hull in the water, do you hear me?”
“Aye-aye, Admiral,” Batman answered, his voice filled with savage glee. “A smoking hull it is.” He turned to Bam-Bam with fire in his eyes. “Make it so.”
TWENTY-TWO
Lieutenant Brett Carter stared up at the speaker as though he could convince himself that the words that were coming over were true. His operations chief was already putting his watchstanders in motion, anticipating the lieutenant’s next command.
Finally, Carter picked up the microphone and answered up. “Puller, roger. Out.” He turned to the chief, his mouth still slightly open. “You heard.”
The chief nodded. “I did indeed.”
A new fire seemed to infuse the lieutenant. It had been a long day, longer than any one that he had ever had, fraught with uncertainty and the unexpected challenges of command. It had been his decision to get
But now… now this. Vindication, if he’d needed it.
“Firing keys,” Carter ordered, and it all went rather swiftly from that point on. The three Chinese vessels were already designated in the system as hostile targets and it was a simple matter to assign two Harpoon anti- ship missiles to each one. The six missiles rippled out of the quad canisters mounted along the sides of the ship with a slight jar.
As Carter watched the symbols materialized on the screen, each on arrowing straight and true toward its intended target, he felt a surge of pride. Challenges, responsibilities, crisis — all in all, he figured it had been the kind of day that he’d joined the Navy expecting. No matter what his next operational tour, it would be years before he would again have command — albeit only temporary — of a warship. And after today, he knew that nothing else he could do would ever equal that experience.
“Kelly, my dear, are you ready for this?” Bird Dog said over tactical. He glanced over at his new wingman as he asked it, taking his eyes off his heads-up display briefly. “You’re about to get blooded, woman.”
After four hours in Sick Bay, complaining at the top of the their voices that they were fine, Bird Dog and Gator had been released to full duty. Sure, they had a few cuts and bruises, but no worse than after any of their previous ejections. Gator insisted that, because of their experience, they were more qualified than the doctors to assess their own physicial conditions.
“I’m ready,” the calm voice of his new wingman said. “So is Tits.”
“Hell of a name for a RIO,” Gator cried happily. “You get Tits, I get Gator — now how did that work out?”
“Perhaps if Gator’s full name were Theodore Irving Turner, he might be Tits as well,” came a deep bass voice from Green’s backseat. “It’s just like your mother always told you, Bird Dog — don’t mess with tits.”
Gator suppressed a snort of disgust. His head was buried in the soft plastic cover surrounding his radar scope as he worked the angles and dangles, the relative velocities and kill ratios in his mind. Four MiGs headed out against two Tomcats and two Hornets — well, the odds were in their favor, weren’t they? Still, in Gator’s ever so humble opinion, Bird Dog had never taken this shit seriously enough. No, not seriously enough by half. And from the sounds of it, neither did Lieutenant Kelly Green or her RIO, Tits.
“Thor, you come in and get that first pair tied up,” Bird Dog said a second later. “Me and Kelly are going to go high and come in on the second two. You think you can handle them?”
“Oh, I imagine two Marines are more than enough to take care of a couple of MiGs,” a slow Southern drawl came from Hornet 106. “Hellman can pull his share of the load.”
“All right, weapons free,” Bird Dog said. “We don’t know who the hell is in that boat down there, but evidently the Chinese are as interested in him as we are. They want him, they can’t have him. That’s the rules of the game.”
“Are you going to get us in the game or not?” Gator demanded from the backseat. “Or is this little mutual admiration society taking up too much of your time?”
In answer, Bird Dog slammed the Tomcat into afterburner and went into a steep, tail twisting climb. Gator gasped as the G-forces pounded against him, sucking the blood down from his head and toward his feet. “Dammit, asshole,” he squeezed out, simultaneous grunting in an M-1 maneuver designed to force blood back up to his brain. He could feel the pressure suit activating around his legs and torso, but Gator was never one to leave the question of whether or not he stayed conscious entirely to automation.
“I thought you were in a hurry to get somewhere,” Bird Dog said innocently, but he backed off the throttles and eased off on his rate of ascent. “AMRAAM as soon as we’re ready.”
“About five seconds, I make it,” Gator said, breathing more easily now as the G-forces subsided. “Stand by — now!”
The ATG-71 radar with advanced avionics held solid contact on the incoming bogey. The aircraft shuddered slightly as the AMRAAM dropped off the wing, the advanced avionics automatically retrimming the aircraft.
“Fox One, Fox One,” Bird Dog sang out. Fox One was the call assigned to a medium-range missile, such as an AMRAAM or a Sparrow. “Looking good.”
“Not good enough,” Bird Dog said. He punched the Tomcat into afterburner. “Let’s get up close and personal for some knife fighting.”
Bird Dog wasn’t the only one flying with an inexperienced pilot on his wing, and for the Hornet pilot, the problem was particularly challenging. At least in the Tomcat, the pilot had a RIO sitting right behind him, ready to double-check plans and provide a sanity check if the pilot became overwhelmed. Not so in the Hornet — the pilot took over all the RIO’s duties in addition to his own.
As confident as Thor had sounded over tactical, he had his own private doubts about his wingman. First Lieutenant “Hellman” Franks was on his nugget cruise, still learning that there were old pilots, there were bold pilots, but there were no old, bold pilots.
Not that Thor had anything against showing balls. No, not at all. After all, they were both Marines weren’t they? And Marine fighter pilots at that.
And it wasn’t that Hellman wasn’t a damned fine pilot, either. He was, as Thor had seen all too often on the bombing range and during workups. He’d sailed through basic and pipeline training at the top of his class, achieved near miraculous scores on the bombing range, and was considered by all to be one hot shit pilot. If he lived long enough, he’d be looking at fast promotions in the Corps.
Still, there was an edge to the man that bothered Thor. Sure, you want to get airborne and get the other guy fast and hard, but you want to do it clean. You take chances, but only those you have to. And you remember that you’ve got a multimillion-dollar aircraft strapped to your ass that Uncle Sam would really prefer that you bring back in one piece.
“Okay, Hellman, just like in refresher training,” Thor said over tactical, switching to the private frequency the two of them shared. “You know MiGs, and this is no different than training. Except no mistakes.”
“You ever see me make a mistake, Thor?” a Virginia drawl asked. “Anywhere?”
“You’ve never been in combat before,” Thor said bluntly. “You suck it in, Marine, and do it the way we taught you.”
“Don’t worry about me, old man,” Hellman shot back. “I’ll keep your ass out of trouble.”
