threat to their operations. As the aircraft’s Air Control Officer, Brown was responsible for the coordination of air activity throughout the carrier battle group’s sphere of operations.

The E-2C and her crew, Brown decided, were really pulling down their pay today, that was for damn sure.

“Watch Dog, Bird Dog Leader” sounded over his helmet earphones. “We copy. Whatcha got?”

“Bird Dog, Watch Dog. We have a hit on our screens here. Unidentified contact, bearing zero-eight-five, range eight-eight miles, over.”

“Ah, roger, Watch Dog. We don’t have him on our display. Over.”

“Bird Dog, the target is flying at extremely low altitude. Contact is intermittent, and we think he may be right down on the deck, zigzagging through the mountains. We’ll vector you in.”

“Roger that, Watch Dog.” There was the slightest of pauses. “So tell me, have you seen any flying saucers lately?”

Brown grinned. The flying saucer gag was one of a number of running jokes aimed at the Hawkeye and its peculiar look with the saucer-shaped radome up top. Sailors aboard the Jefferson made jokes about the little green men who flew it… or called it a Frisbee and asked Brown if he’d like to join them for a game of catch on the flight deck.

So far as Brown was concerned, it didn’t matter what the aircraft looked like. It worked… flew like a dream, if a bit on the sluggish side. In fact, the flattened-dish shape created as much lift as was needed to counteract the parasitic drag of the entire assembly and neither helped nor hindered the plane in flight, even during takeoffs and landings. More important than flight characteristics, though, nothing could move on land, on water, or in the air throughout a volume of three million cubic miles and not be instantly pinpointed by the E-2C’s APS-125 radar. Through a wide-ranging suite of communications equipment, including UHF, HF, and high-speed data links, the Hawkeye could pass coded data to any of the Jefferson’s aircraft, engage in a two-way exchange with the Tomcats, and serve as the primary eyes and ears for Alpha Bravo, the battle group’s commander. So far as Lieutenant Brown was concerned, the entire air wing was structured around the Hawkeyes, like the rim of a wheel connected by spokes to the hub.

He watched the blip crawling across the tangled web of returns off the mountains. As far as he could make out, it was about thirty miles out of Poti and moving away from the city at 150 knots. He adjusted the gain on the set, willing more information from the pulsing smears of light before him. It was hard to tell; there might be two aircraft there. According to the schedule passed to the CBG from the UN liaison office ashore, there were supposed to be a couple of friendly helos flying out of Poti this morning… but that flight had been scheduled for a couple of hours ago. And neither of these guys was showing IFF.

Ah, no! There were two aircraft… and the leader’s IFF had just been triggered by the touch of the Hawkeye’s far-seeing radar. Sierra-Delta-Three-Tango… He checked the code group with a list on a clipboard at his side: UN Flight Two-seven, a CAT mission. Flying under radio silence.

But who the hell was the untagged bogey on Two-seven’s tail? …

0916 hours (Zulu +3) Tomcat 201 Over the Black Sea

Batman was holding his Tomcat steady at 25,000 feet, flying south some ninety miles off the Black Sea coast. He’d been aware of Malibu in the backseat talking with Watch Dog, but not really listening in. So far, their flight had been singularly routine. Glancing back over his right shoulder, he saw that his wingman, in Tomcat 218, was in position twenty meters off his wingtip at four o’clock. The helmeted figure in the other aircraft’s pilot’s seat must have seen the movement, for he raised one hand and touched his visor in a bantering salute.

Lieutenant Tom Mason, “Dixie” to the other aviators in Viper Squadron, was a nugget, a new arrival aboard the Jefferson and CVW-20. The kid seemed to know his stuff. He’d been teamed up with one of the women aviators in the squadron, Lieutenant Kathleen Garrity, as his RIO, and so far they seemed to be working well together. Batman hoped, though, that this deployment wasn’t as rough as the last one; nuggets tended to get excited in real combat, like the furballs the Vipers had participated in over Norway and the Kola. They could do something harebrained, like leave their wingmen, or they could freeze up. Either way, the statistics relating to their surviving that first taste of combat weren’t all that good. Cat Garrity had proven herself over the Kola, though, and ought to provide a good, steadying influence if anything nasty went down this time out.

He glanced left. The Georgian coast was just visible to the eye, a gray-and-purple smear on the horizon beneath the rising sun. It would be so nice if someone would explain, just once and in terms that people other than State Department policy wonks could understand, what America’s strategic interests in this part of the world could possibly be. Thanksgiving was just three weeks away, but it looked as though Jefferson’s crew was going to spend the holiday season away from homes and families. And for what? To enforce the UN’s no-fly zones in the Black Sea? It was hard to think of that as vital to the national interest.

He wondered if the incident with the Russian sub might change things.

Scuttlebutt aboard the Jefferson had it that the Russians fished from the sea last night might be returned home soon… and that the agreement being worked out with Russian officials might even lead to a down-scaling of the hostilities in this region. One rumor floating about VF-95’s ready room had it that the Russians were about to surrender the whole damned Crimea to the UN.

If that happened, maybe they wouldn’t need a carrier out here anymore.

The no-fly zones could be enforced by Air Force planes operating out of Sevastopol.

Not, Batman reminded himself, that things ever worked out that smoothly.

“Contact, Batman,” Malibu said from the backseat. “We’ve got a bogey in the NFZ, probable helicopter. Watch Dog is vectoring us in.”

“Roger that.” He opened the tactical frequency with Mason. “Bird Dog Two, this is Bird Dog One. Did you copy that contact? Over.”

“Ah, roger,” Cat Garrity’s voice came back over the radio. “We copy.”

“And it’s about time,” Dixie’s voice added. “I was starting to doze off up here.”

“Well, it’s time for reveille, people,” Batman said. “On my mark, come to zero-eight-five, and ready… break!”

He brought his stick over to the left and gave the Tomcat some rudder, dropping his left wing as he slid into a hard, tight turn. Dixie and Cat followed, the two Tomcats turning into the sun in air-show perfection.

“Update coming through from Watch Dog,” Malibu said.

“Okay. Patching in.”

“Bird Dog Flight, this is Watch Dog,” the voice of the Hawkeye’s air controller said. “Listen, we have two contacts now. We’ve IDED one as UN Flight Two-seven, out of Poti. He’s being followed by a bogey, designated contact Sierra One. Negative IFF on the bogey. Repeat, bogey is not transmitting IFF.”

“Roger that, Watch Dog,” Batman said.

IFF ? Identification Friend or Foe ? was the means by which ships and aircraft could recognize one another across distances or in conditions where visual identification could be a problem. Back in the old glory days, when air-to-air combat was a matter of getting close enough to the other guy to use your machine guns on him, target identification was a matter of recognizing a silhouette. Nowadays, though, when a Tomcat could down a target at 120 miles with an air-to-air Phoenix launch, something better than Mark One eyeballs was necessary. IFF had been part of the electronic arsenal of warfare for years and was similar in most respects to the equipment used in civil aviation to identify aircraft on air traffic control radars. When an aircraft was touched by friendly radar, a transponder aboard automatically replied with a string of coded pulses. Those pulses were picked up by the radar receiver and matched by computer to a list of known codes; friendlies could instantly be identified simply by painting them on radar. The transponder codes, of course, were carefully kept secret, as were the interrogation frequencies and any other data that might be of use to an enemy in combat. Codes were changed frequently; the distribution of those codes among all of the participants in a given mission was an important part of ops planning.

If the UN flight was transmitting its IFF and Sierra One wasn’t, it was a good bet that Sierra One was a bad guy on the UN chopper’s tail.

Still, in wartime nothing can be taken for granted. It would be nice if they could get a positive visual ID on Sierra One as well. It was always a good idea to know just who or what you were shooting at, especially in a situation like this one, with tangled politics and the inherent, bureaucratic confusion of a joint-service, international

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