Pamela had sneaked a seat next to one of the four windows, and the light streaming in through the scratched and scarred plastic provided enough illumination for her to read her book as they flew. Winston had not been quite as quick to grab a seat, nor had the cameraman bothered to save one for her as he had for Pamela, and she was relegated to the back part of the plane, with the tail ramp in full view. The rear, Pamela had discovered early on, was also the most turbulent part of the COD, although none of it could be called particularly smooth. And other than in the few seats near the windows, there was not enough light to read. Not that Winston had brought a book anyway.
Beside her, the cameraman was asleep. He was an old hand at this and, although she had never told him so, Pamela’s favorite to work with. Jeff possessed an unusually placid, level-headed manner, and even her worst temper tantrums seemed to pass right over him. Additionally, although she’d never told him this either, he was by far in her mind the most bloodthirsty of the cameramen. Given a chance between reaching out to try to save Drake from falling off a cliff and getting a good shot of the look of terror on her face, she suspected he would instinctively choose the latter. Maybe his even temper wasn’t so much a good disposition as a lack of connection on some basic level with other people.
But she’d take good work over friendliness any day, and that was why he was here.
Finally, she fell asleep as well, and the hours passed quickly.
NINE
The admiral’s conference room was packed with his staff and representatives from the ship’s company. Despite the early morning hour, no one looked tired or sleepy, though more than one face showed purple bruises under the eyes. No one had slept much, Coyote included.
“Listen up, people. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’ve got a COD inbound as well as message traffic five feet deep. For the time being, I want us all focused on self-protection and preventing another tragedy. I want a full CAP complement up, twenty-four seven. No chances — not until we figure out what’s going on here. That clear?” Coyote scanned the faces of the staff seated around the table.
Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, could we get a clarification on ROE for the pilots?”
Coyote stared at him for a long, hard moment. “You got something on your mind, mister?”
For a moment Lab Rat wondered if he’d overstepped the bounds of propriety. But dammit, he was the admiral’s intelligence officer — he got paid to point out problems, not to suck up like a yes man. “Yes, Admiral, I do,” Lab Rat continued, unfazed by the scrutiny. “INCOS isn’t holding up under these conditions and I don’t think we can count on what the aircrew remember about it. This could get out of hand very quickly.”
Coyote looked away. Lab Rat could see him arrive at a decision. “I’ll brief all squadron commanders in one hour,” the admiral said finally. “And I expect the word to get out to all aircrews. Now, how are we coming on the survivors?”
“Captain Gaspert says he’s got a complete and accurate count,” the operations officer answered. “Current muster was in the deck log, of course. So far, it looks like most of the fatalities are among his crew, especially the ones below the waterline. There just wasn’t time for them to get out.” He stopped, staring down at the list as though he could make the numbers change by sheer force of will. “Eighty-two missing, presumed dead. One hundred and twenty-eight wounded, sixteen of those critical.”
The numbers sank in around the table, and few were unmoved. It was one thing, horrible though it was, to lose military members. Another thing entirely to kill civilians, as they all knew following the World Trade Center massacre.
“We’re maintaining a full SAR,” Ops continued. “The last rescue was two hours ago. Small boats and helos, with the S-3s as well. I think we’ll find some more of them clinging to wreckage.”
“Let’s hope so.” The admiral turned to the flag supply officer. “Any logistics problems I need to know about?”
“No, Admiral. We’ve outfitted the civilians with dungarees and T-shirts, basic toiletries, that sort of thing. We’ll be fine until we can resupply.”
“Okay, then. Anything else?”
Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, so far we’re not certain who was at fault. The missile trajectories were almost exactly reciprocal. We had a near miss, or we had a hit. It’s going to take more information from national sensors before we can be sure of what happened.”
It was not what they wanted to hear. No one could bear the thought that the
But Coyote hadn’t risen to command of a battle group by being afraid to face facts. His face was somber as he said, “We’ll see.”
As the staff meeting broke up, Strike caught Lab Rat outside in the passageway leading back to their offices. “You got it in for pilots in particular for some reason?” he asked.
Lab Rat shook his head. “We put up CAP, they put up CAP. A lot of metal in a finite amount of airspace, with pilots on both sides truly pissed. You slam the ROE down their throats and I’ll make sure it’s in the pre-mission briefs. The last thing we need is a couple of hotheads banging wingtips with one of the Russians.”
“Pilots will be pilots.”
Lab Rat felt a surge of anger. “Weren’t you listening? We don’t know whose fault it was yet.”
“The pilots know.”
“They
Strike shrugged. “It’s inbred in a pilot. What are you going to do about it?”
Lab Rat’s anger boiled over. “You remind them of what they were before they were pilots.”
“What, civilians?”
“No. Officers. They follow orders and avoid confrontations with the Russians or I’ll prefer court-martial charges myself. We clear on that?”
Strike stepped back a bit, surprised at the intelligence officer’s rage. “Yeah, clear.”
As Lab Rat watched him go, he struggled to rein his temper in. It would do no good to give in to the anger, no good at all. There would be enough posturing and storming from the line officers. His job was to keep it under control, to force them to face facts.
Once they knew what the facts were. And then, God help them all if
Mikhail Gromko put his nimble jet into a hard turn, letting the g-forces wash over him like a wave. He fought off the familiar drag, tensing his muscles just a bit, letting it toy with him. It was like surfing, the ebb and the flow of gravity, an ocean of speed and blue. That he was flying a real combat mission made it all the more exhilarating.
In theory, Gromko knew he could die. He’d seen classmates auger in during Basic, and more screw up during the advanced platform training. He’d attended the funerals, comforted the widows, and rewritten the flight schedules to cover the empty crew slots. There was nothing theoretical about what could happen to you when you flew Russia’s most advanced fighter into harm’s way.
Except that none of it applied to him. Gromko knew, felt it in his Cossack bones, that he was invulnerable. The mistakes and equipment failures that had claimed his peers were impossible for him. He was too smart, too fast, too
Even the two blips homing in on him on his radar screen meant nothing to him. No, that wasn’t exactly true
