Payback

officer calculated Freeman’s RS should be.

“That’s it,” Cuso reiterated to Crowley, wondering if the captain had heard his hypothesis of a few moments before. “They must have wanted us to hear.”

“Admiral,” cut in the EWO responsible for monitoring Japan’s listening posts, “our ears in the three nearest Japanese ports are also reporting hearing a PL loop.”

Crowley shifted uncomfortably in his Mikado.

“He’s gonna rip his balls off,” whispered a hard-copy gofer.

“He hears you, bud, he’ll rip yours off!”

“Quiet! Goddammit!” To their surprise it was Cuso’s voice, not Crowley’s, the captain’s worry lines dark furrows in the eerie blue glow from the big screen showing red X’s and white squares representing all “real-time” warships across the five-eighths of the world that was salt water.

“Question is, gentlemen,” said Crowley, his soft quietude in marked contrast to Cuso’s enthusiastic problem- solving, “what did Qingdao and the sub say to each other? Who’s on the translation?”

“ICT suggests that—,” began the EWO.

“ICT — balls,” cut in Crowley, his voice rising but still not as grumpy as earlier. “Initial computer translations read like some of these modern-day Bibles. They miss out on all the colloquialisms of the language, so they miss the guts of the message. We need a human being on this one. Where’s Oakley?” She was the senior translator on the McCain.

“She’s in the security bubble, sir. Should be done in five.”

“Be precise,” Crowley admonished impatiently. “Five hours, five days?”

“Five minutes, sir.”

“Good.” The admiral turned to his XO. “John, let’s get a Viking up there with JSF quad cover along with the Hawkeye.”

“Yessir,” said Cuso, heartened by what he considered to be a smart decision by Crowley, to get the Viking antisub chaser aloft to join the already airborne E-2C Hawkeye as soon as possible. The four Joint Strike Fighters would ride shotgun should an attack on the “possible hostile” HAN be deemed necessary in order to run interference for the RS, which, by the chief EWO’s reckoning, should be only fifteen minutes away from its mission’s target — which, for reasons of high security, aboard McCain was simply referred to in SES as “the shed.”

“Rhino” Manowski was excited but trying not to show it as he snapped off the return salute to his plane captain, the latter’s identifying brown shirt barely visible in the subdued yellow glow cast out onto the flight deck by the light at the base of the carrier’s island.

“Good hunting!” Manowski’s plane captain shouted up, his voice all but lost in the noise of the approaching storm, the “gonads-dropping” thud then whine of the carrier’s Elevator 2 as it descended to bring up the next Joint Strike Fighter, and the hum of the yellow tow tractors — or “donkeys,” as they were called aboard McCain—adding to the din of the carrier’s pre-launch operations. The 95,000-ton “boat” turned into the wind so as to gain maximum lift for the quad of Joint Strike Fighters, which would constitute a fluid “fingers four” shield protecting the S-3A Viking twin-jet sub chaser as well as the Hawkeye.

Rhino Manowski had been the wingman for celebrated fellow veteran aviator Lieutenant Commander “Chipper” Armstrong when the F/A-18F Super Hornets had been the carrier’s primary Strikers, both men distinguishing themselves in America’s most recent “referee action” over the Taiwan Strait, trying to prevent the Beijing-run People’s Republic of China and Taiwan’s Republic of China from further savaging each other. Manowski and Armstrong were among the very few to have mixed it up and destroyed two of the Soviets’ revolutionary designed MiG-29 Fulcrums. In Manowski’s case, he had not only escaped the Fulcrum’s legendary backward tail- slide-overshoot trap, but had downed the MiG in the process by getting off a quick Sparrow slap shot from his Hornet’s starboard recessed well, Manowski seeing the missile literally disappear up the Fulcrum’s tailpipe, blowing the MiG apart with such violence that it had sent a rain of white-hot debris into his Hornet’s port intake, shutting it down.

When Manowski had landed his injured bird, he’d missed the 3 wire, his tailhook snatching the 4 wire instead, but at such an oblique angle that it had slipped off just as quickly. The Hornet’s surviving starboard engine, as required, was not yet off full power, the setting needed in case a plane missed the wires and had to “bolter”—go around for another try. But on one engine instead of two, and heavy ordnance not yet expended, the Hornet was too heavy to take off again. Manowski had ordered, “Eject!” heard the explosive bolts fire, and thanked God and the ACES’ ejection seats whose “zero-zero” capability assured that he and his radar-intercept officer would be thrown high enough for their chutes to deploy. Manowski’s chute, like his RIO’s, opened, both men having had a split second, amid the traumatic shock of literally being blasted out of their Hornet, to appreciate the genius of whoever it was, in May of ’52, on the USS Midway, who had first tested the feasibility of using an angled flight deck, now standard on all U.S. carriers and which, at 14 degrees off center, ran from the stern to an abrupt sawn-off-looking end back from and left of the bow. It had meant that as their disabled Hornet careened down this landing deck — runway, it was not coming in behind other planes waiting for takeoff on forward catapults 1 and 2.

As Manowski had floated down toward the sea, before McCain’s “Jolly Green” rescue helo had picked him up, he was relieved that his new multimillion-dollar junked airplane hadn’t clipped any of the parked aircraft that jammed the available deck spaces. It didn’t matter to his RIO, who, unlike Manowski, had not landed in the ocean but had slammed headfirst into the huge warship’s port bow. Despite his helmet, the RIO was knocked unconscious, and by the time the helo’s swimmers located him, after he had been swept aside in the bow’s push wave then sucked astern, his body had been mangled by the carrier’s prop blades.

It was testimony to Rhino Manowski’s toughness, as well as his skill as a naval aviator from Top Gun that he was as excited to fly this night as he had ever been. Yes, night ops were scary as hell — someone had said it was like being shoved in a dark closet and having the door slammed on you. But it was the greatest rush he knew. Besides, tonight there was a special reason for Rhino, Chipper, and Quad 3 and 4 to be geared up. This would be their first nontraining op in their wonder of wonders, the F-35C, the Navy’s version of the Joint Strike Fighter.

As Chipper Armstrong’s plane captain was guiding his JSF to its takeoff position in front of the jet-blast deflector on the forward starboard catapult, he smelled the strong fumes and watched the green-shirted cat 1 crew attaching the hold-back bar to the fighter’s nose gear. This restraint, together with the plane’s brakes, would allow the “35,” as the JSF was being called by all involved in McCain’s flight ops, to have its Pratt and Whitney engine at full power, building up thrust like a caged stallion eager to be free. Chipper saw a green shirt sprint forward, holding up his chalkboard with the takeoff weight written on it so both Armstrong and the “shooter”—or catapult officer — could see that total weight of the F35-C was 30,168 pounds plus fuel and ordnance. If the shooter failed to pump enough saturated steam from McCain’s reactor into the cat’s pistons, the sudden and enormous jerk forward would end up tearing the 35’s nose-wheel assembly out of the fighter.

On the other hand, too little steam to drive the pistons would throw the plane off the deck with insufficient force, toppling pilot and plane into the sea, whereupon the carrier’s enormous V-bow would slice it in half, not even giving the pilot, as Rhino Manowski had had in his injured Hornet, time to eject. And the monolith that was McCain would not stop. Even if Crowley wanted to, he wouldn’t. Such an interruption would be a dangerous pause in what to the casual observer appeared to be organized chaos on the flight deck, but this “chaos” was, in fact, an intricately and minutely choreographed ballet of war. A single error by any of the yellow-shirted plane directors, shooters, arresting gear officers; blue-shirted elevator and tractor operators; green- shirted crews; brown-shirted plane captains; or the red-shirted weapons and crash crew could, in a nanosecond, turn the flight deck into a jet-fuel-and-ordnance-fed inferno, as had happened aboard the Oriskany, Forrestal, and Enterprise in the late ’60s, killing 205 crew.

Manowski, like Armstrong, could smell the astringent odor of jet exhaust fumes that had risen up over the jet-blast deflector behind Armstrong’s plane, the fumes driving off the bracing smell of sea air, and he saw that Chipper Armstrong and his shooter, who was hunkered down in the bump on the deck known as the “pod,” both signaled agreement on the green shirt’s chalkboard takeoff weight. Manowski, impatient to be airborne, watched the green shirts dash about Chipper’s Joint Strike Fighter, doing their last preflight check. With no problems reported, the shooter signaled Armstrong he was good to go. Chipper set his engine control to “afterburner” and gave the shooter a sharp, definite salute, remembering how McCain’s XO had grounded a