Bull Morgan checked over his eighteen-ship cell as they came off the tanker and headed into the letdown point seventy-five miles off the Dutch island of Vlieland. Six of his birds stayed at altitude to act as a combat air patrol while he led twelve down onto the deck, coasting in at two hundred feet over Vlieland. He turned south, running in over the Ijsselmeer, the old Zuider Zee the Dutch were slowly draining, stealing land from the sea. As long as his flight remained over water they could hug the deck. His flight took spacing as they separated into pairs for the attack on Soesterberg. Touching shore, he inwardly groaned as he lifted his flight to the mandatory one thousand feet the Dutch demanded when flying over land. The first whiplash of a search radar activated his radar warning gear, but he believed it was too late, that the defenders would not get the F-15 Eagles setting alert at Soesterberg airborne in time. He was three-and-a-half minutes out.
NATO had been watching Soesterberg’s reaction to the impending attack and duly noted the late warning of the inborn fighters. The 32nd had four Eagles airborne but they were in a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) over Ahlhorn, the base they thought would be attacked.
Meanwhile, Bull’s F-4s overflew the base and then headed back out the Ijsselmeer, switching to a CAP role. NATO recorded the time of the attack and calculated that the runway had been cratered and would not be operational for two hours. The American and Dutch base commander conferred on where to divert the airborne Eagles and how long they could engage the attackers… Clearly the first phase of Jack’s plan had worked.
While the fight over Soesterberg was developing, Jack led a thirty-six ship cell down the Dollart, the estuary of the Ems river. The cell broke up over the large mud flat at the mouth of the Ems onto different low-level routes leading to the six IPs they had selected surrounding Ahlhorn. Six minutes later Ahlhorn came under attack as the 45th crisscrossed over the base for eight minutes.
Jack maintained four hundred feet until they entered the low-flying area, then descended to two hundred feet as he turned over the village of Papenberg and headed for their IP. Sooner, his wingman, moved five hundred feet off his left wing as he pushed the airspeed to 480 knots. They split a radio tower that loomed in front of them, exactly as planned. Thunder and Sooner’s wizzo kept twisting in their seats, looking for any bandits that might be in the area. The only other aircraft they saw had an “SW” for Stonewood on their tails. Telltale activity started to light Thunder’s RHAW gear.
“Come on C.J.,” Jack said, “now’s the time to do your thing. Open up the door for us.”
Strobes of jamming activity streaked Thunder’s radar. “Looks like some bear is at work,” Thunder said from the rear.
“Right,” Jack said, wrenching the fighter into a sudden climb, snatching four Gs on the aircraft. “A damn Army helicopter — didn’t he read the NOTAMs?” The Notice to Airmen had warned pilots about the operation and the chopper was illegally transiting the area. Only Jack’s quick reaction saved them from a midair collision.
“Nice dodge,” Sooner radioed, and was interrupted as a lone Luftwaffe F-4 chased a 45th Phantom across their path while a third Phantom sliced down onto the German. They could see the “SW” on the last F-4’s tail. “There goes one sour Kraut,” Sooner intoned over the radio about the developing sandwich.
He got no laugh, especially from Jack, who warned, “IP now,” and jerked his bird onto a new heading while Sooner moved twenty degrees off Jack’s heading, the two aircraft separating for the run onto Ahlhorn.
Two miles out, Jack pulled his nose up, rolling, and pulling back to the ground as he came down the chute, flying the wire down to bomb release. Meanwhile Thunder used their altitude to sweep the area visually, and sucked in his breath when he saw what looked like twenty F-4s converging on them from different headings. Unless everyone’s timing was right, there would be a midair collision over Ahlhorn…
Jack pulled off his bomb run and exited over two F-4s that were running in on the target. On the ground, Group Commander Childs stood with the German commandant from TLP watching the attack. “An impressive show,” the German colonel said.
Jack’s flight of four joined up as they fell into a loose box formation and climbed to five hundred feet, coasting out eight minutes after coming off the target. They climbed lazily to twenty-four thousand feet looking for F-15s or F-4s out of Jever. His flight rendezvoused with a tanker and entered a race-track pattern, waiting for other members of their cell to join up. When eighteen birds were accounted for, they fell into trail behind the KC-135 and headed across the North Sea to Stonewood. As they did, Thunder monitored the radios, listening as the last half of their cell joined up on the second tanker. “All accounted for,” he told Jack when the last two Wild Weasels checked in on the tanker.
Waters found Jack hovering over Bill Carroll, who was peering into the screen on his computer, calculating the various probabilities that would determine the success of the mission. Carroll kept pounding numbers into the computer as he scanned the debriefs from the crews and the reports from the NATO ground observers.
Carroll shook his head. “I’ll have to run it all again, but it looks like we would of lost three birds on this attack. That’s a four point two percent attrition rate. Jever was too tough a target and they got too many birds launched.”
Jack groaned. Such an attrition rate meant that after seventeen maximum-effort missions like the one they had just completed, the wing would have lost half its aircraft.
The Ahlhorn raid had been a bloodbath for the 45th.
Forewarned is forearmed, went the conventional wisdom. But this was the Air Force.
General Blevins’ secretary did not like the position she was in — between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The general was going to reprimand her either for interrupting him after announcing he did not want to be disturbed, even though he was alone in his office, or for not immediately showing the man in. She made two decisions and picked up the phone. “Excuse me, General” — she deliberately clipped her words, using her British accent to full effect — “there is a gentleman here who wishes to see you.” She smiled at the nondescript British civilian in front of her.
“Damn it, can’t you people follow directions?”
“I take it then, General, that I’m to tell the gentleman from MI-5 to come back at your convenience. Good-bye, General.” She picked up her handbag and left.
“What’s got into that twit now?” Blevins mumbled as he hurried to catch the visitor from British counter-intelligence before his secretary sent him away. “Ah, please come in,” he said, affecting what he hoped was his best Bostonian accent.
The man followed Blevins into his office, closing the door behind him. He handed Blevins his ID and scanned the office, deciding that it was probably bugged, the Americans were so careless…
Blevins settled into his chair and smiled. “Not to worry. My offices are swept weekly for bugs.”
“Sir Louis Nugent asked me to speak to you—”
“Ah, yes, the chief of your section.”
“Right… well, to come to the point, we have penetrated something of a spy net, IRA-based mostly. However, there are some interesting connections with Libya, and through them, the Soviets. We are not going to roll them up until we are certain of the extent of their penetration.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” Blevins picked it up, “they have penetrated into my area. Well, I’m not surprised. I do have some, shall we say, interesting personal problems that have been forced upon me.” The general knew how to play the old CYA, cover your ass, game.