by Ian Slater
Turning at right angles to the main axis of the boat, Crowley entered a cross passageway that took him farther inboard. Crew with photo IDs clipped to their uniforms turned aside to allow the admiral to pass, for despite the enormous size of America’s largest ship, her corridors were relatively narrow. Every inch of available space was needed to house the millions of pieces of equipment needed for McCain to carry out its mission: to transport America’s big stick into the Taiwan Strait to contain the war between China and the ROC before the conflict widened in Asia and drew the already overextended U.S. military into what the Pentagon told the President would be a “logistical abyss.”
Crowley, now approaching the nerve center of the 96,000-ton carrier, was leaving the gray area of the ship and entering what the crew called “blue tile country,” which housed the highly sensitive data-linked command and control functions of the carrier. These included the Combat Information Center, where Crowley was now headed, the Joint Intelligence Center, and the ultrasecret SSES, the secret signals exploitation space, a highly sophisticated electronic snooping and worldwide computer spy shop that could provide the captain with links to all U.S. intelligence agencies and infrared satellite surveillance of enemy movements on the ground. All the information collected in this relatively small but securely guarded unit could be linked to the big screens and consoles in the other four independently housed command and control units. All these units were bathed in a perpetual cool blue light — hence the nickname “blue tile country”—the temperature kept low in order to keep the banks of computers and electronic equipment from overheating in their high intensity 24/7 operation.
The moment Crowley entered the Combat Information Center, he reached for his well-worn lamb’s-wool-lined World War II bomber jacket and zipped it up to the neck. “What’ve we got?” he asked the CIC duty officer, John Cuso, whose calm expression, made faintly ghoulish in the cool, bluish light, concealed his concern. His tone was thoroughly professional, worthy of the aviator’s code he still lived by, despite having been permanently grounded after a burst blood vessel during a basketball game that had ended his days in his beloved Tomcat.
Cuso drew Crowley’s attention to the big blue situation board, its surface crisscrossed with vectors and blips, showing the position of McCain’s present combat patrol, the carrier group now leaving the northernmost waters of the South China Sea, passing into the southernmost limits of the Taiwan Straits. Cuso pointed to the biggest blip on the screen. It was coming in from the northeast. “Sir, this typhoon out of Japan is picking up speed. Lost some energy during landfall over Japan, but on encountering less friction over the Sea of Japan, its winds have increased to 120 miles an hour. By the time we enter the Taiwan Strait—”
“Air’s gonna be full of all kinds of junk,” interjected Crowley.
“Yes, sir. It’ll be like a giant vacuum cleaner if it passes over Taiwan. And we’re in late fall — end of the harvest in the fields on the western side of the island’ll mean all kinds of debris.”
“Plus the damn fires our satellites show over Quemoy.”
“Kinmen,” Cuso corrected his boss. Crowley was old school, had flown Skyraider infantry support in Vietnam and, like others of his generation, the old Chinese names stuck. Cuso didn’t like correcting him, but some terrible mistakes had been made on bombing missions by getting the names mixed up. The one the instructors had always used as a warning at the flight school was Bangor, Maine, and Bangor, Washington State.
“Then we’ll have to make sure everyone in the air wing knows,” said Crowley, “emphasis ’Brown Shirts,’ “ by which Crowley meant plane captains, not the brown jerseyed helo captains who wore the same color but sported red helmets to differentiate them from the white-helmeted plane captains whose job it was to be “mother” to his or her particular aircraft.
In fact, John Cuso, the black sheen of his skin speckled by goose bumps from the chilly atmosphere of the CIC, had posted a “dirty air” alert. It meant that flight deck personnel were to be particularly vigilant for foreign object debris on the walkdown of the flight deck that preceded every launch. All the personnel’s eyes, as well, had to be protected by goggles. And the 1,092-foot-long, 250-foot-wide rubberized, nonskid deck was to be closely inspected for anything, no matter how small, which would quickly destroy a multimillion-dollar jet engine if sucked into its intake.
A beeping invaded the low hum of the CIC, John Cuso hearing, “We have a leaker,” one of the electronic warfare officers informing CIC that an unknown aircraft coming out of the northeast quadrant had violated the battle group’s air space. Computer analysis vectors leading to and from the X blipping on the powder blue screen put the bogey’s speed at Mach 1.4. The McCain’s Combat Air Patrol of four F-18s was flying at thirty thousand feet, already on an intercept course, the intruder up to now having evaded the McCain’s battle group’s radar by flying at plus or minus two hundred feet above the sea.
“A skimmer?” inquired Cuso calmly, confident that the McCain’s Combat Air Patrol, on strict radio silence, would be within visual contact in ten minutes.
“Don’t think it’s a skimmer, sir,” answered an EWO, his computers, together with the target acquisition system, telling him the bogey was too fast for an enemy cruise missile, and an intermittent profile of the cross-sectional area, glimpsed by the carrier’s radar, was too large for faster pilotless vehicles.
“How sure are you?” Crowley pressed the electronic warfare officer.
“That it’s an aircraft, not a skimmer? Ninety percent sure, sir.”
Crowley was tempted to break radio silence and take the consensus of his two Aegis cruisers and the destroyers that made up the McCain’s protective screen, but his natural curiosity was sidelined by his responsibility to deny any potential adversary the exact position of his battle group. Cuso knew the admiral’s decision was probably at odds with the White House’s wish to let Beijing and Taipei know that the “police” were coming, as it were, to stop the fighting. But with the disastrous events that had sunk three of the U.S. Navy’s ships in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Cuso favored his boss’s caution. Both men, like the six thousand people in McCain plus the thousands more manning her battle group, had personally known many of those killed and missing. Besides, in five minutes McCain’s CAP would establish if the bogey was a hostile, and if so, shoot it down. And if the CAP didn’t make the kill — though why, Crowley couldn’t imagine — then either the battle group’s formidable Aegis cruisers, Arleigh Burke destroyers, or the duo of fast attack submarines most certainly would.
Typhoon Jane’s winds had increased speed to 125 miles an hour, and Admiral Crowley, returning to Primary Flight Control, six stories above the flight deck, heard the typhoon’s advance gusts howling around the carrier’s superstructure as the huge airfield kept plowing into the Taiwan Strait at 32 knots. The planes parked on the flight deck were chained down as tightly as those in the hangar deck, the huge, gray ship trembling in its lower regions from the reverberations of its four nuclear-generated steam engines, which were driving the four massive shafts of the carrier and all aboard her into harm’s way.
The four Super Hornets of McCain’s Combat Air Patrol peeled off high above the bogey. It was still flying so low that as Lieutenant Commander Chipper Armstrong’s F-18 Super Hornet broke through the thick gray nimbostratus that was preceding Typhoon Jane by 230 miles, he made visual contact with the speck moving southeast toward the carrier’s battle group. The blip on his radar and its concomitant altitude reading seemed at odds, however. His radar was telling him the bogey was 150 feet above the deck, or sea level, his eyes looking through the sun visor of his helmet telling his brain that the unidentified craft was within arm’s reach of the wrinkled gray sea. In the backseat of the Hornet, Chipper’s RIO — Radar Intercept Officer “Eagle” Evans, so-called because of his exceptional daytime vision — flicked on his digital reconnaissance camera, selecting zoom and link-up to Chipper’s right-hand digital display indicator
so that Chipper could now receive real-time images of the bogey.
“It’s an ROC,” said Evans. “Taiwanese. An F-16. That’s a Fighting Falcon to you.”
“What the hell’s it doing here?” asked Chipper.
“Lost his way?” proffered Evans. “Check out its left wing’s flaperons.”
“I see ’em,” said Chipper Armstrong, his eyes following the line of dime-size bullet holes that extended all the way forward of the Fighting Falcon’s rear ventral fins to the leading edge of the fighter’s cropped delta wing and up to the plane’s big telltale bubble cockpit. The Hornet’s zoom caught a blinding flash from the Falcon’s bubble, which was the “gold” sprayed inside to stealth the aircraft from radar waves.
“That gold just freaked out the zoom,” RIO Evans commented, the presence of the pneumonic gray stratus doing little to reduce the gold bubble effect. “I think his nav equipment’s shot to hell, Chipper.”
“Could be,” responded Armstrong. “From those holes forward of his ventrals, I’d say he took a full burst in the kidneys.”
“Can you see him?” asked Evans.
“Negative, but it’s the damned gold cockpit.”
Armstrong moved the stick hard left to give the Hornet’s disc camera a less direct angle of approach, the Falcon looking to Armstrong as if it was still on a straight, perhaps auto-controlled flight path. His assumption was confirmed by the Hornet’s left digital display, telling him the Falcon was 108 feet above the sea and three miles below the McCain’s CAP, its speed 914 mph. Armstrong’s four Super Hornets, descending at Mach 1.1, simultaneously moved out of their line-abreast combat pairs into the more open fluid four formation, its two leaders — Armstrong on the left, “Rhino” Manowski on his right, scanning forward, each of their wingmen behind them and off to the side, their responsibility being to watch fore and aft of the four Hornets’ formation.
Chipper Armstrong and his RIO, on the front left of the formation, were ten thousand feet from their CAP’s right-hand leader and his RIO. The distance between each leader Hornet and wingman, however, was much closer, this spread between leader and minder no more than a thousand feet. This left Chipper Armstrong and Rhino Manowski as the front pair of the fluid four formation, freer to concentrate on the ROC Taiwanese Fighting Falcon that seemed devoid of human guidance.
“He’s moving,” announced Eagle Evans, Chipper’s RIO, Chipper fighting a sudden wind shear that was shooting up in excess of 200 knots per hour. It violently buffeted Armstrong and Evans’s Hornet for four seconds, the strength of the phantom’s “upblast” no doubt having enveloped the Fighting Falcon with such force that Armstrong and his wingman aft left of him came to the same conclusion — that any movement they’d glimpsed in the Falcon’s cockpit almost certainly had been due to the ROC pilot’s body being shaken by the hammerlike blows of the wind shear column colliding with the Falcon’s air drag, putting the Falcon momentarily into “bone-shake” mode before its autopilot computer effected flap and “Hi” stabilizer corrections.
“I dunno, Chipper,” said Evans hesitantly. He thought he’d seen the ROC pilot move forward from the Falcon’s maximum thirty-degree recline position. But he wasn’t sure, which meant he wasn’t sure whether the pilot was alive.
Evans’s hesitation was a manifestation of the doubt born the day after he and Armstrong had completed their six-week-long cadet Aviation Preflight Indoctrination course at Pensacola, Florida. Both men, along with dozens of other hopefuls, passed their rigorous Aerodynamics, Survival, Physiology, Escape, and Navigation training tests. But Evans learned that while he’d been rated “above average,” he’d flunked the test for Navy aviator nighttime vision. At twenty-three, he saw it as a colossal personal failure, despite the instructor’s slap-on-the-back advice that the responsibility in the backseat was huge. “Damn pilot can’t do much if he doesn’t know where the hell he is, Evans.”
Evans had given the appropriate “Right Stuff” smile.
“ ’Sides,” added the instructor, “once your tours are up, you’re gonna be one helluva lot more employable than an aviator. Fighter pilots aren’t in big demand among civilian airlines. You will be.”
Evans had nodded, remaining unassuaged. For Navy aviators, pilots, and RIOs, flying a civilian airliner was referred to disparagingly as “flying a bus.”
Back in the present, Evans thought that maybe Chipper was right. Perhaps the ROC pilot hadn’t moved and had the Falcon on full auto. He hoped so, because if the pilot was hurt too badly to eject, then the auto was his only hope, at least as long as his fuel lasted.
By now the blue screens in McCain’s inner sanctums were showing first four, then eight … twelve … sixteen … twenty-four bogeys entering the McCain battle group’s no fly combat zone at a point fifty-six miles east of Oluanpi, Taiwan’s most southerly point. Neither Admiral Crowley nor his battle group staff had any idea why Taiwan’s air force would be there, when Taiwan’s ROC pilots were committed to protecting their island’s western approaches, particularly at Kinmen Island. If the bogeys turned out to be Taiwanese, they would be classified as friendlies and nothing to worry about, either for Chipper Armstrong’s CAP, 170 miles northwest of the carrier, or for the battle group itself. But then the McCain’s SSES — the Ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, the innermost sanctum — reported detecting, via Satellite Infrared Data Uplink, an unmistakable Triple E — enemy electronic emission — pulsing from the twenty-four bogeys that were now directly south of Oluanpi.
Crowley knew this could mean only one thing — that the bogeys were now indisputably “hostiles,” ChiCom aircraft completing an end run down Taiwan’s east coast and around its southernmost point in order to sandwich the Taiwanese pilots who, low on gas, would be returning from the combat zone over Kinmen. Which meant the twenty-four ChiComs had refueled while in the air, a feat that, given the high advance winds of Typhoon Jane, was not only gutsy, but evidenced an in-flight fueling capability that neither the McCain’s battle group nor Taiwan’s air force had thought the PLA air force was capable of. This, despite an intel report that some illiterate mushroom digger up in Shihmen had claimed he’d seen “glints” of what he thought might have been low-flying aircraft out to sea.
Admiral Crowley ordered his remaining eight Hornets aloft, to be followed by a fourteen-plane FITCOMPRON — Fighter Composite Squadron. This included twelve F-14 Tomcats and an EA-6B Prowler, already overhead, as was an E-2C Hawkeye, which could continue to act as an adjunct for McCain’s ultrasecret signals exploitation space. The Prowler’s crew of four could jam enemy signals and in general cause electronic chaos among the twenty-four hostiles.
Crowley ordered Armstrong and his wingman Rhino Manowski to stay and shepherd the ROC Falcon, while the two other Hornets in the fluid four were to break off and head northeast to join the McCain’s Hornets and Tomcats. The squadron’s mission was to get between the returning ROC fighters low on fuel and the ChiCom hostiles.
“Shit!” complained Eagle Evans, who, like Rhino Manowski and his RIO, had been left out of the FITCOMPRON. “I want to be in the fight.”
“What fight?” said Chipper Armstrong. “Rules of Engagement, Eagle. Remember? Our boys are supposed to get in between the two Chinas, to be peacemakers — airborne referees. Who wants that job? End up getting shot at by both sides if you’re not careful.”
“Well,” came in Manowski, “I’d rather some action than being a shepherd!” His RIO was of the same mind, and they both glared jealously as the other pair of the fluid four peeled off and went to afterburner, racing to rendezvous with McCain’s composite fighter squadron. But the breakaway duo knew that with too much speed, they’d be too low on gas to make it back to the carrier if their loiter time between the returning ROC fighters and the ChiComs was longer than ten minutes. By which time the ROC guys from Kinmen would be heading back to refuel on Taiwan’s west coast at Ching Chuan Kang Air Force Base, seventy-five miles northeast of Taiwan’s Pescadores Islands, the latter approximate
ly halfway between Taiwan and the Communist mainland.
For Chipper Armstrong and Evans, metallic-gray nimbostratus lay ahead, Chipper doing a visual check of his head’s-up display for heading, airspeed, and altitude. The advisory, caution, and warning lights bottom of the HUD screen would automatically flash and sound in the event of impending malfunction, but “ye olde visual,” as his top gun instructor at Fallon used to say, was always advisable. “Remember, son, you’re flying the beast! Beast ain’t flying you!”
Chipper’s main concern was the Super Hornet’s “short legs”—its gas-to-weight ratio — which necessitated operations officers wrestling daily with the critical “weapons-to-drop-tank” equation. The Hornet’s relative lack of internal fuel space, compared to other fighters, was referred to as IFO—“If only!” As a compromise, Armstrong and Manowski’s planes had been equipped with a clip-on underbelly fuel tank in addition to the two drop tanks, one on each wing’s outer stanchion, where they would normally have preferred to carry air-to-air Sidewinder missiles, or two laser-guided bombs.
On McCain, the operations officer, like everyone in the Combat Air Patrol, had no way of knowing how long this “Bizarro” friendly Falcon could stay airborne. If Crowley’d had his way, he would have ordered Chipper and Rhino to join the twenty-two-plane posse now vectored to intercept the twenty-four ChiCom hostiles forty miles west of the Penghu Island group, off southwest Taiwan, before the ChiCom planes had a chance to down the near empty ROC Falcons, which were also defenseless, having expended all their ordnance over Kinmen. Crowley’s other option — his wish, in fact — was to recall Armstrong and Manowski. This was stymied, however, by a political necessity — the President could not be seen deserting a staunch ally in need, even if it was just one pilot. Any reluctance to stay with Bizarro would, as John Cuso advised, be a propaganda coup for America’s enemies, who were already gleeful with the stunning victories of what Arab television, radio, and press were now calling the “mighty midget” sub that, with the massive conflagration at Washington State’s Cherry Point refinery and the forced evacuations of thousands of Americans, was continuing to humble the Great Satan.
