let her have a couple of days of leave, to catch the last trace of snow out in Aspen, and she pulls this shit.”
“So you’re short a RIO. Damn, Batman, bad enough that I have to provide AVGAS and water for your boondoggle — now you want to cadge a RIO out of my Air Wing as well? Besides, I thought this hotshot stuff was too complicated for a mere Fleet Tomcat aviator.”
“The backseat’s not so bad,” Batman argued. “A few improvements, but nothing a sharp RIO can’t catch on to in a few lessons. Bouncer can talk her through it in a few hours.”
“Her?”
Batman had the good grace to look slightly ashamed. “Yeah, well you see, it’s like this, Admiral. I’ve gotten used to flying with a female backseater. Bulldog — that’s my regular RIO — broke me of a number of bad habits in the last six months. I was just thinking that there’s enough going on for a pilot that it’d be counter-productive to have to get used to a male voice in my ear, seeing’s how I’m all trained up to expect some sweet young thing cooing about missile ranges.”
“You said your RIO was called Bulldog?”
“Well, she doesn’t exactly coo. Don’t tell her I said that if you ever meet her, okay? But this is going to take a smart RIO to catch on quick. I was hoping you might let me borrow Tomboy.”
“You want AVGAS and my own RIO?” Tomboy still flew every qualification flight Tombstone managed to squeeze into his schedule. Since she’d been his RIO in combat, it seemed only natural. Unwillingly, though, Tombstone found that he understood what Batman meant about having to get used to new voices from the backseat. And Tomboy was one of the smartest RIOs he’d ever come across. She’d had as much, if not more, combat experience than any man in her squadron.
“You can ask her,” Tombstone said finally. “If she says yes, and on the condition that she still flies with me when I go up, you can borrow her. Understood?”
“Roger that, Admiral!” A strange expression played across Batman’s face. “Um, I’ll look out for her, Tombstone. You know? I mean — well — if she’s your RIO.”
“She’s just an aviator, Batman,” Tombstone said, answering the question that Batman would not dare ask directly. “Now how about these queer Tomcats?” he continued, intentionally changing the subject.
Batman nodded and looked relieved. Message received and rogered for, Tombstone thought.
“What do you think?” Batman said, gesturing to the aircraft.
“Nice paint job. If it works as good as it looks, we can keep you busy.”
“Let me show you the radome. We’ll put some power on her, and I’ll show you what the new avionics look like.” Batman led Tombstone around to the nose of the aircraft with a proprietorial air.
“Hold it! Great shot!” Tombstone heard someone say. Irritated, he glanced back toward the voice. He’d be damned if one of his Public Affairs Officers, or PAOs, was going to turn one of his few moments of freedom into a photo opportunity. The cruise book would have to go without recording this historic event.
He caught sight of the photographer and groaned. Somewhere on his desk, he was sure, was a message detailing the composition of the small civilian press pool that had arrived with the two JAST birds on the COD. It was one thing to tell his own PAO staff to get stuffed — another thing entirely to offend the civilian media.
As the photographer knelt on the flight deck to steady his camera, another figure came into view. Tombstone felt a red flush creep up his neck and caught the trace of amusement on Batman’s face.
“You could have told me, asshole,” he hissed at his former wingman.
“And miss this look on your face, Admiral? Oh, no, Stoney, I don’t think so. Besides, I thought you told me you had a hotshot staff? Didn’t they brief you on the press?”
“Damn it, Batman, I want to see your ass in my cabin as soon as you get these birds tucked in and tied down!”
A woman stepped forward and held out her hand. “Hello, Tombstone — or should I say, Admiral Magruder?” she said warmly, pitching her voice low so that no one else could catch the words. “It’s been a very long time.”
He said the only words that came to mind. “Welcome aboard, Miss Drake.” From the amused look on her face, she knew exactly what that meant.
The demands of planning a response to the FON message kept him from seeing Pamela Drake again immediately, but Tombstone was irritated to find that she was constantly on his mind. He ignored the vivid recollections of her that kept crowding in, distracting him from the brief in progress, but thoughts of the round fullness of her heavy breasts, the smooth, flat lines of her belly gently flaring to the boyish hips, kept intruding. There’d been times when they were together that he could barely tell where she ended and his own body began, so closely locked together had they been. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and glanced at the other officers surrounding the cloth-covered briefing table. Not a one of them would believe that their Admiral, with his legendary reputation for an impassive face and calm demeanor, was sitting there thinking about the last time he’d made love to Miss Pamela Drake.
The lights in the briefing room came up as the intelligence officer finished the slide show portion of the brief. Two ISs darted forward and started unrolling a small-scale chart taped to the top of the chalkboard. It displayed the South China Sea and the littoral countries that bordered it. Running from east to west, a rectangle bisected the middle of the South China Sea.
“Okay, here’s what we recommend, Admiral. This box takes us east to twelve miles off the coast of Vietnam, then due west back out to the Spratly Islands. One day in, another day back out. A little longer if we linger on Vietnam’s coast.” Busby used a pencil-sized laser pointer to trace out the proposed course.
“It accomplishes what Seventh Fleet wants us to do, without getting us too far from the Spratly Islands. I like that. Doing FON ops off China’s coast, moving up north further, might be what they had in mind, though,” Tombstone remarked. He stared at the narrow rectangle on the chart. Something about it seemed familiar — no, not familiar, but it reminded him of something else he’d seen recently.
“We thought of that, Admiral, but we don’t recommend it at this time. There has to be some connection between the political maneuvering in the UN and what we’ve witnessed down here. The Chinese are just too accomplished at this game for it to be coincidence. Moving north to China’s coast puts us two days away from the Spratly Islands,” the CARGRU operations officer answered.
What is it, damn it? Why do I get an uneasy feeling just looking at the box? It’s not any particular operation that I can remember. The only thing I can think of is that fjord we once used to hide the carrier in up around Norway, but that’s not it either. Those double lines around the box — is that it?
A more northern op-area would put us in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands,” Tombstone said, stalling for time while he tried to let whatever random association his mind had made float to the top of his thoughts. “if something odd is going on in the Spratly Islands, I’d lay odds that the Paracels are having their share of unexplained events as well.”
The Paracels were a small group of islands located in the northern half of the South China Sea. Slightly more prominent and stable than the tiny Spratly chain, the islands were also claimed by China, with Vietnam and Taiwan disputing their ownership. China was two hundred miles to the north of the Paracels, and Vietnam slightly closer to the west. Taiwan was almost six hundred miles to the northeast.
“We might gather some information, but we’d also be mounting a more direct challenge to China’s exclusion zone,” the CARGRU Operations Officer chimed in. “It’s one thing to be eight hundred miles to the south of her coast, another to be cruising around the twelve-mile limit. Our best guess is that Seventh Fleet — as well as his bosses — isn’t quite ready to push China that hard. From the box Commander Busby is proposing, we can still reach out and touch the Paracels anytime we need to. Keeping the battle group around the Spratly Islands and testing the twelve mile limit with Vietnam seemed like a good compromise between doing FON and not limiting our options in the South China Sea.”
“Additionally,” Busby added, “Vietnam is currently in a state of flux.”
“When in the last fifty years has it not been?” Tombstone said. “But you’re right — Vietnam knows that whatever her relationship with the United States, she will have to live with China as her neighbor. With all the issues surrounding normalization of relations with Vietnam, it might not hurt to remind them that the United States has the power to intervene in Southeast Asia’s backyard. Okay, let’s go with this plan. Starting tomorrow morning.”
