Meanwhile, the cold part of his mind was steadily examining impressions and making decisions. The bogey was obviously not manned; it was much too small and made turns that would black out any human pilot. On the other hand, it was not an ordinary missile. Which left only two choices a Remotely-Piloted Vehicle, or a UAV like the one he'd shot down over Cuba. If the former, then someone was flying it by joystick from a distant location, using an onboard video or infrared camera for guidance. If the latter, then the bogey was a fire-and-forget weapon, with an onboard navigation computer guiding it to its destination.
He immediately discounted that option; all the UAVs he'd ever heard of, including the one he'd shot down, found their destinations through a combination of ground-mapping radar and Global Positioning Satellite navigation. They were programmed to locate and strike at stationary targets; they couldn't dogfight. So This was an RPV.
Not that the information helped him much right now. All it meant was that the pilot of this bogey could turn, accelerate and climb his vehicle at the limits of the plane's capabilities, not his own.
Limits ...
Tombstone suddenly remembered the BD5-J, a stubby home-built jet even shorter than the bogey. He'd watched them fly at air shows, and spoken to their pilots. Although fast and agile as hummingbirds, the little jets had strictly limited ranges due to greedy engines and minute fuel tanks. The bogey that was chasing him around had to be subject to the same restrictions. Given enough time, it would simply die of starvation.
But how much time was enough? Trying to drain the bogey meant juking and jiving for as long as it took. But every maneuver would have to be a miracle of timing. Too slow, and the bogey wouldn't be fooled. Too fast, and the bogey would simply reacquire. Either way, the result would be the same.
All this went through his head in the time it took the bogey to complete a quick half circle and come back at him again. This time Tombstone noticed the round maw of an air intake, mounted in a depression atop the vehicle. If it weren't for that black circle, the damned thing wouldn't be visible at all from this angle.
He kept his eyes on the circle, timing its approach, making himself wait ... wait ...
Too long! He knew it even as he slammed the Pitts through an ugly maneuver that was half barrel roll, half loop.
Holding his breath, he thought about Tomboy and waited for the impact.
But then the bogey was past him, slanting off toward the shore. Too startled to recover from his maneuver, he stared through the tunnel formed by his spinning windscreen. The bogey began to turn again, but this time without the relentless certainty he'd come to fear. It seemed to settle into a lazy arc. Perhaps it was running out of fuel.
Tombstone leveled out.
Instantly, the bogey jinked toward him, accelerating.
Without thinking about it, Tombstone put the Pitts into a fresh series of barrel rolls. The bogey flashed past, thirty feet to the rear, as if he'd vanished from its sensors. It didn't make sense. Snap rolls were hardly an evasive maneuver for missiles, especially one approaching from the side.
The moment he leveled out again, dizzy and ready to retch, the bogey made an abrupt turn back toward him. He glanced around. He was almost to shore, but there was no hope there nothing but low marshland, without a hill or stand of trees to hide behind.
The bogey grew larger in the corner of his eye. Tombstone held his breath and started another series of rolls, meanwhile letting the Pitts Plummet toward the ocean.
The bogey nashed through the space he'd occupied a moment earlier. It kept going, then entered into another of its broad, lazy turns.
"Okay, you," Tombstone said, still spinning, blood pounding in his head, "I've got you now."
The beach passed by, no more than a hundred yards below. Feet dry, Tombstone thought automatically, trying to keep his stomach from erupting through his teeth. He'd lost track of the bogey. Hoped it had really run out of gas this time. Hoped it had dropped into the water like a shotgunned mallard.
But if not ...
Leveling out, he gulled the Pitts into as steep a sustained climb as it would endure. He looked back and forth, up and down, searching the sky, trying to blink the dizziness away. In a moment he knew that the bogey hadn't run out of gas after all. He saw a triangular flash of red light to the north, then the air intake racing toward him. He watched it, watched it ... and jammed the stick forward, diving back toward the marsh as hard as he could. Although he didn't look back, he sensed the bogey swinging onto his tail.
"Now!" he shouted, and yanked the stick hard right. The swamp began to whirl around the cockpit. Timing it carefully, Tombstone stomped on the left rudder pedal, then hauled back on the stick. The vertical spin abruptly hooked into a flat-out climb. Looking over his shoulder, Tombstone saw a geyser of water shoot out of the marsh and rise so high its tip glowed orange in the last light of the sun.
Whooping, he rolled the Pitts Special one more time ... for joy.
Saturday, 2 AUGUST
0700 local (-8 GMT) Tomcat 306 South China Sea
"Well," Two Tone said dryly from the backseat, "that was a real waste of fuel."
Hot Rock knew his RIO was talking about the extra hours they had pulled circling around and around the site of the sunken sailboat, including an aerial refueling so they could stay on station until the SAR and salvage ops were finished. All that without so much as a glimpse of a Chinese fighter.
He made his voice sound rough and disappointed. "Who knows? We might get another chance."
"We already had a chance with that helo," Two Tone said.
"We were too close to the twelve-mile limit. You heard our orders." Hot Rock eased the Tomcat into a left bank, maintaining his position in the Marshal pattern until it was his turn to trap back onto Jefferson.
"Well, let's just hope that helo doesn't decide to take out some other poor civilian boat," Two Tone said. "Or if it does, that we don't let it get away again."
Hot Rock didn't respond. He wasn't sure if there was a reprimand behind those words, or not. He had to remember that not everyone was his father, Not everyone could peer into his heart and see that, deep inside, Reginald Stone knew he wasn't good enough.
Besides, Two Tone was almost a stranger. Apart from the absolute synchronicity imposed by life in a Tomcat, they shared no common interests and rarely hung out together.
Fifteen minutes later it was his turn at last to land, and he angled the big bird down toward what looked pretty much like a post card-sized deck. But his hands remained steady on the controls, his breath flowed smooth and easy, he was perfectly relaxed. He loved this part.
A moment later the Tomcat's tailhook snagged the three wire and the Tomcat jolted to a halt. Hot Rock smiled. Another perfect trap. His father could never have done such a thing. His brother, either.
"I'll say one thing," Two Tone said in his honking accent. "Nobody knows how to get a bird home as safely as you do, man."
Friday, 1 August
1945 local (+5 GMT) Meadowlark Air Field Maryland
Although Tombstone was a member of the flying club at the Naval Air Station, he preferred to keep his Pitts Special at a small private strip in the middle of the Maryland countryside. Somehow, the biplane looked more at home amongst the motley collection of Supercubs, Cessna 150s and Stearmans that lodged there than it did surrounded by sleek Bonanzas and Sky Kings, not to mention F-14s and F/A-18s. Besides. Tombstone liked the laid-back atmosphere. He liked the grass strip adjacent to the paved one, and he liked how a pot of bad coffee was always percolating in the office building.
By the time he eased the Pitts down onto the grass, the sun was squatting on the horizon, pushing long shadows across the field. Tombstone taxied to his tie-down area, the Pitts bumping over the sod, and killed the engine. Climbed out of the cramped cockpit and dropped onto the grass--and almost all the way to his knees. His legs were shaking like Slinkys.
He should be dead. That was the thing. He should be dead right now. He'd had close
calls before, sure; but this was different. This time he was alive for only one reason luck. Not because he was such a damned fine pilot, but because he didn't know how to handle the Pitts properly. The truth was, that bogey should have nailed him on its first pass. And it would have, if he hadn't pulled out of his dive too soon. Luck had saved him. Pure luck. That was all.
He heard the crunch of gravel under car tires, and demanded that his legs stiffen. He couldn't endure being seen like this. As he stood, he had to reach up and grab the Pitts' cockpit coaming to maintain his balance.
"You got back just in time," said a familiar voice, and Tomboy appeared before him, short and buxom and beautiful in the shadows. Instinctively, he reached out and pulled her to him, and hung on to her rather than the biplane. Her red hair smelled of violet, as if the twilight had gotten caught in it.
"Hey, big guy!" she said, sounding both surprised and pleased. She hugged him back. "That must have been some flight."
Tombstone began to laugh. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Yeah, that was some flight."
Tomboy pulled away from him. Her face was serious. "Before you tell me about it, I've got something to tell you." Within a couple of minutes, she gave him an encapsulated version of a terrible event in the South China Sea. CBG-14, his old command, was involved.
Atop the airport building, a beacon began to flash at the first stars.
"The Chinese again," Tombstone said, thinking of his one-time wingman and best friend, Batman. "What the hell are they up to this time?"
Tomboy put her hand on his arm. "There's something else, sweetheart. The man who owned the yacht was someone you know. Phillip McIntyre."
"Phillip ... you mean ... Uncle Phil?" His knees weakened again. Phillip McIntyre wasn't really an uncle, but an old friend of Tombstone's real uncle, Admiral Thomas Magruder. The two older men went way back together. They'd been regular blood brothers all during grade school and high school, and remained close after that even though their careers had taken them in opposite directions from college on. Phillip McIntyre had gone into engineering, focusing on the development of computer Circuitry long before it was trendy, then cashing in on the sudden bonanza. From there he'd diversified into other forms of manufacturing and high-tech development.
Tombstone remembered his uncle Phil as a kind of jet-setter, always sending cards and gifts from exotic corners of the world. When Tombstone graduated from Annapolis, a brand-new Japanese motorcycle was waiting for him, courtesy of Uncle Phil. More recently, while Tombstone and Tomboy were in Vegas for their quick, supposedly secret wedding, a complete set of hand-carved rosewood bedroom furniture was en route from the Philippines, on one of Uncle Phil's commercial ships.
"Is he ..." Tombstone said. "Did he ...?"
"They don't know yet. They're still searching. Anyway, your uncle called and told me he won't be having dinner with us tonight."
"I understand." Tombstone shook his head. "That's okay. Frankly, I don't think I'm up for it myself."
She rested a hand on his forearm. "Phillip might not be dead, Tombstone. We don't know yet."
"It's not that. I mean, that's a shock, but there's something else."
"Don't tell me Your new toy scared the piss out of you. Go on, admit it."
He gulped down another mad surge of laughter. "Not exactly." Then he told her what had happened, and watched her eyes widen in the darkness.
4.
Saturday, 2 August
0732 local (-8 GMT) Central District Hong Kong
"Very bad thing. Very bad. Is why I left Vietnam. Now same thing here!"
Dr. George wished the cabbie would shut up. The horrendous mid-morning Hong Kong traffic was distracting enough without this man jabbering on about something or other. Dr. George was on his way to make a crucial presentation, and he wanted to rehearse it in his mind, He wanted it to be just right. Absolutely convincing. Hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake.
No, millions of dollars. That's the angle. This is Hong Kong, remember. Millions of dollars are at stake, that's what I've got to tell them. Billions of dollars.
It was a shame he had to behave like a door-to-door salesman to seek financing for his work. Unfortunately, for political and economic reasons, the United States government had cut back drastically on direct research into Dr. George's specialty Pacific Basin tropical storms. The logic was that typhoons were a Pacific phenomenon, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had reason to concentrate its resources on Atlantic Basin storms. It was hurricanes, after all, that endangered American homes and American businesses. With the exception of Hawaii and a few pissant military enclaves, only far-away Asian lands were threatened by typhoons.
The cabbie shouted something in Vietnamese, his voice high and throbbing. Arms waving, he switched to English. "Where are police? Need order! Need order now!"
George tried to close out the racket and concentrate on his speech. Mr. Chairman, members of the Board ... you operate a major shipping company here. How much income does your business lose annually to storm damage, time lost to bad weather, and high insurance premiums?
The irony was, studying typhoons was a perfect way to increase knowledge of hurricanes. Both phenomena had the same causes, but typhoons tended to be larger in size and scope, and to live longer as well. This made them the ideal subjects for detailed study.
If NOAA would only give him a bit more time a year, two years ... he could hand them the Holy Grail of meteorological research a truly reliable method of predicting unborn storms. But no, they-
The cabbie shouted again, slamming down simultaneously on brakes and horn. "Traffic very bad today!" he cried. "Very bad! See all people? See signs? Is protess today. You know protess? Is to complain to Chinese about boat sink. Hong Kong people always protess!"
my system, Dr. George recited in his head, once it's finalized, will allow your business to operate throughout typhoon season with complete confidence. This will give you considerable advantage over your competitors, who will continue to be subject to the vagaries of ..."
His own government hadn't been the only one to turn him down. After NOAA informed him they would be shifting the majority of his personnel and all of the Guam station's research aircraft to the Atlantic, he'd immediately started contacting other Pacific Rim nations for possible funding.
He'd started with Japan, but they'd bowed out on him. Literally. Ditto the Filipinos, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Indonesians ... all citing Asia's economic woes.
Which left only Hong Kong. If George failed here, Project Valkyrie would also fail. He had seven meetings arranged over the next two days--far and away the most critical two days of his career.
And that cab-driver just wouldn't shut up.
"Is no good!" the cabbie shouted. "Protess cause big trouble! No good! You see!"
After being rebuffed by governments, George had had what he'd believed to be a stroke of genius going straight to large, private businesses for financing.
Gentlemen, for an initial investment of only 1.6 million dollars, You will reap savings of tens of millions annually ...
Unfortunately, so far every corporation, conglomerate and guild he'd contacted had been just as shortsighted as their governmental counterparts. Money was tight these days, they pointed out with elaborate regret. As for George's promise to come up with a nearly-flawless storm prediction system, well, they'd heard that before.
"Chinese get angry!" the cabbie shouted. "They say, 'You want trouble? Okay, we give trouble! Sink more than American yacht.' Never trust Chinese!"
George gave up. For the first time he realized that the traffic around them really had congealed, even by Hong Kong standards. He eyed the stationary cars, heading in the direction of Victoria Square. Many of them carried banners or signs marked in both Chinese characters and in English YOU WERE WARNED! KEEP HONG KONG FREE! NO TIENAMEN SQUARE! They waved the signs and chanted as they marched.
Dr. George sat back and sighed. Whatever it was they were protesting,
in a few days it wouldn't matter. They didn't know what he knew Somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, the first typhoon of the season was brewing. Not just a typhoon. A super typhoon, king of storms. Winds in excess of two hundred miles per hour. Rain like a barrage of cannon fire. Surf capable of flattening buildings and sweeping cars into the ocean.
George knew, because Valkyrie had told him. Although the program wasn't perfect yet, it was good enough to recognize the approach of a true monster ... like the one coming to life, right now, in the Pacific not far to the west. Coming to life and turning its attention toward China. When it arrived ... well, that would end any protest.
1650 local (-8 GMT) Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC) USS Jefferson South China Sea
Lieutenant Commander Curt "Bird Dog" Robinson strode down the corridor toward the CVIC, hopping briskly over each knee-knocker he encountered. He was a little late for the special briefing, but he'd wanted to make sure his notes were in order before he arrived. He knew the meeting had to do with the scuttling of the civilian yacht just before dawn. All morning he'd watched CH-46E Sea Knights, the twin-rotored helicopters normally used to ferry Marines into combat, unloading body bags and a few blasted chunks of fiberglass onto the apron of the flight deck. As he understood it, Jefferson's morgue and pathology lab had quickly overflowed, and now some of the body bags had joined pieces of wrecked sailboat in the hangar bay.
He'd heard a wide variety of other rumors, too The Chinese had fired a torpedo at the yacht; American fighter jets had tangled with Red Chinese fighters over the site of the sinking; CBG-14 was about to go on full alert.
The last bit was probably nonsense; as for the rest, he wasn't so sure. So he wanted to be prepared for any eventuality during this meeting. It was important for a lot of reasons. God knew that so far, he hadn't exactly wowed his superiors with the strategic acumen he'd picked up in his studies at the Naval War College. In fact, during his first combat situation after graduation--the Second Cuban Missile Crisis--he'd not only done a lousy job of helping direct Navy tactics, he'd gotten his butt shot out of the sky.
Carrier 14 - TYPHOON SEASON Page 5
