“Give me the grid reference.”
No one could expect the analysts to memorize hundreds of confusing Arab place names, the more so as in some cases a single name covered ten separate targets, so all targets were given a grid reference by the Global Positioning System, which pinned them down to twelve digits, a square fifty yards by fifty.
When he bombed the huge factory at Tarmiya, Don Walker had noted that reference, which was attached to his debriefing report.
“It’s not here,” protested the colonel. “It’s not even a goddam target. Who zapped it?”
“Some pilot from the 336th at Al Kharz. Missed out on his first two assigned targets through no fault of his own. Didn’t want to come home with full racks, I guess.”
“Asshole,” muttered the colonel. “Okay, give it to BDA anyway. But low priority. Don’t waste film on it.”
Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary sat at the controls of his F-14 Tomcat. He was a very frustrated man.
Beneath him the great gray bulk of the carrier USS Ranger had her nose into the light breeze and was making twenty-seven knots through the water. The sea of the northern Gulf was dead calm in the predawn, and the sky would soon be bright and blue. It ought to have been a day of pleasure for a young Navy pilot flying one of the world’s best fighter planes.
Nicknamed “the Fleet Defender,” the twin-finned two-man Tomcat had come to a wider audience when it starred in the film Top Gun . Its cockpit is probably the most sought-after chair in American combat aviation, certainly in Navy flying, and to be at the controls of such an airplane on such a lovely day just a week after arriving on station in the Gulf should have made Darren Cleary very happy. The reason for his misery was that he was assigned not to a combat mission but to BDA, “taking happy snapshots,” as he had complained the night before. He had beseeched the squadron operations officer to let him go hunting MiGs, but to no avail.
“Someone’s got to do it,” was his answer. Like all air-superiority combat pilots among the Allies in the Gulf War, Cleary feared that the Iraqi jets would leave the skies after a few days, putting an end to any chance to tangle.
So to his chagrin, he had been “fragged”—assigned—to a TARPS mission.
Behind him and his flight officer, two General Electric jet engines rumbled away as the deck crew hooked him up the steam catapult on the angled flight deck, pointing his nose slightly off the centerline of the Ranger . Cleary waited, throttle in his left hand, control column steady and neutral in his right, as the last preparations were made. Finally the terse inquiry, the nod, and that great blast of power as the throttle went forward, right through the gate into afterburn, and the catapult threw him and 68,000
pounds of warplane from zero to 150 knots in three seconds.
The gray steel of the Ranger vanished behind him, and the dark sea flashed below. The Tomcat felt for the rushing air around her, sensed its support, and climbed smoothly away for the lightening sky.
It would be a four-hour mission with two refuels. He had twelve targets to photograph, and he would not be alone. Already up ahead of him was an A-6 Avenger with laser-guided bombs in case they should run into antiaircraft artillery, in which eventuality the Avenger would teach the Iraqi gunners to be quiet.
An EA-6B Prowler was coming on the same mission, armed with HARMs in case they ran into a SAM
missile site guided by radar. The Prowler would use its HARMs to blow away the radar, and the Avenger would employ its bombs on the missiles.
In case the Iraqi Air Force showed up, two more Tomcats would be riding shotgun, above and to either side of the photographer, their powerful AWG-9 in-air radars capable of discerning the Iraqi pilot’s inside leg measurement before he got out of bed.
All this metal and technology was to protect what hung below and behind Darren Cleary’s feet, a Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System, or TARPS. Hanging slightly right of the Tomcat’s centerline, the TARPS resembled a streamlined coffin seventeen feet long. It was rather more complicated than a tourist’s Pentax.
In its nose was a powerful frame camera with two positions: forward-and-down, or straight down.
Behind it was the panoramic camera looking outward, sideways, and down. Behind that was the infrared Reconnaissance Set, designed to record thermal (heat) imaging and its source. In a final twist, the pilot could see on his Head-Up Display inside his cockpit what he was photographing while still overhead.
Darren Cleary climbed to fifteen thousand feet, met up with the rest of his escorts, and they proceeded to link with their assigned KC-135 tanker just south of the Iraqi border.
Without being troubled by Iraqi resistance, Cleary photographed the eleven principal targets he had been assigned, then turned back over Tarmiya for the secondary-i
nterest twelfth location.
As he went over Tarmiya, he glanced at his display and muttered, “What the fuck is that?” This was the moment the last of the 750 frames in each of his main cameras chose to run out.
After a second refuel the mission landed back on the Ranger without incident. The deck crew downloaded the cameras and took them off to the photo lab for development to negatives.
Cleary was debriefed on an uneventful mission, then went down to the light table with the intelligence officer. As the negatives came up on the screen with the white-light underneath, Cleary explained what each frame was and where it had come from. The intel officer made notes for his own report, which would be attached to Cleary’s, plus the photos.
When they came to the last twenty frames, the intel officer asked, “What are these?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Cleary. “They come from that target at Tarmiya. You remember—the one Riyadh tacked on at the last moment?”
“Yeah. So what are those things inside the factory?”