sink rate.
There, to the left… the beach. The pale sand caught his eye, Relax….
Relax, and concentrate The whiteness flashed beneath them.
“Coast-in,” Jake told the bombardier.
McPherson used his left hand to activate the stop clock on the instrument panel and keyed his radio mike with his left foot. “Devil Five Oh Five is feet dry. D Five Oh Five, feet dry.”
A friendly American voice answered. “Five Oh Black Eagle. Roger feet dry. Good hunting.” Then silence. Later, when Devil 505 returned to the coast they would broadcast their “feet wet” call. Grafton and McPherson knew that now they were on their own because the HawkEye’s radar could not separate the A-6’s image from the earth’s return without the aid of the IFF.
Jake saw moonlight reflecting faintly off rice paddies indicating a break in the overcast ahead. The weather forecasters were right for a change, he thought. Out of the corner of his eye the pilot saw flashes: intermittent flashes in the darkness below.
“Small arms fire, Morg.”
“Okay, Jakey baby.” The bombardier never looked up from his radar scope. His left hand slewed the computer cross hairs across the scope while his right tuned the radar. “This computer is working great, but it’s a little . . .” he muttered over the ICS.
Jake tried to ignore the muzzle flashes. Every kid and rice farmer in North Vietnam had a rifle and apparently spent the nights shooting randomly into the sky at the first rumble of jet engines. They never saw their target but hoped somewhere in the sky a bullet and American warplane would meet. Big morale boost Jake thought. Lets every citizen feel he’s personally fighting back. Jake saw the shuttering muzzle flashes of a submachine gun. None of these small arms fired tracer bullets so the little droplets of death were everywhere, and nowhere.
Patches of moonlight revealed breaks in the clouds ahead. The pilot descended to 300 feet and used the moonlight to keep from flying into the ground. He was much more comfortable flying visually rather than on instruments. With an outside reference he could fly instinctively; on instruments he had to work at it.
Off to the right antiaircraft artillery opened fire. The tracers burned through the blackness in slow motion. The warble of a Firecan gun-control radar sounded for a second in his ears, then fell silent.
A row of artillery fire erupted ahead of them. “Christ, Morg,” he whispered to the bombardier. He picked a tear in the curtain of tracers, dipped a wing, and angled the jet through. McPherson didn’t look up from the scope. “You got the river bend yet?” Jake asked as the flak storm faded behind them.
“Yep. Just got it. Three more minutes on this heading.” McPherson reached with his left hand and turned on the master armament switch. He checked the position of every switch on the armament panel one more time. The dozen 500-pound bombs were now ready to be released. “Your pickle is hot,” he told the pilot, referring to the red button on the stick grip which the pilot could press to release the weapons.
Again and again fiery streams of antiaircraft shells spewed forth like projectiles from a volcano. The stuff that came in the general direction of Devil 505 seemed to change course and turn behind them, an optical illusion created by the plane’s 700-feet-per-second speed. The pilot ignored the guns fired behind or abreast and concentrated on negotiating his way through the strings of tracers that erupted ahead. He no longer even noticed the flashes from rifles and machine guns, the sparks of this inferno.
A voice on the radio: “Devil Five Oh Eight is dry, feet dry.”
There’s Cowboy, Jake thought. Cowboy was Lieutenant Commander Earl Parker, the pilot of the other A-6 bomber launched moments after them. Like Jake, and McPherson, Cowboy and his bombardier were now racing across the earth with a load of bombs destined for a target not worth any man’s life, or so Jake told himself as he weaved through the tracers, deeper and deeper into North Vietnam.
“Two miles to the turnpoint,” the bombardier reminded him.
An insane warble racked their ears. A red light labeled “MISSILE” flashed on the instrument panel, two feet from the pilot’s face. This time McPherson looked up.
The two men scanned the sky. Their best chance to avoid the surface-to-air missile was to acquire it visually, then outmaneuver it.
“There’s the SAM! Two o’clock!” Jake fought back the urge to urinate.
Both men watched the white rocket exhaust while Grafton squeezed the chaff-release button on the right throttle with his forefinger. Each press released a small plastic container into the slipstream where it disbursed a cloud of metallic chaff-that would echo radar energy and form a fake target on the enemy operator’s radar screen. ‘The pilot carefully nudged the stick forward and dropped to 100 feet above the ground. He jabbed the chaff button more times in quick succession.
The missile light stopped flashing and the earphones fell silent as death itself.
“I think it’s stopped guiding,” McPherson said with relief evident in his voice. “Boy, we’re having fun now,” he added dryly. Grafton said nothing. They were almost scraping the paddies. The bombardier watched the missile streak by several thousand feet overhead at three times the speed of sound, then turned his attention to the radar. “Come hard left,” he told the pilot.
Jake dropped the left wing and eased back slightly on the stick. He let the plane climb to 300 feet. The moonlight bounced off the river below. “See the target yet?”
“Just a second, man.” Silence. “Steady up.” Jake leveled the wings. “I’ve got the target. I’m on it. Stepping into attack.” The bombardier flipped a switch, and the computer calculated an attack solution. The word “ATTACK” lit up in red on the lower edge of the vdi, and the computer-driven display became more complex. Symbols appeared showing the time remaining until weapons release, the relative position of the target, the drift angle, and the steering to the release point.
Jake jammed the throttles forward to the stops and climbed to 500 feet.
The Mark 82 general-purpose bombs had to fall at least 500 feet for the fuses to arm properly; they were equipped with metal vanes that would open when the weapons were released and retard them just long enough to allow the plane to escape the bomb fragments.
The needle on the airspeed indicator quivered at 480 knots. The stick was alive in the pilot’s hand. Any small twitch made the machine leap. Jake’s attention was divided among the mechanics of instrument flying, the computer-driven steering symbol on the vdi, and the occasional streams of yellow and red tracers. He felt extraordinarily alive, in absolute control. He could see everything at once: every needle, every gauge, every fireball in the night. With his peripheral vision, he even saw McPherson turn on the track radar.
“Ground lock.” The bombardier noted the indication on the track radar and reported it to the pilot with an affectation of amazement. The damn track radar often failed. McPherson was glued to the radar screen, his entire world the flickering green lights. “Hot damn we’re gonna get ‘em.”
He feels it too, Jake thought. With the track radar locked on the target the computer was getting the most accurate information possible on azimuth and elevation angle.
On this October night in 1972, Devil 505 closed the target, a “suspected truck park,” jargon for penciled triangle on a map where the unknown person who picked the targets thought the North VietNamese might have some trucks parked under the trees, away from the prying eyes of aerial photography.
Trucks or no trucks, the target was only a place in the forest.
The bomb run was all that existed now for Jake Grafton. His life seemed compressed into this moment without past or future. Everything depended on him well he flew Devil 505 to that precise point in space where the computer would release the bombs to impact upon the target.
The release marker on the vdi marched relentlessly toward the bottom of the display as the plane raced at 490 knots. At the instant the marker disappear the 500-pound bombs were jettisoned from the bomb racks. Both men felt a series of jolts, a physical reminder that they had pulled a trigger. The attack literally was extinguished when the last weapon was released and only then did Grafton bank left and glance outside. Tracers and muzzle flashes etched the night. “Look back,” he told the bombardier as he flew the aircraft through the turn.
Morgan McPherson looked over the pilot’s shoulder in the direction of the target, obscured by darkness. He saw the explosions of the bombs-death flashes-twelve in two-thirds of a second. Jake saw the detonations in his rear-view mirror and roll out of the turn on an easterly heading. Without the drag of the 500-pounders, the two engines pushed the low fleeing warplane even faster through the night, now 500 knots, almost 600 miles per hour.
“Arm up the RockEyes, Morg.”
