run—at twelve miles east of the target shed. Then they went to change into flying gear. As usual, they had arrived in civilian clothes; the policy on Bahrain was that too much military out on the streets might alarm the locals.
When they were all changed, Williamson as mission commander completed the briefing. It was still two hours to takeoff. The thirty-second “scramble” of Second World War pilots was a long way gone.
There was time for coffee and the next stage of preparations. Each man picked up his handgun, a small Walther PPK that they all loathed, figuring that if attacked in the desert they might as well throw it at an Iraqi’s head and hope to knock him out that way.
They also drew their ?1000 in five gold sovereigns and the “goolie chit.” This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the British, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well. A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, “Dear Mr.
Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with ?5000 in gold.” Sometimes it works.
The flying uniforms had reflective shoulder patches that could possibly be detected by Allied seekers if a pilot came down in the desert; but no wings above the left breast pocket, just a Velcroed Union Jack patch.
After coffee came sterilization—not as bad as it sounds. All rings, cigarettes, lighters, letters, and family photos were removed, anything that might give an interrogator a lever on the personality of his prisoner. The strip search was carried out by a stunning WAAF named Pamela Smith—the aircrew figured this was the best part of the mission, and younger pilots dropped their valuables into the most surprising places to see if Pamela could find them. Fortunately, she had once been a nurse and accepted this nonsense with calm good humor.
One hour to takeoff. Some men ate, some couldn’t, some cat-napped, some drank coffee and hoped they would not have to pee halfway through the mission, and some threw up. The bus took the eight men to their aircraft, already buzzing with riggers, fitters, and armorers. Each pilot walked around his ship, checking through the pretakeoff ritual.
Finally they climbed aboard.
The first task was to get settled, fully strapped in, and linked to the Have-quick radio so that they could talk. Then the APU—the auxiliary power unit that set all the instruments dancing.
In the rear the inertial navigation platform came alive, giving Sid Blair the chance to punch in his planned courses and turns. Williamson started his right engine, which began to howl softly, then the left.
Close canopy, taxi to number one, the holding point. Clearance from the tower, taxi to takeoff point. Williamson glanced to his right. Peter Johns’s Tornado was beside him and a bit back, and beyond him the two Buccaneers. He raised a hand. Three white-gloved hands rose in return.
Foot brakes on, run up to maximum “dry” power. The Tornado was trembling gently. Through the throttle gate into afterburn, now she was shuddering against the brakes. A final thumbs-up and three acknowledgments. Brakes off, the surge, the roll, the tarmac flashing by faster and faster, and then they were up, four in formation, banking over the dark sea, the lights of Manama dropping behind, setting course for the rendezvous with the tanker waiting for them somewhere over the Saudi border with Iraq.
Williamson brought the power setting out of afterburn and settled into a climb at 300 knots to twenty thousand feet. With radar, they found the tanker in the darkness, closed behind her, and inserted their fuel nozzles into the trailing drogues. Once topped up, all four turned and dropped away down to the desert.
Williamson leveled his detail at two hundred feet, setting a maximum cruise at 480 knots, and thus they sped into Iraq. He was flying with the aid of TIALD, the Thermal Imaging and Laser Designator, which was the British equivalent of the LANTIRN system. Low over the black desert, the pilots could see everything ahead of them, the rocks, the cliffs, the outcrops, the hills, as if they glowed.
Just before the sun rose, they turned at the IP onto the bombing run.
Sid Blair saw the radio mast and told his pilot to adjust course by one degree.
Williamson flicked his bomb-release catches to slave mode and glanced at his Head-Up Display, which was running off the miles and seconds to release point. He was down to a hundred feet, over flat ground and holding steady. Somewhere behind him, his wingman was doing the same. Time on Target was exact. He was easing the throttle in and out of afterburn to maintain an attack speed of 540 knots.
The sun cleared the hills, the first beams sliced across the plain, and there it was at six miles. He could see the metal glinting, the mounds of junked cars, and the great gray shed in the center, the double doors pointing toward him.
The Bucks were a hundred feet above and a mile back. The talk-through from the Bucks, which had begun at the IP, continued in his ears. Six miles and closing, five miles, some movement in the target area, four miles.
“I am marking,” said the first Buck navigator. The laser beam from the Buck was right on the door of the shed. At three miles, Williamson began his “loft,” easing the nose up, blanking out his vision of the target. No matter, the technology would do the rest. At three hundred feet his HUD told him to release. He flicked the bomb switch, and all three one-thousand-pound bombs flew away from his underside.
Because he was lofting, the bombs rose slightly with him before gravity took over and they began a graceful downward parabola toward the shed.
With his plane one and a half tons lighter, he rose fast to a thousand feet, then threw on 135 degrees of bank and kept pulling at the control column. The Tornado was diving and turning, back to the earth and back the way it had come. His Buck flashed over him, then pulled away in its turn.
Because he had a TV camera in the belly of his aircraft, the Buccaneer navigator could see the bombs’ impact right on the doors of the shed.
The entire area in front of the shed dissolved in a sheet of flame and smoke, while a pillar of dust rose from the place where the shed had been. As it began to settle. Peter Johns in the second Tornado was coming in, thirty seconds behind his leader.
The Buck navigator saw more than that. The movements he had seen earlier codified into a pattern. Guns were visible.
“They’ve got triple-A!” he shouted. The second Tornado was lofting.
The second Buccaneer could see it all. The shed, blown to pieces under the impact of the first three bombs, revealed an inner structure twisted and bent. But there were antiaircraft cannon blazing among the mounds of wrecked cars.
“Bombs gone!” yelled Johns, and hauled his Tornado into a maximum-G turn. His own Buccaneer was also pulling away from the target, but its belly PAVESPIKE kept the beam on the remains of the shed.
“Impact!” screamed the Buck’s navigator.
There was a flicker of fire among the car wrecks. Two shoulder-borne SAMs hared off after the Tornado.
Williamson had leveled from his turning dive, back to one hundred feet above the desert but heading the other way, toward the now-risen sun. He heard Peter Johns’s voice shout, “We’re hit!”
Behind him, Sid Blair was silent. Swearing in his anger, Williamson pulled the Tornado around again, thinking there might be a chance of holding off the Iraqi gunners with his cannon. He was too late.
He heard one of the Bucks say, “They’ve got missiles down there,”
and then he saw Johns’s Tornado, climbing, streaming smoke from a blazing engine, heard the twenty-five- year-old say quite clearly,
“Going down ... ejecting.”
There was nothing more any of them could do. In earlier missions the Bucks used to accompany the Tornados home. By this date, it had been agreed the Bucks could go home on their own. In silence the two target markers did what they did best: They got their bellies right on the desert in the morning sun and kept them there all the way home.
Lofty Williamson was in a blind rage, convinced he had been lied to.
He had not; no one knew about the triple-A and the missiles hidden at Al Qubai.
High above, a TR-1 sent real-time pictures of the destruction back to Riyadh. An E-3 Sentry had heard all the in-air talk and told Riyadh they had lost a Tornado crew.
Lofty Williamson came home alone, to debrief and vent his anger on the target selectors in Riyadh.
