in the closet.
“I really can’t believe this,” Mace muttered as he composed, encoded, and keyed the reply message into the AFSATCOM terminal keyboard. “Those stealth fighters were supposed to be such hot shit, and they can’t even hit the target.”
“Take it easy, Daren,” Parsons said to his radar navigator. “What do you expect when the rag-heads have a triple-A on every rooftop in Baghdad? The Goblins aren’t supersonic, you know.”
“Tell me about it,” Mace said. “They couldn’t hit anything in Panama, either. What a waste! If Schwarzkopf wanted the job done right, he should have sent the F-111s in right away.”
“Hey,” Parsons said, “what’s done is done. The -117s had their chance. They blew it. Now it’s up to us.”
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons was the commander of the 710th Bombardment Squadron (Provisional), a Strategic Air Command F-111G medium bombardment squadron secretly deployed to Batman, Turkey. Parsons’ thin gray hair and baggy eyes attested to the high degree of thinking and planning he did in preparation for every mission, from the easiest “cakewalk” training sortie to the toughest combat mission. He had been flying various models of the USAF/General Dynamics F-111 medium bomber for nearly twenty years, but he studied, planned — and, yes, worried — like a cherry lieutenant.