The squadron commander was in his office, photos spread out before him. For an hour he briefed his senior flight commander on what was wanted.
“You’ll have two Bucks to mark target for you, so you should be able to loft and get the hell out of there before the ungodly know what’s hit ’em.”
Williamson found his navigator, the rear-seat man the Americans call the wizzo, who nowadays does a lot more than navigate, being in charge of air electronics and weapons systems. Flight Lieutenant Sid Blair was reputed to be able to find a tin can in the Sahara if it needed bombing.
Between them, with the aid of the Operations people, they mapped out the mission. The exact location of the junkyard was found, from its grid reference, on their air maps.
The pilot made plain that he wanted to attack from the east at the very moment of the rising of the sun, so that any Iraqi gunners would have the light in their eyes while he, Williamson, would see the target with complete clarity.
Blair insisted he wanted a “stone bonker,” some unmistakable landmark along the run-in track by which he could make tiny last-minute adjustments on his course-to-steer. They found one twelve miles back from the target in an easterly direction—a radio mast exactly one mile from the run-in track.
Going in at dawn would give them the vital Time on Target, or TOT, that they needed. The reason the TOT must be followed to the second is that precision makes the difference between success and failure.
If the first pilot is late even by one second, the follow-up pilot could run right into the explosion of his colleague’s bombs; worse, the first pilot will have a Tornado coming up on his rear at nearly ten miles a minute—not a pretty sight. Finally, if the first pilot is too early or the second pilot too late, the gunners will have time to wake up, man their guns, and aim them. So the second fliers go in just as the shrapnel of the first explosions subside.
Williamson brought in his wingman and the second navigator, two young flight lieutenants, Peter Johns and Nicky Tyne. The precise moment the sun should rise over the low hills to the east of the target was agreed at 0708 hours, and the attack heading at 270 degrees due west.
Two Buccaneers from the 12th Squadron, also based at Maharraq, had been assigned. Williamson would liaise with their pilots in the morning. The armorers had been instructed to fit three one-thousand-pound bombs equipped with PAVEWAY laser-guidance noses to each Tornado. At eight that night, the four aircrew ate and went to bed, with a morning call set for threeA.M.
It was still pitch-black when an aircraftman in a truck came to the 608th Squadron’s sleeping quarters to take the four crewmen to the flight hut.
If the Americans at Al Kharz were roughing it under canvas, those based on Bahrain enjoyed the comfort of civilized living. Some were bunking two to a room at the Sheraton Hotel. Others were in brick-built bachelor quarters nearer the air base. The food was excellent, drink was available, and the worst loneliness of the combat life was assuaged by the presence of three hundred female trainee flight attendants at the nearby training school of Gulf Air.
The Buccaneers had been brought out to the Gulf only a week earlier, having first been told they were not wanted. Since then, they had more than proved their worth. Essentially submarine-busters, the Bucks were more accustomed to skimming the waters of the North Sea looking for Soviet submersibles, but they did not mind the desert either.
Their speciality was low flying, and although they were thirty-year-old veterans, they had been known, in interservice war games with the USAF at the Navy Fighter School in Miramar, California, to evade the much faster American fighters simply by “eating dirt”—flying so low as to become impossible to follow through the buttes and mesas of the desert.
The inter-air-force rivalry will have it that the Americans do not like low flying and under five hundred feet tend to lower their undercarriages, whereas the Royal Air Force love it and above one hundred feet complain of altitude sickness. In fact, both can fly low or high, but the Bucks, not supersonic but amazingly maneuverable, figure they can go lower than anyone and survive.
The reason for their appearance in the Gulf was the original losses sustained by the Tornados on their first ultra-low-level missions. Working alone, the Tornados had to launch their bombs and then follow them all the way to the target, right into the heart of the triple-A. But when they and the Buccaneers worked together, the Tornados’ bombs carried the laser-seeking PAVEWAY nose cone, while the Bucks bore the laser transmitter, called PAVESPIKE. Riding above and behind a Tornado, a Buck could “mark” the target, letting the Tornado release the bomb and then get the hell out without delay.
Moreover, the Buck’s PAVESPIKE was mounted in a gyroscopically stabilized gimbal in its belly, so that it too could twist and weave, while keeping the laser beam right on the target until the bomb arrived and hit.
In the flight hut, Williamson and the two Buck pilots agreed to set their IP—Initial Point, the start of the bomb 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. T
hrough 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.
In the CENTAF headquarters on Old Airport Road, the delight of Steve Laing and Chip Barber that the Fist of God had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.
Chapter 19
Brigadier Hassan Rahmani sat in his private office in the Mukhabarat building in Mansour and contemplated the events of the previous twenty-four hours with near despair.
That the principal military and war-production centers of his country were being systematically torn apart by bombs and rockets did not worry him. These developments, predicted by him weeks before, simply brought closer the pending American invasion and the fall from office of the man from Tikrit.
It was something he had planned for, longed for, and confidently expected, unaware on that midday of February 1991 that it was not going to happen. Rahmani was a highly intelligent man, but he did not have a crystal ball.
What concerned him that morning was his own survival, the odds that he would live to see the day of Saddam Hussein’s fall.
The bombing at dawn of the previous day of the nuclear engineering plant at Al Qubai, so cunningly disguised that no one had ever envisaged its discovery, had shaken the power elite of Baghdad to its roots.
Within minutes of the departure of the two British bombers, the surviving gunners had been in contact with Baghdad to report the attack. On hearing of the event, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar had personally leaped into his car and driven to the spot to check on his underground staff. He was beside himself with rage and by noon had complained bitterly to Hussein Kamil, under whose Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization the entire nuclear program reposed.
Here was a program, the diminutive scientist had reportedly screamed at Saddam’s son-in-law, that out of a total arms expenditure of $50 billion in a decade had alone consumed $8 billion, and at the very moment of its triumph it was being destroyed. Could the state offer no protection to his people?
The Iraqi physicist might have stood a whisker over five feet and been built like a mosquito, but in terms of influence he packed quite a punch, and the word was that he had gone on and on.
A chastened Hussein Kamil had reported to his father-in-law, who had also been consumed by a transport of rage. When that happened, all Baghdad trembled for its life.
The scientists underground had not only survived but escaped, for the factory included a narrow tunnel leading half a mile under the desert and terminating in a circular shaft with handrails in the wall. The personnel had emerged this way, but it would be impossible to move heavy machinery through the same tunnel and shaft.
The main elevator and
cargo hoist was a twisted wreck from the surface down to a depth of twenty feet.
Restoring it would be a major engineering feat occupying weeks—weeks that Hassan Rahmani suspected Iraq did not have.
Had that been the end of the matter, he would simply have been relieved, for he had been a deeply worried man since that conference at the palace before the air war began, when Saddam had revealed the existence of “his” device.
What now worried Rahmani was the crazed rage of his head of state. Deputy President Izzat Ibrahim had called him shortly after noon of the previous day, and the head of Counterintelligence had never known Saddam’s closest confidant to be in such a state.
Ibrahim had told him the Rais was beside himself with anger, and when that happened, blood usually spilled. Only this could appease the rage of the man from Tikrit. The Deputy President had made plain that it was expected that he—Rahmani—would produce results, and fast. “What results, precisely, did you have in mind?” he had asked Ibrahim. “Find out,” Ibrahim had yelled at him, “how they knew.”
Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to” their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was assumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs.
From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view—and several of their officers were Western-trained—was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike. No way.
So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a scrap metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully.
The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them.