in Norway because I wasn’t letting the other guys do their jobs while I did mine.”
“Well, the leader still has the responsibility, right? I was supposed to be looking out for him.” Batman gave a hollow laugh. “Good job, huh?”
“New guy. Just out of a RAG and trying to prove himself.” Grant paused.
“Is he wearing a chip? Black guy in a white-bread world?”
“I wouldn’t say he’s got a chip on his shoulder, no. He’s all right.
Seems to fit in with the others okay. But he does work extra hard to prove he can cut it.”
“Yeah.” Grant looked away. “Look, Ed, I wasn’t out there. I don’t know what I would have done in your place… but I don’t see where you made any wrong decisions. Mason missed the ID call. Hell, that can happen even to a veteran. But you can’t second-guess your people all the time, veterans or newbies. If you do, you’ll burn yourself out ? and you’ll take the squadron with you.”
Batman nodded. “You’re right. But, God, I could’ve killed someone, one of our guys.”
“Well, you didn’t. Concentrate on that. If you let it get to you, it’ll screw your head up so bad you’ll never pull out of the spin. You’re too good an aviator to lose your wings because of something that almost went down.”
“I may be a good flier,” Batman said. “The question is how good a CO I am. When I was your XO, it was pretty easy, you know? I fielded some gripes for the guys, I helped you with the paperwork, I did my turn on CAP or on combat ops. No big deal. Shit, Coyote, you should’ve told me what you were going through, running the show. Then maybe I’d’ve told them what to do when they decided to stick me in this slot.”
“You’ll handle it, Batman. Trust me. Inside a few weeks, you’ll be the same old arrogant, cocksure hot-dog bastard we all know and love.”
Batman finished dressing and closed his locker. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. He managed a grin. “Of course, first I have to survive whatever old Stoney decides to throw at me. If I don’t make it out of debriefing alive, Coyote, you can have my CD collection.”
Tombstone Magruder looked up at the four officers standing in line in front of his desk. He didn’t speak right away. His emotions were in turmoil, caught between horror at the incident that had so nearly turned tragic and relief that the ultimate tragedy had somehow been averted. The fact that two of the four were among his best friends didn’t make his job this morning any easier. Friends are a luxury you can’t always afford in the Service, his uncle, now a desk-bound admiral in Washington, had told him once.
He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s have it,” he said.
No one answered. He studied them, one after another. Mason and Garrity were at rigid attention, looking far too young and vulnerable to be part of the carrier’s front line of defense. Batman and Malibu were older, steadier hands, officers he had long relied on. Friends…
Coyote shifted in his chair to Tombstone’s right. “Friendly fire happens sometimes, Stoney… CAG.”
“That’s not an explanation,” he shot back. “You can’t just say “Shit happens’ and leave it at that.”
Still, Coyote was right. He knew that. Friendly fire, accidental attacks against your own people, had probably been a factor in warfare since the first cavemen duked it out over the local water hole. In the Persian Gulf War some of the most serious battlefield casualties taken by Allied forces had been the result of friendly fire, especially when fast-moving ground support aircraft misidentified vehicles on the ground. The press had spent a lot of verbiage agonizing over those incidents, of course, but anyone with combat experience knew they were inevitable. The fog of war was as real on today’s electronic battlefield as it had been in the days of Napoleon… or Sargon the Great.
He was thinking in particular of an incident hauntingly like this one, back in 1994, when two U.S. Air Force fighters had engaged and destroyed two Army helicopters in the no-fly zone established over northern Iraq. The pilots had been edgy, the AWACS procedures had broken down, the IFF systems on the choppers had been turned off. And then, as now, someone had confused the U.S. Army Black Hawk with the Soviet-made Hind. That time, over twenty men had died.
Murphy’s Law still ruled, especially when men were excited, frightened, or tired. But there were supposed to be safeguards in place to keep these things from happening, and Magruder needed to know just what had gone wrong.
“Sir, I take full responsibility…” Batman began.
Magruder cut him off. “You bet you do, Commander,” he said harshly.
“But that’s not much better than “Shit happens’ either! Do you know the difference between a Hind and a Black Hawk?”
“Yessir,” Batman said quietly.
Mason cleared his throat. “I made the ID, CAG,” he said. “It was my fault, not the skipper’s.”
“You made the ID,” Magruder said, turning his angry gaze on the younger man. He let the words hang there for a moment before reaching into his top desk drawer and extracting a manila folder. Inside were several photographs, drawn from the files of Jefferson’s OZ Division, the carrier’s intelligence department.
He spread the photos out on the table, turning them so Mason could see.
“This is a Hind,” he said, tapping one of the photos. “Recognition features: five-bladed rotor; tapering, anhedral stub wings shoulder-mounted on the fuselage; separate, stepped pilot’s and gunner’s cockpits; cannon mounted in a nose turret; five-bladed tail rotor mounted to the port side of the boom.” He tapped another. “This is a UH-60 Black Hawk. Recognition features: four-bladed rotor; large, single cockpit with broad windows; four-bladed tail rotor mounted to starboard of the tail boom, and canted at twenty degrees to provide additional lift; large tail planes. Is there anything here you don’t understand?”
“No, sir. I know what a Black Hawk looks like. I know what a Hind looks like. I only saw the target for a second or two, and from behind, so I couldn’t see the double cockpit. But I did see the weapons pylons on either side. I’ve never heard of a Black Hawk with weapons pylons.”
“For your information, son, what you saw was an External Stores Support System, ESSS.” He looked at Cat. “What about you, Garrity? Did you see it?”
The woman shook her head slowly. “No, CAG,” she said. “My head was down at the time.”
“Your head was down. So you were the only one who saw it, Mason?”
“Yes, CAG,” Mason said. “I… I really thought it was. The aspect was from the rear and above, and it really looked like a Hind configuration to me. I honestly thought…”
He held up a hand. “We’ve established what you thought you saw.”
“They were being painted by a Gun Dish signal from the ground, CAG,” Batman said. “Probably a ZSU. I made my decision based on the report of one of my aviators. I could have ordered a double check of the target, but thought it would be unwise to risk possible triple-A from the Zoo. There was also the possibility that the enemy was engaging the UN flight. Time was critical.”
Tombstone let himself relax a little. “You’re right. You made a mistake. Wrecked an aircraft that cost the taxpayers something like fifteen mil. And before any of you points it out to me, I’ll say the rest. It would also have been a mistake to get confirmation if those Zoos had opened fire and brought one of you down. And it would have been a mistake if you’d let the sucker go on about his business and he turned out to be a Hind on his way to shoot down the UN Hip.”
“Hell, CAG, we can’t win for losing,” Cat Garrity said. There were a few chuckles in the room, and the tension eased a little.
“That’s exactly right, Cat,” Magruder said. “This no-fly zone crap is one of the trickiest damned ops we’ve taken on. There’s no clear-cut enemy out there, nothing but a set of vague rules that we have to interpret well enough to keep everybody off our backs while we try to do our job at the same time. Right now, our biggest worry about this incident is the fact that there were reporters on that UN helo.”
“Reporters!” Malibu said.
“Oh, shit!” Dixie added.
“The headline news tonight may lead off with a real humdinger of a story.
Something like “Navy Downs Army Helo Over Georgia.’”
“If we’re lucky,” Coyote said with a grin, “they’ll play it on the sports segment. “Navy Scores Over Army, 1– 0.’”
“More likely we’re going to get a storm of inquiries. Congressmen calling. Interviews. Hell, maybe somebody
