Tomcats flying close Tactical Combat Air Patrol, or TACCAP, on White Lightning. Their call sign that morning was Shotgun One.
Three miles to the west, Shotgun Two was covering White Lightning Two.
'Shotgun, Shotgun' sounded over Coyote's helmet phones. 'This is Echo Whiskey Two-one. We're reading aircraft coming off the ground at Ura Guba.
Could be an intercept.'
'Echo Whiskey, Shotgun One-one,' Cat replied in the back seat. 'Copy that. I've got them.'
Echo Whiskey was the Hawkeye providing battle management for the White Lightning/Shotgun strike force. Ura Guba was a small town at the head of the narrow gulf south of Port Vladimir, about twenty miles to the east of their current position. There was a military base there, one that had been hit repeatedly during the past eighteen hours.
'Talk to me, Cat,' Coyote said over the ICS. 'Whatcha got?'
'Two contacts, Coyote, just coming up out of the ground clutter. Range eighteen miles, bearing zero-eight- five.'
Coyote opened his mike to the flight's tactical frequency. 'Okay, Shotgun One. You all hear that? Sound off.'
'Shotgun One-two,' Coyote's wingman, Mustang Davis, called. 'We copy.'
'Shotgun One-three,' Slider Arrenberger called. 'Copy.'
'One-four.' That was Slider's wingman for this mission, Lobo, Lieutenant Chris Hanson. 'We copy.' Coyote was well aware of the friction between Arrenberger and some of the women. He and Tombstone had discussed the matter at length several times over the past few days. Normally, Arrenberger flew wing with Nightmare Marinaro, but Marinaro's Tomcat, downgrudged the previous afternoon, was still down.
Both Coyote and Tombstone had been doubtful about assigning Lobo Hanson as Slider's wingman in Nightmare's place. Aviators flying wing with one another had to work closely, with an effortless and professional communication born of practice and mutual understanding, and Arrenberger, it was well known, had managed to irritate or outrage just about every woman in CVW-20.
But Tombstone had been running into problems with squadron assignments already. True, Coyote could have taken Hanson as his wing and let Mustang fly with Slider, but he and Tombstone had agreed that shuffling the rosters like that would cause more problems in the long run. Once people started getting the idea that either they or someone else was getting preferential treatment, morale would take a nose-dive, and there were troubles enough in that department already.
The only special treatment Tombstone had okayed ? and that in complete secrecy ? was to keep Lieutenants Strickland and Hanson in separate flights.
The rumor had managed to spread throughout the wing that those two were sleeping together. While there was no meat to that rumor beyond the strictly circumstantial evidence of their PDAs, both Coyote as Squadron CO and Tombstone as CAG agreed that having them in the same flight risked the cold and professional calm, the engineer's detachment valued in combat flying.
Human emotions didn't follow predictable patterns or lend themselves to graphs or flight data tables. What would happen to one if the other got into trouble? For the time being at least, Hanson would fly with Shotgun One, while Strickland was assigned as Batman's wingman in Shotgun Two.
Coyote's thoughts touched only lightly on the flight assignment problems.
Right or wrong, the decision had been made. The primary problem at the moment was those aircraft taking off from Ura Guba.
'Shotgun Two-one,' Coyote called. 'This is Shotgun One-one. Do you copy?'
'Affirmative One-one,' Batman's voice replied. 'What's the gouge?'
'How about taking the reins for both White Lightnings, Batman? We'll slide east and eyeball those bandits coming up at zero-eight-five.'
'Roger that, Shotgun One. We'll mind the store.'
'Shotgun One, this is One-one. On my mark, break left and go to a two-by-two dispersal. Let's see if these boys want to play.'
'Roger that,' Slider replied. 'Let's nail us some of those sons of bitches!'
'Ready then, on three… two… one… break!'
As one, the four Tomcats stood on their port-side wings, slipping away from the Intruder flight ahead and angling off toward the east. Splitting into two groups of two, Coyote and Mustang moved high and to the north, while Slider and Lobo went low and to the south. The bandits were approaching rapidly, already at a thousand feet and coming on at better than Mach one.
'We're closing too fast to risk a Phoenix launch,' Cat told Coyote. They were flying with a standard interception warload of four AIM-54s, two Sidewinders, and two AMRAAMs. 'Recommend AMRAA.M.'
'Rog.' Though if they got much closer they'd be in knife-fighting range.
'One-one, this is One-three!' That was Arrenberger. 'I've got four bandits now, repeat four. Range ten miles and still coming hot!'
'Confirmed,' Cat said over the ICS. 'Four bandits. Coyote, I've got a threat warning.'
Coyote heard it in his headset, the thin, high warble that meant an enemy fire-control radar was painting his aircraft. 'I'm switching to air-to-air mode on my HUD.' Damn! Adding their speed to his, the lead target was closing at over 1,500 knots, a good half mile every second.
There was no time to think… only to act. 'Mustang! Stay with me!
Going to full burner!' He rammed his throttles forward to zone five, felt the kick-in-the-seat boost of the F- 14's powerful GE turbofan engines.
As he accelerated, his wings folded themselves to their sixty-eight-degree backswept configuration, and a moment later he slid smoothly through the sound barrier. 'Launch! Launch!' Cat cried. 'Bandits have launched!'
But by going supersonic, Coyote had unexpectedly closed the range so quickly that he was already inside the Russians' optimum range for a head-on radar lock. He saw two of the enemy fighters as they flashed past, a pair of specks against blue sky that appeared, then dwindled astern almost too quickly to follow.
Immediately, Coyote chopped back on the throttles and went into a hard left turn. The Tomcat shuddered as he yanked it into an edge-of-the-envelope angle of attack, his wings sliding out to full extension, the G-forces squashing him and Cat down into their seats with the force of six full-grown people sitting in their laps. Spots danced in front of his eyes… and then his vision started to turn gray, closing in from the sides as blood drained from his head.
He grunted hard, tensing the muscles of his legs and torso in order to keep the blood from draining from his head. The practice was properly called the M-1 maneuver, though aviators simply called it the grunt. A good grunt could lessen the effects of the turn by perhaps one G.
'Where… are… the… other… two?' he said, forcing each word out past clenched teeth.
He was taking a chance, letting the bandits get between him and the two Intruder flights, but the range had started out so tight that there'd been little else he could do. Now he was behind one of the bandit elements.
Mustang, with Walkman, his RIO, was still with him, on his right.
Then they were out of the turn and squarely on the six of the two bandits. 'Mustang, this is Coyote!' he called, even as he slid the targeting box across one of the targets. 'I've got the one on the left!'
'And I've got the one on the right.'
A buzz sounded over his headset. 'I've got tone. Fox one!'
An AMRAAM slid off the rail beneath his right wing.
Lieutenant Commander Gregory Arrenberger had gotten his handle from shipboard slang during his flight training at Pensacola. A 'slider' was a hamburger, as opposed to a 'roller,' or hot dog. Commended by his CO for the cold-blooded precision of his formation flying, he'd replied, 'Hell, sir, I'm no hotdog.' The nickname Slider seemed inevitable after that, especially when connected with the 'berger' in his last name.
Slider was using every bit of his engineer's precision now as he pulled his Tomcat out of a hard-right turn, tracking on the second element of Russian planes streaking through the Tomcat formation. For a moment there, tunnel vision had clamped down on him and he'd felt himself wavering at the edge of consciousness, but he'd
