Fifteen hundred miles to the west, the spectral glow from F-111 cockpits streaked through the blackness. The bombers flew in tight RRC formations, one tucked left, right, and beneath each tanker. If detected by defense radars, the return from each radar resolution cell would appear on the screen as one aircraft, not four.
The strike force was approaching the Straits of Gibraltar when the high-speed extensible booms of the Stratotankers began lowering for the second of four refuelings. Minutes later, thousands of gallons of JP-4 fuel had been pumped simultaneously into each bomber.
When refueling was completed, Larkin, Applegate, and the members of the other F-111 crews each ingested a 5-mg amphetamine capsule to ward off drowsiness brought on by the long flight, ensuring they would be at peak sharpness over the target.
About an hour later, the inky blackness was broken by specks of light twinkling in the distance, where the port cities of Tarifa, Spain, and Punta Cires, Morocco, pinch the Straits to a width of 8 nautical miles.
The attack force was now 1,375 miles from Tripoli. ETA to target was 1 hour 42 minutes.
In the watery depths below, the USS Cavalla was 500 meters beneath the Mediterranean, just off the Libyan coast. The continental shelf is unusually narrow here, extending less than 10 miles from shore before dropping off sharply. This meant the Cavalla could make a deep-water approach, minimizing the chance of detection.
To further diminish it, Duryea rode the currents that swirl counterclockwise from Tunisia and Sicily into Tripoli harbor, moving silently into position.
The submarine’s interior had been in redlight since sunset, a daily event on dived boats, giving the crew a sense of day and night. It also preserved night vision for periscope surveillance should it surface.
Duryea was hunched over his chart table, his face bathed in the eerie glow from the luminous screen. He scooped up the phone and punched the button labeled Sonar.
“Talk to me, Cooperman—”
“I’m doing a three-sixty now, skipper,” the sonarman replied. He was absorbed in the fuschia-colored readouts and the sounds of the sea singing in his headset, while he methodically switched through the various sonar arrays. “Usual surface traffic, nothing else.”
“Good. Anything weird turns up, anything, I want to know right away.”
“Aye-aye, skipper.”
“Let’s take her up to a hundred and go in,” Duryea said to McBride firmly.
The exec relayed the command to the duty officer in the control room, and the planesmen who controlled the boat’s depth and angle went to work.
The hiss of high pressure air and the rush of water being forced from the ballast tanks reverberated through the hull. The bow tilted upward, and the Cavalla began rising from the depths. She had just leveled off when the BQQ-5 dish in the bow detected another submarine.
Cooperman immediately reported it to the captain.
“One of ours?” Duryea prompted anxiously.
“Beats me, skipper,” Cooperman answered, studying the acoustic signature pattern that was tracing across his monitor and printing out, simultaneously, on the console below. “This is going to sound weird but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard before.”
“Nuke? Diesel? Twin screw? Single? Take a shot,” Duryea prompted, unsettled by the threat an unidentified submarine represented.
“Twins,” Cooperman replied, pressing a key on his console to store the data in the boat’s computerized acoustic signature library. “Probably a diesel. I’d put my money on a clunker; a real old one.”
“What are the chances this antique is tracking us?”
“Slim and none, skipper. She’s way out there,” Cooperman replied, pressing a hand against one side of his headset. “She just cut back her engines. My guess is she’s surfacing.”
“Okay, talk to me if she starts getting nosy.” Duryea hung up, swiveled to his keyboard, and encoded a command. A pulsing cursor appeared on the electronic chart table, marking the mystery sub’s location. He watched it blinking at him for a moment, then turned to McBride and said, “Let’s move into final position.”
The America’s prow cleaved through the Mediterranean like Excalibur’s blade, the broad flight deck at its hilt broken by silhouettes of A-6 Intruders lurking in the steam that belched from launch catapults. Its air group of eighty-five warplanes could deliver more destructive power than the entire navy in World War II.
In the combat center — a computerized maze of video monitors, Plexiglas charts, and status boards — tense young men, many still in their teens, were about to launch the air strike against Benghazi.
“Ready to launch!” the air boss barked.
On deck, the taxi director, alienlike in green helmet, goggles, earmuffs, and kerchief tied outlaw-style over his nose and mouth, dropped to one knee and thrust his right arm to the black sky.
The pilot of the A-6 in the catapult responded with a thumbs-up and shoved the throttle to the stops. The turbojets seared the pop-up exhaust baffle with blue-orange flame. The bomber strained at the massive steel hook until the engines had built up enough power to keep it out of what fliers call the box — too much speed to stop, too little to become airborne.
The instant launch-pressure had been reached, the catapult operator released the hook.
In less than 2 seconds, 25 tons of exotic metals and electronics were accelerated from a dead stop to 150 miles an hour. The bomber was 60 feet above the water when the Pratt and Whitney turbojets took over and sent the gleaming-white Intruder climbing into the blackness above the Gulf of Sidra.
In Washington, D.C., the sun had set, leaving a luminous lilac haze in the sky. The time was 6:47 P.M.
In the oval office, technicians were adjusting lighting and camera positions in preparation for the president’s address, which would follow the raid.
The chief executive sat in an anteroom, reviewing the script with his writers while a television makeup artist added some color to his complexion. When he was finished, the president headed for the situation room in the basement, where Kiley, Lancaster, and his other civilian and military advisers had gathered. He had just settled in his chair beneath the presidential seal when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had taken a call, announced, “Intruders are in the air. ETA to target nine minutes fifty-three seconds.”
At Okba Ben Nafi Air Base, a former U.S. Air Force installation on the coast just east of Tripoli, a platoon of infantry ringed hangar 6-South, where the two F-111s would be housed. Once called Wheelus Field, it was the most well equipped and defended of Libya’s air bases, hence its selection as the landing site.
Inside the hangar, in an office that had been set up as a command post, General Younis anxiously awaited word that the bombers had arrived. His attention was riveted on an aide who was in communication with air traffic control in the tower.
“SAM batteries are ready, General,” one of his officers reported, referring to the antiaircraft missiles that would defend the airport during the raid.
“You checked each and every one?”
“Yes, sir. Guidance radar is off. Only adjusted sixes have been mounted.”
“Good. We wouldn’t want to blow up our F-111s before we get our hands on them.”
Indeed, Younis had been faced with the problem of shooting down two bombers without shooting them down. Antiaircraft fire was required to explain their loss during the raid and couldn’t be curtailed; and though Libyan missile defense batteries would be forced to turn off their ground radar to prevent air-to-ground HARM missiles from homing on the signal, greatly diminishing their accuracy, the chance of a lucky hit had to be eliminated. Younis knew that both heat-seeking and radar-homing SAM-6s were fitted with proximity fuses, which detonated just prior to impact, and had ordered them adjusted to maximum sensitivity. This meant they would detonate, not just prior to impact, not even close to impact, but on the slightest detection of the flares and metallic chaff that would be released into the air by each bomber to confuse missile guidance.