especially when he was flying.
No more. He’d met a girl two months ago, a wonderful girl… and he was seriously considering giving up the Navy and settling down.
There’d been a time, not so many years back, when Batman would have howled with derision at the thought that he could ever be anything other than a naval aviator. He loved flying, loved it with a passion that put flight at the very core of his entire life. He’d joined the Navy in the first place precisely because, in his opinion, naval aviators were better than any other military pilots; they had to be, to let themselves be hurled off a pitching flight deck at 170 knots… or to trap on the carrier deck after hours in the air, often in the dark and in stormy, wet, or visibility- poor weather.
But after more than ten years in the Navy, he was beginning to look for something more than the heart- pounding slam of acceleration when he pushed the throttles to Zone Five burner.
He was beginning to realize that Sunny Tomlinson might just be that something more.
Ahead, another F-14 waited on Cat Three as the dance on the deck continued, White Shirts completing their safety checks, red-shirted ordnancemen checking the aircraft’s weapons, making certain the arming pins with their red-tagged wires were pulled, making double-certain each of the F-14’s missiles ? Sidewinder, AMRAAM, and Phoenix ? was secure. Then the jet blast deflector, the JBD, slowly rose from the deck into an upright position squarely behind the Tomcat, obscuring it from Batman’s view.
In less than a minute, however, the F-14 ahead thundered off the angled flight deck, its F110-GE 400 engines glowing like twin bright orange eyes as the catstroke hurled it off the waist and into the sky, following the Hornet. In a swirl of steam, the JBD folded back down to the deck, and Batman eased Tomcat 201 forward, guiding it over the slot where green-shirted hookup men ran the catapult shuttle back to the start.
Everywhere on the deck around him, the dance continued, an ant-heap scurrying of rushed but purposeful behavior. Four to five hundred men were working together on the deck, moving in close synchronization, the entire production directed by the Air Boss in his glassed-in aerie high up on the island, in Pri-Fly. Things were moving fast this morning, as if to compensate for the unexpected interruption in flight activities last night. With the survivors of the sunken Victor III’s crew aboard now and with the Jefferson well into her operational area in the eastern end of the Black Sea, the launches and recoveries were going like clockwork, the carrier flexing her airborne muscles.
A Green Shirt standing to the starboard side of the F-14 held up a board reading 62500, providing Batman with verification of the Tomcat’s total weight in pounds ? aircraft, fuel, and weapons. He nodded agreement; the same weight would be fed to the catapult officer in his domed-over hideaway on the deck, letting him know just what settings to call for from the cat crew below. Get it right, guy, Batman thought with a flash of gallows humor. In fact, every man and woman aboard the ship knew his or her job as well as he knew his.
But there were so many things that could go wrong. Not even the instruments were fast enough to keep up with everything that happened during the catstroke; launch was a supreme gesture of blind faith in shipmates and in technology.
A Red Shirt held up a bundle of wires, each with a red tag fixed to one end. There were six of them, representing two AIM-9M Sidewinders and four AMRAAM radar-guided missiles… correct. A clatter of chains beneath Batman’s feet told him the hookup men were securing his nose-wheel to the cat shuttle.
The final checklist run-through proceeded swiftly and with a taut economy of motion. The launch officer held his hand high, circling tightly, and Batman eased his throttles forward to full military power. He checked the motion of his stick, forward, back, left, right… then the rudder pedals, left, right. All clear, all correct. A red light high on the carrier’s island next to Pri-Fly winked over to green.
“Green light,” Malibu called.
“Hang on to your stomach, buddy. Let’s find us some elbow room!”
“Roger that.”
The launch officer, standing to the F-14’s right, was taking a last look around, checking the aircraft, checking to make sure deck personnel were clear. He looked up at Batman and saluted.
Batman returned the salute, a final exchange indicating readiness for launch. The launch officer dropped to his knee, pointing down the deck as the Green and Yellow Shirts nearby crouched low. He touched the deck with his thumb.
An explosion of acceleration slammed Batman back against his seat as the catapult hurled him down the deck. In two seconds he was traveling at 170 miles per hour, past the island, off the angled flight deck, and flashing past the overhanging cliff of Jefferson’s towering gray bows close off his starboard wingtip. The catstroke’s acceleration was so hard it actually seemed as though he slowed down once he was clear of the track and airborne; he felt the aircraft’s controls biting the air ? nothing soft or mushy, no red-light indicators of engine failure or control fault. “Good shot!” sounded in his headphones as the Assistant Air Boss confirmed his launch.
It always took him a second or two to recover mentally from the cat launch, to “get behind the airplane.” Gently, he brought the stick back and started climbing. Blue sky and sunlight shone above and around him with the unearthly, dazzling intensity of flight.
“Whee-ooh!” Malibu exalted from the rear seat. “I think we left the old stomach back there on the deck someplace.”
“Too late to go back for it now, Mal,” Batman told his RIO. “Let’s see if we can find us some mountains.”
“I’m with you, dude. Try east.”
“Into the sun.” He brought the stick gently right, watching his compass heading change on the HUD as the sun, still low in the sky, shone with a brilliant, golden light above a lowlying ripple of clouds on the horizon.
He thought of Sunny, and the last time they’d been together.
Peoples Republic of Georgia First Lieutenant Marty Cole, U.S. Army, opened the pilot’s-side door and clambered awkwardly into the cockpit of the VH-60 Black Hawk. He was stiff and sore from two days of hard flying mixed with nights of sleeping on hard cots in dilapidated shanties. Cold and hard as they were, folding cots brought in off the Guadalcanal and set up in a drafty tent were infinitely better than the parasite-infested bedding that was the norm in most of the buildings he’d seen since being assigned to the UN Crisis Assessment Team. But this morning Cole was starting to wish he’d taken his chances with the insect life.
“How’s it looking, Ski?” he asked, suppressing a yawn. Another thing he was wishing for was a decent cup of coffee, even a bad cup of coffee, to help him wake up. The stuff they served locally was worse than Turkish coffee… and a good explanation for why most people around here seemed to drink tea. Normally he was up before dawn, but he’d been out later than expected last night and not made it back to Tara until nearly zero-three-hundred.
Tara ? the name of the mansion in Gone With the Wind ? was what the American forces in Georgia were calling their camp ashore, a tent city just outside a ramshackle native village of stinking huts made of sod, clapboard, and sheet tin damned near as ritzy-looking as some of Rio de Janeiro’s poorer slums. Poti, the nearest city hereabouts, was almost as bad, shot to hell and almost abandoned.
Second Lieutenant Paul Dombrowski looked up from the copilot’s position and frowned over the top of the dog-eared preflight checklist. “You look bright-eyed and chipper this morning. Where have you been?”
“Crashed. Crashed and burned.”
“Big date last night, huh?”
“Don’t I just wish. God, I hate this place!”
“Well, we’re preflighted and ready to go. We’re gonna be late, though.
We’re running two hours behind our flight plan, at least.”
“The damned blue-hats don’t give a shit if they’re on time or not,” Cole said bitterly, ignoring for the moment the fact that both of them had been issued flight helmets painted the brilliant baby blue of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. “Don’t see that it makes any difference to us how late we are.”
In his five years in Army aviation, Cole had served on his fair share of shit details, but this one, he figured, ought to satisfy his quota for at least the next seventy years or so. This whole operation was one big cluster fuck from start to finish, a monster conceived in good intentions, born in politics, and nurtured in the hellish clash of committees, boards, and panels that dominated every policy-level Pentagon decision made these days. The cross- service problems alone were staggering; Sustain Hope had started as a joint Navy-Marine operation, but the Army, unwilling to let itself be cut out of the potential treasure trove of political largesse, name recognition, and program
