Afterburn

CHAPTER 6

Commander Edward Everett Wayne completed the aircraft checkout. He was strapped into the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat, nose number 201, parked in the early morning shadow of Jefferson’s island, and he’d just brought both engines on-line.

“Clearance to roll, Batman,” the voice of his Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Blake, said over his ICS.

“Here we go, then.” He nudged the throttles, and the F-14 nosed forward, following the vigorous hand and arm movements of the yellow-jerseyed plane director who was guiding him out of his parking place, a holding area behind a red-and-white safety stripe painted on the dark gray deck just aft of Jefferson’s island. Their destination was Cat Three, the inboard of two catapults leading across the carrier’s angled flight deck amidships.

“The met boys are still calling for CAVU,” Blake, call sign “Malibu,” said. “Perfect weather over the entire AO.”

“That’s something, anyway,” Batman replied. “At least we’ll be able to see where we’re flying.”

The Tomcat shuddered as another aircraft, an F/A-18 Hornet of VFA-161, cranked up its engines on Cat Four, ahead and to Batman’s left. Hot air roiling back from the aircraft’s twin engines made the air above the deck dance and shimmer. Deck personnel, their duties identified by the color of their jerseys and helmets, moved clear of the Hornet and crouched low on the deck. The launch director dropped to one knee, then touched thumb to deck.

Instantly, the Hornet slid forward, accelerating to flight speed in less than two seconds as steam boiled from the cat track in its wake, a seething, straight line of white fog swiftly dissipated by the breeze coming in over Jefferson’s bow. From Batman’s vantage point in his Tomcat, the Hornet appeared to slide off the end of Cat Four and vanish, dropping off the end of the rail as though plunging toward the waves far below.

Then, as if by magic, the Hornet reappeared, climbing up from behind the edge of the flight deck that had briefly hidden it from view, climbing higher, dwindling in seconds to a speck in the blue sky above the blue horizon.

Launching off a carrier, Batman reflected, was the only time when the aviator didn’t have full control over his aircraft.

Most aviators feared the trap at the end of a mission more than the launch ― night traps or recoveries during bad weather were the worst of all ― and Batman shared that common dislike with all other naval pilots. At least during a trap the aviator was in control of his machine, guiding it down the glide slope, adjusting position and speed and angle of attack in response to the LSO’s radioed commentary, and to his own eye, hand, and judgment. But the launch was the one time during the mission when the man in the cockpit was literally a passenger. Just beneath the carrier’s roof, in the catapult room, steam pressure was fed into two enormous bottles, with pistons attached to the shuttle, which rested in its track on the deck overhead. The FDO ― the Flight Deck Officer ― was responsible for calling for just the right amount of steam, an amount that varied depending both on the type of aircraft being launched and on its launch weight, which might vary anywhere from 42,000 to 82,000 pounds. Too much steam pressure, and the aircraft could be torn apart; too little, and it would not build up enough speed to become airborne and would trundle off the front of the catapult and into the ocean below. There wasn’t much room for error; typically, cats were set to launch aircraft at about ten knots above the minimum speed necessary to get them airborne.

Sometimes ― not often, but sometimes ― something just plain went wrong with the equipment, and the aircraft was given a nudge instead of a kick. Batman had seen it happen more than once. On one occasion, pilot and RIO had ejected as their Tomcat fell toward the sea. The RIO had survived, but the aviator had been recovered from the sea by helicopter later, dead, his neck broken.

Even in peacetime, flying jets off a carrier was one hairy way to earn your paycheck.

It was always a bit unsettling then to sit and wait in line for your turn at the cat. Batman liked being in control; he was very good at what he did ― which was flying a high-performance Navy fighter ― and he disliked just sitting there, strapped into his ejection seat hoping that somebody else got their figures right and pushed the right sequence of buttons.

He’d been giving a lot of thought to control, lately, especially as it related to his future. Aboard the Jefferson, Batman had a playboy’s rep; when he’d first checked in with the VF-95 Vipers, several years earlier, he’d been something of a hot dog, young, brash, and just a bit too eager to bend or break the regs when it suited him, especially when he was flying.

No more. He’d met a girl two months ago, a wonderful girl… and he was seriously considering giving up the Navy and settling down.

There’d been a time, not so many years back, when Batman would have howled with derision at the thought that he could ever be anything other than a naval aviator. He loved flying, loved it with a passion that put flight at the very core of his entire life. He’d joined the Navy in the first place precisely because, in his opinion, naval aviators were better than any other military pilots; they had to be, to let themselves be hurled off a pitching flight deck at 170 knots… or to trap on the carrier deck after hours in the air, often in the dark and in stormy, wet, or visibility-poor weather.

But after more than ten years in the Navy, he was beginning to look for something more than the heart-pounding slam of acceleration when he pushed the throttles to Zone Five burner.

He was beginning to realize that Sunny Tomlinson might just be that something more.

Ahead, another F-14 waited on Cat Three as the dance on the deck continued, White Shirts completing their safety checks, red-shirted ordnancemen checking the aircraft’s weapons, making certain the arming pins with their red-tagged wires were pulled, making double-certain each of the F-14’s missiles ― Sidewinder, AMRAAM, and Phoenix ― was secure. Then the jet blast deflector, the JBD, slowly rose from the deck into an upright position squarely behind the Tomcat, obscuring it from Batman’s view.

In less than a minute, however, the F-14 ahead thundered off the angled flight deck, its F110-GE 400 engines glowing like twin bright orange eyes as the catstroke hurled it off the waist and into the sky, following the Hornet. In a swirl of steam, the JBD folded back down to the deck, and Batman eased Tomcat 201 forward, guiding it over the slot where green-shirted hookup men ran the catapult shuttle back to the start.

Everywhere on the deck around him, the dance continued, an ant-heap scurrying of rushed but purposeful behavior. Four to five hundred men were working together on the deck, moving in close synchronization, the entire production directed by the Air Boss in his glassed-in aerie high up on the island, in Pri-Fly. Things were moving fast this morning, as if to compensate for the unexpected interruption in flight activities last night. With the survivors of the sunken Victor III’s crew aboard now and with the Jefferson well into her operational area in the eastern end of the Black Sea, the launches and recoveries were going like clockwork, the carrier flexing her airborne muscles.

A Green Shirt standing to the starboard side of the F-14 held up a board reading 62500, providing Batman with verification of the Tomcat’s total weight in pounds ― aircraft, fuel, and weapons. He nodded agreement; the same weight would be fed to the catapult officer in his domed-over hideaway on the deck, letting him know just what settings to call for from the cat crew below. Get it right, guy, Batman thought with a flash of gallows humor. In fact, every man and woman aboard the ship knew his or her job as well as he knew his.

But there were so many things that could go wrong. Not even the instruments were fast enough to keep up with everything that happened during the catstroke; launch was a supreme gesture of blind faith in shipmates and in technology.

A Red Shirt held up a bundle of wires, each with a red tag fixed to one end. There were six of them, representing two AIM-9M Sidewinders and four AMRAAM radar-guided missiles… correct. A clatter of chains beneath Batman’s feet told him the hookup men were securing his nose-wheel to the cat shuttle.

The final checklist run-through proceeded swiftly and with a taut economy of motion. The launch officer held his hand high, circling tightly, and Batman eased his throttles forward to full military power. He checked the motion of his stick, forward, back, left, right… then the rudder pedals, left, right. All clear, all correct. A red light high on the carrier’s island next to Pri-Fly winked over to green.

“Green light,” Malibu called.

“Hang on to your stomach, buddy. Let’s find us some elbow room!”

“Roger that.”

The launch officer, standing to the F-14’s right, was taking a last look around, checking the aircraft, checking to make sure deck personnel were clear. He looked up at Batman and saluted.

Batman returned the salute, a final exchange indicating readiness for launch. The launch officer dropped to his knee, pointing down the deck as the Green and Yellow Shirts nearby crouched low. He touched the deck with his thumb.

An explosion of acceleration slammed Batman back against his seat as the catapult hurled him down the deck. In two seconds he was traveling at 170 miles per hour, past the island, off the angled flight deck, and flashing past the overhanging cliff of Jefferson’s towering gray bows close off his starboard wingtip. The catstroke’s acceleration was so hard it actually seemed as though he slowed down once he was clear of the track and airborne; he felt the aircraft’s controls biting the air ― nothing soft or mushy, no red-light indicators of engine failure or control fault. “Good shot!” sounded in his headphones as the Assistant Air Boss confirmed his launch.

It always took him a second or two to recover mentally from the cat launch, to “get behind the airplane.” Gently, he brought the stick back and started climbing. Blue sky and sunlight shone above and around him with the unearthly, dazzling intensity of flight.

“Whee-ooh!” Malibu exalted from the rear seat. “I think we left the old stomach back there on the deck someplace.”

“Too late to go back for it now, Mal,” Batman told his RIO. “Let’s see if we can find us some mountains.”

“I’m with you, dude. Try east.”

“Into the sun.” He brought the stick gently right, watching his compass heading change on the HUD as the sun, still low in the sky, shone with a brilliant, golden light above a lowlying ripple of clouds on the horizon.

He thought of Sunny, and the last time they’d been together.

Peoples Republic of Georgia First Lieutenant Marty Cole, U.S. Army, opened the pilot’s-side door and clambered awkwardly into the cockpit of the VH-60 Black Hawk. He was stiff and sore from two days of hard flying mixed with nights of sleeping on hard cots in dilapidated shanties. Cold and hard as they were, folding cots brought in off the Guadalcanal and set up in a drafty tent were infinitely better than the parasite-infested bedding that was the norm in most of the buildings he’d seen since being assigned to the UN Crisis Assessment Team. But this morning Cole was starting to wish he’d taken his chances with the insect life.

“How’s it looking, Ski?” he asked, suppressing a yawn. Another thing he was wishing for was a decent cup of coffee, even a bad cup of coffee, to help him wake up. The stuff they served locally was worse than Turkish coffee… and a good explanation for why most people around here seemed to drink tea. Normally he was up before dawn, but he’d been out later than expected last night and not made it back to Tara until nearly zero-three-hundred.

Tara ― the name of the mansion in Gone With the Wind ― was what the American forces in Georgia were calling their camp ashore, a tent city just outside a ramshackle native village of stinking huts made of sod, clapboard, and sheet tin damned near as ritzy-looking as some of Rio de Janeiro’s poorer slums. Poti, the nearest city hereabouts, was almost as bad, shot to hell and almost abandoned.

Second Lieutenant Paul Dombrowski looked up from the copilot’s position and frowned over the top of the dog-eared preflight checklist. “You look bright-eyed and chipper this morning. Where have you been?”

“Crashed. Crashed and burned.”

“Big date last night, huh?”

“Don’t I just wish. God, I hate this place!”

“Well, we’re preflighted and ready to go. We’re gonna be late, though.

We’re running two hours behind our flight plan, at least.”

“The damned blue-hats don’t give a shit if they’re on time or not,” Cole said bitterly, ignoring for the moment the fact that both of them had been issued flight helmets painted the brilliant baby blue of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. “Don’t see that it makes any difference to us how late we are.”

In his five years in Army aviation, Cole had served on his fair share of shit details, but this one, he figured, ought to satisfy his quota for at least the next seventy years or so. This whole operation was one big cluster fuck from start to finish, a monster conceived in good intentions, born in politics, and nurtured in the hellish clash of committees, boards, and panels that dominated every policy-level Pentagon decision made these days. The cross-service problems alone were staggering; Sustain Hope had started as a joint Navy-Marine operation, but the Army, unwilling to let itself be cut out of the potential treasure trove of political largesse, name recognition, and program funding that the UN mission represented, had wormed its way in through the back door. While CH-53 Sea Stallions had been ferrying Marines ashore yesterday, Cole and Dombrowski and their aircraft’s crew chief, Warrant Officer Palmer, had flown one of two Army UH-60 Black Hawks into Poti’s airfield.

They’d come to Georgia loaded for bear. Their Black Hawk had been equipped with ESSS ― an acronym meaning External Stores Support System. A deliberate copy of the external weapons mounts employed by Russian Hind helicopter gunships, the ESSS would let the Black Hawk ride shotgun for the UN Crisis Assessment Team’s Hip. There’d been a lot of sniping at UN air traffic over western Georgia lately, chiefly from Russian mobile antiaircraft units under the control of one or another of the militia or Russian army forces in the area; one UN helo had been shot down the week before, and two others damaged. The Army Black Hawk’s ESSS, loaded with sixteen Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, would be one hell of an incentive for those units to stay under cover and leave UN aircraft alone.

Dombrowski touched the side of his helmet, listening closely. “Uh-oh.

Here it goes.”

“What?”

“Two-seven finally checked in over the radio.” The code group referred to the Assessment Team, and their helicopter. “They’re saddling up.”

Cole glanced at his watch. “Only about two hours late. That must be a new speed record for a Crisis Team.”

The tall Pole’s frown turned into a grin. “All we have to do now is pray that nobody goes and insults the local honcho’s sister before we get out of here. They’ve got our flight plan so screwed up now I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll get back home before our enlistments expire.”

The Crisis Assessment Team had been on the move for over a week now, since long before the Americans had arrived. They were traveling from town to town throughout western Georgia, trying to determine from interviews with the locals ― and by whether or not anybody took a shot at them as they passed ― whether this wretched country had indeed been abandoned by the more organized Russian units, or whether Reds or Blues were still here in force. From what Cole had seen over the past couple of days, there wasn’t anything organized about Georgia… except possibly for the misery of its inhabitants. The towns were war-shattered, with little left but rubble and vast, sprawling, disease-ridden refugee camps and tent cities. The team they were escorting was a varied lot ― two U.S. Army officers who’d arrived with Dombrowski and Cole, two Marine officers out of MEU-25, three British army officers, a French air force man, two Turks, and an Ethiopian UN Special Envoy with the tongue-twisting name Mengistu Tzadua ― not to mention the ragged, heavily armed Georgian freedom fighter who’d insisted on accompanying the team as it made the rounds of the countryside, plus two people from the American Cable News network, a reporter and a cameraman. The whole operation was a bizarre melting pot. They could barely share ideas among themselves, much less quiz the locals on how the UN could better deliver humanitarian aid. Cole didn’t know how much more of this assignment he’d be able to put up with before he did something most undiplomatic. He was all for helping the victims of war by delivering humanitarian aid, but so far he’d seen more bureaucrats than relief workers, and it seemed like there was no end in sight.

Cole grimaced. You usually knew why you were on an op, and who your enemies were, and what the risks were likely to be, whether it was delivering food to Somalia or stopping the neo-Soviets in the snow-covered mountains of Norway. This was something totally different, however, a tangled web of crossed interests, cross purposes, and particularly unpleasant men with guns who weren’t always pleased to see the U.S. troops or UN peacekeepers.

“Here they come,” WO Chris Palmer called from the rear compartment.

“Finally!” Cole muttered, powering up the Black Hawk and gently feeding the twin T700-GE-700 turboshafts, listening to the rising whine of the rotors with a practiced ear. “Radio silent routine, people, once we’re airborne.”

Their orders had specified staying off the radios once in the air. The idea was to surprise Russian forces who might otherwise track them by their radio calls.

Moments later, another helicopter flew past, an odd-looking, ungainly beast with an elongated, rounded fuselage and prominent round windows along the sides. The Mi-8 Hip was an old Soviet design and was seen everywhere in this part of the world, especially for transport duty. This one had the blue UN flag painted on its side. “Hang on, everyone,” Cole said, and he engaged the collective, lifting the Black Hawk clear of the dirt.

Poti spread out below, shattered white buildings crowded against the sparkling waters of the Black Sea, a ruin that looked as dilapidated from the air as it did from the ground. Cole could almost imagine the stink of the place fading away as he followed the Hip toward the northeast.

“That guy’s really traveling,” Cole said. The Hip was already a good three miles ahead of them, a black spot just above the horizon. “Wonder if he’s trying to make up for lost time?”

“Maybe so.” Dombrowski pulled out a map from under his seat, folded and attached to a clipboard. “So where to today? Cha-something, they said?”

“Chaisi,” Cole replied. Another last-minute change, decided on just last night by the team’s leaders. “Little village up in the mountains, just outside the NFZ.”

“Outside the no-fly zone? Oh, joy. We get to play tag with Hind gunships today.”

“None have been sighted so far,” Cole told the copilot. “In fact, from everything I heard last night, it looks like the Russian regulars really have pulled up and stolen away into the night. Not so much left behind as a crust of black Russian bread. Piece of cake.”

“Shit. That just means we’re gonna be staying here, L-T! Maybe we should scare up a Hind or two. Might mean we get pulled back to the ships.”

“I’m not sure which is worse,” Cole said. “Sleeping on those damned cots at Tara, or being cooped up aboard a hip-pocket aircraft carrier.”

“Man, look at those mountains,” Dombrowski said, changing the subject.

One particularly rugged range was thrusting up in front of them, its jagged brown walls only a few miles distant now. “We’re not going over that thing, are we?”

“Nah. There’s a valley.” He pointed at the Hip, now reduced to a tiny spot far ahead and to the right. “See? Two-seven’s headed straight for it.”

“Christ,” Dombrowski said as the valley opened up around them. Trees flashed past to left and right, some reaching well above the Black Hawk’s cockpit. “Just like the trench on the Death Star in Star Wars.”

“At least,” Cole said with a grin, “we won’t have Imperial fighters on our tail!”

He wished, though, that Two-seven would slow down a bit. He didn’t want to get lost in these mountains, and with radio silence, he couldn’t call the bastard and tell him to slow down.

Muttering an imprecation against all bureaucrats, Cole opened the throttle a bit wider.