fact… but it was damned hard to look at it too.
'Washington?' Fitzgerald asked. There was the slightest curl to his lip as he spoke the word.
Magruder looked at his watch. 'Fourteen fifty-six,' he said. 'They've been in the water for almost an hour. Backstop lost the beeper signal forty minutes ago. How long do you think they'll survive in that cold water, Captain?'
Fitzgerald's cigar worked up and down in his mouth, the muscles in the lean face working furiously. 'I'd say we still have to give it a try, Admiral. We can't just leave our boys out there, can we?'
Magruder looked away as he handed a teletype printout to Fitzgerald.
The reply to his call to CINCPAC had been routed back down the line with startling swiftness. Admiral Bainbridge had assured him that the Joint Chiefs were closeted with the President at that very moment, discussing this latest twist to the Korean crisis.
In the meantime, though…
Jefferson's carrier battle group consisted of six ships spread across nearly one hundred miles of ocean. Closest to the Korean coast was the Spruance-class destroyer John A. Winslow, now steaming north some forty miles west of the Jefferson. Even at top speed, it would be hours before the Winslow could launch her two Sea Kings, hours more before the helicopters would reach the waters where Rodeo Two had gone down.
They'd be better off getting help from the Republic of Korea. The ROKs kept helos ? Blackhawks and Sea Kings ? stationed at Yangyang and Kangnung on South Korea's east coast. Hell, they might even have a few up at Kansong, and that was only seventy-five miles south of where the action was. Seventy-five miles was thirty minutes for a Blackhawk. They could have been there already!
Fitzgerald looked up from the teletype. 'Washington is sitting on the ROKs?'
Magruder nodded. 'Somehow, they seem to feel the North Koreans are going to feel threatened by a fleet of South Korean helicopters coming at them up the coast.' He gestured at the message. 'Quote, it is imperative that no actions which can be construed as deliberately provocative be taken, unquote.'
Commander Wheeler, Jefferson's Air Boss, looked up from his chair across the compartment. 'And shooting down one of our Tomcats isn't provocative,' he said in disgust. 'Shit.'
Magruder ignored him. 'We've been ordered to hold our position while the Joint Chiefs study the situation,' he said quietly. 'We're too far out to launch a SAR of our own, and a sortie by the ROKs is out of the question. I'm afraid we've lost our people.'
'You want to explain that to our aviators?' Fitzgerald asked. The faces of the other officers in Pried-Fly wore the shock which the Captain's words lacked.
'Want to? No. But there's not a hell of a lot else to do, is there? Except wait for CINCPAC and the Joint Chiefs to get off their asses and make up their minds.'
'We'll be sitting out here until this time next year.'
Magruder walked over to the window and looked down on the aft flight deck, forty feet below. The procession of deck crewmen had vanished with Tombstone and Snowball beneath the overhang of the island's superstructure. Matthew would be coming up shortly. The Admiral had passed the word for his nephew to meet him here.
The Air Boss walked over to stand beside him. 'Pardon me, Admiral, but we can't leave those boys out there.'
'What do you want me to do, Commander? Invade North Korea?'
'If that's what it takes.' The muscles at his jaw worked for a moment before he added, 'Sir.'
There was a stir of emotion by the Pried-Fly entry, and Tombstone walked in. Lieutenant Commander Pete Lepke, the Assistant Air Boss ? 'mini boss' to Jefferson's aviators ? was the first to shake his hand. 'First class, Matt.'
'Thanks, Pete.' Tombstone turned to face Magruder and Fitzgerald. 'Admiral. Captain. Reporting as ordered.'
The admiral couldn't look at Matthew Magruder without seeing the boy's father ? his brother. Tombstone was tall for an aviator, as tall as Sam had been, with the same unruly brown hair, the same dark eyes. The somber, almost brooding features which had given the boy his running name were Sam's too.
'So you chalked one up for the wall at Miramar?' the admiral asked. There was a wall in a passageway at the Top Gun school at Miramar where the dates of Navy air-to-air victories are recorded on red-painted silhouettes of the kills. 'Well done, Matthew.'
'Thank you, Admiral. Is there any word yet about Coyote and Mardi Gras?'
The admiral kept the smile frozen in place. The older man shook his head, a slight, jerking movement. 'Negative, Matthew. Backstop lost the SAR beeper forty minutes ago.' He paused, unwilling to say the rest. 'I've ordered Backstop RTB.'
'For God's sake, why? Coyote is still alive out there somewhere! I talked to him!'
Admiral Magruder looked away. 'They're out of range for SAR helos. And we're being dangled by those bastards in the five-sided squirrel cage.'
'The Pentagon? What-'
'It's a touchy situation, son,' Captain Fitzgerald said. He gestured with the teletype flimsy. 'Coyote may have gone down inside North Korean territorial waters.'
'So? They shot him down. They shot first. We go in and get him.'
'I wish it were that simple,' Admiral Magruder said. 'But with tensions running as high as they are up here, the word is to play it with a low profile. No hostile acts.'
'It was the NKs who started with the hostile acts, damn it!' He caught a warning glint in his uncle's eye, and stiffened. 'Yes, sir.'
'I know how you feel, Matthew, but right now our hands are tied. There's a chance the North Koreans picked him up. If so, it will be up to the State Department boys to get him out, not us.'
'And if the November Kilos didn't pick him up?'
The admiral walked over to one of the windows. A rainbow of colored shirts spilled across the flight deck a telephone pole's length below. A pair of F-14s were being nudged into position on catapults two and four. Green shirts ran the cat shuttles back, locking them in place to each aircraft's nose gear as steam boiled from the deck around them. 'Then it's probably too late already. That water out there is damned cold.'
'Yeah,' Tombstone said after a moment's silence. 'And the water's not the only thing that's cold. Sir.'
He turned and strode from Pried-Fly. Admiral Magruder could feel the younger man's anger like a white heat.
CHAPTER 5
Tombstone spent the next hour surrounded by sea and sky on Vulture's Row, the railed walkway high up on Jefferson's island, trying to come to grips with the knowledge that Coyote wasn't coming back. The sight and jet- engine shriek of Batman and the other Backstop aircraft coming in for their traps onto Jefferson's stern were like nails driven into the coffin. They'd lost Coyote.
Numb, he made his way down the number two island ladder and into the gray maze of passageways and corridors branching out beneath the flight deck. His destination was the mess area known as the dirty shirt wardroom. In the formal wardroom below the hangar bay he'd be expected to change into the uniform of the day, but things were more relaxed here. He was still wearing his flight suit, and he felt sticky, dirty, and ripe enough to peel paint off a passing battleship, but his squadron was still on alert, and he didn't want to risk the luxury of a shower and a clean uniform. Not yet.
He was stopped along the way by an explosion of noise from the VF-95 ready room. 'Tombstone!' Batman Wayne and Malibu Blake burst from the open doorway, still wearing their flight suits and carrying their helmets.
'What happened out there?' Tombstone said, cold fury moving beneath the words. 'How'd you guys lose the
