instead of MiGs. If that was true, he was damned sure he didn’t want that next star! What would that entail taking on a satellite single-handedly? Maybe a space shuttle? Surviving near death always brought with it its own sense of giddiness.
“I’ve got a visual,” he said, surveying the landscape ahead of him.
The Cuban naval base was easily visible in the sunlight now pouring out from the east. Brilliant white buildings set against the lush tropical foliage, some of them partially concealed by towering palm trees. A thin line ran around the compound, undoubtedly a fence of some sort.
Tombstone could see people moving around, the damaged building still smoldering from the strike the day before, and heavy construction equipment invading the open field that had contained the alleged missile silos.
Farther to the west, he established a visual on his target.
From the air, the command center looked innocuous a single-story building no different from its fellows. But according to intelligence, it burrowed deep into the earth, and the actual command center was cut off from the Potemkin village structures aboveground.
“Home Plate, this is Tomcat Two-zero-two,” Tombstone said into his microphone. “Commencing bombing run.”
“Stoney!” Batman snapped over the circuit. “Goddamn it, one of these days I’m going to” Tombstone cut him off. “Listen, shipmate, I don’t have time to talk right now. I’m gonna blast this bastard back to the Stone Age. As for the details well, if you come clean with me when I get back to the ship, I’ll fill you in on them.
Otherwise, you’re permanently out of the loop.”
“Not on the circuit,” Batman snapped. “Jesus, don’t you think that I” “I’m betting you didn’t do anything,” Tombstone interrupted again.
“You remember a certain conversation we had in the Flag Mess two days ago? About Vietnam and what we learned from that?”
“Yes.” Batman’s voice was wary. “You’ve been thinking about that?”
“You bet. And I think I know how this whole thing developed and how to keep it from happening again.
We’ll talk about that when I get back, but the priority right now is preventing Cuba from launching on the U.S. Quick now I’m almost in is there any later intel?”
“It’s as we suspected, Stoney,” Batman said. “It’s that command center we ID’d from the photos. We believe the complete command staff is down there and they’ve got tactical control of every weapon on that island.
If you damage them, even take out all their antennas, they’ve got no way to launch. Not unless they’ve got a remoted capability to each of their silos that we don’t know about.”
Tombstone sighed. “If we don’t know about that for certain, we’d better assume the worst case. I want vectors back to the silos, the ones you know about. I’ll drop a few HARMs at the command center and save the five-hundred pounders for the three silos we identified. Are there any others?”
“No new reports of them. But Stoney, you’d better hurry,” Batman said, his voice taking on a new note of urgency. “We’ve got targeting indications.”
“On my way. Just keep the Libyans and the Cuban air power occupied to the east for a bit while I take care of business, okay?”
“You got it.” Tombstone could hear Batman giving a series of orders to someone in the background. Finally, he came up on the circuit. “Think you can manage a little air-to-ground attack strategizing?”
Tombstone chuckled. “After what I’ve been through today, I think I probably can. But if you try sending me up against a satellite, you can forget it.”
“All systems green,” the senior missile officer reported. He glanced up at Mendiria. They’d done this so many times as a drill surely this wasn’t the real thing? The echoes of the bombs that had exploded around him yesterday still rang in his ears. Yes, he conceded, his hands suddenly sweaty and shaky: This was it. The moment they’d been training for, the decisive point in the battle that their Libyan advisors had been coaching them for for the last two years. One strike, they’d all agreed, and the U.S. would crumble. They’d never be able to stand the political pressure at home following an attack from the Cuban mainland.
He wished he were as certain about that as his superiors.
He laid his hand over the launch button, and tried to stop his finger from trembling.
As Tombstone bore in on the target, he rolled the Tomcat over and stared downward at the ground through the canopy. Land streaked by in a haze of brown and green, the colors almost indistinguishable at this speed. He watched for a few seconds, craned his head to get an accurate visual on his IP, then rolled the Tomcat back over into level flight.
Four seconds later, he was over the command center bunker. He flipped the weapons release switch, felt the Tomcat leap up into the air as missiles left its rail, then jerked the aircraft away to the right in a hard, screaming turn.
The two HARM missiles seemed to hang in the air.
Suddenly, something seemed to catch their attention the invitingly enticing scent of electromagnetic radiation. Rocket motors kicked in, seeker heads aligned on the emissions, and the missiles dove in on the target.
When they were seconds away from impact, the radiation suddenly ceased.
No matter they were too close now, too certain of a kill, to disarm or detonate harmlessly. The two missiles exploded, the first one half a meter in front of a delicate microwave communications assembly and the second at the base of a high-frequency antenna whip.
The microwave structure exploded into a hail of shrapnel, shredding two guards located outside the front of the command center. The destruction of the high-frequency antenna was less dramatic, but equally telling. The thirty foot whip exploded up out of the ground as though it were a javelin, arcing across the compound to clatter to the ground just outside the officers’ club. Wires that were ripped out of the ground and out of the power supply trailed around it before settling into awkward, half-described circles on the ground. The base structure sputtered once, then shorted out in a spray of sparks.
“Commander! We’ve lost data link with the launch site.”
The senior missile officer felt a vague trace of relief, then felt guilty over it. It was wrong to be relieved that a commander’s strategy had been foiled, entirely wrong.
Nonetheless, if he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn he was grateful for it.
“Come right, steady on zeroone-five,” Tomboy ordered.
“Twenty seconds to IP.”
The Tomcat groaned as it took the high-G turn, racing between ground targets like a car negotiating a set of orange pylons on a test track.
The Hornet, while it would have done better on the quick turns and maneuvers required to hit the missile launcher sequentially, couldn’t have carried enough armament to take out everything. Not that and the command center as well.
The first target was an easy one. Tombstone didn’t even bother with the rollover maneuver to take a visual sighting on his target, but simply followed Tomboy’s direction in. By now, her ESM indicator was screaming about launch indications from the farthest-away site, and that had to be the top priority. Still, he doubted there was time to take that one first and then come back for the others. No, they would do them in sequence, the way they’d planned.
The first five-hundred-pound bomb hung up on launch.
Tombstone swore, dropped the Tomcat down into a hard dive, then jerked it up. As the Tomcat pulled up violently, he toggled the launch button again. The sudden change in force vectors shook the bomb loose from the rack and sent it hurtling toward its intended target. The decrease in weight increased the Tomcat’s angle of attack. The massive aircraft stuttered for a moment, momentarily approaching stall speed, then grabbed hard at the air for lift.
