Basher Five-Two (3 page)

I waited twenty seconds after Wilbur started his takeoff roll—this was a necessary time span so that we wouldn’t collide in the clouds—before I took my feet off the brakes and pushed my throttle forward. Gliding smoothly down the runway with a sure, steady motion, I pushed further on the throttle until I was at full afterburner. This injected fuel into the engine’s hot exhaust stream and created thrust, the power for a quick takeoff. I felt as if I were being shot into space with a slingshot.

Liftoff speed was 200 miles an hour, which I had reached in a matter of seconds. I made a lightning-speed
check of my instruments to be certain there were, no systems failures or need for an emergency landing. In the next second, before the plane reached 330 miles an hour, I pulled up my landing gear. That speed is critical. The landing gear is fragile, and if a pilot waits too long to pull it up, high air speeds can do serious damage when the gear is in motion. Everything in the F-16 happens in what seems like microseconds. Reflexes mean a lot.

I looked at my watch, an old but expensive Rolex that had been a gift from my dad several years before. It was 1:15
P.M
., Aviano time, and I was feeling on top of the world.

I
broke through scattered cloud cover at 12,000 feet and stared into a magnificently clear sky. I had already locked on to Wilbur with my radar, and now fixed my airspeed so that I would stay two miles behind him. At our current speed, we could cover two miles in all of twenty seconds.

“Two is visual,” I radioed to Wilbur on our interflight frequency. This meant that I had him in my sights.

“Clear to rejoin,” he replied. We were now over the Adriatic Sea and would be in Bosnian airspace in about fifteen minutes. I closed the gap between us until we were in fingertip formation. We flew side by side, separated only by a few feet, and held our positions. This allowed Wilbur and me to make a visual inspection of each others aircraft, to make sure that there were no fluid leaks and that all external systems were working. We also tested our chaff and flares, both part of the F-16’s defense system. Chaff was a substance like tinfoil that was discharged from the plane to give enemy radar a false image to read. Flares were discharged to try to attract incoming heat-seeking missiles away from our planes.

Everything looked perfect. Inspection over, we moved
into a formation known as tactical line abreast. As the wingman, I flew a mile and a half from Wilbur and about 2,000 feet above him. Wilburs role was to lead our mission and to be the eyes and ears of our two-ship element. My responsibility was to maintain the basic flight formation and to support Wilbur in his decisions during the mission. We were now at 27,000 feet and cruising at 500 miles an hour, an altitude and speed similar to those of a commercial jetliner. The only difference was, we were flying over unfriendly territory.

Our flight pattern carried us over the lush, green boundary separating Croatia and Bosnia, just south of a city named Bihac. We were running into a fair amount of clouds, and the air was choppy, but we decided to establish our combat air patrol, or “cap.” We patrolled the skies by flying an oval pattern, similar to the shape of a racetrack, with each leg covering about twenty-five miles. Each oval took about eight minutes to complete, including making the two 180-degree counterclockwise turns. Flying the same pattern over and over might sound boring, but you never knew who would try to enter the no-fly zone. This was called our “vul” time, when we were vulnerable over hostile territory. A few minutes after we started our vul time, our radars showed a low-flying aircraft to the west, near the Udbina airfield. This was the stronghold of the Krajanian Serbs, and they were an aggressive bunch. Sixteen months earlier, despite NATO
planes protecting the no-fly zone, the Krajanian Serbs had boldly launched an air attack against Muslim sites in Bosnia. To show that we meant business, NATO pilots had had to shoot down four Serbian jets.

The lone plane stayed clear of the no-fly zone, avoiding any hostile action by me.

After about an hour of combat air patrol, we began to run low on fuel. The F-16 uses an enormous amount of fuel—a mixture of kerosene and gasoline, about 10,000 pounds for every hour and a half of flying. That’s the same as a car getting two or three miles to the gallon. Following Wilbur’s lead, I headed back over the Adriatic to meet our specially equipped Boeing 707 plane. This was our airborne gas station. While I “parked” on the tanker’s wing, Wilbur took a position directly under the fuselage of the 707. As we all flew at the same speed, Wilbur flipped a toggle switch to open his fuel door, which sat right behind his cockpit. At the same time, the operator of the 707 extended a boom and probe—like a gas hose—into Wilbur’s open fuel tank. Then it was just like any other gas station. The pump was turned on, and you waited until your gauge showed Full.

After Wilburs turn it was mine, and I passed the seven-minute refueling time talking to the tanker crew on my intercom. I discovered one of the crew was a former “Juvat,” a pilot with the Eightieth Fighter Squadron in Korea, with whom I had served a tour of duty. We Juvats,
past and present, were a tight bunch. We even had a squadron coin that summed up our close bonds. The coin read: “You will always be a Juvat no matter where you go.”

“Audentes fortuna juvat,
” I called out to my fellow Juvat as I left the tanker. The Latin words were our squadron’s motto: “Fortune favors the bold.”

For our second vul time, Wilbur led me slightly north of our last location, in search of better weather. Finding a relatively clear patch of sky, we settled into our routine. Instead of running our ovals northwest and southeast as we had last time, we rotated to due west and east. I was 1,000 feet above Wilbur and continually moved my eyes between the sky and the dials and digital instruments in front of me. While we had no reason to worry about anything specific, we knew to stay far away from the Bosnian Serbs’ SAM rings to the north and to the east. SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were a definite threat to an F-16, even with our high-tech defense systems.

What Wilbur and I had no way of knowing was that a Bosnian Serb unit had secretly trucked a SAM battery into an area underneath where we were patrolling. And their missiles were already lined up, ready to fire at us.

The first sign of trouble came when Wilbur’s threat warning system showed a blip on his screen. He had been “spiked,” spotted by radar on the ground. By itself, this was no major concern. In Bosnia, radar was extremely common as a general tracking device, much like traffic
control centers at major airports. A blip on a screen wasn’t necessarily connected with missiles. But the F-16’s electronics could pick out different types of radar. Wilbur had been spiked by “acquisition,” or threat, radar—the kind that SAM operators liked to use. With threat radar, the enemy can learn enough about a plane’s location, speed, and flight pattern to launch a missile in seconds.

“Basher Five-One, mud six, bearing zero-nine-zero,” Wilbur radioed to me on our open frequency. He wanted me to know there was possibly threat radar to the east.

“Basher Five-Two naked,” I shot back. That told him my threat warning system hadn’t picked up anything.

On the same open radio frequency, I listened for Magic, NATO’s nearby airborne command center. Equipped with special intel electronics, the airborne center served to help pilots as an early warning system. In touch with spy satellites and U-2 spy planes, Magic could tell Wilbur and me if there was active radar from the SAM rings to the north and to the east as well as in any other location. If the radar was coming from the north and the east, we didn’t have to worry because we were out of their missiles’ range. The blip on Wilbur’s threat warning system would have been a false alarm.

It took Magic only seconds to get back to us. “Basher Five One,” a calm voice called over our radios, “your mud six report is uncorrelated.”

Magic was saying that they couldn’t really confirm where the radar was coming from. Cautiously, Wilbur and I continued to fly our ovals. At exactly 3:03
P.M.
, Aviano time,
my
threat warning system showed a bright blip. I stared at my console in disbelief. At the same time, an alarm shrilled over my headset. I had been spiked by threat radar.

Forget any threat from the north. This was coming from due east, just like the one Wilbur had picked up. Could it really be a second false alarm? My stomach did a flip.

“Basher Five-Two, mud six, bearing zero-nine-zero,” I said into my radio.

“Basher Five-One naked,” Wilbur reported back.

Our roles had been reversed. It was now my turn to be hunted. I knew I had to prepare myself for the worst. Through my canopy I scanned the skies for any evidence of a missile. The actual rocket that fires a SAM leaves a trail of white smoke. That smoke is a pilot’s only chance to make a visual identification. Once the rocket turns off, the smoke stops. Then the missile sails on toward its target, silent and deadly, at a speed almost twice as fast as my F-16.

Seeing nothing in the sky, my eyes swam back to the video display on my threat warning system. The bright blip had not gone away, which meant I was still being
spiked. A moment later, a second alarm blared over my headset. My glance jumped back to my screen. A new warning was there, brighter than the one before.

This was all happening in seconds. Split seconds. But it was long enough for me to understand I had just been locked up by a target-tracking radar. This was the type that guided a missile to its target. While I didn’t know it, Magic had received information from a spy satellite that there were missiles right below Wilbur and me, but because of a garbled radio communication, we never got the message. It hardly mattered. My instrument panel had already delivered the bad news.

I was in somebody’s deadly sights. As I thought out the meaning of those words, I realized a missile might already have been launched. I was angry that we had all been outsmarted by the enemy, but I tried to stay calm. This was what our years of training had prepared us for, and I was ready.

A programmed voice from the plane’s computer system rang out over my headset. “Counter, counter.”

A second later, a brilliant red flash lit up the sky between Wilbur and me. A missile had passed between us, just missing us both. My heart sped up. I knew that SAMs were usually launched in packages of two. The chances were likely that another missile was already in the air, coming straight at me. As the adrenaline pumped through my veins, my thumb traveled down to the button
that would release my chaff and flares. At the same time, I thought about pushing my aircraft into a series of steep climbs and dives to avoid the missile.

I had time to do neither. What happened in the next tick of a second, I’m not sure. Wilbur would later tell me that he had screamed over the radio, “Missiles in the air!” I never heard him. What I did hear was a thunderous roar that almost shattered my eardrums. Then came a blow like nothing I had ever felt. It was like getting rear-ended by an 18-wheeler with a rocket tied to its front grill.

The missile had found its mark.

A burst of flames and intense heat spread through my cockpit. I began to pitch and roll wildly. It felt as if a giant hand had reached down, grabbed me with brute force, and shaken me in a frenzy. What was left of my plane was like a straw in the wind, totally out of control.

For all its space-age electronics, its supersonic speed, its defensive powers, the F-16 is not perfect. In the blink of an eye, it can be turned from the prince of the skies into a burning scrap heap of wire and twisted metal. The missile had blindsided me, coming up through cloud cover below. It had struck the plane’s underbelly, hitting one of the fuel tanks and cutting my F-16 in two. It took me another moment to understand. The nose and cockpit had broken away—and I was now in a free fall to Earth.

As I spun out of control, I worried about blacking out from the sudden and unexpected G forces. I watched my
console break and twist apart before me. My mind was outracing my ability to react. Flames from the exploding gas tank had found a crack between my oxygen mask and visor. They had also reached the back of my neck. Part of me was waiting for the cockpit to explode. Somehow, the heat and the pain and the insanity of the moment focused my thoughts.

Dear God,
I prayed,
please don’t let me die now—don’t let me die from this.

I gazed down, through the flames, and saw a fat yellow handle attached to my seat. The handle pushed up between my legs, bigger than life, staring at me like the miracle I took it to be. The beautiful words stamped across the top were impossible to miss, even in the fire and smoke:
PULL TO EJECT.

I had no idea how much time had passed since the missile had struck. In reality it had been only seconds. It felt like an eternity. I knew I wasn’t waiting much longer. For another microsecond, I worried that my damaged canopy wouldn’t open, or if it did, that the seat wouldn’t eject. But I really didn’t have time to worry.

My left hand dropped down to the handle, and I pulled with all my might.

S
trictly speaking, birds and insects are the only creatures born to fly. But I was ready to join them in the sky at a very early age.

Before we moved to Spokane, my family lived in Long Beach, California, where my dad had a private pilot’s license. At age six, I flew with him in a snappy red-and-white two-seater Cessna 150 to Catalina Island, twenty-six miles away. The 150 was a slow, steady machine, nothing glamorous, but for my first voyage it felt as if I were moving faster than a speeding bullet. Below, the tiny dots of houses and swimming pools slipped by in seconds. As we headed out over the Pacific and I saw the gray waves crashing in formation against the shore, I thought there was no other place to be but up in the heavens. After we landed, the Catalina airport tower honored me with a certificate for my first flight, a piece of paper I proudly signed and have kept to this day.