Chapter one
GUAM — JULY 1990
Lieutenant Les Shilling opened his locker and appraised his flight equipment. He was going to work. But this was no normal nine-to-five job.
He began his routine by pulling on his G-suit, which he jokingly called his eighteen-hour girdle. He breathed in and zipped up the side. Then he sucked in his belly, held his breath, and bent down in order to zip up the leggings. Next, he threw on his chest harness and strapped the leg restraints on his calves. After that came the survival vest. He checked for his emergency items. Strobe light. Water bottle. Knife. Flare gun. Smoke signal… He placed them all on his body. Somewhere. A pocket here. A pocket there. He reached for his gloves and oxygen mask.
Last but not least, he grabbed his helmet. He was now ready to do battle, if called upon, in the way he was trained. He was an aerial gladiator, in much the same tradition as the coliseum combatants in the days of the old Roman Empire, but now acted out in the technical, computerized times of the late twentieth century.
Les turned a sharp left and lined up his F-18 Hornet fighter to the edge of the runway. The stream of white light from his wing sliced the heavy night air. He stopped and ran through the final checks before takeoff. He fidgeted in his seat until he felt as comfortable as any pilot could be in his G-suit, helmet, and oxygen mask. He took one last glance around the cockpit. So tight in such a self-contained space.
His high-tech enclosure — full of screens, digits, and dials — winked codes in bright colors. Greens, yellows, whites. Three large cathode-ray tubes measuring five inches square dominated the cockpit. These were the Digital Display Indicators. DDIs, as they were known in the business. The left and right DDIs exhibited precise three-color information for such items as radar navigation, weapons, sensor data, and system checks. The bottom screen was a Multipurpose Color Display — MPCD — that contained navigational data and a digitally-generated colored moving map. At eye level… the HUD. The Head-Up Display was an electro-optical instrument that superimposed numerical information onto the pilot’s twelve-o’clock field of view. Les’s cockpit was right out of Star Wars.
Finished with the final push-buttoning prior to flight, he readied himself for takeoff, gloved hand on the stick.
A voice crackled on his radio. “ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF. MAINTAIN RUNWAY HEADING AND CONTACT DEPARTURE CONTROL ON THREE-THREE-THREE DECIMAL THREE WHEN SAFELY AIRBORNE.”
Les answered the tower with a prompt, “ROGER BARKSIDE.”
Brakes on, he nudged the dual throttles forward to full military power. The roar of the engines, nearly 16,000 pounds of static thrust each, made him tingle, as it always did. He could hear the blast and felt the vibration through the cockpit Plexiglas and his padded helmet. Then he let go of the brakes. With two fingers of his left hand on the throttles, he lit the afterburners. The equivalent of one swift kick in the butt, and he was off and down the runway, gathering speed.
The acceleration was smooth and swift. With the stick in the neutral position and using the nose wheel steering button on the column, Les controlled the takeoff roll. He gently brought the stick back so that the angle of attack read seven degrees nose-up on the HUD. Then… in a blink, he was in the air. Before the far edge of the runway the wheels sucked into the belly with a slight jar. The HUD data changed from gear down to gear up. Over the water now he turned north, leaving Agana Naval Air Station and the tropical island of Guam behind him. He glanced at the HUD. Airspeed — 373 knots. Altitude — 500 feet. It was a half-moon night, no turbulence in the air, the silhouette of clouds ahead. He changed radio frequencies.
“BARKSIDE, ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE AIRBORNE.”
“ROGER ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE, THIS IS BARKSIDE. TARGET TO PORT ON HEADING THREE-FIVE-ZERO. ANGELS ONE. SPEED 200 KNOTS. RANGE ONE-THREE-ZERO.”
Les came off afterburners, climbed and leveled off. His right hand went for the right DDI. Using the push buttons, he selected the proper functions for the Range While Search — RWS — mode which detected targets out to eighty nautical miles. The DDI glowed brightly with symbols and bits of info. But no target. He tapped the decrease range and azimuth buttons to obtain the required range. In a short time, he saw the lights of Tinian below. His MPCD verified it. He recognized the Manhattan-shaped island on the color display.
Then a target appeared.
The Single Target Track — the STT — mode burned a prompt onto the HUD. A flick of a switch on the stick, he changed the air-to-air mode from RWS to STT. Now he could track a single target with more clarity, as well as be ready for steering commands and shoot prompts for the armed missiles he was carrying on the wing tips and fuselage.
“ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE. TARGET SHOULD BE DEAD AHEAD. RANGE TEN MILES.”
Les hit the radio button. “ROGER BARKSIDE. I SEE IT.”
“ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE, GO BUTTON ONE-FOUR LEFT.”
“ROGER.” Les’s gloved hand reached to his up-front control at chest level and changed the radio frequency from the right radio to the left radio. The comm 1 channel display window confirmed the move. He turned the volume up. “ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE ON ONE-FOUR LEFT, BARKSIDE.”
The Hughes APG-65 digital multi-mode radar burned into the right DDI. Les could see it was a large target. The readouts showed the aircraft to be ahead at a range of seven miles. He peered through the glass and the HUD, into the night, towards the direction of the dark, puffy clouds. No visual. Not yet. Two hundred knots was pretty damn slow. It had to be landing somewhere. Maybe the nearby island of Saipan.
“ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE, THIS IS BARKSIDE. FIND OUT WHO HE IS AND WHAT HE’S DOING IN OUR AIRSPACE. WE ARE UNABLE TO MAKE RADIO CONTACT. OVER.”
“ROGER, BARKSIDE. COMING UP ON HIS SIX. CLOSING AT 500 KNOTS.”
Then the radar target disappeared off the pilot’s radar. “BARKSIDE, THIS IS ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE. IT’S GONE. REPEAT, GONE.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN GONE?” Long pause. “HEY, YOU’RE RIGHT. SCOUT AROUND. FIND OUT WHERE HE WENT.”
“ROGER, BARKSIDE.”
After a thorough but unsuccessful search of the area, Les hit the radio transmitter. “BARKSIDE, ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE. NO VISUAL. OVER.”
“COME ON BACK, ZULU TWO-FOUR-THREE,” the controller sighed. “NO JOY TODAY.”
“ROGER, BARKSIDE. COMING HOME.”
Les pulled hard right on the stick and increased the throttles until the speed flashed to 600 knots on the HUD. The G-forces pressed against his body… 3-G… 4-G… This was the second time in a week that a large unidentified target had appeared suddenly on the Agana radar screens, only to vanish without a trace once a navy fighter approached it. Both times, Les was in the cockpit. He wasn’t too concerned about it, though. Often, especially in the last few weeks, Andersen Air Force Base, situated on the north end of Guam, would send up their USAF bomber aircraft and the lines of communication with the navy would get crossed. Right now, that aircraft — whatever the hell it was — was probably about to or had already landed on Saipan.
On the way back, he set up his waypoints and followed them on the overlaid display on the MPCD. The south edge of Tinian flashed by, then the small island of Rota. The waypoint bearing readout showed 184 degrees. Before he reached Guam, he made the selections for the TACAN — the Tactical Air Navigation — a navigational approach aid that gave both distance and bearing to a base.
Coming in downwind at 280 knots, eighty percent RPM, speedbrakes out, flaps in the auto mode, Les had the nose up at nine degrees. He fell easily and controllably out of the sky with a twenty-eight-degree bank turn. He retracted the speedbrakes and leveled out. His airspeed dropped to 240. Two miles out, he selected full gear down and full flaps.