“Hot damn!” Mason said with boyish enthusiasm. “Just like Star Wars!”
Lieutenant Kathleen Garrity, call sign “Cat,” smiled behind her oxygen mask with mingled condescension and amusement. Technically, the man up front outranked her. Tom Mason had made lieutenant six months back, while she’d received her promotion from j.g. to full lieutenant only three months ago, while Jefferson had been undergoing her all-too-brief refit at Norfolk. Still, Dixie was a nugget, a new arrival to the air wing who’d transferred in from a reserve air group Stateside. Cat, on the other hand, was a combat veteran who’d seen action in the Kola Peninsula.
She recognized Mason’s eagerness, though. Nine months back, she’d felt the same way.
Cat had battled to get where she was now. She’d battled harassment, battled prejudice, battled the sneers and jibes of fellow aviators to get what she wanted ? an assignment as a naval flight officer, as an RIO in the backseat of an F-14 Tomcat, instead of a routine billet as just another tech specialist in some rear-echelon base. She’d battled, she’d gambled… and she’d won.
And now she was the old hand, the vet, listening with wry amusement to the excited edge in her partner’s voice.
She and Dixie had a lot in common, she decided. A decade back, naval aviation had largely been a private club reserved for white males with the right connections. A few black and Asian and Hispanic officers made it into carrier air, but not many, and damned few as NFOS. Those minority Naval Flight Officers who did make the grade more often than not ended up flying CODS or other support aircraft. Things had finally started to open up, though, and if she and the other women on the Jefferson were a success story, then so was Tom “Dixie” Mason.
Because Dixie was a black ? no, an “African-American,” she wryly corrected herself ? his battle had been at least as rough as hers, in a Navy that still sometimes had the air of an exclusive, all-white country club at the highest levels of the command hierarchy. There’d been black admirals and female admirals for some years now, but much of the Navy was still run by the old boys’ network, a network that could be damned vicious sometimes when it came to an aviator’s sex or color… or even the fact that a man’s name ended with a vowel.
Mason had graduated near the top of his class at Annapolis and again at flight school in Pensacola. For the past four years, though, he’d been struggling against the odds to win acceptance as an aviator. Shunted into a RAG for most of his career, he’d finally managed to land carrier duty… which any flier in the squadron would insist was the one assignment that separated aviators from mere pilots.
And she had to admit that Mason was a superb flier, one of the best she’d ever seen. Despite the enthusiasm, technically he was an iceman, cold and hard and precise. The emotions showed through when he was under stress, but all he really needed there was some seasoning.
“Bird Dog, this is Dog House.” That was Lieutenant Chadwick’s voice, from Ops. “Do you copy, over?”
“Bird Dog Leader copies, Dog House,” Batman replied over the open channel. “What’s the gouge?”
“Bird Dog, we confirm your bogey, but we still don’t have an India Delta yet. Repeat, no confirmed identification on the bogey. Nothing on radio and no IFF signal. Before we take further action, we need a positive visual ID. Until we do, we’re calling it a possible hostile. Over.”
“Ah, roger that, Dog House,” Batman replied. “With stress on the possible, right?”
“That’s affirmative, Watch Dog. You’ve got weapons free, but stick to the ROES. Get a positive visual identification before you do anything. The last thing we need is a friendly fire incident to lead the news stories today.”
“Understood,” Batman said. “We’re on it, Dog House. Bird Dog clear.”
He paused. “Dixie, you still with me?”
“Bird Dog Two, roger,” Mason answered.
“You hear all that? We’ve got weapons free, but mark your targets.”
“That’s a roger.” Cat heard him pause. “Uh, Skipper? You think this one’s for real?”
“Hell, that’s what we’re here to find out. You keep your eyes peeled up there, or I’ll have you in for another session of sensitivity training.”
“Oh, no, not that, Skipper,” Mason said, his tone mock-serious.
“Anything but that!”
Cat laughed. The politically correct crowd back in Washington had been leaning hard on the Navy to provide sensitivity training to teach tolerance, understanding, and acceptable behavior toward women and minorities both. It was thoroughly loathed by all concerned and didn’t seem to do very much good, though the people issuing the directives seemed less concerned with results than with the actual issuing of the directives.
It was a strange world, sometimes.
“Don’t worry, Dixie,” she said over the ICS. “Even if this run turns up dry, I’m sure we’ll see action pretty soon. Up at North Cape and the Kola, it was one damned crisis after another. I’m beginning to think the old Jeff just kind of draws trouble like a magnet.”
“Just my luck if everything goes quiet as soon as I get in the game,” Mason told her. She could hear just a trace of bitterness in his voice. “You train every day of your life for something that never comes… know what I mean?”
“Hey, don’t forget who you’re talking to back here. Of course I know what you mean. And believe me, if women can get a piece of the action out here, your turn’s bound to come up!”
Cole had never particularly liked low-altitude flying in rough terrain, and today was no exception. But the Hip with its VIP passengers up ahead was flying NOE so that they could get a good look at the terrain below as they passed, and Cole knew better than to argue with the brass. Especially when most of the brass belonged to self- important UN twits who tended to retreat behind language problems anytime they didn’t want to understand a complaint or a protest.
“Keep your eyes on the road, L-T,” Dombrowski said. “That’s about the only way to tell we’re on course.”
“Yeah. Right.” The road, in this case, was a track that might have been paved once, but which had deteriorated under harsh weather, hard use, and lack of maintenance. According to the map, it followed this valley all the way up to Chaisi, up among those ice-capped peaks ahead.
He saw something up ahead, a squat vehicle parked alongside the road. He touched Dombrowski’s arm and pointed. “Shit, Ski, that looks like a Zoo down there.”
“Got news for you, man. It is a Zoo.” Dombrowski grinned at him. “One of our freedom fighter buddies told me about ‘em last night. His people have a few of them, compliments of the Reds when they pulled out. It knows we’re coming, and it won’t fire. Probably.”
Cole muttered a curse. “You might tell a guy, you know. The altitude we’re pulling now, we’d be dead meat before I could get us high enough to dodge those suckers.”
The “Zoo” ? slang for the ZSU-23-4 ? was a deadly air defense weapon that was one of the most dangerous pieces of equipment in the ex-Soviet arsenal. A self-propelled tracked vehicle mounting quad AZP-23 cannons, it fired 23mm shells directed by the B-76 radar code-named Gun Dish by the U.S. military. A Zoo could wreak havoc with any low-flying aircraft unlucky enough to stray into its line of fire.
Neither man spoke for a long moment. Then Cole looked across at Dombrowski, scowling. “And just what the hell do you mean by ‘probably,’ anyway?” he demanded.
Dombrowski laughed.
The blip winked onto Dixie’s Vertical Display Indicator with the suddenness of a thrown switch… a hard signal from the Tomcat’s own AWG-9 radar, not a data link feed from the Hawkeye. “Contact!” he yelled. “I’ve got him now! Bearing oh-one-oh, range four miles.”
“I keep losing him in the ground clutter,” Cat added. “Getting an eyeball on this guy’s going to be tough.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.” The typical helicopter cruised at less than 150 miles per hour, a snail’s crawl to a Tomcat howling in at just below Mach 1. And with the helo flying down on the deck in these rugged mountains,
