Six minutes later, Ammon found the tanker’s lower rotating beacon as the enormous aircraft made its final turn back toward the Bone. Two minutes after that, the tanker rolled out directly ahead of the B-1, one thousand feet above it. Richard Ammon quickly punched off his auto pilot and began a swift climb up to the tanker. As he climbed, he watched his fuel readout click down through 2,500 pounds. A bright yellow light continually flickered in his face, warning him of his critical fuel state. It had been on for the past sixty minutes. He was able to ignore the light now.
He began to concentrate on the tanker that lay up ahead. He was closing very quickly. It would only be a matter of minutes before he would be taking on fuel.
“Tanker is at twelve o’clock, four thousand feet,” Morozov announced from the back cockpit. He was monitoring Ammon’s approach to the tanker on his radar.
“Rag,” Ammon replied, keeping the tanker in sight. He was just beginning to see the outline of its huge wings as they were illuminated by the underbelly floodlights. He glanced at his airspeed indicator as he continued closing. He had almost fifty knots of closure speed on the tanker. That was way too fast. But he didn’t pull back on his throttles. He didn’t have time to slow down and make a nice, smooth approach to the tanker. Instead, he stole another quick glance at his fuel gauge. One thousand nine hundred pounds.
Tight. It was going to be tight.
Ammon was still five hundred feet from the tanker when his number four engine flamed out.
“Wolf five-three, this is Global on eleven-forty-six HF. How do you read?” the Global Air Traffic controller transmitted for the fifth time. Again no response. The controller, sitting in a warm office in Thule, Greenland, turned to his supervisor and shrugged his shoulders. The supervisor then spoke into a phone.
“No contact. Yes, yes, of course we’ll keep trying. But it doesn’t sound like they’re there. Now that could be because of two things. They could have turned their radios off. Or switched over to another frequency. Either way, if they aren’t listening to us, there isn’t much we can do.”
Caution lights flashed all over the cockpit when Ammon lost his number four engine. He quickly extinguished them by hitting the master caution light reset button on his forward instrument display. He could live without the engine for now. What he needed was to get up to the tanker and get some gas.
The KC-10 loomed up before him, filling the front of his wind-screen as he moved in closer. He could now see the air-refueling boom as it hung down from the KC-10’s tail. Tiny blue lights illuminated the tip of the boom, swinging around in a small circle as the boom drifted and floated in the stream of rushing air.
Ammon tried to ignore the stirring boom and instead concentrated on the body of the aircraft as he moved aggressively into position. When the Bone was within eighty feet of the tanker, Ammon quickly drew his throttles back to idle. The bomber slid into position, twelve feet aft of the boom. As Ammon concentrated on maintaining this position, the boom operator extended the boom and slid it along the nose of the bomber. At first, the boomer missed the air refueling port, and he pulled the boom quickly away from the bomber to keep from smashing out one of the windows. Ammon sucked in his breath and then held it. His number two engine sputtered and also flamed out. Another half dozen caution lights flickered on. Morozov swore at him from the back cockpit. Ammon stayed in the contact position, waiting for the boomer to hook up to his Bone. Slowly, with exercised caution, the Boomer moved the boom back toward the tip on the B-l’s nose. The boom slid across the thick metal as it searched for the receptacle block. Then, with a solid clunk, the receiver latched and accepted the nozzle.
Ammon glanced down at his fuel gauge. Twelve hundred pounds. He held his breath and bit on his tongue as he counted the systems he had lost when the second engine had flamed out. Two generators, two main hydraulic pumps, half a dozen avionics computers. The list went on and on.
But it didn’t matter. The B-1 could fly with only two engines. It was dangerous, but not deadly. What he needed was fuel. He continually cross-checked the fuel gauge. Then he saw the numbers begin to increase. The bomber was taking on gas.
Four huge transfer pumps inside the tanker began to pump fuel out of their tanks and through the six-inch boom at a rate of over 10,000 pounds every minute. Ammon cross-checked the fuel gauge once again. It was passing through 3,000 pounds and increasing very quickly. He let out his breath with a sigh of relief, reached down and restarted his engines, then settled back in his seat and concentrated on staying in the proper position behind the huge tanker.
“Sir, I’ve located a carrier task force off the coast of Portugal, about three hundred miles west of Lisbon,” the Torrejon controller said. “They may be within UHF radio range of the Wolf tanker. I’m getting a satellite link with them now.” The controller was standing by the communications officer’s desk. The CommOff looked up and rubbed his hands through his sandy brown hair, then glanced at his watch. 21:14. The refueling, if it was on schedule, was just about ready to begin.
“Do it,” he commanded. “Tell the carrier communications center to blanket the sky with the message. The tanker should be monitoring guard frequency. Every aircraft has to do that. Tell them that would be a good place to start.”
“Sir, it’s already done.”
Ammon looked at his fuel gauge. They had already taken on almost 130,000 pounds of fuel. It was good to be fat once again.
Suddenly, with another clunk, the refueling boom disconnected from his bomber with a mist of spraying jet fuel. The boom operator raised the boom and retracted its nozzle. Ammon heard his radio come alive.
“Heater four-one, that completes your off-load. You have received one-hundred-thirty thousand pounds of JP-8.”
“Roger, Wolf,” Richard Ammon replied as he pulled back on his throttles and began to descend away from the KC-10. The outline of the tanker began to fade and merge with the darkness as the Bone descended toward the ocean.
Ammon pushed the nose of the aircraft downward, establishing a 25 degree nose low attitude. They descended toward the ocean at over 20,000 feet per minute, cutting through the darkness toward the glistening ocean waves. He only had a few minutes to get down low. They would soon be close enough to the coast of Spain that, at any altitude above a few thousand feet, they would be detected by NATO’s over-the-horizon radar.
Ammon didn’t need to remind himself that the Americans knew he was coming. And they had fighters based all over Europe, as well as carriers in the Mediterranean Sea.
As he pushed the aircraft down toward the sea, Morozov spoke up from the rear cockpit.
“Looks like we got a little weather up ahead,” he announced. “My radar is showing a huge squall line. I’ve got all sorts of radar returns. Looks like there are huge thunderstorms all across the Mediterranean Sea.
THIRTY-FOUR
The America heaved in the fifteen-foot seas, the darkened flight deck pitching into the night sky as the carrier crashed through the waves. The carrier’s superstructure was shrouded in a thick fog of mist and saltwater spray. A freezing rain mixed with the crashing waves and soaked the carrier’s grated steel deck with a sheet of diluted salt water. Strobes of lightning flashed through the sky while thunder crackled and rolled overhead.
The Mediterranean weather had turned sour, a result of a low pressure system that had been slow in making its way across the plains of central Europe. The system built up heat and energy as it crossed the sun-baked land, then became unstable as it mixed with the moisture laden troposphere that hung over the Mediterranean Sea. The result was an enormous line of storms that now stretched from southern Italy to the western coast of Turkey, rolling the entire Mediterranean with high winds and bitter cold rain. Brutal lightning continually flashed from the bowels of the mushroom-shaped clouds, arcing its way to the sea.