Despite the monotony and thankless ness of their job, they were lucky.
Every thirty-six hours they would be able to walk into their homes and be greeted by wife and kids.
Martain thought about the strange lives the transport pilots led. They would walk out the front door and go in to work just like any other day.
Mission briefings, preflight checks and normal prep, just as always.
Lift off from a real airbase talking to real air controllers and dodging normal civilian flight patterns. The long, tedious transatlantic flight would be no different from any other flight at any other time. Only when the transport swung lazily toward the northeast over Saudi Arabia did the mission profile change. That was where the insanity began. The turn, no different from any other flight maneuver, was a signal to the transport crews that they were heading into danger.
No doubt they felt the same buildup of tension that he felt before going into combat. The mind begins to focus. Images begin to sharpen.
Pulse rates slowly climb as the body prepares itself for sudden action and reaction. Though the transport pilots faced only the potential of combat, it made no difference to the mind or the body. Danger is danger, and the potential of mutilation or death elicits the same response from everyone.
The lumbering transports flew along invisible air corridors that changed daily to keep the Soviets from planning raids on them. The pilots strove to maintain their aircraft within these established corridors, which not only acted as a means of controlling traffic going into and out of Bandar Abbas, but also represented the only place in the sky where the transports were safe from friendly antiaircraft fire.
As they flew closer to Iran, people on ships prowling the Persian Gulf and combat air patrols flying between the air corridors had greater freedom to engage unidentified aircraft. The sky was divided up into areas other than air corridors.
There were missile-free zones where any aircraft that was not positively identified by friendly forces could be engaged by heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles, missiles that could not read nation symbols on aircraft mistaken for enemy and break off the attack at the last minute.
There were positive-identification zones where the pilot had to have visual ID of his target before engaging. The United States could not afford to allow its pilots the freedom to go about gunning down anything that flew and that didn't answer special electronic interrogation signals called IFF-identify, friend or foe. The skies over the Persian Gulf were still crowded with civilian air traffic despite a thirty-day-old war and the declaration that the Gulf was a war zone. There were many civilians who insisted on exercising their right to fly over international waters.
Once on the ground at Bandar Abbas, the transport pilots entered an alien world. It was a world of substandard living conditions where Americans had to make extraordinary efforts simply to maintain life.
The seemingly utter chaos, destruction and clutter were in sharp contrast to the neat, clean airfields at home, with their grass bordered runways, well-painted buildings and efficient organization.
Here air raids left craters and scars, and hasty offloading operations resulted in mountains of discarded packing and blocking materials along the runways. The shuffling of aircraft, Army and Air Force, combat and transport, added to the confusion. Without exception, the transport pilots dreaded most the wait on the ground.
After along flight, they were thrust into a dangerous and confused environment over which they had no control. They eagerly sought to make their stay in Iran as short as possible. Through careful control, wellplanned and — executed defense of the air corridors, and the extreme range that Soviet pilots had to travel to get at them, losses to the transports had been "minimal and acceptable." This, however, was a concept that was incomprehensible to a four-year-old child who was told that her daddy wouldn't be coming home anymore.
For a moment Martain was overcome by a desire to go home. In that instant nothing mattered to him more than to see his wife and daughter.
He wished there were some way he could go back with one of the transports for a day, a half day, an hour. All he wanted to do was hold his wife in his arms, feel her arms around his neck, run his hands down her sides and embrace her. Martain dreamed of looking into the round smiling eyes of his young daughter as he lifted her. The smell of baby shampoo in her hair and the ceaseless sweet babble of her stories without beginnings or ends evoked tears as the soft images passed through his mind.
Martain stood and began to walk in an effort to compose himself. He would not be going home today. Nor tomorrow or the next day. Instead he would fly two or three missions, the same as he had done yesterday and the day before. He would continue to fly until the conflict had been resolved or he could no longer fly. Already the squadron had lost three of its aircraft and two crews. One crew had died with its plane as it disintegrated after being hit by a Soviet air-to-air missile. The crew of a second aircraft had ejected safely but had landed in the no man-land between the advancing
Soviet and U.S. forces four days prior. Attempts to recover the crew had been unsuccessful. If the Iranians didn't take them the desert would.
Omaha Flight had, to date, been successful in surviving and in carrying the war to the Russians. Martain had accounted for three confirmed kills, and his wingman had one to his credit. Martain's first kill had been so simple that he had difficulty accepting the fact that he had actually shot down another fighter. All he had done was listen to the AWACS as it vectored him into a position where his wizzo picked up the target. When the wizzo had good track on the target and the target did not respond to the IFF interrogation, Martain fired from a range of fifteen miles. The blip that had represented a multimillion-ruble jet fighter simply disappeared from his plane's radarscope and that of the AWACS. His second combat, a real knife fight during which he used his guns, was more like what Martain had expected. High-speed maneuvers with turns that pressed his body into his seat as the invisible vise known as Gs tore at his frame were countered and followed by the Soviet fighter he pursued. One minute Martain was the hunter, the next the hunted as the two opponents hurled themselves at each other. He had enjoyed that victory. He had worked for it and could see the shattered remains of the MIG plummet toward earth in a ball of fire.
His thoughts were interrupted by. the sound of a sergeant running from tent to tent waking the squadron's air crews. Martain looked at his watch. It was still too early for normal operations. Something was up. He was about to turn when the sound of a C-5A transport rumbling down the runway caught his attention. Another transport was headed home, without him.
The buildup of Soviet air activity had been slow and near normal that morning. Transports on routine flights deep behind the lead elements of the advancing Soviet forces lumbered to and fro. Activity over Iraq started to build earlier than normal and began to appear as if it had a purpose for a change. Soviet recon flights, sent aloft to get a picture of the situation at first light, lifted off airfields around Tehran and were detected by the AWACS' radar and tracked by its computers. Operators at their stations watched and reported but were not concerned. Another day of war was beginning.
With a suddenness that bewildered the operations officer aboard the AWACS, the entire situation changed. The clear screens of the operators degenerated into a cluster of static and sparkling clutter.
Powerful electronic jamming from what had been thought to be transports en route to forward bases began to blanket the AWACS' radar frequencies. A war waged by computers and electronic devices began as the AWACS' computer flipped its radar frequencies in milliseconds in order to escape jamming, and the Soviet electronic-warfare aircraft beamed barrage after barrage of static toward the AWACS in an effort to degrade or jam its radar. For brief seconds the operators were able to see clearly before the Soviet radar and computers found the AWACS' new radar frequency and jammed it.