In the cockpit of the lead F-111, the pilot glanced at his flight navigation monitor.
“Thirty miles to target,” he announced.
The wizzo grasped the Pave Tack control handle in the sidewall and thumbed one of the buttons. A long cylindrical pod pivoted out of the plane’s belly. Its spherical head began scanning the horizon with radar and infrared cameras, using the preprogrammed alphanumeric data to search for its target.
The pilot put the bomber into an attack dive. He leveled off at 500 feet and thumbed the countermeasures release button. Bundles of missile-distracting flares and chaff were ejected into the slipstream from ports beneath the stabilizers.
“One plus thirty,” the pilot announced.
The F-111 was slicing through the darkness toward downtown Tripoli at 595 MPH when the wizzo reacted to the image of the Bab Al Azziziya Barracks on his screen. Columns of alphanumeric data flanked the image; one fixed, the other changing rapidly.
“One minute,” the pilot said, turning over command of the bomb release mechanism to the Pave Tack computer.
“Target acquired,” the wizzo replied, pressing a button that fired a pulsing red laser from the Pave Tack pod to the ground. The pencil-thin beam locked onto the target and began measuring the range, relaying the ever-changing alphanumerics to the Pave Tack computer. “We have a lock,” he called out when the target indicator became fixed on Qaddafi’s compound.
“Twenty seconds… ten… five… four—”
Electrical impulses activated the ejector feet on the bomb release units below the F-111’s wings and, in a programmed sequence, four 2,000-pound GBU-15s were unleashed from the hardpoints.
The pilot punched the throttles to avoid the upcoming explosion. The agile warplane accelerated up and away but the Pave Tack pod, swiveling in its gimballed cradle, kept the laser locked on Qaddafi’s compound.
Sensing devices in each bomb began making adjustments in the moveable tail fins. This kept the bombs homing on the laser’s frequency, as if they were traveling on a wire stretched between warplane and target.
The time was 1:57 A.M. when the first percussive blast blew out the front wall of Qaddafi’s residence.
“Yeah!” the wizzo exclaimed, having no reason to think Qaddafi wouldn’t be at home. “Kiss it good-bye!”
In downtown Tripoli, in the deluxe Al Kabir Hotel on Al Fat’h Street where the international media was housed, the force of nearby blasts set chandeliers swinging and guests scurrying for cover.
The time was 2:03 A.M. — 7:03 P.M. New York time.
On the ninth floor of the Al Kabir, a CBS News correspondent crouched next to the window of his room, talking by phone to anchorman Dan Rather, who had just started his nightly telecast.
“Dan,” he reported. “Tripoli is under attack.”
In Washington, D.C., Congressman Gutherie and his staff were also watching the report on CBS.
“Put your microphone out that window and let us hear it,” Rather urged the correspondent in Tripoli.
Sounds of explosions boomed from the television.
“Perfectly timed for the evening news,” Gutherie cracked. “Only thing the White House didn’t do was list it in TV Guide. Must be killing them they couldn’t.”
On Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Stephanie Shepherd and her children were in the den, surrounded by Walt’s air force memorabilia: recruiting posters, photographs of military jets, a large American flag, flying helmets, trophies, and academy citations and awards.
She had finished the Gutherie interview that afternoon by phone and was at her desk working on it — one eye on her word processor, the other on the television news. She stiffened as Dan Rather said: “Informed sources have told CBS News that United States Air Force F-111 bombers based in England are carrying out the surprise attack.”
“Come up here with Mommy,” Stephanie said to Jeffrey, who was playing with his trucks. “Come on,” she coaxed, as she pulled him up onto her lap.
Five days had passed since she and Laura had phoned Walt and learned of his transfer to Upper Heyford. He never called back, and the feeling of not really being part of his life had begun haunting her, though now Stephanie thought she understood why he hadn’t called.
High above the Mediterranean near Sicily, 300 miles from Tripoli’s laser-slashed skies, the Hawk-eye strike-control aircraft was in a holding pattern, monitoring the action on radar. It was out of skin-painting range, which meant pulse-doppler scanning couldn’t pick up raw radar returns from the F-111s; only radio transponder signals, using special frequencies not detectable by enemy radar, were being tracked on the screens in the electronics-packed fuselage — alphanumeric data next to each blip denoted tail code, altitude, and air speed.
Radio silence had reduced C3—command, control, communications — to waiting. No signal to commence attack had been given by the mission commander; none would be given to cease. Each crew was on its own; each flew the sequence points to its target, bombed it, and proceeded to a holding area to regroup. All but two.
Colonel Larkin was approaching his target, a military installation in the desert, when he reached to the fuel control panel, lifted the red safety catch, and threw the toggle used to dump fuel.
At the rear of the aircraft, directly beneath the vertical stabilizer and centered between the engine exhausts, the conical fuel mast opened, releasing a burst of JP-4 into the bomber’s slipstream.
Larkin flicked the toggle to off; then, capitalizing on a technique called torching, sometimes used by pilots to distract heat-seeking missiles, he hit the afterburners, igniting the fuel, which erupted in a massive fireball a distance behind the F-111. To any of the other crews that might be observing — crews concentrating on high-speed bombing and evasive maneuvering in total darkness — it would appear that one of the bombers had been hit by a surface-to-air missile.
The instant the fuel exploded, Larkin put the F-111 into a steep dive, pulled out at extremely low altitude, and shut off his transponder.
In the Hawkeye, one of the eight radar operators monitoring transponder signals stiffened apprehensively as an F-111 in his sector began losing altitude rapidly. Suddenly, the blip vanished from his screen. “One-eleven down, sir,” he reported in a choked voice.
“Tail code?” the mission commander asked, knowing the crew wouldn’t have broken radio silence even if able.
“One seven nine, sir.”
The MC scanned his computerized roster. “Shepherd.”
An operator at an adjacent console winced as a blip vanished from his screen. “Bastards got another one, sir.”
Immediately upon acting out their crash scenarios, Larkin and Applegate made sweeping low-level turns onto headings for Okba ben Nan and walled the throttles.
At Okba Ben Nafi Air Base, an air traffic controller, keeping a vigil for the F-111s, picked up the raw return on his radar as they came within skin-painting range.
“Two aircraft approaching,” he reported to his anxious superiors in the hangar command post.