Combat

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Wynn Foster, Rick Morgan, George Olmsted, Larry and Janet Pearson, Robert Powell, Dwight Van Horn, Phil Wood, Jack Woodul, Lucy Young, the Skyhawk Association, and Training Squadron Seven.

One The Boat

“Well, now I almost believe it,” exclaimed Michael Ostrewski to his fellow flight instructor from Advanced Training Associates.

“Believe what?” Eric “Psycho” Thaler stood beside him on the flight deck of the former USS Santa Cruz.

Ostrewski pointed about him. “That we’re really going to carqual on this boat. I mean, as long as she was mothballed in Bremerton, she was just an old Forrestal-class carrier. But now that she’s an active ship, here in Long Beach, it looks like we’re in business.”

Thaler, who with “Ozzie” Ostrewski had gone to war aboard one of Santa Cruz’s sisters, envisioned this flight deck in its glory years: when aircraft carriers were named for battles or historic ships rather than mere politicians. He visualized thirty knots of wind over the deck, steam roiling from the catapults, and dozens of sailors milling in organized chaos as twenty-ton aircraft slammed onto the deck at 130 knots. He asked his colleague, “Did you talk to the navy yard guys yet? I mean, about the old girl’s condition?”

Ostrewski nodded. “Yeah, just a little. One of the engineers was still aboard after the cruise from Bremerton. He says they worked up to twenty-four knots, but they expect to make thirty by the time we start trapping.”

“What about the jobs that weren’t finished there?”

“Well, they concentrated on what we’d need to operate six jets. Besides main plant and electrical, we have two good catapults, the arresting gear, and fuel systems. The condensers aren’t up to speed, so there’ll be limited water, and some of the radars aren’t operational. But the mirror system checks out so the LSOs will be happy.” He flashed two thumbs up.

Thaler looked around the 328-foot-wide deck where American and Chinese military personnel and civilians were busily engaged. “I guess the chinks will have a smaller crew and air wing, huh?”

Ostrewski nodded. “Smaller air wing fershure, dude. They plan on two Flanker squadrons plus a couple of helo outfits for starters. I don’t know how many bodies that means, but a lot less than one of our wings. Probably about two thousand for ship’s company, to start.”

“Oz, I don’t really understand something. This isn’t a commissioned naval vessel yet, and far as I know the Chinese haven’t paid for it in full. Who’s actually responsible for this bird farm? I mean, do they have two captains or what?”

“Yeah, they do. Admiral Rhode at NavAir says the official skipper is Captain Albright, who’s about to retire. He has a Chinese opposite number with an exec and department heads on down the line, and most of them have American supervisors. But a lot of the crew is civilian contract labor because there aren’t enough white hats available after all that ‘right sizing.’”

“They still going to send some talent out from Pensacola?”

Ostrewski nodded. “Yeah, I guess Rocky Rhode and others are nervous about of a bunch of civilians driving a carrier up and down the California coast, and retired guys like us landing on her. We’re getting an instructor from the LSO school and a couple of TraCom instructors to monitor our procedures.”

“Well, I’m glad to see the Chinese are running their part of it.” Thaler waved a hand toward the carrier’s island, where a gutted Flanker airframe was secured to the deck by tie-down chains. Even with its outer-wing panels folded, the sixty-eight-foot-long fighter, with its twin tails reaching eighteen feet high, took up a lot of space. The ATA instructors watched “Flight Deck 101” in progress as Chinese sailors rehearsed aircraft handling and servicing in the unaccustomed carrier environment.

“Think they’ll get the hang of it?” Thaler asked.

“Yeah. This first class is a mix of navy and air force. The sailors handle the basic chores and the blue-suiters do the aircraft maintenance. They already knew the Flanker systems.”

Psycho Thaler was skeptical. “Man, they’re sure jumping in with both feet. I’d hate to have to learn everything they need to in a few weeks.”

Ostrewski pointed to the sailor doing most of the talking. “See the petty officer who’s lecturing? Mr. Wei, our Chinese liaison, told Terry Peters that this bunch started training ashore back in China. They knew all the moves before they got here: the yellow gear, the deck cycle, all that stuff. They even had full-size flight deck and hangar deck mock-ups to practice moving airplanes.” He shook his head in appreciation. “Makes sense when you think about it.”

Deep in thought, Ostrewski toed a tie-down on the nonskid deck surface. “What is it?” Thaler asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Ozzie looked up again at the bustle around him. “I can’t quite get used to the idea of us selling the Commies an operational carrier, then teaching them how to use it.” He grinned self-consciously. “Even if our company has the contract.”

Thaler nudged his colleague. “Careful — if Terry Peters hears you, it’s bad enough. If Jane hears you …” He allowed himself a grin. “Besides, like we always said in the navy — it’s way above our pay grade. Congress and the administration signed off on it three years ago, so just be thankful that we got the job.” Psycho grinned at his former Langley shipmate. “Besides, how’d you like to watch some other civilian contractor get a sweetheart deal like this?”

Thaler noticed a stocky Caucasian detach himself from the Chinese. “Hey, there’s Igor Gnido. He’s the lead pilot with the Sukhoi transition team.”

The Russian waved at the Americans, and Thaler greeted him. “Hey, Igor.” Ozzie was less effusive; he merely nodded. The Only Polish-American Tomcat Ace respected Gnido’s reputation as an aviator but could not bring himself to like the former Soviet combat pilot.

“Good morning to you,” Gnido ventured with a smile that Thaler took as genuine. The Flanker pilot waved a hand toward the Chinese sailors. “They getting good start on flight deck pro-cee-dures.”

“We were just discussing that,” Thaler replied. He watched as a group of “grapes”—sailors in purple jerseys — moved a fuel hose toward the Sukhoi’s port wing. “Did the factory specially build this airplane to accept American hose fittings? I mean, like they built the nose gear to fit the catapult shuttle?”

Gnido leaned close, trying to ensure that he understood the question. Thaler made a circle with his left thumb and forefinger and a probe of his first two right fingers. The Russian nodded. “Ah, da, da.” He nodded decisively. “Nose gear yes. Fuel fittings, not exactly.” He shook his head. “All Soviet aircraft were being designed to take your hoses, you know?” He hid any edginess in mentioning a NATO — Warsaw Pact conflict. “Plan was, take European airfields and use equipment already there, you know?”

Ostrewski, whose Polish roots ran deep, absorbed that knowledge and worked his professionalism around the ethical thorns. “Well, I guess that makes sense, if you’re going to invade the next country.”

Thaler felt moved to intervene. “Does that cause any problems with maintenance, Igor? I mean, having both English and metric systems in the same airplane.”

Gnido shrugged eloquently. “Is not being much problem. Just way it is, you know? Like cockpit instruments. In air force Flankers, all is metric. In this airplane for navy, airspeed is knots, altitude meters. Besides, pretty soon America is being all metric, like rest of world. Best for everybody, yes?”

Thaler demurred. “Igor, you’ll get an argument about that, I guarandamntee you.”

Two Scooter

Half a dozen staffers of Advanced Training Associates lazed away the shank of the afternoon, sipping slowly and speaking rapidly. The animated atmosphere in ATA’s office spaces probably had not been seen since Williams Air Force Base became Williams Gateway Airport south of Mesa, Arizona.

Despite the beer-call military ambience, the atmosphere was post— Cold War business; a corporate foundation overlaid with a lather of friendly rivalry.

One of the partners, Zack Delight, had told an active-duty friend, “Here there be morale.” A former Marine aviator, he had retired as a reserve lieutenant colonel, flew for Delta, and now was on his second or third career, depending on how they were reckoned. Pushing sixty, he was stocky, well built, and studiously irreverent. He sat on a barstool, scratching the Vandyke beard he had cultivated to cover a scar obtained in a motorcycle “incident.” Now, with the unaccustomed beard, “Pure” Delight said he was still getting accustomed to “that mean-looking bastard glaring at me in the mirror every morning.”

Next to Delight was Robert “Robo” Robbins, a retired navy commander and former landing signal officer. Slightly younger, he wore a perpetual smile as if savoring a private joke at the expense of the world around him. Aside from their previous part-time work for ATA, both staffers shared a passion for World War I aviation. They haunted The Aerodrome web site, exchanged arcane information and esoterica, and constantly critiqued each other’s alternating chapters in an epic titled Duel over Douai.

Delight and Robbins were joined by Ozzie Ostrewski, just back from Long Beach. New to ATA, he was known as an exceptionally fine fighter pilot. Rumor and gossip swirled around Ozzie. Reportedly he had scored multiple kills as a USS Langley F-14 pilot during a classified dustup in the Indian Ocean a few years before. He steadfastly declined all efforts to elicit details, both overt and otherwise. Not even his shipmate Psycho Thaler would discuss it; he had been there as well.

“Hey, Oz,” said Delight. “Lemme buy you a drink, god damn it.” Pure and Robo traded sideways smiles. They knew Ostrewski as a nonimbiber, nonblasphemer, and devout Catholic — a rara avis in military aviation.

“And the horse you rode in on,” Ostrewski replied evenly. He was getting good at bowdlerizing. He reached over the bar and pulled a root beer from the ice chest. “Any word yet?”

“Naw,” said Robbins. He knew what Ostrewski meant. “The boss is still in the office with the new kid. But I think he’s gonna hire her.”

“Damn!” Ostrewski slammed his bottle down on the bar harder than intended. It was the direst expletive the normally composed aviator allowed himself. “That’s one reason I got out of the navy — the damn double standards and all that bu … siness.” Delight suddenly realized how upset the instructor really was.

Robbins nudged him. “C’mon, Oz, how bad can it be?”

Ozzie inhaled, held his breath, and exhaled. “Look, it’s the accumulation of all this stuff. I don’t know about you guys, but I really don’t like the idea of teaching Chinese Communists how to land on carriers, let alone go bombing and strafing with them. Add in the trouble we’re bound to have with girl aviators, and what was a dream job is going to get screwed up.”

“The world’s changing, my boy,” Robo said solicitously.

“Yeah, I know, I know … it’s just not my world anymore. Not even my same country.”

Michael Ostrewski wore his heart on his flight jacket. His friends knew he was intensely proud of his Polish heritage and its Old World values.

“Attention on deck!”

Delight, Robbins, and the others turned in their seats. Striding through the door was Terry “Hook” Peters, six-foot-three-inches of enthusiasm and what the navy called command presence. Peters saw his wife in the room and winked. Jane Peters, five-foot-five-inches of feistiness, blew a kiss at the once-gangly kid who earned an ironic call sign when he forgot to lower his tailhook for his first night carrier landing. A former Blue Angels commander, he and Jane had invested most of their savings in ATA, and now it had paid off with the Chinese training contract.

With him was a brown-eyed brunette, about five-foot-nine and 135 pounds. She glanced around, noticed Jane Peters, and gave her a shy smile. Jane had liked her immediately and told Terry Peters that Elizabeth Vespa got Jane’s vote among the four applicants for the new slot. The fact that Liz and that nice Ozzie Ostrewski were single had not escaped her attention.

“Gang,” Terry explained, “I’d like to introduce our new instructor — Liz Vespa, call sign Scooter.”

Cheers, applause, and laughter greeted Elizabeth Vespa. A few ATA staffers chuckled at the nickname. Ostrewski muttered to Robbins, “Cute.”

“Yeah, she is, kind of,” Robbins replied.

“I meant the call sign,” Ozzie said in a monotone.

Peters continued the introduction. “Liz comes to us from TraCom. She left active duty as a lieutenant commander, and the navy’s loss is our gain. She was an A-4 CarQual instructor before going to T-45s, and that’s part of the reason I selected her now that we’re progressing with the Chinese students. She’s more current on carrier qualifications than any of us, and now, having flown with her, I can say that she’s a good stick.” He turned to Vespa and grinned. “Liz, welcome aboard!”

Vespa blushed slightly at the attention. Standing with her hands behind her back, she said, “Thanks, Captain Peters.” She scanned the room, taking in the faces. “There’s no place else I’d rather be than here, flying with you guys.” More applause and laughter skittered through the room — except from the crew cut, gray-eyed instructor at the bar who met her gaze without blinking. Even from that distance, Liz Vespa could read the flight jacket patch that said OZZIE.

Three As Good As It Gets

Peters and Delight watched the two Skyhawks accelerate as Ostrewski led Vespa in a section takeoff. Zack turned toward his partner. “You sure this is a good idea, Terry?”

Peters’s gaze never left the TA-4s. “It’s Jane’s idea. She said that when any of her third-graders didn’t get along, she put ’em at the same desk.” He shrugged. “Eventually they made up and became friends.”

Delight shook his head. “Child psychology applied to fighter pilots.” He unzipped a wry grin. “Works for me.”

Three miles over Gila Bend, Ozzie keyed his mike. “Ah, Wizard Two, let’s go in trail. Over.”

Liz smiled in anticipation. That was the agreed-upon signal. “Let’s go in trail” actually meant, “The chase is on; see if you can stay with me, cowgirl.” But privately she rankled at Ozzie’s self-confident call sign: “The Wizard of Oz.”

She double-clicked her mike button in acknowledgment.

Two seconds later Ozzie half snapped to inverted and sucked the stick into his stomach. From sixteen thousand feet, Wizard One responded in a mind-numbing split-ess, the Gs building quickly to the grayout stage. His vision grew fuzzy around the edges, narrowing to a thirty-degree cone. In several seconds he would regain full vision and swivel his head to see if he had made any money on Scooter Vespa.

Liz had expected an abrupt move, but the suddenness caught her off guard. She lost a hundred fifty yards before she rolled over and followed Ozzie downward. It was much as she expected: On the ground, Michael Ostrewski was a complete gentleman. Up here, man to man, he was a mongoose. No quarter asked or given.

And damn sure no preferential treatment for girls.

Wizard One pulled through the bottom of the split-ess, and as the nose reached the horizon Ozzie rolled into a ninety-degree bank, still pulling hard. He sensed the Skyhawk approaching the onset of buffet, but a minute adjustment sustained his rate of turn. He felt he was getting maximum performance out of the bird.

From experience and conditioning, Ostrewski was comfortable at four Gs. He looked back over his right shoulder, in the direction of his turn. Vespa’s Wizard Two had lost some of its original dead-six aspect, but the contest was far from over.

Ostrewski’s testosterone-rich brain was convinced that no woman could stay with him in a sustained high-G contest. He determined to make Sir Isaac Newton his chief ally, wearing down Vespa by the unrelenting pressure of gravity. Besides, it was an accepted fact in squadron ready rooms: Girls can fly, but they can’t hack the G.

With her throttle two-blocked, Liz focused her powerful concentration not only on Wizard One, but on its projected path. She knew that Ozzie was unlikely to telegraph his punches, and he could be trusted to do the unexpected, but the laws of physics permitted no amendments; they were enforced equally upon all contenders.

As both jets came around the circle, completing their first 360, Liz perceived that the relative separation had stabilized. Ozzie’s initial move had netted him perhaps fifteen degrees. By common consent, the fight would end one of two ways: reaching the artificial “hard deck” of ten thousand feet, or when one of them could track the other in the gunsight for at least three seconds.

Passing through magnetic north, Ostrewski nudged bottom rudder, sliding the TA-4 downward to the right. Liz saw the motion and, momentarily perplexed, jockeyed stick and rudder to follow. She was suspicious; Delight had confided that Ozzie seldom made an error of technique.

As Liz slid down toward Ozzie’s six o’clock, he abruptly half rolled to the left, pausing almost inverted. Liz could either try to match the move or risk closing to dangerous range. She followed, smoothly coordinating her controls. The G had abated a little, but the oppressive load still pressed on her body.

Ostrewski smiled to himself as he completed an elegant slow roll, stopped the motion, then stomped left rudder and continued around the circle, sliding outside Vespa’s field of view in a lopsided barrel roll. When he rolled wings level he looked up to his left — about 9:30—and was gratified with a view of Two’s belly. He retarded the throttle and hit the button. His speed brakes extended into the slipstream, incurring welcome drag that slowed him further.

With airspeed and G relatively undiminished, Wizard Two edged ahead of One. Liz sensed more than knew what had happened — there was only one way to explain Ozzie’s disappearance — and she knew it was seconds before his triumphant “Guns” call ruined her day.

Her mind raced. He’s behind my trailing edge, slowing and expecting me to overshoot. But I’ve got more energy.

Liz began a hard left turn, realizing that Ozzie would be cleaning up his speed brakes and adding power before putting his gunsight pipper on her tailpipe. But instead of continuing the turn, she forced the Skyhawk three-quarters of the way around, completing 270 degrees of roll. She stopped the wings nearly vertical to the horizon, then pulled right. She surprised herself with her calmness. Gosh, I hope we don’t collide.

Ostrewski gaped at the plain view of Wizard Two crossing his nose two hundred feet ahead. With Liz’s superior momentum at that point, he realized she would continue the turn into his rear hemisphere before he could regain comparable energy. Smooth move, Scooter! He had no chance to make a “Guns” call.

“Hard deck. Knock it off!” Liz Vespa knew the contest was a draw, but her voice carried the ring of triumph.

Ninety minutes later, following the debrief, Ozzie Ostrewski and Scooter Vespa regarded one another across the bar in the Skyhawk Lounge. He clinked his root beer against her Coors Light. “Here’s to good times.” Clearly the frost had melted.

“Long may they wave.” She clinked back.

Ozzie looked at her. “You seem pretty darn pleased with yourself, Miss Vespa.”

Feeling flirtatious, she cocked her head. “Why not, Mr. O? I just outflew The Only Polish-American Tomcat Ace.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

He grinned back at her. “Okay, you made a righteous move after I was kicking your butt. Where’d it come from?”

She set down her beer. “Well, because I made a human being of you, I’ll tell you.” She pretended to ignore his feigned indignation. “Daddy’s best friend flew F-86s in Korea. When I got my wings, he told me about his fights in MiG Alley.”

Ozzie nodded vacantly, staring at the mural above the bar. “You know, it’s odd. I’ve seen that move before, too.”

“Really? Where?”

His eyes returned to her face. He shrugged.

“Oh.” She thought. They still won’t talk about the Langley cruise.

“Well,” he said, “it was a great hop, Scooter. You can be my wingman anytime — in Wizard Flight.”

She giggled more than she intended. “And like Maverick said to Iceman: ‘Bullshit. You can be my wingman — in Scooter Flight.’”

Ostrewski gave a noncommittal grunt as he finished his root beer. Two minutes passed before he worked up enough nerve to ask Liz to go dancing.

Four Gonna Wash That Man …

Orbiting at sixteen thousand feet, Liz Vespa relished being alone in a jet. Hawk Twelve was one of four A-4Fs owned or leased by ATA, and the powerful little single-seater was a joy to fly — as Zack said, “Pure delight.” Lighter than the two-seat trainers with almost thirty percent more thrust, it was the sports car of Skyhawks.

Nearing the end of the two-week air-to-ground phase, the instructors anticipated live ordnance for qualification. Vespa smiled beneath her molded gray oxygen mask — the feds had gone spastic at the mere suggestion of five-hundred-pound bombs being loaded on civilian aircraft. But ATA’s certification with State and DOD, plus some high-level arm twisting on behalf of the Chinese, had resulted in issuance of approval for “owning” and proper storage of destructive devices. Vespa marveled at Terry Peters’s patience with fearful, overbearing federal inspectors.

Vespa switched channels on her VHF radio and checked in with the Gila Bend controller. She was advised to watch for two F-16s outbound — Fighting Falcons of the Fifty-sixth Tactical Fighter Wing based at nearby Luke Air Force Base. Moments later she caught them, swift darts rocketing above her to the southwest. For a moment Liz envied the Falcon pilots their high-performance fighters, then mentally berated herself. I’ve already got one of the best flying jobs on earth. She keyed the mike. “Gila, this is Hawk Twelve. I see them. Are we clear?”

“Roger, Hawk. Your range time begins in three minutes.”

She acknowledged and switched to ATA’s common frequency. “Hawk Lead from Hawk Twelve. Zack, do you read?”

The carrier wave crackled in her earphones as Delight’s New Mexico drawl came to her from twenty miles astern. “Twelve from Lead. I gotcha, Scooter. I’m inbound with four good birds. Will proceed as briefed. Out.”

Vespa now knew that Pure Delight had launched with three other TA-4Js, all with four Mark 82s beneath the wings. Acting as range safety officer, she would clear the flight into the operating area and coordinate with the ground controller in keeping other aircraft away from the impact zone. She was authorized to cancel operations at any time with a knock-it-off call.

In her fifteen years in the navy, Liz Vespa had seldom seen live ordnance expended. Most of her flying had been in C-9 transports and TraCom T-34s or TA-4s. The closest she had got to tactical operations had been qualification as an A-4 adversary pilot, but even that coveted slot ended when all but two of the squadrons were disestablished.

Quitcherbitchin’ she told herself. She leveled the Foxtrot, nosed down slightly, and executed a precise four-point roll. Then for no reason at all she wondered what it would be like to kiss Michael Ostrewski. Do you, Scooter, take Ozzie …

Liz made a clearing turn to port, expecting to see Hawk Flight inbound. She forced herself to focus on the job at hand, upset that she had allowed her mind to wander in the air. That had seldom happened. It was one of the factors that separated her from so many other aviators, male or female. Her flight evaluations had repeated entries: “excellent situational awareness, full concentration, highly professional.” Now she found herself humming the refrain from South Pacific, her favorite musical. Gonna wash that man right out of my hair, and send him on his way …

She told herself she was not in love with Ozzie Ostrewski or anyone else, which was true. She knew that Ozzie had recently met “a nice Catholic girl” at a midnight Mass and presumably he was dating her. Once or twice Liz had thought of asking offhandedly, “Hey, Oz, how’s your love life?” She had demurred because she knew that The Only Polish-American Tomcat Ace would certainly interpret it as jealousy. Men are such swine. Well, at least some men. If only he weren’t such a good dancer …

“Hawk Twelve from Hawk Lead. I gotcha, Scooter. I’m about three miles back at your eight. Over.”

Damn it! Liz, get your shit together. She was angry at being “caught” by Zack Delight, flying in the backseat of one of the trainers. Vespa felt she should have made the first tally-ho on a four-plane flight instead of being tagged as a single. She knew that, despite his red-meat exterior, Delight was too polite to mention it again, but she also knew she had just dropped a point in the unrelenting tacit competition among aviators.

“Lead from Twelve. Roger, Zack. I’m clearing you onto the range. Check in with Gila Control before your first run.”

“Right-o, Scooter.”

Resuming her orbit, Liz awaited Delight’s initial bombing pass. Each Skyhawk would make four runs: one each from five thousand feet at sixty degrees; seven-thousand at thirty degrees; and two from the low-level pop-up pattern at forty-five degrees. She and Delight would mark the hits on their kneeboards for comparison with the data received from the range personnel before debrief.

Moments later Delight was on the air again. “Gila Control, this is Hawk Lead. Rolling in hot.”

Glancing down, Liz saw the jet roll over and slant into its sixty-degree dive toward the northerly target, an ancient truck. She knew that Wang was flying, with Zack observing in the rear seat. The other three Chinese — Deng, Yao, and Hua — were solo.

The lead Skyhawk tracked straight down its chosen path. Liz judged it a decent run, maybe a bit shallow, but the little delta-winged jet smoothly pulled up after making its drop. Wang’s lilting accent came to her ears, “Lead is pulling off.” Below and behind the TA-4 an orangewhite light erupted near the truck, spewing smoke and dust into the air.

Deng was next down the chute with a “Two is in” call. Liz watched with pride as her pupil put his first bomb near the target at five o’clock. If anything, he had released a little high. She imagined him flipping the master arm switch to safe as he recovered and called, “Two off.”

“Three going in,” came from Yao. Liz rolled port wing low to follow his run. She knew that Ozzie had literally taken the taciturn Chinese under his wing, and evidently the instructor’s extra attention had borne fruit. Mr. Yao would never be the best bomber in the class, but he showed steady improvement. For a moment Liz wondered if Ostrewski had invested the effort for Yao, or for himself. She literally shook the thought from her mind, snapping her head left and right. I’ve got to get him out of my mind for a while.

Yao was pressing, no doubt about it. Delight had just called “Three, you’re …” when Yao dropped. The hit was about thirty feet out at one o’clock. Zack came back on the air. “Too low, Yao. You were probably below twenty-five hundred.” There was no reply, so Delight added, “Acknowledge.” The hick on the turnip truck was gone from his voice, replaced by the Leader of Men.

“Acknowledge.” Liz could tell that Yao resented the rebuke.

As Four rolled in, Delight was climbing back to the perch, leading an aerial daisy chain of pirouetting Skyhawks. Vespa tracked each through the seven-thousand-foot pattern and the first pop-up, observing one hit for each pilot. On his fourth run, however, Hawk Lead pulled out without releasing; Delight had a hung bomb. Clearing the immediate area, he called Vespa. “Liz, I can’t get shed of this thing. We’re gonna have to divert to Luke. Over.”

Vespa realized that Zack Delight had no choice. The FAA had balked at permitting ATA jets to take off with live ordnance; there was no question of allowing anyone to return to a civilian field with a potentially armed bomb aboard, whatever the master switch position. “Roger, Zack. I’ll finish the cycle here.”

Deng’s fourth bomb was the best yet — it obscured the deformed old vehicle. As he called off and clear, Liz directed him to dog in the holding pattern until the others were finished. She wanted to lead a four-ship flight back into the break, “lookin’ good for the troops.”

Yao called “Three in” and made an aggressive move in his second pop-up. It was immediately apparent at the apex that he was too steep. Liz realized that Mr. Yao was determined to get a center hit, and the onerous Mr. Delight’s departure only encouraged the student. She thumbed the mike button. “Three, you’re too steep! Pull out!”

The TA-4J continued its plunge toward the chalky circle on the desert floor. Liz felt her cheeks flush. “Hawk Three, this is Hawk Lead. You are ordered to pull out. Now, mister!”

Yao’s Skyhawk never wavered in its dive. With her thumb still on the transmit button, Liz watched aghast. My god, he’s going right in …

She was already forming the thought “target fixation” for the postmortem when Yao released. Liz estimated he dropped at less than two thousand feet above the ground, and the lethal blast pattern extended to twenty-two hundred. His nose had barely come level when the Mark 82 detonated.

Five Thumbs-Down

Hawk Three was obscured in the mushrooming smoke and dust of the explosion. Vespa gave a sigh of relief, surprised to see the Skyhawk recover. She realized he had been caught in the frag pattern. He must have damage. She ordered priorities in her mind.

“Knock it off, knock it off. This is Hawk Twelve to all Hawks. Safe all your master arm switches. Acknowledge.”

Wang in Hawk Four, the only one still with ordnance, chirped a response at least two octaves high. Liz had Yao’s jet padlocked in her vision as she pushed over to join him. Briefly she switched frequencies. “Gila Control from Hawk Twelve. We may have a damaged aircraft. I’m stopping operations.”

“Ah, roger, Hawk. We read you. Standing by.”

She was back to the common freq. “Hawk Three from Twelve. Yao, do you read me?”

Something rapid and garbled came from the two-seater now less than two thousand yards ahead of Twelve. Liz waited clarification, got none, and called again. “Yao, this is Vespa. I am a mile in trail, overtaking you to port.” She could see the stricken jet was streaming something, fuel or hydraulic fluid. Or both. The plane was in level flight, slowly turning northerly, toward Williams.

Yao’s gentle turn allowed Vespa to close more easily. She slid up on his left wing and surveyed the damage. Small holes were hemorrhaging vital fluids from the wings and empennage. The Skyhawk’s “wet wing” held three thousand pounds of fuel, and most of it was venting through holes in the bottom. It occurred to Liz that this sight had been familiar to aviators of Hook Peters’s generation: a battle-damaged A-4 trying to reach home before it bled to death.

She remembered to speak slowly, modulating her voice. “Yao, this is Vespa. Can you transmit? Over.”

She saw the student’s head turn toward her briefly, a faceless entity beneath the oxygen mask and sun visor. He tapped the side of his helmet, then he nodded vigorously. Placing his left hand on his mask, he shook his head left and right. He can receive but not transmit. She rocked her wings. “All right, Yao. Keep this heading.” She paused. “Break-break. Four, do you copy?”

“Yes, Miss Vespa. Copy.”

“Wang, I want you to safe your bomb and drop it on the nearest bull’s-eye. Then join Deng and return to base. Clear each other for hung ordnance before landing. Acknowledge.”

Wang replied, then Liz was back to Yao. “Three, this is Vespa again. Let’s do a systems check. Show me a thumb’s-up, thumb’s-down, or thumb’s-level for a declining state.” She allowed him to absorb the procedure, then began.

“Hydraulics.” Thumb down.

“Utility.” Thumb level. Damn, he’s losing his controls.

“Fuel.” Thumb level. He’s bleeding fuel and hydraulics. Vespa was frustrated, uncertain how long Yao could stay in the air.

“Electric.” Thumb up.

“Yao, I can clear you for a straight-in approach or you can eject in a safe area.” Yao motioned toward the north, nodding for emphasis. “You can maintain control long enough for a landing?”

Yao nodded again, less vigorously.

“All right. I’m calling the tower to declare an emergency.”

Assured that the fire trucks were rolling, Liz took stock. Fifteen miles out, it was still possible for Yao to eject into the row crops south of Williams, or she could talk him down.

The steps came to her like multiplication tables. “Yao, get ready. To compensate for hydraulic loss, you’ll have to pull the T-handle. First, be sure you’re below two hundred knots.” Liz glanced at her own airspeed indicator: 210.

She saw him lean down in the cockpit, then straighten. He nodded. “All right, Yao. You’re flying by cable now. The stick forces will be very high — especially the ailerons — but you can compensate somewhat with electric trim.”

The abused J52 began spitting intermittent smoke. Liz noted that the white mist in the slipstream was nearly gone. He’s about to run out of fuel. “Yao, listen. You need to switch to the fuselage fuel tank. Do it now.”

Yao nodded, then flashed a thumbs-up. Vespa asked, “Fuel flow steady?” Another nod, followed by a thumb level. Liz assumed problems with the fuel pump, but at fifty pounds per minute the fifteen hundred pounds in the fuselage tank would get the wounded Skyhawk home.

Vespa’s mind raced, trying to stay ahead of the airborne crisis proceeding at three and a half miles per minute.

He’s getting pretty low; he’s going to drag it in. “Yao, you’re losing altitude. Can you add power and hold what you got?”

Hawk Three seemed to respond, then visibly decelerated. Liz glanced at her altimeter: barely two thousand feet above the ground. It’s gonna be awful close.

“Yao, listen. I think you’re having fuel feed problems. Switch to manual fuel control.” A brisk nod acknowledged the order. “Okay, good. Now slowly advance your throttle to eighty-eight percent. Let me know how that works.”

Long moments dragged by before Yao gave a thumb’s-up.

“All right, Mr. Yao. You’re doing fine. Listen, we’re going to make a low cautionary approach. I want you to maintain 160 knots indicated, okay?” The two jets jockeyed in relation to one another, speed stabilizing at 165 by Vespa’s airspeed indicator.

“Now, one more thing, Yao. I need you to put 110 mils on your gunsight. Understand? At the end of the runway, you will aim for the thousand-foot marker and fly onto the runway. Okay?”

Yao reached up and put the setting on his sight. He looked at Vespa and displayed his left thumb again.

Liz waited a few more moments, trying to gauge Yao’s rate of descent against the remaining distance. Damn it! I need to talk to him. She waited several seconds more, then regretted the time she spent pondering. “Yao, this is Hawk Lead.” She sought to reassert her authority. “You need to decide right away if you can land or if you should eject.” She emphasized each syllable for clarity. Yao squirmed on his seat as if trying to make a decision. Following several rapid pulses, he pointed straight ahead.

There’s the runway! Vespa could see the perimeter fence and the two-mile-long concrete strip running into the midday mirage. She knew that Yao could stand some good news. “Three, this is Vespa. I have the runway in sight. Come left about fifteen degrees.” Slowly, the TA-4 complied, steadying up on the runway heading. Barely two miles now.

Then Yao depressed the landing-gear knob and pulled the emergency gear extension handle. The nosewheel and both mains fell forward, locking under their own weight, incurring horrible drag. Liz Vespa’s heart sank. There was no retracting them. “Yao! You’re settling too fast! Power, power, power!”

The abused J52-P8 had no more power to give. As the last of the engine oil siphoned overboard, bearings and blades exceeded design limits and the jet began shaking itself apart in its mounts. At best, Liz saw that Hawk Three would impact between the fence and the gravel overrun at the threshold. The extra drag coupled with the straining engine and ponderous controls conspired with gravity to defeat lift. The “zero-zero” specifications of the IG-3 ejection seat flashed on her mental screen: wings level with no rate of descent. But there’s no time! “Yao, eject, eject, eject!”

The TA-4 shuddered, wavered for a long ephemeral moment, and the airspeed dropped through 110 knots. The canopy shot upward and away from the airframe as Yao began the ejection sequence — two seconds too late. Hawk Three fell to earth and exploded with a low, rolling carrumph.

Scooter Vespa landed through the smoke of Yao’s pyre.

Six Post Mortem

Terry Peters was first up the boarding ladder of Hawk Twelve. He ensured the seat was safe, then waved the line crew away.

Liz pulled off her helmet and fumbled for the bag. Peters took the blue-and-white hardhat with the ATA logo and Scooter in gold script across the back. “Oh, Terry,” she croaked. “It was awful …” She choked down a sob and rubbed her watery eyes with a gloved hand. He stretched his right arm between her neck and the headrest and awkwardly hugged her, allowing his forehead to touch hers. “I know, babe. I know.”

Slowly she unstrapped and followed him down the yellow ladder. They stood by the nose gear, smelling the smoke and hearing the mindless wailing of the sirens. Peters decided against any preliminary questions. There would be plenty of those, but he felt that Mr. Wei, the program manager, undoubtedly would declare a regrettable loss wholly to pilot error. In this case, the PRC officer would be right.

Liz ran a hand through her raven hair. In that motion she seemed transformed from a shaken young woman into a professional aviator who had just sustained a loss. She looked at her employer with eyes still misted but calm. “We didn’t have full comm,” she said in an even voice. “He could receive but not transmit, so I gave him the lead. He signaled that he was losing utility and fuel, but he still thought he could make the field. About two miles out I saw he might not make it and I asked if he …” She ran out of breath. Inhaling, she continued. “I asked if he didn’t want to eject while he had time. But he continued the approach, and …” She cleared her throat. “ … and he dropped the gear too soon. He started a high sink rate, and then he lost power and the bird went in.” She dropped her right hand, palm down. “Just like that. He pulled the handle just as he hit.”

Peters nodded. “I know, Liz. We heard most of it on squadron common. I don’t know what else you could have done …” His voice trailed off.

He won’t say that I should have ordered Yao to eject sooner. She realized that eventually some of the others might be less reluctant to voice that opinion. With a start, she thought of Delight and Wang, who probably now were landing at Luke. “Does Zack know?”

Peters shook his head. “Negats, unless he monitored our freq, which I doubt. Anyway, I don’t want to distract him when he has to land with hung ordnance.”

Liz realized that ATA still had a lesser emergency to sweat out before the day could be put behind them. She looked at Peters again. “Ozzie?”

Peters’s blue eyes went to the pavement before meeting hers again. “He knows.”

Seven Slaying Dragons

“Ozzie?”

“Yes.”

“This is Liz.”

Ostrewski’s pulse briefly spiked, then returned to his normal fifty-five. But his grip tightened on the phone while he thought of something to say.

“Hi, Liz.” He never asked “How are you?” unless he meant it. Whatever his faults, insincerity was not among them.

Her breath was measured, controlled. “Listen, Michael. I really think we should talk. Could I come over?”

“Well, yeah. I mean … tonight?”

“Yes, if that’s all right.”

No point putting it off. “Okay. Ah, sure.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “You’re still shook about Yao?”

“He’s dead, Ozzie. But you and I haven’t said ten words since yesterday morning. The investigation and everything …” She swallowed. “I just felt you didn’t want to talk to me, you know.”

He swallowed hard. “Why, of course I’ll talk to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“‘Bye, Scooter.” He hung up. “Damn!”

Fourteen minutes later the doorbell rang at Ostrewski’s condo. Before he opened the door, he inhaled, closed his eyes, and did a five count. He did not want to do this — he would rather tangle with two of Colonel Li’s MiG-29s again — but he recognized the only way out was straight ahead.

“Hi, Liz. C’mon in.” He managed a smile.

“Thanks.” She stepped inside and looked around. “Gosh, this is nice. I’ve never been here before.” Oh, that’s original, Liz. Talk about stating the obvious!

Ozzie showed her to the living room, where he had some ice and soft drinks. “Well, I haven’t done much entertaining, you know. At least not before I met Maria.”

Liz sat on the sofa, trying to appear nonchalant. “Oh, when do we get to meet her?”

Ostrewski sat in the chair at right angles to the sofa. He poured a Coke for himself and a Tab for Liz. “Oh, I’ll prob’ly bring her around one day. We’re just now going steady.” Got that out of the way.

She sipped her drink, trying to decide how she felt about that information. “Mmmm … what’s she do?”

“She’s an MBA; manages the family business — construction. It’s a large family, sort of like mine.” He waved to a series of color photos on the wall behind the sofa.

Liz turned to study the Ostrewski family portraits surrounding a simple crucifix. A big, happy Polish clan with lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins. The only other photo was a large framed shot of an F-14 squadron. It was labeled “VF-181 Fightin’ Felines, USS Langley,” and the date. Suddenly Liz felt on safer ground. “Was that your combat cruise?”

“Yeah. The CO was Buzzard McBride. That’s me and Fido Colley behind the skipper.”

She leaned forward, hands in her lap. “I’d really like to hear about it sometime, Ozzie. As much as you can tell.”

He leaned back, a defensive gesture. “I can’t say much, Liz. There’s a twelve-year hold. I don’t even know why. Something to do with intel sources and diplomacy.”

“But that’s crazy. A lot of people know what happened.”

He smiled. “Like the GS-20 said, ‘There’s no reason for it — it’s just our policy.’”

Vespa recognized a no-win setup and changed the subject. She looked him full in the face. “I need to know what you think about Yao.”

Well, there it is. “Liz, I think he screwed up — twice. He pressed too low and he stayed with a dying jet too long.”

“Some of the Chinese think I’m partly to blame. Damn it, Ozzie, I have to know what you think. What you really think. He was your student and I lost him …” She had sworn she would not cry; she held back the tears. For ten seconds. Then the dam broke.

Michael Ostrewski, who had dueled with the Tiger of the North, shot eight Front-Line aircraft out of the sky, and held the Navy Cross, felt helpless with a weeping female. It was one more Guy Thing.

“Ah, Liz …” He moved beside her on the sofa, awkwardly patted her shoulder, then wrapped both arms around her. She leaned into him and let the sobs out.

Nearly three and a half minutes trickled by, two hundred seconds, each with a beginning, middle, and an end. Abruptly she sat up, wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and sniffed a few times. He handed her a Kleenex.

“Thank you. I’m all right now.” She blew her nose and Ostrewski had no idea what to say. Instead, he picked up her glass and passed it to her.

She drained the soda, set it down, and looked at him through misted eyes. “I really do need to know, Ozzie. Do you think I could have saved Yao?”

He took her hand. He realized that she needed to know another professional’s opinion of her judgment. “Liz, I think if I’d been there I’d probably have told him to pull the handle. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t know what you knew, and you didn’t know what I knew about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I brought him along, that’s all. I think I got inside his head. He was insecure about his bombing, and my guess is that he thought by saving the jet he could sort of make up for, you know, screwing up.”

Liz dabbed at one eye with the hankie. “Did you like him?”

“What?”

“I mean it. Did you like Yao as a person?”

“Well … gee, I don’t know. I didn’t think of him as an individual human with friends and maybe a family. He was a student who was my responsibility.” He shrugged. “It was a professional relationship, that’s all.” Ozzie looked at her again. “Do you like Deng?”

She smiled. “Yeah, I do. The way he wears his Stetson everywhere. And he has that shy quality about him, you know?” Ozzie nodded. He didn’t know.

“But he’s a good student, Liz. He follows orders.”

“You know they were friends? They’d been squadronmates for about four years.”

“He seems to be taking it okay.”

She gulped an ice cube. “Better than me, evidently.”

“Liz, didn’t you ever lose anybody in TraCom?”

“No, not like this. A classmate of mine was killed instructing in T-34s at Whiting, but this was different.” Ostrewski shrugged again. “Ozzie, why didn’t you talk to me when Yao was killed?”

He exhaled, slowly letting the air out of his lungs. “I didn’t know what I felt, Liz. I guess … I guess I didn’t trust myself to say anything to you before I learned the details because I wondered if you had screwed up, and I was even more afraid that I had screwed up. Maybe I missed something with Yao. I just don’t know.” He rubbed her arm. “I’m sorry that I caused you any extra pain. I should have been thinking beyond myself.”

“You had your own dragons to slay.”

“How’s that?”

She smiled. “It’s a Chinese saying or something. We all have our emotional dragons to slay.” She laughed. “You were one of mine.”

Ozzie’s eyes widened in apprehension at the implication. High buffet, airspeed bleeding off. Unload, bury the nose and go to zone five ’burner. He recovered nicely. “Consider that dragon slain, Scooter.”

Ozzie walked Liz to her car and made a point of hugging her again. They kissed good night the way friends do.

Eight Dead Eyes

There was a little delay in the pace of training after Yao’s death. As Peters predicted, Mr. Wei had declared the incident closed long before the FAA, the Air Force, or anyone else had reached the obvious conclusions: Mr. Yao had ignored the minimum recoverable altitude when using live ordnance and had tried to land the aircraft instead of ejecting while he still had control. “Consider it another lesson learned,” Wei had said. His next words bespoke his mission-oriented mind-set: “I expect you will proceed with strafing next week.”

Sitting with the other IPs in the Skyhawk Room, Robo Robbins absorbed the implication. “Did you ever notice Wei’s eyes?” he asked. “He’s got dead eyes, like a shark.”

“Be that as it may,” Peters said, “we’re now going to be dead eyes with our guns.” There were exaggerated groans at the pun. “To tell you the truth,” Peters added, “I’d just as soon wrap up the air-to-ground phase and get on to the tactics syllabus.”

Delight rubbed his beard, and asked, “Terry, are we condensing the gunnery syllabus to make up time?”

“Affirm. I talked to Rocky Rhode and held his hand long-distance. He’s concerned that the loss would delay carquals and upset Lieu and some others back in D.C. so we’re throwing in an extra simulator session with two live-fire hops instead of three.”

Peters searched the audience. “Gunner, where are you?”

Warrant Officer Jim Keizer raised a laconic hand at the back of the room. He was a tall, well-built career sailor in his late thirties. Peters continued, “Now that we’re done with bombing, your ordies can concentrate on the twenty millimeters. Then you can all go back to Kingsville and rejoin the Navy.”

“What? And lose all this per diem? Not likely, sir!” Keizer’s retort drew appreciative laughter. Ordnancemen qualified to arm and load bombs and maintain the A-4s’ cannon were a premium commodity. Like all seadogs, they knew how to turn their per diem expenses into a profit by careful shopping and gratuitous mooching.

“All right,” Peters continued. “We have three days before the first gunnery flight. Jim’s crew has done the boresighting, but we need to test the guns on the jets we’ll be using in this phase. That’s eight launches a day. We have range time tomorrow and the next day to confirm that both guns work in each bird. Everybody gets one hop to fire fifty rounds per gun. Any malfunctions, and I may exert my authority and take the extra flights myself.”

Catcalls and two paper cups pelted Hook Peters. Fending off the assault with crossed arms, he intoned, “Hey, it’s not my fault. Jane said either she gets a gunnery hop or I sleep on the couch.”

Nine Manly Man Night

“El Cid,” began Delight, standing at the Skyhawk Bar. “Greatest six-minute sword fight ever filmed — duel to the death for possession of the whole danged city of Calajora. Single-combat warriors like Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Right Stuff.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “And Sophia Loren …”

“Fighting Seabees,” countered Robbins. “Burly construction guys who drive bulldozers and earthmovers. They level mountains for airfields while killing Japs and hardly break a sweat.”

“Okay, The Vikings. You can’t get no more manly than they were. Sail the Atlantic in an open longship, then go raping and pillaging — real Manly Man stuff. And remember Ernest Borgnine? Ragnar’s feasting hall where they swill mead from horns and throw battle-axes at each other and ravish the serving wenches …” Delight grinned hugely. “Come to think of it, kinda reminds me of Animal Night at Miramar …”

Robbins nearly choked on his drink, rerunning the long-gone Friday frivolity at Fighter Town USA. He thought fast. “Taras Bulba. Those cossacks were really Manly Men — jumped their horses over a huge ravine to prove who was right or wrong.” He struck an heroic pose and emulated Yul Brynner. “‘I am Taras Bulba, colonel of the Don Cossacks. Put your faith in your sword, and your sword in the Pole!’” He glanced across the room at Ostrewski. “Oops, sorry, Oz. No offense.”

Ozzie, conversing with Vespa and Thaler, flipped him off without looking back.

“Conan the Barbarian.” Delight flashed a gotcha smile, confident he could not be topped.

“Beeeeep,” went Robbins. “You lose. Conan doesn’t count ’cause he isn’t real.”

Terry Peters entered the lounge with Jane on his arm. He turned to his wife. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “They’re at it again.”

She looked around. “At what again?”

“Richthofen and Brown over there. They play a game called Manly Man Night. One starts by naming a movie and the other has to respond with an equally macho flick until one of them runs out of titles. I think Zack just lost.”

Delight saw the Peterses enter the lounge and joined them at a table. “Hi, guys. You’re just in time — the party’s rolling.”

Jane regarded the former Marine, a suspicious pout on her face. “Things never change around here. The monthly Friday night gathering and poor Carol’s over there with the rest of the aviation widows.” She glanced at the far corner where Carol Delight sat in animated conversation with Kiersten Thaler, Marie Robbins, and some other ATA wives.

Delight waved a placating hand. “Hey, it’s an old-married-person trick. You spend the whole evening talking to everybody else so you have something to say to your spouse during the drive home.” He looked back and forth between Terry and Jane Peters. Keeping a straight face, he added, “Didn’t you know that?”

Jane patted his cheek. “That’s all right, dear. I’m sure you have a comfortable couch somewhere.” She joined the other ladies, knowing that her husband wanted to speak to their partner.

Peters motioned Delight into a corner. “Zack, I got a call from Congressman Ottmann this afternoon. He wants to meet me for a faceto-face with one of his people day after tomorrow. I should be back Monday night.”

Delight nodded. “Sure. You taking the red-eye to Dulles?”

“No, I’m hopping Southwest to Wichita.” He looked around to ensure no one overheard. “Look, if anybody asks — and don’t volunteer it — I’m looking at a twin Cessna at the factory. Ottmann stressed that we keep this as low-key as possible. I don’t know exactly why, but that’s how he wants it.”

“Okay.” Delight thought for a moment. “You figure it has something to do with the Chinese?”

“I don’t know what else. Anyway, I’ll get back ASAP.”

Delight punched Peters’s arm. “Okay, pard. You got it.” He returned to the bar, where Robbins was still holding forth.

Liz Vespa, intrigued by the arcane male ritual under way, edged closer to Delight and Robbins. Zack offered her the ice bucket. “Hey, Scooter. You need a refill?”

“No, I just wonder how you tell which movie is most manly.”

Delight’s warning receiver began twitching. He knew that Liz Vespa could kid a kidder. “Well … it’s, like, a Guy Thing.”

“Sort of common consent,” added Robbins. His perennial grin seemed to indicate that girls would not understand.

“You want to know what Manly is?” Vespa did not await an answer. “I’ll give you Manly. It’s PMS … actually, it’s flying with PMS.”

Robbins braced himself. Here it comes. The Girl Speech.

“Imagine feeling bloated from all the water you’re retaining. Then add a migraine headache, plus nausea. Then throw in stomach cramps — the kind that make you just want to curl up and go to sleep.” She leveled her gaze at both men. “Now, with all that, imagine making an instrument approach in rough air, at night.” Privately, Delight recalled when he had felt that way.

Vespa was warming up. “Now, after you’ve fought off vertigo in an instrument descent, aggravated by your headache and nausea, consider this. You feel that same way during an air-combat hop, pulling four or five Gs and doing that twice a day for a week.”

Liz drained the last of her vodka tonic and set the glass on the bar with a decisive clunk. “Gentlemen, I’m here to tell you: only Manly Men can fly with PMS.”

The men watched her walk away, too astonished for a reply.

Robbins found his voice first. “Wow! What got into her?”

Delight turned to Thaler, who joined his friends at the bar. “Hey, Psycho. What were you guys talking about with Liz?”

“Well, Ozzie said that he and Maria are getting engaged.” Thaler cocked his head in curiosity. “Why do you ask?”

Ten Almost Human

Mr. Wei Chinglao sat across the desk from Terry Peters and played the game. Producing a pack of cigarettes, he politely asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?” In the months he had been working with ATA, he hardly could have missed the “No smoking” signs, let alone Robbins’s handlettered “Oxygen in use” beside the WW II LSO paddles on his wall.

Hook Peters had quit smoking three decades before, between Vietnam deployments. He had told his wingman, “If I’m ever about to get captured, you’ll have to shoot me. I’d tell the gooks anything after two days without a smoke.”

Now, Peters regarded Wei’s request. He knows I don’t smoke; he knows there’s no smoking in the building. If I turn him down, he probably thinks I’ll feel I owe him something. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Wei, I’m allergic to tobacco smoke. That’s one of the reasons we post the signs in our spaces here.”

Wei nodded. “Ah, yes. Please excuse me.” He put the Camels back in his shirt pocket. Americans: such a peculiar race. Well, not even a race, he told himself, as mongrelized as they had become. Asia’s homogeneous populations had blessedly escaped most of those problems. And such concerns over trivia! The cartoon animal used to advertise Wei’s favorite cigarettes had been virtually banned by the U.S. government. All things considered, America was a mishmash of contradictions: constant meddling in the affairs of other nations but unwilling to control its own borders; puritan ethics constantly exposed to public hypocrisy; a vicious civil war fought to free the slaves, the descendants of whom still suffer in economic servitude; a constitution proclaiming supremacy of the individual but steadily eroded by the power of the state. If not for its technological genius, Wei was convinced that America never could have come to world prominence.

“I am preparing a report for Mr. Lieu at the embassy,” the program manager explained. “Now that our pilots are nearing the end of their carrier-landing training, I am required to provide a preliminary assessment of their progress.”

Peters turned in his chair toward the “howgozit” chart on the wall. Each PRC flier’s name and grades were neatly inked in for each phase of the program. Where a pilot had failed the course was an abrupt, final red X indicating that he had departed. Two, Peters thought ruefully, had departed this life.

“Well, sir, the figures are right there for you. Overall, I think your pilots have done pretty well.” He turned back to Wei. “Actually, I was surprised that we didn’t lose more pilots or planes before now. The weapons and especially the aerial-tactics refresher programs had the greatest potential for losses, but Yao’s incident was the only one directly involved in our training program.” He did not need to add that the first loss had involved wake turbulence from a Boeing 757 landing at Williams.

Wei’s dark eyes scanned the chart, evidently reading the small, neat letters from fifteen feet. “Mr. Yao brought disaster upon himself, Mr. Peters. My report made that clear.” The normal brisk tone of his voice softened perceptibly. “I trust that you know we hold your firm completely innocent in that event.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, I have been following the field-landing practice as much as possible, and I believe most of our pilots are doing reasonably well. But how many might not achieve your own standards before going to the ship?”

“I was discussing that with Mr. Robbins. We noted four pilots who were inconsistent in the simulated carrier-landing pattern. Two of them have improved this week; the others remain erratic.”

“And they are?”

“Mr. Zhang and Mr. Hu.”

“I mean, Mr. Peters, who are the four?”

“Oh.” Peters was taken aback; he knew that Robbins was inclined to give the first pair “a look at the boat.” He referred back to the list. “Mr. Chao and Mr. Wong. But I should note that Mr. Robbins believes they are making satisfactory progress.”

Wei scribbled a note, then looked up. “Even if Chao and Wong do not complete the course, we regard this as an acceptable completion rate.” He almost smiled. “You have done well.”

Peters was surprised; outright praise from Wei Chinglao was unprecedented. “Well, thank you, sir. Of course, we won’t know the actual results until after the qualification period aboard the Santa Cruz.” He opened his mouth, then thought better of it.

“Yes?” Wei prompted.

No point kidding this guy. “To tell you the truth, sir, I’m surprised and impressed with how well your group has done here. They’ve done quite a lot better than most of us expected.”

Wei leaned back — an unaccustomed, almost relaxed, posture. “Mr. Peters, now I will tell you the absolute truth. These pilots are the product of a screening process completely unprecedented in our military history. Not only did we require exceptional pilots by our standards, but exceptional individuals. The language study alone eliminated several of our most experienced aviators.”

“Well, yes, sir. We knew that this group …”

“Excuse me, Mr. Peters. In all candor, your Navy was told as little as possible about these men. It was considered necessary as a security measure at the time.” He looked down, as if composing his thoughts. “When my government accepted your government’s ah, suggestions as to our internal affairs, there was much resentment. But it was judged worthwhile because of the greater access to American trade and programs such as this.”

Peters sat silently, astonished at Wei’s candor.

“Now, there is a reason for our pilots’ success here,” Wei continued. “You know that most of our aviators only fly about one hundred hours a year — roughly half of what most Americans do. But once we selected our people for this program, they were given that extra hundred hours, much of it under Russian instruction. Therefore, some of our people flew far less than one hundred hours. Additionally, the prospective carrier fliers were exempted from most political requirements. Each year the army is mobilized to help bring in the crops when necessary, but none of these men did so.” He paused, looking directly into Peters’s eyes. “You realize what that meant?”

Peters waved a hand. “Certainly, sir. It meant they were expected to succeed here.”

“Precisely. And thanks to your staff, the large majority have done so.” Wei stood up, preparing to leave. Peters leapt to his feet as well, ruefully thinking that he had mistaken the man’s intentions with the cigarette gambit.

“One final thing, Mr. Peters. You must suspect that I have some aviation background. Therefore, I wish to ask one thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“At a convenient time, may I ask the favor of making a carrier landing in the backseat of your Skyhawk?”

Peters did not even try to conceal his pleasure. He extended a hand, which Wei solemnly grasped. “It’s a deal, sir.”

Wei bowed slightly and walked out the door as Delight looked in. “Any problems, Hook?”

Peters shook his head. “Just that I’m afraid Wei is starting to act human.” He looked at his friend. “And that scares me.”

Eleven Things Unsaid

From seven thousand five hundred feet on a crystalline night, the Phoenix Valley was a splash of multihued color from millions of lights strewn across the black carpet of the Sonoran Desert.

Returning to Williams Gateway after a series of instrument approaches to Sky Harbor, Hawk Six descended through the night sky, running lights strobing from wingtips and fuselage. In the front seat, Liz Vespa concentrated on her approach plate. She knew that she had done well on the instrument-check ride, though not quite as well as she would have liked for this particular check airman. Ozzie Ostrewski rode in the back, keeping notes for the debriefing.

Northwest of the field, Ozzie unexpectedly waggled the stick. “I got it, Liz.”

Vespa raised her hands, speaking into the hot mike. “You have it.” She wondered if she had missed something, committed a mental error.

“Let’s take a look out desert way,” Ozzie offered. “I always like to see the desert at night, away from the lights.”

“Okay,” she replied. Something’s on his mind, she told herself as the TA-4J banked more to the east. Ozzie’s usually all business once he’s strapped into the jet.

The Skyhawk settled on course 090, south of the Superstition Freeway. Apache Junction and then Gold Canyon slid past the port wingtip before her scan returned to the cockpit, where her practiced gaze registered normal indications in the red night lighting.

Minutes passed without further conversation. Vespa was becoming slightly concerned when Ostrewski was back in her ears. “Maria and I have set a date: two months from now.”

Though it was physically impossible, Liz tried to turn her head to look at Ozzie. The fittings on her torso harness prevented her from shifting her shoulders more than a few inches. “Wow. That’s great, Ozzie.” He’s really going to do it. “Congratulations.” Her voice was flat.

“Thanks. We want to have a church wedding, you know? It’ll take a while for my family to make travel arrangements out from Chicago.”

Liz’s pulse was back under seventy. As seconds passed, she reminded herself to scan the instruments again: fuel flow, engine RPM, tailpipe temperature, the TA-4’s own vital signs.

“Michael.”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you wait until now to tell me? I mean, why not before we launched? Or after the debrief?”

“Hell, Liz … I guess I don’t really know. Maybe it just seemed important that we have a little time … you know, without anybody else around.”

She almost laughed. “Well, this is as private as it gets.”

“Ah, I just thought that maybe you’d sort of like some time to, you know, maybe, talk.”

She forced her feminine fangs back; she would not coyly ask, Gosh, Ozzie, talk about what? “That’s sweet of you, Michael.”

Liz mentally cataloged everything she did and did not want to say — and everything that she could never again discuss with her friend and rival. In two months there would be no going back.

“I’m going to miss you, Michael.”

He knew exactly what she meant. “Thank you, Liz. But Ozzie will still be here. And you’ll still be Wizard Two.”

“Does Maria understand that?”

He thought for several seconds. “Maybe not quite. But she will. It’s part of my job as her husband.”

“Roger. Break-break.”

Again, Michael Ostrewski perfectly read the intent of Elizabeth Vespa. Ozzie waggled the stick and said to Scooter, “You have it. Come right to two four zero. Descend and maintain four thousand five hundred feet.”

Hawk Six banked into a thirty-degree turn in the night sky, leaving something more than jet exhaust in its wake.

Twelve Who Needs Oxygen?

Four Skyhawks were announced by the Pratt and Whitney whine that once was an ordinary sound at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, south of Los Angeles. Peters looked up from the flight line, where ATA and the Sukhoi delegations were quartered. “Well, that’s the last of them.”

The TA-4Js broke up for landing interval, gear and flaps coming visible during the 360-degree overhead break. In a descending spiral, line astern, each pilot allowed sufficient distance behind the plane ahead.

“Lookin’ good,” Peters commented.

“Damn straight,” added Robbins.

Peters shielded his eyes with one hand. “I guess Zack had his division up for practice before they left Williams.” He looked back toward the parking lot adjacent to the flight line.

“Expecting somebody, boss?”

“Yeah, Rob. I told Jane about Zack’s ETA. She and Carol were going to be here for for his arrival.”

Robbins worked his eyebrows. “I thought there was some doubt if Carol would even come.”

“There was, up until a couple days ago. I guess it took some begging on a pretty thick rug, but Zack convinced her she’d be better off here with us than waiting back home.”

“Roger that.” Robbins did not need to elaborate. He had persuaded his own wife to accompany him rather than stay alone in their condo — too many people did not want the program to proceed.

As Hawk Ten taxied into the chocks, Delight waved from the cockpit, his rear seat occupied by one of Chief Dan Wilger’s maintenance men. The other three A-4s parked beside Delight’s, their noses gently bobbing on the long nose-gear oleos.

The boarding ladder was barely in place before a car horn sounded behind Peters and his entourage. Jane Peters and Carol Delight alit from the rented Ford, waving to the crowd as two security men emerged from the front seat. Delight scrambled down the yellow ladder, tugging off his helmet. He met his wife halfway across the ramp, scooped her up in both arms, and carried her back to their friends. “You fool, put me down!” Carol’s demand lacked conviction.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Zack cooed. He kissed her warmly, then turned to face Jane Peters. “You too, honey.” He leaned forward to touch lips with her.

“Pure, what the hell are you doing?” Hook Peters knew perfectly well what his partner was up to.

“I’m ravishing two gorgeous women at the same time,” he declared. “It’s a Manly Man kind of thing.”

Carol Delight settled more comfortably in her husband’s arms, both hands around his neck. “I’m glad you’re in a manly mood, dear,” she said sweetly. “Jane took me shopping on the way back from John Wayne Airport.”

Delight shifted her weight in his arms. “That’s as manly an airport as there is. I hope you spent a lot of money.”

Carol cocked her head, as if studying him. “Did you get enough oxygen on the way over here?”

“Darlin’, I don’t need oxygen as long as I’ve got you.”

That saccharine statement prompted a chorus of “Yuuuk” sentiments when Chief Wilger appeared. “Excuse me, folks,” he intoned. “You might want to come listen to the portable radio.”

“What is it?” Peters asked.

“Well, apparently the Chinese and the Vietnamese are shooting at each other.”

At eight that night most of the instructors and their wives gathered in the Peters’s suite at the old visiting officers’ quarters. Two security guards from the firm contracted by Wei stood outside, guarding the door.

“I want you all to know what’s going on in Vietnam and how it affects us,” Peters began. He stood by the television set that was turned on but muted. The news graphic headlined, “War in the Tonkin Gulf.”

“First, apparently it isn’t really a war. It seems to be a limited naval action involving the same area that was disputed several months ago. China and Vietnam both claim the area where petroleum was found, and Vietnam has been drilling there for a few years. You’ve heard the same news reports I have, but a couple of my D.C. contacts have more detail.”

Peters paced a few steps, staring at the carpet. “Congressman Ottmann is coming out here tomorrow or the next day at the latest. So are a couple of Navy representatives involved with the PRC carrier program. From them, I’ve learned that Chinese marines occupied two of the three drilling platforms.”

Robbins interrupted. “Terry, what’s Washington say about the Chinese carrier program? If the chinks are the aggressors, won’t that result in some kind of sanctions?”

“I’m just coming to that, Rob. Washington has chosen to treat this as a local feud. Even though Beijing is technically the aggressor, the State Department waffles it enough to say that both sides should stand down.” He raised his hands. “That’s just diplomatic BS. The president and Congress are in bed with the Chinese too far to back out. The bottom line is markets and money, and in that contest, Hanoi loses every time.”

“So you’re saying we’ll continue with the CarQual schedule?” Ostrewski sat on the floor between Vespa and Thaler.

“Well, as of now I haven’t heard anything different. Rob, you were out to the boat yesterday. How’d it look?”

“Fine. Captain Albright was happy with things, and he said he can give us twenty-eight knots. Oh, we heard from Pensacola. Two landing signal officers are inbound tomorrow. They’re supposed to clear us instructors for preliminary CarQuals before the Chinese begin trapping.”

Peters scanned the crowded room. “Any other questions?”

Liz Vespa voiced the thought in a dozen minds. “Only about a hundred, skipper.”

Thirteen The Truest Test

Peters convened the briefing in Ottmann’s suite. Zack Delight, Rob Robbins, Ozzie Ostrewski, Psycho Thaler, Liz Vespa, and Chief Wilger were seated around the dining-room table.

“First,” Peters began, “for those who haven’t met Congressman Tim Ottmann, I’ll introduce him by saying he’s on the House Military Affairs Committee. He chairs the Tactical Airpower Subcommittee, which has oversight of the Chinese carrier program. Before that, Skip made a poor but honest living as an Eagle driver.” Ottmann shared the group’s laughter.

“Before Skip explains the reason for this meeting, one thing has to be clear.” As usual when he wanted to make a point, Peters paused. “Everything that’s said here stays here. What we’re planning is potentially dangerous, and the legal implications are not clear-cut. Zack and I are in, but you have to make your own decisions. So, before we continue, anybody who wants to withdraw, do so now.” Peters waited but nobody stirred. Peters then turned to Ottmann, standing at the head of the table.

“Thanks, Terry.” Ottmann cleared his throat. “Folks, in no more than seven days Mainland China will invade Taiwan.”

Vespa’s hand instinctively sought Ostrewski’s. Chief Wilger voiced the unspoken sentiment of everyone else. “Holy shit.”

“I know your first concern,” Ottmann said. “You wonder why the Chinese would pick fights with Vietnam and Taiwan at the same time. Well, the Vietnam feud is strategic deception — a manufactured crisis to draw our attention away from Taiwan.

“The real reason behind the upcoming invasion is, well, time. The old guard in Beijing — the hard-line Maoists — are dying off. They want China ‘reunited’ before they go to Marxist valhalla. The new generation is more pragmatic.” Ottmann gave an ironic smile. “By ‘new generation,’ I mean those who don’t remember the Long March in 1936.

“Now, they’ve been very patient. They went along with the so-called internal reforms we wanted because they needed American technology. But there is nothing to prevent the Communist Party from reverting to its old ways once it has what it wants — control of Taiwan. It’s a purely cynical view, but remember, these folks insist that Mao Zedung was ‘too great a man to be bound by his word.’” Ottmann shrugged. “It’s a cultural attitude that we can’t change.”

Ostrewski leaned forward. “Mr. Ottmann, I don’t know much, but I know if China invades Taiwan, there’ll be war with the U.S.”

“Previously I’d agree with you, but things have changed.” Ottmann stopped to organize his thoughts, then continued. “The reason the PRC has initiated its so-called reforms is to increase its influence here. You all know about the scandals that never went anywhere. Well, by making themselves financially necessary to three administrations, the Chinese bought themselves more than political influence. They bought political souls.”

Robbins was tempted to mutter, “No such thing” when Liz Vespa spoke up. “My God, how did it ever go this far?”

“Well,” Ottmann said, “the Bush administration continued normal relations after Tiananmen Square. Clinton, who hammered Bush for his China policy in the campaign, not only continued that policy, but expanded it.” He grinned sardonically. “Hey, Washington runs on hypocrisy like jets run on JP-4.

“Anyway, besides the millions of dollars in campaign money, you had major corporations clamoring to do business with one-third of the human race. After all, most other Western nations already were in bed with Beijing, and our CEOs didn’t want to be left out. So they leaned on their politicians, and things just snowballed.”

Robbins raised his voice. “Sir, how do we fit into this?”

“Okay. Beijing knows that America can’t just lean back while PRC troops walk over Taiwan. There has to be a publicly acceptable reason for us to sit it out and pass some window-dressing sanctions. We’ll probably impose embargos again.

“However, the Chinese are hedging their bet. They have a new long-range missile, the DF-41, with technology we either sold them or they stole from us. France and Israel also contributed, by the way. So, in the next few days we expect China to launch a ‘test’ that’ll hit about two hundred miles off the Washington coast. That’ll be a warning shot that says, ‘America, you don’t have any better missile defense than we do.’ So ICBMs are a standoff.

“Now, that’s where you folks come in. A Malaysian-registered freighter is headed this way with a Chinese crew. Its manifest lists petroleum products. It does not list five backpack nukes.”

Ostrewski merely emitted a low whistle.

“No kidding holy shit,” Wilger said in a hushed voice.

“We’re tracking this ship, the Penang Princess, and we expect it to arrive off Long Beach day after tomorrow. The plan calls for her to transfer the nukes to several smaller vessels that will bring them ashore in different places. But one of them will be delivered, minus detonator, to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. There, the president and secretary of state will be invited to see it, with a promise that four more have been distributed around the country. At that point, China wins. No American politician is going to defend an Asian island at the expense of thousands of American lives — maybe tens of thousands. It’s in his interest, and Congress’s, to keep the lid on. No overt acts, no hysterical commentary, and damn sure no scandal about giving in to blackmail.” Ottmann shook his head admiringly. “You got to admire the plan — it’s a beaut. Right out of Sun-Tzu.”

“Sun who?” asked Wilger.

“Sun-Tzu, an ancient Chinese military philosopher. He said the truest test of a general is to win without fighting.”

“Okay,” Robbins interjected. “So what do we do?”

Ottmann looked directly at the LSO. “You sink that ship.”

Fourteen Questions

The responses came with machine-gun rapidity.

“We don’t have ordnance!”

“How do we know the nukes are aboard?”

“What about the Navy or Coast Guard?”

And, on everyone’s mind, “How do we stay out of prison?”

Ottmann raised his hands, asking for silence. “I’ll answer as many of your questions as possible, folks. First, we know the backpacks are aboard because one of our sources helped load them. Most of our intel has been back-channel between unofficial contacts on both sides. I can’t tell you more for obvious reasons — you were all military professionals. But I’m convinced the intel is real.

“Second, we’re not involving the Navy because the people in DC who know about this plan need ‘plausible deniability.’ That’s a buzzword that means you’re lying and everybody knows you’re lying but nobody will prove it because everybody else lies, too. The Santa Cruz is perfect: officially it’s not a U.S. or a Chinese ship. It’s not yet commissioned in either navy, it has a mixed crew, including civilians, and there’s been no transfer ceremony.”

Zack Delight spoke up. “Tim knows I’m an all-up round for this plan. But how about explaining the legality?”

“Right. The plan is to launch you during your first qualification period with thousand-pounders that’ll be loaded aboard right before the ship leaves the dock. You’ll have the location of the Penang Princess inside our twelve-mile limit, and a full briefing on her. You’ll land back aboard before the Santa Cruz returns to U.S. waters, which is a legal technicality, but it preserves the appearance of American neutrality.”

“But, Congressman,” Vespa interjected, “we’ll still have sunk a neutral ship. People will probably be killed. Aren’t we — pirates or something?”

Ottmann smiled as he reached inside his sport coat. From the pocket he produced several folded sheets. “These are full pardons, exonerating you for everything since Adam. They’re signed by the president but undated. You’ll have your copies, notarized by the attorney general, before you take off from here to land aboard the ship. If everything goes well, you won’t need them. If things go wrong, you’re covered.”

Vespa locked eyes with the New Yorker. “So the president …”

“ … still denies involvement.” Ottmann smiled again.

“Excuse me, sir,” Robbins said, “but how do we know these papers are valid? We might be set up, and you wouldn’t know it.”

“Well, Rob, I could just say, ‘Trust me.’ But if one of you goes to prison, I’ll be there waving bye-bye when you finally walk out the front gate. As deep as I am in this, I’d never see daylight again.”

Robbins’s blue eyes had a little-boy gleam. “You just told me that you’ve got the president by the …”

“By the plausible deniability.” Ottmann grinned.

“A couple of other things,” Robbins continued. “If I was smuggling nukes into this country, I wouldn’t put ‘em all in one basket, and I wouldn’t wait until a few days before I might need ’em. Doesn’t that seem kind of suspicious?”

“Geez, Robo. You ever consider a career in politics?” Ottmann chuckled at the sentiment. “Your instincts are good, but we know that the Chinese decided not to risk discovery of the backpacks until almost the last minute. And actually they’re not putting them all in one basket. As I said, some or all of them will be put in other boats before unloading. That’s why we need to sink the ship at a specific time and place.”

“We’re going to recover them?”

“We’re sure not going to leave them on the bottom of the ocean. Tactically, it’d make more sense to sink the ship in deep water beyond our limits. But this way, the U.S. government has full authority over recovery and salvage operations. I believe that a Coast Guard cutter will accidentally be nearby to pick up all survivors — and whatever they get off the ship.”

Ozzie gave an appreciative whistle. “Sounds like you have it all doped out, sir.”

“Well, it’s been a long time planning. But in any operation like this, there’s always the Oscar Sierra factor. Just remember that if things do turn to shit, you’re covered legally.

“Anything else?” Ottmann asked. Liz Vespa’s frown caught Ottmann’s attention. “Miss Vespa?”

“Liz,” Scooter corrected. “You know, all this seems really well planned, but I don’t understand something. Why are the Chinese blackmailing us with ICBMs or backpacks? They must know we can’t stop them from taking Taiwan — we don’t have the people, the airlift, or the sealift anymore. So if they’re willing to accept the political fallout, why not just go?”

“Good strategic question. I wish I could tell you what I know, but I can’t right now.” He looked around. “Yes, Ozzie.”

“With everything involved in a big operation like occupying Taiwan, the folks on that island must know what’s coming. I mean, PRC bases for shipping, airfields, and several infantry and armored divisions — all of that’s got to draw attention. Why haven’t we heard anything from them or the UN?”

“Hell, the UN doesn’t matter since China has a veto. As for Taiwan, they’ve lived in the shadow of the PRC for about fifty years — their military is on constant alert. Also, the Chinese have American politicians in their hip pocket. There hasn’t even been any contingency planning for operations involving the PRC for several years now.” He snorted his contempt. “Hell, dozens of White House staffers don’t even submit to presumably mandatory security checks, so don’t expect the military to buck policy. Maybe it would help if some senior uniformed people would stand up and risk their careers, but there aren’t any left.” He looked around the room full of former military professionals. “There just aren’t any left.”

Fifteen Answers

Hijacking a moored aircraft carrier is no small task. It requires planning, cunning, and most of all, nerve.

It also helps to have well-placed contacts.

Representative Tim Ottmann announced a later meeting after the first one broke up. He impressed upon Terry Peters the importance of having everyone involved in the program present to take a tour of the Chinese and Russian facilities at El Toro.

“Have you talked to Captain Albright?” Ottmann asked Peters.

“Yes, he’ll be here with his exec. I also told our active-duty instructors to attend. That’s Lieutenants Arliss and Horn plus Lieutenant Commander Cartier from the LSO school.” Peters inclined his head slightly, regarding the New Yorker with amused suspicion. “You’re up to something.”

Ottmann made a small come-hither gesture with two fingers. Though they were alone in the room, Peters stepped closer. “I want the Chinese and everyone else to think that we’re having a last conference here before qualifications begin day after tomorrow. As far as you and anyone else knows, there’ll be a reception until late tonight in my suite. Wei and his students will attend, and I’ve even invited some of the Russians.”

“Okay.”

“While the Santa Cruz’s captain and exec and the active-duty guys are here, including your LSO, there’s not much chance of anyone thinking the ship’s going to sail, is there?”

Peters’s eyes gleamed in admiration. “You’re a sneaky bas …”

“Thanks. A helo will pick you up here at 2230. Would it be suspicious if you and Robbins both disappeared at that time?”

“Hell, I don’t know, Skip. Are you going to serve booze?”

“All the adult beverages anybody wants to consume. Except your guys, of course. As soon as I get word from you that the ship’s under way, I’ll tell Zack your overhead time. His flight will land aboard, load ordnance, and get the final brief.”

Peters nodded. “Sounds like your plan hasn’t changed much.”

“Now, there’s one more factor in our favor. The harbor pilot is one of our guys, Ben Tolleson. He’s a master mariner and probably could run the ship without much help. Except for flight operations, of course. But you’ll be in full command once you exit the harbor.” Ottmann searched his fellow conspirator’s face. “Are you really sure you can drive that boat?”

“Well, it’s been quite a few years, Tim. I conned Independence before she entered the yard. But yes, I’m sure.”

“Okay. Now, while we still have time, I need to let you know about our inside source.”

“Why tell me? Do I really need to know?”

Ottmann smiled. “Oh yeah, you really need to know. He’s flying in one of the two-seaters tomorrow morning.” Ottmann rapped on the wall of the adjoining bedroom. After a few seconds the door opened and Terry Peters gaped at Mr. Wei Chinglao.

Sixteen Half-Truths and White Lies

Tim Ottmann invited Wei to take the most comfortable chair while the Americans sat on the couch. Wei produced a cigarette holder and inserted a Camel before lighting up. He blew two near-perfect smoke rings before he began to speak.

“Mr. Peters, I have not been completely truthful with you. However, you will understand the need for security.”

“Certainly, sir.”

The old MiG pilot put down his cigarette. “Mr. Peters, the primary Chinese trait is patience. We take the long view of history, but now, in the twenty-first century by your reckoning, some of us realize that events have accelerated far beyond our accustomed pace. The world economy and global communications have forced a radical change upon us. Unfortunately, most of the venerable leaders in Beijing are unable to grasp that fact. Tiananmen Square was just one example.

“Frankly, various American administrations have made the task of reform-minded Chinese more difficult. Your politicians tried to have things both ways: supposedly opposing the successors of Mao while trying to exploit China’s emerging economy. The hypocrisy of Republican and Democrat administrations has left China convinced that America stands only for profit and expediency. That attitude has, ironically, reinforced the old men’s determination to seize Taiwan. They believe that after an initial flurry of protests, Sino-American relations will return to the status quo ante.”

“Will they, sir?”

Wei looked at Ottmann, who nodded. “Most assuredly. As far as America is concerned, I shall explain the consequences for China. But first, I concede that China has too much influence in your internal affairs to prevent, as you say, business as usual. Too many public figures have accepted illegal contributions; too many are compromised in other fashions.” Wei shook his head. “You would not believe how many people or how many ways.”

Peters felt a small shiver between his shoulder blades.

“Now,” Wei continued, “you ask why my colleagues and I are working with men like Mr. Ottmann. The reason is that we are Chinese patriots. Oh, some of us still believe in Marxism, but that is almost irrelevant. Instead, we look at this Taiwan folly and see unnecessary risks. Therefore, we decided to upset the nuclear blackmail part of the plan. Without the assurance of American capitulation, the operation is too dangerous to proceed. Even if it succeeds, the rest of Asia would unite against us, economically and militarily. We would be forced into the type of military spending that ruined the Soviet Union.”

Peters ingested the revelation, emotionally breathless at the implications. “Mr. Wei, why don’t the Politburo and the Chairman understand these things?”

Wei dismissed the concept with the wave of a hand. “You know of America’s so-called Beltway mentality, Mr. Peters? We have the same thing in Beijing. From there, the world appears logical and orderly, bound to fit the outmoded perceptions of the office holders. Our ‘wise old men’ still view the world through Marxist prisms, even though many of them are political pragmatists. They know their time is running out, and they are determined to cling to their attitudes until the last moment.”

Peters leaned back, rubbing his eyes as if in disbelief of what he had heard. He rolled his shoulders and faced Wei once more. “All right, sir. You convinced me. How do we proceed?”

“Our intention is to have the Santa Cruz at sea without anyone knowing of it here until the last possible moment. Surprise will be important in sinking the Penang Princess, and we must assume that her captain will have some form of communication with agents here at El Toro or in Long Beach.”

“That’s right,” Ottmann added. “Remember the original plan, Terry? We were going to have your instructors qualify in one day and stay aboard that night. Then the Chinese pilots supposedly would fly out the next day with some of the other instructors to begin the main qualification period.”

Peters snapped his fingers. “And we’re going to launch the strike the same day as the instructors’ CarQuals.”

“Exactly, Mr. Peters. However, in our long-range planning we only had a time frame. We knew the best time of year for an invasion of Taiwan, and we knew the decision had been made to insert the nuclear weapons a few days before that date.” He raised his hands in a semihelpless gesture. “Therefore, our planning could not be as precise as we hoped.”

“All right,” Peters replied. “But Mr. Wei, I don’t understand something. You got a promise from me to get you a carrier landing. How does that fit into the plan?”

Wei almost smiled. “I made it known to my pilots that I wanted to share their experience. Now, if they see me in one of your aircraft, they are unlikely to be suspicious. But it also suits our larger purpose. First, your government and my faction wish to emphasize the Chinese participation in this operation while minimizing American involvement. My authority is accepted among the Chinese aboard the ship, and will not be questioned.

“Therefore, in keeping with the Chinese emphasis, we will need PRC pilots. I am one; Mr. Hu will be the other.”

Peters glanced at Ottmann, then back to Wei. “Why Hu? He’s one of those who was almost cut from the program.”

“Mr. Peters, Hu is my sister’s son. I trust him.”

Ottmann could almost hear the wheels clicking in Peters’s skull. “Terry, when Mr. Wei says we need Chinese on the mission, it’s part of the plausible deniability. No active-duty Americans are involved, and we emphasize that PRC pilots flew the mission.”

“I see. We ATA folks are retired while the flight-deck troops are Chinese or inactive American reservists.” Peters winked at the congressman. “A half-truth isn’t quite the same as a white lie.”

Ottmann made a point of shaking hands. “Terry, welcome to the wonderful world of politics.”

Seventeen One of Our Carriers Is Missing

It was just past midnight, but the floodlights on the flight deck, and those along the pier on F Avenue, provided ample illumination for the Jet Ranger that Wei had leased. The pilot, who had flown SH-60s, was more than willing to set down directly on Santa Cruz, saving Peters and Robbins a long walk from Navy Landing a mile and a half away. They waved good-bye, then turned and entered the island en route to the bridge.

“Think they’ll miss us at Wei’s reception?” Robbins asked.

“Not likely, with all the free booze and fresh crab. Did you see how our boy Igor was sucking it up?”

On the O–9 level Peters entered the red-lit bridge. He saw an older man, graying with a two-day crop of stubble, talking to the watch officer. “Mr. Tolleson? I’m Terry Peters.”

“That’s me,” the harbor pilot replied. He regarded Peters openly, assessing the aviator who would take this ship to sea. They shook hands. “Our friend told me to expect you.”

“Well, it’s early for the usual watch change, but I think we’ll do all right.”

“I hope so, skipper. I’ve never hijacked a carrier before!” Tolleson smiled. “By the way, do you know your officers of the deck? Mr. Odegaard and Mr. Mei. Gentlemen, this is Captain Peters. He’ll be relieving Captain Albright today.”

Peters greeted the American and his Chinese counterpart. “Yes, I’ve met both these gentlemen.” He knew that Odegaard was a retired reserve commander; Mei had been aboard destroyers and frigates; reputedly he was an above-average ship handler.

“All right, gentlemen, let’s get started. Captain Albright said to expect four boilers on line and four standing by, provisions for two days, and a full complement sufficient for carrier qualifications tomorrow. We’re running under our own power without connections to shore. Also, I’m told we have tugs standing by. Is that correct?”

“All correct, Captain.” Odegaard nodded toward Mei. “We’ve checked with the department heads and we’re ready to go.”

“Very well.” Peters inhaled, held the breath, then let it out. “On the bridge, this is Captain Peters, I have the conn.” He turned to Robbins. “Robo, check with the weapons officer — Medesha? I want you to eyeball the Mark 83s before we push off.”

“You got it, boss.” He disappeared down the ladder.

Peters turned back to his bridge watch. “We’ll light off the other boilers as we clear the channel, but right now it’s important to get under way without drawing too much attention.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Odegaard replied. “The plant is lined up in parallel. We’ll use those four boilers to provide steam for the main engines.”

“Good. Ah, let’s see … I know the elevators are raised. Are they locked?”

“Yes, Captain. We can confirm that with the deck division if you prefer.”

“Not necessary.” Peters strode to the starboard side of the bridge, assessing the topography of his new domain. He turned to the watch standers. “Let’s test the rudders. And I’d like to confirm that we have up radar plus navigation and comm.”

The helmsman was a retired merchant marine and active yachtsman who relished steering eighty thousand tons of steel. He tested the tiller and reported that he had full control of the two rudders.

Mei came to attention. “Captain, I have personally inspected the navigation equipment. I also consulted the communications watch officer. We are ready.”

“Very well, gentlemen.” He looked to Tolleson. “Captain, request you make up the tugs, sir.”

“Right, Cap’n.” While Tolleson communicated with the tugs that would pull the carrier’s deadweight outboard against the onshore breeze, Peters saw to the pierside procedure. He waited for word from Robbins before the remaining brow was wheeled back from the starboard quarterdeck. The call quickly came from the weapons division.

“Weps to bridge.”

Odegaard responded, leaning into the speaker. “Bridge aye.”

“This is Robbins. Tell the captain we’re cocked and locked.”

Peters grinned beneath the brim of his “A-4s Forever” ballcap. “Cocked and locked” was verbal shorthand for the occasion: Robbins had seen the thousand-pound bombs and confirmed that there were suitable fuzes on hand.

At a nod from Peters, Odegaard broadcast over the 1-MC general-announcing system. “Set the special sea and anchor detail. Single up all lines and make all preparations for getting under way.”

Peters waved to his de facto executive officer and the harbor pilot. “Mr. Odegaard, Mr. Tolleson. We’ll move to Aux Conn.” While they stepped eight feet aft to the auxiliary conning station, sailors on the pier removed the first of two heavy lines securing the carrier to each of eight stanchions along the ship’s 1,046-foot length. Meanwhile, Tolleson directed both “made-up” tugs into position at the bow and stern.

Taking nothing for granted, Peters leaned out of Aux Conn, looking fore and aft to confirm that all was ready. He called behind him, “Let go all lines.” The order was repeated, echoing metallically through the moist maritime darkness as pierside personnel released the final eight hawsers linking Santa Cruz to shore.

Peters turned back inboard to face his bridge crew. “Gentlemen, I see no reason to stand on ceremony. Captain Tolleson, you’ll give your orders directly to the helmsman, if you please.” He chuckled slightly. “We do things differently in the Skyhawk Navy.”

Tolleson scratched his beard, beaming his approval of the nonregulation procedure. “Right you are, Cap’n.” He waited until he judged the ship forty to fifty feet from the pier, then said, “Son, give me left standard rudder.” As the helm swung through fifteen degrees of arc, Tolleson announced, “Back one-third on number one and two; ahead two-thirds on three and four.”

Peters watched the “spinning” maneuver move the bow away from the pier, ponderously swinging to port. The watch officer, peering through the window, called to Tolleson. “We’re fair, Pilot.”

Tolleson spoke into his walkie-talkie, clearing the tugs of their chore.

As the big ship maneuvered in the turning basin, Tolleson called, “All ahead one-third.” Santa Cruz grudgingly edged up to five knots as Tolleson smoothly coordinated rudder commands and orders to the tugs. With the bow properly positioned, he turned back to Peters. “She’s all yours, skipper.”

Peters warmly shook hands with the friend of Wei Chinglao. “Nicely done, sir. You’d better catch your taxi if you don’t want to make this cruise.”

Tolleson laughed. “I might enjoy it at that.” He slapped Peters’s arm and disappeared through the hatch, en route to the stern, where he would take a jacob’s ladder down to the tug.

Captain Terence Peters, USN (Retired), felt the faint throbbing of the engines through the soles of his brown aviator shoes. Peering ahead into the Pacific darkness, he modulated his voice in what he intended to resemble confident authority. “All ahead two-thirds.”

Eighteen Ready Deck

The A-4s dropped their tailhooks and entered the Delta pattern two thousand feet overhead the ship in a descending left-hand carousel. Thaler, Delight’s wingman, crossed his leader’s tail from the left to establish right echelon beside Ostrewski with Vespa outboard.

Delight reached the initial point three miles astern of the carrier, approaching parallel to her starboard side. He looked down from eight hundred feet and felt a rumble of excited satisfaction in his belly. After months of planning and training, there was the former USS Santa Cruz with a ready deck, steaming upwind and eager to receive him. Zack led his little formation ahead of the ship’s white-foamed bow. He checked his airspeed — steady on three hundred knots — and prepared for his break turn.

Ahead of the ship, Delight laid the stick over to port, brought the throttle back to 80 percent, hit the speed brakes, and pulled. His vision went gray at the periphery, but he rolled wings level about a mile and a quarter off the port side, descending through six hundred feet while headed aft.

Delight’s left hand automatically found the gear and flap handles, and he felt his A-4F decelerate through 220 under the additional drag. He shot a glance at the angle-of-attack indicator, cross-checking with airspeed.

As the LSO platform seemed to slide past him, Delight turned left, adding power to maintain 130 knots. Turning his head, he saw the mirror’s meatball halfway up the deck. He crossed the wide white wake, sucked off a bit of throttle, and stabilized his angle of attack with minute adjustments of the stick.

Meatball, angle of attack, lineup, Delight chanted to himself. He knew that a good start and small corrections were the keys to success. He felt as if the A-4 were balanced on a pencil tip, and forced himself to fly smoothly — too much muscle meant overcontrolling that did bad things to landing grades.

“Pure, this is Rob. Come back.” Robbins was avoiding standard LSO phraseology in case somebody was listening.

“Read you, Robo.”

“Lookin’ good, keep it coming.”

Delight liked to fly his approach half a ball high. If he began to settle in close, he could catch it without a fistful of power, and it worked. He added a little power and the meatball stabilized nicely in the center. As his wheels impacted the deck he crammed on full throttle in case of a bolter — and was thrown against his straps as the hook snagged the four wire.

Did it! he exulted. He retarded throttle, tapped his brakes, and raised the hook. Up ahead a yellow-shirted crewman was into his manic arm-waving routine, gesturing Hawk One to the elevator.

Behind Delight, Psycho boltered, shoved up the throttle, and went around. Ozzie snagged the two wire; Liz flew a near-perfect OK-3. Thaler trapped the three wire on his next pass.

The ordies began loading weapons on the hangar deck.

Nineteen Face of a Stranger

Zack Delight stood at the head of the ready room with the doors closed and guards posted outside. The passageways on either side were blocked with plastic tape, forcing anyone transiting the area to detour around the area.

Delight looked over his bobtailed “squadron” seated in the first row: Ostrewski, Thaler, and Vespa, plus Robbins the LSO. Wei and Hu sat in the second row. On the board behind him was an overhead view of Penang Princess, carefully drawn to scale.

Delight mussed his graying hair and grinned to himself. “Never thought I’d be in a ready room again, wearing Nomex and briefing a strike with live ordnance against a real target.”

“Neither did we,” exclaimed Ozzie. He winked at Liz, who smiled back.

“I never thought I’d brief a strike against a real target at all,” she added.

“Okay, folks. Here we go.” Delight’s face seemingly morphed before his tiny audience, passing in one heartbeat from peace to war. Liz felt a tiny thrill somewhere deep inside her. She realized she was seeing a man she had never met before.

Delight quickly passed through the basics: launch, rendezvous, and the route outbound. Then he addressed communications.

“You have your UHF and VHF frequencies, but we need to run this thing under total EmCom if at all possible. If you do have to transmit, no names or call signs on the radio — no Zack or Pure or Ozzie. We are Papa Flight, for ‘Pure.’ I’m Dash One, Ozzie’s Dash Three and so on. The backseaters are Two Bravo and Four Bravo. The helos are Hotel One and Two.

“If anybody has to abort, keep off the radio. That’s only for no-shit emergencies. Just rock your wings and break off. We’d rather not bring live ordnance back aboard, but if you can’t find a safe place to jettison your bombs, just be damn sure they’re safed. If possible, dog overhead the ship until everybody else is back aboard.” He paused. “Any questions?”

Robbins waved a hand. “Zack, let’s play Oh shit, like we talked before.”

“Right.” Peters looked from Robbins back to the front-row aviators. “Over the past couple of days, Terry and Rob and I discussed some of the things that might go wrong. For instance, suppose the guys on that ship know we’re coming. Maybe they’ll have SAMs or even Triple A. Well, two A-4s will have flare pods and chaff dispensers, and there’s no need to conserve them.”

Ostrewski piped up. “What if the Penang doesn’t show up on time? Or we can’t find her?”

“Well, in that case our part is over. We return to the boat or land at El Toro. You’ll have to recover ashore if you get a hung bomb.”

Robbins spoke again. “You want to discuss SAR at this point?”

“Coming to that, Robo.” Delight leaned on the rostrum, checking his notes. He picked up the paper and extended it to arm’s length, ignoring chuckles from the other pilots. “If anybody has to make a controlled ejection, try to get as close to the carrier as possible. We have two helos aboard, but only one is fully equipped for rescues, so be aware that we need to keep that one nearby as plane guard.”

Thaler waved a pen. “Since the Boorda’s in the area, what about diverting to land on her?”

Scooter shot a glance at Psycho. “That’s right, I forgot. I have a Pensacola classmate aboard, flying Hornets.” Vespa’s tone told the males that there was probably little love lost between the two women. Ostrewski, who had met slender, blond Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Jensen—“Jen-Jen” the ice princess and admiral’s daughter — knew that Vespa resented her rival’s influence in getting a coveted fleet assignment.

Delight shook his head at Thaler. “Nope, not unless there’s something entirely unexpected. We’d rather you eject and write off a jet rather than show the U.S. Navy what we’re doing.”

With no further questions, Delight turned back to the board. “Now, here’s the crunch. When we positively ID the target, we’ll conduct a dualaxis attack with roll in from about twelve thousand feet. Put 112 mils on your sight, and include that in your precombat check. I recommend that you pickle no lower than forty-five hundred feet. Like we practiced at Gila Bend: a five-G pull gets you level by three thousand feet.

“I’ll take Psycho in from the bow. That’s the best way to attack a ship because it forces you to get steep, and we’ll be making sixty-degree dives. By attacking along the fore and aft axis of the target, we have a better chance of getting hits with shorts and overs.” He jotted pinpoints along the deck of the Princess with his Magic Marker, indicating random hits.

“Ozzie, you and Liz will pull around to the stern. If there’s no opposition, wait until you’ve seen the result of our attack. The fuzes are one-tenth of a second delay, but there’ll still be smoke and probably flames. Otherwise, time your roll-in so you’re down the chute as we’re pulling off.” He scrawled two arrows breaking to port from their attack.

“Now, if there’s opposition — either SAMs or Triple A — Psycho and I will try to strafe, time permitting. I’ll tell you what I’m doing. If we do this right, it’ll be the only radio call of the whole mission, because we want to stay zip-lip from startup to attack.” He scanned the audience, emphasizing his words with his tone.

“When I roll in, I’ll start popping flares whether there’s any shooting or not. Ozzie and I in the A-4Fs both have enough flares in our pods to cover this short an attack.

“Mr. Wei, Mr. Hu.” The two Chinese sat attentively upright in their seats. “You can help your front-seaters by keeping your heads moving the whole time. Let them know if you see anything unusual. When the attack starts, your video cameras need to stay on the target as long as possible. It may be the best damage assessment we get for a while.”

“Except for Eyewitness News,” Ozzie ventured.

Wei raised his hand from the second row. “Yes, sir,” Zack responded.

“Mr. Delight, perhaps you should describe the return to port.”

“I was just coming to that. As soon as we’re back aboard, all ATA personnel will jump in both helos and we’ll be flown to a vacant lot near Tustin. Two or three cars will be waiting there, and we’ll return to El Toro. From that point on, we don’t know nothin’.” He looked around the room again, noting each flier’s face. The Chinese were impassive, whether from temperament or familial trait he could not guess. Robbins was completely relaxed, a professional “waver” waiting to do his job. Ozzie fidgeted slightly; Delight attributed it to excess energy. As for Liz Vespa — well, she was smiling.

Twenty Been There, Done That

Terry Peters stepped into the ready room, unexpected and unannounced. Liz Vespa saw him first. Partly from impulse, partly from abiding respect, she reverted to naval custom. “Captain on deck! Atten-hut!”

Almost in unison the green-clad aviators shot to their feet. Wei and Hu, untutored in such things, followed the example.

Peters felt a warm rush inside him — something close to love. “Thank you, gent … ah, lady and gentlemen. Please be seated.”

Striding to the front of the room, he collected his thoughts. A short speech is a good speech, he told himself. He exhaled, wet his lips, and began speaking. “I just wanted to say how proud I am of you guys — all of you. When we started this project, I had no more of an idea how it would turn out than anyone else. Now that it’s about to end, and considering what’s at stake, well …” He blinked away something and shook his head. “ … I wouldn’t be anywhere else on earth today, or with any other people.”

“Neither would we, pard.” Delight’s eyes were beginning to mist over, too.

“Damn straight,” added Robbins.

“Well,” Peters concluded, “I’d better get back to the bridge. But first I want to wish good hunting to everyone here.” He trooped the line, warmly shaking the hands of his friends and colleagues, squeezing Liz in a bear hug, and solemnly greeting Wei and Hu. Then he stepped back three paces, standing erect. “This isn’t regulation the way we were brought up, but this ship is in our navy, isn’t it?” Peters brought his heels together and whipped his right hand to the brim of his ball cap in a slicing arc that might have left a vacuum in its wake. His aviators returned the gesture for the first time in their lives, as it was contrary to U.S. Navy practice when uncovered. Then he was gone.

Eric Thaler began zipping his torso harness and survival vest while Robbins and Hu helped Wei with the unfamiliar garments. Ostrewski caught Vespa’s attention and motioned to the far corner in the back of the compartment.

“How do you feel, Liz?”

She arched her eyebrows. Now he thinks I’m going to wimp out! “I’m fine, Ozzie. Just fine. Why?”

He glanced away from her and saw Delight’s head turned toward them. Equally quickly, Delight averted his gaze. Like Ward Bond in The Searchers watching John Wayne and his sister-in-law, Ostrewski thought.

“Well, it’s just that this is the only combat mission we’ll ever fly together …” His reticence finally melted in a rush as he heard himself say, “Ah, hell, Liz.” He wrapped his arms around her, awkwardly pulling their bodies together despite the bulky flight gear. Her arms encircled his neck, compressing the collar of his flotation device.

“Michael …”

They kissed one another with a tender aggressiveness that trod the neutral zone between the foundation of friendship and the dawning of desire. It lasted an eternal four seconds.

“Now hear this! Pilots, man your planes.”

The squawk box on the bulkhead repeated the ritual command, focusing aviators’ attention and shattering peaceful thoughts.

Ostrewski pulled back, locking eyes with Vespa. “I love Maria, Liz. I’m going to spend my life with her. But I needed to do that, especially today.”

She patted the front of his vest. “So did I, Michael.”

He managed a laugh. “Okay — been there, done that.”

“Good,” she added. “Now, let’s sink us a ship.”

The pilots emerged from the base of the island and strode onto the flight deck. Wearing helmets with visors lowered, they were unidentifiable to anyone who did not know them well.

As the aircrew approached the yellow boarding ladders on four Skyhawks, each of the fliers paused to look at the thousand-pound bombs beneath each wing. Delight touched a kiss to one of his; Vespa ran a loving hand along the ablative surface of hers. Plane captains and ordnancemen scrambled with last-minute checks as catapult crews stood by.

Lowering himself into the blue-and-white A-4F now called Papa One, Delight glanced up at the bridge. He saw Terry Peters’s face in one of the windows and perceived a smart wave. Delight tossed a nonregulation salute to the former deep-draft skipper who had missed his chance to drive a flat-roofed bird farm. Twisting slightly to his right, Zack saw the diamond-design Foxtrot flag snapping from its halyard, indicating flight operations under way. Higher up the mast, appearing in stark contrast to the striped banner he was accustomed to seeing, flew the jolly roger. The leering white skull with crossed leg bones on the black field sent an electric thrill through his body. Below it, expressing no less heartfelt a sentiment, was the light blue ensign of the Tailhook Association.

Zack Delight clasped his hands over his head in a gesture of undiluted rapture. At fifty-nine years of age, he knew that he would never again feel as good as this day and this hour. He felt gleefully giddy as his mind defaulted to the frontier tales of his Southwest youth. Ya-ta hay! he exulted. It is a good day to die!

Twenty-one The Oscar Sierra Factor

The beeper sounded on Peters’s cell phone, pulling him back from the disappearing A-4s that had been the focus of his existence. He pulled the handset from the Velcro pouch on his belt, hit the button, and said, “Peters.”

“Terry, thank God!” Jane was almost breathless.

“Honey, what is it?”

“Terry, I don’t know how, but the Chinese here know what you’re doing! They’ve roped off their hangar and they’re rounding up people and holding them inside.” She paused to inhale. “There’s been some shooting, and I saw two bodies on the ground. I think they were security guards.”

Peters slid off the captain’s chair. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m okay. So’s Carol and everyone else I’ve seen.”

“Jane, where are you?” He waited three seconds. “Jane!”

“I’m, ah, I don’t think I should say over the phone, darling. We’re safe for now, and we’re keeping out of sight. But they’re guarding the parking lot.”

“Have you called the police?”

“No, I called you first.”

“Jane, honey, there’s nothing I can …”

“God damn it, Terry! Listen to me!” The venom in her voice silenced him like a piano smashing a Walkman. “Are you listening?”

“Yes.” His voice was muted.

“One of the ordnancemen is with us, Ron. He saw the Chinese loading ammunition in two A-4s, and we heard them taxi out.”

“Oh, no …”

“There’s more.”

“They’re arming more A-4s?”

“No, honey.” She inhaled. “The Russians kept the Flankers fueled, and Ron said they were hanging missiles on the rails.”

Peters’s eyes widened, saucerlike. “Call me again in ten minutes.” He broke the connection, belatedly regretting not asking about Skip Ottmann, about the security men who might be dead — and not telling her that he loved her. But now, sorting priorities, he flipped the switch to the communications division.

“Radio, this is the captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call Papa Flight and tell them at least two A-4s are launching from El Toro with live ammo. Our people are to assume they’re hostile. Get an acknowledgment — to hell with EmCon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wait, there’s more. Tell them … tell them the Flankers are spooling up, too. And they’re armed with missiles.”

“Yes, sir!”

Peters sat back in his chair, sorting through the phone numbers stored in his Powerbook. He scrolled down the listings until he reached NavAirPac, then punched in the number.

It was forty seconds before he got a tone, and the phone rang four times before the watch stander finally answered. “GoodmorningComNavAirPacPettyOfficerStroudspeakingthisisanonsecurelinemayIhelpyou?” Peters barely understood the rapid-fire babble that seemed mandatory in the modern Navy. He wanted to scream, “Shut up, you bitch!” Instead, he did a fast three count.

“This is Captain Peters, commanding the aircraft carrier Santa Cruz, steaming off Long Beach. I am declaring an emergency and I need to speak with Admiral Paulson. Right now.”

Petty Officer Stroud seemed taken aback; she had never heard of USS Santa Cruz and had no idea of the protocol involved in a ship declaring an emergency. “Sir, the admiral’s at a conference.”

“Then I’ll speak to the senior watch officer. Immediately.”

“Sir, what shall I say is the nature of the emergency?”

“Listen to me, Petty Officer! You have about twenty minutes before a backpack ‘nuke’ detonates under your rosy red ass. Now, what part of ‘nuke’ don’t you understand?”

“Lieutenant Commander Paglia. What is your emergency, sir?”

“This is Terry Peters. I’m in command of the Santa Cruz, conducting CarQuals off Long Beach. Listen carefully, son.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I have four A-4s airborne with live ordnance, operating under orders from the national command authority. Their mission is to sink a Malaysian freighter carrying nuclear weapons into this country.” He paused for effect. “Do you understand, Commander?”

Peters could almost hear Anthony Paglia swallow hard. “Yes, sir. Ah, may I request verification …”

“Commander, I have no verification. And there’s no time for you to call the White House and get it. Is there?”

“Well, I suppose …”

“Fine. Here’s the situation. My flight is about to be intercepted by two Chinese-flown A-4s trying to prevent us from sinking the Penang. Okay? That’s not the problem — my guys can take care of themselves. But the Russians who’re here to CarQual their Flankers are loading missiles at El Toro this minute.”

“Ho-ly …”

“Right. So here’s what I need you to do, Commander. I assume there’s an alert flight on the pad at Miramar.” Please tell me there is! “I need you to scramble them, get ’em up here at the speed of heat, and contact my mission commander on Baker Channel. He answers to Papa One. Your flight can talk to me on 308.2. Tell your people that under no circumstance are they to shoot a Skyhawk. Any Flanker — I repeat, any Flanker in the air or on the ground at El Toro is a legitimate target. The ROE is: shoot on sight.”

“Sir, are you authorized to establish rules of engagement?”

Peters did not even blink. “Absolutely. Definitely. You can check with CNO. But for now, you have your orders, Commander Paglia. Acknowledge.”

“Uh, yessir.”

“Fine. Call me back as soon as you know about the Hornets.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Robbins appeared at Peters’s side. “How bad, Terry?”

“The Oscar Sierra Factor just kicked into afterburner.”

A low whistle escaped the LSO’s lips. “What else can we do?”

Peters slumped into his swivel chair. “Wait.”

“What do you think about Miramar? Will they scramble or will that O—4 go through channels?”

Peters tipped back his cap, biting his lip. “I don’t know, Rob. He seemed like a good kid, but …”

“But his career’s on the line in a situation that’s not covered in the Watch Officer’s Guide.” Robbins folded his arms, leaning against the thick glass overlooking the flight deck. “And initiative’s been bred out of the system. The ‘zero defect’ mentality just stifles risk taking, doesn’t it?”

Peters closed his eyes. “It doesn’t get this way under good leadership.”

“Yeah,” Robbins replied, “and look who’s been ‘leading’ us recently.” He etched quote marks in the air with both hands.

“Bridge, Radio.”

Peters leapt to the console. “Captain speaking.”

“Captain, we just heard from Papa One.”

“Yes?”

“Sir, they can’t find the target.”

Twenty-two An All-Up Round

In Papa One, Zack Delight ran his precombat checklist, still savoring the memory of the kick in the small of the back as the catapult threw him off the deck, accelerating the A-4 from zero to 120 knots in three seconds. He confirmed the mil setting on his sight, ensured that his master arm switch was off, and scanned his gauges in one practiced sweep of his eyes. He was, as he liked to say, an all-up round.

Delight raised his right leg and withdrew the chart. After nearly a century of powered flight, the human thigh remained the best map holder yet invented.

The Los Angeles area navigation chart was folded to show Penang Princess’s most likely location, given her expected arrival time. Delight had bounded the search sector in red crayon — a twenty-mile-by-ten-mile rectangle beginning five miles offshore. At two thousand feet altitude, he could see fifty-five miles in any direction, haze and smog permitting.

Delight glanced down again, taking in the multitude of ships and vessels approaching or departing the Middle Breakwater. Even allowing for the possibility that her company’s green hull and beige deck had been repainted, none of the aged thirty-thousand-ton freighters matched his target’s configuration.

With a rising flush of ambivalence, Zachary Delight felt frustrated and proud. I’m like Wade McClusky at Midway, he thought. I’ve got Heinemann-designed airplanes at my back, looking for a target that’s not at the briefed intercept point. The kinship he felt with the Enterprise air group commander nearly sixty years before was diluted by the growing doubt that the mission could be accomplished — and bandits were inbound.

He made a decision and keyed his mike. “Papa Three, look north and west of the track. I’ll swing south and west.”

“Roger.” Ozzie’s voice was crisp, professional. He eased into a right bank, leading Liz Vespa parallel to the coast.

The cell phone buzzed and Peters whipped it out of the pouch. “Talk to me!” Whoever you are!

“Terry, it’s Jane.”

“You okay?”

His wife’s response was delayed a fraction longer than he had grown to expect in twenty-nine years. He had time to wonder if he had hurt her feelings with his abrupt tone.

“We’re still all right. I wanted to tell you that Skip’s been on the phone to Washington. He called the Pentagon — he has a cell phone — and now he’s talking to somebody at NavAir.”

“Rocky Rhode?”

“I don’t know, honey. It’s … awful … confusing …”

“What about the Flankers?”

“What?”

Peters closed his eyes, forcing composure upon his growing anger and frustration. “Jane … honey … I asked, what about the Flankers?”

There was no reply. Peters lowered the handset from his ear to look at it, willing the inanimate thing to explain itself. He raised it again and spoke slowly, clearly. “Jane, this is Terry. Do you hear me?”

The line clicked twice and went dead.

Delight and Thaler completed their sweep down the east side of the search area, again coming up empty. Zack’s cockpit scan took in his fuel state: twenty-four hundred pounds. Enough for a little while, he thought. Then we’ll have to abort. At his altitude, necessary to ID the target, fuel was going fast.

Decision time, Delight realized. Either we continue trolling this area or we look elsewhere. He waggled his wings, signaling Eric Thaler that they were heading east to hunt along the coast. He motioned for Psycho to spread out, expanding the visual limits of their horizon.

“Do you know any satisfying profanity?”

Robbins wondered if Terry Peters would recognize Walter Brennan’s line from Task Force. The LSO sought any method of easing his friend’s gnawing concern about his wife, if only for a few seconds.

“Lots of profanity, Rob. None satisfying.” Peters bit his thumbnail and stared northward, as if trying to see inland thirty miles to El Toro from fifteen miles at sea. The uncertainty, the concern, the growing fear all eroded his cultivated composure. Aviator cool was one thing — the modulated voice during an in-flight fire or engine failure. Standing here, feeling 280,000 horsepower throbbing impotently beneath his feet, was an appallingly new experience. He paced a few steps back and forth, hardly noticing that he forced Odegaard and Mei out of the way.

“Why the hell haven’t we heard from AirPac or Miramar?”

“I don’t know, Terry. Shall I give ’em a call?”

Peters spun on one heel, his face eerily alight. “I should’ve thought of it before, Rob! The Chinese A-4s!”

Robbins shook his head. “What about ’em?”

“They probably know where the Penang is! So would the Flankers. If ATC …”

“I’m gone!” Robbins seemed to vaporize as he exited the bridge.

“Captain?” Odegaard stood near the helmsman, wearing a querulous expression.

“I should’ve thought of it before!” Peters smiled for the first time in an ephemeral eternity. “If air traffic control can break out those A-4s and track them, it’ll tell us where the target is!”

The watch officer nodded. “Mr. Robbins is talking to ATC?”

“No, Mr. Odegaard. I suspect he’s screaming at them.”

Twenty-three Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Peters, what the hell is going on out there?”

Nice to hear from you, too, Rocky. “I don’t have much time, Admiral. Tell me what you know and what you can do to help.”

A continent away, Rear Admiral Allen Rhode nearly sputtered at the flippancy from a retired captain. Instead, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations gripped the phone harder and fought to control his anger. “Mr. Lieu just called to tell me that Santa Cruz has been taken over by a bunch of Chinese dissidents, that they’re going to bomb merchant vessels, and you’re helping them!”

Peters almost gasped. So Lieu’s behind it! Why didn’t Wei tell us?

Rhode was back inside Peters’s ear. “Then Skip Ottmann called. He says you and Wei are going to sink a Malaysian ship with nukes, that he’s trapped with your wife at El Toro, that A-4s are taking off, and the goddam Russians are loading goddamn AA-11s on their goddamn Flankers!”

“Okay, Admiral. You got the picture, right? Lieu’s the fly in the ointment, and Wei’s with us. Now, what’re you doing to keep those Flankers off my guys? Hell, they’re probably gear up by now.”

Rhode’s voice came back more modulated. “Yeah. I heard from AirPac that you need a scramble from Miramar.”

“Well?” So Rob called it. Paglia’s a wimp.

“Terry, the Marines don’t maintain an alert. At best it’d take them a half hour to upload ordnance. I’ve given the order, but this’ll be over by then.”

Peters’s heart sank. Maybe Paglia’s not such a wimp. “What help can you get us, then?”

Rhode paused, and Peters uncharitably imagined N-88 calculating the odds of how best to play the hand. “Listen: the Boorda’s headed for the SoCal Operating Area. Most of the air wing just flew aboard from Lemoore; they deploy in two days.”

Peters’s mind raced. The new Nimitz-class CVN with Air Wing 18 would be even closer than MCAS Miramar. “A really tactical guy like Baccardi Riccardi might have a couple of Toms or Hornets on Alert Five.”

“Hook, I already made the call. I don’t know their deck status, but they’ll be talking to you directly. It’s best if I stay out of the loop, you know …”

Yeah, I know, Rocky. If anything goes wrong … “Thanks. I’ll try to keep you informed.” Peters hung up, then turned to the speaker. “Radio, this is Peters.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Rob, tell me something.”

Robbins’s voice shot back. “Terry, I’m talking to ATC at LAX. They’re working the problem, but I think they’re more concerned with diverting commercial traffic than finding our bogeys.”

“Any joy at all?”

“They had a couple low-level skin paints out around Tustin but nothing definite. The A-4s aren’t squawking, of course.”

Peters bit his lip. The Chinese interceptors naturally would stay low to evade radar while avoiding transponder identification. “Rob, we need a Hawkeye or another AWACS — something that can break a bogey out of the ground clutter. I need to talk to Boorda.”

“Rog, boss. I’ll keep after the feds.”

Peters straightened up, and Odegaard approached him. “Excuse me, Captain. I was just wondering — couldn’t our own radar pick up the Chinese?”

“Not over land — too much background clutter. Over water, maybe, depending on their altitude and distance. Otherwise …”

“Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz. This is USS Boorda.” The power of the transmission was such that Mei turned down the volume on the bridge console.

Peters answered in person, speaking bridge to bridge. “Lima Delta, this is Santa Cruz, Captain Peters speaking.” He used the CVN’s generic call sign to demonstrate his knowledge and authority. “Good thing we worked with these guys at Fallon,” he explained to Odegaard and Mei.

“Ah, yeah, Terry. This is Ben Spurlock. Listen, I’m putting you through to CAG Riccardi in strike ops. Call sign Chainsaw. You copy?”

Peters grinned. Captain Spurlock had been Lieutenant Commander “Spurs” Spurlock in Peters’s air wing. “Hey, Ben. Sure thing, put Baccardi through.”

“ … ardi here, Terry. You read me?”

“Affirmative, Chainsaw. I guess you know our situation?”

“I understand you have four A-4s on a SinkEx for a Malaysian freighter hauling nukes, that a couple of Chinese A-4s are looking for them, and one or two Flankers are involved. Right?”

“That’s right. As yet we haven’t found the target, Tony. Now, I’m not worried about the Chinese A-4s ’cause that’ll be a straight-out gunfight that my guys will win. But the Flankers …”

“Concur. They’re the threat. Terry, I’m launching two Hornets right now with a couple Toms several minutes behind them. I’m also trying to get an E-2 up, but that’ll take longer. Probably too long.”

“That’s okay, CAG. Just be sure they know that they shouldn’t shoot any A-4s. The odds are seventy-five percent that they’re friendly.”

“Consider it done. Chainsaw, out.”

Peters turned to Odegaard and Mei. “At least there’s something going right. Now if …”

“Bridge, Radio.” It was Robbins’s voice.

“Rob, what’ve you got?”

“LA Center has been in touch with Dougherty Field at Long Beach. Between them they’ve got a plot on two low-level fast movers headed offshore.”

Peters’s eyes widened. “Send it!”

Twenty-four Bogies

“Papa One, this is Santa Cruz. Over.”

Delight’s pulse spiked. God, I hope they have something for us. “Papa One here. Go.”

“Pure, this is Rob. Listen, amigo, LAX and Long Beach both got fixes on two low-level fast movers. They’re feet wet at Anaheim Bay.”

Delight did the geometry in his head. From El Toro, the Chinese Skyhawks had to overfly the Seal Beach naval weapons station and the wildlife refuge. They’ll get FAA violations fershure, Delight mused. He pressed the mike button. “Roger, Robo. I’m northbound.” He paused for two seconds. “Break-break. Papa Three from Lead. Over.”

“I heard it, Lead.” Ostrewski’s voice came through crisp and clear. “We’re inbound.”

“Papa Lead, Robo here again. The bogies are climbing, orbiting the area around Island Chaffee. Your signal is Gate.”

“Roger.” Delight glanced over at Thaler, nodded briskly, and shoved the throttle almost to the stop—“through the gate” as it was known in the propeller era. Almost immediately Thaler called, “Lead, gimme a percent.” Delight nudged off a skosh of throttle to allow his wingman to keep up.

In a fast climb, Delight led his section toward one of the four small islands in San Pedro Bay. He marveled that Penang Princess could have come so far so soon, apparently to drop anchor virtually within sight of the pier from which Santa Cruz had sailed the night before. Subconsciously checking his A-4’s vital signs, he began thinking ahead in time and space.

Let’s see … if they’re climbing, it’s because they want to intercept us before we roll in. They’ll be waiting at twelve thousand feet or higher, probably a little south of the ship. He punched the button again. “Papa Three, Lead.”

“Three here.”

“I’m going in high, Oz. If you see we’re engaged, ingress below the fight. We’ll buy you some time.”

“Three copies. Out.”

On the bridge of his hijacked aircraft carrier, Captain Terry Peters rubbed his chin, staring north into the Los Angeles Basin’s perennial smog and haze. Emotionally he was split between his friends, airborne and about to engage in an old-fashioned gunfight and dive-bombing attack, and his wife, who was — what? He began allowing himself to consider the possibility that he might no longer have a wife.

“Captain?” Odegaard was at his side.

Peters was startled by the intrusion. He visibly flinched. “Yes?”

“Well, sir, Mr. Mei and I were looking at the chart. The only way the Princess could have got this far north was if she’d been running about three or four hours ahead of schedule. I mean, there wasn’t a specific arrival time, but it was a pretty narrow window if they were going to off-load as planned.”

Peters felt himself growing short-tempered. “Yeah. So what’s your point?”

“Well, sir, presumably the Chinese didn’t have time to divert the freighter because they only learned about us this morning. And they couldn’t follow their original plan because they know that their leased facility at Long Beach is compromised. But here they are, still one step ahead of us. That means, either they intentionally built this fudge factor into the equation, or …”

“Or what?”

“Or they planned to transfer the nukes to other boats all along.”

Peters shook his head as if avoiding a nettlesome insect. “What are you saying?”

Mei stepped forward. “Captain, we don’t know how long the Princess has been offshore. It is possible the backpacks are not aboard her anymore.”

Peters slumped in his chair, chewing on his thumbnail, pondering the prospects of his watch officers’ assessment. He felt that he should have considered the likelihood himself, and he knew why he had not. Jane, where are you?

Finally, he shook his head. “Negative, I don’t think so. Otherwise, there’d be no reason to scramble the A-4s and cap the freighter. We’ll know more once Zack gets a visual.”

Odegaard was dubious enough to press his point. “Skipper, I think we’re obliged to notify the Coast Guard or the harbor patrol. At least they could board the Princess and …”

Peters shot a laser glance at Odegaard. “No, absolutely not! If the nukes are still aboard, the crew is bound to resist, and there’ll be casualties. And if there’s a patrol craft alongside, more innocent people will get killed. No, Mr. Odegaard. We have to play it out.”

Odegaard’s eyes widened. “You mean, you’d order the attack even with a Coast Guard vessel right there?”

“I mean that Zack Delight and Ozzie Ostrewski will hit their target unless I call them off. And I won’t do that.”

“Captain Peters, I wish to object. I still think we have options to …”

“Noted. Log it, and I’ll sign it. You too, Mr. Mei.”

The Chinese officer. exchanged glances with his American counterpart. “You mean, Captain, you are accepting full responsibility?”

“It goes with the territory, son.”

Peters swung his chair outboard, slightly surprised to find that he cared very little about what happened to Penang Princess. Jane’s face came to him at the same time as Robbins’s voice.

“Terry, I’m still in Radio. I’m hitting Baker Channel.”

Psycho Thaler’s voice was high-pitched in alarm: “Bogies, one o’clock high!”

Twenty-five Bandits

Zack Delight had seconds to decide his tactics. Psycho’s call told him all he needed to know — the Chinese had altitude on him. He could split the section, relying on his A-4F’s superior performance to hold off the hostile Juliets while Thaler bombed, but Delight was the one with flares to deceive heat-seeking SAMs. Or he and Thaler could jettison the two tons of weight penalty they each carried, shoot it out with the bandits, and buy time for Ostrewski and Vespa. Four Mark 83s could sink the ship, but six or eight offered far better prospects. Then there were the Flankers to consider …

I’ll never get this chance again, he realized. A pure guts and gunfight; no radar or missiles. “Two, I’m engaging. ID the target and attack.” Delight quickly unlocked the drum on his gunsight, dialed in thirty mils, and locked the lever. At one thousand feet range his sight reticle now subtended thirty feet, slightly more than the wingspan of an A-4. He double-checked his armament switches even as Thaler acknowledged, “Dash Two is in.”

Two and a half miles below, riding at anchor off Island Chaffee, was a dark-hulled freighter with light-colored deck and upper surfaces. But Delight’s attention was focused on the two Skyhawks slanting toward him from his right front. He resolved to keep his bombs as long as possible, hoping that Psycho could drop, rejoin, and even the odds.

The lead bandit tripped off a short burst of 20mm rounds, accurate in elevation but wide to the right. Delight two-blocked the throttle, resisting the temptation to squeeze off a burst in reply, and wrapped the little Douglas into a shuddering, high-G turn as the aggressor pulled off high and left.

Delight felt an emotional shiver when his opponent zoom-climbed for the perch. It was an unwelcome message: This guy wants an energy fight; I can’t match him with my current airspeed. He glimpsed the Chinese wingman rolling over and diving after Papa Two. Well, I can’t go vertical with my guy; I’ll go down.

Delight retarded the throttle and rolled over. Through the top of his canopy he caught a view of Thaler’s TA-4J diving toward the ship. As Delight pulled his nose through, aligning his illuminated sight with the target, he saw one, then two lights streak upward, corkscrewing awkwardly. “Yeah!” he exulted. It’s gotta be the Princess all right!

The SA-7s shot almost vertically from the stern. One wobbled, perhaps uncertain which heat source to home on, and belatedly tried to correct back toward Papa Two. By then, Thaler was down the chute, tracking for the five seconds he needed. Both bombs came off the hardpoints, stabilized, and accelerated toward the ship.

The second man-portable SAM passed twenty feet beneath Psycho Thaler’s aircraft before detonating.

Delight saw the white smoke of detonation, noted Papa Two wobble in its dive and begin a shallow pullout. A human noise chirped in Delight’s earphones — something unintelligible. The Chinese A-4- “Gomer Two”—had veered away from the two SAMs, giving Thaler some maneuvering room. However, Gomer One — the intelligent bastard somewhere above and behind Delight — was positioned to kill one or both Americans.

Delight knew he was poorly placed to get hits. His roll-in after avoiding the Chinese leader was too far astern for a high-angle attack, and his sight was calibrated for air-to-air. He quickly reset 112 mils with Stations Two and Four selected. Recognizing he was shallow in his dive, he held half a diameter high, hit the red “pickle,” felt the Mark 83s leave the racks, then punched the flare button four times. Beneath Station Five, outboard on his starboard wing, four magnesium flares arced downward, silent sirens competing for the attention of the next SA-7s.

Two blows rocked the A-4, then another. Without needing to look, Delight knew that Gomer One was in range and gunning. The Marine kicked right rudder, slewed to starboard, and pulled the stick into his lap. His left hand shoved up the power and began accelerating through 430 knots.

Now long-forgotten, Thaler’s two half-ton bombs smashed into Penang Princess just aft of amidships. One punched through the deck, exploding two compartments down. The other hit slightly to port, dishing in three-eighths-inch steel plates and destroying a speedboat lashed alongside. The splintered Chris Craft, minus four feet of its bow, flooded and sank as far as its lines permitted.

Delight’s bombs struck thirty feet aft of the stern. One was a dud, victim of fuze failure. The other strewed water and steel splinters in a wide radius, adding to the confusion aboard the Malaysian vessel.

Zack pulled off target, coming nose level at three thousand feet, and looked left. Gomer Two was turning in behind Thaler, whose TA-4J was streaming something white — smoke or fuel. Briefly Delight wondered what Mr. Wei must be thinking in the rear cockpit. Then the former Marine was coordinating his controls, feeling some slack in the rudder, cutting the corner on Gomer Two and rotating his sight drum back to thirty. He knew that Gomer One was still back there, but Papa Two needed help.

“Papa One, this is Three. We’re rolling in hot.”

Thank you, God! Delight forced himself to keep the hostile TA-4 padlocked as Island Freeman careened into view. With Ozzie and Liz now attacking, Gomer One probably would let Delight go, trying to disrupt the greatest threat to the Princess.

Probably.

Delight keyed his mike. “Psycho, come right and drag ’im for me.”

There was no reply, but Papa Two reversed from left to right, turning northerly toward Island White and the Belmont Pier. Gomer Two fired and missed astern, big 20mm slugs churning the water into tall geysers as the fight descended through one thousand feet. He underdeflected! Delight exulted.

The Chinese pilot, either unaware of his peril or boldly ignoring it, followed the turn. Delight, twelve hundred feet back and three hundred feet higher, knew the Gomer would pull deflection on Thaler and Wei after another thirty degrees of turn. But as the hostile Skyhawk crossed his nose and the deflection angle narrowed to nearly zero, Delight nudged back his stick, set the pipper one mil over the canopy, and pressed the trigger.

Beneath his feet, Delight felt the twin Colts pounding out three-quarter-inch-diameter shells at a combined rate of thirty-two per second. He kept the trigger depressed for two seconds, expending one-third of his ammunition.

Gomer Two absorbed fifteen rounds across the top of the fuselage and wings. Delight saw shattered canopy glass glinting briefly in the sun, followed by gouges of aluminum, streams of fuel, and just plain junk whipping in the slipstream. The little jet rolled right, dropped its nose, and went straight in.

Zachary Delight pulled up, savoring the dirty brown-white geyser marking his kill, and screamed an atavistic shout of warrior joy that pealed off Valhalla’s golden dome.

At least that was how he felt at that exact moment.

A microsecond later he was back in control of himself. He rolled hard right, turning into Gomer One, who had vanished. Leaving the throttle against the stop, he began climbing back toward the likely roll-in point. Delight could do nothing more for Thaler, but still felt an obligation. “Eric, Zack. You better plant that thing.”

“Roger, Zack. Ah … I’m losin’ fuel, but I think I can make the boat.”

“Good luck, pard.”

Climbing back to the east, Delight rolled his port wingtip down for a better view. He was just in time to see two more bombs explode amidships of Penang Princess.

Three seconds later, missile tracks arced out of the haze, passing well above him on a reciprocal course. Then his friend and coauthor was back on the radio. “Papa Flight, be advised. We have Flankers inbound from the east and Hornets from the west.”

Twenty-six Gomer One

“Four, you bomb the ship. I’ll block for you.”

With that, Ozzie Ostrewski rolled over and slanted down from thirteen thousand feet. He already had spotted the hostile TA-4 trying to cut off the bomber’s roll-in point. Confident that Vespa would hit the target, he intended to tie up the Chinese long enough to afford her a clear shot.

Scooter Vespa flipped MASTER ARM, confirmed her sight setting, and nosed over. She forced herself to concentrate on the fundamentals rather than all that had gone wrong. We were going to make a coordinated attack on a moving target miles from here, without enemy interceptors. She came back on the throttle, recalling Zack Delight’s combat motto: No plan survives contact.

The ship was listing slightly to port, with smoke partly obscuring the stern. From a twelve-thousand foot roll-in, Vespa stabilized her TA-4 at 450 knots. She remembered to tell Hu in the rear seat, “Keep the camera going.” She received a grunt of acknowledgment.

Elizabeth Vespa had all the time in the world — ten seconds of time in which to trim out her dive, align the sight with the aim point, and track smoothly to the release point. This is good, she told herself. This is very … very … good. She marveled at how … ordinary … it seemed.

At forty-five hundred feet she thumbed the button.

Ostrewski met Gomer One head on — Ozzie going downhill, Gomer headed up. At six thousand feet they passed, slightly offset, and Ozzie pressed the bomb release. With the fuzing switch on SAFE, both Mark 83s slanted toward the water, ridding Papa Three of unwanted weight and drag.

Ozzie honked back on the stick, using his greater momentum to zoom-climb for the perch. He knew that he had the fight in the bag. His opponent, nose-high with energy bled off from the climb, had nowhere to go. The Chinese pilot’s only move was to bury the nose, accelerate away, and try to evade.

That was exactly what Deng Yaobang decided to do.

Gomer One rolled into a diving port reversal, looking for the best cover available. He saw it less than three miles ahead.

Barely a mile away, Zack Delight saw the developing fight. He keyed his mike. “Papa Three or Four, this is Zack. I’ll take the Gomer. You guys finish the ship.”

Without his bombs, Ostrewski could do no more than shoot holes in Penang Princess’s hull. Frustrated at giving up a gun kill — the universal fighter pilot’s wet dream — he recognized the wisdom of Delight’s call. At least I might split the defenses for Liz’s attack. He reversed course, expending some of his excess energy in a high-speed descent back toward the target.

Delight came hard aport, cutting the corner on Gomer One, who was leaving a 350-knot wake on the water. The hostile Skyhawk flashed across the bow of the Catalina Island cruise ship, drawing appreciative responses and Kodak Moments from the passengers. Delight was six seconds back.

Deng banked fifteen degrees left to thread his way through the channel between the Downtown Marina to starboard and Queen Mary to port. Leaving a rooster tail behind him, he flew under Queensway Bridge, popped up long enough to clear the 710 exit, Anaheim Street and Pacific Coast Highway bridges, then bunted his nose down toward the Los Angeles River.

Delight, with his teeth into his former tormenter, followed Deng beneath the Queensway Bridge without thinking about it. Only when the hostile Skyhawk popped up to clear the next three spans did it really occur to him what he had done. Willow Street, Wardlow, and the 405 all disappeared below their white bellies at six and a half miles per minute.

Delight tried to put the TA-4’s tailpipe in his reticle. Down low, with the river channel providing a natural barrier, he thought it might be safe to shoot, but Gomer One’s jet wash made steady aiming almost impossible. Even within the confines of the flood-control channel, Delight knew there would be misses and ricochets. Besides, he told himself, if I do hose the sumbitch, he’s likely to crash on the Long Beach Freeway. Route 710 North lay an eighth of a mile off their port wingtips.

As if reading Delight’s mind, Deng abruptly laid a hard right at the 710/91 interchange. Scooting along the Artesia Freeway, he quickly departed North Long Beach, entered Bellflower at fifty feet altitude, and felt safer in a residential area. Delight followed.

Liz Vespa felt the thousand-pounders fall away, counted One potato, then began a steady, hard pull. She tensed her abdominal and thigh muscles, straining as six times the force of gravity forced her deep onto the unyielding ejection seat. While her vision narrowed, somehow her hearing improved; she heard Hu’s grunts over the hot mike.

With the horizon seemingly descending to meet her jet’s nose, Vespa extended her left arm, locking the elbow. The J52 spooled up from 80 to 100 percent. She regained full vision and scanned the panel. All in the green. Now, where’s the ship?

Vespa kept three G on the aircraft, turning back toward the target so Hu could resume videotaping. Coming parallel to the burning, smoking vessel, the TA-4J was rocked as a white shock wave radiated outward from the hull. One second later the aft sixty feet jackknifed, paused an ephemeral moment, then dropped back in a cascading eruption of smoke, flames, and spray.

Scooter Vespa’s eyes widened behind her visor. “Secondary explosions, Hu! Are you getting this?”

“Yes, miss! Hold this angle.” She thought she heard him laugh. “This is wonderful!” He depressed the zoom button to get a closer view of the conflagration.

Liz shared the laugh. She felt almost giddy. “We have a saying in this country, Mr. Hu.”

“Yes, miss?”

“Film at eleven.”

Delight scanned his instruments. RPM, fuel flow, and tailpipe temperature were in the green, but he felt himself losing ground on Gomer One. He reasoned that the battle damage had torn gouges in his jet’s aluminum skin, imposing a drag penalty. He was down to nine hundred pounds of fuel, and Gomer seemed headed back to El Toro. Nothing I can do there, he thought. Reluctantly, Delight pulled up, briefly wagging his wings in tacit tribute to a bravura low-level performance. As he climbed to a more fuel-efficient altitude, the last he saw of the Juliet was a fast white dart making 400 mph in a 65 zone.

Ozzie called for a joinup; he wanted mutual support in case more bandits arrived. “Papa Four, this is Three. I’ll meet you over Freeman. Angels eight.”

Liz hedged for a moment. “Ah, Four, we’re getting BDA. Please wait one.”

Ostrewski fidgeted on his seat. He understood Vespa’s wish for bomb damage assessment, but the Princess was beyond help. For a moment he wondered about the heat-resistant qualities of bootleg backpack nukes.

From long habit, he turned his head through almost two hundred degrees. Looking upward to his left, he froze for two heartbeats. Coming from seaward was the track of an air-to-air missile streaking inland.

Twenty-seven Light to Moderate

“Missile inbound! Left eleven o’clock!”

“My God! It’s …”

“Tommy, break! Break left!”

The voices on the VHF circuit overlapped in rising octaves and decibels as twelve miles from the burning, sinking Penang Princess, a female section leader screamed at her male wingman. Liz Vespa, hearing the garbled transmissions, fought to make sense of it amid her elation at putting both bombs square amidships.

“Tommy, eject!” The female voice was nearly hysterical now. “My God, oh my God …” The hoarse contralto descended into an audible sob before the thumb slid off the mike button.

Five heartbeats later, the voice was back. “This is Bronco Three-Zero-Four broadcasting on guard. Three Oh Six … exploded. I’m off Palos Verdes. Send a helo!”

Elizabeth Vespa felt a shiver between her shoulder blades. My God … Jen-Jen!

Flying alone in Flanker One at sixteen thousand feet, Igor Gnido had an idea that he was too late. That black smoke roiling off Long Beach looked ominous for the prospects of Penang Princess, and he could only hope that her cargo had been off-loaded. In truth, there had been little chance of making a timely interception.

Furthermore, the R-73M2s and R-77s had necessarily been in deep storage, and it took time to upload the missiles, especially with the Sukhoi factory crew unaccustomed to handling ordnance. Furthermore, Deng and Li obviously had failed to prevent the carrier-based A-4s from attacking.

Gnido glanced again to the south, where the freighter seemed to be burning itself out. He sucked in more oxygen, mentally tipping his hardhat to Miss Scooter. Not long ago he had plans of bedding her; now he might have to kill her. Or maybe it will not be necessary, and I will kill her anyway.

Igor Gnido literally possessed a license to kill. He chuckled at the thought of his diplomatic passport from the Russian government, plus his credentials as a trade representative of the People’s Republic of China. The mirth he felt at his present situation — controlling the airspace over Los Angeles, California — was mixed with contempt for politicians and diplomats who made such a condition possible.

The first American fighter had been ridiculously easy to destroy. The R-77—what NATO called the AAM-AE “Amraamski”—had been fired well within range and performed as advertised. The haze made it difficult to discern the fireball fifteen nautical miles away, but the big Sukhoi’s sophisticated radar clearly showed the southerly target destroyed. Gnido knew that it had to be a Tomcat or Hornet, and from the its unvarying course he wondered if the pilot had been using his radar-warning receiver. Not that it would have mattered very much; R-77 was a fire-and-forget weapon like the U.S. AMRAAM.

Gnido banked into a tight orbit above Terminal Island, awaiting events. He felt confident that the Americans would not return fire as long as he was over land, where aircraft wreckage or missiles would cause casualties and damage on the ground. However, with his lookdown, shoot-down radar, he could easily track anything over water.

To the northwest the radar picture was a cluttered mess. Gnido laughed again at the thought of the panic he must have caused at LAX, where a flock of jetliners was scrambling like a covey of quail. Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to announce the cancellation of Flight 123 owing to occasional Flankers and light-to-moderate missiles in the area. It occurred to him that he could hide in the LAX traffic pattern, essentially holding hostage any commercial traffic still there.

A pity I only have three missiles left, he gloomed. There had been no time to load more.

“Papa Three or Four, this is Lead.”

Ozzie heard the call and replied first. “Zack, this is Oz. Where are you?”

“Ah, I’m halfway to home plate on the zero three five radial. Getting skosh on fuel. How ’bout you?”

“Dash Four and I have seen missile plumes, Zack, and there’s a splash on guard channel. You hear it?”

“Negative. I been kinda busy.” There was a pause while Delight sorted priorities. “Four, you copy?”

“Four here. Go!” Vespa sounded calm, even eager.

“You have a visual on Three?”

“Yes, I’m closing on his four o’clock.”

Delight mentally computed the relative positions of the three Skyhawks. Ostrewski and Vespa would be below and behind him, still offshore. “Okay. Break-break. Santa Cruz, this is Papa One. What dope on Dash Two? Over.”

Moments passed before the watch officer replied. “Ah, Papa One, be advised. Papa Two is aboard with a bent bird. Pilot and backseater are both okay. Your signal is Charlie on arrival.”

“Roger. See you on deck.”

Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Jensen fought to control the palsied trembling of her hands and forearms. For the first time in her naval career she was forced to confront the fact that she was out of her depth, facing a situation that neither seniority nor contacts would alleviate.

That knowledge, combined with the fiery death of her wingman, meant that she was deep-down, bone-chilling scared. Just how scared she might have to admit eventually — how else to explain the switchology error in firing a Sidewinder after designating the suspected Flanker for an AMRAAM shot?

Now, with the range closing at six miles per minute, she was barely one minute from the merge with that supremely arrogant Russian. Belatedly, Jensen realized she had not made the obligatory “Fox Two” call, indicating an AIM-9 shot. She knew that she had been too rattled to follow procedure, but with a little luck she might still retrieve the situation. Which would be fortunate indeed, considering that she had not yet received the “Weapons free” call from Boorda’s strike operations center.

She inhaled deeply, sucking oxygen into her lungs with the faint molded rubber scent of her mask. She willed herself to project the ice princess tone in her voice as she called Strike Ops. “Chainsaw Strike from Bronco Three-Zero-Four. Request weapons free. Repeat, weapons free.”

“Three-Zero-Four, stand by.”

God damn it, I can’t afford to stand by! “Strike, Bronco. I’m looking at multiple bogies on my nose. My wingman is down, and I’m outnumbered!” Immediately, Jen-Jen Jensen regretted the tremor in her voice — the guys would say she choked — but she realized it could work to her advantage. Admiral, I was in reasonable fear of my life. My God, they had just killed Tommy Blyden!

Interminable seconds crawled past. During that infinity of time, Jensen fought a cosmic battle of Ambition against Fear. Ambition whispered in her ear, hinting at glorious rewards that might yet be hers if she succeeded. Fear screamed the banshee wail, the dirge that the only reason that Flanker pilot had not yet destroyed her was his willingness to toy with her until he tired of the game.

“Bronco, Strike. Two Tomcats are launching at this time. You are cleared to fire only in defense of yourself or other aircraft. VID is required. Acknowledge.”

Jensen was appalled. Visual identification? He’ll kill me before I ever see him! Then, like a gambling addict laying her last dollar on the table in hope of beating the house odds, she heard herself say, “Three Zero Four. Acknowledge.”

Gnido sought to sort out the confusing radar picture. Amid the multitude of blips on his screen, one American fighter had gone down, another continued toward him, briefly painting him with fire-control radar. At least three more aircraft were below him to the south. He assumed the latter were A-4s but had no way of knowing which were friendly or hostile. One was climbing out to sea, probably returning to the carrier, and that one likely was an American. Gnido placed his cursor on the blip and toyed with the idea of locking it up. If I had a full loadout …

But he needed to keep his remaining R-73 for the main threat — the fighter pressing inland over the Palos Verdes peninsula. He remained confident that no American officer would allow a BVR engagement over a densely populated area. Therefore, he retained control of the situation, willing and even eager to test his aircraft and close-range weapons against a competent opponent. Whatever the political fallout from the Penang Princess debacle, Igor Gnido felt that he stood to gain exceptional benefits both from his Russian employers and his Chinese patrons. “Yes, it was terrible what happened at Long Beach,” arms merchants would say, “but did you notice what one Su-30 did to three or four U.S. Navy fighters?”

American businessmen talked of “cutthroat competition.” The comfortable, dilettante bastards. How could they compare to Igor Gnido, who was turning into a world-class salesman?

Jennifer Jensen was thinking better now. She had broken lock on the presumed Flanker, lest the pilot get nervous and spear her with another long-range Archer. She was willing to go to visual range, which would probably be under three miles in this murk, and if the bogey — no, make that bandit — made a threatening move, she would would use her remaining AIM-9M.

Following the “bandit box” in her heads-up display, Jensen turned slightly to port, keeping the threat on her nose. It was an eerie feeling, knowing that somewhere within the HUD square superimposed on infinity lay the source of the death of Lieutenant Thomas Blyden.

Elizabeth Vespa craned her neck, trying to glimpse the high-performance jets jousting inland. She approved of Ostrewski’s decision to remain low on the water, relatively safe from radar detection, but it was about time to head for the boat. The temptation to ask Papa Three his intention was powerful, considering that their survival might be at stake, but Scooter Vespa knew that Ozzie Ostrewski would think less of her for it.

And Scooter was like every other tactical aviator. She would much rather die than look bad.

Gnido had had enough of groping through the murk. Since the carrier aircraft approaching him apparently had not fired, nor even continued targeting him, he realized that his premise was correct. The Americans will not engage beyond visual range! But he was under no such stricture. He thumbed his weapon selector to the helmet sight detent, confirmed the symbology, and prepared to fire. As soon as the target emerged from the smog and haze, he would shoot, then decide whether to deal with one of the low-flying targets. A BVR kill, a short-range kill, and then perhaps a low-level over-water kill would look very convincing in the sales brochures.

The Hornet appeared slightly offset to starboard as Gnido’s blue eyes focused on the dark shape. Range four point five kilometers, good enough. He pressed the trigger.

In Bronco 304, Jensen felt her blood surge as she saw the big Sukhoi. She already had her starboard Sidewinder selected, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. There was the tracking tone chirping in her earphones …

And the smoke trail of an AA-11 igniting beneath the Flanker. One four-letter word strobed in her brain as she reacted. Stick hard over, throttles against the stops, and pull.

The Hornet pirouetted about its axis and the nose arced abruptly downward.

Twenty-eight Two V One V One

Ozzie’s experienced eyes picked the Archer out of the sky. He would not have seen it had it performed normally — that is, if it had killed Jennifer Jensen — but its rocket motor described a swirling, corkscrewing path below the haze.

“Papa Four, heads up. Missile shot five o’clock, way high.” He thought to add, “No threat. Yet.”

Vespa looked over her left shoulder and scanned the upper air. She saw the errant missile a few seconds later. “It’s gone ballistic?”

“I think so.” Ostrewski estimated the geometry of the situation and decided to face the potential threat. He led Vespa into a forty-degree banked turn, climbing back toward the north-northwest.

Jennifer Jensen rolled wings level at four thousand feet and began her pull. She remembered to call the ship. “Chainsaw! Heshotatmeheshotatme! Iwillreturnfire!”

“Bronco, Chainsaw. Say again? Repeat, say again.”

Jensen barely heard the response to her panicked transmission. She fought the oppressive G that she loaded on herself as the Hornet’s nose rose through the horizon, her vision tunneling through a gray mist.

As her vision returned to normal, her adrenaline-drenched brain perceived a dark spot almost straight ahead. Her richly oxygenated blood put her in a survival mind-set — eyes dilated, blood pressure, pulse, and respiration elevated. Psych 101, fight or flight. It did not occur to Jensen that the aerodynamic shape approaching her through the HUD symbology was far lower than the threat aircraft that had just launched against her.

She heard the AIM-9 Mike’s seeker head tracking the friction heat generated by the 320-knot airspeed of the target airframe. They said there might be two Flankers! With the range down to two and a half miles she pressed the trigger, remembering to call “Fox two!”

From his perch above and behind the plummeting Hornet, Igor Gnido watched in fascination. The sight presented to him was almost enough to erase the anger he felt at the malfunctioning R-73 that had narrowly missed the F/A-18. The pilot is mad, Gnido told himself. For the life of him, the Russian could not conceive what the Hornet was shooting at. He eased off some power, brought his nose up, and bided his time.

Ostrewski’s combat-experienced mind screamed at him even as his rational side denied what was happening. He heard something garbled on the radio, vaguely imagined it was Vespa, then began dealing with the lethal reality accelerating toward him.

Ozzie shoved up the power and abruptly rolled into a right turn, better to gauge the Sidewinder’s aspect and closure rate. Head-on it was nearly impossible to determine the range until too late.

As the smoky trail corrected slightly to rendezvous on him, he told himself to wait. He punched off four or five flares, none of which seemed to deceive the Mike’s improved logic board. Not yet … not yet … Now!

It is not enough to change vectors in one dimension to defeat a missile. The trick is to alter both heading and altitude simultaneously, forcing more G onto the mindless killer than its small wings can accept.

Ozzie’s stomach was bilious in his mouth, constricting his throat. He did not realize that he stopped breathing.

He snapped the stick back, pitching up abruptly while coordinating aileron and rudder. His high-G barrel roll, executed with less than two seconds leeway, forced the winder to cut the corner at too acute an angle to continue tracking. As its seeker detected that the range was opening, the warhead detonated.

“Knock it off, knock it off! Hornet, knock it off! You just shot at a friendly!” Vespa’s voice was a high-pitched mixture of astonishment and outrage. She had no idea who was listening to her frequency, and at that moment she was not inclined to be charitable. She saw Papa Three reappear beyond the smoke of the Sidewinder’s explosion, apparently unharmed, but Michael Ostrewski had been forced on the defensive. If the Hornet pressed its advantage …

She turned in, savoring the Skyhawk’s superb roll rate. If he turns into Ozzie, I’ll shoot. She remembered Hu in the backseat. “Hu, watch for other planes. We don’t know who these people are.”

In a Topgun “murder board,” the debriefer would have faulted Jensen for turning back to engage. The school solution was to blow through, extend away from the immediate threat, reassess the situation, and set up for another missile shot.

Jennifer Jensen pulled her nose above the horizon, anxious to observe the result of her shot. She needed to know that her opponent had either been destroyed or driven into a vulnerable position for a reattack. As she neared the peak of a chandelle, seeking the target through the top of her canopy, she allowed her airspeed to bleed off more than she intended. By the time she caught sight of the target, which she recognized as an A-4, she was down to 285 knots. She tapped the afterburners, pulling through into a 135-degree slicing turn, ruefully recalling that she had no more Sidewinders. Too close for an AMRAAM, she flicked the selector and her HUD indicator changed from HEAT to GUN.

Something’s wrong, she realized. That’s not a Flanker. She eased off some of the G, retarding throttles slightly to gain more time to evaluate the potential threat.

“Liz, cut him off!” Ostrewski’s evasive roll had depleted much of his energy. He stuffed his nose down, pulling back into the threat, but knew he lacked the “smash” to go vertical.

With 375 knots on the dial, Vespa committed to an all-or-nothing gamble. She gauged the distance by the Hornet’s size in her thirty-mil reticle, waited three vital seconds, then pulled up. Vespa felt oddly calm, almost as she had during adversary training missions with VC-1 in Hawaii. Tracking the F/A-18 from eight o’clock low, she remembered to fly the pipper through the target, allowing a full ring of deflection.

At nine hundred feet range, she pressed the trigger and held it down.

Gnido shook his head in bemused contempt for the American’s folly. How could he allow himself to be sandwiched between two potentially hostile aircraft? And then to compound it by turning back again to repeat the error! The Sukhoi pilot decided to watch the outcome of the Hornet’s clumsy attack. Depending on what happened, he would kill the winner, return to El Toro, and try not to smile too broadly when waving his diplomatic passport on his way out of this amazing country.

Jen-Jen Jensen had no idea what was happening. Something like hailstones on a tin roof hammered the airframe behind her. The canopy shattered two feet aft of her headrest. Her initial emotion was confused disbelief; only after the Hornet lurched abruptly and began an uncommanded roll did she realize she had been hit by an unseen assailant. The other Flanker! she raged.

Jensen shot a wide-eyed glance at her instrument panel. Master caution, fire warning, and system-failure lights strobed at her in red-andyellow hues. Wind-fed flames waved angrily orange in her rearview mirrors. For an indecisive moment she wondered whether she should risk taking time to point the nose out to sea, away from the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. Her father’s voice came to her. Honey, don’t ever hesitate in an emergency. The Navy can always buy another airplane.

The crippled strike fighter dropped into a mind-numbing spiral barely a mile over San Pedro Bay.

“Bronco Three Zero-Four! Mayday, mayday!”

Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Jensen pulled the black-and-yellow-striped handle.

As Vespa passed below and behind the doomed Hornet, Ostrewski had an unforgettable view. In a nose-down spiral the canopy separated, the seat fired with its rocket motor glaring white-hot, and the parachute deployed, pulling the pilot violently erect.

“Santa Cruz, this is Papa Three. Be advised, we have an F/A-18 down about one mile off Long Beach Marina. The pilot has a good chute. He’ll splash about two miles south of Pier J.”

“Roger, Three. We’re alerting the …”

Vespa’s voice chopped off the rest of the message. “Ozzie! Above you! Flanker at six o’clock!”

Taking the warning on faith, Ostrewski responded the only way he could. He turned into the threat.

Igor Gnido saw the nearer Skyhawk reverse its turn, hauling around the corner in a ninety-degree bank. The Russian had not intended to shoot yet, but he relished sparring with what was certainly a more competent opponent than that idiot in the Hornet. He added power, pulled up and executed a high yo-yo, keeping the A-4F on the defensive. The TA-4J was still too far off to pose any danger.

Topping out of his four-thousand-foot pitch-up, Gnido half rolled and brought his nose over the top, toward the southern horizon. He looked rearward between his twin tails, found the Skyhawk where he expected, and retarded his throttles.

Ostrewski had padlocked the big Sukhoi, conserving his available energy for the right moment. Like a Topgun free-for-all, he thought: two versus one versus one. When he saw Gnido’s nose pull through, he pitched up, momentarily spoiling the Flanker’s tracking. Both pilots had a chance for a gun snap shot; neither took it.

As they passed one another, offset two hundred yards at twenty-five hundred feet, Ostrewski stomped right rudder, shoved the stick over, and buried his nose. He gained fifteen degrees angle on the Flanker before it rocketed upward again in that awesome climb, this time pulling its vector toward Papa Four. His rapid turn caught Ostrewski by surprise — Papa Three could practically join on his wing, almost too close to shoot.

“All stations, all aircraft over Long Beach Harbor. This is USS Boorda on guard. Be advised, two F-14s are inbound. They are armed and cleared to fire at any threat. All aircraft: You will comply with any directions from the mission commander. Out.”

Gnido cursed fervently. With most of his weapons gone, he was in no position to tackle two Tomcats. He decided to kill one Skyhawk, disengage, and streak for EI Toro at low level.

He felt he was managing the two Skyhawks nicely. Without missiles, they had to gain a close-range tracking solution on him, and as long as he kept both of them off his nose — or well below him — he could not be hurt.

The A-4s could not say the same thing. Gnido had selected his last R-73M2. With the Archer’s seeker slaved to his helmet-mounted sight, he could kill up to sixty degrees off his nose; he put the reticle on the two-seater running in from ten o’clock. A sideways glance to his right showed the single-seater to be no threat. It was going to pass close aboard and slightly high, too near for more than a fleeting snap shot.

Gnido pressed the trigger and felt his last Archer come off the rail. He was tracking the TA-4J smoothly, knowing that as long as he kept the Skyhawk in his forward hemisphere it was doomed.

Ostrewski saw the smoke plume as the rocket motor ignited, sending the AA-11 toward Papa Four. His heart was raw in his throat; he knew that Liz possessed neither the time nor the countermeasures to defeat the missile. With thrust vectoring, it was perhaps the most agile air-to-air weapon in the world.

Without room for a decent shot, without time to extend away before turning back in — and without conscious thought — Ozzie made his move.

Vespa saw the smoke trail, knew it for what it was, and rolled nearly inverted. She intended to wait until the last possible instant before pulling into her belly and loading maximum positive G on her aircraft. From 135 degrees of bank, her world was a crazy quilt of three-dimensional geometry with the Russian missile eating up the last quarter mile of airspace.

She shut her eyes, saw her mother’s face, and pulled.

Gnido saw the evasive maneuver, admiring the pilot’s last-ditch effort while knowing it was futile, and awaited the explosion.

Michael Ostrewski’s last view was a windscreen full of Flanker. The twotone gray paint scheme loomed at him, and his final willful effort was to clamp down on the trigger.

His cannon had hardly begun to fire when the little Douglas speared the big Sukhoi squarely behind the cockpit.

Liz fought the G, realizing that she had bottomed out of her desperate split-ess, knowing that the very realization meant life. I’m alive. How? She craned her head, seeking the Flanker that had to be above and behind her, positioned to shoot again.

The first thing she noticed was a corkscrewing smoky spiral as the Archer, devoid of guidance, followed its ballistic path to destruction. Vespa reversed into the threat that now was nonexistent. The visual footprint led to a dissipating fireball suspended in space, shedding fuel, flares, and aircraft parts.

Her pulse spiked at the knowledge that Michael Ostrewski somehow—somehow—had gained enough room to pull lead on the Flanker. A warm deluge of adrenaline-rich adoration flooded her veins. Ozzie, you are one superb fighter pilot! She pressed the mike button. “Three, this is Four. Climbing through four thousand.”

She waited several seconds for the reply, believing that the Only Polish-American Tomcat Ace must be savoring his triumph. When no response came, she tried again. And again. Finally, she said, “Hu, look around. Do you see Ozzie?”

The Chinese pilot turned in his seat, swiveling his head across the horizon. “No, miss.”

Realization descended on Vespa’s brain, draining downward in a chilling cascade that coagulated into a hard, insistent lump in her stomach.

She spoke to the windblown smoke and drifting shards. “Oh, Michael. What did you do?”

Twenty-nine Last One Back

Peters and Delight were on the bridge, digesting three versions of what had happened to the renegade Sukhoi. Delight, still in his flight suit and torso harness, was coming off an adrenaline high following his kill.

“I still think Ozzie gunned the sumbitch and ejected.”

“Zack, radar saw the plots merge. And we have a secondhand report from the Coast Guard reporting a midair collision.” Peters slumped against the bulkhead, arms folded. Staring at the deck, he intoned, “They’re searching, but …”

“ … but Ozzie’s probably dead.”

Peters nodded.

“TA-4 on downwind, Captain!” Odegaard lowered his binoculars and pointed to port.

With gear and flaps down, Scooter Vespa broke at “the ninety” while Robo Robbins, Psycho Thaler, and Mr. Wei watched from the LSO platform.

Vespa rolled wings level a mile and a quarter from the ramp, making minute adjustments to keep on glide slope. Robbins, with the phone in one hand and the “pickle switch” held aloft in the other, waited for her call.

“Skyhawk ball,” she said. “State point six.”

Robbins and Thaler silently regarded one another. With six hundred pounds of fuel, she would have only two chances at the deck. “Lookin’ good, Liz. Keep it comin’,” Robbins called.

Thaler had the binoculars on the TA-4, serving as Robbins’s watcher. “Hook!” He turned to look at Robbins. “No hook!”

Robbins made a conscious effort to keep his voice calm. “Liz, drop your hook.”

Vespa chided herself for missing the crucial item. Damn it — I’ve never done that before! She reached down for the hook-shaped handle, missed twice, and had to look in the cockpit. When she returned her gaze to the mirror, the ball was a diameter high and she was angry with herself almost to the point of tears.

“Waveoff, Liz. Take it around!”

Vespa knew that she could recover and probably catch a four wire, but obedience to the LSO’s command was too deeply ingrained. She shoved up the power and ignored the usual procedure. Instead, she wrapped into a hard left turn, leaving gear and flaps down, rejoining the circuit slightly downwind of the ninety.

Thaler leaned into Robbins’s shoulder. “I think she could’ve made it, Rob.”

“I know. But she’s gotta be shook about Ozzie, and this way there’s less doubt in her mind.”

As a landing signal officer, Robbins also was a working psychologist. He knew how frustrated and anxious the pilot must be, especially with a passenger aboard. He keyed the phone. “Don’t worry, Scooter. We’ll catch you this time.”

Vespa scanned the instruments once more, pointedly ignoring the fuel gauge. Over the hot mike, she said, “Mr. Hu, brace yourself for possible ejection. If I miss this pass I’ll climb straight ahead and give you as much notice as I can.”

“Yes, miss.” His tone sounded neutral.

As Vespa rolled out of her oblong-shaped 360-degree turn, the ball was half a diameter low. She called “Skyhawk ball,” omitting her fuel state, and added throttle to intersect the glide slope. She barely heard Robbins’s “Power” call.

As the ball rose slightly she led it with pitch and power, stabilizing her airspeed at 122 knots to compensate for the light fuel load. Santa Cruz’s 328-foot-wide deck was irrelevant to her now. What mattered was the eighty-foot-wide landing area with the lifesaving arresting wires, though Vespa aimed within three feet of centerline.

For the next ten seconds Elizabeth Vespa’s attention was riveted on the glowing amber meatball. From the the backseat, Hu appreciated the fact that it remained nailed in the middle of the datum. He heard Robbins’s only additional transmission. “Good pass, hold what you got.”

Papa Four impacted the deck at eleven feet per second sink rate, the landing gear oleos compressing under pressure as the tailhook snagged the third steel cable. As Vespa added power in event of a bolter, the TA-4J was dragged to a stop.

Mr. Wei Chinglao broke all decorum and hugged Robo Robbins. Psycho Thaler pounded both of them on the back, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Robbins turned to his writer. “Papa Four, low-state recovery, rails pass. Underfunckinglined OK-3!” As a group, they turned and ran up the the deck to the parking area.

Vespa sat in the front seat, listening to the J52 unspool with its vacuumcleaner whine. She wanted time to absorb what had happened to Ostrewski, and what she had just done. Hu already had descended the ladder, standing with his camcorder, intending to record his pilot’s triumph. He was immediately joined by a crowd of plane handlers, ordies, and the LSO contingent, plus Peters and Delight from the bridge.

Liz dropped her helmet over the side, where the plane captain caught it. She beaned a smile she did not quite feel, blew a kiss at Hu’s camera, then pinched her torso harness restraints and eased out of the cockpit. She backed down the ladder but had not reached the bottom before she felt eager hands plucking her up and away. She was afloat on a raucous sea of male faces, borne shoulder high toward the island. For the tiniest instant she thought back to her high-school senior prom and the condescending look of triumph that Christine LaMont had shot her as the tiara was set on the queen’s head. Take that, Christine.

The men grasping Vespa’s legs and thighs allowed her slide off their shoulders. She alit in front of Peters, who grasped her in a crushing hug. When he pulled back he exclaimed, “I am so proud of you.”

She blinked back what was rising inside her and managed to keep her voice calm. “Ozzie?”

Peters wanted to avoid her eyes. Instead, he focused on her face and shook his head. “No word, Liz. I think he’s gone.”

“Scooter.”

Liz turned at the sound of her call sign. Delight stood by her left shoulder, and she leaned into him. “Oh, Zack.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. He patted her back, exactly the way he had reassured his grandchild after a bicycle spill twenty years ago.

“Did you see it?” He knew what she meant.

“No, hon. I was …” He cleared his throat. “I was in the pattern about that time. But …”

“But my God, Zack. He died for me!” Her eyes were clear and dry, but she choked on her words. “He died for me …”

Delight grasped her by both shoulders. “Listen to me, Liz. Listen to me!” They both were aware of the crowd melting away. The deckhands recognized that this was a moment between friends who had shared something exceptional. “If he was still here, he’d be just as proud of you as … we are.” Delight allowed her to grasp that sentiment. “Liz, you just sank a ship and got a gun kill on the same mission. Do you realize nobody’s done that in about fifty-five years?”

She allowed herself a grim smile. “You got a kill, too.”

Delight looked at Peters. “Hook and I both flew a couple hundred missions in Vietnam and never got close to what happened today. But, hell, my mom could have hosed that gomer from six o’clock.”

Vespa realized that she had instructed the dead Chinese pilot. “Do we know who was in that airplane?”

“No,” Peters replied. “But we’ll find out fairly soon.”

Delight shook his head, marveling at the pilot he had chased. “I’ll bet the ranch that my guy was Deng. I don’t think anybody else in the class could’ve flown that way.”

Robbins forced his way through the dispersing crowd. He leaned around Delight and kissed Liz on both cheeks. “Scooter, that was the best pass I’ve seen in years. You got an underlined OK-3.” He grinned hugely. “And after a hell of a mission.”

Some of the giddiness was returning even as she wondered, Have they forgotten that Michael’s dead? But she heard herself responding to the banter. “Even with the low start, Rob?”

He punched her arm. “Hell yes. That was a great recovery, and since I’m the only LSO aboard, it’s a perfect OK-3.”

“Captain from bridge.” Odegaard’s voice snapped over the 1-MC speaker. Peters looked up at the 0–9 level where a khaki arm waved at him. “Sir, the phones are working at El Toro and your wife’s on the horn. She and Mrs. Delight want to know if you will both be home for dinner.”

Thirty Shakeout

“How many federal agencies can there be, anyway?”

Representative Tim Ottmann grinned ruefully at Delight’s plaintive query. “Hell, Zack, don’t blame me. I voted against every new bureau and agency that ever came up for funding. Even tried to make a couple of ’em go away, but it did no good.”

Peters looked around the hotel suite, assessing the collective mood. Besides himself and Jane, the Delights and Ottmann, were Vespa, Robbins, Thaler, Wei and Hu, plus two Washington attorney friends of Ottmann’s. One of them, a former A-7 pilot named Brian Chappel, specialized in transportation law, including maritime and aviation. He was cordially detested by the Navy Department and the Department of Transportation.

“In the two days since the excitement, I’ve heard from the following,” Chappel said. “DOT including FAA and the Coast Guard, FBI, ATF, and DEQ. That doesn’t count state and local agencies.”

Robbins raised his head. “DEQ? What’s their take on this?”

“Something about protection of coastal waters. They say that bombing is bad for the fish, and the Penang’s oil spill caused some concern.”

Peters was anxious to wrap up the meeting. “Okay, Brian. Where is all this likely to lead?”

“My guess is that it’ll mostly disappear in a couple of weeks.”

“Really?” Jane Peters was reluctantly eager to believe it.

“Yes, Mrs. Peters. Really.” Chappel gave her a convincing smile. “Look, the bottom line is this: Everybody on both sides wants the same thing. To make this go away. State and DOD are red-faced over the way things turned to … hash … with their Chinese program. The way that heavy ordnance like bombs and missiles were smuggled into this country, or actually purchased here, could force Congress to ask a bunch of embarrassing questions.” He looked at his D.C. colleague. “Right, Skip?”

Ottmann gave two thumb’s-up. “Guarantee it.”

Thaler picked up his glass and slurped the last of his lemonade through the straw. “Mr. Chappel, I understand the PR angle — the government’s got to look like it’s investigating all this. But you know that the fix is already in with the president and the administration. Those pardons that Skip got for us, in case we need them.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So what’ll happen in Taiwan?”

“Oh, that plan is canceled. With the assistance of Mr. Ottmann, Mr. Chappel, and some other well-placed individuals, the names and roles of certain prominent PRC officials are being made known on a confidential basis in Washington.”

“Which means”—Ottmann grinned—“that the papers and news networks will have all the details in time for today’s five o’clock news. With what we can release about bribes, kickbacks, and influence peddling, neither the U.S. nor Chinese governments will risk losing billions of dollars in trade and revenues.”

Vespa spoke for the first time. “Mr. Ottmann, what about the backpacks? Are they being recovered?”

“I shall answer that,” Wei interjected. The old MiG pilot regarded the American woman frankly. At length he said, “Under utmost secrecy, I confide to you what few people will ever know. There were no nuclear weapons.”

Liz involuntarily shuddered; Jane felt the tremors in Vespa’s body and put an arm around her shoulders. Liz leaned toward the Chinese. “Michael died for nothing?” Her hands clenched into frustrated, vengeful fists.

“Not at all, my dear. Not at all. He played a vital role in carrying out the most important part of our plan. When I said that we knew the weapons were aboard because one of my people helped load them, that was the same information that went to the Premier and the Politburo. Oh yes, packages were placed in the Penang Princess’s hold, and they would have showed a reading if exposed to a Geiger counter. But they were, ah, your word is — a placebo.”

“A fake pill to make the patient feel better.” Peters slowly shook his head, marveling at the subtle complexity of Wei’s plan.

“Exactly, Mr. Peters. In this case, the patient was the premier and his Stalinist cabal. Now that their ‘plot’ has been defeated and exposed, China may move on to more productive endeavors.”

Liz grappled with the cooling anger she felt. At length she asked, “But what about the people on that ship? Eric and I …”

“Miss Vespa, Mr. Thaler, please.” Wei managed a note of sympathy in his voice that still seemed out of place for the man. “You knew that people would die when you accepted the mission. The rationale was that a far greater number might be saved. Well, nothing has changed. The eleven men who were killed and the twenty or so injured must be balanced against the losses that would occur in an invasion of Taiwan.”

While Vespa allowed herself to accept the fact that she had been skillfully used in a geopolitical chess game, Delight intruded on the hushed silence. “One thing I’d like to ask, Mr. Wei. What caused the secondary explosions after Liz’s hits?”

“Explosive charges set near the presumed weapons, Mr. Delight. We wanted to ensure that an independent agency confirmed the presence of nuclear materials. Your emergency disaster crews have reported trace elements in the atmosphere and water — far below any hazardous level, but enough to ensure that protests and diplomatic consequences will result in Beijing.” He allowed the ghost of a smile. “Your Navy will ‘recover’ the weapons.”

Thaler swirled the ice in his glass, still shaking his head at the revelations. “How were the charges set?”

“Again, Mr. Thaler, I require utmost discretion. But you have treated me and Mr. Hu with uncommon courtesy, and provided me with the most exhilarating day of my life.” He almost smiled again. “When the attack began, one of our operatives set off a timer. Then he escaped over the side.”

“And the pleasure craft alongside?” Thaler asked.

“You may consider your effort well spent,” Wei responded. “That was a Mexican drug smuggler hired by the PRC agents in Long Beach. He was to disperse the backpacks to other agents throughout the area.”

Ottmann noticed Chappel closing his briefcase. “Well, I guess that’s about it. Brian, you have anything else for these folks?”

“No, just the usual lawyer-client warning.” He smiled at the audience. “The spin doctors will take the lead, but people, please remember this. Don’t say a damn thing to anybody without consulting me first.”

Peters stood up, resting one hand on Jane’s shoulder. “Then I guess we can all go home.”

Wei and Hu looked at each other in a way that had nothing to do with family ties. “Not all of us, Mr. Peters,” Wei intoned. “Not all of us.”

Thirty-one Scooter Flight

The memorial service at St. Francis Catholic Church was smaller than the wedding would have been. The testimonials had been spoken, the elegy delivered by Terry Peters, the rites performed by Ostrewski’s priest.

The mourners rose following the benediction and slowly filed out. The ATA contingent stood by while Maria Vasquez accepted greetings and condolences from friends and relatives.

“By the way,” Peters said, “Tim Ottmann is recommending Ozzie for a special orders Medal of Honor. With the political horse trading, he figures it’s a cinch for a Navy Cross.”

“Oz already had a Navy Cross,” Delight replied without irony. “Besides, you know how he felt about this country for the past several years.”

Peters chose to ignore the sentiment. “Additionally, everybody else on the mission probably will get a Silver Star.”

“I’ve got a Silver Star,” Delight replied — with irony.

Carol Delight leaned over the pew. “I don’t understand something. Everybody involved was civilian. How can military medals be awarded?”

“Actually there’s precedent — industry tech reps, even war correspondents have received combat decorations. Besides, Tim said something about a videotape of a former secretary of the Navy with a sheep.” Delight shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe Skip was exaggerating — I couldn’t say.”

Maria Vasquez turned from the front row, her obsidian eyes searching the pews. “Mrs. Peters,” she whispered. “I don’t see Elizabeth. I can’t believe she would miss this.”

Jane patted the young woman’s hand. “Don’t worry, dear. She’ll be here — I promise.” She nodded to her husband, who strode up the aisle in that long, ground-eating gait.

“But the service is over.”

“Not exactly, Maria.” Jane took her arm. “Let’s step outside, shall we?” On their way to the exit, Maria glimpsed Terry Peters speaking into a handheld radio.

Thirty seconds later the screech of low-level jets echoed off the surrounding buildings. “There!” somebody shouted, pointing to the south. Other witnesses followed the gesture and clapped or cheered — or merely shielded their eyes against the glare.

With the effortless grace of jet-propelled flight, the finger-four Skyhawk formation glided eight hundred feet overhead. In unison, they dropped their tailhooks in salute.

“It’s illegal as hell,” exclaimed Carol Delight. “How’d you swing that?”

Zack whispered in her ear. “Don’t ask, don’t tell!”

Maria leaned against Jane Peters, one hand to her lips and the other dabbing at her eyes. Jane hugged her close. “That’s Liz, Maria. With Eric and Rob and Tim.”

From eight hundred feet over downtown Mesa, Arizona, Scooter Vespa added power and abruptly pulled up from the number one position while the others continued straight ahead. The vacant space — the missing man — was obvious to everyone on the ground.

As she laid the stick to starboard, inducing a series of vertical aileron rolls into a cloudless blue sky, Liz Vespa made the call to Hook Peters.

“Wizard Flight, off and out.” She paused. “Break-break. Scooter Flight, returning to base.”

About the Author

BARRETT TILLMAN is the author of four novels, including Hellcats, which was nominated for the Military Novel of the Year in 1996, twenty nonfiction historical and biographical books, and more than four hundred military and aviation articles in American, European, and Pacific Rim publications. He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1971, and spent the next decade writing freelance articles. He later worked with the Champlin Museum Press and as the managing editor of The Hook magazine. In 1989 he returned to freelance writing, and has been at it ever since. His military nonfiction has been critically lauded, and garnered him several awards, including the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Foundation Award, the Nautical & Oceanographic Society’s Outstanding Biography Award, and the Arthur Radford Award for Naval History and Literature. He is also an honorary member of the Navy fighter squadrons VF-111 and VA-35. He lives and works in Mesa, Arizona.