only difference is you got more time under your belt. She stays your wingman. Got it?”
“I don’t suppose I have any say in this?” Shaughnessy said, walking to the front of the room. Cold fury infused her delicate features. Electricity seemed to crackle off her. “Because if I do, then I—”
“No,” Gator said simply. “You don’t, either. Now, unless both of you want to be assigned permanent squadron duty officer while everyone else flies, I suggest you get your asses up to the flight deck and start preflight. You fly together, or you don’t fly at all.”
Shaughnessy beat him to the ladder heading up the flight deck, and he had to admit that hurt slightly. She was smaller and weighed less, he told himself. She squirmed through holes in the crowd that you couldn’t expect a guy his size to go. And, climbing the ladder, well, she had a lot less weight to carry around, didn’t she?
By the time Bird Dog arrived on the flight deck, Shaughnessy was already well into her preflight checklist. The plane captain stood by her side, nodding and smiling, and that bothered Bird Dog, too. It was his favorite plane captain, and he resented the defection. Just because Shaughnessy herself used to be a plane captain, they were all over her like she was still one of their own. Well, she better learn about the responsibilities and burdens of being an officer. She couldn’t keep sucking up to a stupid airman.
“Sir?” his own plane captain asked. “Are you ready?”
“Of course I’m ready,” Bird Dog snapped. “I’m always ready.”
All around them, the flight deck buzzed with frantic activity. An outsider watching might have concluded it was uncontrolled chaos, but everyone on the carrier knew better. It was a delicate, complex ballet, each sailor with his own starring role, all under the watchful eye of the Air Boss located in the tower seven decks above.
Forward, the alert five aircraft that had been sitting manned on the catapults were already launching. Steam boiled up from the catapult line as the piston came up to full power. The catapult officer ordered one final check of control surfaces, and the Tomcat wiggled every moving part. Then, satisfied that no last-minute gremlins had crept in, the plane captain popped off a sharp salute. The pilot returned it, the catapult officer dropped the deck and pointed and released his finger from the pickle.
The aircraft shot forward as the shuttle began its run down to the end of the deck. It picked up speed at an astounding rate, taking less than five seconds to reach minimum takeoff speed. First one, then the other alert five aircraft launched.
As the jet blast deflectors lowered, a long line of steam curled lazily away from the shuttle. A familiar vibration rang throughout the deck, a gentler echo of the one produced by the launch, as the shuttles ran back to their starting position. Already Tomcat and Hornets were vying for position. From the middle of the deck, a helo lifted gracefully from its spot, then moved off to the side and took station astern of the carrier.
Bird Dog performed his preflight quickly, almost automatically. How many times had he done this? Why, hell, he had more time preflighting than Shaughnessy had in the cockpit, he’d bet. Finally satisfied, he pulled down the boarding ladder from the side of the aircraft and started to climb up. As his eyes cleared the fuselage, he could see that Shaughnessy and her RIO were already buttoned up, canopy down, and waiting to taxi to their shot.
Dammit, she shouldn’t be getting ahead of him. She was his wingman, not the other way around. He added this offense to the list of infractions she had committed just to piss him off.
A plane captain followed him up, helped him with the ejection harness fastenings, and pulled the safety pins from the ejection seat. He held up the ejection pins for Bird Dog’s inspection, then put them in his pocket. “Good hunting, sir. Kill one of those bastards for me, would you?”
“You got it, buddy. Bird Dog started to slide the canopy forward.
“And, sir?” The airman pointed over at Shaughnessy’s bird. “Bring her back. She’s still kinda new — she doesn’t know what she’s doing like you do. But, I know she always watches to see what you do. She says you’re the best pilot she’s ever known in a Tomcat. So, keep her out of trouble. We’d all really appreciated it.”
“No sweat. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” Bird Dog locked the canopy down and turned to taxi.
So, he wasn’t the only one who realized what Shaughnessy was facing, was he? Even her own former peers realized it. Hell, knowing where she came from, maybe that made her a little desperate to succeed. Maybe she tried too hard, felt like she had something to prove.
But she was a hot stick. Did she know that? Did she know how really good she was? Good enough not to have anything to prove to anybody.
Maybe she didn’t know that. He considered the possibility as he kept up his scan of the deck and followed the plane captain’s motions to taxi forward. Shaughnessy fell in behind him and her own plane captain held her back and waited for Bird Dog.
Good thinking. Maybe between the plane captains and her RIO, they could keep her from screwing up.
The shuttle locked on and the Tomcat jolted slightly. He watched the plane captain and the catapult officer, cycled his stick on signal, saluted, and braced for launch. Seconds later, he was airborne.
Once clear of the ship, Bird Dog circled around to the marshal point and waited for Shaughnessy. One way or another, along with killing his share of MiGs, he was going to bring her back alive.
FOURTEEN
Under any other circumstances, Lieutenant Bruno Parto would have considered this a tropical paradise. Towering palms swayed gently in the light breeze, and the foliage was dense with a wide range of exotic flowers. Everywhere he looked it was green, the colors running the gamut from the pale yellow shades to dark, almost black greens. Hibiscus blossomed seemingly at random, deep red and yellow splashes against the green canopy.
This far up the mountain, there were few sounds of civilization. No trucks, no internal combustion engines. No aircraft. Instead, the air teemed with shrieks and raucous cries of birds as they went about their daily tasks.
Yes, paradise. Except for the area immediately in front of him.
Someone had been brutal about clearing the area, as well as quite thorough. A cleared path slashed through the forest, leading down to the main road he’d observed from the air. Up here, the road widened into a clearing forty feet in diameter. Within the cleared area, everything was trampled to the ground. Ugly stumps seeping sap poked up, raw and wounded. The debris was tossed around the edges of the circle, already turning brown and melting down to join the compost on the tropical floor. Parked in the center was the rocket launcher, its rails extending up from the bed, a missile already in place.
Parto ran his hand over the ground, letting the rich loam sift through his fingers. Even the most brutal treatment by men could not permanently stop nature. Already, only a week after the area had been cleared, the jungle was trying to reclaim its own. Small sprouts of green poked up through the debris, and twigs were visible in the center of the tree trunks. Within another week, the ground would not be visible as foliage started to sprout, and in perhaps as little as three months he would never have been able to tell it had been cleared.
But, for now, it was an ugly scar on the land, easily visible from the air, although a bit more difficult to find on the ground. The dense foliage screened it until you were almost on top of it.
It was the smells that first gave away the location even before he had visual contact on it. The scent of people, cooked meat and tobacco, sweat, and the oily, noxious odor of machinery. He motioned to the members of the squad, and they dispersed silently around him. They advanced slowly, each with his own assignment, knowing that time was running short.
The previous three sites had been easily taken down. The SEALs had approached like Ninjas, undetected, and during the night had silently and finally eliminated the soldiers asleep in their trucks. After everyone was dead, Parto himself had run through the simple sequence of input commands on the attached fire control panel, canceling all preprogrammed launch instructions. As a final precautionary measure, they carefully detached the warhead sitting on the bed of the truck and rolled it off onto the ground. It would be impossible to remount on the launcher, and other teams would be along later to dispose of it.
But they had run out of darkness before they had run out of trucks, and the result was that they were making their approach on this one in the afternoon, already worn out after a night of operations.
Parto could smell something cooking, as well as coffee, and he swore silently. He would have preferred to
