“Clear,” Woods said.
Wink pushed the handle of the canopy forward and it closed.
The engines were turning beautifully, the engine instruments hovering in the middle of acceptable ranges. Woods signaled Airman Benson, who disconnected the huffer and power cable. Wink ran through his checklist carefully. Woods’s hands darted back and forth, instinctively moving switches and knobs until the cockpit was set up perfectly and the systems all checked out. He could almost do it without thinking, a risk he was particularly aware of tonight. His mind wasn’t worrying about cockpit switches — he was thinking about SAMs and the Syrian Air Force, which would like nothing better than to be able to engage him, and ideally, ask him a few questions.
He put his feet on the top of the rudder pedals to hold the brakes as Benson took the tie-down chains off and moved the chocks away from the wheels. Benson glanced at Woods and Wink and saluted sharply. Woods returned his salute in the dark, then saw that the yellow shirt was ready to start him taxiing toward the catapult.
“Hot mike,” Woods said as they moved toward the bow catapult. He glanced down at the clock on his dashboard and saw that it was ten minutes before the time for his launch. It was also five minutes before the scheduled launch of the Tomahawk missiles. No one knew what Syria would do. All they had was a warning from the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations. He had called a press conference immediately after the declaration of war by the United States and had told the Americans in unequivocal terms that any attack on Syrian soil would be perceived as an act of war against Syria. This had given the politicians some pause. The reaction in the VF-103 Ready Room had been: Excellent! Come on up.
Woods squinted at an enormous flash that lit the horizon to his left. As he watched, a fireball climbed into the sky and suddenly another, then another, all of them coming from the vertical launchers of the destroyers that surrounded the carrier. Five more glowing, burning missiles flew up from the ships and headed east after the first.
“Holy shit,” Wink said, almost speechless as he too watched the Tomahawks head inland. “We’re really going to do this.”
“Sure looks like it. You ready?” Woods asked, his heart racing, now in full sprint. The Tomahawk launch had caught him off guard, a let’s-go-to-war exclamation point.
“Ready.”
“Lights on.” Woods flipped the light switch on the outside of the throttle with his left hand and the exterior lights of the F-14 illuminated. It told everyone on the flight deck they were ready. The aircraft suddenly jerked down and was ripped forward accelerating almost instantly. They were pulled along the length of the catapult and thrown off the bow of the carrier at one hundred thirty-five knots.
“We’re flying,” Wink said, his eyes locked on the altimeter and airspeed indicators, watching for any sign of loss of altitude or speed. He wanted to make sure that he had enough time to eject if they started down. He had about three seconds to make the decision if things went badly.
“Gear up. Flaps up,” Woods said as he threw the levers. More Tomahawks flew up into the sky from a distant destroyer, the last group of the unmanned land attack missiles that would get there long before the Air Wing and soften up the approach to their targets.
Woods heard Fungo, Lieutenant Commander Lyle Tourneaux, the Admin Officer who was also Bark’s RIO, call airborne as Bark flew the second Tomcat into the dark sky three miles behind.
Wink checked out the systems and turned on all his sensors. The radar was picking up everything in the sky. The huge wattage output of AWG-9 radar was unparalleled in aviation. It could pick out a bomber-sized target a hundred twenty miles away, and calculate launch solutions on twenty-four targets at once. It displayed them all on the PTID, the clear and understandable display screen in the backseat.
He trained the radar around to the starboard side of the Tomcat as they completed the turn waiting for the rest of the airplanes in the strike. The radar swept over Syria. Go ahead, Wink thought. You want F-14 radar energy to talk about? Have some of this. He looked anxiously for the fighters that might come from Syria to stop them. Nothing but airline traffic.
Woods glanced at Wink’s radar picture, which was repeated on his Visual Display Indicator. “Looking for Syrian fighters?” he asked.
“You can always hope.”
“The day Syria sends fighters up after American planes at night will be the day you and I have simultaneous heart attacks.”
“Don’t think they’ll come?”
“You heard the intel brief. I don’t think they’ve even flown at night, let alone fought anybody at night. Plus after we hit their SAMs and blow up the Sheikh they’ll be able to bluster about it. If we whack a bunch of their fighters to boot, they’ll just look stupid.”
“So all we need to worry about are the long skinny ones without pilots.”
“Right. The SAMs.”
Simultaneous flashes illuminated the horizon.
“Look at that! SAMs trying to hit the Tomahawks. Good luck.”
“I love that!” Wink exclaimed. “One stupid missile trying to shoot down another stupid missile!”
To his left Woods saw Bark rendezvousing on him from across the circle. Woods and Bark both had their anticollision lights off for the night hop. They could see each other only by the green, rectangular formation lights. Bark slid toward Woods expertly at exactly the right closure rate. Woods eased his turn a little to make the rendezvous even less difficult. “Bark’s joining on us,” he told Wink, who had his head buried in the charts and mission planning.
“Roger,” Wink said absently, and then looked at the time. “We’ve got to head inland in ten minutes.”
“Rog,” Woods replied. “How’s your data link picture?”
“EA-6B’s ten miles ahead. The two F-18 HARM shooters are on his wing.” The EA-6B was to jam every radar of consequence on the way in and out for the strike. The F-18s were waiting for a fire control radar — a surface to air missile or AAA to turn on. “Looks like the guys off the Eisenhower are ready to go into Syria. Everybody’s in place.”
As Bark slid under Wood’s F-14 and moved out to his right, Woods saw the sky being peppered with tracers and glowing missile flames. “Check that out.”
Wink’s eyes shifted from his radar and his navigation to focus inland. “That’s where we’re going.”
“Combat checklist,” Wink prompted.
“Okay,” Woods replied. He started reciting the checklist from memory.
Wink knew that Woods had the checklist memorized but he always turned to the written checklist he carried on his knee board. He didn’t trust himself or anyone else to remember everything when combat approached. He swore by the adage that when the balloon goes up, 90 percent of your brains go to your butt to squeeze it off as tight as it will go.
Woods pushed the throttles forward to military power and started the F-14 up to their ingress altitude of forty thousand feet to avoid most of the SAM envelopes.
The LANTIRN pod under the right wing of the Tomcat was the key to the strike. The F-14 had proved itself to be one of the best night attack fighters in the world once it had learned to use the LANTIRN pod. It stood for Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting for Night. When night-vision devices were worn the LANTIRN allowed the F-14 to fly very low, very fast, and drop bombs at night with deadly accuracy.
Woods leveled off at forty thousand feet. Bark, on his wing, had taken a trail position, flying loosely behind Woods, headed inland.
“Ten seconds,” Wink said.
“Roger.”
Wink watched their symbol cross over the way-point on his PTID exactly on time. “Three, two, one. Take heading 083,” Wink said.