The Warbirds (6 page)

Shaw wanted to give his crews more to fight with, but he had been denied permission by higher headquarters to upload the alert birds with the most effective air-to-air ordnance he had. Hell, he thought, this is what I get paid for. AIM-7 radar missiles could be uploaded, but that was a time-consuming process. If missile rails were already on the planes, AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles could be uploaded much quicker. “Do the birds have missile rails on them?” Shaw asked his deputy for Maintenance.

A sober look was on the DM’s face. “We’re not allowed to upload the alert birds.”

“Do the alert birds have missile rails on them?” he repeated, anger in his voice.

“Yes, sir,” the DM admitted, not happy with what was coming next.

Shaw made his decision. “OK, get the missiles on the way. Upload the AIM-9s first. Hurry.”

“But we haven’t practiced emergency missile loading,” the DM protested. “It’ll take about an hour to break the missiles out of the dump, form a convoy, and move them to the alert pad. Then it’s another fifteen minutes to upload the AIM-9s.”

“Then do it faster,” Shaw warned, his anger rising.
Christ, he had directed Maintenance to start training on emergency missile uploads months ago.

The wing commander mashed the transmit button on the telephone: “Stinger One-One and One-Two, AIM-9s are on the way, followed by AIM-7s. If you are scrambled before the missiles are loaded, go without them.”

“Control, Stinger One-Two,” Jack answered. “I’ve been running some numbers in my head. With two wing tanks, we’ve got about two hours and twenty minutes flying time to play with. That gives us a cruising radius of maybe six hundred nautical miles. A tanker for inflight refueling would be helpful if they send us out over the Mediterranean for escort.”

His adrenaline was flowing. For the first time in months he felt that maybe all the trivia, paperwork and “square filling” they endured might be worth it. A slight smile creased the corners of his mouth as he thought about the party and “punishment” that had gotten him onto alert.

Shaw knew he should have thought of inflight refueling, but hadn’t. He was impressed with Locke’s quick thinking. He wondered if he could get the Strategic Air Command tanker unit on his base to respond quickly enough and get one of their two KC-135s airborne. They’d probably dig in their heels and claim they had no requirement to support the alert birds—that nothing was on the schedule. Still, he’d try. “I’ll see if I can pry them loose,” he told Jack. “You know how SAC is.”

16 July: 1430 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1430 hours, over the Sahara

“Grain King Zero-Three, Tripoli Center.”

“Go ahead, Tripoli. This is Grain King,” Toni answered, handling the radios on the C-130 while the navigator and loadmaster racked out. She had ordered them to get some rest; both were well into their twelfth hour of crew duty. The radio call woke Belfort from his troubled nap in the navigator’s seat. Tripoli Center read out a new flight clearance for the C-130 while Toni and Dave copied it down.

“Copy all, Tripoli.” Toni acknowledged the new clearance automatically. “Dave, what’s that going to do to us?”

Belfort was bent over his work table, studying the chart and scratching new numbers into his log. “They’ve given us a new route with a dogleg going due north instead of letting us go direct to Alexandria South. That will take us right into northeastern Libya. Hold on a minute.” The navigator worked quickly. “The dogleg will add almost thirteen minutes to our en route time and cut our fuel reserve to twenty-five minutes.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked.

“Probably to get us on an established airway to enter Egyptian airspace. That’s pretty routine. But I’d like to get Sid on the ground and into a hospital ASAP.”

Toni looked worried. “McCray, how’s Captain Luna doing?”

“No change,” the loadmaster replied. “He’s conscious, the bleeding has stopped. He seems OK.”

She made her decision. “Thirteen more minutes shouldn’t make too much difference. We’ll go with the clearance. Couldn’t get it changed to go direct anyway if they want us on an airway. Hell, we have to do a lot of things we don’t want to do on these missions. Like airlifting food into every little village like the one where they clobbered Sid. They ought to be using trucks to deliver this stuff, like in Ethiopia, not C-130s.”

“Lieutenant, there’s no roads in the southern Sahara that can handle heavy trucks,” McCray told her, “and by delivering the food we at least can keep it from getting stolen. Getting ripped off was our biggest problem in the cargo sheds at Niamey.”

The mission they were on was part of Grain King III, the third year that the U.S. government had mounted the relief program bringing food to the starving inhabitants of the southern Sahara. Grain King I had not started as a pure airlift operation but had turned into one after its first faltering steps. It had started out as a massive but straightforward logistics problem. The Air Force brought food and relief supplies into central staging points and delivered them to the local authorities for distribution to outlying areas by trucks. Every pound of grain was duly
accounted for and the data fed into the appropriate computer. Grain King I was judged to be a resounding success.

Nevertheless, some disturbing reports were still coming out of the area about widespread and growing starvation. A meeting of the UN General Assembly had resounded with bitter accusations from Third World ambassadors about the United States propaganda efforts being greater than its attempts at food relief. Economic imperialism and genocide had been openly mentioned. The U.S. ambassador had been forewarned and was prepared with a commanding battery of charts and statistics outlining the size of the food deliveries under Grain King I, comparing them to the size of the annual grain production in each of the stricken countries.

The figures were imposing and should have carried the day. But the ambassador from Mali had produced a series of photographs showing potbellied, starving children, mothers nursing emaciated babies, and gaunt, hollow-eyed old people with death as their companion. With each photo, the ambassador had stated the date and location where each had been taken. All were in the area of Grain King operations and less than two weeks old. “So much for Operation Grain King. My people continue to die.”

The commander of MAC (Military Airlift Command) who had been responsible for the first Grain King, General Lawrence Cunningham, was rumored to have once kept a pet piranha until he discovered that it was too even tempered and not aggressive enough. So he ate the fish. Cunningham had never been content as the commander of MAC (“Trash hauling is not my bag”) and his disposition hadn’t improved after getting a call over the Pentagon’s hot line. The subject had been Grain King and the UN. For once, Cunningham did the listening. His rage, not to mention vocabulary, after that phone call was well remembered at MAC. Four colonels had been relieved from duty and ordered to be off base by sundown because they had produced the same figures as shown at the UN. What had gone wrong?

The answer came from a young major running the Airlift Command Element at Ouagadougou, the capital of
Burkina Faso. Corruption had been responsible for diverting the food supplies into the hands of local merchants once the grain had been transloaded onto trucks for final delivery. The kickbacks had been enormous. Over eighty percent of the food had been shipped south into prosperous areas that could afford to buy it.

Cunningham was ordered to restart Grain King and he gave a decisive order: airlift it all down to the local level, to the people who were starving. That directive became the single-minded marching order for Grain King and had not changed after Cunningham left MAC for command of the Air Force. The basic tenet of Grain King had been established and chiseled in stone: airlift it and get it to the people.
All of it
…

Belfort broke the silence on the flight deck, “Time to dogleg north.”

“Rog’,” the copilot responded as she turned the C-130 onto a northerly heading—right into the heart of eastern Libya. She contacted Tripoli Center…

16 July: 1458 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1058 hours, Washington, D.C.

Colonel Eugene Blevins’ shirt was damp with sweat. General Cunningham had been sitting in the Watch Center’s battle cab for over five minutes and hadn’t said a word. He was staring directly at Blevins, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth.

“Sir,” Blevins said, “we have just received a second Apple Wave message. Grain King’s route has been changed. It is flying north into Libyan GCI radar coverage and the Libyans have placed two fighters on runway alert.” He handed the message to the Air Force’s legendary gorilla.

Sundown Cunningham continued to stare at Blevins, not bothering to read the message. “Who the hell is sending these? Get me a
name.
” He dropped the Top Secret message to the floor.

Blevins hurried the short distance to the waiting Nesbit. “Get on the line to the reconnaissance unit that flies these missions. You heard what the general wants—
move.
”

“I haven’t got a clue what unit that is, Colonel.” The sergeant knew Cunningham was listening.

“Well, find
out
, Sergeant.”

Suppressing his smile, Nesbit assumed a worried look and placed an unnecessary call. He knew what unit to contact and whom to talk to. He enjoyed the thought of what he was doing to Blevins by stalling.

Cunningham continued to wait, chewing on his cigar. After a long pause, he barked at Blevins, “What do you recommend that I do about this Apple Wave?” Cunningham believed the hardest thing for any man to learn was how to think under pressure. The general already knew what his decision was but wanted to gauge the mental agility of his Watch Center commander.

Blevins admitted to himself that he didn’t know what do do, and worse, he didn’t know how to escape the general’s undivided scrutiny. The best he could do was stall for time. “I’m waiting for my analysts to correlate this information with an area situation report. I’m confident, sir, that they will give us a level of assurance on which to make the proper decision.” The general continued to glare at Blevins, who turned to one of the repeater consoles in an attempt to appear busy while frantically devising a way to shift the general’s attention away from himself.

Tom Gomez joined Blevins at the repeater console. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said
sotto voce
. “Cunningham wants you to make a decision. You’re in charge of the battle cab. Get some people in action before he rips us apart.”

There was desperation in Blevins’ voice. “My job is intelligence, damn it, not, not…”

In a low voice Gomez quickly outlined what Blevins should say. Blevins listened, then steeled himself for what he had to do.

He walked over to Cunningham and met the general’s direct stare. He paused and looked at the four other generals and six colonels who had crowded into the battle cab. “General, I have placed two F-4E fighters on cockpit alert at Alexandria South Air Base. I recommend you scramble them into an orbit close as possible to the C-130. Keep them in friendly airspace. Sergeant Nesbit has the details worked out.”

The cigar rolled in Cunningham’s mouth for a moment. “Not bad, Blevins.
Do it
. Relay everything we’ve got to Outpost. And tell them to get Grain King the hell out of Libya.” The general did not bother to tell the colonels what or where Outpost was; he simply expected them to get the message through and damn quick. Gomez and Nesbit knew that Outpost was an intelligence-gathering unit in northwestern Egypt near the Libyan border that operated under the guise of a radar ground control intercept site. Outpost would be able to find the C-130 on its radar and establish radio contact to relay Cunningham’s order.

“Excuse me, General,” Nesbit called from his console. “The module commander in the RC-135 sending the Apple Waves is Colonel Anthony J. Waters.” The sergeant knew Blevins had wanted to give Cunningham the name and take credit for himself.

The general remembered the name. From the depths of his memory, everything became clear.
So, that’s where you’ve been hiding. I wondered what had happened to you after that F-15 fiasco. I was sure the Air Force had lost one of its better tactics men.
Cunningham had participated in one of Waters’ Red Flag exercises and had been trounced by the complex scenario Waters had thrown at him.

The general had thoroughly enjoyed it.

16 July: 1511 hours, Greenwich Mean Time 1711 hours, Alexandria, Egypt

“Stinger One-One, scramble. Stinger One-Two, scramble.”

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Fairly and Lieutenant Jack Locke hit their start buttons simultaneously when they heard the first “scramble” from control.

Fairly acknowledged, “Roger, control. Scrambling now. Standing by for words.”

Bryant’s low voice came over the cockpit intercom. “The boss would rather die than sound bad on the radio.”

“You’ve got to look good and sound good to be a squadron commander, me lad. I want to make them eat their
hearts out at the bar tonight, so let’s try to be as good,” Locke said.

“Goddamn Air Farce!” Bryant exploded. “Here come the missile trailers now. Too damn late. We get to go to war with only a gun? Well now, look at that. There’s a crew headed for one of the tankers. I didn’t know them SAC fellows could run.”

Control came over the radio. “Stinger One-One and One-Two, you are scrambled to Point Hotel. Contact Outpost on primary frequency two six-five point eight, backup frequency two eight-three point five.”

And Fairly again answered the controller, “Roger, control. Copied all.”

“Thunder, where in all the United Arab Republic
is
Point Hotel and
who
is Outpost?” Jack asked.

“I’ll dig it out while the inertial nav system aligns,” the WSO answered. Got to keep the boy cool, he thought.

“A wonderful thing, the inertial navigation system,” Jack said. “All ready to go and here we sit while that damn little black box tries to make up its mind where it is.”

“Patience, patience,” Bryant urged, pulling his aircrew aid out of a pocket on the leg of his anti-G suit. He thumbed through the small book until he found what he wanted. “Point Hotel is over two hundred nautical miles to the west. Glad for that tanker. Outpost is a radar control post. OK, the inertial nav system is aligned. Cleared primary-sync.”