The planes on the strike had reached the point of separation. They split up to approach the target from different directions, making the air defense calculations immeasurably harder for the defenders — not just one piece of sky to look for.
The breakup was Woods’s cue. “Goggle up,” he said to Wink. They took their NVDs out of the cases and clipped them to the brackets on their helmets, folding them down and turning them on. Woods could now see everything, the horizon, the mountains, the puffy cloud twenty miles away, and every airplane within ten miles. Everything was green. He immediately pushed the nose of the Tomcat over and headed toward the deck, watching his instruments carefully to ensure he stayed under thirty degrees of nose-down attitude. The airplane felt heavy and sluggish. Wink turned his radar to standby. They were going in totally EMCON, emissions controlled — no electronic signals emanating from the plane at all — until near their target. They didn’t want anybody picking up on them heading toward Iran with their radar blasting away, detectable for hundreds of miles.
He eased the stick back to slow his rate of descent as they neared the ground — gullies, bushes, and rocks were now clearly visible. He pulled harder and brought the nose up to the horizon, steadying out two hundred feet above the ground. Low enough that no radar would pick them up outside of thirty miles or so, and high enough that he was unlikely to hit most obstacles. They had the wires and cables of each area emblazoned on their chart.
Big joined on his wing in comfortable trail formation about a quarter of a mile behind him and slightly higher.
The radar warning detector was quiet. No surface to air missiles or AAA were trained on them as they started their race through eastern Syria. The Tomcat bounced slightly as the desert air rose from hills causing minor turbulence.
In the back, the LANTIRN god was fine-tuning his picture from the FLIR, the passive forward-looking infrared that was such a significant part of the LANTIRN system. It was working perfectly. Wink settled into his navigation and was comfortable with everything he saw. One of his favorite things about LANTIRN was it had a self-contained GPS unit that confirmed its position from satellites. It gave them their position three dimensionally.
“How we looking, Wink?”
“Coming up on our turnoff,” Wink replied. “See the bridge just to the right?”
“Yeah.”
“Stand by.” As they came upon it Wink called, “Come port to 065,” and Woods turned northeast toward the mountains of Iran.
38
Woods pushed the nose of the Tomcat over slightly following down a hill as he stayed at two hundred feet above ground level. He increased his speed to five hundred fifty knots. Wink had his head buried in the infrared LANTIRN system and watched for any sign of the launch of a surface-to-air missile or AAA. Wink glanced at the green-glowing radar warning indicator by his right knee. It was completely quiet.
Woods checked his fuel. They were below their consumption ladder again, burning more fuel than they should be. He checked his speed and fuel flow again. The fuel flow was slightly higher than projected. His calculations had been wrong. Bark had told them to check their fuel carefully. If they weren’t close, they were to abandon the mission. The last thing Bark said he wanted was to lose two Tomcats from fuel starvation. They were already burning through their Bingo fuel — the cushion they relied on when returning to the carrier to fly to a nearby airfield if they couldn’t get back aboard. Wink checked their projected time on target with the LANTIRN system.
“Crossing into Iraq,” Wink reported.
“This just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?” Woods replied. He glanced at his engine instruments, the fuel flow, the turbine inlet temperature, the wing position, and engine rpm’s. Everything was as smooth as silk. “You see Big?”
Wink grabbed the steel handle on top of the radar panel in front of him and twisted around to look between the tails of the Tomcat. “Yep,” Wink said with some difficulty due to his contortions. “Got his formation lights. About a quarter mile behind us. Stacked right.” He glanced at his PTID again. “Time to target is thirty-six minutes.”
“Roger,” Woods said. His hands were beginning to sweat inside his gloves. The green landscape flashed by smoothly. The desert air was mercifully quiet with few pockets of turbulence or intense heat rising into the cool night sky.
“Approaching way-point three,” Wink said. He had chosen an intersection as the way-point, something that they could check visually to make sure they were on course. “Stand by to come port to 049. Check for intersection.”
“Roger.” Woods watched the distance to the way-point count down in tenths of miles. He strained to see an intersection. He hadn’t even seen a road in thirty minutes. The desert had a way of rejecting roads unless they were well maintained. He had a feeling the chances of this intersection being well maintained were not high. He scanned the horizon for anything suspicious. There were no signs of life at all.
“Mark. Come port, 049,” Wink said crisply.
Woods banked the F-14 left and pulled up slightly to make sure the turn didn’t bring them closer to the ground. He checked the radar altimeter, the only emission they were making that might be detected by the enemy. It was a small radar beam that was projected directly down, beneath the Tomcat, to measure its height above the ground with amazing accuracy. The accuracy would cause the numbers to jump around even if they were level because of the changing elevation of the ground. He steadied on the new heading. Woods had found himself watching the sky even more carefully after they’d passed into Iraq. He couldn’t believe they were flying through Syria, Iraq, and Iran all in one night. He started to wonder how smart his plan had been. It was fraught with potential for disaster, not the least of which was the longest night low-level he had ever flown. He wouldn’t put it past Iraq to try to come up and stop them. Not that he was worried about Iraq’s ability to find them and shoot them down at night with one of its fighters, but he didn’t have enough gas for even one turn with a fighter.
The air grew unfriendly as they entered a mountain valley. They started bouncing noticeably in the mountain air. Woods was worried about maintaining his heading and altitude without running into something. He followed the valley through the jagged rocks and tried to maintain his course, beginning to breathe audibly.
“You okay?” Wink asked.
“Yeah.”
“Entering Iran,” Wink announced casually.
Woods was busy scanning back and forth with his night-vision goggles. His field of vision was much more limited than usual. He had to turn his head to see the gullies and valleys that were flashing by. He saw what looked like a tent settlement directly ahead and wanted to pull up to avoid them, but he had to stay low. He held his altitude and flew right over the dark tents. He could only imagine what those in the tents thought as they were awakened in the middle of the night by nearly instantaneous and overwhelming jet noise from one hundred feet away. Their animals probably all had heart attacks.
“We’re getting close, Trey. Thirty miles out. We’ll start up at ten miles.”
Woods climbed over a small hill and pushed the nose over to stay low to the ground.
“Twenty miles,” Wink said, his excitement growing. “Oh, shit!” he added. “I’m getting a SAM indication. An SA-6!”
“They’re waiting for us,” Woods said. “We’ve got to stay low and do a pop-up bomb run.”
“We can’t! We told them it would be a mid-altitude drop! Our laser guy is waiting for us to come in high!”
“No way, not in the middle of an SA-6 envelope. I just hope like hell the laser guy keeps that laser on target or this is all for naught.”