Thunder directed them along a series of short navigation legs leading to their IP. “Arm ’em up,” he told Jack, who toggled the last switch that activated his weapons-delivery system, glad for the reminder. He’d been concentrating on the MiGs and had forgotten to throw the Master Arm switch and so wouldn’t have been able to pickle off his bomb load.
“IP one minute,” Thunder announced.
“IP in sight,” Jack replied over the radio. “Sooner, split now.” The two aircraft broke onto separate headings in order to strike the target from different directions. Sooner would hit the target exactly twenty seconds after him, gaining the separation in time he needed to miss the debris kicked up by Jack’s bombs. Jack stroked the afterburners, pushing the Phantom as fast as it could go that low to the ground. Until they shed the drag created by their six Mark-82 Snakeyes, their maximum speed was 540 knots and their rate of fuel consumption was enormous.
“Tallyho,” he shouted as the storage dump that was their target surged into his left forward quarter panel on the windscreen, just where it was supposed to be. He jerked the nose of the bird skyward into a pop maneuver, rolling and bringing the nose back onto the target before they climbed too high. His thumb hovered on the pickle button as the altimeter unwound and the pipper on his target ring walked to the target. As he flicked the button, a shadow flashed across the top of their canopies. “What the hell… ” Jack yelled, pulling off the target and jinking to the left.
“A SAM,” Thunder said, his voice remarkably calm. “Sooner in sight; come left and he’ll cross in front of you.” A hard wrench to the left brought them onto a southerly heading, and Sooner skidded his jet across and above them, falling into place two thousand feet abeam Jack for their egress. A series of secondary explosions from the storage dump marked the two fighters’ exit, but they did not notice. Their CAP was nowhere in sight. What was going on? Something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Fish, eject! eject!” a voice crackled over Guard, the radio channel reserved for distress calls.
“Goddamn. C.J.’s wingman,” Jack said.
“Bandits, eight o’clock, on us,” Sooner shouted over the UHF radio. Before Jack could react a stick of smoke reached up and enveloped the leading enemy aircraft in a fireball. The second bandit broke off, presenting the plan-form of a MiG-23 as it turned away from them. The attacking MiG had been shot down by one of the PSI’s SA-6 missiles… The problem of sorting out friendly and enemy aircraft for the ground air-defense systems had worked to Jack’s advantage. This time…
As they coasted out, heading south for Ras Assanya, Thunder spotted two Phantoms from their cell. Jack joined them up and called for a fuel check. All four were low on fuel. He climbed the flight to eighteen thousand feet, conserving fuel as much as possible. Fifteen minutes later the flight touched down, forty-nine minutes after taking off…
When they arrived for their debriefing at the COIC, C.J. was waiting for them, already finished with his debrief. White streaks of dried sweat etched his flight suit. His face was haggard with fatigue. He walked with them to their debrief, asking if they knew about any losses. “I heard someone yell for Fish to eject, that’s all,” Jack told him.
C.J. nodded. “Yeah, I heard that call. I think someone behind us bought it too. They were waiting with everything, including the goddamn kitchen sink. We still managed to shut the SAMs down, but MiGs were all over the place. I didn’t see any friendly CAP at all. I can’t handle both SAMs and MiGs… ”
“We ran into the same thing,” Jack said. “We did see four bandits on ingress but they didn’t see us. I mean, we were down in the weeds. A SAM almost speared us just as I pickled and we got jumped by two MiGs outbound. One of their own SAMS assholed the lead son of a bitch. The other MiG beat feet, lost interest I guess.”
C.J. sat with them through their debrief before they went into Ops, where they found Waters, his face gaunt and lined. Motioning to them, he sat down, still staring straight ahead. “Tom Gomez is missing. What went wrong?”
“Oh God,” from Jack.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” C.J. exploded, “there was no CAP!” He started walking away, then stopped abruptly. “Excuse me, sir. Give me a minute… I didn’t want Colonel Gomez to fly with the tail-end flight. It’s too dangerous back there and he knew it.” The major’s eyes were fixed on the floor.
“The UAC were fragged for a CAP,” Waters seethed. “Where the hell were they? Why didn’t Tom abort the mission?” A feeling of failure sickened him and he silently swore at the UAC pilots for not covering his wing.
“It was okay when we went in,” C.J. said. “The shit hit the fan when we came out.”
Waters could only shake his head, anger building in his chest, then walked out of the COIC, slamming the door behind him.
“Not my idea of a war,” Thunder muttered, and headed for their trailer while Jack made his way to the mailroom. When he saw his empty box, he walked away, talking to himself. “What’s wrong with her? Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.” Back in the trailer Jack took a quick shower and flopped onto his bunk. Thunder had already sacked out. But sleep wouldn’t come for Jack as thoughts of Gomez and Gillian intermingled. Gillian… he had written her the day he arrived at Ras Assanya, giving her his new address. He had struggled to find the words to tell her how much he felt about her without seeming sappy. He was feeling miserable, sorry for himself and guilty about that… after all, it was Gomez who had just been killed. But still… Gillian was the woman he had decided to settle on, or at least hoped he could. He remembered that local fair that he and the other officers were encouraged to go to for PR purposes, mingle with the civilians, put a good face on the Yank overseas, and how the two girls from the village had propositioned Thunder and himself, and how when he gave it a pass, Thunder told him that he figured maybe Makeout Jack was finally growing up. Now he wondered if he hadn’t just been suckered… Of course, feeling as he did, it never occurred to him that his letter had been lost in the mail. During the confusion that marked the first few days at Ras Assanya his letter had been mistakenly sent to the APO in New York and not to Stonewood. There it ended up in the dead-letter file. If he had waited a few days before writing or sent a second letter, Gillian would have gotten the letter in one or two days. But he couldn’t know any of that… God, he was tired, tired, and finally escaped into a fitful sleep…
After dinner, Thunder had roused him and insisted he eat… Jack wandered into Intelligence and sat studying the reccy photos that showed the Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) from their mission. The six targets had been obliterated and the PSI’s drive against Basra blunted. But looking at the targets, he felt hollow inside.
Waters walked in on him then. “It doesn’t do any good to brood on it. We take our losses and go on from here… ”
“Maybe there were other ways we could have done it—”
“Jack, it’s self-indulgent to go blaming yourself for what happened. Your planning was right on. The results on the photos prove that. We plastered them.” The wing commander studied the BDA photos. “And we paid a price… ”
“Yes, sir. Two birds out of forty-eight. That’s over four percent attrition—”
“It’s worse than that,” Waters said, not sparing him. “Six of the birds had battle damage and two won’t fly again; we were lucky they even recovered. That puts our aircraft attrition rate at eight percent. I don’t worry about losing birds when we recover the crews. There are lots of E models floating around the National Guard and Reserve units that can be ferried in.” Waters stopped, not wanting the young lieutenant to assume all the burden for the wing’s casualties — that fell to him. He searched for words… “Jack, you based your planning on not having to deal with a MiG threat. When the MiGs showed up, the mission should have been aborted. That was Tom’s job, that’s why he was there. Intel says a MiG got him when he coasted in, before he could abort the attack. I have to accept that. What I’m trying to say is that when the threat changes, we’ve got to change — and fast. Otherwise, we lose our friends and aircraft. Jack, you have a natural talent that helps put us right at the tip of effectiveness. You lay out attacks that bring what we’ve got, our capability, to bear on the enemy. You put six birds on each target and tied it together with nearly precise timing. And because of it, we clobber the bad guys. This mission today would have been textbook perfect except for one thing — MiGs — which we saw for the first time.”