Three miles from the landing zone the lead Osprey began to slow. The flaps on its wings deployed as they approached the LZ, and with the airspeed gently dropping, the long engines and their massive rotors began to rotate. The aircraft seemed to swing out as if they were on a trapeze, descending smartly to the ground.
The landing area was a hard-packed dirt road, and there was only room for one of the aircraft at a time. The second Osprey banked a short distance to the north, revolving slowly around a hilltop. Within a minute and a half the Marines on Osprey One were off; it rose and its companion came in. Ninety seconds after touching down, the second aircraft pulled up, having disembarked its platoon.
Still escorting the rotobirds, Turk swung back in the direction of the base. His sensors scanned the air at long range to make sure the enemy UAVs hadn’t chosen this moment to appear. The Ospreys had a short run back, but they were extremely vulnerable to enemy aircraft, with no weapons to defend themselves.
Cowboy remained over the LZ. He made radio contact with Captain Thomas and the CCTs — combat controllers — with each platoon.
While the Corps had its own personnel trained to act as ground controllers, they sometimes “borrowed” similarly trained men from different services. In this case they had two of the profession’s finest: Air Force special ops pararescuers, both of whom had seen action in Libya just a few months before, working clandestinely with the rebels there.
The Air Force combat controllers were descendants of the World War II pathfinders, paratroopers who’d dropped into Europe ahead of D-day. As the war evolved, the pathfinders had called in air strikes, helping the allies move quickly across Europe. Given jeeps and allowed to ride with the tanks in Patton’s spearhead, the small band of sky-dropping daredevils had revolutionized warfare.
In the contemporary military, their Air Force descendants trudged through the mud and gravel alongside troops from every service, from “ordinary” grunts to Tier One SEALs. Able to do anything from locating the landing zone for a parachute drop to creating an airfield in the middle of a jungle, their job today was to direct air strikes if things got hairy. They’d spent a month working with the MEU on the other side of the island. Cowboy had worked with both; they recognized his voice as well as his call sign, and gave him a little bit of ribbing along with their sitrep.
It was a sign that things were going well, Turk thought — they didn’t fool around when the situation was tight.
With the Ospreys safely home, Turk returned, taking a high track above and slightly behind the figure eight Cowboy was cutting in the area. He stayed at 18,000 feet — high enough to assist in a ground attack if necessary, while still at an altitude he thought sufficient to deal with the UAVs.
Both F-35s carried two AMRAAM air-to-air missiles in one of their bays, along with a pair of Sidewinder infrared heat-seekers on their wings. Because of the way the aircraft was designed, the wingtips of the F-35B were bare; the Sidewinders were mounted on the last of three hard points on each wing. That left the other four external points and one internal bay for a mix of Redeye cluster bombs and “small” SBD-II bombs. The SBDs were fitted four to a rack, giving the two aircraft considerable versatility if called on for ground support.
Twenty minutes of flying loops and crazy eights left Turk bored, and he found himself half wishing the UAVs would appear. He knew it was wrong — bad karma and all that — but still, he was ready.
Finally, the lead segment of rebels left the jungle and headed for the road north, aiming directly at the ambush point Captain Thomas had plotted. But only a few minutes passed before they left the road again, splitting into two columns along the western side and moving north. The move complicated things for the Marines, but they quickly adjusted, setting up an ambush about a mile deeper in the jungle. That was a good thing for the F-35s — it gave them a little more room to maneuver without going over the border. While Indonesia was powerless to stop them, it had radars in the area able to detect the F-35s when they were carrying weapons under their wings, and any transgression of the border would bring protests at the UN.
On the ground, time was moving quickly; the Marines were hustling through the jungle as quickly as they could, scrambling to make sure they were in place. In the air, time dragged. Turk rehearsed a dozen scenarios in his head, then rerehearsed them.
“They’re saying zero-five from contact,” Cowboy told Turk after the Marine controller with West Force checked in.
“Roger, I heard.”
“I have nothing on long-range scan.”
“Copy,” said Turk.
“They engage the lead elements, and then we get called in if they have enough of a target for us,” said Cowboy, who was simply repeating the basic briefing. Turk realized he was bored, too. “We may not have a target in the early stages.”
“Roger. Got it.”
“There’s a hill about two miles south of the ambush point, overlooking the road,” added Cowboy. “I’m thinking that if the rebels retreat, they may try to take a stand there. We may end up hitting that position.”
“Copy.”
As Turk began scanning for the position, West Force radioed that they had made contact and taken the rebels under fire. Now came the hardest part of the mission for the pilots: waiting for something to happen, while knowing that the guys on the ground were taking fire.
The battle on the ground — in a jungle, at night, in terrain unfamiliar to both sides — was a confusing mélange of explosions, bullet rounds, and blind cursing. The Malaysians and Americans had the advantage of night vision and superior communications; the rebels had numbers. Surprise was a factor at first, and greatly aided the American force. Their initial volleys of fire drove the rebels back in confusion. But the thick jungle made it difficult to see even with the night gear, and before the allied force could take real advantage, the rebels rallied. The two columns retreated and then consolidated. Better trained or at least better disciplined than the force the day before, the rebels managed to organize a line of defense along a stream that ran down the center of a shallow rift. Lying on the high side of the ground, they used machine guns to stop the Malaysian and Marine squads pursuing them.
But that just gave Cowboy and Turk something to do. With a clear line marking where the enemy was, Basher One and Two went to work.
In the not too distant past, precision ground support meant getting very close and personal to the target — the lower, the better. That subjected the airman to a fair degree of danger from the ground. Most enemy soldiers didn’t particularly like being bombed, and could be expected to fire whatever they had at their attackers. Even a rifle could potentially bring down an airplane; there were, in fact, stories of American soldiers in the Pacific taking down Japanese airplanes with their M-1s by striking the pilot.
Getting close to the enemy still worked well in certain situations and with certain weapons, but in this case it was unnecessary. The small-diameter smart bombs the F-35s were using allowed the pilots to hit targets beyond sixty nautical miles — making the word “close” in close-air support a misnomer. With a multimode sensor — the bomb could be directed to its target by radar, infrared, and laser as well as GPS and an inertial guidance system — the weapon was as versatile as it was accurate.
Officially, the bombs had a margin of error that allowed them to strike within about a four meter radius of any given target. Unofficially, the margin of error was much less than that, depending on the guidance mode.
Just inside five miles from the target area, Basher One unleashed four bombs, all guided by GPS locations that he had double-checked with the friendlies on the ground. The bombs hit in a staggered line on the rebel side of the creek, devastating the middle of their position and eliminating both machine guns.