Joint Operations c-16

by Keith Douglass

  Just then, he got a call over his own communication circuit. He breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the sense that it was all futile lift. If he could hold on for five minutes, maybe a little more, he would have reinforcements. Four more MiGs were launching off the third Chinese vessel.

  Tomcat 207

  0750 local (GMT –10)

  “We’ve got company, Lobo,” Lobo’s backseater announced. “Four more playmates inbound — let’s get the hell out of here. As it is, we’re not going back overland — we’ll have to circle around seaward to get some support.”

  Lobo acknowledged the pronouncement with two clicks of the mike. Her attention was elsewhere, as she took station on Hot Rock’s position, coming in high as he automatically took the low position.

  “How much time have we got?” she asked.

  “Three minutes, maybe.”

  Lobo nodded. It would be enough, especially with a two-on-one engagement. Especially now.

  There had been a time when she wouldn’t have been so certain, when Hot Rock was facing demons of his own, learning that being a fighter pilot was more than just fast reflexes and good eyesight. He’d come to terms with it several cruises ago, and since then his attitude equaled if not surpassed his technical flying capabilities.

  “We’re going in. Kill him now,” she ordered.

  Tomcat 201

  0750 local (GMT –10)

  Hot Rocks barreled in ahead of Lobo, slipping into the low position that was usually hers. He expected to hear a sharp reprimand over tactical, but she simply took his normal position above and behind. Somehow she knew how much he wanted this kill, how intensely personal it was for him.

  The MiG was slightly above him, just starting to turn away. Hot Rock ascended, calculating the vector that would put him square on the other’s tail in perfect firing position. While the envelope for an air-to-air shot was increasing every day with the advanced avionics and independent seeker heads in the AMRAAM, he wanted this kill to be up close and personal. If there was a way he could have made it a slow, painful death, he would have.

  “Take him with AMRAAM,” his backseater ordered. “Don’t screw around with this.”

  “I can’t. We’re too close to land. Can’t take a chance of overshooting and collateral damage,” the pilot answered. Collateral damage — a cold, passionless word for the death of civilians, the exploding cement and bricks, the shattered bodies and lost lives.

  “We don’t have time for guns,” the backseater argued.

  Hot Rock ignored him. If there wasn’t time to avenge this atrocity, then time had no meaning at all. He kicked in afterburners and rapidly closed the distance between them. Just as he settled in within range, the MiG jinked violently upward, using its own afterburners to achieve a sheer vertical climb with no movement forward. It was an impressive display of power and airmanship, had Hot Rock been in the mood to admire it.

  But he’d seen the maneuver too often at airshows to be distracted by it now. Reacting instantaneously, he slammed his Tomcat into a similar maneuver, starting well before he reached the MiG’s last position of level flight. No, the Tomcat couldn’t duplicate the maneuver, but it could come damned close.

  “Back off, Hot Rock,” Lobo snapped. “You’re interfering with my shot!”

  “Not a chance,” Hot Rock grunted, straining against the G-forces slamming him back into his ejection seat.

  “Break right!” Lobo ordered. “Break right, or you’re going down with him.”

  Hot Rock ignored her, fine-tuning his approach on the rapidly ascending MiG. Sooner or later the bastard would run out of airspace and be forced to turn out of the climb, and Hot Rock was making sure he had just enough reaction time to roll into level flight behind the MiG and blow it to Kingdom Come.

  “Out of time!” his backseater shouted. “Hot Rock, we gotta get out of here, buddy! His playmates will be within weapons range in fifteen seconds, and I guaran-damn-tee you they’re not going to give a shit about firing over land or collateral damage.”

  Hot Rock swore violently, and just for a split second considered ignoring the unfolding geometry. A few more seconds and the MiG would have to turn out of the climb, just a few more —

  “Now!” his backseater screamed. “Break off now or I punch us both out!”

  Finally, the hot red rage flaming behind his eyes loosened its hold on his brain. If he got the MiG, but added to the loss of civilian life, what was the point?

  He pulled out of the climb and looked for Lobo. She was eight thousand feet below him, waiting on him.

  “Buster, asshole,” she snapped. “Follow me this time.” She peeled off and headed back for the boat without another word.

  Hot Rock followed, but snapped his head around to get one last look at the MiG as it escaped.

  I’ll be back for you, you murderous bastard. And next time, no power on earth is going to stop me from smearing you and your aircraft across five acres of sky.

  SEVEN

  Heaven Can Wait

  0800 local (GMT –10)

  Adele Simpson stared dumbfounded at the black smoke rolling up from the city. The transmissions on bridge-to-bridge radio onboard Heaven Can Wait were incomprehensible. Everyone with a radio was trying to talk at once and give the definitive and only report of what was going on ashore. Each party on the circuit seemed convinced that he and he alone had the truth. As a result, every channel normally used around the Island was completely clobbered.

  “Honey? Got that chart?” a voice from overhead asked.

  Jack Simpson, her husband of three days. After a long engagement and quiet wedding in San Diego, they had flown to Hawaii and rented Heaven Can Wait for seven days of utter solitude. Adele had grown up around water and was an excellent sailor. Her husband, Jack, a senior engineer with McIntyre Electronics and a Naval Reserve captain, was a fair hand with larger boats but that didn’t necessarily mean he understood the intricacies of driving anything without missiles or a flight deck.

  She reached into the chart table and pulled out a fresh copy of the harbor chart. She used tape to hold down the corners as she centered it on the plotting table. “Got it,” she reported, and then went back up to the flying bridge to check their situation.

  “So what do we do?” she asked quietly. Adele was not one given to panic, and she found that panicking usually made a bad situation worse.

  From the moment they heard the muffled distant explosion, they had both known something was terribly, terribly wrong. Unlike many of their fellow sailors, however, they did not try to pretend that whatever had happened ashore was none of their business and simply continue their cruise or jam the airwaves with rumors. Duty ran deep in each of them, and that had been one of the first things that had attracted her to Jack.

  As a result, Adele immediately turned over ship-handling responsibilities to Jack, and gone down below to pull out a chart. What exactly he intended to do, she had no clue, but Jack seemed to think it was important.

  “Okay, honey, you know where we are?” Jack’s voice floated down. “Take a few bearings, and get us in as close as you can.”

  Adele peered out a side window and took a hasty bearing with a handheld compass. That lighthouse there — and on the other side, the jagged stack of rocks. She slid a ruler across a piece of paper, lined up the bearings, and drew in a small circle where they intersected. Just for accuracy’s sake, she checked against the GPS. It was dead on.

  “Got it, on both GPS and visual bearings,” she reported. She hadn’t questioned his request that she take visual bearings, as both of them knew that the global positioning satellite system would be one of the first casualties of any real —

  Any real what? War? How had she come to that conclusion so quickly, she wondered.

  “Keep track of where we are. I’m going to call off anything of interest, and give you a range and bearing from our position, okay?”

  “Okay. But even assuming you turn up something of interest, how are you going to re
port it to anyone? No traffic is going to get out on any circuit we’ve got,” Adele pointed out.

  “Cell phone,” her husband answered. “If I can figure out who to call. Then there’s one other option as well.”

  Adele took a few steps back and popped her head up out of the hatch to look up at him. “What do you mean, another option.?”

  “This.” He extended the small, black radio about the size of the cell phone. “It is a PRC seven, an emergency aviation radio. Saltwater activated so that if it gets wet it broadcasts a constant beeping. It’s also got a direct transmission limited range.” He pointed at a toggle switch on the side. “If I switch to military frequencies, assuming there’s someone with a receiver in range, I should be able to talk.”

  “Where did you come up with this?” she asked.

  “I borrowed it from my office,” he said calmly. “Just in case.”

  And if any one phrase characterized Jack Simpson, it was that one. Just in case.

  USS Centurion

  0810 local (GMT –10)

  Petty Officer Jacobs felt the foam of the headset wearing down the skin on his ears. It had been over four hours without a break. A couple of times, he felt his attention start to wander, just as it had during refresher training, but after a few moments, he remembered exactly how things were.

  Centurion had come shallow and attempted to communicate with the naval station, with no luck. Dead static echoed over every official Navy circuit they tried. The harbor channels suffered from exactly the opposite problem — voices shouted in screams, clamoring to be heard over each other. Just outside sonar, in the control room, Jacobs could hear Captain Tran discussing their situation with the navigator.

  “I recommend we make a slow, deep approach on the harbor, then come to periscope depth and see if we can figure out what happened,” the navigator said crisply.

  The skipper was a good man, probably one of the best officers Jacobs had ever met. But for all that, he was an officer — maybe a little too strict sometimes, maybe a little too prone to worry about things that didn’t make a difference.

  Still, since the situation seemed to be going to shit, Jacobs was glad to be serving under him.

  “It sounds risky, coming shallow in the harbor,” he heard the captain say. “There’s no way sonar can keep everything sorted out to make sure we don’t surface directly under a small craft.”

  “We’ll come up slowly,” a navigator said. “Our bow wave will push them away from us.”

  “Probably. I don’t imagine they’ll like it any better than I do,” the skipper said.

  If it were only a small boat running an engine, they would hear the vessel in plenty of time to slow their upward motion and avoid crashing into its keel. No, the problem wasn’t motorized boats, although their speed could put them in danger’s way. The problem was sailboats. There was simply no way to accurately detect them by passive means and nobody wanted to put an active sonar tone in the water. Counter detection considerations aside, they’d be lucky if they didn’t fry a swimmer.

  “We’ll come to periscope depth now,” the skipper said, making the decision that Jacobs had hoped for. “We’ll assess what the situation is, then decide whether we’re going to proceed in the harbor. If we do, it will be at periscope depth.”

  From a sonarman’s point of view, that was the preferred alternative, but the thought of having anything just above them when they didn’t know what was going on ashore made him excruciatingly nervous.

  EIGHT

  TFCC

  0810 local (GMT –10)

  Batman paced furiously along the side of the island, stomping down hard on the flight deck as though to punish it instead of the pilots. There was no way he could damage the nonskid, but oh, Hot Rock and Lobo were in for it. They’d be lucky if they ever saw the inside of a cockpit again, much less flew combat missions from his carrier.

  He could hear the calls now, with the team of two inbound on Jefferson. Lobo was in the lead, her Tomcat lined up hard and righteous on the flight path. He felt a moment of appreciation at the lineup, rock steady, on course, on altitude, then pushed the thought away. She might be in the lead in the air, but god knows she’d just failed every definition of good leadership he could think of.

  Being an officer meant more than flying a hot aircraft and shooting down MiGs. It meant following orders, fitting your aircraft’s mission into the overall battle picture, making sure that your wingman and the rest of the junior officers were also onboard with the program. And no matter how hot a pilot Lobo was, no matter that she’d earned the respect of every pilot in the Navy, she’d just screwed up big time, just as much as Hot Rock had. Oh, sure, he’d taken the chase on, but it was her flight, her mission. She knew as well as the admiral that it was her responsibility.

  Can’t you cut her some slack? After what she’s been through?

  He considered that for a moment, tempted. One part of his mind would have given anything to avoid the action he was about to take against the two, and trotting out Lobo’s career would be justification for just about any breaks he wanted to cut her. During a mission in her nugget year, Lobo had been shot down. She’d spent a couple of months in a POW camp, abused, raped and generally tortured beyond anyone’s understanding. That she’d withstood it, then had the sheer guts to recover and get back in a flight status — well, he wasn’t so sure he would have made as good a showing, had he been in her shoes.

  It’s an out. Take it.

  But no, he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to do his duty. This was why they’d made him an admiral, given him command of a battle group, to make the calls like this one.

  And to use your discretion. For a moment, Batman thought he heard the sternly lecturing voice of Tombstone. We’ve pulled our share of shit, shipmate. Find a way out of grounding those two. Because in your gut, you know that’s what you want to do.

  Batman sighed, frustrated. Tombstone — or at least the Tombstone he was talking to inside his own head — was right. Lobo and Hot Rock had done what every man and woman on board the carrier had wanted to do, tried to take out a MiG that had attacked an innocent, unarmed civilian aircraft. Yes, it had been too damned close to Hawaii, and yes, it could have gone brutally wrong if they’d sent the MiG spiraling into the hotels and tourist facilities crowded onto the shoreline.

  But they hadn’t. Lobo had waited for the shot, held Hot Rock in check, from what he’d been able to tell. They’d maneuvered the MiG out over open ocean and away from the harbor.

  She used her good judgment — now you use yours.

  “They’re not getting off scot-free, Stony,” Batman said out loud, his voice lost in the cacophony of the flight deck. “I can’t let that happen — you know that.”

  I know. Rip ’em each a new asshole, nail them in their fitreps, give them every shitty little job you can think of. But keep them in the air. That’s where they belong.

  Lobo’s Tomcat called the ball, indicating that the pilot had a visual on the meatball, the Fresnel lens located on the starboard side of the stern. Batman heard the voice of the LSO, the landing signals officer, chime in on the circuit.

  “Tomcat 201, say needles.”

  “Needles say on glide path,” Lobo replied.

  “Roger, 201, fly needles,” the LSO concurred, indicating that he agreed with her instruments’ assessment of her approach on the carrier.

  Lobo didn’t need instruments, Batman thought. She didn’t even need the LSO, not really. Rock steady on approach she held the Tomcat so steady in the air that you could almost believe it wasn’t flying at all, that it was a giant balloon being towed aft of the ship.

  But a balloon wouldn’t make that much noise, wouldn’t be howling in toward the deck with low-throated thunder. It wouldn’t be getting larger every second until it looked so large that a civilian would have thought it impossible to fit that much aircraft onto the deck of the carrier.

  Tomcat 201 slammed down on the deck with a squeal of tires and a puff of
vaporized rubber. The engines howled as Lobo slammed the throttles forward to full military power, insurance against an arresting wire breaking or a kiddy trap when the tailhook appeared to catch and then skipped over the arresting wire. Without full military power, the heavy aircraft would lack sufficient speed to launch again off the forward end of the carrier and would simply dribble off the end of the ship and smash into the ocean. Missing the arresting wire and taking off again was called a bolter.

  The tailhook caught the three wire neatly, pitching the nose down hard on the deck of the carrier. The arresting wire spun out against the hydraulic pressure with a harsh keening noise, slowing the Tomcat from landing speed to a dead stop. Lobo kept the Tomcat at full military power until a yellow shirt stepped out in front of her and signaled her to reduce power. No sane pilot reduced power until the technician in charge of that portion of the flight deck felt confident enough about the landing to stand in front of the aircraft himself.

  The Tomcat backed down slightly, and at a signal from the yellow shirt, the tailhook lifted up and dropped the arresting wire. Lobo taxied forward confidently, following the flight deck technicians as they directed her aircraft to its spot.

  Batman stood motionless, his hands on his hips, as he watched Lobo roll her bird to a gentle stop. Behind him, he could hear the next Tomcat approaching the stern, but his business was with Lobo. His anger rose as he watched the canopy slide back and saw the plane captain mount the boarding ladder to assist Lobo and her RIO in unstrapping their ejection harnesses. The plane captain signaled that the retaining pins had been placed in the ejection seat, rendering it inoperable. Only then did Lobo rise from her cockpit and swing one long leg down over the side of the aircraft, her foot finding the boarding ladder without even looking.