Afterburn

CHAPTER 20

Dixie frowned. “Hey, Badge? I got another problem here.”

“What is it, man?”

“My wings won’t swing forward. Can’t tell whether it’s the computer or the wing hardware, but they won’t budge.”

The F-14 Tomcat’s variable geometry wings were designed to fold back at higher speeds to increase maneuverability and decrease drag, and swing forward at low speeds to provide additional lift for takeoffs and landings. Normally, the aircraft’s central air data computer, or CADC, began swinging the wings forward when the plane’s speed dropped below three hundred knots. They were at 275 knots now as they circled in the Marshall stack, but Dixie’s wings stubbornly remained folded in the full-back position.

“Try the override.”

“I did. No go.”

“Shit. How do you feel about a negative-turkey landing?”

Dixie chuckled nervously. “I think I can handle that.”

Some Tomcat pilots overrode their computers during the final approach to the carrier, subscribing to the popular and loudly voiced belief that a Tomcat with its wings extended forward looked like a big, ugly, long-necked bird ― ”turkey mode,” as they called it. A Tomcat could land with its wings folded back but had to maintain a landing speed of 145 knots on the approach and touchdown instead of the 115 knots of a wings-out landing.

“Two-one-eight” called over his headset. “Deck clear. Charlie now.”

That was the signal for him to break from the Marshall stack formation and start his approach for the trap. They’d kept him in the racetrack-shaped loiter course for nearly twenty minutes while they brought other aircraft down; now it was just him, Badger, and Batman still up, with the other two Tomcats staying aloft both to provide security for the ship and to help talk him down if necessary.

God, he wanted to be down. His Tomcat had begun shuddering ominously during the long flight back, the vibration growing worse and worse as he descended to five thousand feet and becoming especially pronounced when he worked the flight controls, opening the flaps or spoilers. Normally, his CADC handled all such minor flight adjustments from moment to moment, as well as controlling his wing geometry, but he was having to make all corrections by hand now. According to his instrument readouts, his CADC was still operational, but its commands weren’t reaching his wings… and each manual input seemed to increase the vibration from his left control surfaces. Sweat was pooling inside his oxygen mask now; he could taste it, feel its slickness between skin and rubber. His hands were sweating, too, inside his gloves, and he resisted the temptation to pull them off and wipe his palms on his flight suit.

His entire career in the Navy, it seemed, had focused his life to this moment when everything was riding on his skill and training. He’d always told himself that because he was black he had to be better than anyone else he was flying with, sharper, more skillful, more aggressive. The problem was that a lot of his bravado had been empty. Oh, sure, he’d known he was good, but in a superficial way that had been challenged, and seriously shaken, by the helicopter incident.

This was where everything he’d learned was laid out for all to see ― bringing a crippled aircraft down onto a carrier deck at sea.

Turning to port, he came in astern of the carrier, following her wake, cutting his speed further now to 230 knots. “Two-one-eight, call the ball,” he heard over the radio. That was the voice of the Landing Signals Officer, the LSO, standing on his platform on the carrier’s port side aft, just left of the spot where Dixie wanted to set his damaged bird down. He could see the “meatball” now, the green bull’s-eye of the Fresnell landing system tower that revealed, by appearing to move above or below a pair of horizontal dashes, whether he was staying in the correct glide path or not. To the right, aft of the carrier’s island, the laser landing system beacon showed a dazzling green, giving him his choice of input. So far he was right on the money.

“Tomcat two-one-eight, ball,” he called back, identifying his aircraft and alerting the LSO that he did have the ball in sight. “Point five.” That last told them he had only five hundred pounds of fuel aboard. Prior to leaving the Marshall stack, he’d jettisoned much of his remaining fuel, as well as the missiles slung from his belly and wings. A lighter aircraft was easier to wrestle down, and if he did slam into the deck too hard, it would be easier on the Jefferson’s flight deck if he wasn’t packing almost a full warload and tanks filled with JP-5.

The carrier was riding calm seas half a mile ahead, looking terribly tiny and isolated now against a very great deal of blue.

“Roger ball,” the LSO replied. “Just bring it in nice and easy, Dixie.

Everybody’s turned out for the show down here, so let’s show them what a real hotshot aviator can do, huh?”

LSOS, Dixie had learned soon after becoming an aviator, possessed an uncanny knack for instant psychoanalysis and treatment. The best ones didn’t say very much at all, but what they did say was exactly right to correct a problem, or calm shattered nerves, or snap a pilot’s mind back instantly to where it belonged. The duty LSO had just reminded Dixie that he had a bunch of people down there pulling for him… something he’d lost touch with over the past few days.

It was a good feeling. A warm feeling.

“What’s the met rep?” he asked.

“Sea state calm, wind easterly at five knots,” the LSO replied.

“Carrier’s at fifteen knots. Easy trap.”

“Right. Keep your heads down, everybody.”

“Deck going down. Power down… just a hair.”

He eased back on the throttle and gave it a bit more flaps. Speed one-sixty… he was coming in too fast! He dropped the throttle another notch.

“Don’t over-corrects Power steady.”

The deck was rushing up at him now, much faster than he’d ever remembered in making an approach before. Then the carrier’s roundoff vanished beneath the Tomcat’s nose and he saw his own shadow flashing along the dark steel deck ahead of him.

His wheels struck the deck, a savage clang and jolt. His hand slammed the throttle full forward and his engines thundered with renewed life and power, ready to take him off the deck again in a touch-and-go bolter if his tail hook failed to connect.

But at the same moment as his engines howled to full power, he felt his tail hook snag one of the cables stretched taut across the deck, and his body surged forward hard against his harness. He cut his power back to a grumbling idle as a deck director and a gang of Green Shirts ran toward his aircraft. To the side, he saw other people running toward his aircraft, including the brightly clad fire detail and a number of rescue personnel and duty hospital corpsmen. The yellow-painted mobile crane stood ready close by, but there were so many people on the deck that it would have been difficult for it to get through. That sort of display was against regs, but nobody seemed to care this morning.

Easing back, he spit out the wire, then followed the deck director toward a waiting slot aft of the island. He cracked his canopy as a plane crew chief popped his access steps. He reached up, yanked off his mask and helmet, and gulped down cool, delicious air. It had never tasted so good.

“Nicely done, sir,” the plane chief said as he leaned in and safed the ejection seats. “Welcome home!”

“Give me a hand with Mickey,” he said.

“That’s okay, sir,” a hospital corpsman said, scrambling up alongside the chief. “We’ve got him. You just take care of yourself. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” His knees felt weak, his legs shaky. Helping hands unfastened his harness and helped him out of the cockpit.

“Well done,” someone called as he set foot on the deck. Someone else clapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Dixie, bringing old Mickey Moss back!”

“How is he?”

“Can’t tell yet, sir,” a corpsman said. “He’s alive. Can’t find any bleeding. Side of his helmet’s dinged. I think a piece of shrapnel must have whacked him.” Several rescue people worked together to ease a board down behind Mickey’s back and strap him to it. With his head and neck immobilized, they began lifting him out of the cockpit and into a Stokes stretcher.

“Dixie!”

He turned and found himself face to face with Cat Garrity. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, quick and hard. People standing nearby cheered or clapped or laughed.

“That was some damned good flying,” she told him.

He grinned at her. “Does this mean I’m off the shit list?”

“Dixie, my man, I’ll fly with you anytime, anywhere!”

He felt like he was home.

Gunfire crackled in the distance ― the expected attack by Dmitriev’s naval forces. For Tombstone, it was a particularly helpless feeling, to be trapped at the palace with a group of nearly thirty American service personnel, with a pitched battle being fought nearby and nothing that he could do to help himself or the others. His first consideration, certainly, was the treatment of the men wounded in the assassination attempt. There were four dead ― Captain Whitehead, Special Envoy Sandoval, and two civilians. Wounded, besides Admiral Tarrant, were a Lieutenant Billingsly from OC, one Marine private named Garibaldi, five civilians, and Jorge Luis Vargas y Vargas, Sandoval’s personal aide.

Ambulances had shown up within twenty minutes of the shootings, and doctors and medical assistants had provided first aid, but Tombstone had not authorized the release of any of the wounded Navy personnel to the local civilian medical authorities, and the senior UN people had requested that Vargas be taken to a Navy ship as well. The Russians had not been insulted; in fact, they’d been relieved, for facilities at the Yalta hospital, between casualties from the Russian Civil War and the ongoing critical shortage of medical supplies, were already strained to the limit.

The shortcomings in the Russian medical service were legendary, of course. Earlier, a Russian doctor, a woman named Vaselenova, had complained about it to Tombstone as she’d prepared an IV saline drip for the wounded Admiral Tarrant. He’d watched in horror as she’d stropped the tip of a disposable syringe needle on a whetstone, then dropped it into a pot of boiling water. “Da, da,” she’d said a few minutes later, using a spoon to fish the needle out of the water. “There is never enough of what we need. Plasma. Penicillin. Clean sheets at hospital. Beds. Scalpels. Needles. Especially needles. There are never enough.”

So the medics had treated his wounded as well as they could, but left them in one of the sitting rooms in the palace, which had been transformed into a makeshift temporary hospital. If they could just establish communications again with the CBG… if they could arrange at least for helicopters to fly in and carry off the wounded, they could receive decent treatment aboard ship. The Saipan, especially, the MEU’s Tarawa-class LHA, had a three-hundred-bed hospital aboard, with some of the finest military medical facilities afloat.

If they could just reach her…

That, he decided, was a large part of the feeling of helplessness he’d been enduring over the past several hours. It had him pacing restlessly back and forth at the top of the steps to the palace, with occasional stops to stare out across the blue of the sea at the southern horizon… and the battle group invisible beyond it.

Pamela had been able to read what he was feeling, even if he hadn’t put those feelings into words. “You know,” she told him, “that there are some things even the Navy can’t fix.”

He wished she would lay off the Navy. For some reason, the pride he felt for the Navy, justifiable pride, had always seemed to grate on her. He guessed that was one of the incompatibilities she’d talked about at the restaurant. He’d known they had differences, but he was willing to try to work them out.

It still galled him that Pamela didn’t exhibit the same willingness.

There’d been little enough time to worry about that since the attack, however. In the two and a half hours since the assassination attempt, Tombstone had managed to round up all of the Americans in the party and get them into one place ― a difficult operation in itself, given the confusion that seemed to be gripping everyone in the White Palace complex. He’d put Chief Geiger in charge of all personnel, including the officers, by declaring him to be “chief of the boat” and delegating to him the responsibility of keeping everyone together and out of the Russians’ way.

Chiefs did not outrank officers in the command hierarchy, but Tombstone had found long ago that they often outranked them in sense. Almost immediately after making the assignment, he’d overheard a brief exchange between Geiger and Commander Sedgwick, who wanted to go up the beach with a party of Marines to find a place where Navy boats could come ashore and take them all off. Geiger had said, simply, “The captain wouldn’t like that, sir,” in his characteristic deep-throated rumble, and that had been the end of it.

Kardesh he kept with him as his personal translator, while Tomboy Flynn became his aide. Tomboy made herself invaluable by taking on the duties to which he had originally been assigned ― serving as his liaison with the nearly one hundred press and TV news representatives who had become his personal responsibility.

Both women carried out their assigned tasks with quiet efficiency.

Kardesh spoke excellent Russian ― her mother, she told him, was Russian ― while Joyce proved to be a born public relations expert, fielding questions and handling complaints with a light, personal touch that Tombstone knew he never could have managed… even if he’d had the time.

And he’d been working with Pamela a lot during the past few hours, too, trying to set up a radio connection with the battle group. The available Russian equipment, it turned out, didn’t have the range to reach American aircraft which were, in any case, below the horizon, and they didn’t have the codes ― for reasons that were fairly obvious ― that would allow them to tap into U.S. military communications satellites.

American Cable News, however, had equipment that was better in some respects than that of the American military. They’d originally flown into Simferopol Airport with a van-load of sophisticated electronics, including a satellite up-link that gave immediate and secure communications with ACN headquarters in Washington, D.C. It had been a fairly simple task, then, to organize a patch to HQ-NAVTEL, the Naval Telecommunications Command headquarters in Washington, which in turn routed the communications channel through a MILSTAR communications on.

It was a roundabout method of talking to the CBG’s bosses Stateside.

Tombstone was reminded of the story of Marines during the invasion of Grenada in 1983 who’d lost radio communications with the rest of their unit a few miles away and had used a credit card to place a telephone call to Camp Lejeune, South Carolina, which in turn relayed their fire-support request to the appropriate units in the field. The tale was possibly apocryphal but had enough of the ring of truth about it to make him suspect that it was at least based on a true story.

The faster they could get Tarrant and the others medevaced back to the Saipan, the better. They’d been able to stop the bleeding and to give him saline ― what medical personnel would refer to as a BVE, or blood-volume expander ― to help make up for the lost blood, but he needed more blood, and even if they’d had access to Russian blood supplies, Tombstone knew he’d be happier trusting Tarrant’s life, through cross-matches and donor blood, to Navy doctors and corpsmen who weren’t forced by necessity to recycle their disposable equipment.

“How is your admiral?” Pamela asked him, as they waited for the communications patch to go through.

“Stable. We need to get him to some decent medical facilities, though.”

“There’s a pretty good hospital here in Yalta, I hear.”

Tombstone made a face. “If we have to. But they’re crowded. Besides, ‘pretty good’ in Russia, with all of the shortages and problems they have here, isn’t even in the same league with Navy medicine.”

She sighed. “Matt, you have such complete and unbounded confidence in the Navy.”

He shrugged. “I suppose I do. It’s a confidence based on… what?

fifteen, eighteen years of experience.” He nodded toward a small group of naval personnel, including Joyce and Natalie Kardesh. Sykes was there, and Lieutenant j.g. Vanyek, looking vulnerable and scared. They were sitting on the grass talking together. “They’re good people,” he said. “Whatever you think of the organization as a whole, it’s composed of good people who know their jobs and do them.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’”

It was her turn to shrug. “Matt, you must know they’re abandoning you here.”

“I don’t know any such thing.”

“Come on. Step out from behind the uniform and take a whiff of the real world. Do you seriously think they’re going to risk a three-and-some-odd-billion-dollar nuclear aircraft carrier to rescue thirty-some men and women? At a risk of a hundred million per sailor? I don’t think so. You and I both know how Washington works. They’re not going to lift a finger to get you out unless they can make political capital on it, and I can tell you from personal observation that the tone back in the States right now is for us to stay the hell out of the Russian war.”

“The public usually supports military personnel in the field,” Tombstone said stubbornly. “They wouldn’t like it if Washington left us stuck out here.”

“Really?” She cocked her head. “Remember a little picnic in a place called Vietnam? They ― the people who put you here, I mean ― they don’t care. And as for John Q. Public, well, I think Norway and that battle up in northern Russia frightened a lot of people, let them see how terrible, how destructive and deadly modern warfare really is.”

“Mr. Magruder?” Tombstone turned to face one of Pamela’s ACN technicians. “Yeah, Ted?”

“We have your line. A guy named, uh, Coyote is waiting to talk to you.”

“All right! Thanks!”

He nearly sprinted to the mobile communications van, which was now ringed by determined-looking U.S. Marines. When he took a headset from another ACN tech and held it to his ear, he could hear a faint hiss of static, but the line was unusually clear. “It’s encrypted, sir,” a Navy radioman sitting at the console said. “You can talk in the clear.”

“Thanks.” He pressed the transmit key on his mike. “Coyote, Coyote, this is Tombstone. Do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, Stoney,” Coyote’s voice came back. “I gather you guys had to go around Robin Hood’s barn to get this comm hook up.”

“That’s affirmative, and I don’t know how often we’ll be able to do it, or for how long. Direct, tight-beam satellite feeds are hard to trace or jam, but there are some ugly customers hereabouts who might like to try.”

“Roger that.”

“Any ideas about getting us out of here?”

“We’re working on it, Stoney. Air superiority is a problem right now.”

“Understood.”

“So is Washington. We’ve not had any clear direction as to what we’re supposed to do. I can tell you right now that if it was up to the people here on the Jeff, they’d declare war on Russia right this minute, for knocking out the bridge, stranding you guys, taking a shot at one of our planes, wounding the admiral… and probably for conduct unbecoming, as well. But the five-sided squirrel cage is being slow just now.”

“What’s happening with the chain of command?”

“Okay. Captain Brandt, as Tarrant’s flag captain, just got a brevet promotion to admiral. Confirmed through Naples about fifteen minutes ago. He’s taking over the entire battle group, but he’ll be under the command of Admiral Collins, who’s senior.”

“Right.” Rear Admiral Frederick Collins was the commanding officer of MEU-25, together with Marine Colonel Winston Howell, who commanded the MEU’s ground troops. From what he’d heard, Howell was a firebrand who’d won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, while Collins was a more cautious, conservative type.

“Commander Hadley’s got the ship, though he’s pretty junior, too. I’ve been confirmed as CAG. Sorry, Stoney, but you’re out of a job. At least until we work out a way to get you guys out of there.”

“No problem, Coyote. I think I’ll have my hands full here.”

“Right. We’re on full alert, of course, and flying full coverage patrols. Lots of intercepts, too. The Russkis are testing us… or maybe trying to use up our JP-5. We’ll keep flying as long as we can, though.”

“We’re going to need to work on getting the shore party back to the ship,” Tombstone told him. “The admiral needs medical help, better medical help than they can give him here, and we have some other wounded as well. We also have a large number of civilians. They might be allowed to leave from the Simferopol Airport, but I’m not holding my breath.”

“I wouldn’t, Stoney. Last we heard here, monitoring Russian radio, the military was shutting down all commercial flights, ‘for the duration of the present emergency.’”

“Did they say what the emergency was?”

“No. They’re managing to say it’s Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries both, without releasing anything definite. Oh, and Boychenko has been branded a traitor. Our old friend Dmitriev is in charge of the Black Sea Fleet, and he’s declared himself the legitimate military governor. No response yet from Krasilnikov’s people. At least, none we’ve heard.”

“Okay. I think we’re going to have to assume that we’re stuck here for a while, though I want you to keep working on a way of getting the wounded off. Maybe at night, by submarine.”

“We’ll look into it.”

The crump and rumble of heavy gunfire ― field artillery, possibly ― sounded closer and louder, lending a new sense of urgency to the conversation.

“Okay, Coyote. I don’t have much time. The way I see it, either Washington comes to our rescue, or we’re going to be left on our own out here while they argue about it.”

“Is this a multiple-choice test? How many guesses do I get?”

“We have to start planning for what happens if they hang us out to dry.”

“Agreed.”

“Okay, here are some possibilities.

Together, they began discussing options.

“Attention on deck!”

Coyote and the other staff officers standing around the large chart table snapped to attention at the call of the sailor standing guard outside the compartment door. Captain ― no, Coyote reminded himself ― Admiral Brandt walked in, followed by several of his staff aides, looking grim.

The assembly had been called earlier that afternoon and included not only Jefferson’s department heads, but the skippers and senior staff of several of the other ships in the squadron, including those of MEU-25. Steve Marusko was there, as skipper of the Guadalcanal, as was Colonel Winston Howell, the commanding officer of MEU-25’s Marine detachment. Admiral Collins was conspicuous by his absence. He was still aboard his flag, the Guadalcanal, and had delegated his interest in the planning session to Howell. In a way, Coyote thought, that was good. They could brainstorm some rather wild possibilities here, without being immediately overruled by the conservative MEU commander.

“At ease, gentlemen,” Brandt said. Walking to his accustomed place at one side of the chart table, instead of Admiral Tarrant’s usual spot at the head, he nodded to the others in the room. “Okay, people. We’ve had to endure a lot of sudden changes, and chances are this is just the beginning. I’d like to tell all of you, before we set out, that I have no idea how I’m to fill Admiral Tarrant’s shoes. I’m not half the man he was, not half the strategist, and I’m feeling a bit out of my depth. I’m counting on each and every one of you here to see me through this thing, to help keep me from making an ass of myself and putting this battle group in jeopardy.”

He paused a moment, looking from face to face. “Okay. We’re here, as you all know by now, to discuss our options. I don’t need to tell any of you, I’m sure, that our situation as of this morning is not very promising. Some of us have been working on the various alternatives that have presented themselves, however.

“Let’s hear from you first, CAG.”

Coyote hesitated. It was the first time anyone had referred to him officially by that unfamiliar title, and he still wasn’t very comfortable with it.

Of course, he thought, Jeremy Brandt must be having the same problem with his new role as admiral and CO of the whole battle group.

“Our major problem,” he told the others, “isn’t tactical. We’re more or less hamstrung until we get definitive orders from Washington, and it could be a day or so before that happens. In the meantime, all we can really do is button up and maintain our own operational security.

“We are, however, maintaining full CAP coverage, and we’re continuing to fly ASW patrols. We are also beginning to make plans for some sort of operation aimed at getting CAG ― Captain Magruder, I mean ― and the rest of the Americans ashore out of hostile territory.” He smiled. “We’ve code-named it Operation Ranger, after John Paul Jones’s ship.”

“I thought that was the Bonhomme Richard,” Commander Barnes, the Air Boss, said.

“Just for his big I’ve-not-yet-begun-to-fight engagement,” Coyote said.

“Before that, his ship was the Ranger.”

He pointed to the large chart, which showed the Crimean coastline.

Jefferson and the other ships of the CVBG, along with the vessels of MEU-25, were all plotted, along with the current CAP tracks and ASW patrols. A number of points had been marked in red, extending in a ragged arc along the battle group’s perimeter. “Our principal tactical problem is the Russian overflights, of course,” Coyote continued. “Their attempted overflights. In the past five hours, our aviators have carried out seven interceptions of various Russian naval aircraft, ranging from Mig-29s to a Badger-G attack plane.”

During the bad old days of the Cold War, encounters between Russian reconnaissance aircraft probing both the material and psychological readiness of the American carrier defenses had been common. Most aviators had treated it as a kind of a game, a way to show off to the Russians and even pick up a souvenir or two. There’d been plenty of cases of trades arranged by sign language or radio between bomber and Tomcat crews ― a Russian fur cap for a copy of Playboy, for instance. For the most part, though, the Russian bomber pilots had tested the American defenses, noting how soon they were intercepted by the Tomcats and how far they could press the Tomcats before being forced to change course. There’d been several accidents during the closest of those encounters, but no cases of missiles or gunfire exchanged.

The situation was far more uncertain here, with the Americans completely in the dark about Russian intentions. Any of those approaching aircraft could be loaded with ship-killers intended for an all-out assault on the Jefferson. Each had to be met and, if possible, turned aside.

“We’ve met each Russian approach and turned it aside without incident, but it’s forcing us to use our aircraft fuel reserves at a rather alarming rate. We’ve been putting aircraft off our flight deck nonstop now for, let’s see…” He checked his watch. “For two hours, now. It seems likely, to Ops, at least, that the Russians are deliberately forcing us to expend our fuel reserves. They blocked the straits in the first place. They know we’re not getting any more fuel. Now they’re trying to get us to expend what we have.”

“Setting us up for an attack, CAG?” General Howe asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe just to leave us helpless. Without air, of course, we’re just so much gray-painted metal.”

“What about our UN assignment for keeping the peace?” Marusko wanted to know.

“That’ll be up to Washington, Steve,” Admiral Brandt replied. “The transfer of control to the UN didn’t legally take place this morning. Washington might want to take that as an excuse to back out now. On the other hand, we could get a directive anytime telling us to start bombing Sevastopol until the bastards yell uncle.

“In any case, our first priority, after the security of the battle group and MEU, of course, is to get our people off the beach.” Brandt looked at Coyote. “You said you’ve been discussing this with CA-with Tombstone.”

“Yes, sir. We’ve discussed several possibilities. One urgent note. We need to get the wounded out, including Admiral Tarrant. Stoney was wondering about subs, or a quick helicopter in-and-out.”

“I don’t want to send our subs that close inshore. Not in Ivan’s backyard.” Brandt looked at Marusko. “How about it, Captain? Can you get them off with your helos?”

“If Coyote’s people could give us air superiority, both over the beach at Yalta and in a secure corridor all the way back to the battle group, certainly. A piece of cake. If not, well…” He shrugged. “We all know what happens when helicopters tangle with interceptors.”

The attempted joke fell flat in the room, eliciting no more than a forced chuckle or two.

Brandt looked at Coyote. “How about it, CAG? Can you deliver on that air superiority?”

“Well, sir, we’re not going to manage it without a fight. While they’ve been probing our defenses, we’ve been probing theirs, seeing how close we could get to the beach. Every time we get within, oh, forty, fifty miles of the coast, though, we find ourselves facing Migs. Lots of them. It’s kind of a standoff right now, you see. If they try to force our defenses, we open fire and we’re in a shooting war. Same for us, if we try to force our way through to the beach. And until we get clear orders from Washington…”

Brandt nodded. “I think we’re all aware of that particular handicap. I had quite a long session with Admiral Scott this afternoon. He tells me there’s a special briefing of the President’s advisory staff scheduled for this morning, Washington time, and they’ll be going over their alternatives. But he also told me that the atmosphere back there is a bit panicky. No one in the administration wants to get into a fight with the Russians. At least, no one wants the responsibility of being the one who gives the order. We may be on our own out here for quite a while.”

Brandt paused for a moment, as though gauging the feelings and attitudes of each of the men standing around the Flag Plot table.

“I do not happen to believe, however, that we should be sitting around on our hands just because Washington is. I want each department represented here to begin working up a list of working options, based on the possibility ― no, belay that, the probability ― that we’re going to have to fight to get ourselves out of this damned mess… and to evacuate our people ashore.”

“Getting out of this,” Commander Jeffries, the senior Air Ops officer, said thoughtfully, “could require something other than fighting Russians.”

“Who’d you have in mind, Bill?” someone asked, and the others laughed nervously.

“The Turks, actually, since they’re the ones who aren’t letting us into their waters or airspace. Has anybody considered the possibility of putting the MEU-25 Marines ashore at the mouth of the Bosporus?”

“Write it up,” Brandt told him. “All of you, I want a major brainstorming session out of each man here. Let’s see exactly what our options are.”

“I vote we dig a canal through Turkey,” Lieutenant Commander Arthur Lee, the head of the CAG Department intelligence team, said.

“Nah,” Barnes said, arms folded, shaking his head. He nodded toward the chart. “Dig it through the southeast corner of Bulgaria and that little bit of northeastern Greece. Shorter distance. We’re out sooner.”

The others laughed, and some contributed their own outrageous suggestions, including sinking the entire Crimea to remove that peninsula as a source of conflict. They’re not licked yet, Coyote thought with a flash of pride. Not if they can still joke about it.

They were going to need a sense of humor to sustain them for these next few days. Nothing, not defeat, not fear, not the threat of an enemy attack, sapped a unit’s morale like being left hanging in the breeze by one’s own superiors in the chain of command.

What the hell are they thinking about in Washington? he wondered.