But deterrence required understanding why a country was doing whatever it was doing, and unraveling the chain of logic that underlay China’s political and military decisions was an almost futile task. Steeped in centuries of military tradition, and following the tenets of such brilliant military-political thinkers as Sun Tzu, the Chinese agenda was undoubtedly a subtle one.
“Get me a secure line to General Emberfault,” the senior Magruder said, referring to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He’s probably already gotten reports on this from other sources, but I want him to hear it from us. It’s my battle group that’s on the line out there, and I need to know what I can do to protect it.”
“I didn’t see it myself, Admiral, but I sure felt the blast.” Bird Dog Robinson shifted uneasily in the hard plastic chair. The buzz of adrenaline from the bolter and his trap was starting to fade, leaving him feeling dopey and slow. He was tempted to rest his elbows on the government-issue table and support his head with his hands. He was still in his flight suit, although he’d ditched his ejection seat harness in the Handler’s office on his way down to CVIC for debriefing. Despite the air conditioning in his Tomcat and in CVIC, dried sweat glued his Nomex shirt to his back, and it was starting to itch. With the Admiral sitting in on the debriefing, a fresh trickle of sweat had started down the middle of his back.
“I thought I saw a blip of something, Admiral,” Gator volunteered. “Tomboy saw it, too, but it was there and then gone so fast, I can’t be certain. Could have been a sea-skimmer, though — the speed seemed right, from what I can remember.”
“We’ll take another look on the mission tapes. None of our surface ships picked up anything, not even the Aegis. Not that that decides it one way or the other. You boys had the advantage of altitude.” Rear Admiral Magruder frowned slightly. “The perennial look-down problem of the AWG-9 surfaces again. The F/A-18 Hornets and the F-14F have gone a long way toward correcting the deficiency, but the versions of the F-14 we’re still flying in the Fleet have a tough time on low-altitude contacts.”
The Admiral glanced back at the debriefing sheet Bird Dog had filled out. “The rock — anything unusual about it?” the Admiral asked.
Bird Dog looked down, unable to meet the eyes of the Commander of the Carrier Group. The Admiral’s voice had a hard-edged impatience to it. If the lack of information irritated him, what would the highly decorated pilot say if he knew how Bird Dog felt during that last trap? He shifted again in his seat, certain that Admiral Magruder would be as disgusted with him as he was with himself.
“Nothing. Still just a rock with a tank on it. I thought I saw a couple of guys standing on the tank, but we were still fairly high. If they were waving and cheering for the American way of life, I missed it,” Bird Dog said.
Immediately, he wished he could recall the words. Fear did that to him, for some reason. His mouth opened before he thought, and inappropriate words came tumbling out before he could think. But this was a serious matter, and the admiral had a reputation for being a serious guy. Someday, Bird Dog’s smart-ass mouth was going to get him in trouble.
“Sorry, Admiral,” he mumbled, and stared at his shoes.
Tombstone stared at him silently for a few moments. Then he said, “You remind me of my old wingman, Batman. Same sense of humor, and same sense of timing. I bailed him out more than once in briefings.” The barest trace of a smile twitched at the corner of the admiral’s mouth. “Lieutenant Commander Flynn? You saw this contact, too, I understand?” Tombstone asked the tiny redheaded RIO.
“Yes, Admiral. The AWG-9 just got a couple of hits on it, barely enough to paint a trace. Whatever it was — if both paints were even the same target — it was going like a bat out of hell. Then again, it could have just been two clots of sea clutter that happened to pop up one right after the other.” She shook her head. “I can’t give you a solid answer, sir. I’m sorry.”
“What’s your gut feeling about the contact?” Tombstone pressed. “You’ve got good eyes, Tomboy. You were trained by the best, after all.”
A smile flashed across her face, quickly replaced by the more serious look of a professional naval aviator called on to make a decision. Too often in the intricate game of radar detection and classification the final call on whether a contact was hostile or not depended on the judgment of the officer on the scene.
Tombstone had good reason to trust Tomboy’s judgment. During her first cruise, she’d been his RIO on countless occasions when he was CAG of Air Wing 14. Despite her markedly female appearance on the ground, Tomboy was a hard-line, top-notch RIO in the air. “My gut says it was a missile, Admiral,” she said in a clipped, incisive voice. “My radar painted something that looked like skin. It looked solid, and it looked like the same contact on both sweeps. I’d call it an actual contact, not a ghost. And there’s supporting information for that as well.”
“A Chinese outpost getting blown out of the water a few minutes later is pretty solid correlation,” the Admiral agreed. “What worries me is the lack of detection on a launching platform.”
“Do the Chinese have anything like our Stealth program, Admiral?” Gator asked. “That could be one possibility. An aircraft that we didn’t detect launched a missile.”
“Several of the intelligence officers have suggested that possibility,” Tombstone acknowledged. “There are a couple of problems with that explanation, though.
“First, if the missile had been air-launched, it would probably have been from a reasonable altitude. We’d have had a better detection on the missile, if not the aircraft. We know it’s not a stealth missile because you two did get a couple of hits on it. From the sounds of the contact, the reason for the intermittent detection was low altitude, not stealth technology.
“Second, a non-stealth missile on a stealth aircraft would destroy the low radar profile of the aircraft. Third, if it were air-launched, we’d probably have seen a seeker head of some sort,” he said, referring to the normal terminal guidance method of most air-launched missiles. “And finally, there’s no evidence that China has made much progress on a stealth program. They’re still buying fighter aircraft from the Russians, and Russia’s not about to sell their nearest regional threat their latest in advanced technology.”
“So it had to be launched from something else,” Bird Dog said thoughtfully. “A submarine, maybe. Or it could be a Chinese version of our Tomahawk missile.”
“Those are also possibilities, but they require us to make some assumptions about their technology. According to our intell, the Chinese don’t have a long-range land-launch strike missile, nor do their subs carry one. Remember, the Chinese navy is still strictly a brown-water force, not a blue-water like ours.”
Tomboy shrugged. “Well, whatever it is that they don’t have, it sure made a hell of an explosion out there.”
Tombstone questioned the four aviators for a few more minutes. Finally, convinced that they knew nothing else about the incident, he dismissed them. His eyes followed Tomboy as the aviators left the debriefing room. The baggy flight suit was pulled taut across her upper back and fell into loose folds around her hips, concealing her figure. From what he remembered of their last liberty together, that was a damned shame. A trickle of pure lust ran through his body, making him uncomfortable because of the sheer incongruity of feeling it while looking at a RIO in a flight suit. Still, despite her call sign, Tomboy was nothing if not completely female.
“That pilot — he sounds just like Batman did at that age,” Tombstone said reflectively.
CAG chuckled. “I see it, too. How’d you ever get him to quit playing hotshot with those Soviet Bears?”
“I didn’t — not really. He’d still be at it if he were out here.”
Batman, known more formally as Captain Edward Everett Wayne, was a Top Gun-trained F-14 pilot. He’d joined the VF-95 Vipers as a lieutenant nugget when then-Lieutenant Commander Tombstone Magruder was on his second — or was it third? — cruise. He’d been hardheaded and impulsive, and had almost gotten himself in serious trouble hot-dogging with a Soviet Bear reconnaissance aircraft. Later, once it hit home with him that he was killing men along with aircraft in the sky, he’d started to doubt his ability in combat. Tombstone had served as his sounding board.
In subsequent cruises, Batman and Tombstone had seen combat in Norway and Pakistan. The hotheaded young pilot had grown into one of the most superbly proficient aviators Tombstone knew.
Now Batman was flying something new, a platform that was forcing him to grow in new and not entirely pleasant ways: a desk in the Pentagon. Tombstone had read recently that Batman was heading up the development on JAST, the Joint Aviation Strike Technology program.
“What about these explosions? Washington’s not going to be happy if we don’t have some response planned,” Tombstone said to Captain Cervantes, his CAG.
