Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age by Boyne Walter J

Author:Boyne, Walter J. [Boyne, Walter J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765308450
Google: 0VAcnwEACAAJ
Amazon: B002ASFQ8G
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2009-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

January 17, 1991

En Route to Baghdad

THIS WAS IT. Tonight the stealth fighter was going to prove whether Ben Rich or Kelly Johnson was right. Johnson had died just the previous month and was considered by many to be the greatest aeronautical engineer of the twentieth century. He had always insisted that the F-117A was a mistake, that its angular-faceted shape was an aerodynamic monstrosity. He felt it would never be useful as a warplane. Fortunately Ben Rich, another improbably creative engineer, knew, for one of the few times of his life, that his longtime mentor was wrong.

V. R. Shannon fervently hoped Rich was indeed correct. He’d taken the Nighthawk into combat once before, in Panama, and things had not gone as well as he wished. Tonight they were beginning Operation Desert Storm, attacking one of the toughest integrated air defense systems in the world. They would prove—or disprove—the value of stealth once and for all.

His Nighthawk was one of the ten Lockheed F-117As of the 415th Tactical Fighter Squadron that had rumbled down the runway at 0022 hours. His fellow pilots called the isolated field at Khamis Mushait in Saudi Arabia “Tonopah East” for its sixty-eight-hundred-foot-high elevation and the uncanny similarity of the surrounding mountains.

The Nighthawks were one part of a simultaneous one-two-three punch designed to take out Iraqi air defenses. At sea, mixing the past and the future, a battleship and two cruisers stood by ready to launch Tomahawk surface-to-surface cruise missiles. At the same time, Task Force Normandy, a lethal joint strike force of Air Force Pave Low and Army Apache helicopters, was ready to attack key air defense positions deep in Iraq. All three of the assault units were pathfinders, opening the electronic gate to Iraq for the heavy assault forces—B-52s, F-15s, F-16s, and many others.

The first refueling had gone well. The tankers, airborne since just after midnight, orbited dangerously close to Iraqi airspace, just as they had done so many nights before, always with the intent of lulling Iraqi defenses. Tonight would be a night just like any others for the Iraqis—until the attack began.

The three strike forces were but the tip of the massive United Nations’ spear. At other bases all across Saudi Arabia and other supportive nations in the Gulf, hundreds of fighters, bombers, reconnaissance, electronic countermeasure, and support aircraft were airborne. A flight of Boeing B-52Gs was inbound from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, flying the longest combat mission in history, ready to fire their air-launched cruise missiles at Baghdad. The crowded decks of huge Navy aircraft carriers in the Red Sea and the lower Persian Gulf were alive with action as they prepared for the assault. AWACS aircraft, another of Bob Rodriquez’s great contributions, orbited just as they did every other night, also looking perfectly routine to the sleepy Iraqi observers, but ready to orchestrate the attack.

There was an hour to go before bombs away and V. R. had to force himself to think of other things than the capability of Baghdad’s air defenses.

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