Coyote?'
'Take it easy, Stoney,' Batman said. 'We didn't lose him. He just stopped transmitting.'
Other officers stepped into the passageway behind him. Lieutenant Gary Ashly, 'Dragon,' gave Tombstone a tight grin. 'Congratulations on your kill, Tombstone! Nice job.'
Dragon's RIO was Lieutenant Commander Henry Whitridge. He took a hard look at Tombstone and shook his head. 'Lay off the guy, Dragon. Can't you see he's shot?'
Malibu seemed to read the misery in Tombstone's face. 'Look, Tombstone,' he said. 'We're all real sorry about the Coyote and Mardi. I know you guys were close-'
'That has nothing to do with it!' The words were out before he could stop them, driven by the pent-up anger and frustration he felt inside. He reined himself in, looking from Batman to Malibu and back. 'Coyote and Mardi Gras were two damned good men. I hate the thought of losing them… that's all.'
But he knew that that was a lie as he said it. He'd flown with Coyote before, off the Kennedy, and before that they'd been stationed together at San Diego Naval Air Station. Both of them had dated Julie Wilson until she finally decided to marry Coyote, and then Tombstone had been best man at their Navy wedding.
'You know, Stoney,' Whitridge said. 'We all miss those guys. But we can't bring 'em back. All we can do is go back in, right?'
'Snoops is right,' Batman said, using Whitridge's running name. 'Rack 'em up and zap a few black hats for Coyote and-'
'Damn it. Wayne, I don't want to hear your damned hot-dogging patter!'
He turned away and strode off, lifting his feet as he stepped through the knee-knocker partitions where bulkheads crossed the passageway. After a moment's silence, he heard a burst of laughter from behind.
'Ah, he'll be okay,' he heard Batman say as the officers filed back into the ready room. 'Just shook, is all. Man, I hope those gomers come out again. I just wish I could've had one of 'em in my sights-'
Tombstone walked away, feeling as though he'd lost his brother. It wasn't that his running mates were insensitive, he knew. Sometimes it was the bravado, the aviator's mystique of the right stuff, that helped a man handle sudden death. Or maybe the idea of Coyote's death hadn't touched them yet, hadn't sunk in.
Coyote, dead. He forced himself to face that word, to say it in his mind. And how would he ever know for sure that Coyote's death had not been his fault? He, Tombstone, had split the formation after the first dogfight. It had been his command responsibility, his decision. And Coyote was dead because of it.
The question gnawing at his thoughts now was, would he be able to make that kind of decision again? As squadron commander he would have to, but could he? It was possible that they'd be in combat again within the next few days in the skies over Wonsan.
He didn't know. The uncertainty was as keen an agony as the loss of his friend.
The President of the United States had been up the entire night. His Chief of Staff had pulled him out of the formal reception for the OAS representatives early the previous evening, and he'd been on the firing line ever since.
He sat at the end of the long hardwood table which dominated the Cabinet Room. The other men who ringed that table had also been at it all night, and they looked it. Most had abandoned suit jackets or uniform coats for shirtsleeves, and the room's ventilation system was having difficulty with the cigarette smoke collecting under the ceiling's soundproofing tiles. The Secretary of State looked worried; the Director of Central Intelligence looked tired. Most of the others showed varying mixtures of fatigue and worry as each came to grips with this latest piece of bad news from the Far East.
At the far end of the room, a Pentagon action officer tapped a pointer against a series of photograph enlargements mounted on cardboard and propped up on easels. The pictures were almost abstract, black disks flecked with white and cryptically annotated with meaningless letters and numbers.
'We have here repeaters off the radar screens pulled from the Hawkeye's transmissions and downloaded to the NSA at Fort Meade,' said the officer, a lieutenant colonel in an immaculate dress uniform. Like most Pentagon briefing officers, he had the good looks and articulation of a TV news anchor, but this one at least seemed to know what he was talking about. 'As you can see here… here… and here, Chimera was being almost constantly shadowed by what we presume was a North Korean task force, a frigate and eight to twelve light patrol craft. At zero-seven-thirty-six local time ? that was seventeen-thirty-six hours last night ? two military aircraft provisionally identified as MiG-21Fs of the North Korean air force strafed the Chimera. At the same time, the Korean Communist surface units closed in.' The pointer moved, touching featureless blobs of light. 'We see them here… and here.
'At zero-seven-thirty-nine local, Fort Meade received a portion of a message by teletype, indicating that Chimera was under attack. The message was interrupted. It is possible that the sending antenna was damaged or destroyed.'
One of the men at the table shifted uncomfortably, then removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the end of his tie. Secretary of State James A. Schellenberg had already made his position quite clear. A military response in this crisis was the last thing the United States wanted at this time. 'Excuse me, Colonel, but, ah, there was nothing to indicate that this, uh, Chimera was destroyed, was there?'
'If by 'destroyed' you mean sunk, no, sir.' The action officer shuffled the stacks of photos to reveal a new series. 'Okay, fifteen minutes later you can see this large Korean vessel ? radar intercepts indicate it to be a Najin-class frigate ? moving close alongside Chimera. Here, they get so close that the two blips merge into one.
'At eleven-fifty hours local time, we have two blips again, underway at eight knots and moving toward Wonsan, some twenty-four miles to the west.' He lowered the pointer and turned to face his audience. 'We can only assume, Mr. President, gentlemen, that Chimera was boarded by hostile forces and taken by force into Wonsan.'
'Taken by force,' the President repeated. He watched as the action officer gathered his photographs. 'Options, gentlemen,' he said at last. 'Give me options.'
General Amos Caldwell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looked up from the yellow tablet on which he had been making notes. 'How many options are there in a situation like this, Mr. President? Seems to me we simply can't allow this deliberate and premeditated provocation to go unpunished.'
'Are the Joint Chiefs in full agreement on this?'
'I would have to agree with General Caldwell, Mr. President.' Admiral Fletcher T. Grimes was Chief of Naval Operations, a crusty, lantern-jawed man who twenty years before had commanded an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. 'This is the Pueblo all over again. We can't let those bastards get away with piracy, damn it!'
'So? What are we going to do about it, Fletch?'
'We have a carrier battle group less than twelve hours from Wonsan. Use it!'
'How?'
'Air strikes… backed up by amphibious landings, if necessary. The Marines in Okinawa are on alert already. If we show the Koreans we mean business…'
'I'd go one further, Mr. President,' Caldwell said. 'This calls for full-scale intervention, right down the line. Army. Air Force. Special Forces.'
'Invasion.'
'We'll look pretty damned silly if we don't use every means at our disposal to bring about a resolution of this… this crisis, Mr. President. These people mean business. I suggest we show them we mean business as well.'
'Good God,' Schellenberg said. 'Don't you think we ought to take the diplomatic approach first? The days of head-to-head military confrontation are over!'
'Who says?' The Director of Central Intelligence leaned forward at the table, hands clasped. Victor Marlowe, head of the entire American intelligence community, had personally brought word of Chimera's capture to the White House the night before. His voice carried a quiet, almost bantering tone which fooled no one at the table. They all knew how important Chimera was to him. 'Mr. Secretary, you know as well as I do that gabbing with those people isn't going to get us anywhere.'
'How do you know unless we try?' George Hall, the White House Chief of Staff, said from the other side of the table. 'Mr. President, this could really backfire on you in the polls. There's time for a military option later.'
