'Put your radio on beeper, Coyote. I'll tell 'em you're waiting. See you at home!'
'Roger that. See you… back home.'
Home. The word brought a rush of thoughts, of memories, and the nostalgia was so surprising it momentarily crowded out of his mind thoughts of survival, of cold, of being abandoned in this vast expanse of water. For a moment, he could see Julie's face as clearly as if he could touch her. She was in San Diego now, with Jimmy.
Something caught his vision, tugging at his awareness just as he slid down the back slope of another ocean swell. What was it? Helplessly, he waited out the approach of another swell, felt himself rising… rising…
At the peak of the wave, he strained his eyes toward the something he'd glimpsed before and felt a thrill of recognition. A parachute! At first he thought it might be his, but then he realized the lines were still caught on something, that the canopy was still partly inflated and billowing in the stiff, chill wind.
Mardi Gras! That was his chute! After setting the radio to send out its steady, homing beep-beep-beep, he secured it to a strap on his shoulder, then began to paddle with clumsy strokes toward the chute. It was at least a hundred yards away, and he lost sight of it every time he slid into the trough between one wave and the next.
But if he could reach Mardi Gras, the job of the search and rescue choppers would be one hell of a lot easier. Grimly, he kept stroking and slowly closed the range.
Yes, the thunder definitely sounded a little louder now.
Batman Wayne looked from side to side as his Tomcat roared low over the Sea of Japan. The ocean was gray and empty, with a heavy swell under a stiff northeasterly breeze. 'Well, are we getting closer or what?'
'Try south,' Malibu replied from the fighter's backseat. 'Uh… make it one-eight-five. We're close, but I don't know how close.'
'Can you get a triangulation with the other aircraft?'
'Affirm. We've got him to within a couple of miles. Wait one.'
'Rog.' Batman dropped to four hundred feet, trying to focus on the water rushing past his aircraft's belly at better than three hundred knots. He was ashamed of himself for snapping at Malibu, but the pressure was on for some high performance. MiGs he could handle, he thought, but how the hell was he supposed to spot a couple of guys swimming in all that ocean? The string of beeps his RIO was listening to would vector them in. The only question was how long it would take.
'Surface contacts,' Malibu said. 'Three miles, bearing two-five-oh. Inside the line.'
'Shit. Maybe Homeplate'll let us go have a peek. Raise 'em, will you?' Batman wanted to concentrate on flying, on the gray swell of sea and whitecap below.
'We'll have to go through Tango,' Malibu replied. 'Too low to hit the Jeff… Tango Seven-niner, Tango Seven- niner, this is Backstop. Do you copy, over?'
'Backstop, Tango Seven-niner,' the familiar voice answered. 'Go ahead.'
'We have multiple surface targets at two-five-zero, range three miles. Request fly-by, over.'
Batman shut out the radio chatter as he brought the Tomcat around in a low, slow turn, wings fully extended, streamers of white contrail blasting from the trailing edges in the humid air. Far to the east, sunlight spilled through a rare break in the cloud deck, then flashed from an aircraft canopy. That would be his wingman, Nightmare Marinaro, quartering another piece of the ocean. The other two aircraft of Backstop Flight were searching behind them, further to the north.
Even with the damned beeper, this was going to take some looking. The fact that the invisible line marking North Korean territorial waters now lay only a mile or so off his starboard wing didn't make it any easier. What if Rodeo Two had gone down on the wrong side of the line?
'No go, Batman,' Malibu said over the Tomcat's ICS. 'We're stuck with the ROES.'
'Aw, shit!' Batman replied. 'They already shot one of our people down! We gotta go through that ROE crap every time we meet gomers?'
'Don't take it out on me, amigo! I'm right behind you, all the way.'
'Yeah.' Batman stifled the surge of emotion ? it wasn't anger he was feeling so much as excitement, a keyed-up, high-pitched eagerness to come to grips with an unseen enemy. There were MiGs out there, damn it, and he wanted one so badly he could taste it.
That realization only fanned the flames hotter. Every aviator in the Navy lived his whole career for one thing, and one thing only… the chance to come up head-to-head with an enemy MiG, to engage in combat and prove that mix of skill, training, and ego which made a combat fighter pilot.
It wasn't that he'd forgotten about Coyote and Mardi Gras. He hadn't… couldn't. But pilots went for unscheduled swims in the peacetime Navy too. It was a part of duty aboard a carrier that every aviator trained for… and kept as far to the back of his thoughts as was possible. Ditchings happened.
Turning and burning with real live MiGs, now, that was something else! The last time an American aircraft had tangled with MiGs had been during the Gulf War, and the dogfights over Iraq had been Air Force victories, more often than not. But how he would have liked to have been a part of that set-to!
Lieutenant Edward Wayne was a victim of one of the paradoxes of modern Naval service… especially service with a carrier air wing. He'd spent eight years of his life so far training for only one thing: meeting an enemy pilot in air-to-air combat and shooting him down. It wasn't that he wanted a war; nobody did. But air-to-air combat, real combat, and not the mock dogfights aviators engaged in with one another on an almost daily basis, was the crowning test of any fighter pilot's career.
And Tombstone and Coyote, those lucky sons-of-bitches… it had been handed to them on a plate!
He dropped the Tomcat a little lower, his eyes watering as he tried to focus on the water rushing past, searching for smoke, for parachutes, for anything. 'Ho, Malibu,' he said. 'How about doing the radio for a while? Maybe he'll tune in.'
'Sure thing, man. Rodeo Two, Rodeo Two, this is Backstop. Rodeo Two, this is Backstop…'
CHAPTER 4
Coyote was exhausted. The struggle to make his way toward the other chute through the heaving sea had left him so tired he could hardly move his arms. After almost fifteen minutes of paddling, he still wasn't sure whether he was getting closer to Mardi Gras… or whether his RIO's chute was dragging Mardi Gras closer to him.
'Mardi!' he shouted. Water slapped him in the face again and he spat it out. 'Mardi! You okay?'
There was no answer, no indication that Mardi Gras was even there, that he was still connected with his chute. Somehow, Coyote found the will to keep going. His hand closed on wet nylon and he began pulling hand- over-hand, dragging fistfuls of guideline as he pulled himself and the raft past the collapsing parachute and toward the dark form he could now see each time it rode to the top of another ocean swell.
Vince Cooper's helmet was blue with white stripes, the call sign Mardi Gras picked out in red letters on either side of the visor knob. The RIO's head sagged back against the collar of his life jacket, completely limp with the roll and swell of the waves. Unconscious, Coyote decided. Their life preservers were designed to inflate automatically when they hit salt water. Fortunately, Mardi's had functioned as advertised.
'Mardi! It's gonna be okay!' He dragged himself closer. 'You hear me, Mardi?' His hand closed on Mardi Gras's life preserver, dragging the bobbing form against his body. 'It's gonna be okay, Mardi! Just…'
Mardi Gras's head lolled sideways with sudden movement, and Coyote saw the shattered side of the helmet, the crimson color staining the water. He pulled Mardi Gras partway onto the raft, clinging to him as he searched for signs of life.
Coyote could feel the sickly crackle of bone fragments grating as he touched the RIO's head. Mardi Gras was dead, the left side of his skull crushed within the damaged helmet. 'Oh, God, Vince!' He peeled off one of his gloves, probing his RIO's throat searching for a pulse. 'Don't die on me!'
