by Ian Slater
“There he goes!” said Evans, his voice so loud it startled Armstrong in the front seat.
“Jesus, Eagle—”
“No doubt about it. Right hand is definitely moving — sliding along the canopy seal — for support, I guess. Hand must be shot up pretty bad — trying to edge it forward along the seal so he can let it drop down onto the stick.” The eagle-eyed Evans, though not having realized his dream of being a fighter pilot, was recalling that the Falcon’s control stick, unlike in most fighters, wasn’t on the center line, but was instead located on the right console.
Now Chipper could see it too, though it was difficult to spot, given the F-16D’s near opaque shining gold bubble. Evans was correct, and their Hornet’s wingman confirmed his observation. “Eyes of an eagle, ol’ buddy,” Rhino complimented him. “Eyes of an eagle.”
“Yeah,” responded Evans, “but not the eyes of an owl.” No one but Armstrong picked up Evans’s oblique allusion to his aviator nighttime vision test.
To the four Americans’ astonishment, the Falcon’s pilot managed to turn his head, albeit slowly, to his right, his left hand raised slightly in a “thanks” salute.
“Hey hey hey!” called Rhino excitedly, simultaneously giving the Falcon a thumbs-up. “You go, girl!”
“Girl?” It was Rhino’s RIO. “Bullshit! You can’t tell a guy from a skirt underneath a bone dome.”
“She’s got her visor up,” retorted Rhino. “You see that, Eagle?”
“Yeah,” said Evans, “but a lot of young Asian guys can look to us like a woman. You know, no facial hair, small physique.”
“I can see her boob bumps in the g-suit,” said Rhino.
“Pull the other one,” kidded Evans.
“I’d like to pull ’em both. Hey, you guys, Taiwan’s not the only country with women on the joystick. We’ve got ’em too, remember?”
“Not many,” cut in Evans.
“We’ve got ’em, though,” cut in Rhino’s RIO. “Call signs—’Pussy Galore,’ ’Titty Galore’—”
A gravelly voice that sounded right next door but was Admiral Crowley over three hundred miles away entered the conversation. “Chipper, Rhino, knock it off.” The McCain was no doubt doing its thing, scanning, plucking radio signals out of the ether at will, alerting Crowley to the presence of one or all three of McCain’s women pilots in the Combat Information Center.
“Focus,” Crowley added grumpily. “Report on Bizarro?”
“Bizarro looking good,” reported Chipper crisply. “Possible …” He paused. Was it a he or a she? What the hell did it matter anyway? “Possible that Falcon will be able to make our roof.” “Roof” wasn’t exactly code, but using colloquialisms like this instead of saying “able to reach our carrier” was more often than not effective in confusing ChiCom listening posts.
In McCain’s Combat Information Center, Admiral Crowley was concerned about the rock-bottom morale of the U.S. Navy after this last week. It had enveloped him as much as if not more than the six thousand officers and crew on his boat. No one could afford another mistake, though just how anyone could be blamed for not having detected the small but deadly predator hiding somewhere in the eleven hundred square miles of Juan de Fuca, and now apparently Georgia Strait, was not all clear. Of course, everyone aboard had his or her own theory of how such a small target lurking in the depths could so easily have escaped detection. There were six thousand theories aboard McCain alone, though the pointy heads — the electronic warfare elite — had all but unanimously concluded that the midget sub must be covered in revolutionary state-of-the-art anechoic sound tiles with the sonar absorption capability of cottage cheese. It didn’t surprise Crowley. Hell, the U.S. had done it with the radar-absorbing tiles on the latest stealthed fighters and bombers.
The “little black guy,” as the tall, six-foot-three John Cuso was affectionately called by the McCain’s CIC staff, was also concerned. He had become as perennially cautious as Crowley, despite his life on the edge in his previous incarnation as a fighter jock. Perhaps his caution, like his boss’s, was in part the result of simply growing older, when one began to lose the air of invincibility, the universal conviction of youth that they wouldn’t be the one to “get it,” that the unthinkable fate would be visited only upon the incompetent and the hesitant.
Cuso, his skin still goose-pimpled by the cold air-conditioning in the CIC, cautioned the admiral that this “Bizarro”—another informal code word to confuse hostile eavesdroppers — might be a ChiCom pilot in a captured ROC Falcon from Kinmen Field.
“For what purpose?” asked the admiral.
“To decoy our CAP away from the ChiCom hostiles who slipped around the bottom of Taiwan and who, if everything is on cue—” Cuso looked up at the CIC situation board. “—should be encountering our boys pretty soon.”
“Well, John,” answered Crowley, “if Bizarro is a decoy, which I doubt, he or she managed to sucker us only for a while. But we’re on to the hostiles now.”
“Yes, but if we’d had Chipper’s CAP farther northeast as the hostiles came around, we’d have scattered them there.”
“ ’Ifs’ don’t help us, John. Our CAP had to investigate Bizarro, who they think is a wounded Taiwanese pilot. My gut instinct is that it’s exactly as young Evans says — a friendly, shot-up, scared, on auto until he or she recovers enough to be able to land that sucker. And my guess is he’s low on gas.”
Cuso nodded at this last conclusion. “I think you’re right there. The vectors suggest he, she, must have only—”
“CAP to Mother.” It was Armstrong’s voice. “Are we to escort Bizarro to the roof?”
“One moment, Chipper,” said Crowley.
“If that Falcon’s shot up—” began Cuso.
“Goddamn, John,” retorted Crowley. “They can see the bullet holes in it, tail to canopy. It’s a miracle the bird’s still in the air.”
“What I mean, sir,” continued Cuso, “is that his auto might be whacked for a landing anywhere, let alone a carrier.”
“I’m not risking him landing on the roof, John. I’m not risking any of our crew on the deck.” He grabbed the spiral cord mike. “Mother to CAP. Negative for the roof. You’ll have to have Bizarro eject for pickup. I say again, Bizarro to eject for pickup.” Crowley put the mike in its cradle, asking his “covey” of electronics weapons officers, “What’s our CAP’s ETA?”
“Twenty-five minutes, sir. Possibly a little less. SSES advises SATRECON shows strong tailwind.”
“That from the typhoon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good for Armstrong and Manowski coming home, but that means strong headwinds for FITCOMPRON.”
“Yes, sir. Gusts up to seventy miles per hour.”
Confirming his officers’ verbal report, the admiral, like every other commander in his carrier battle group, looking up at their big blue screens, could see that his FITCOMPRON was slowing because of the headwinds. Contact would now be made in fifty seconds, the CIC computers also projecting a rapidly increasing rate of fuel consumption. Crowley ordered three of his six S-3B Vikings to be brought up by their elevator and gassed up, their antisub warfare crew to ready the aircraft for its other function as aerial refueler, should the Hornets and Tomcats — particularly the Hornets — become dangerously low on Avgas after having to buck the winds of the advancing typhoon.
“No way the Chinese Communists started this punch-up with Taiwan,” Crowley told John Cuso. “Who in their right mind would risk any kind of invasion, knowing a typhoon is gonna hit them in the face?”
Cuso was noncommittal. A lot of the world wasn’t in its right mind, including his mother-in-law. “Maybe Beijing was caught with its pants down. Didn’t believe the weather forecast. Or maybe the ChiComs figured that now would be when an attack would be least expected. Like MacArthur at Inchon,” continued Cuso, “and that Freeman retreating with his armor in that blizzard, then—”
“Angels approaching hostiles,” announced a wea
pons officer calmly, his relaxed tone belying the tension building in the skies over the Penghu Islands, where McCain’s twenty-two fighters’ job would be to break westward, but not before they made visual contact with what SSES’s satellite-catalyzed radar had designated as “hostiles.” Only then could McCain’s twelve “Hummer” Super Hornets and F-14 Tomcats break left, heading eastward to act as what the White House was pleased to call a “buffer zone” between the two Chinese air forces, the Pentagon Rules of Engagement forbidding the Americans to fire unless fired upon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Moments after they reached the air space above the Penghu Islands, which had been only mere dots on the Hornets’ and Tomcats’ radar screens, McCain’s squadrons received a shock. Ahead, in the“ box” of twenty-four hostiles, red stars emblazoned high on tailfins and wings, were two types of aircraft. McCain’s planes were a mix too, but the ChiCom “box” consisted entirely of Russian-made aircraft. Twelve of them were pale blue, wave-flecked gray MiG29 fighters — NATO designation “Fulcrum”—the remainder a dozen Sukhoi-30s, fighter-bombers. Both Fulcrums and Flankers were as fast as the Americans’ Tomcats, and over 300 mph faster than the Hornet.
“Shit! Russians!” exclaimed the Tomcat leader, Lieutenant Colonel Gene P. Crouper, “Drummer” to his fellow aviators.
“Negative!” cut in the nasal radio voice of Commander Johnny Reisman, or “Hummer One,” leader of McCain’s twelve Super Hornets and overall commander of FITCOMPRON. “Those red stars are barred,” he said, by which Reisman meant that the red stars on the Fulcrums and Sukhois had a bar painted on either side of the star, the insignia of the ChiCom air force, not the Russian air force.
“You sure?” pressed Drummer.
“Positive,” Reisman assured him. “Russkies are broke. They’ve been selling assets off all over.”
“Okay, but why the Flankers?” asked Drummer Crouper. “I mean, fighter-bombers.”
“Got me,” answered Johnny Reisman, “but they’ve seen us — got the message. Let’s break east, go play referee.”
“Roger that,” said Crouper. “I hope we can persuade—”
“What the — they’re jinxing us.” Drummer was only half right, for while the twelve Fulcrums, the best fighters Mikoyan-Gurevich ever produced, had broken fast left, coming hard at the Americans, the twelve Sukhoi-30 Flanker fighter-bombers were continuing north northwest.
Reisman saw what was up immediately. The twelve Russian-made ChiCom Flankers were carrying Kh-17 “Krypton” air-to-surface antiradiation missiles and TV-guided 1,100-pound bombs on their ten hard points. This told Reisman, and now Drummer Crouper, that the ChiCom left hook mission wasn’t just about flying down Taiwan’s east coast and around its southernmost tip below the ROC’s radar screen in order to engage returning low-on-gas Taiwanese Falcons and Mirages headed home to refuel.
“Bandits jinxing us thirty-eight miles,” announced Tomcat’s Drummer.
“Swing away,” ordered Reisman. “Do not engage. I say again, do not engage!”
“Shit!” observed Reisman’s RIO. “Every damn pilot in the world knows jinxing’s a direct confrontation—”
“Break right!” shouted Reisman, and every fluid four in the American box swung away in a unison that rivaled the Navy’s elite Blue Angel Hornet formation team. And every pilot hated the break. Running away from their sole reason for being — to fight.
“And every driver on our side,” Reisman reminded Tomcat leader Drummer Crouper, “knows our mission. We’re tasked to be peacemakers. That’s all. Just let ’em know we’re here.”
“Drummer to Hummer One. They’re coming at us again. Thirty miles.”
“Break due west,” said Reisman, his voice sounding tight, the increased G force pressing hard on his chest, he and his two squadrons making a hard left turn once more. And then Reisman did something neither he nor many other fighter pilots had done in their career — he flicked from his Fighter Composite Squadron’s radio frequency to 243.000, the Coast Guard Mayday channel, which all pilots — ChiCom, ROC, and anyone else aloft, and, most important, the carriers — would have open. If a dust-up was about to occur, Reisman wanted everyone to know who shot first so that no U.N. son of a bitch would be able to complain about U.S. aggression. Whether he liked it or not, Reisman was trying to implement the White House’s policy — a totally unrealistic one, in his view — of trying to play referee between the two warring Chinas.
Cuso and Crowley in McCain’s CIC were duly astonished. “What the hell—” the admiral began, then paused, listening.
“Crazy to taunt us like that,” said Cuso, watching the blue screen. “Don’t they remember what happened to the Libyans?” It was a reference to the downing of two Libyan MiG 23s in January 1989 who were brash and brave enough to jinx a pair of Tomcats off the John F. Kennedy.
Crowley could feel his blood pressure soaring with the sense of urgency in the plane-to-plane chatter, frying noises of static surge, and labored breathing of his pilots in their exhausting turns as they ran from the ChiComs.
“Bogeys jinxing again twenty-six miles!” Cuso and Crowley recognized it as Tomcat leader Drummer Crouper, his “again” so emphatic that it conveyed all the frustration of the FITCOMPRON’s aviators at being ordered by Reisman to evade rather than engage. Crowley was more conscious than anyone on the ship that while pilots might speak to their RIO or other crew members in a completely informal manner, he or she knew that whatever you said on interplane radio could be heard by everyone in the squadron and on the carrier, that it was your reputation on the line. Drummer’s “again” was telling everyone that he thought the squadron had “breaked” too much already. Cuso saw his point. What kind of “referees” could expect to do their job without respect?
“He thinks Reisman’s being too cautious,” Cuso said. “Wants us to do a Freeman.” It had slipped out before he had a chance to cage it. Cuso thought Freeman was great, had a naval aviator’s daring.
“Oh, really?” replied the admiral caustically, his eyes still on the screen, his tone a measure of his frustration, the frustration of all battle group commanders who, despite a military man’s instinct, know full well that they and their careers are under control of the top civilian executive of the United States. He turned sharply to face Cuso. “What do you want me to do, John? By doing a Freeman? Start shooting? Get us into a punch-up in the strait when we’re already overextended, spread from Afghanistan to Korea, to the drug wars in Colombia, to the four-thousand-mile-long border with Canada? And in the Philippines? And never mind we’re still in the Balkans and Japan. You talk about Freeman — I can’t understand why the President is using an old warhorse like him anyhow. Should be pensioned off!”
Cuso said nothing. Freeman was being used by the White House precisely because Crowley was correct — the United States, its superpower status notwithstanding, was stretched dangerously thin throughout the dangerous world, at sea, on land, and in the air. All reserves in the three armed services had been called up, including Marine reserves. Everyone, including Freeman and his ex-SpecFor warriors, was needed.
They heard Johnny Reisman once more order his fighters to “break west,” the twelve ChiCom Fulcrums jinxing yet again. Crowley saw an EWO officer at his console glance questioningly at another.
“Something wrong, Abrams?”
“No — no, sir.”
“Then watch the screen.”
On the ship’s signals exploitation space intercom, the “boffins” informed CIC that the ChiCom Sukhoi-30 fighter bombers were still proceeding northward in air space above the Penghu island group.
“Thank you!” acknowledged Crowley, turning again to Cuso, his tone, though still edgy, more conciliatory. “We can see that on our own screen. They think we’re blind in here or—” Crowley had suddenly divined what Reisman had realized a minute or so earlier. The ChiCom fighters were jinxing McCain’s squadron to protect their fighter-bombers heading for Penghu. The admiral snatched the mike from i
ts cradle, his short stature requiring him to perform what the less charitable among McCain’s six thousand souls called his “tippy-toe” maneuver.
“Mother to Hummer One. Do you read me?”
“Loud and clear,” came Reisman’s response.
“Give bandits warning on two four three — repeat, two four three — that if they jinx again you will engage. Repeat — if they jinx again you will engage. Do you read me?”
“Roger that. Warn bandits on Guard Channel. If they jinx again we will—”
“Bogeys jinxing twenty miles!” It was Reisman’s wingman. “Noses on, Angels Nine plus,” which told McCain’s CIC that the carrier’s twelve Hornets were at nine thousand feet and climbing out of the way. Instantly, Crowley gave his aviators “weapons-free independent decision authority.” To engage, not evade.
“Roger that,” began Reisman when Drummer Crouper, five miles ahead, his eyes on his Tomcat’s vibrant green heads-up display, saw the flashing MASTER CAUTION light on his right side advisory panel. Master Caution was now replaced by the flashing black on yellow acronym AAM, an air-to-air missile, seen as a green tadpole symbol on Drummer’s radar screen, the missile fired by a Fulcrum and closing fast on the green X that was Drummer’s bird.
Drummer broke hard right, hit the afterburner, broke hard left, left again, piling on the G force, using his upgraded digital readout that was telling him the Chicom’s AAM was a PLA air force R-77, NATO code AA-12 Adder radar-guided active terminal, range thirty-one miles, speed Mach 4, warhead sixty-six pounds, HE fragmentation. It was still closing. He hit the cat’s afterburner, again broke hard left, left again, piling on more G’s, then hard right. “Ready for chaff!” he yelled to his RIO.
