Waters twisted about in the cockpit of his F-4 to see if his entire package had taxied. A pickup truck pulled up alongside and the driver gave him a thumbs-up followed by a zero formed by his thumb and forefinger: there were no dropouts; the strike was formed. A green light flashed from the control tower and the Eagles roared down the runway in pairs, quickly lifting off and reaching for the sky, not needing to light their afterburners.
The fighters headed southeast. C.J. and his wingman split off from his flight and headed for the Russian trawler that was moving inshore trying to monitor the takeoff visually. The two Phantoms dropped down, skimming the smooth green cellophane of the Gulf. They could see figures running on deck as they bore down on the trawler. C.J. clicked his sight on and told his wizzo to lock on with his radar. “That should get their attention.” The two Phantoms stroked their afterburners, pulling up and barely clearing the spy ship, which rocked under their jet-wash. The two birds rejoined as the trawler turned back out to sea. “If we can’t touch the bastards, maybe we can scare them away,” C.J. observed.
The PSI watch team on the coast had been warned about the launch and had no difficulty counting the birds as they took off. The radio operator was encoding the launch warning when a small British commando squad attacked. The twelve men from the SAS moved with precision and speed as they annihilated the team. Each man, but one, took out his assigned target within twenty seconds. The lone survivor had escaped to the latrine under the floor-boards. The attackers methodically searched the area for the missing man until the leader motioned the unblooded member of his squad toward the latrine. The man scampered soundlessly across the open ground until he was within ten yards of it. In passable Arabic he called out a name: “Amini, come out. The fighting is done.” When nothing happened he repeated it in Farsi. Slowly the man climbed out of the muck. And a single shot took off the top of his head.
The commando leader checked the stopwatch on his wrist. “Message?” he rapped. The shake of a head told him that the PSI watch-team had not gotten off a warning message. He wiped the sweat off his blackened face. “Bloody hell,” he added in a crisp British accent, “even an unscheduled trip to the loo can’t stop us.”
Jack and Thunder sat on the beach and counted the jets as the strike force completed their launch. Since Wolf Flight was scheduled to fly that night, they were not part of the strike. They saw C.J. buzz the trawler in the distance but doubted it would do much good. “He’ll radio the Gomers,” Jack said. “At least he’ll have the count wrong.”
“He’ll be back out there tonight when we launch,” Thunder said. “I wish we could do something about him.”
Jack tried to think of a way to discourage the trawler from monitoring their takeoffs. “We need a different type of intimidation… ”
While the trawler did not get an accurate count of the launching aircraft, its crew was able to relay the exact time of launch to the PSI’s waiting air-defense command net. The MiGs were standing by and scrambled to meet the Americans. Mary Hauser was at her radar console analyzing the multiple targets appearing on her scope. Her right hand flashed over the buttons on her IFF panel. Without looking, she selected the mode that interrogated the Floggers’ IFF. “Let’s see if any of you gentlemen have your IFF’s on,” she said under her breath, hitting the interrogate button. Every target responded. Mary nodded in satisfaction and quickly counted eighteen bandits. “So, you assume your IFF is secure. Never assume anything in this business… ”
“Stormy.” Mary keyed her transmit button, calling the lead F-15. “Bandits, ten o’clock at eighty-five, angels thirty.” The short transmission by the GCI controller alerted every Eagle pilot to the inbound threat, telling them hostile aircraft were coming at them from sixty degrees to the left, eighty-five nautical miles away and were at thirty thousand feet. By only identifying the lead F-15, she hoped to confuse any enemy monitoring her radio frequency; they would have to sort out who “Stormy” was and the number of F-15s.
The F-15s turned to the left, into the Floggers. The radio crackled with commands as the F-15s used their radar sets to break out the MiGs and assign each Eagle a target. Then the PSI started communications jamming. Only the GCI site had the brute power to override the jamming, and Mary Hauser’s cool voice could be heard as she paired up targets and F-15s, rapidly calling the Eagles to new, jam-free radio frequencies. The F-15s surged away from the F-4s and met the MiGs head-on while the attack birds dropped down to the deck, still over water.
Much to Mary’s surprise the F-15s did not mix it up with the MiGs but launched their radar missiles from a front aspect and then blew on through the MiGs, zooming out of the flight. The symmetry of the engagement shattered as the MiGs dodged the missiles and scattered over the sky. The MiG pilots were startled to find no F-15s to contend with and switched their attention to the F-4s, which they had no trouble finding, their camouflage paint standing in stark contrast against the bright green of the gulf.
C.J. swore at the F-15s, angry at their poor tactics. He pushed forward the radio transmit button under his left thumb on the throttles to transmit an abort, and in his anger broke the switch off. Before he could tell Stan to transmit the message he heard Waters aborting the mission and ordering the Phantoms to jettison their loads. C.J.’s left hand moved over the weapons-selector panel, choosing what he would jettison. He punched off the F-15 type fuel tank on his centerline but kept the two valuable Standard Arm anti-radiation missiles carried on each inboard pylon, then toggled his pinky switch under his left little finger on the throttle to guns.
The voice of Stan-the-Man came over the intercom. “Bandit, left eight o’clock, coming to your nine, low. Hard left, engage.” He could have been at the bar ordering a round of drinks, for all the excitement in his voice. The Flogger was not in a position behind C.J. to launch a missile and was closing in for a gun kill with its twenty-three-millimeter cannon.
Without first looking for the bandit, C.J. wrenched his bird to the left as Stan had directed. When the MiG pilot saw the F-4’s nose turn and point directly at him, he chose to disengage, break off the attack, turned slightly to the right and accelerated ahead. But the Flogger pilot had given C.J. too much room to turn onto him. He should have pointed his Flogger directly into the Phantom. As it was, the thirty degrees he gave C.J. would cost him his life. With his Phantom still in front, at the Flogger’s eleven o’clock, C.J. now pulled his nose up, not wanting to shoot past the MiG in the opposite direction, and used the vertical to turn into the MiG. He was still on his back and pulling the nose toward the ground when the Flogger slashed into his sight ring. C.J. always flew with a “stiff sight,” reducing the amount of lead fed into the sight-picture, a mode especially suited for a close-in fight. Now he mashed the trigger for a snap shot, sending a stream of high-explosive bullets into the MiG. Over thirty rounds tore the plane apart.
But there was no momentary exultation in the kill for C.J. He immediately checked his fuel and rolled ninety degrees for a belly check, looking for bandits beneath him. He was a professional going about his business. He would celebrate later.
“Shit hot,” his wingman yelled over the radio. “I’m at your six, come off right.” C.J. turned one hundred eighty degrees to the right and rolled out, heading for Ras Assanya. His wingman fell into place on his left and slightly above him in a tactical formation. Homeward bound.
Jack and Thunder were still sitting on the beach when the first of the Phantoms started to recover. Jack glanced at his watch. “They’ve aborted the mission; something must have gone wrong.” They stood in the hot sun and counted the returning planes. The worry they both felt lessened when a returning Phantom entered the pattern and did a victory roll as it passed down the runway. “The Eagle drivers aren’t going to like that,” he said. “Looks like one of C.J.’s Weasels got a MiG.”