The Seventh Flag Over Texas

By: Dave Morris

CHAPTER ONE

Saturday, July 4th, 3 p.m.

The two air traffic controllers in the tower at Sheppard Air Force Base were discussing bikinis. Every so often, a fuel truck or other vehicle broke in on the radio to request permission to cross the 13,000-foot runway. It was a quiet day, like most weekends now. There were no jet operations planned for today, and the atmosphere in the tower was relaxed.

The sun beamed through the wide open window spaces, and one of the controllers wiped sweat from his forehead as he flipped the pages of a lingerie catalog. "Can you believe anybody would be caught dead wearing this?" he asked, holding up the catalog so the other lieutenant could see the picture.

"Pfff," the other one hissed, then turned to look back out the window. In a distinctly Nebraskan accent, he added: "I like the one in yellow on the other page."

Sheppard AFB, situated in far North Texas a few miles from the Oklahoma border, was home to student jet fighter pilots who were receiving their first training in T-38 jets. Although Sheppard was primarily a training base, on this hot, July 4th afternoon there were also a few F-15 and F-16 tactical fighter aircraft parked on the tarmac. A few years earlier, they would have been tucked away safely in hardened shelters, but the "scramble" aircraft of the cold war era were no longer needed this far inland. The Soviet Union didn't exist any more, and now that it had been split up into its several constituent countries, there wasn't a nation left on earth that could afford to wage war against the United States.

Lieutenant Williams put the catalog on his lap again and leaned back in the chair. "I don't know about the one in yellow. She's too dark for me. Ya know? She'll be like leather when she's fifty."

"That gives you a good... what, 25 years?" the blonde Lieutenant Knudsen said.

The hollow clanking sound of leather dress shoes in a steel stairwell announced the arrival of a third officer into the tower.

"Ahhh!" he said and took in conspicuous, deep breath of air through his nostrils as he reached the top of the stairs. "I love the smell of Jet A in the afternoon!" He beamed with false joy as he surveyed the landscape below through the 360-degree windows. The unmistakable odor of burnt jet exhaust penetrated even the cool, conditioned air of the control tower.

"Afternoon, Captain Jacobs," said Williams, as he resumed reading the catalog. Without looking up, he added: "There won't be any more Jet A this afternoon. Sheppard One and Two are neither one active this afternoon." He pointed casually at the sky. "Getting close to minimums out there."

"Aw, man! I hate it when that happens," Capt. Jacobs said, walking toward a filing cabinet, where he pulled out some folders. "I sure miss the excitement of Carswell!"

Lt. Knudsen said and picked up binoculars to look into the sky. "Carswell, shmarswell, you should have been in Saudi," he said, peering intently at a spot in the sky.

"Saudi Arabia?" Jacobs asked. "Williams wouldn't even be allowed to take that magazine with him!"

"What, this?" Jacobs asked, looking at the cover with mock incredulity.

"They'd cut off his...." Jacobs was interrupted by the sound of an aircraft calling on the tower frequency. He gestured a guillotine with his hands. Williams grabbed his crotch and feigned terror.

The Nebraskan turned up the volume control, shook his head, and suppressed a laugh. "Piper One Four Two Six Lima, Sheppard tower, go ahead," Knudsen spoke into the microphone and jotted the identification numbers "P1426L" on a notepad.

"Two Six Lima, uh, I think I have a problem with my landing gear," the reply crackled over the radio in a heavy foreign accent. Knudsen snickered and looked at the others with a look of disdain. The telephone rang, and Capt. Jacobs walked over from the filing cabinet to answer it. It was the control tower at Dyess Air Force base calling to shoot the breeze. He sat down to take the call.

"Hey! Did Wichita Fall yet?" said the controller at Dyess, laughing. "How's it going out there?"

"Nothing much going on," he said and looked out the window. "One of the locals with a gear indicator problem. Did that flight of three that was headed out your way ever show up?" Jacobs asked.

"Nope. I guess they got lost up there somewhere trying to find the maps," the controller at the other end of the phone answered. They laughed.

Knudsen spoke into the mike again: "Two Six Lima, do you need a visual check?"

"Roger, roger, I will fly by the tower, yes?"

Knudsen shook his head and held the binoculars up to his eyes again. The controllers hated having civilian airplanes use their runways, and the Arab accent did not make this pilot any more welcome. "We should close the airport to visual traffic, and tell him the ceiling is too low. I hate these guys," he said to the other tower controllers.

They might have gotten away with it. The sky was completely overcast, and low-hanging clouds were drifting just a few miles northwest of the air base. If they had bent the rules slightly and declared the airport to be operating under Instrument Flight Rules ("IFR") due to weather, they could have forced the airplane to go to another airport. But that would have been frowned on as unethical in this case, since a possible emergency existed.

"Roger, that's approved, do you need emergency equipment?" Knudsen said into the microphone, in an irritated tone of voice. "Damn rag-heads," he muttered, "I thought we threw them all out a long time ago! I swear this guy's from Iraq."

It was common to hear strange sounding accents on the aviation channels. There were many foreign flight students in Texas, and most private pilots were accustomed to hearing broken English. But the strong accents and the generally poor quality of the radios always combined to make communications difficult, so the aviation community held many of these foreigners in great disdain. Race, creed, and color were fair game as long as nobody pressed the mike button.

The other officers laughed and twisted around in their seats to get a better look, as his aircraft veered slightly of its normal approach course. The procedure was standard: The pilot would fly past the tower just above the controllers' eye level, and they would visually verify whether his wheels appeared to be "down and locked" and safe for him to land. They had done it many times before. Usually the gear was fine-it was always the warning lamps that always seemed to malfunction.

Jacobs casually pointed up to a second blip on the radar screen. "Knudsen, what's this one doing inside our airspace?" Without waiting for a reply, he resumed his conversation on the phone: "Huh? No, just some Arab student who forgot how to extend his gear, and we got somebody bustin' the Class C again."

Class C airspace was an imaginary cylinder of air several miles in diameter, inside which all aircraft had to be in radio contact with an air traffic controller. It was designed to prevent aircraft flying into or out of the air base from colliding with each other. The boundaries were imaginary, based on the radius of a circle around the runway and did not coincide with any visible landmarks, making it difficult to accurately gauge one's position relative to the protected area. So it occurred frequently that a small plane would accidentally stray in for a moment or two while flying in the vicinity. The air traffic controllers-who had an unfair advantage with their sophisticated radar and computers-were to report all such incursions. But normally they ignored the rules unless the plane penetrated very deeply into the area without making radio contact.

Right now all three Sheppard controllers were busy. Knudsen was staring through the binoculars at the Piper that was having a gear problem. The plane was turning, and was headed toward the tower now. Jacobs was leaning back with his feet propped up on the desk, giving the controller there a blow-by-blow description of the process. And Williams was busy making a note in the incident log to show both the protected airspace penetration and the gear-problem. He noted the time. It was 1500 hours on the nose.

"Jesus Christ! What's he doing?" Lt. Williams said suddenly, looking out the window.

"Piper Two Six Lima, please pass east of the Tower, EAST of the Tower!" Knudsen yelled into the microphone.

Jacobs turned to look, and frowned. Dyess Air Force Base seemed to be having a similar problem with a foreign pilot. "Really? You've got an Arab with gear problems out there too? They're all over the place!" he said.

Knudsen set the binoculars back down on the table and slowly stood up, looking pale. "He's not turning!" he exclaimed.

The plane was closing fast. But Williams was too busy watching the second plane-the one that had entered the airspace without permission. He looked up at the radar screen, then out toward the far end of the runway. "Hey Knudsen, that plane that busted our airspace... its turning final... did you clear him to enter the pattern?"

"No, I didn't... but look!" he yelled, pointing out the window. "We got worse problems! Look at this guy! Piper Two Six Lima! Turn left, TURN LEFT!" The plane was diving directly toward the tower.

Williams grabbed a red phone on the desk and stood up in panic. They didn't hear the controller at Dyess AFB yelling into his phone: "Oh my god, he's gonna crash into us!" They didn't know that the very same scenario was playing out on the other end of Texas at the same instant.

Piper 1426L impacted on the top section of the tower with such force that it came crashing through on the other side, shattered glass and twisted metal spraying into the air. At the same time, it detonated, blowing the entire tower off its base and shattering windows for miles around.

The second aircraft had already turned onto final approach about two miles from the runway and accelerated in a dive toward the ground, dropping three packages in parachutes evenly spaced along the concrete strip. Then it banked sharply to the right, and dove straight toward the tie-down area where all the fighter jets were parked.

It struck the first plane on the ground traveling at over a hundred miles per hour. The high explosives on-board sent a fireball billowing outward that enveloped five or six of the fighters. Burning fuel and pieces of airplanes were scattered all across the field, leaving not a single plane intact. A few seconds later, the parachutes hit the ground and their packages exploded, blowing three large craters in the runway, effectively knocking the entire air base out of action.

Sheppard and Dyess Air Force Bases were not the only victims. Similar suicide raids were being conducted at exactly the same moment at Altus AFB, the Dallas Naval Air Station, Lackland AFB in San Antonio, and every one of the twenty or so other military airfields all across Texas. In every case, pilots with heavy foreign accents were able to come within striking distance of the control tower without arousing any suspicion and plunged their ships, loaded with explosives, into buildings, airplanes, and fuel storage tanks.

At Lackland, a squadron of F-15s had just taken off, and at Reese AFB in Lubbock the Air Force managed to launch two F-16s and a T-38 after the attack, in a desperate effort to defend against new strikes. But in every case, the fighters found nothing to shoot at. The attack was over, but the victors were dead. It was eerie.

Panic and confusion gripped the military within minutes of the attack. Every Air Force Base and Navel Air Station in Texas had been hit, and much of the telecommunications system had been knocked out as a result. Some of the suicide planes had plunged into radar antennas so that most military radar coverage had been disrupted. Fires were burning out of control, sending up thick black columns of smoke into the air all over the state.

Secondary explosions from ammunition stores, on-board ordnance, and fuel tanks occasionally rocked the cities adjacent to the airfields, causing giant fireballs to scorch the air several hundred feet into the afternoon sky. The low-lying layer of dark clouds over North Texas blocked the smoke's rise, causing the last remaining clear airspace to fill with heavy, oily smoke, reducing visibility to zero within minutes.

Simultaneously, commandos entered the FAA's air traffic control center near the DFW airport, rounded up all the controllers, and marched them into a locked room. Then they took their seats at the radarscopes, and began ordering airliners to divert to destinations outside the state of Texas. Another small group of soldiers forced their way into a room marked "Department of Defense-Communications Room", shot the occupants, and took their positions.

Very soon thereafter, total pandemonium reigned at the Pentagon. Normally secure military communications were compromised, and the terrorists had seized total control of the skies over Texas.