chance as us hitting it with this tank!”
“You wait.” The gunner looked pointedly at his Stinger, and hefted it to his shoulder. The Stinger, a U.S.-built shoulder-launched infrared guided surface-to-air missile, had proved its reliability in every combat theater in the last fifteen years. It had been the primary reason for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Chu Hsi had seen the demonstrations, and was impressed. But he wasn’t about to tell his gunner that.
“I won’t hold my breath.”
The two men watched the aircraft grow larger, impossibly fast. The light gray shapes were hard to see in the ever-present haze that clung to the surface of the warm sea, but the contrails that formed in the warm air were clear.
“F-14. I will make the report.”
“Which is so necessary,” Chu Hsi sneered. “As though our superiors on the next island can’t see and hear it just as clearly as we can.”
The gunner paused, half in and half out of the tank. “It is a requirement. You are aware of that.”
Chu Hsi waved him down, suddenly tired of baiting the gunner. Useless entertainment, since nothing ever pierced the gunner’s humorless devotion to operational requirements. The sheer boredom of sitting in a tank on a rock in the middle of the ocean would probably kill both men before anything else.
The American aircraft disappeared over the horizon. Chu Hsi took a step back toward the open hatch. The minutes until the next hourly radio report stretched interminably before him. Chu Hsi sighed.
The two Tomcats made several passes over the two rocks, descending to five thousand feet for a better look. “Nothing new, as far as I can tell,” Bird Dog said finally. “Same old rusty tank, same little fellow sitting on top. And the same old gun emplacements on Mischief Reef. Okay, enough of this shit!”
“Now that we’ve had our look-see, you ready to head for home?” Gator asked.
Bird Dog didn’t answer.
“Come on, Bird Dog, let’s just head back to the carrier, nice and easy,” Gator coaxed.
“In a minute. Let’s take a quick trip around the battle group first. Just for the hell of it,” Bird Dog said, too casually.
“Don’t do this to me again,” Gator warned. “No fly-overs on the cruiser, you hear me? They got downright hostile the last time you did that without asking them. You’re going to convince them to send a missile up our ass next time, instead of just locking us up like last time.”
Bird Dog shoved the throttle forward and felt his ass sink into the hard seat. Around him, the comforting scream of the twin engines deepened. He held his hand on the throttle for a moment, reveling in the sheer power of the vibrations there. Sweet and even, reassuring reminders that every bit of this finely tuned machine was running perfectly.
“We’re not going to do a fly-over,” he said softly. “Not this time. But somebody ought to remind them to watch out for friendlies. That damned CIWS locked me up last time. I don’t appreciate it. Not one little bit.”
The Phalanx Mark 15 20-mm CIWS — pronounced seewhiz — was the Close-In Weapons System, a ship’s last defense against a fast-moving inbound missile. Its J-band radar tracked both incoming targets and the gatling-gun stream of bullets it fired, self-correcting its aim. Theoretically, the Block I version on the Vincennes could fire 4,500 rounds each minute within two seconds of detecting an incoming object that matched its threat parameters.
“What’re you going to do, Bird Dog?” Gator asked, a sudden note of concern in his voice. “Don’t go screwing with that ship. CAG already reamed you out for the fly-over, and he’ll castrate you if he catches you dicking around out here.”
“Hang on!” Bird Dog said, and punched the throttle forward into afterburner. He nosed the aircraft down, letting gravity add speed to the power generated by the afterburners.
Bird Dog leveled out at five hundred feet, increasing his speed to.8 Mach. At 480 knots, the aircraft was traveling eight miles every minute. The cruiser was thirty-five miles away, and would have a surface radar range of approximately thirty miles against a decent target. Bird Dog hoped he’d dropped off their radar screens when he’d descended.
“Damn it, Bird Dog! You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? I swear to God, one of these days I’m punching out! I’ll let you try to explain why you got back to the ship minus your backseater!”
Bird Dog watched the ocean streak by below. One more minute.
Six miles from the cruiser, Bird Dog yanked back on the stick and stood the screaming jet on its tail. He let it claw for altitude, and felt the slight decrease in pressure against the back of the seat as his speed fell off. At six thousand feet, he leveled off and continued on toward the cruiser.
“There,” he said, satisfied. “CAG can hardly gig me for a fly-over if I’m at angels six, can he?”
“Oh, no, hardly a fly-over. You idiot! Are you trying to give that ship a hard-on for you?”
“What? Me?” Bird Dog said innocently.
“Asshole,” Gator muttered. “You know exactly what they thought, and CDC is going to be screaming in my ears any second. Disappear off everyone’s radar, come in fast and low and pop up — you know what they thought!”
“That I was a sea-skimmer missile popping up on them? Oh, surely not, Gator! Not that finely trained bunch of black shoes that tried to sic CIWS on me last week! After all, they’re watching the scopes, tracking the friendlies. They had to know it was me, didn’t they? I mean, we talked to them last week about not causing a blue-on-blue engagement. Surely they’re paying more attention this time!”
“If I had any sense, I would have punched out an hour ago and taken my chances with the sharks! Better them than CAG.”
“So touchy,” Bird Dog murmured. “You RIOs never have the right stuff. You know that, Gator?”
His backseater sighed and gave up.
Twenty miles from the carrier, something blipped into existence on the RIO’s radar screen for two sweeps. “Hold on, I got — wait, it’s gone,” Gator said.
The note of excitement in Gator’s voice cut through Bird Dog’s daydream of a perfect world where pilots flew every day and every trap was a three-wire. “Got what, Gator? What?” Bird Dog demanded.
“Nothing now,” his RIO said, frustration edging his voice. “I thought I saw a high-speed blip break out of the ocean clutter. Just for a second — it’s gone now.”
“I saw it, too,” Lieutenant Commander Joyce Flynn, Spider’s RIO, chimed in. Nicknamed Tomboy, the diminutive redheaded Naval Flight Officer had been one of the first women assigned to a combat squadron.
“What the-what do you mean, a blip?” Spider demanded.
“Just that. A couple of hits on the AWG-9, then it disappeared.”
“Sea clutter. Ain’t nothing out here high speed,” Bird Dog said. He shrugged, and felt a moment of sympathy for the two Radar Intercept Operators. If the presence patrol missions were boring for a pilot, they were doubly so for the RIO. Few radar contacts, nothing to track or shoot at, and not even the simple pleasure of flying to make up for it. Even if there had been adversary air, Bird Dog wouldn’t have been inclined to worry. He took it as an article of faith that there wasn’t an aircraft built or a missile launched that could touch a Tomcat. RIOs always worried too much.
“You’re probably right. Nothing in the LINK on it,” Gator said uneasily. The AWG-9 had its problems with look-down capability, a problem partially remedied on the later versions of the F-14 and somewhat improved on the F/A-18. “Then again, this area’d be out of range of the surface search radars off the ships. And it’s awful calm down there to be generating much sea clutter. We got time to swing back and take another look?”
Bird Dog glanced at the fuel gauge. “Nope, not unless you really need to. We stay around too much longer and Jeff’s gonna have to launch a Texaco. Then we’ll catch it when we get back.”
“No, not solid enough for that,” Gator answered. “Probably just sea clutter, like you said. Still …”
“How about we drop down a little lower while we head back to the boat?” Bird Dog asked. “You take a quick look around on the turn. Maybe it’s a fishing boat or something.”
It was, he thought, the least he could do for the RIO, who’d suffered through an occasional barrel roll or period of inverted flight to break up Bird Dog’s own boredom. Chasing down sea clutter ghosts would give them both a break from the monotony of straight and level flight.
