'We'll discuss my fitness report later.' He saw three aircraft symbols on his HUD now, Bayerly sandwiched between two MiGs. 'Dixie! Tickle that guy with a radar lock.'
He lined up on the trailing aircraft, waiting for the warble that told him he had a lock. If he couldn't fire the missile, at least he could startle the MiG's pilot, who would hear the radar lock as a tone in his own headset and know an American plane had him in its sights.
'Tone,' Dixie called.
The target MiG did not waver. Either he wasn't aware of Tombstone's weapons lock, or he was gambling that the Americans would not fire first.
'He's not going for it,' Tombstone said. 'Going to buster. He rammed the throttles full forward, cutting in the Tomcat's afterburners.
Acceleration slammed him against his seat.
With startling swiftness, the trailing MiG swelled to fill his HUD.
Tombstone cut the burners, then finessed the stick to starboard, angling the F-14 so that it would pass the MiG on its right side with a few yards to spare. At close range, Tombstone could see details of the other plane's construction down to the individual rivets along the fuselage. It was not a Soviet export aircraft, he saw, but a Shenyang J-7, a Chinese copy of the MiG-21 built under license. He'd faced them before over Korea. It was silver with red control surfaces, and he could read the numbers on the nose. There were no national markings or unit ID, however. Was it Chinese, Burmese, or something else?
The pilot looked back at Tombstone across the narrow gap between the aircraft, eyes wide above his oxygen mask. Tombstone brought his stick back to the left, closing the gap slowly, drawing closer… closer…
The J-7 pilot needed no further urging. As Tombstone brought the F-14 tight across the Shenyang's bow, the other pilot cut his aircraft sharply to the left, breaking contact with Bayerly's plane and angling away from Tombstone with his own afterburner blazing. Tombstone held the turn, pulling a full circle as he began climbing once more.
'Cowboy Leader, this is Sierra Bravo.' Tombstone could hear the Hawkeye calling Bayerly. 'Cowboy Leader, be advised you are entering Burmese airspace. Come to course one-eight-zero, execute immediate.'
Tombstone leveled off at ten thousand feet, searching the northern horizon. Dixie spotted Bayerly's plane first on radar and gave him the bearing. Tombstone could see him then, the second of two contrails flitting across the jungle, two miles to the north and down on the deck.
The border was invisible, but Tombstone knew that Bayerly had already crossed the line and was plunging deeper into Burmese territory with every second.
Bayerly's thumb caressed the trigger as the MiG grew large in his HUD.
'Cowboy Leader, this is Sharpshooter Leader,' Magruder's voice called over the radio. 'Break off, Made It. Break off!'
'Cowboy Leader, this is Homeplate,' a second voice added. 'Terminate pursuit. Repeat, break off and RTB.'
Return to base? Bayerly shook himself. He was sorely tempted to fire.
But no, his career was in a tailspin already. A stunt like that would make him crash and burn for sure.
'Shit!' Bayerly snapped. Savagely, he yanked back on the stick, hauling the F-14 vertical as he cut in his afterburners and clawed for the sky. The MiG continued to race toward the north, dwindling into the haze on the horizon. At ten thousand feet Bayerly leveled off, bringing the Tomcat around to a southerly heading. He could see Magruder's plane loitering in the distance, Wayne and Costello circling beyond that. The realization that he'd pursued the enemy MiG miles into Burmese territory hit him like an icy wave.
Quickly, he checked the sky around his Tomcat, but it was empty of hostile aircraft.
'Where's the guy on our tail?'
'Tombstone brushed him off, man,' Stratton said. The RIO sounded shaken.
'That bandit's heading out of Dodge at Mach 1.'
Bayerly groaned inwardly. Magruder again. That made it worse. He pushed the throttles forward, going to buster.
The air battle, such as it was, had ended.
'Cowboy Leader, Sharpshooter.' Tombstone was angry. Bayerly had deliberately violated the ROEs on two points… three if you counted mixing it up with the intruder aircraft in the first place. 'What the hell were you playing at?'
'Get off my six, Magruder,' Bayerly's voice replied. 'I'm not in the mood.' A short string of profanity followed, harsh and biting.
'Whoa there, don't go ballistic on us, Made It,' Tombstone said. 'You're way out of line!'
'Tell it to your damned uncle, hero,' Bayerly snapped. The words carried suppressed fury, and his voice nearly broke. 'I've had it with all of you bastards!'
Tombstone opened his mouth to deliver a burning reply, then stopped.
Something was riding the other aviator, and until Tombstone knew what it was, he wasn't going to push. He didn't know Bayerly that well, but he could tell that the man was on edge, more than could be explained by post- combat jitters.
The CO of the VF-97 War Eagles was a big, bluff man given to occasional bursts of temper, but he was a competent pilot. He wouldn't have been given a squadron skipper's slot if he wasn't.
In any case, the other skipper was not under his command, and the tactical frequency was not the place to chew out another pilot. The whole matter would have to rest until they got back to the carrier.
Then the voice of the Air Officer back aboard Jefferson broke in on the tactical net. 'This is Homeplate. Ninety-nine aircraft, RTB. I say again, ninety-nine aircraft, RTB.'
The radio call 'ninety-nine aircraft' referred to all of the carrier's airborne planes. 'That's it,' Batman said. 'They're calling us back to the bird farm.'
That wasn't surprising, Tombstone thought. Not after the incident he'd just witnessed, an incident tracked on the Hawkeye's long-range radar.
Bayerly was not going to need his report to get himself hung.
But the man's attitude still puzzled Tombstone. Crossing a border in hot pursuit of a MiG he could understand. In combat, nothing existed save your plane and your opponent's plane, and the adrenaline rush of battle could wipe everything else from your mind.
It was the acid… the pain in Bayerly's voice that bothered him, that and the crack about his uncle. Made It had seemed withdrawn for the past few weeks, worried presumably, by something he'd not shared with the other men in the wing. For the first time, Tombstone wondered if the other aviator's personal problems were interfering with his flying.
Navy aviators joked about living on the edge, referring to that wild mix of speed, bravado, and arrogance which characterized the life of the typical fighter pilot… at least in the perceptions of Hollywood and the public.
They did not talk about going past the edge, about losing the self-assurance which alone let them put their lives on the line day after day, week after week.
Had Bayerly just lost it? With a trap coming up, they might all be about to find out.
Bayerly was still seething as he held his aircraft at two thousand feet, maintaining his position several miles astern of the U.S.S. Jefferson. The holding pattern, called a Marshall stack, was primarily used in rough weather or at night, but with all of the carrier's far-flung aircraft lining up for their traps, several low on fuel, the Air Marshall had shuffled them into the stack, giving each its own priority on the big green board in Ops which kept track of aircraft status.
From fifteen miles out, the Nimitz-class nuclear carrier looked tiny, a sliver of a gray rectangle almost lost on the wide, gray sea. The other ships of CBG-14, Jefferson's Carrier Battle Group, were scattered across the ocean in all directions. Bayerly could make out the lean shape of the U.S.S.
