“Barry” — Shaw turned to the NCO sitting at the main console — “patch the landline into the loudspeaker so we can talk to the crews when they get plugged into the drop cords.” The colonel was referring to the long, extension-like cords that hung from the ceiling of each bunker and connected their helmets to a secure telephone landline running to the command post. The crews could sit in the cockpit and talk directly to the controller without using their aircraft’s radio. Without an engine start to run the F-4’s cooling system, heat buildup limited ground use of their radios to ten minutes.
“Stinger One-One is up.” Fairly’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker.
“Stinger One-Two is up,” Jack answered in quick succession.
Shaw picked up the controller’s phone and keyed the transmit button. “Roger, Stinger flight. We received a flash message bringing you up to cockpit alert. Other than that, we don’t know what’s going down. This is not an exercise. You’ll have to be pretty flexible on this one.”
“If we could get some ordnance besides a gun on these birds,” Fairly replied, “we might be more flexible.”
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.”
“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?