“Bogeys! Four — six o’clock!” the EWO called. “Mach one point three. On your tail, Murphy.” It meant that the four MiGs had gone back to base, refueled, and come back to kill the two remaining B-52s. Three Harriers led by Squadron Leader Jean Williams entered the fray, and now Murphy saw something few men or women outside of war games pilots and test pilots would see, and it happened so quickly that Murphy and the EWO watching the dogfight on the scope barely had time to notice. On paper there should have been no contest, the supersonic MiG-29, 2.5 Mach against a pedestrian Harrier whose top speed was.9 Mach, a cheetah running a dog to death, the lead MiG piloted by Sergei Marchenko getting on the tail of Williams, her wing-man yelling, “On your tail… on your tail!”
She went into a right turn. Marchenko turned with her, got into her cone, and fired a 120-pound Aphid heat- seeker. She had already released flares, and with the Harrier’s vectored thrust, “viffed”—suddenly dropping like a stone three hundred feet, the MiG flashing by overhead and turning left. She rose and saw the Fulcrum going into its world-renowned “flip-up,” when the plane, in a virtual tail-slide, is raised up, and Marchenko was ready to fire straight into Williams’s gut, with his thrust-to-weight ratio so good he actually increased speed in the straight-up- the-wall vertical climb.
But this time the Harrier moved abruptly to left, dropped again, as if punched by some unseen force, and turned slowly compared to the Fulcrum but with the turn much tighter. Shirer’s Harrier had caught up and was behind Marchenko. He heard his Sidewinder missile “growl,” showing he could lock on and shoot, but then Marchenko went to afterburner for a split second, rising high above and off to the right. Shirer and his Harrier worked their magic, the Harrier viffing, its vectored thrust slamming it to the right for a split second in the Fulcrum’s cone, and he fired his two 30mm Aden underfuselage cannon. The MiG gave off a lick of flame from the exhaust which rapidly spread, briefly showing the “Yankee Killer” motif painted in black forward of the port box-intake.
Shirer saw two things simultaneously: Marchenko ejecting and another MiG taking fire from Williams’s Harrier, exploding into Marchenko, swallowing him up in its own flame, due in no small measure to Williams’s having been in the right place at the right time.
“Splash one!” Shirer yelled triumphantly.
“Splash two!” Williams’s voice came.
The other two MiGs, flying “welded wing,” almost touching and so flown by inexperienced ChiCom pilots, immediately broke off.
“Nice shooting, Major!” Williams’s sweet voice came.
“Your assist on mine,” Shirer answered. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Man!” Murphy said excitedly. “Did you see that—”
“SAM — gainful — five thousand,” the EWO cut in. It meant that there was a twenty-foot four-inch-long, 1,230-pound surface-to-air type-6 missile with a warhead of 176 pounds streaking toward them, and no matter how high they tried to go, the SAM’s thirty-seven-mile range could outreach their envelope.
With no foil, or chaff, left to scramble the missile’s radar guidance, the air commander in Ebony One and the pilot of the other B-52 had to take whatever evasive action they could, but now the second EWO announced there were more “telephone poles” coming at them, and suddenly there was an explosion a hundred meters to the right of Ebony One and a sound like hail as the shrapnel from the SAM now struck Ebony One. The plane was shuddering violently. Whether he’d only been clipped by missile debris or by AA fire he wasn’t sure and didn’t care — he only knew that everything was vibrating so badly he could hear the ping of rivets coming out and could no longer talk to his copilot on the intercom, warning lights dancing madly in front of him. Thompson fought the yoke with all he could, barely managing to keep the plane aloft, losing hydraulic fluid and knowing one of the wing tanks had been hit. He did a magnificent job of keeping her aloft as long as he did, but he knew he was losing the battle, his altimeter needle telling him the end was near.
It was just beyond Tabriz in the far northwestern corner where Iran meets Iraq that Thompson knew he could no longer control Ebony One, its yoke now fighting him like a thing possessed. Thompson thought of his wife and two youngsters, ages two and four, back in Toledo, Ohio.
“Everyone out!” he yelled, indicating the top hatch to the copilot. The copilot unstrapped and, stepping below, holding the radar’s console for support, yelled with all his strength at the navigator, radar nav, EWO, and Murphy to get out.
Both Thompson and the copilot ejected down out of the nose hatch. After them came Murphy, the EWO, radar nav, and navigator.
The copilot hit the fuselage of the remaining B-52 behind and to the right of them, traveling at 560 miles per hour. They knew this because his head had penetrated the aluminum sheeting on the port side of one of the eight Pratt and Whitney engines’ intakes, the fan decapitating him.
Thompson tried to work his chute, but wind drift took him into the long tongue of fire now licking the starboard side, his chute becoming a roman candle within seconds as he disappeared into the swirling gray abyss beneath. The navigator, radar navigator, and EWO also drifted into the inferno, their chutes torched long before their bodies, like blackened matchsticks, disappeared from view.
As Murphy the gunner descended, his chute intact, he felt frantically for his survival pack and his .45 service revolver, and all he could think of was the pictures he’d seen as a child of the American hostages and hearing parts of the tape the Iranians had sent to the CIA, with the screams of an American on it whom the Iranians had slowly, methodically, tortured to death.
He had absolutely no doubt they’d see him coming down under the burning inferno of the aircraft, its flames casting enormous shadows off low clouds as he passed through them, drifting downwind in the overcast dawn.
Over a thousand miles east the sun had already risen and the Inner Mongolian sky was as blue as lapis lazuli but turning mustard as a moving wall of dust twenty miles wide proceeded south like the great invasions of the Khans centuries ago. With no enemy in sight and his Bradleys still “coattailing” back and forth to create the impression of a bigger force than he had, Freeman, his columns no longer falling victim to Turpan’s rocket offensive, felt the tension ease and was giving a running commentary to his tank crew, whether they liked it or not, on the tactics of the great Khans.
As his body fell through the cold darkness of heavy cloud and his feet hit the dry dirt of the Kurdistan foothills, Murphy heard another explosion to the north behind him and wondered if it was the last B-52 caught by AA fire or downed by one of the SAM batteries. Quickly he punched for the release clip, the chute dragging him along over the dusty, stony terrain, but he missed and succeeded only in winding himself. He smacked at it again and felt himself slow as he scrambled out of the harness and began to walk back toward the billowing canopy of silk, rolling it up as he went, falling over stones the size of baseballs, skinning himself.
He began cursing, but not too loudly lest anyone hear him, though he seemed to have landed in a remote area, there being no sign of village lights of the kind he’d seen sprinkled below the bomber. As best he could figure it, he guessed the B-52 had been struck well south of what the navigator had earlier told him was Kvoy, one of the ancient cities in Kurdistan region whose unofficial borders had moved back and forth in the towering mountains of eastern Turkey and Iraq to the west and in Iran’s northwestern frontier.
The towering bulk of the mountains, great bastions shrouded in fog, frightened Murphy — the wildness and vastness of them unimaginable twenty-four hours before, before he’d ever heard of Mount Ararat, let alone about these mountains that seemed to cover the world for as far as he could see.
Bundling up the parachute, he began to scrape a shallow trench with his knife to bury the chute, but the ground was unbelievably hard, like baked clay on the Utah salt flats, and he was worried about making too much noise. He stopped and listened, heard nothing, aware only of the sound of dry, cold wind sweeping down from the mountains. Moments later he heard running water and, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the gray dawn, he could make out a small ditch, possibly an irrigation channel, only ten feet or so away from him.
Thinking that it might mean a village nearby, Murphy drew his .45, the handle frigid, and made his way cautiously toward the stream. When he reached it he stopped, listened again, and stared into the fog to see whether there were any buildings nearby. He could see nothing, hear nothing but the water. He scooped up a handful — it had a surprisingly metallic taste, and he guessed it was artesian water rather than runoff from the snowcaps—
