the young man.
Yet this was why the burden of command was such a grueling, demanding pressure. You spent years honing the judgement and skill of your officers, inculcating in them the ability to make decisions such as this. You hoped and prayed that when the time came, they’d make the right ones, but you knew that it would twist them into knots just like it did him. Because as much as he wanted to get Harding off the ship, take care of him the way a captain is entrusted to care for his or her sailors, he couldn’t. His priority had to be the safety of the ship, the mission, and other hard priorities that were so distant from the concerns of one family over one sailor.
And you hated doing it, but you did it anyway. And the day that it quit hurting, that you stopped caring about your sailors and still forced yourself to make these decision, why, that was the day that you ought to retire.
He’d visit Harding later today, after things settled down. He’d tell the lad that they’d get him off as soon as they could, urge him to hold on. And the real bitch of it was, the thing that would keep him awake at night would be the look of understanding in Harding’s eyes, the forgiveness he’d see there.
ELEVEN
“Two minutes,” Rat announced. “Then descend to two thousand feet and come left to course 340.”
“Got it,” Fastball said. He let the aircraft slide back slightly until he was behind Bird Dog rather than on his wing, and then descended. He stayed slightly to Bird Dog’s right, avoiding the turbulence directly behind the Tomcat in front of him.
Below him the land was clearly visible now, flat, hard baked desert sand, filthy blue water lapping at the shore. The compound itself was no great shakes either. The three sets of fences strung around it looked ominous but tattered. Guard towers and searchlight emplacements were set in each corner. Inside were three concrete buildings, none of them with any windows. They were crammed together in the middle of the compound, with wide open spaces between the buildings and fences. For increased security? he wondered.
Men were running around a compound, obviously alerted to the incoming aircraft. Rat peered around over Fastball’s shoulder, then blinked. It looked as if… as if…
“Fastball,” she said urgently. “The sand — it’s moving. I think I’m seeing—”
A blast of smoke blew up from the shifting sand, and then, impossibly, an antiair missile was barreling straight for them.
Immediately in front of them, Bird Dog broke hard to the right. Fastball broke to the left, and started climbing, kicking into full afterburner as he did so. Rat was jammed back against the seat, and she tensed her muscles and grunted, forcing oxygen into her brain. It wouldn’t do to gray out now — not when everything depended on what she did in the next few moments.
Then Bird Dog completed his circle, descended to one thousand feet, and continued on in. “Hammer flight, on me,” he said. “It should be a piece of cake — these guys are bad shots.”
Fire flared briefly under Bird Dog’s wing, then a HARM missile shot out. In seconds, it nailed the entire radar, thus effectively eliminating the SAM threat.
“On me,” Bird Dog repeated. “We’re on our own for about forty-five seconds, people. Then its back up to altitude with our fighters. And there’ll be one less dirty little SAM sight in the world. Fused glass — that’s what the admiral asked for and that’s what he’s going to get.”
Rat shut her eyes for a moment, and offered up a prayer.
Fastball was gyrating the Tomcat through the atmosphere like a rock and roll dance partner. The tail end of the Tomcat slew around violently, throwing her first against one side of her ejection harness, then the other. She fought the blackness that nibbled at the edge of her vision, forcing her breath out in hard grunts as she tried to remain conscious.
“Stay with me, Rat,” Fastball grunted, his own voice tight. “Fifteen seconds — get ready.”
They continued to descend, the compound and the men so close she thought she could make out their individual features. She watched the target marker inch along their flight path, and then, at precisely the moment indicated, she toggled off the payload.
The Tomcat jolted upward violently, suddenly two thousand pounds lighter. At the same instant, Fastball broke hard to the left again, kicking in the afterburners and pitching the Tomcat into an almost vertical climb.
This time, Rat lost the battle. She saw the gray creeping in, saw the color leach out of her vision. She tried to fight it, but the blackness eventually met in middle of her field of vision as she passed out.
“Rat! You okay?”
No answer.
“Dammit, Rat, stay with me!” Fastball tried to lean forward, as though that would somehow magically increased the speed of the Tomcat and get them safely out of antiair range. While the SAMS might be destroyed with their radar, they could not ignore the possibility that there was another site somewhere nearby.
Finally, at altitude, he cut back on the afterburners and converted into level flight. “Rat?”
“Oh. I’m here,” she said, her voice groggy yet determined as she fought her way back to consciousness.
“I got it,” she said, as she regained her tactical awareness. She had only been out for about five seconds, but it was the longest five seconds Fastball could remember in a long time.
As he formed up on Bird Dog, staying within the circle of their accompanying fighters, it occurred to him that that was the essential difference between a Tomcat fighting team and single-seat fighters. In a Tomcat, you were part of a team. You depended on your RIO to feed you information, became accustomed to the steady patter of instructions, advice, and second opinions echoing in your ears. During combat, it was as though you were one person, one person with two brains. In a good team, your thinking eventually synchronized almost completely with your RIO, and sentences became shorthand, clipped phrases that were incomprehensible to anyone else.
Not so in an aircraft like the Hornet. There, you were completely alone, with no one to second-guess your judgment or give you a sanity check. There would be a certain freedom about that, he supposed, somewhat like the trainers he learned in. But in combat, two brains and two sets of eyes were always better than one. And in those few moments when he thought — even rationally knowing exactly what happened — that he has lost her, he had known real panic.
“Tomcat flight, good job,” a new voice said on tactical. “It looks like a direct hit for everyone.”
“Yes!” Fastball said. “Good going, Rat. Good going.”
“Thanks.”
For a few minutes, Fastball concentrated on maintaining his position in formation as he vectored toward the tanker waiting for them. Then he said hesitantly, “Rat? About what I said… I really
“Some good flying back there, Fastball. Not everybody could’ve gotten us out of that alive.”
“So… we still a team?” he asked.
There was a long pause, and he felt a flash of dread at what her answer would be. But finally she said, “Yeah, sure. Just as long as you remember I’ve got an ejection handle back here, too.”
“Put it in command eject. From now on, if you go, I go.”
“Touching,” Rat said dryly. “I’m very moved. But you know, I think right now I would be even more touched if you just concentrated on getting this bitch tanked and back on deck.”
“Yeah, sure.” Fastball let it drop, but inwardly he was fuming. Hey, he made this big reconciliation thing, and what did she do? Take the cheap shot, remind him of the last time he lost his nerve on a tanker approach. Well, she might be a good RIO, but she was still a bitch as far as he was concerned.
In terms of pucker factor, tanking was right up there with landing on the carrier. At least they were fortunate that the weather was good. And from looking at the flight schedule, Fastball had seen that Rabies Grill was in the cockpit of the tanker. Now that was good news, as much as Rabies bitched about tanker duty. No one flew a steadier pattern than Rabies.
