A slight additional whine haunted the airframe as the radar spun up and came on-line. His heads-up display sprang to life with a speckling of green clutter that quickly resolved itself into the fuzzy-edged lozenges indicating radar contact.
There?it had to be La Salle. The large one loitered in deep water.
A smaller contact, probably Shiloh, was positioned twenty miles astern of the massive flagship. Yuri calculated the intercept, then dove back down to the deck for the concealment of sea clutter.
“Sir! You’ve gotta listen to me!” Carey’s voice was deeper, harder. “There’s something going on with this contact I don’t like.” He pointed to the automated status board.
Skeeter stared at the display and frowned. “The altitude?it’s not matching up, is it?”
“No, sir. And look at the EW?the electromagnetic-warfare signal?going with it. A Furuno.”
“That’s not right?not at that altitude. Unless it’s a fishing boat with-“
“Sir. With all due respect, you’re letting your conclusion drive your analysis.” Carey stabbed a finger at the display. “You’ve got a contact radiating commercial IFF, going too fast, displaying a radar it shouldn’t have, and now bouncing back and forth between five hundred feet and eight thousand.”
Carey’s voice took on an urgent note. “Sir, you’d better get the TAO in here. Now.”
“What if it’s just a commercial flight after all? Or a computer-processing glitch?” Skeeter replied uneasily. As a junior officer stashed on board the flagship, he’d been pressed into duty as the Combat Direction Center TAO only because the ship was in peacetime cruising mode. Nobody was expecting anything to go wrong, not in the familiar confines of the Aegean Sea and just off the coast of a friendly nation. Besides, the admiral’s Chief of Staff had expressed full confidence in Skeeter and told him it was an opportunity. “What does the Aegis say?”
A flicker of movement on the large-screen display drew their eyes toward it. The Aegis response was clear?the blip had been redesignated as an unknown, potentially hostile contact.
“I know Lieutenant Commander Boney,” Carey said. “If you call him and wake him up for no reason, he’s not going to be pissed. He expects it?hell, if he’d known you’d hesitate to do it, he wouldn’t have left you here alone on watch, sir!”
Skeeter reached for the telephone and punched in the four-digit code that would ring the TAO’s stateroom. He stared at Carey as the phone rang twice, then quickly briefed the Tactical Action Officer on the scenario.
Color drained from his face as he listened to the response. He slammed the receiver down and turned to Carey. “You and your counterpart on the cruiser better be right. Lieutenant Commander Boney’s on his way down here, and he told me to ring the captain.”
Carey nodded, immensely relieved. “Better safe than sorry, sir. Always.”
TFCC was one of the smallest compartments on board the supercarrier, but it was the fusion center for every sensor on every platform assigned to Carrier Battle Group 14. Radar, electromagnetic, and a variety of other sophisticated detection and countermeasures systems fed their electronic data into the processing center. Tiny waverings in the electromagnetic spectrum, fuzzy contacts that might have been sea clutter or actual contacts, were correlated with national sensor data from satellites and other top-secret assets to produce a chillingly accurate bird’s-eye view of the airspace and sea for five hundred miles around the carrier. A satellite data link with the Sixth Fleet flagship extended her range to well within the Aegean Sea.
The compartment was dimly lit, red lights glowing softly from the overhead while a giant blue large-screen display covered the far end. Two tactical consoles were positioned in front of the screen, each with its own automated status board, keyboard, trackball, and associated communications circuitry. The Flag Tactical Operations Officer occupied the right-hand one, while his assistant sat in the left. Both wore headsets linking them to the command circuit, and a dial-up switch in front of them allowed them to change to other circuits as necessary.
At the moment, both were studying the large-screen display. Just seconds before, the “unknown, possibly hostile” designation had flashed before them as the Aegis cruiser had revised her opinion on the identity of the air contact. Lieutenant Commander “Gator” Cummings, an F-14 Radar Intercept Officer, or RIO, slewed his cursor over to capture the offending blip. His status display indicated the contact had been designated a COI (contact of interest) by La Salle, now loitering two hundred miles to the northeast.
“Raw video,” he muttered. “That’s what I’d rather see than this. If I could see just exactly what the radar is painting, I’d know-“
“Just what you know now,” his assistant finished tartly. “Gator, you RIOs always believe you’ve got the only calibrated set of eyeballs in this Navy. Don’t you figure those operations specialists on the cruiser know their jobs?”
“Sure they do, but I know mine even better.”
“Well. What do you want to do about it?”
Gator stared at the symbology on the tactical screen. It was tracking southwest, headed directly toward the Sixth Fleet flagship. Behind it, a shadow trace indicated its previous path. From its track history, it appeared to have left Ankara and been detected as it went feet-wet off the coast. “Could be a commercial air?time’s wrong, but it might be a charter flight.” He changed his mind as soon as he said the words. “Or something else.”
The other officer, an E2C Hawkeye pilot, nodded. “I don’t like this.”
“Anything from Intel?” Gator asked.
“Let’s find out.” The pilot picked up the telephone and punched the numbers. He spoke a few short sentences in the receiver, then hung up. “Commander Busby’s on his way down right now. He sounded worried.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
Gator picked up the Batphone located to his right. “Get the Alert 30 Tomcats rolling. I’ll brief the admiral.”
One hundred miles. It’s time. Still, he hesitated.
Why?
Was it the enormity of the act he was about to commit? Or simply lingering doubts about the viability of the entire operation?
He shook his head, pushing the questions that had plagued him for the last five months away. There was more to this plan, more than he’d ever been told or would ever know. It was the old Soviet way?that he know only the small portion that was required for the successful execution of his mission, not the broader strategic implications. He took a deep breath, focused on the radar screen, and toggled the weapons-select switch on his stick. Not that it made much difference?he carried only one missile, and an odd variant at that.
He punched the button on top of the stick, releasing the weapon from its hard-point station on his right wing. The MiG heeled, suddenly unbalanced by the loss of six hundred pounds of?of what?
As he broke off from the approach and heeled back in a tight turn toward Turkey, he felt the question grow more insistent in his mind. What had he just fired?
And why?
Minutes after the TAO’s wake-up call, the flight deck was teeming with a rainbow of jerseys. Two decks down, the Alert 30 Tomcat crews waiting in their Ready Room were slipping into their ejection harnesses, double- checking kneeboard data, and trying to figure out why the hell they were scrambling.
The yellow-shirted flight-deck control personnel swarmed over the Alert 30 Tomcats, conducting final preflight checks and readying the aircraft for their crews. Inside the carrier, the duty tower crew stampeded up eight decks to Pri-Fly, the glassed-in control tower on the inboard side of the island. CAG, although his presence was technically not required in the tower, rousted himself out of his rack and hastily tossed on his yellow jersey over his khaki pants.
