about the JAST program, too, and I’ve got two of them sitting on my deck right now. No sure bets on anything these days.
“This would be the Flanker-C or -1B — those are the two-seater versions,” an intelligence officer chimed in. “The C version was primarily a trainer, but it was fully combat capable. The 1B was the fighter-bomber that was supposed to deploy from their carriers. And Admiral, while the Flanker is equipped for in-flight refueling, the Chinese have had notoriously little training in it. If they wanted to come out and take a look-see at us, they’d probably rather be launching from Vietnam than China’s southern coast. It’s a hell of a lot closer, and they can get out and take some pictures with their onboard stores.”
“Let’s not get completely convinced by the tail artwork. A Flanker is a Flanker, be it Chinese or Vietnamese,” Tombstone said. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, let’s play this one like pros. The Flanker — whoever he belongs to — gets a look as long as he plays nice. But keep that Hornet on him every second. Something starts looking hinky, I don’t want us scrambling for cover.”
A whiff of light, clean perfume floated through the air. Tombstone turned to find the source.
“Good morning, Admiral,” Pamela said, stepping over the knee-knocker threshold to TFCC. “The Chief of Staff told me I’d find you in here.”
“We’re a little busy right now, Miss Drake,” he said, momentarily grateful for the subdued red lighting in the operational center. Damn it, he couldn’t afford to be distracted right now!
“I’ll stay out of the way,” she answered, moving over to an unoccupied corner of the tiny space.
While his nose quickly became accustomed to the scent of her perfume, and Pamela was now out of his direct line of sight, Tombstone could feel her in TFCC. Apart from the normal physical sensations and memories just thinking of her generated, her presence was doubly uncomfortable with Tomboy flying CAP on the unknown contact.
As much as he tried to deny it, there was something about the female aviator that inevitably drew his eyes to her. Tomboy had been his RIO when Jefferson had faced down the Russians on the Kola Peninsula, and during their mission over the Polyamyy submarine base. Their Tomcat had taken a hit, and they’d punched out. Tomboy had come out of it with a broken leg and an extended hospital stay.
She’d been lucky. Not every female pilot had been, he thought. Lieutenant Chris “Lobo” Hansen had been shot down on the same mission. The militia that’d captured her had gang-raped her and left her naked and shivering, displayed in a wire cage. When the Marines rescued her a few hours later, she was already deep into psychological and physical shock.
Tombstone had heard from Tomboy that Lobo had completely recovered and been sent to an instructor’s billet at Top Gun school. There’d been some talk of barring her from further combat duties, but in the end the Navy did the right thing. Lobo had finished her tour as an instructor, and had received orders to VF-95 as the Safety Officer. Whatever else the Navy had learned from the integration of women into combat squadrons, it was that there was only one personnel policy that worked — treating each and every aviator as a professional. Tombstone approved.
He wondered if he’d feel the same if it had been Tomboy who’d undergone the same experience. Involuntarily, he remembered how her head barely came up to his wings on his chest, and how her voice sounded over the ICS. A pilot and regular RIO were always close. During combat, the RIO’s voice merged with the pilot’s thoughts, until every comment from the backseat sounded like his own mind. Was that what he was feeling? The traditional psychic bond between two aviators that depended on each other in the air? Or was it something else?
He turned his attention back to the screen and forced himself to depersonalize the aircraft on the screen. It wasn’t Tomboy and Snoopy — it was Tomcat 201. If the Navy had the intestinal fortitude to insist on equal standards for its male and female pilots, the least its admirals could do was the same. Anything else would have been a slap in the face to the aviators, both male and female, that had worked so hard to make the policy succeed.
Finally, since there was nothing else that really required his attention, he turned and faced Pamela. It felt odd to be facing his old lover while listening to Tomboy’s voice on the net. But when you got right down to it, why should it be difficult? What was Tomboy to him? She certainly wasn’t his lover — couldn’t be, not while she worked for him and they were assigned to the same ship. But whatever she was to Tombstone, he could feel her presence behind him as the arcane symbology representing her aircraft crept across the screen.
“That was her, wasn’t it?” Pamela said softly.
“Who?” he managed to say. Damn her, she always could seem to read his thoughts.
Pamela shot him a wry grin. “Don’t worry, Tombstone, nobody noticed it but me. She was your RIO last cruise, wasn’t she?”
“She was a lieutenant then,” he said, and then swore at himself for sounding like a blathering idiot.
“Ah,” Pamela said, as though he’d just made sense.
Thor eased back on the throttle and slid behind the other aircraft. Its slipstream buffeted the light Hornet. Although the Flanker looked like it was about the same size as the Hornet, the slipstream of the Chinese fighter carried a punch.
Something about the aircraft bothered him, although he couldn’t have said exactly what it was. He slid the Hornet over to the Flanker’s other side and studied it carefully. Nothing unusual caught his attention. It was, he decided, just the other pilot’s attitude that seemed strange. During peacetime, most military pilots would at least wave to each other, acknowledging the bond that all airmen felt. Weeks later, if hostilities broke out, they’d do their damnedest to kill each other.
The Flanker pilot had not even glanced his way, much less proffered a friendly, universally obscene gesture. Thor shrugged. At least being able to move around a little eased the cramp in his lower back.
“TAO! I’m picking up communications downlink from the Flanker!” the Electronics Warfare Specialist, or EW, said over the CDC net.
“You sure?”
“Positive! Frequency, everything’s right on.”
“Make sure the Hornets know,” the TAO snapped to the OS monitoring the two fighters, picking up the TFCC telephone again. “And get the alert 5S-3B up. That bogey is talking to somebody we don’t hold contact on. That means one thing.”
A submarine. Had to be. The tactical picture was really starting to stink.
Minutes later, the distinctive sounds of an S-3B engine spooling up overhead vibrated through CDC. She watched the two symbols on the large-screen display, the Hornet and the Flanker flying so close together that their symbols occasionally merged. The carrier SPS-49 radar alone couldn’t have broken the two contacts apart. Only the powerful SPY-1A radar on the Aegis cruiser could positively distinguish between the two. She glanced at the information display screen to the right of her desk and confirmed her suspicion. The radar symbol displayed on the screen came from the Aegis’s radar, relayed to the carrier over LINK II.
Four minutes after the video downlink was detected, she heard the Hoover go to full military power, the roller-coaster rattle of the steam catapult, and the final surprisingly soft thud as the catapult piston reached the end of its run and tossed the S-3 into the air. Seconds later, the Operations Specialist controlling the ASW aircraft reported radar contact on Hunter 701. The S-3B vectored toward the bogey, scanning the ocean’s surface with radar and FLIR, trying to find the bogey’s playmate.
It could be anywhere, she thought. The bogey’s altitude gave him enough horizon to cover at least a thousand square miles of ocean. Somewhere out there, the nondirectional video downlink was giving someone accurate targeting positions on the battle group. A brief shiver ran up her spine. Irrational as it might seem, she would have given anything to be airborne herself right then instead of trapped inside steel bulkheads on the 03 level of the carrier.
