Acts of Vengeance

CHAPTER SIX DECEPTION

From twenty thousand feet, the complex looked just like the recon photos. Maxwell could pick out what Morse had assured them was the headquarters building, a sprawling, metal-roofed structure with two extended wings. Arranged around it were a half a dozen smaller buildings, reported to be barracks and weapons storage facilities.

The complex lay in a wide valley with terraced hillsides on either side, opening to a sprawling plateau. Only one item seemed to be missing. Maxwell saw no sign of a road, no other access to the complex. The faded landscape might have been the surface of Mars.

It was spooky. No sign of life, no vehicles moving, no troops running for cover. If Al-Fasr possessed antiaircraft batteries, they were eerily silent. No missile alerts were coming from the strike fighters’ RWRs or from the AWACS.

The HARM shooters had preceded the strikers, launching ADM-141 tactical decoys to trick the enemy into lighting up air defense radars. If a target-tracking radar came on-line, a HARM missile was poised to destroy it.

So far, no HARMs had been fired. What radar the enemy possessed was staying off-line.

Likewise, the four-man crews of the EA-6B Prowlers had been frustrated. Their job was to jam the enemy’s air defense systems with their suite of airborne electronic warfare equipment. There was nothing to jam.

High overhead, the F-14s on TARCAP — target combat air patrol — waited to intercept inbound enemy fighters. The Tomcat crews assumed that such a threat, though unlikely, would have to come from the west, either Eritrea or Chad across the Red Sea.

No fighters had appeared.

“Ninety-nine Gippers, check switches,” Maxwell transmitted, using the groupwide call sign. Glancing over his left shoulder, he saw that B. J. Johnson was in good position, a quarter mile abeam. Off his right wing was his second section, Flash Gordon and Leroi Jones, also in position.

Each strike fighter was carrying a Paveway laser-guided bomb. Smart bombs were life insurance for fighter pilots. Besides being accurate enough to park on a doorstep, they could be released with the standoff distance to keep the pilot out of antiaircraft gun range.

Today it didn’t matter. There were no antiaircraft guns.

Behind Maxwell’s flight were two more four-plane divisions from the Bluetail squadron armed with Mark 20 Rockeye cluster bombs. The Bluetails were the mop-up crew. After the Paveway bombs had dealt with the buildings, the Bluetails would scour what was left with the cluster bombs.

Overkill, Maxwell thought. The place looked like a ghost town.

“Gipper Zero-one is in hot.” Maxwell rolled in on the target.

In quick succession, each of the other three members of his flight reported rolling in on the target.

Through the HUD, Maxwell saw the headquarters building, the largest structure in the complex. It was a big, hard-to-miss sitting duck.

With his left forefinger he slewed the laser designator over the target, stopping it on the gray tin roof. A couple of fine adjustments, positioning the designator exactly in the center… hold it a second… release.

He felt the jolt all the way through the airframe of the Super Hornet as the two-thousand-pound bomb kicked free of its station.

While the GBU-24 soared toward its target, Maxwell found himself wishing. It would be sweet justice if Al-Fasr was in the building. He had delivered the order that took Josh Dunn’s life. And Tom Mellon’s. Today was payback time. Eight tons of armor-piercing, high explosive bombs in exchange for one wire-guided missile.

This was the hard part: waiting, letting the laser designator illuminate the target. Each of the other Hornets in his flight was doing the same, each lasing on a different optical frequency.

The bombs were all in the air now, descending like a hail of death on the tin-roofed buildings. Anything left alive would be shredded by the Bluetails and their Rockeye cluster bombs.

He sensed the bomb impact without actually hearing it. The center of the roof opened like the lid of a can, sucking the building inward. An orange ball of flame roiled into the sky. The sides of the building burst apart.

A microsecond later, the adjacent building erupted. Then another. Each of the tin roofed buildings was mushrooming into the morning sky.

It was a lesson right out of Sun Tzu: Taunt your enemy, lure him into your territory, reveal to him your apparent weakness.

A dozen times Al-Fasr had read the classic on guerilla warfare. Now he was executing the principles, not in medieval China but here in the milky sky of Yemen. When he commits to the attack, surprise him. And kill him.

So it was happening.

The three MiGs came blasting out of the underground revetments, taking off from the makeshift runway at the old BP complex, one behind the other in full afterburner. Staying low and accelerating to supersonic speed, they spread out in a loose line-abreast formation, separated from each other by half a kilometer.

No radio transmissions, no air-to-air radar — not yet. No signal that would reveal their presence to the enemy’s electronic surveillance gear.

Ahead, beyond a low ridge, Al-Fasr could see plumes of black smoke. It meant the first bombs were already landing on the decoy compound. Against the backdrop of pallid sky, he could see the specks of two fighters climbing steeply up from the target. At any moment they would be detecting the unexpected presence of the MiGs.

At this altitude, less than a hundred meters above the terrain, the earth was flashing by in a brownish blur. He glanced at the machmeter. The Cyrillic-lettered gauge was showing 1.06 mach, which at this altitude equated to thirteen hundred kilometers per hour. Speed is life, went the fighter pilot’s mantra. The more the better.

He glanced over his left shoulder. It took him a second to pick out the mottled paint scheme of Rittmann’s MiG, nearly invisible against the landscape. To the right was Novotny, the Czech pilot. Novotny was an able but unimaginative pilot, always waiting to be told what to do. He had no illusions about Novotny’s life expectancy in the coming battle.

Rittmann was another matter. He was aggressive — too aggressive, perhaps. In their brief training exercises back in Chad, before deploying to Yemen, Rittmann had surprised Al-Fasr with his boldness, but it was an undisciplined boldness. The German would thrust himself into air-to-air engagements like a snarling attack dog. Rittmann needed a leash.

Al-Fasr knew that any second now the American pilots would be receiving urgent warnings from their AWACS. He wished he could eavesdrop on their tactical frequency. It would make him laugh. The invincible American Navy pilots would be squealing like pigs about to be slaughtered.

He checked the display on his inertial navigation system. Ten kilometers to go.

“Radars active,” Al-Fasr called to his two wingmen, breaking their radio silence. “Acquire your targets.”

He punched the mode control on his Sapfir radar display from standby to acquisition mode. Three sweeps later the display came alive, the screen filling with greenish, hash-marked target symbols.

There they were, the two he had acquired visually as they climbed off target. Another pair was just pulling up. Behind them, approaching from the next quadrant, four more Hornets. Al-Fasr counted twelve in all. As he expected.

The information from his source was accurate.

There would be more up high. The MiG’s Sapfir Doppler radar had a gimbal limit of sixty degrees up, not enough to paint any high CAP fighters, but it didn’t matter. If the assessment report continued to be accurate — and Al-Fasr was now sure of it — he knew exactly where they would be. He even knew how many — four F-14 Tomcats orbiting at twenty-four thousand feet. Exactly the wrong place to counter the threat of low-flying MiGs.

Another lesson from Sun Tzu: Learn your enemy’s strength; conceal your own.

On his armament panel, Al-Fasr selected an AA-11 Archer missile. The low growl of the Archer’s heat-seeking head filled his earphones.

Boyce’s eyes were glued to the tactical display screen. He hated this role, sitting here in CIC like a goddamn spectator at a ball game, watching his team play and not being a part of it. Shit! It had been his own paranoid decision to stay back here aboard ship. Him and his gut feelings. He should have swallowed his doubts and done what an Air Wing Commander was supposed to do — lead his people.

Well, it was turning out okay. Better than okay, because Maxwell and his strikers were taking out the terrorist compound like it was an anthill. Best of all, the ants weren’t shooting back.

He could see Admiral Fletcher peering at his own tac display, while a young lieutenant explained the symbology on the screen to him. Boyce wondered again why a flag officer who didn’t know shit about tactical air operations was in command of this show.

Then he remembered. Sitting next to Fletcher was Babcock, his chin in his hands, staring at the display.

The only problem so far had been with the KS-3 Viking tankers. While on his refueling station, one of the tankers had called in with a hydraulic failure. Now Stickney and Cmdr. Williams, the air boss, were preoccupied with getting him back aboard. Up on the flight deck, yellow shirts were scrambling to respot parked jets.

Down in the darkened CIC space, everyone felt their weight shift in their seats as the carrier heeled to port. Stickney was heading the ship back into the wind so the Viking could recover.

Boyce studied his display. For the third time in fifteen minutes, he called the AWACS. “What’s the picture, Sea Witch?”

A pause followed. Boyce knew the controller — an Air Force captain named Tracey Barnett. She was sorting her own array of contacts. “Picture still clear,” she reported. “Yankees on second, Pirates headed for first, Dodgers up to bat.”

Boyce acknowledged. It corroborated what he saw on his own display. “Picture clear” confirmed that nothing hostile was showing — no MiGs, no SAMs, no target-tracking radars. The baseball team code meant that Maxwell’s flight — Yankee — was coming off target, while his second division — Pirate — was just rolling in. Behind them Dodger flight — the Bluetails — was smoking in low and fast.

Boyce knew from experience there was always a glitch. If the place was totally undefended, it meant that they had gotten inaccurate intel about the defenses. But what if the enemy had simply been caught with their pants down? It meant that any moment they would wake up to the fact that they were getting the shit bombed out of them. They would start shooting.

The only thing they couldn’t immediately assess was bomb damage. Not until they’d gotten reconnaissance footage obtained by a low-flying Tomcat with a TARP package — Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod — and from satellite imagery would they know for sure whether Al-Fasr had been put out of business.

The photo of the terrorist smiling back at him from the screen in the briefing room was still in Boyce’s mind. He hoped the grinning bastard had been nailed in his headquarters taking a nap. Or sipping one of those thick Arab coffees while he was —

“Pop-up! Pop-up bogeys, north bull’s-eye five miles!”

The controller’s call pierced Boyce’s thoughts like a knife. “Two targets! North bull’s-eye, four miles, closing fast!”

Boyce could hear the controller trying to keep her voice calm. “No!” she called. “Make that three targets!”

Boyce could see them on his own display, which was datalinked with the AWACS. Sure as hell, out of nowhere, three blips were there that weren’t there before. Converging with the strike fighters.

Pandemonium spilled out of the strike frequency. “Bandits, bandits, two o’clock low!”

“Who? Who’s got bandits—”

“Yankee One, bandits four o’clock low.”

“Dodger One, snap vector, two-six-zero, four miles.”

“Confirm bandits! Who’s got an ID?”

“Sea Witch confirms three bandits, north bull’s-eye, three miles.”

“Threat two-four-zero. Looks like Fulcrums.”

“Yankee Two spiked at seven o’clock!”

Maxwell could hear the urgency in B. J. Johnson’s voice. “Chaff!” he answered. He wanted her to dump a trail of radar-deflecting foil. “Break left now! Keep the chaff coming.”

He was getting the same warning on his RWR. They were both spiked by an enemy fighter’s radar. They were the targets. With their tails exposed to the low-flying bandits, radar-deflecting chaff was their only salvation.

Unless the guy was shooting infrared missiles. Heat seekers didn’t need radar. They could home on the IR — infrared — signature of your engines, or even the friction of the air over your jet’s skin.

Over his shoulder Maxwell could see the dark shape of the bandit down low, coming at them in a nearly vertical climb. He recognized the low-slung belly scoops, the twin vertical fins. A MiG-29. As he grunted under the strain of the six-G turn, he saw a flash beneath the MiG’s port wing root.

A missile. IR or radar? No change in the RWR. Had to be a heat seeker.

“Flares!” he called, toggling his own flare dispenser. “B.J., break left. Bandit, seven o’clock low. Missile in the air.”

Like chaff, the flares were decoys that were supposed to deceive the missile’s guidance unit. If the weapon was a heat seeker — and if they were lucky — the missile would lock onto the flares. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. The Russian-built Archer missile was smart enough to distinguish flares from tailpipes.

Pulling maximum G, grunting to keep from graying out as he kept his eyes on the fast-climbing Fulcrum fighter, Maxwell wondered how they got caught like this. Where did they come from?

How many were there? Why didn’t they get picked up by the AWACS?

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

In the lead Tomcat, Cmdr. Burner Crump listened to the urgent radio calls.

“Dodger One spiked at three o’clock!”

“Snap Vector, Pirate One, tactical, one-five-zero, five miles.”

“Yankee Two, no joy, no joy!”

The last call was a woman’s voice. The Roadrunner pilot, B. J. Johnson, was reporting that she couldn’t get a visual on the bandit that was targeting her.

Crump felt like pounding his fist in frustration. He and his Tomcats had been orbiting on their overhead CAP station waiting for nonexistent MiGs. The trouble was, the MiGs weren’t nonexistent, and they had somehow gotten down there to hose the bombers. The goddamn fight would be over before Crump and his shooters could get to them.

Maybe not. “Felix One, Sea Witch,” came the voice of the AWACS controller. “Snap vector one-three-five, fifteen miles, low. Buster.”

“Felix One copies,” Crump answered, shoving his throttles into the afterburner detent. “Buster.”

Here we go, thought Crump. Better late than never. The AWACS controller had just decided that maybe the Tomcats ought to join the furball. She was issuing the bearing and range to the targets. “Buster” was brevity code for maximum speed, which was a good clue that the Hornets were in deep shit.

Crump rolled to the new heading and dumped the nose of the Tomcat. Under full thrust of the F110-GE engines, the big fighter was accelerating like a bullet. In combat spread on the right, his wingman, Gordo Gray, was staying with him. The brown expanse of the Yemeni wasteland swelled in Crump’s windscreen.

“You got ’em sorted, Willie?” he asked the RIO in the backseat. He could hear Lt. Willie Martinez, the radar intercept officer, breathing heavily into his hot mike. Martinez was peering into his display, trying to separate cowboys from Indians.

“Hang on a sec. We got a customer… twelve o’clock… yeah, get ready, I’m getting a lock—” The sound of Martinez’s breathing abruptly stopped. “Shit, we’re spiked! He’s taking a shot!”

Al-Fasr grunted against the seven-G pull-up. The nose of his MiG-29 was pointed nearly vertical, climbing like a rocket from the energy of the supersonic dash over the surface. If his timing was correct, and if he was lucky…

Yes! They were directly above him. He flipped the radar to narrow scan and was rewarded with a target-acquisition symbol. Not one but two targets, diving toward him, probing with their own radars.

It would be a snap shot. Only a marginal chance for a kill, but he had no choice. They would merge in eight seconds, and long before that the enemy fighters — they had to be F- 14s — would have their own missiles in the air.

He would have preferred a radar-guided Alamo missile, but that meant he would have to remain locked on with his radar while the missile tracked. That was suicide.

It had to be a fire-and-forget heat seeker. Al-Fasr punched the fire control button on the stick. Whoom! An AA-11 Archer missile leaped from its rail beneath the right wing.

He punched again. Whoom! A second Archer streaked upward, both missiles trailing plumes of fire and gray smoke.

For an instant he wished he could wait and see the missiles do their work. But his life would then be measured in seconds. He was a hunted animal surrounded by predators.

He flicked on the chaff dispenser and hauled the nose of the MiG over the top of the loop, back down toward the horizon. He punched his targeting radar off. No radar emissions, no electronic target.

His life lay in the effectiveness of his missiles. If the Archers killed the F-14s before they could launch their own missiles… if the chaff deflected the enemy’s radar-guided weapons… if he was not already targeted by other fighters…

The MiG was pointed in a vertical dive back to the earth, back to the cover of the radar-scattering terrain.

The earth was expanding in his windscreen like a zoom lens. Don’t fly into the ground, Al-Fasr told himself. He pulled hard again on the stick, coming out the dive within a terraced valley. On either side the walls of the valley passed in a brown-hued blur.

Through the clear glass in the top of the MiG’s canopy, he saw wreckage tumbling out of the sky: a dark shape, spewing debris and orange flame and smoke. A Tomcat? Or one of his MiG-29s?

He saw pieces separate from the wreckage. A parachute canopy blossomed. Then a second. Two white chutes floating down to the Yemeni hills.

Al-Fasr felt a warm glow of satisfaction. The only multiple-crew fighters in this engagement were the Tomcats. One of his Archers had struck home. A face-to-face shot. He won; they lost.

He wondered how Rittmann and Novotny were doing. Had they scored kills? Or were they dead?

Rittmann cursed himself. Why did he take the shot? He should have waited.

In his great haste to kill the lead Hornet, he had fired the missile too soon. He, of all people! Even though he had a steady kill tone in his headset, he knew that the Archer’s guidance unit was subject to false locks at this range, especially shooting upward into the sun.

The two Hornets were in a hard break to the left, spewing a trail of foil. The second section had broken to the right and were not a threat, at least not yet. Rittmann had a speed advantage, having converted his supersonic velocity over the surface into a vertical climb. He was closing on the first pair, who were in a high reversal turn to counter his attack.

Rittmann selected another Archer missile. The lead Hornet had gained enough angle off to be outside the Archer’s off-boresight limit. It didn’t matter. The wingman was still well within range.

He was getting a good acquisition tone from the seeker head. The IR rangefinder showed six thousand meters and closing — well within the envelope. This time he would do it right.

For another second Rittmann tracked the enemy fighter. He had a clear view of the Hornet’s aft quarter — the twin afterburners torching flame, canted vertical stabilizers, the pilot’s head visible through the back of the canopy. Wisps of vapor were coming off the wings, evidence of the heavy G-load the pilot was pulling.

Rittmann depressed the firing button. The AA-11 Archer missile rocketed ahead of the MiG, flying a curved track toward the hard-turning Hornet.

He saw what appeared to be — Was ist das? — balls of fire? No, he realized, flares. He had never seen them this close before. The Hornet pilot was ejecting flares to throw off the heat-seeking missile.

Too late.

Moving at three times the speed of sound, the Archer closed the distance between the fighters. For a second the missile veered toward the trail of flares. Then, like a trained hunting dog, the missile sensed the deception and swerved back to the real target.

The Hornet was in a vertical bank, making a maximum-G turn. With its tiny guidance fins, the stubby air-to-air missile was unable to match the tight turning radius. The Archer overshot, missing the Hornet’s tail by twenty feet.

But it was close enough. The missile’s proximity fuse detonated, and the metal-shredding shrapnel in the Archer’s warhead ripped through the tail section of the Hornet.

Fascinated, Rittmann watched the Hornet go into a skid, then straighten itself, coming out of the hard turn. Part of the right vertical stabilizer was gone. Pieces were spitting out of the right engine, and flames licked around the outside of the fuselage. For a second Rittmann considered finishing the job with the thirty-millimeter gun in the MiG’s left wing. Before the pilot could escape, Rittmann would convert him to chopped meat.

In the next instant, the Hornet erupted in a ball of fire. Instinctively, Rittmann threw the stick to the right and yanked hard, barely missing the fireball.

In clear sky, he took a deep breath. He had just killed his first real enemy. But the battle wasn’t over. There were many more out there waiting to —

The Sirena. The urgent, warbling noise of his radar warning receiver filled his cockpit. He was targeted.

It would be a max angle off-boresight shot, but Maxwell didn’t care. The MiG — this particular MiG — wasn’t getting away. He would take this guy out any way he could. He’d use the nose-mounted Gatling gun if necessary.

Never in his career had Maxwell felt so frustrated. It had happened so suddenly. Just as he was reaching the apex of his defensive turn, he glanced over his shoulder in time to witness the disintegration of B. J. Johnson’s Hornet.

That was when the MiG pilot made his mistake. He tarried too long behind the target after taking his shot. He was forced to make an evasive turn to the right, which gave Maxwell the opening he needed. Pirouetting his Hornet at the top of the arcing turn, he sliced the nose back downhill — toward the oncoming MiG.

Flash Gordon’s voice came over the frequency: “Yankee Three and Four engaged. Bandit locked twelve o’clock low.”

That explained what happened to his second section, Gordon and Jones. Coming off the target, they had made a hard break to the right to counter another low-flying MiG. That made two. Hadn’t AWACS reported three bandits?

“B.J. is down,” Maxwell said. “Anybody see a chute?”

“Yankee Three, negative,” said Gordon. “We saw a fireball, Brick. No chute.”

Maxwell struggled to control his emotions. You lost your wingman. If he had reacted quicker to the AWACS pop-up call… if he had made an immediate break into the threat sector…

He pushed the thoughts from his mind. Focus. Kill this guy.

The MiG was directly in front of him. The Sidewinder seeker circle in the HUD was superimposed on the sleek shape of the Fulcrum. The low growl of the missile’s seeker unit swelled in his earphones, telling him it was tracking.

Without his second section and now missing his wingman, he knew he was vulnerable to attack by the third bandit. He should get the hell out of there and stay defensive.

No. Take this sonofabitch out.

The MiG was in a hard left turn into him. Maxwell could see the mottled paint scheme, the twin torches of flame from the afterburners.

He squeezed the trigger. From the right wing tip a Sidewinder air-to-air missile streaked out in front of the Hornet.

“Fox two!” he called, signaling the launch of an AIM-9 heat-seeking missile.

He watched the missile go into an arcing left turn, pursuing the MiG like a wolf chasing an antelope. He kept the MiG centered in his HUD. He rocked his air-to-air armament selector back to GUN. If the Sidewinder missed, he would do it the old-fashioned way.

It took exactly four and one-half seconds.

The tail section of the Fulcrum disintegrated in a shower of fragments. The fighter slewed into a rolling, yawing tumble to the right.

Maxwell saw something — the ejection seat? — separate from the cloud of wreckage. Behind the object trailed a stream of material, which then blossomed into the tan-colored canopy of a parachute.

“Splash one!” Maxwell called.

A few seconds later he heard Flash Gordon’s exultant voice: “Splash one!”

Another MiG down.

He took his eyes off the tumbling wreckage of the MiG and scanned the sky around him. Two MiGs were out of the fight. That left one still alive.

Where?

No radar, no radio transmissions. Give them nothing with which they could track him.

His Sirena radar-warning receiver told him they were searching. With the sophisticated equipment aboard their AWACS ship, they probably detected him. But by his staying low, skimming the ground on the north slope of the massif that stretched to the Red Sea, his chances were decent. They improved with every kilometer he put between him and the enemy fighters.

Al-Fasr kept the MiG in full afterburner. It meant that he would be fuel critical within minutes. So be it. The only fighters that could threaten his escape were the Tomcats, and he was opening up enough lead to put him beyond their pursuit range. Within ten minutes he would be across the narrow Red Sea. Then he would put the fighter down on the strip in Eritrea.

The fight had gone as well as he could have expected. According to the reports from his battle observation monitors, stationed in a hundred-kilometer belt around the complex, at least two American fighters were down. He had lost two MiGs.

Two for two. It was a fair exchange, considering the odds.

Novotny was dead. He was sure of it. The blockheaded Czech had bored straight into a section of Hornets just as they were coming off their target. They had executed a nose-on attack before Novotny had even gotten a missile in the air.

So it went. Fools like Novotny were expendable.

Rittmann had remained in character. True to his word, he had not been afraid. He had thrust himself at the attacking Hornets like a fearless — and stupid — German attack dog. Kill and be killed. That was Rittmann’s style. Now he was either dead or lost in the vastness of the Yemeni highlands. It didn’t matter. Rittmann was more trouble than he was worth.

His Sirena was chirping in the same mode it had been since he left the battle. It meant their radars were scanning, possibly even picking up a return from his low-flying jet. From the display he could see that no threats were coming his way. No missiles in the air, no fighters targeting him from behind.

Ahead, the high ridge of the massif sloped toward the horizon. He kept the MiG-29 low, skimming the boulders and the scrub brush. Occasionally the blur of a terraced field passed beneath him. He glimpsed huts, outbuildings, thin wisps of wood smoke.

The brown landscape dropped away beneath him, and the rocky shoreline came into view. Beyond lay the milky blue haze of the Red Sea. He had been informed that the Reagan’s pilots, by their rules of engagement, were forbidden to pursue targets beyond the coastal boundaries of Yemen.

The coastline flashed under the MiG’s belly. Across the narrow passage lay the shore of Eritrea.

Safety.

In the cockpit of the MiG-29, Al-Fasr let himself relax for the first time since he’d left the revetment. He had survived the first battle. The next was about to begin.

The red phone next to Boyce’s chair rang. It was the direct line from the captain’s station on the bridge.

“I’m afraid so,” said Boyce, “two down, a Tomcat from the TARCAP, and a Hornet from Yankee flight.”

Boyce held the phone two inches away from his ear. Stickney wanted to know where the MiGs had come from and how come nobody saw them coming and why did this whole goddamn caper look like fucking amateur hour?

Boyce felt the eyes of Admiral Fletcher and Babcock on him while the Reagan’s captain roared over the phone. “I don’t have the answers yet, Sticks, but I assure you we’re gonna find out. My first priority is getting the RESCAP in place and snatching our people out of there.”

He hung up and saw Claire Phillips standing beside him. Her face looked somber.

“It’s not good, is it?” she asked in a low voice.

“I’ve seen better.”

“Some of our pilots have been shot down. Who are they?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“One of them is the woman pilot. The one they call B.J.?”

Boyce looked around the CIC compartment. Controllers were hunched over their consoles, coordinating the elements of the strike group. Fletcher and Babcock were staring at him again. “Look, Claire. This is a pretty volatile situation, and the media shouldn’t be this close. I’m going to ask you to leave while we deal with this.”

“Red, please, I won’t interfere with—”

He took her elbow and steered her toward the door. “Listen to me, Claire. Not a word, not a hint of what you saw or heard in here will be reported without clearing it through me. Is that understood?”

Claire’s eyes flashed. “Of course it’s understood. Do you think I’m the enemy, Red?”

“No. Sorry, but you know what I mean.”

On her way out the door she paused. “Just tell me. Is Sam okay?”

He glanced back at his tactical display. None of the symbols on the screen had changed in the past half minute. “Yeah. Sam’s okay.”