“I say again,” came the brisk response from the E-2 Hawkeye. “Fifty Flankers inbound your location, bearing 000, ETA ten minutes.”
“
“Vipers,” the E-2 said crisply, “be aware Homeplate took a hit and is red deck. Repeat, Homeplate has a red deck. There will be no backup. You are weapons free. Fire at will.”
Hot Rock felt the sweat begin to trickle.
On a more immediate note, it meant that the odds facing the BARCAP pilots were not only three to one, but unlikely to improve. No help would be rushing in….
“Better hope we don’t use our go-juice too quick, youngster,” Two Tone said. “There’s only one Texaco in the sky — and lots of planes bound to get thirsty.”
“Here we go, Hot Rock,” came over his headset from his new lead, Neanderthal. “Try to stay with me.”
Neanderthal’s Tomcat banked hard right. Hot Rock followed.
Until now they had been flying, as much as possible, in the direction of the wind. Going that way, the air was almost smooth. But come around, and life turned into a hell of buffeting and vicious vertical wind shears. Not to mention lack of visibility. The entire world was the striped, irregular gray of oily rags. And this was the
Best to ignore the view entirely. Stare out there for more than a few seconds, denying the brain reliable visual reference points, and in no time you’d start to think you were on the verge of a stall, or had entered a power dive, or even that you were going backward. There was no escaping it — no one, however hot on the stick, could fly in by the seat of his pants in zero visibility.
Instead, you watched your instruments. The blips on radar, those were real. Readings from altimeter, variometer, airspeed indicator, attitude indicator — those were real. When a pilot flew instruments, he became as dependent on artificial sensors as was any RIO.
“Picking up the bogeys now,” Two Tone said. “Yep. I’d call that a shitload of Flankers.”
“Phoenixes,” came over the radio.
“Phoenix ready,” Two Tone said. “Got us a nice juicy Flanker all picked out, Rocker.”
“Roger,” Hot Rock said, switching the weapons selector switch to the appropriate setting.
A moment later, the order came: “Fire when ready.”
As with the helicopter, Hot Rock didn’t allow himself to think: He toggled the switch and made the Fox call. The upward bounce of the Tomcat when the missile’s weight dropped away was barely noticeable in the general tumult.
He watched the missile’s progress on radar, knowing that the pilot of the targeted Chinese plane was doing the same thing. For all the Phoenix’s weaknesses, Hot Rock was glad the PLA didn’t have anything like the big radar-guided killer.
“Miss,” Two Tone said. “That’s a miss.” Meanwhile, over the headphones came whoops from a handful of more fortunate Vipers. Sounded like three or four had successfully taken out a Flanker.
Three or four… out of fifty.
The Vipers hurtled northwest into the claws of the wind, intending to engage the Chinese as far as possible from
“Hang tough, amigo,” Two Tone said. “Don’t leave your lead for anything this time.”
“What do you mean, ‘this time’?”
“Just thinking of that helo you shot down. Some people might have questioned that if I hadn’t backed your story, you know? So this time stick with your lead, stay in position. Don’t do anything fancy on your own. That’s what I’m suggesting.”
“But I — you — ”
“Heads up, Rock. Here come the bad guys.”
Beaman struggled into his OBA, or oxygen breathing apparatus, and mustered with the rest of his damage control party. Hosemen, investigators, and on-scene leader — they fell into their assigned positions automatically.
“Beaman,” the team leader said. “Get going. Cut around the forward end of it — see how big it is.”
Beaman nodded. As the primary investigator, his first task was to figure out where the edges of the fire were so that Damage Control Central, or DCC, could order smoke and fire boundaries set. First they would try to contain the fire, keep it from spreading, contain the smoke in the damaged area with heavy curtains hung from the hatches. Then while essential systems were being rerouted through the multiple system redundancies that existed on every Navy ship, the fire party would start nibbling at the edges, forcing flames and heat back into a smaller and smaller area until they could finally extinguish it.
At least, that was the plan. Reality always threw some monkey wrenches into the mix.
“You, Jones — get down to the first deck, see if the overhead’s starting to buckle. We stop it from moving down first, people. You know why.”
Beaman nodded. He did indeed. Starting three decks below the hangar bay, the aircraft carrier was honeycombed with ammunition lockers. Sure, they were equipped with sprinklers, watertight doors, Halon systems, everything the carrier could bring to bear in the way of fire control. But three decks wasn’t all that far away, not if this was a class D fire, a metal-burning conflagration. Given a little time, the fire could eat through steel deck plates like they were hot tortillas.
“It might have missed the hangar queen,” Beaman said. “They were moving her forward last time I saw.” The hangar queen, an aircraft that was virtually impossible to ever get flying again but served as a valuable source of parts, had been spotted directly ahead of them.
Even two hundred feet away from the fire, Beaman could feel the waves of heat rolling over him. The fire billowed and roared, battered the overhead, and reached out for them with tentacles of sparks.
“Get moving. Be safe,” the team leader said. He gave Beaman a swat on the rear as Beaman and his designated messenger broke off from the pack. “We’re right behind you.”
As they neared the edge of the fire, the hosemen behind Beaman arced a stream of fog into the air, showering it around him from a safe distance away. It wasn’t particularly useful for actually extinguishing the fire, but that wasn’t the point just yet. The mist cooled the air off to a temperature that his fire-fighting ensemble could withstand.
The rest of the damage control party was out of sight now as Beaman and his messenger moved around the far wall of the inferno. No secondary explosions yet, and it looked like — two more steps — yes, by God, one break. He could see the hangar queen safely out of the way. Safe for now, at least. Another five minutes and the gutted hulk of the queen would simply be more fuel in the fire. And then they would have a problem — once the aircraft’s metal ignited, there would be damned little chance of extinguishing the blaze.
Beaman backed off a bit until the noise was at a tolerable level. He toggled the transmit switch and screamed, “Hangar queen’s clear. Checking the far side now.” He slipped the walkie-talkie into a pocket on his fire fighting suit and motioned to the messenger to follow him. If he lost communications completely, his messenger would be his only link with the team leader.
Back close to it now, as close as he dared. The air inside his ensemble scorched the delicate lining of his noise, rasped against the back of his throat as he sucked down heaving breaths. Sweat cascaded down his face, his neck, his entire body, trickling down to soak his dungarees and seep into his boots. Another few steps, another one step — Beaman struggled against the blackness crowding in on his vision, knowing on some level that he was too close, too damned close, that he had to —
He felt someone jerk him back by his elbows. He stumbled and fell awkwardly onto the deck. Heat from the
