It looked like a diamond flashed in the sky somewhere, a brief flare of light that indicated a hit.
'Skeeter, talk to me,' I demanded, leaving it to the backseaters to appreciate the damned fine shot. 'Talk to me ? have you got it?'
'I think so ? it's a little too far north, so I'm ? damn.'
'Damn what?'
'Right engine over temp. I'm pressing on anyway.'
'Any signs of fire?'
'Negative. Probably just a faulty gauge. Ready for Fox three. Now!'
'Shit.' Gator's verdict from the backseat was good enough for me. Despite his unwillingness sometimes to go along with what I deemed an adequate tactical maneuver, Gator had an almost psychic sense of when a missile would hit and when it wouldn't.
'We're on it,' I said, goosing the fighter slightly. I wanted speed, lots of it, to close the gap between me and the missile before I took a shot at it. The Tomcat screamed and the G forces pushed me back in my seat. It was a healthy, pounding thunder of powerful jet engines ripping speed out of thin air.
Closer and closer, until I got both a good growl off the Sparrow and the high whine off the Sidewinder. Hell, go with what works. I toggled up another Sidewinder, glad it had only taken me one to nail the last missile.
The Tomcat felt markedly lighter now, more responsive and nimble under my fingertips. Not that anti-air missiles weigh that much, but the drag they place on a high-performance airframe is always a factor.
'It looks good, it looks good,' Gator said. 'Not certain yet, but it might be.'
'I'm coming in for follow-up,' Skeeter announced. 'I've got two Sidewinders left.'
'Back me up,' I agreed, waiting for that final confident howl of glee from Gator that would tell me we were on the mark. Hell, it was just a surface-to-air missile ? I didn't need any help to nail one.
'Damn it, Bird Dog, it's dropping off!' Gator's voice held the note of confidence I'd been waiting to hear, but the words were wrong. All wrong.
'Shit, it fucked up?'
'Some sort of malfunction.'
'Where's the fucking sun?' I swung my head around to see it. 'No, not that. What the hell's got it distracted?'
'Maybe just a bad bird, Bird Dog.'
I toggled off another missile, already feeling a sinking, twisting sensation in my gut that told me I was in a bad tail chase. Real bad. The geometry flashed through my mind, more instinct than an actual mathematical calculation, but often just as deadly accurate. Gator wasn't the only one who could predict a hit, and despite my wishes I was calling this a no-go.
'I'm there,' Skeeter said. 'Fox three, Fox three.'
'You can't make it,' Gator said, his voice panicked now.
'Bird Dog, get Snoopy down on the deck. She's gonna have to try to evade it.'
An E-2 trying to evade a missile is like a snail trying to evade a fly-swatter. I had five seconds to watch, five seconds longer than any I've ever had in my life. Even flying nap of the earth over the Arctic hadn't curled my balls back up into my torso and made me want to puke with pain like this.
Five seconds. The E-2 started to move, pitching down and pointing her nose to the deck. She picked up speed immediately, trading altitude for airspeed.
Four seconds. The E-2 went into full nose-dive now, at an angle any experienced pilot would have been insane to try. Those airframes are sturdy but ancient, and the metal stress factors that play into extreme maneuvers like this are another thing to be worried about. I imagined what it was like in the cockpit of that bird, hearing the old structural members scream and complain, the ominous pops and cracks of an airframe exceeding her performance envelope.
Three seconds. The E-2 pilot was howling on tactical now, praying to every god he knew and damning the Vietnamese.
Two seconds. I heard it, those fatal last words that always echo over the airwaves, the ones that signify a pilot's final acknowledgment that he's really screwed the pooch this time. 'Oh, shit.'
One second. I had a visual on the missile now, so much smaller than the aircraft, streaming directly toward it with fire gouting out its ass.
The sky five miles away from me exploded into fire, violent, searing colors of orange and yellow. The black smoke followed, billowing around it like a shroud, then a secondary explosion, then nothing but black smoke and odd shards of metal cluttering the sky and Gator's radar scope.
'Chutes, any chutes?' Gator said urgently.
I tossed the Tomcat around in a tight curve, spiraling higher to avoid the black fireball now fouling the air. The sky was brilliant blue above, no trace of the fiery destruction down in my realm. Blue, innocent, and eternal. But that wasn't what I was interested in.
I spiraled down, staying well clear of the fireball that was now mostly smoke and a rain of shrapnel.
No chutes. No billowing arcs of silk white that would indicate any one of the four people on board had had time to punch out.
I dived lower, so close I could see the wave tops curling over and under, white-capped, covering deep sea fields of kelp. Just on the off chance that they made it out, had time to slip by me somehow undetected and make it to the safety of the ocean.
No luck. Not for me. Not for the E-2 crew.
'Let's get back to the boat,' I said finally to Skeeter over tactical. 'The helos are on their way ? they can do a better search at this altitude than we ever could. If there's anything there, they'll find it.'
Two clicks acknowledged my transmission, nothing more. Skeeter had spent his own time at sea level looking for any trace of the survivors. Hoping against hope, we both knew it was not going to happen.
Both of us were getting low on fuel. What we'd really like to do was head back in over land and nail the bastard who'd fired those missiles at an innocent, harmless E-2. If they wanted to fight, why hadn't they taken on one of us, somebody who had the maneuverability to at least stand a fighting chance? But no, they'd taken out the one bird in the sky that was more an ungainly seagull than a tactical aircraft.
And the one that could do them the most harm. Why were they objecting to the E-2's presence in their skies? In other words, what did Snoopy see that they didn't want him to?
'We're spooling up two F/A-18's now,' the controller back on the carrier said, as though he'd managed to read my thoughts from a distance of fifty miles. 'As soon as they're airborne, we'll recover you.'
'Roger.'
Skeeter and I fell into the starboard marshal, waiting our turn. As we spiraled around in our assigned spots, I keyed the mike and called the carrier one last time. 'What are those Hornets loaded out with?'
'Ground weapons,' was the short, satisfied reply. 'And we're just waiting for clearance.'
Fine. If I couldn't take the SAM site out myself, then at least we were doing something. Doing something this time, instead of doing what my father's generation had done, concentrating firepower on truck parks and POL sites. We needed to hit these bastards hard, where it could hurt them, where they knew exactly why we were doing it. As far as we were concerned, that SAM site would be toast.
I let Skeeter take a plug at the tanker first. As I hung back waiting my turn, it was easy to see that he was shaken up. Not that he would have admitted it, but it showed in his approach on the KA-6 tanker. Skeeter, normally the rock-steady precision flyer, was all over the sky. It took him three tries to plug the tanker, and even then he had one breakaway before he managed to suck down five thousand pounds. When he finally pulled away, I could tell from the tanker pilot's voice that he'd just about had enough of playing patty-cake with Tomcats.
'C'mon in, Bird Dog,' Leslie 'Loon' Luna said. He was normally the most unflappable of tanker pilots, but now his voice was short. I had a feeling we wouldn't be trading dirty jokes over the tanking frequency this time.
'On my way.' I slid the aircraft forward slowly, eased into position, then, keeping my eyes on the lights around the basket, slid the probe home with a firm thunk.
'Good seal,' Loon reported. 'Ready to begin transfer.'
I sucked down a quick five thousand pounds, glad I could at least manage to do this right.
Good eyesight and fast reflexes aren't enough to make a fighter pilot. You need something more ? the ability to compartmentalize your mind, to shut out everything else in the world once you step into that cockpit. My wife,
