“Little shits,” Red Tail said conversationally over tactical. “Guess we scared them, huh?”
“Yeah. Looks like they’ve got orders to stay well back. I wonder what we could do that would get them out here.”
“Don’t know, man. Maybe we’ll have to go in and drag them out.”
Drag them out. Easier said than done. For all of his bravado, Thor knew that getting past the overlapping shore antiaircraft sites would take some doing.
The shore sites themselves were marked with black Xs, each one labeled with the target designation. Shaded green circles radiated out from each X, some quite regular, others irregular. Those represented the detection ranges of the radars as corrected for terrain, atmospheric conditions, and other known obstructions. Within the green, there was a smaller area crosshatched in red, indicating the kill zone. Within the red area, the radars had an eight-percent chance of being able to put a missile in your vicinity. Of course, whether you were there when the missile arrived at the spot was another matter altogether. Finally, just outside the green area, about half the distance from the side, was a yellow dotted line. This represented the counterdetection range, the range at which Thor could expect to detect pulses from the shore radar before the radar detector saw Thor. In general, counterdetection ranges were one and a half times as large as detection ranges.
Overall, the shore sites provided a solid interlocking stretch of green along the coast. There was no way to avoid going into it unless you went far to the north and came in that way, and that wasn’t going to happen.
Fortunately, there was an answer. Two Wild Weasel teams armed with antiradiation missiles were leading the pack, going in slightly ahead of the conventional fighters. Each one carried missiles that would home in on the shore-site radar signals. Even if the transmitters were then turned off, the missiles would remember their location and head directly for the antennas that were radiating signals. In theory, at least, the antiradiation — or HARM — missiles would cut a swath of destruction through the antiaircraft installations, enabling Thor and his cohorts to get inland.
“I hold you on course, on time,” the voice of the E-2 Hawkeye backseater said. “Estimate thirty seconds until you’re within range.”
“Roger,” Thor acknowledged. “Stand by, boys and girls — Mom has the keys to the playground.”
Sure enough, as they descended through the cloud cover, Rabies’ radar picked up a small lozenge of a contact. He banked, spiraling around down toward it, and caught the glint of sunlight reflecting off a metal hull. “Some gunboat,” he complained. “Well, that’s too bad.”
“I don’t think so, sir. This isn’t sound from a surface ship. No way.” Greenberg’s voice was confident. “It’s way too deep.”
“You sure, Greenie?” Rabies asked doubtfully, playing the wet blanket even though his pulse was already beating faster at the tone of Greenberg’s voice. “Lots of merchant traffic down there.”
“This is
“All right, then!” Rabies turned to his copilot. “Call it in!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she said. She glanced wistfully at the controls in his hand, sighed, then picked up the mike.
“Okay, okay,” Rabies grumbled. “I did promise, didn’t I? Your aircraft.” He waited till her hands were on the controls and she had positive control of the Viking.
“My aircraft,” she acknowledged. Rabies picked up the mike.
It was his own damned fault, wasn’t it? He had told her she could fly the next pattern. After all, that was why they put a senior pilot together with a new pilot, wasn’t it? To give the youngsters some experience, to let them practice under an expert pilot before sending them out with a green team. That’s the way it was in the Navy — you trained your own replacement.
And Lord knows, if anyone deserved a chance, this kid did. She had good reflexes and even better airmanship skills, not to mentioned a healthy dose of common sense. She even knew a fair amount about submarine acoustics, and that was saying a lot. Most Viking pilots like to emphasize the fact that they were pilots — jet pilots — not four-eyed geeks who read intelligence summaries and studied sound-velocity profiles. They were jet pilots, by God, and nobody was going to forget it.
But she’d always been interested in the technical details of acoustics and classification, so much so that Rabies was almost embarrassed for her. Rabies had even begun to suspect that at heart she was just as much of a geek as Greenberg was.
Rabies called the carrier, filling them in on the detection although the data was already flooding onto their screens via the secure link. The TAO on the carrier already knew exactly where each one of the Viking’s sonobuoys were, and they could even get real-time transmission from each one via a link with Viking to display the contact in the ASW module.
But there was nothing like eyes on a target to get a good, accurate picture of what was going on. Even in the data link, sometimes the details were lost, some of the fine details that had alerted Greenberg to the presence of a submarine.
As he spoke to the carrier, Rabies kept an eye on his copilot and the progress they made between the fly-to points. Just as he anticipated, she handled the aircraft as though it was an extension of her body, deftly maneuvering from point to point with minimal fuel usage and popping out sonobuoys at precisely the right moment to land exactly where the TACCO wanted them.
“All buoys sweet and hot,” Greenberg sang out, no trace of smugness in his voice. Rabies understood — as did Greenberg — that there had never been actually any question about whether or not there was a submarine there. Rabies was just doing his job, and Greenberg had known indisputably that he was right. There had been no contest.
“Roger, Viking,” the carrier acknowledged. “Maintain firing solution on contact at this time. I repeat, maintain firing solution.”
“What the hell?” his copilot asked. She glanced over Rabies, the question plain on her face. Why they hell weren’t they putting a couple of fish in the water to take the bastard out? After all, they had a strike inbound on the shore installation, didn’t they? Did anyone actually believe that this little bastard was just out here for a walk in the park? Not possible, not this close to the carrier. Although the minisub was still too far to attack, it wouldn’t be long before it was within range of the carrier, and that was assuming that the information they had about weapons ranges was accurate.
“There are a couple of nations around here that have minisubs,” Rabies said, distaste in his voice. “It’s possible it could be somebody else’s. They’re going to verify that there are no neutrals or friendlies in the area through some top-level channels. If they don’t get an all-clear, we don’t get weapons-free.”
It was his copilot who summed up what they were all feeling. “If they close within weapons range of
TWENTY-THREE
Hamish pulled the thin T-shirt away from his body, stretching it and then letting it snap back. The movement of the air over his skin at least gave the illusion of a cooling breeze, though nothing could be further from the truth. With the humidity hovering around ninety percent and the temperature still higher than ninety degrees, there was no way the sweat on his body was going to dry.
Given a choice, Hamish preferred the dry baking heat of the interior where he’d grown up. Although temperatures could soar dangerously high before you realized it, the fact that you were sweating reminded you to stay hydrated. Here, the climate defeated the body’s natural cooling mechanism.
But it wasn’t like he had a choice, was it? The orders from the mullah had been clear — every man over the age of fourteen was to report to the nearest military commander for mobilization. The very young and the very old
