Raven One - [4]

The lights of Baghdad loomed larger.

Breathing through his mouth, the pilot realized his throat was bone dry. His eyes tracked the occasional flashes of cruise missile impacts throughout the metro area, which he could see in its entirety through the windscreen. The flashes grew larger as they neared the city.

All around Baghdad, ordered rows of lights lifted slowly and silently from dozens of locations to fill the sky above the city. Some gracefully turned this way and that before they reached their apex and died out. These great tentacles of AAA, almost elegant in their beauty when viewed through the night vision goggles, formed gnarled fingers of light as they, too, looked for something to kill. They wanted to swat down some piece — any piece — of American aluminum so that it made a flaming, cartwheeling plunge toward a fiery impact on the desert floor.

The pilot imagined, if he had to eject, the gunners pointing at his parachute and the raging mob below waiting to beat him senseless — or worse. This is the Cradle of Civilization. The pilot couldn’t help but think of the irony as he neared this web of death at nearly 10 miles a minute.

“Brooms, Excalibur, picture bullseye, single group cold, low.”

“Broom Four One, declare.”

He looked right with a start. His NVG field of view was filled with a Hornet centerline fuel tank and underside coming right at him. Seconds from midair collision, he instinctively pushed nose down. After he managed to recover, he looked up to his left and saw the aircraft stop its leftward slide and come back above him to take station. Did I miss a call? Or did he?

“Brooms, Excalibur, single group bullseye three-five-zero for ten, hot, climbing. Hostile, repeat, hostile.”

Fighters! The Iraqis are coming up! Forgetting his near midair but keeping a wary eye on his wingman, the pilot ran his radar elevation down. A blip immediately appeared, and, with a flick of his thumb, he locked it.

The suppression element miles behind him fired their high-speed, anti-radiation missiles. As the missiles flew above the Buckshot formation, they resembled supersonic sparklers rocketing along unseen tracks, blazing forward to home in on enemy radar emitters and destroy them. That gave the pilots an opportunity to maneuver into a position to fire on the enemy “bandits.” The bandits were coming right at him right now. Yes! Yes, they’re coming! We’re gonna splash these guys!

As he approached the target area, the radio came alive with calls of AAA and radar spikes, check turns and threat locations. For a few seconds, he noticed the contrast between the radio activity and the silent light show in front of them, especially as the impacts of the Tomahawks occurred with a greater frequency and the AAA arcs rose to their altitude. He could make out specks of radiance far to the south — formations of carrier strike aircraft coming up from the Persian Gulf. Right on time, the pilot thought. The slowly rotating tentacles of light grew closer.

He squeezed the trigger. With a lurch, a missile fell from the aircraft and ignited into a giant sun that sprinted ahead with a deep rumbling.

WHOOOMMmmm!

Even as the flash momentarily blinded him, he could see through his goggles that the missile seemed to run like a cheetah after its target. He saw another missile come off his wingman’s aircraft and watched it rise into the star-filled sky toward its target.

Without warning, but accompanied by a muffled boom, he was jolted in his seat by something that slammed into his jet from behind. The airplane rolled right. Full left stick was useless to stop the roll. His headphones erupted into the cries of his airplane’s death throes, recorded by an impassive female voice: Flight Controls. Flight Controls. Engine Right. Engine Right.

Warning and caution lights, too many to comprehend and too many of them red, popped up on the digital displays and lighted panels. As the rotations got tighter and tighter, he saw that the scattered lights on the ground below were also spinning in his windscreen.

“Get out!” he heard someone call over the radio.

Yes, get out! he thought, at the same time he sensed his airspeed increasing. He tore the goggles from his helmet, dropped them on the console and found the handle between his legs. He grasped the handle with his right hand and grabbed his right wrist with his left as he was trained to do. With his back against the seat and elbows in, he pulled.

The pressure and cold of the 500-knot airstream roared into his cockpit void and gripped him hard as the canopy exploded off the airplane. For a moment, he wondered if the seat was going to ignite, but then was compressed into it as the rocket he was sitting on blasted him into space with deafening and painful force as the slipstream violently wrenched helmet and mask from his head. Legs and arms flailing, he tumbled through the darkness…

* * *

When Lieutenant Commander Jim Wilson opened his eyes in the early morning shadows, the first thing he saw was the rack above him in stateroom 02-54-1-L aboard USS