readily offered.
Shortly after 1400, they arrived at the SAS HQ at Senny Bridge, eight miles west of Brecon, the headquarters having been moved forty miles west of Hereford on the English side because of Soviet rocket attacks. The Brecon Beacons were covered in deep, fast-moving shadows and then brilliant sunlight. “A dabbledy day,” said the RSM as he jumped down from the jeep leading the three-tonners, and looked up at the jumbled sky. “All right then, lads. Columns of three. Tallest left and right — smallest in the middle. Shake a leg.”
Major Rye, an officer in his midforties with slightly graying hair and a broad, friendly face, dressed in beret, camouflage-pattern battle dress smock and trousers, came out to welcome them. They were all volunteers from every branch of the services — their reasons for volunteering as varied as the men themselves, some bored with life in the line regiments, which, because of the slowdown in supplies occasioned by convoy losses, were now forced to dig in and wait. Others no doubt were escaping domestic entanglements of one kind or other, and some had volunteered because they, as young men, some of them children at the time, had been electrified, as was the whole world, by the riveting spectacle of the first SAS public appearance. There had been rumors that an elite force, called the Special Air Service, had existed, but the first time the world knew the rumors were right was on May 6, 1980, in London in “Operation Nimrod.” The SAS counterterrorist team, covered head to toe in what was to become their telltale black uniform, wearing CS gas masks, which also protected their identity, attacked and, with astonishing speed, ended, in front of the world’s TV cameras, a six-day, twenty-one-hostage drama in the Iranian Embassy. The attack, combining sheer-cliff mountaineering abseiling, stun grenades, and perfect HK MPS submachine-gun kill shots at close range in crowded rooms, was so fast, the Iranian terrorists literally didn’t know what hit them.
Though this constituted the first public view of the SAS, the Special Air Service had already been operating for over thirty years, ever since being formed from an “odd-bod” collection of commando enthusiasts who wreaked such havoc behind the enemy line in the Western Desert, destroying over 380 of Rommel’s German aircraft and vast quantities of oil and ammunition, that Adolf Hitler issued a personal order to the Wermacht regarding the SAS that “these men are dangerous. They must be hunted down and destroyed at all costs.”
After the Second World War, the SAS had carried on its covert service of British foreign policy, involving them in everything from the Malayan Communist emergency to joining the West German counterterrorist CSG-9 in the hostage-rescue attack against the hijacked Lufthansa airliner on the airstrip at Mogadishu in Somalia. The fierce gun battle there lasted for more than seven minutes, but the success of the operation— only one hostage was wounded, and not fatally — was due once again to the extraordinary speed and accuracy of the assault, during which every terrorist aboard was hit in the first bursts of the commandos’ gunfire. And then there were the audacious and devastating night raids in the Falklands War, and later deep inside Iraq, against Saddam Hussein’s airfields.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Over the Sea of Japan, Shirer nosed the 747 down toward the thick cumulonimbus at fifteen thousand, seeking protection of zero visibility against the three breakaway fighters, the 747’s over-the-horizon radar showing the Bogeys were now only sixty miles away, active radars on and coming in arrowhead formation for interdiction at a thousand miles per hour — almost certainly MiG-29 Fulcrums.
Shirer knew the F-14 Tomcats that would try to protect his 747 were good — on afterburner, over a hundred miles an hour faster than the Fulcrums — but, as an ace, he also knew the old rule still held: With the gizmology being more or less equal, over sixty percent of all kills in dogfights went to only the top six percent of pilots.
As the 747 entered the cloud in the pitch darkness, the three Fulcrums now only forty miles away, Shirer called through to the COMCO — countermeasures control officer. “Compute distance from Vladivostok to here and back. Approx.”
The COMCO’s Cray computer had it in four seconds. “Return journey plus or minus one thousand miles, Captain. I say again ‘miles.’ “
As if reading Shirer’s mind, the officer had already computed the Fulcrum’s combat radius of plus or minus eleven hundred kilometers against the distance from Vladivostok, and the arithmetic projection was clear: The Fulcrums could make it to interdiction and back to Vladivostok, but it would leave them little time for the attack. Their wing commander must certainly have taken this into account. COMCO’s conclusion, quickly relayed to Shirer, was that the Fulcrums were probably hauling drop tanks for extended range.
Even so, Shirer knew that during an attack, the Bogeys would, at some point, have to jettison the drop tanks, even if they hadn’t used all of the fuel from them, in order to reduce weight and so engage the Tomcats at maximum speed. This would force the Russians’ fuel consumption to jump to eighteen times normal “suck-through” rate. In four minutes on full war power, each Fulcrum would guzzle more than thirty percent of its entire fuel load.
Shirer flicked on his mike. “Freedom One to Angel Leader. Do you read me?”
“Angel Leader,” acknowledged the Tomcat pilot. “Go ahead.”
“Fire Fox One at each Bogey. Repeat, fire Fox One at each Bogey.”
The RIO — radar intercept officer — behind the pilot in each Tomcat wondered what in hell Shirer was up to. Very soon each of their Fox One air-to-air radar-homing Sparrow missiles would be ready, the fast-closing Fulcrums within range, but why, they wondered, fire now — allowing the Bogeys to have at least ten to fifteen seconds to “jinx” their way out of it, particularly when the Fulcrum was so highly maneuverable?
But orders were orders, all three RIOs in the Tomcats going to “warning yellow, weapons hold” status, each of the RIOs straining to hear the tone alert — a low growl in their earpiece telling them the missile was fully armed and ready for launch.
Back in the general’s compartment, Col. Jim Norton was ill, the 747 continuing its hair-raising forty-degree dive, buffeted by so much turbulence, the whole plane seemed to be rattling to pieces, Norton convinced his stomach was now in his chest — or was it the other way around? — blocking his breathing. Glistening in the redded-out combat lighting of the aircraft, the droplets of sweat on his forehead looked like hundreds of tiny rubies.
“Now, don’t you worry about it, Jim,” Freeman assured him. “That boy up in front is gonna put this bird down in Seoul in no time.”
Norton couldn’t speak, unable even to articulate his terror, the veins in his hands standing out like dark strings as he clenched the armrests, eyes discombobulated, mouth parchment-dry, his heart thumping rapidly, doubly mortified at exhibiting such fright in front of Freeman, and painfully conscious again of the great and terrible divide between a civilian aircraft and a military one. Here the noise was at once thunderous and screaming as it fell through the blackness, the nausea, indescribable in its clammy dizziness, overtaking him in a suffocating net.
“Fix your eye on something middistance, Jim,” Freeman instructed him. “Helps keep your balance.”
It was the stupidest goddamn thing the colonel had ever heard Freeman utter — there
In the Tomcats, the radar intercept officers got the tone alert.
“Master arm on,” announced the Tomcat leader. “Centering up the T. Bogeys twenty-one miles. Centering the dot… Fox One, Fox One!”
The next rush of conversation between the Angel pilots and their RIOs surged with static and was full of overlay so that it was difficult for Shirer to know exactly who was speaking. Battling with the yoke in heavy turbulence at ten thousand feet, he heard his copilot yelling, “There they go!” the exhaust of the 524-pound American missiles lighting the clouds nearby in a momentary and astonishingly beautiful peach glow, and then six seconds later, a fast, broken chorus of “Good kill! Good kill!… Shoot him!…”
“Haven’t got a fucking tone…”
“Shoot him… Shoot…!”
“Christ!” said Shirer’s copilot, seeing a blip on the Boeing’s radar screen disintegrating. “They got one of ours!”
Shirer was fighting to keep the Boeing in the steep dive, slipping farther away from the point of intercept, the babble of the Tomcats now interspersed with Russian: “
