2
The strident tones of the Klaxon had jolted Matt and Haney into action. It was a “Smoke” and he and Haney ran for the cockpit.
“I’m up.” Haney’s voice came over the intercom, cool and collected, the moment Matt slipped into the seat and jerked his helmet into place. They were patched together by communication cords that ran from the ceiling of the bunker to their helmets. The same com cord connected them to the command post whose call sign was Dogpatch. After an engine start, they would go on internal power, unplug the cords, and establish radio contact with Dogpatch.
Matt glanced at the set of command lights mounted in the ceiling above the open blast doors. All three were red. If the bottom light had been green, he would have started engines and held in the bunker. If the middle and bottom light were green, he would have taxied for the runway and held to await a takeoff order. If all three were green, he would have launched for a holding orbit to await a coded strike message that would send him and Haney into a nuclear war. Matt thumbed his transmit button. “Dogpatch, Romeo Zero-Four. Standing by for words.” His voice was amazingly calm.
“Roger, Romeo Zero-Four,” Dogpatch answered, “continue to hold.” They could hear chatter in the background as other alert birds checked in on status.
The wing had deployed to its Colocated Operating Base at RAF Stonewood in the United Kingdom as part of a Reforger exercise the United States mounted every September. Near the end of the active phase of Reforger, the political situation in the USSR had turned into a shambles as contending factions struggled to gain control of the decaying empire. Finally, the hard-line military clique had gained control and started to make ominous moves in the forward area and reoccupied Poland. NATO had responded by increasing its state of readiness, which in turn had triggered a harsher response by the Russians. Then Matt had found himself and his back-seater, Mike Haney, sitting Victor Alert at Stonewood, ready to man a nuclear-loaded F-15E that was parked in a hardened bunker. Frantic political maneuvering had reduced tensions and the day had started out as just another routine tour of alert duty.
The bottom command light flicked to green, the order for an engine start, and Matt pulled the T handle of the Jet Fuel Starter at his right knee. Before the small starter engine could spin up, the middle command light changed to green. Now they were cleared to taxi. Matt could see the image of the Security Police truck that was parked in front of the bunker as a block to an unauthorized taxi move out of the way. “Looks like a go,” he mumbled under his breath, waiting for the engines to spin up and the inertial nav system to align.
The top command light changed to green, ordering a launch, as the command post controller transmitted a coded strike message. “All Victor aircraft, this is Dogpatch with a Zulu Yankee message …” Both Matt and Haney copied the coded message down.
“I copy a valid strike message,” Haney said, much faster than Matt in decoding the transmission.
“Roger,” Matt answered, not bothering to finish his own decode. Trusting Haney, he gunned the throttles and taxied for the runway.
Forty-five minutes later, they had reached their departure point over Denmark and were dropping down through a thick ceiling to start their low-level ingress into hostile territory. At five hundred feet, they broke out of the overcast and could see approximately five miles in front of them. “Better and better,” Matt said. He flipped open the small map booklet that traced their route and used it to double-check their position, which was also on the Tactical Situation Display. “I hold us on course, on time,” Matt said.
Haney confirmed Matt’s call with a hasty “Roger.” He was sweating and breathing hard. A bright light flashed off to their left, momentarily causing their gold-tinted visors to go opaque, saving their eyesight from the searing light of a nuclear explosion. Then their visors cleared and they could see again.
“Damn,” Matt yelled. He had been hand-flying the jet, not relying on the autopilot, and had inadvertently ballooned to seven hundred feet when his visor blanked out his vision. He slammed the F-15 back onto the deck. Two surface-to-air missiles flashed by over the canopy and exploded behind them.
“Oh shit!” Haney yelled from the pit. “Master Caution light.” They had taken battle damage.
“Fire warning light on number two,” Matt told him.
Haney started to read the emergency checklist for Engine Fire or Overheat. “IP in two minutes,” he warned Matt. Now they were running the emergency checklist, shutting down their right engine and double-checking all switches, making sure the nuclear weapon they were carrying was armed and would release. “Break right!” Haney yelled. “Bandit four o’clock. On us.”
Instinctively, Matt reefed the fighter to the right, trusting Haney’s call. He called up the air-to-air mode on his HUD and selected an AIM-9L Sidewinder missile. The plan form of a MiG-29, the Soviet equivalent of the F-16, flashed in front of him, turning away from the fight. Matt turned hard after the MiG, the G meter reading five g’s. A reassuring growl came through his headset — the seeker head on the Sidewinder was tracking. He hit the pickle button, sending the missile on its way, and wrenched his jet back to the deck, dropping below two hundred feet.
“Hard left!” Haney yelled. “Bandit …” Before Matt could react, the cockpit shook violently and a loud explosion deafened them. Smoke filled the cockpit. From memory, Haney yelled out the Smoke and Fumes checklist. Matt reached and pulled the emergency vent handle and the cockpit cleared.
“What the …” Matt gasped, surprised by the toxicity of the fumes. He hadn’t expected that. He scanned the sky for the bandit. No joy. It had been a hit-and-run attack. They had most likely been hit by a Soviet Aphid, a decent air-to-air missile.
“Keep coming left,” Haney ordered. “IP on the nose.”
Matt could see the railroad bridge that was their Initial Point. They were seven miles out from their target, a Soviet Army headquarters. Another flash from a nuclear explosion sent their visors opaque and again Matt inadvertently ballooned the jet. But this time, there was no reaction from the defenders. The detonation had been too close. The F-15 rocked from the shock wave, the needles on the G meters bouncing, registering a 3.
“Son of a bitch!” Matt yelled. “The CAS is tits up.” The Control Augmentation System that electrically adjusted inputs into the aircraft’s control surfaces had malfunctioned owing to battle damage from the last hit they had taken. Now the pilot had his hands full just flying the aircraft.
“My screens are out,” Haney shouted. The four video screens in front of the wizzo had gone blank. He jerked his map booklet out of the map case and flipped open to the target run page. “It’s gonna have to be visual with an emergency release.” The backseater could not believe how tired and thirsty he felt. Still, he kept talking, telling Matt to come right or left, when to roll out, as they bore down on their target. Streams of tracers filled the windscreen as Matt jinked back and forth. The defenders were fighting for their lives. Then Haney shouted, “Pull!”
Matt honked back on the stick and hit the emergency release button on his weapons control panel. They felt a slight shudder as the bomb separated cleanly, arcing high into the air — a standard toss delivery for an airburst. Matt slammed the F-15 into a descending left-turn escape maneuver. He pushed the throttle of his one remaining engine into full afterburner in a desperate attempt to gain separation distance.
Again, their visors went opaque as their bomb exploded behind them. The F-15 started to buck uncontrollably, sending signals that it wasn’t going to fly much longer. But they had done their job and gotten their weapon onto target. “Matt,” Haney said, his voice again calm and resigned. “We’re gonna have to eject.”