Stone turned and smiled at Elliott, who returned his amused grin. The officers and the young scientist piled into the heavy air-conditioned blue Air Force van, and they headed back out on Perimeter Road.
Jon asked, “I understand your first reconnaissance sortie will take off in a few hours?”
Stone nodded. “It’s about four hours’ flying time from here to the Philippines for the RC-135 and AWACS planes; about three hours for the EC-135. They arrive on station in the Celebes Sea about midnight. They stay on station for four hours, then head on back. They RTB about eight A.M.”
“So my crew can have the plane about nine A.M.?”
“That’s right. You said installing your PACER SKY gear will take less than five hours, which is good because maintenance needs to get the aircraft ready to go at four P.M. That gives you a little leeway, but not much.”
“It’ll be plenty,” Masters assured him.
“Great.” Stone turned to Fusco and said, “Take a swing past the south apron and let’s see what’s going on, Tony.” They drove south along the flight line road, past an E-3C AWACS radar plane with its distinctive thirty-foot-roto-dome atop its fuselage; another camouflaged Boeing 707 aircraft with no distinctive marking except for two canoeshaped fairings on the underside of the fuselage behind the nose gear and rows of antennae atop the fuselage; and another Boeing 707 aircraft painted white over gray, with a refueling boom on the tail and a large, complex antenna array on the top of the fuselage. There were also two McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 aircraft modified as aerial refueling tankers in dark green and white camouflage nearby, and another two Boeing 707s also modified as tankers in standard light gray livery. Crates and crew members from Sky Masters, Inc., were already congregating around the planes, talking with Air Force maintenance crews.
“Quite a collection of planes out here,” Masters exclaimed. “I recognize the AWACS plane and the KC-10 and KC-135 tankers, but what are the other 707s?”
“The dark gray one is an RC-135X radar reconnaissance plane,” Stone explained. “The fairings you see house the multi-mode radars with the inverse synthetic aperture and pulse-Doppler systems, which we’ll use to map out ship and troop locations; it can also slave its radar to radiation-detection sensors to map out locations of search, acquisition, fire control, and missile uplink transmitters, and in an emergency we can arm it with antiradar missiles. I believe you’ll be installing a PACER SKY set and your communications complex on him so he can receive your PACER SKY data and transmit his data directly here.
“The other is one of SAC’s EC-135L radio relay aircraft. We’ll be using him on the first few missions to make sure we get a good feed from the recon planes.” He paused for a moment, then said, “This is a good way of conducting strategic reconnaissance. Lots of planes, lots of crew dogs, not much sleep. Frankly… I still trust this method. No offense, Doctor Masters.”
“None taken,” Jon said. “I’m sure the crews will enjoy the tropical weather, because they won’t be doing much flying. My NIRTSats’ll work just fine.”
The commander of the Strategic Air Command STRATFOR gave the young scientist an amused nod. This guy’s got confidence, Stone had to admit. He wasn’t afraid to place his trust in this high-tech crap, although none of it had ever been tested in fast-changing, demanding combat conditions. Unfortunately, it was cockiness like this that usually got such operations in big trouble.
“What exactly is the plan for these recon flights?” Elliott asked.
“Simple,” Stone replied. “We’re going to do the southern Philippines first; the Chinese defenses are weaker. RC-135 no less than one hundred miles off the coast, well within radar range but nothing too provocative — I got that word loud and clear from JCS. AWACS close enough to monitor the Philippine coast and all our aircraft. Two hundred miles east, we put the EC-135. Between the AWACS and the carriers, we put a Navy E-2 Hawkeye radar plane to control escort fighters coming from the carriers. The Navy will put up tankers to service their fighters after takeoff; we’ll have a KC-10 nearby to service all aircraft involved in the recon operation.”
“How many fighter escorts will you have up?”
“Not enough,” Stone replied grimly. “JCS asked for eight per aircraft; we’re only getting two. Apparently the White House thought eight fighters per looked too much like an invasion force.”
“So if there’s any trouble…” Elliott said.
“We run like hell,” Stone answered. “The fighters cover the withdrawal; they don’t engage. But we’re not expecting any trouble. We’ll be far enough offshore that we won’t seem like a threat. The Chinese should lay off.”
The sight across the road from the south apron commanded instant attention; it was a huge black B-52, with a tall, pointed tail, glistening polished steel skin, and racks of bombs hanging from hardpoints under each wing. Masters asked, “What’s that? Some sort of memorial?”
“The Arc Light Memorial,” Colonel Fusco replied. “Dedicated to the men who flew the heavy bombing missions over Vietnam. That was one of the B-52s that made the last bomb run over North Vietnam in 1972 — ‘Old 100,’ the one-hundredth B-52, built in 1955. We keep her in tiptop shape — in fact, it’s still considered an operational aircraft. The memorial was dedicated on the first anniversary of the return of the POWs from Vietnam.”
“I’ve crawled all over a B-2,” Masters said, “and I know the avionics system on the Space Shuttle like the back of my hand, but you know, I’ve never seen a B-52 this close before. Weird, huh? That thing is just plain huge.”
The other men nodded. It was a war machine with which they all had had very personal experiences. For all of them who flew it, they recalled times when the B-52, seemingly all at once, had tried to kill them and had saved them — such was the nature of that black monster. It was a killing machine that demanded one hundred percent from every man who touched it. Masters stared at the plane and commented on its size, but it had not taken any part of him yet — these two entities, the young scientist and the metallic black monster, were probably born about the same time. For the others, it had affected their lives forever. The group fell silent as Fusco turned around and headed back to the Sixty-fifth Strategic Squadron building.
On the way back, Stone’s aide, Krieg, turned to Elliott and asked, “Did you fly Arc Light, sir?”
“Two years,” Elliott replied. “Sixty-one sorties. Took an SA-2 missile in the shorts and bailed out over the South China Sea in 1968. I might’ve even flown Old 100 a few times. But I wouldn’t know. I never really saw the machines, you see. Instead, I saw the men — wondering whether the machine was going to let them live… or die. God, this brings back memories.” None of them pleasant, Elliott added to himself. In his opinion, they had had the power to end the Vietnam War five years earlier. By conducting heavy bombing and harbor-mining missions in 1972, they had forced an end to the war, but by then it was too late. The American people had had enough of it, and “Vietnamization” and “withdrawal with honor” — and, ultimately, defeat — were preferable to nightly news reports of mounting casualties.
There was something to be learned here, Elliott thought, and after a few sobering minutes thinking about the men he knew that had died in the Vietnam War, he was glad Fusco had brought them to the Arc Light Memorial before this new Philippine operation started. America had devastating air power back then, Elliott thought — just as now. They controlled the skies over North Vietnam, they controlled the harbors, they neutralized the NVA Air Force and ultimately defeated the dense antiaircraft defenses — but they still lost the war. They lost the Vietnam War because the decision to employ America’s massive air forces was delayed and canceled and “committeed” and “staffed” to death.