Everything is still dark, so you stay on the instruments. You hear radio calls coming from everywhere, from planes hundreds of miles away and from planes just a few miles away. Slowly, the real poop starts to-filter in: wingman’s up, wingman’s got you locked on his radar so he can catch up without the carrier’s radar or the E-2 Hawkeye’s radar operators vectoring in. Vector to the tanker — an F-14 sucks a lot of gas for takeoff, and the good guys are three hundred miles and a quarter-tank of gas away still. Check the cockpit, get a check from your RIO — Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant JG Bob “Bear” Blevin — check oxygen and pressurization, check weapons, check everything.
Soon the sounds of the hostile area filtered in. An Air Force reconnaissance plane is less than a hundred miles from the Philippines, within pissing distance of Chinese warships. Intelligence says Chinese patrol planes, with fighter escorts, might be up. They say the Chinese ships might have antiair missiles and guns and might just shoot first and ask questions later. Great. With nothing but black surrounding you, you feel more alone than you’ve ever felt before — there’s nothing but miles of ocean between you and dry land or deck.
Things happen too quickly, even though the Air Force plane is hundreds of miles away. Blevin makes radio contact with the KA-6 tanker, and they maneuver to intercept. The small KA-6 will transfer only a few thousand pounds of fuel, but it’s better to fly overwater with full tanks as much as possible in case of trouble.
Night aerial refueling ranks right up there with night catapult shots in the anxiety department. Povik has to drive up behind the KA-6 tanker, find a tiny four-foot-diameter lighted basket, and stick a three-inch nozzle inside it by maneuvering his forty-five-ton air machine around it. Meanwhile, the KA-6 is turning in a racetrack pattern so it won’t fly too far from the carrier, which makes the hookup even more difficult. With gentle coaching from Blevin, Povik made the hookup on the second try, and he managed to stay hooked up and made the transfer all at once. He maintained visual contact on the tanker while his wingman made contact and got his gas, and then they got a vector from their E-2C Hawkeye radar plane controller to the west.
No sooner had they finished refueling, and they were transferred to the Air Force E-3 AWACS radar plane’s controller, who was providing air coverage for all the planes operating near the Philippines. The Navy guys had trained a few times with Air Force controllers, but they still used different terminology and never seemed to shut up — they seemed determined to read off every number on their radar screens and let the fighter crews work their own navigation solutions. But after filtering out the chatter — obviously those AWACS guys were nervous too — Povik and his wingman in Bullet Five were vectored in to visual range of an Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane. It looked like a KC-135 tanker, but without the refueling boom and with lots of odd bumps and antennas all over it.
All that, from cat shot to now, took less than an hour. Now they had unidentified aircraft bearing down on them. Povik didn’t even have time to get himself comfortably situated, get his heads-up display set up just right, and tighten his straps — the fight was starting right
“Bullet flight, take spacing and check your lights,” Povik radioed to his wingman. He turned to check that his wingman was configured properly — no missing missiles, lights off, nothing funny-looking out there — before he disappeared into the darkness. Now they were relying on the Air Force AWACS controller to keep them separated, yet working as a team as they prosecuted these bandits.
“Bullet flight, this is Basket. Four bandits twelve o’clock, Blue plus twenty, flight lev — er, angels fifteen. Possible second flight of two bandits, angels ten.” The AWACS controller was trying hard to use Navy terminology for this intercept, such as “angels” for “thousands of feet” or “port” and “starboard” for “left” and “right,” but the more excited he got the more he was stumbling over his tongue. “Starboard ten for intercept.”
“Bullet flight copies.” Povik’s backseater could just as easily lock onto the incoming Chinese fighters with his AWG-9 radar, but the radar emissions could be detected at incredible distances and the longer he kept his radar off the more they kept the element of surprise.
Just then they heard on the international Guard radio channel: “Unidentified aircraft at ten thousand meters altitude — this is fighter unit seven.” The accent was heavily Oriental, not Spanish or Filipino — but Chinese. “You have violated restricted airspace. You will reverse course and drop your landing gear immediately.”
“Bullet flight, additional bandits departing Zamboanga area,” the AWACS controller radioed on the air frequency. “Number unknown at this time.”
“Range from the bandits to Flashlight?” Povik said.
