The Warbirds (12 page)

“We’re here to write an after-action report, not ax anyone,” Waters told him, trying to keep the irritation he felt out of his voice. “John and I go back a long way; you want me to ignore him?”

Blevins shrugged, said nothing. Besides, the damn heat had given him an underarm rash. He’d better see a medic.

Shaw met them as they walked into his office, offering coffee.

Waters was ready to get down to work. “John, Sundown sent us here to take an in-depth look at the Grain King incident. He’s interested in everything that happened and sees it as a chance for us to learn some lessons about operating in this part of the world. He also wants to know why the alert birds were scrambled without missiles…”

Shaw allowed a grin. “I’ve got a classified file an inch thick on that. You should see some of the messages we’ve gotten back from headquarters in reply to our requests for
permission to upload missiles on the alert birds. I think you should read the file. The general is going to get his eyes watered.”

“Colonel Shaw,” Blevins said, “are you saying higher headquarters specifically ordered you not to upload missiles for the scramble on Grain King?”

“No, it doesn’t work that way. We—”

“Did you specifically request to upload missiles when you were placed on cockpit alert?”

“No, I don’t think it would have done any good—”

“But you didn’t even try to use your command net to get permission. Is that correct?”

Shaw nodded.

Blevins was on a roll now. While still a captain he had chosen the Pentagon’s bureaucracy as the path to promotion, seeing the nice, orderly flow of information, orders, supplies and personnel as the real strength of the Air Force. To his way of thinking, jet jockies were just freewheeling incompetents who disrupted the proper way of doing business. In a way he felt it was his job to protect the Air Force from people like Waters and Shaw.

“Colonel Shaw, I’d like to have the complete file immediately.”

Shaw stared at Blevins. Waters didn’t try to suppress his shock. The wing commander’s eyes narrowed as he dissected the man, grudgingly conceding that for all his flabbiness and rigid attitude he did at least present a neat and professional appearance: firm jaw, slightly gray hair, chiseled mouth—all fitted the image of the very model of a modern Air Force officer. The image earned the promotions, Shaw decided. He clamped a control on his anger at Blevins’ insinuation that the file might be purged before he saw it, casually picked up a phone and called his first sergeant.

“Mort, bring in every scrap of paper, message, memo for the record, notes, anything and everything we’ve got on arming the alert birds to my office. Sign them all over to Colonel Blevins.”

Sitting the phone down he continued to stare at the colonel, appreciating how accurate Mort Pullman’s report on
Blevins had been. “I think you’ll have everything you want in a few moments. Satisfactory?”

A sharp knock at the door announced Chief Pullman, who quickly entered and handed over a thick file to Blevins. “Please sign here, sir,” he said.

Blevins scribbled his name on the sign-out record, not recognizing the chief as the driver from the night before.

Shaw wondered why Cunningham had teamed Blevins with his friend Waters. Well, he never could understand Sundown’s logic. Who the hell could?…He turned to Waters, “Any other reason Sundown sent you here?”

Waters set the coffee cup down and opened his briefcase, trying to hide the disgust he felt at Blevins’ demand for immediate control of the file. An IG team would have done that. “I think this’ll help. Here’s the memo Dick Stevens gave me.”

Blevins instantly felt threatened as Waters handed Shaw the memo drafted by Cunningham’s aide. Any indication of such close cooperation made him uneasy.

Shaw read the memo and Waters felt better as he watched the colonel’s face, knowing what was in the memo. After reading it a second time, Shaw’s adrenaline was pumping. “Lord, Muddy, this is what we’re all about.” His excitement filled the room, crowding the problem of the missiles and Grain King into a corner, and with it Eugene Blevins. “Let me get my people working on it.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment from Waters, Shaw was on the telephone, ordering up a staff meeting in thirty minutes.

Chief Pullman found two offices for Waters and Blevins in wing headquarters to work out of and a smaller office in the command post for Sara. Waters decided to send Sara over to the squadron to meet the aircrews that flew in the engagement and get a copy of the videocassette tape of the mission debrief. He knew the F-4 jocks would try to do a snow job on her. Not realizing they were dealing with a first-class mind as well as body, they would likely reveal more than they should to impress her.

After Sara left for the squadron Waters closed the door
for a private chat with Blevins. “Gene, have you ever been assigned to a fighter wing?”

Blevins shook his head. “I’ve been at headquarters at SAC, DIA and now the Pentagon.
That’s
where the action is.”

“Operational wings are the cutting edge of the Air Force, Gene. Shaw is responsible for about forty-five hundred personnel and their dependents, seventy-two aircraft, a munitions dump that can destroy cities and God knows what else. It’s an awesome responsibility few men have to live with. Please remember that when you’re dealing with him.” Waters knew he would never convince Blevins but at least he figured to slow him down. “Most of the generals we work for have been wing commanders. They tend to support wing commanders when there’s a pissing contest with staff officers like you and me. Remember, the commander of Third Air Force handpicked Shaw…”

Blevins well understood power struggles, and the commander of Third was a three-star general who might serve on the brigadier general promotion board. Waters had gotten his attention.

Sara waited in the 379th to meet Lieutenant Colonel Fairly. She had not been lonely, for Thunder and Nelson had exercised proprietary rights until Fairly returned from a flight.

Like most men who first met her, Johnny Nelson wanted to make a good impression, even hoped he had an inside track. “What the weapons systems officer is all about is this…They call us the GIB, for guy in back, or the pitter, because we fly in the pit or back-seat, or wizzo, which is short for Weapons Systems Officer, also known as WSO. Those are polite names they call us.”

Thunder broke in then, steering the conversation. “We’re sort of a combination bombardier, co-pilot, navigator and radar operator. We also operate the radio and the RHAW gear, that’s our Radar Homing and Warning system. It can get pretty busy back there.”

“You mean you can fly the plane like a pilot?” she asked.

“Sure.” Thunder grinned. “Jack, my nose gunner, lets
me fly it all the time, and sometimes land it. But the heavies would have fits if they found out.”

Sara could sense she had been brought into their inner circle when Thunder trusted her with the information about his landing the Phantom. Bryant had deliberately mentioned it, testing her reaction and trying to develop an ally in the game of choosing sides that constantly went on in the Air Force.

“You call Lieutenant Locke your nose gunner when you mean pilot, and everyone seems to have a nickname. How do you keep things straight?”

“We do it to simplify things,” Thunder said. “Our procedures tend to get complicated and it helps to balance out the formality the Air Force wants. You listen to the tapes of when we tangled with the MiGs, you’ll hear the boss call ‘Jack’ over the radio and not use our call sign, Stinger One-Two. We’re, assigned a different call sign every time we fly, which causes confusion when the heat’s on. It’s much easier to remember your wingman’s nickname, his tactical call sign, when you’re mixing it up in a fight.”

“What does the Air Force want?” she asked.

“Official policy is that we’ll use rotating call signs and not tac call signs. When the brass at headquarters hear the tapes they’ll be all over us again to stop using tac call signs. They do get pretty bent out of shape over it.”

“You don’t seem too worried about it.”

Another voice broke into the conversation: “There’s not much anyone can do about it unless they want to fly themselves, and staff officers don’t like taking risks.”

Sara turned, suspecting that he had been standing behind her for a few minutes. She did not like being watched, even when she was aware of it. The name tag on his flight suit belonged to “Lieutenant Jack Locke—Fighter Pilot.” She took him in: just under six feet, athletic and conditioned, an interesting face topped by darkish blond hair. She was glad he didn’t have a moustache like his backseater. Scars over his right eye and along his left jawline marred the symmetry of his features—but his dark blue eyes reached out to her, and like many beautiful women, Sara knew when to bring up her guard.

“Well, Thunder, introduce me to your latest guest,” Jack said.

Waters’ talk about wing commanders moved Blevins to action. He’d show what a good staff officer could do. He carefully read the file Shaw had given him but didn’t have the technical know-how to follow the arguments that went on between the wing and higher headquarters about missile loading and the tactical advantage missiles gave the Phantom. Now he handed the file over to Sara to keep in her office and turned his attention to wing Intelligence, reviewing Intel’s part in the Grain King incident. His years as a photo interpreter for SAC had given him expertise in photometrics and he poured over the reconnaissance photos of the MiG’s crash site. From the first he sensed that something was wrong. He stared hard—then it snapped into place…the crash site was in
Libya
.

He overlapped the photos and measured from known reference points, established the border on the photos in relation to the crash site. No question…the MiG had been shot down in Libya, but the actual border markers on the ground placed the crash site well inside Egypt. Again his photo-interpretation experience helped him. He needed a geodetic survey of the area, found what he was looking for in the back files of Civil Engineering. The answer was right there: a huge magnetic anomaly in the area had thrown off the original boundary survey. When Eugene Blevins attended to what he knew instead of what he pretended to know, he was very good.

Sara had read the thick file on the wing’s request to upload missiles, then turned it and the tapes the squadron had given her over to Waters. The colonel listened as she relayed what the aircrews had said. His hunch about them opening up to her had proved correct: they had given her not only a copy of the tape of the debrief but their gun-camera film, which was really a video tape, and a cassette tape recording that Thunder had made of everything said in his Phantom during the flight.

“Sara, did they talk about missiles?” Waters asked.

“Thunder, he’s Jack’s pitter,” she told him, “said the missile trailers arrived just as they were scrambled.”

Waters grinned at her ready use of fighter lingo. “Okay, find out everything you can about the missiles. Read this file, if you haven’t already. Talk to Munitions and Shaw. Try to get a handle on what happened…”

At ten she left. Waters spent the next two hours listening to and replaying Thunder’s tape. He called Chief Pullman, who delivered a TV set and VCR. “Chief,” Waters asked, “can you get me a copy of the radar tapes from Outpost?”

The first sergeant hesitated. All intelligence-gathering units carefully guarded and controlled their information. Outpost used a small room in the 45th’s large walk-in Intelligence vault to store and process its material. Not only was the vault more secure than the radar site, it removed intelligence activity from Outpost and helped maintain its cover as a lonely GCI radar-control post. Well, Pullman knew how to back-door a copy out of the vault from a sergeant who owed him a favor. “How fast you need it, Colonel? I can have you one in twenty minutes, long as you forget where you got it. Otherwise I can get you one through official channels in about four days.”

“Appreciate it, Chief,” Waters said, understanding the sergeant now held his marker. More important, the sergeant was trusting him.

It turned into a long evening with the tapes. At two
A.M
. Waters knocked off.

The next morning Waters walked into the 379th, asking to talk to Fairly and the other men on the scramble. They found an empty briefing room and for the next three hours went through an entirely different debrief with Waters.

After he left, Jack shook his head. “Where did
he
come from?”

“Calm down,” Thunder told him. “What did you learn?”

“That we flew a shit hot mission, fucked up by the numbers, could have gotten two MiGs without half the hassle if we had done it another way, the Libyans are flying better, and we should be congratulated to hell and back again, big joke.”

“Was he right?” Thunder asked.

Before Jack could answer, Fairly broke in. “He’s right. We’ve been a flying club around here.”

“He didn’t say that—”

“No, I did But that was his message. I think it’s time we started to get our act together.”

Waters gathered his team together in Sara’s small office and began by asking Sara what had happened with the missiles.

“Up front,” she said, “it looks like the Pentagon simply denied the wing permission to upload missiles because the issue is very sensitive with the Egyptians. But it’s not all the Pentagon’s fault. The wing could have done more. They never practiced rapid upload of missiles even though Shaw had told them to start doing it. They could have built a missile-holding area right next to the alert birds. The Russians built weapons bunkers into every revetment. Modifying them would have been simple and cheap. And Colonel Blevins was right; they could have requested permission to upload once they were placed on alert.”

Waters nodded. “And you, Gene?”

Blevins fought to mask the triumph he felt as he told about his discovery of the true location of the crash site. Waters said he had suspected the fight had strayed into Libyan airspace when he reviewed the mission-debrief tape.