Battle Born

The high-resolution synthetic aperture image on his digital display resembled a black-and-white photograph. The clarity was startling — he could actually make out the outline of a large tractor-trailer vehicle. “Hogs, I got a big mother trailer-sized vehicle — looks like a Scud missile reloading operation.” He centered the cross hairs directly on the image. “You’re cleared to the target! Let’s nail that puppy! We’re seven seconds late. Give me twenty more knots, pilot.” The pilot goosed the throttles a bit more — they were now screaming inbound to their target at almost ten miles per minute. “TG twenty seconds.”

“Bandits four o’clock, twenty miles and closing!” the DSO shouted. “Notch right!”

The pilot yanked the control stick right…

“No! TG fifteen! Wings level!” the OSO responded. “Stay on the bomb run!”

Suddenly, they all heard a faster-pitched deedle deedle deedle tone, no longer playful at all. “SA-6 up!” the DSO shouted. The SA-6 was a mobile Soviet-made medium-range surface-to-air missile system, widely exported all over the world. Its mobility, its top speed of almost three times that of sound, and its all-weather, all-altitude capability made it a deadly threat. The SA-6 fired a salvo of three missiles that were almost impossible to evade. “Three o’clock, within lethal range! Trackbreakers active!”

At the same moment, several white arcs of smoke traced across the sky, the thin white trails aiming right for the B-1, and the warning tone on interphone changed to a fast, high-pitched deedledeedledeedle. “Smoky SAMs!” the copilot shouted. Smoky SAMs were little papier-mache rockets, no threat to the bomber by themselves, but signifying a missile launch against the bomber crew. It meant the crew hadn’t done their job protecting their bomber.

“Simulated SA-6 launch!” the DSO shouted. “Uplink shut down! Chaff, chaff!” Clouds of thin tinsel shot out of canisters along the Bone’s upper spine, creating a radar target several hundred times larger than the 400,000- pound plane itself.

“Hold heading!” the OSO shouted. “TG ten! Doors coming open!”

The copilot watched as one of the simulated SAMs passed directly overhead. Talk about the “bullet between the eyes,” he thought grimly — if that had been a real antiaircraft missile, they’d have been dead meat. And he would have watched the final stroke all the damned way.

“Ready… ready, now! Bombs away!” the OSO shouted. One cluster bomb canister dropped free of the aft weapons bay. At the precise instant, it split apart and scattered the bomblets across the target area in a direct hit on the trailer.

“Bomb doors closed!” the OSO shouted. “Clear to maneuver!”

“Pump right, now!” the DSO shouted. The pilots rolled the bomber to the right away from the target area and pulled back on the control stick until the stall warning horn sounded, then released the back pressure. The DSO ejected more clouds of chaff behind them, successfully breaking the “enemy” radar locks and allowing the bomber to escape.

“That release looked good from back here, pilots!” the OSO yelled gleefully. “What did you see up there?”

“We saw our shit get blown away by a SAM!” the copilot yelled. “They had us dead-on!”

“I had the uplink shut down,” the DSO protested. “No way that missile would’ve hit…”

“Well, then they used an optical tracker or they got lucky,” the pilot said. “But they got us. If one of those smoky SAMs was a real one, we’d’ve gotten nailed. Shake it off, Long Dong. Nail the next one. These Navy pukes aren’t playing fair anyway.”

“Shit!” the OSO cursed into his oxygen mask. A perfect bomb run, a perfect release… and they got zilch. All that hard work for nothing. He angrily entered commands into his keyboard to sequence to the next target area. “Steering is good to the next target complex, pilot. We’ll take out the next Scud missile site.”

“What are the defenses in the area?” the copilot asked.

“SA-3s, SA-6s, and Zeus-23s,” the DSO replied.

“All right. Shake it off, guys,” the pilot said. “No more mistakes. Let’s kick some ass this time.”

“I’ve got another SA-6 and an SA-3 up,” the DSO reported. “SA-6 is nine o’clock, moving outside lethal range. The SA-3 is at one o’clock.”

“Where are the fighters?” the pilot asked.

“No sign of ’em,” the DSO replied.

“Clearing turn coming up,” the pilot said. “Back me up on altitude, co.” He banked the B-1 up on its left wing, then strained to look aft up through the eyebrow windows for any signs of pursuit. When he had turned almost ninety degrees, he initiated a steep left turn. “I got it,” he told the copilot. “Find the damn—”

“Aces!” they suddenly heard on the interplane frequency. It was their wingman, five miles somewhere behind them. “Bandit coming down the ramp! I think he’s on you! You see him?”

Both pilots furiously scanned out their cockpit windows. Suddenly, the copilot shouted, “I got him! Two o’clock high! He’s diving right on top of us! He’s got us nailed!”

The pilot swore loudly, then racked the bomber into a steep right turn, jammed the throttles to full military power, pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to the first detent, and zoomed the B-1 skyward.

“What are you doing, Rodeo?” the copilot shouted.

“I’m going nose-to-nose with this bandit!”

“Are you nuts?”

“The best way to defeat a fighter on a gun or close-in missile pass is nose-to-nose,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to let this Navy puke get a clear shot on us!”

Both pilots clearly saw the oncoming fighter as it plummeted toward them. It was a Navy or Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet, the primary carrier attack plane, which also had a good air-to-air capability. The Bone’s nose was thirty degrees above the horizon in the steep climb. All they could see was blue sky and the fighter diving down on them.

The sharp zoom maneuver was sapping their speed quickly. “Airspeed!” the copilot shouted — just a warning right now, not an admonition. The aircraft commander was still in charge here, no matter how unusual his actions seemed.

“I got it,” the pilot acknowledged. He pushed the throttles forward into full afterburner power. “C’mon, you squid bastard. You don’t have a shot. You’re running out of sky. Break it off.”

“We better get back down, pilot,” the OSO urged him. “We’re off our force timing!”

“Get the nose down, pilot,” the copilot warned.

“You lost us, bub,” said the pilot, addressing the pilot of the Hornet.

The OSO switched his radar display to air-to-air, and the ORS immediately locked onto the Hornet. “Range three miles and closing!” he shouted. “Closure rate one thousand knots! This doesn’t look good!”

“Airspeed!” the copilot warned again. They were now draining fuel at an incredible three hundred pounds of fuel per second and going nowhere but straight up.

“Pilot, we’re off our force timing and three thousand feet high!” the OSO called. “We’re inside the one-mile bubble!” For safety’s sake, the rules of engagement, or ROE, at Navy Fallon prohibited any pilot from breaking an invisible one-mile-diameter “bubble” around all participants. “The ROE—”

“Shut up, co!” the pilot snapped. “We still got three seconds!” Breaking the ROE could put all the players in serious danger — and he was breaking rules one after another. “We’re not going to show ourselves. He’ll have to break it off.”

“Get the nose down, dammit!” the copilot shouted again.

Then, seconds before the copilot was going to push his control stick and try to overpower the pilot, the fighter rapidly rolled right. They had lost almost three hundred knots of airspeed — and for what? They saved themselves from the fighter but were now in the lethal envelope for any surface-to-air missile battery within thirty miles.

“Ha! Where are you going, you wussie?” the pilot shouted happily. He was breathing as hard as if he had just finished a hundred-yard sprint. “Keep him in sight, co,” he panted.

“This will work out perfectly, hogs,” the OSO said. “This next target is a Zeus-23. We’ll stay high and nail him! Center up.”

The pilot started a left turn toward the next target. “Where’s that fighter?” he asked.

“Eleven o’clock, moving to ten o’clock, way high,” the DSO reported.

“Zeus-23 at twelve o’clock,” the DSO reported. The real “Zeus-23,” or ZSU-23/4, was the standard Russian