The Warbirds (30 page)

The two colonels looked at each other and left.

“What a surprise,” Gomez said as they walked down the hall.

“That Jack read a book?” Waters smiled.

“No. Well, he’s changed. Or at least seems to have…I’m worried, though. That mission, too damn many things can go wrong. Think our crews can hack it? We’ll be in deep
kimshi
with Sundown if we lose another bird.”

Waters only nodded, and Gomez changed the subject. “Any more feedback from the Puzzle Palace or Third Air Force about the fizzle on Jack and Thunder’s court-martial?”

“Only that they lucked out, and got a blivet from Sundown. My guess is that that’s part of Jack’s newfound religion…” And added to himself that Blevins, a canny in-fighter, wasn’t likely to let it go at that…

Chief Pullman took a quick survey of wing headquarters that afternoon, sauntered into the command post and cornered the on-duty controller.

“What combat status we reporting today?”

“A one, Chief. No problems except for night sorties. Not enough of them. The Old Man’s got a waiver and we’re reporting that in the remarks section.”

Satisfied at last that no surprises were waiting for his colonel, Pullman left the command post and headed for the NCO club, where he found the bar nearly deserted. The place didn’t fill up at quitting time as it used to, the bartender told him. Still, fifteen minutes later Chief George Gonzaga, Maintenance’s first shirt, sat down next to Pullman at the bar and ordered a beer. “Didn’t know your stomach let you drink, Mort,” he said.

“It seems to be cooperating these days. How’s things down in the trenches, George?”

“Busy. We’re launching more sorties than ever. Don’t know how much longer the birds can take it.”

“Getting behind on scheduled maintenance then, right?” Pullman asked.

“Nah, right on schedule.”

“Then behind on meeting your scheduled flying time?”

“Nah, we’re actually ahead of the time line and might have to request additional flying time.”

“The birds are starting to break more?”

“Not a bit.”

Another chief master sergeant entered the bar that was hard to ignore. Chief Curtis Hartley stood slightly over six and a half feet tall and was built like a weight lifter. Pullman motioned for him to join them. “How’s the Security Police business?”

Hartley grunted. “Not good. The Old Man is using my sweet black ass for target practice these days.”

“Gawd, it’s big enough. Hard to miss,” Gonzaga told him.

“Colonel Waters has got us training like mad; perimeter defense, intruder exercises. You name it.”

“Your troops can’t take the strain?” Pullman asked.

“Naw, they love it. Especially when they hear about Waters getting on my case.” The three sergeants spent the next three hours complaining happily to each other about how rotten things were.

All activity in the command post stopped. The men sat behind their telephones and radios and waited. The board plotters had finished marking up the birds as they reported in on status. Seventy-one aircraft stood ready to launch on the Ahlhorn raid. Only one plane had not checked in on status: 512.

“I can’t believe that,” Leason snapped, picking up the phone and jabbing the button for Maintenance Control. “Get 512 on status or start building a scaffold.” Ten minutes later Leason’s phone rang. The DM listened and hung up, then leaned back in his chair and grinned at Waters. “The damned battery failed when they put power to the aircraft. No big deal replacing the battery but you have to pull the backseat to get at it. Normally about a
two-hour job. The crew chief turned into a madman, dove into the pit head-first without removing the seat, got twisted around somehow and got the battery out and a new one in. Not by the book, but it’s done. They had to pull the chief out by his feet.”

Waters nodded. “Make sure your troops know they did a good job. I don’t recall ever hearing of a wing getting all its birds up at once.”

The digital master clock flashed 1305 and the first wail of cranking jet engines could be heard. Waters took a deep breath and tried to relax as his wing headed for the North Sea.

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.

“Not quite, sir. One of the ring’s agents has recruited a sixteen-year-old Irish girl to establish a liaison with an American colonel stationed at Headquarters USAFE in Ramstein, Germany. Apparently his duties bring him here quite often.” The man snapped open his briefcase and laid a stack of glossy black-and-white photos on Blevins’ desk. “We did not take these; they did.” The photos chronicled the development of a love affair, the last four prints leaving no doubt about the intimacy of the affair. “Very professional, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes…well, this colonel has been passing classified information to the girl?”

“No. Not yet. We want to leave the girl in place and watch her. However, we want the colonel out of the way. He is in charge of the Inspector General’s Operational Readiness Inspection team, the ORI, I believe you call it, and is really quite small cheese.” The agent did not tell Blevins that MI-5 wanted to feed misinformation through the girl to the Soviets, and for that they needed the girl’s talents to be directed elsewhere. “Really,” the agent concluded, “at this point the affair is quite harmless, other than the girl’s young age, of course.”

“Of course, we shall discipline the colonel and end the affair,” Blevins said.

The agent gave an inward sigh. “Not discipline, that would be unwise. We simply want you to use your offices to tell the colonel to end the affair. If the colonel is, as you say, disciplined, then it will be obvious that we are onto the girl. This must be done discreetly, appear altogether natural.”

“Certainly, of course. We will be glad to cooperate with Her Majesty’s government.”

The agent then handed the general a card with the colonel’s name; then, without shaking hands or saluting, left the office.

The plan did not immediately jell for Blevins. But a chance remark the next day that the 45th was due for an Operational Readiness Inspection set his mental processes to grinding…He told his new secretary to book him a
seat on the next plane to Ramstein, preferably that day. He was
finally
going to teach Waters that his way of running the Air Force was the only way. And, he calculated, do the Air Force a favor in the process. Which, of course, had always been his mission. It was just that some idiots and malcontents didn’t understand…