From the intelligence compartment next to TFCC, Lab Rat watched the Greek fighters peel out of their strikes waves. Before they’d even formed up into fighting teams, he tapped the TAO on the shoulder. “Call Admiral Wayne. Tell him it’s urgent.”
Tombstone Magruder was flanked by six guards as he entered the command post. The look on his face would have caused most officers to break out into a cold sweat and start planning their civilian careers. Yet General Arkady merely waved a congenial greeting and beckoned him over to stand before the radar screen.
“What is the meaning of this?” Tombstone demanded, his voice even colder than the expression on his face.
Arkady glanced up, then surveyed the guards as though slightly surprised to see them there. “I wanted you to see this. Under the circumstances, I thought you might need some persuasion.”
“Persuasion? You mean like placing the rest of my officers and troops in custody and assigning guards to keep them in one room? You’ve got the wrong idea about how allies behave toward one another, General.” Tombstone stalked into the room as though it were his own squadron spaces. “Unless my people are released within the next ninety seconds, I’m withdrawing all American forces from participation in UNFORGREECE. And just in case you think I don’t have the power to do that, you just try considering exactly who those men and women will obey if it comes right down to it.”
“Which is exactly why I’ve put them all together for safekeeping,” Arkady said, his pleasant expression broadening into a smile. “Yes, I understand your American forces far better than you think I do.”
“You understand nothing,” Tombstone spat. “Nothing at all. Not about fighting this war, not about the UN, much less about any of us.”
Arkady’s face froze for a moment, then the smile faded into an expression far more menacing. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating me.”
“Like you’ve done us?”
Arkady shook his head, the menace fading away as he did so. “Look at your disposition of forces first. Then tell me I don’t understand your people.”
Tombstone could see the tactical picture as clearly as though he’d charted it out himself. The American aircraft, both Tomcats and Hornets by their symbology numbers, were arrayed in an orderly formation leaving the area of their last strike. Ahead of them, a disorderly gaggle of Greek aircraft were breaking away from a fighter sponge and forming up into pairs of twos, one taking high station and the other taking low. The loose-deuce fighting formation, a two-on-one combo that rarely failed to give the Americans a distinct advantage over other nations more accustomed to fighting under the direction of a ground controller.
“Why?” Tombstone asked finally as he watched the two waves of aircraft approach each other. Two even lines, sets of twos — at least the lead American pilot had gotten the idea and was reconfiguring his forces into fighting pairs. “Why any of this?” The six guards crowded in closer to him as his fingers curled into fists.
“Because this is an internal problem.” Arkady paused for a moment to let Tombstone consider his words. “As we’ve said from the very beginning, there is no place for the rest of the world in resolving this matter. But you Americans have become accustomed to simply barging in anywhere in the world that your misguided sense of knighthood seems to tell you that your presence is needed.” Arkady’s calm facade was cracking now, revealing the insanity underneath it. “My people were making sophisticated battle plans, inventing the very sciences that you use today when your ancestors were still worshipping trees. We don’t need the world to solve our problem for us any more than we needed the friendship of the Romans all those centuries ago.”
The Greek general turned to stare at the screen again, and watched with satisfaction as the two waves of aircraft merged into a fur ball. “And now we’ll teach the world one more lesson — to stay out of our country.”
Thor put the Hornet in as steep a climb as he could manage without going into afterburner. Even before the engagement began, fuel was already his limiting factor. A bad thing anytime, but particularly so when your opponent was a Greek Tomcat carrying more pounds of fuel after a bombing run than you could at max load.
The thin whine of the ESM gear filled the cockpit. A lock. Thor glanced at his HUD. A Sidewinder probably — the IR guided antiair missile was the weapon of choice with the Hornet’s tail pointed almost directly at the oncoming Tomcat.
Why had the Tomcat picked him? The question beat in the back of his head as he flew upward, gauging the exact moment when he’d have to take evasive action.
“I’m on him, Thor,” his wingman said. Cassidy “Hopalong” Kramer, a nugget still less than one year out of the Fleet Replacement squadron but one of the best natural pilots Thor had ever run across. “Break right when I say.”
One the HUD, Thor could see Cassidy’s Hornet streaking in from above, diving and pivoting in midair to cut back in behind the Greek Tomcat in perfect killing position. It had better be quick — Thor could feel his airspeed bleeding off, the knots clicking down as the altitude crept up. The hair on the back of his neck started to prickle, and his hand reached for the throttle. Low fuel or not, in a few seconds he was going to need that extra power to keep him out of the stall envelope.
The ESM warning shifted upward in tone, indicated a solid lock. Then it broke into an excited chatter. Thor reached for the controls — missile launch — no way he was waiting, he had to get the hell out of Dodge
“Now!” Hopalong sang out as though echoing his thoughts and Thor broke hard right.
“Where’s the missile?” Thor demanded as he let gravity take hold, bolstering his airspeed and preparing for evasive action. “Where is it, dammit?” He tapped the afterburners, accelerating the Hornet well into a comfortable flying attitude.
“Fireball caught it,” Hopalong crowed. “Got that bastard on guns! Man, splash one Tomcat!”
“Where’s his wingman?”
“He’s just… wait, he’s… shit, Thor, he’s on me! Cut back around me and nail him. I’m going rolling scissors.” Hopalong spun his Hornet onto his back and went into a hard, spiraling horizontal roll. The wingman started to follow, then evidently recognized the trap. If the Hornet could trap the less-maneuverable bird into a horizontal game, the Hornet won. Sooner or later, Cassidy would have cut inside the Tomcat’s turning radius and either stitched a line down its side with gunfire, hoping to hit a fuel tank, or pickled off a heat-seeking missile locked hard on the Tomcat’s tailpipe.
But this Tomcat pilot wasn’t that stupid. He exploited the Tomcat’s greater thrust to wing ratio and grabbed for altitude, clearly intended to pace the Hornet from above and force the game into the vertical.
Thor pulled up his own dive for the deck when his airspeed was well within the envelope again. He still had five thousand feet on the climbing Tomcat, but the range… could he make it in time to slip in behind him? He considered it for just a second, then slammed into afterburner and closed the horizontal distance between them.
The Tomcat pilot caught on just as his vertical ascent passed through the horizontal plane of Thor’s airspace. The massive fighter twisted in midair, fighting against inertia and gravity to slew the glaring tailpipes away from Thor and to bring the Vulcan Phalynx cannon mounted under the left wing root to bear on the smaller aircraft.
But the Greek pilot was fighting more than two pissed off Hornet pilots — he was up against the laws of momentum and mass, and he didn’t stand a chance. Thor saw it before the Greek did and waited as the Tomcat started pulling out of the vertical climb and turning to face Thor.
Just as the clear canopy of the other fighter swung into view, but before the Tomcat could bring its own guns to bear, Thor toggled off a short burst from his gun. So maybe he couldn’t shoot the Macedonians on either side of Murphy when he’d wanted to, not that time, but guns and rounds were something that every Marine aviator schooled in the tenets of close air support understood very, very well.
The rounds, every tenth one a tracer, spat out across the front of the Tomcat. The canopy shattered, large chunks of plastic and metal supports streaming back from the cockpit along with a fog as the cockpit depressurized. Thor continued the stream of gunfire to the right, taking a few precious microseconds to do it, then slammed into
