Afterburn

CHAPTER 8

“Jesus H. Christ!” Cole shouted, jerking the control stick over and banking sharply as a silver shape thundered past the helicopter a few hundred feet overhead, then broke into a sharp climb. “What the hell was that?”

Dombrowski shook his head. “Oh, shit, man! Who told those Navy bastards they had the right-of-way?”

“Navy?” It took Cole a moment for that to register. “Oh, yeah, sure, the flyboys watching the no-fly zone. Man, that guy scared the shit out of me!”

“Guess he got bored flying CAP and decided to come hassle us,” Dombrowski said.

Cole swore and brought the helicopter back on course. “Man, the moment we get back, I’m reporting this one! That guy could’ve smashed us into a cliff with his jet wash!”

But something was nagging at him. According to the op plan he’d seen, the Navy fighters were supposed to fly racecourse tracks out over the sea unless there was a specific reason for them to fly inland. A reason like a no-fly zone violation.

“Dom,” He said, feeling cold. “Get on the horn. Raise Tara. Find out what the hell a Navy F14 is doing in here.”

“Radio silence, LT. Remember?”

“I don’t give a shit about radio silence! I want to know what the hell is going on!”

“Bird Dog Two, this is One,” Batman called. “Say again your last!”

“One, this is Two,” Dixie’s voice said, harsh with urgency and with the stress of a high-G climb. “Target Sierra One is a Hind gunship. I say again, Hind gunship.”

Batman pulled back on his stick, taking the Tomcat to eighteen thousand feet. His VDI showed three targets now, Mason and Garrity’s F14, the UN helo, and the bandit.

“Cat,” he radioed. “Do you concur?”

“Sorry, Batman. I didn’t see it. We’ve got a Zoo down here in the rocks and I was working my board.”

“Bird Dog One, this is Dixie. I only had a glimpse but it was pretty close. I made the weapons pylons.”

“Do you have it in sight now?”

“Negative,” Dixie replied. “Still in my climb. He’s behind us somewhere.”

At the top of his climb, Batman eased the stick left and put the nose over, lining up the shot. On his HUD, the targeting pipper drifted toward the bandit, moving up the mountain valley. At a range of just over five miles, he still couldn’t actually see the target, but the Tomcat’s computer had painted it on his VDI and again on his heads-up display, a tiny circle of green light. Pipper and circle connected.

“Batman,” Malibu said over the ICS. “I’ve got something from UN Two-seven. It’s garbled… something about they’re under attack.”

“That Hind must be taking shots at them. Tell ‘em the cavalry’s on the way,” Batman said. “I’ve got the bandit lined up. Target lock!”

He decided to go with a heatseeker rather than a radar-guided AMRAAM. With the target between his AWG9 radar and the valley floor, there was too great a chance that the missile would accidentally lock onto the ground instead of the Hind. The helicopter’s engine exhaust was hot, the ground cold. It would make a perfect target beacon for the AIM9.

He snapped a selector switch and immediately heard the high-pitched warble as one of his Sidewinder missiles “saw” the heat emitted by the helicopter.

His thumb closed on the firing switch. “Fox two!” he called, giving the alert that told all friendly aircraft that a heatseeker was in the air.

With a piercing shoosh, a Sidewinder slid free of its rail beneath his starboard wing, streaking toward the valley five miles away. As its exhaust flare dwindled, Batman suddenly remembered the date and broke into a grin behind his oxygen mask.

“Trick or treat, you sons of bitches,” he said.

“You raise Tara yet?” Cole demanded.

“Yea, but things are all screwed up. Sounds like a Chinese fire drill back-” Dombrowski stopped. He’d turned in his seat to illustrate his point and stopped in mid-sentence, staring out of the Black Hawk’s cockpit toward the rear.

“Dom?”

“Shit! Missile! Missile! Incoming!”

Cole acted on instinct alone, bringing the Black Hawk’s nose up and over in a hard turn to the right. No helicopter in the world could outrun a missile; their one chance was to turn into the missile and pray that it smacked into the ground before it could correct.

They almost made it.

The AIM9 Sidewinder streaked in at 660 miles per hour, arrowing down from above and behind the Black Hawk, homing on the bright, hot flares of exhaust spilling from the two engine exhaust shrouds beneath the big four-blade rotor. The missile’s tiny brain was correcting the weapon’s course, bringing the AIM9 up to match the target’s forward vector when it struck… not the engine, but the tip of one whirling rotor blade.

The explosion was shattering, but not as deadly as it might have been if the warhead had detonated inside the target’s engine, as it had been designed to do. Cole felt the aircraft lurch suddenly, and then the helicopter was violently oscillating, the entire ship jerking back and forth with each turn of the rotors. He battled the stick, trying to bring the ship back under control. The landscape was whirling past the cockpit now as the Black Hawk spun dizzyingly into the valley.

It felt as though they’d lost all or most of one rotor blade; the imbalance would tear the engine apart in seconds, but with luck and some decent piloting, Cole thought he might be able to save enough collective to make it to the ground all in one piece. Nursing the engine, battling stick and pitch and collective, he brought the spinning aircraft down. In the last second or two before touchdown, however, the machine started to go over onto its right side, and nothing Cole could do would right it. The spinning rotors chewed into earth and the Black Hawk’s fuselage counterrotated. An instant later, the engine blew, and a ruptured fuel line spilled aviation gas across a red-hot manifold.

They struck hard, plowing into soft earth, the impact softened somewhat by the right-side ESSS crumpling with the crash and breaking away. Cole gasped as he slammed against his safety harness, then again as his seat tore free of its mountings and slammed him forward into the instrument console. The fuselage bounced once, then rolled partly upright; the change in attitude let the pilot seat collapse backward into an approximation of its original position.

Stunned, his chest shrieking agony with each breath, Cole still managed to hit the release and drag himself free of the seat. Dombrowski’s head lolled to the side; Cole couldn’t tell if the copilot was dead or unconscious. Blinking back tears against the pain, he unstrapped Dombrowski, tried to drag him free… and failed. The man’s weight was too much for him to handle with what felt like several broken ribs.

Then Chris Palmer was with him, his face a mask of blood from a nasty cut on his scalp up near his hairline, but otherwise intact. Smoke boiled into the cockpit from the aft cabin.

“The ship’s on fire!” Palmer yelled. “We’ve got to get out!”

“Help me with him!”

Together, they dragged Dombrowski out from between the cockpit seats, aft into smoky darkness, and out the right-side door. They hit muddy earth and kept moving; Cole glanced back once and caught a glimpse of the entire engine housing aflame, as black smoke spilled from the downed aircraft’s interior. A few seconds later, the flames reached the fuel tanks and the Black Hawk erupted in a searing yellow-and-orange fireball that roiled into the morning sky.

The two of them dropped to the ground on either side of Dombrowski’s body, gasping for breath. “God, what happened?” Palmer asked.

“We just got shot down, is what happened,” Cole said. He winced as pain lanced through his side. “Damn, I think we just got shot down by the fucking Navy!”

It was a miracle that any of them had survived.

Mason pulled up gently, putting his Tomcat into a terrain-hugging flight across the hills. At the far end of his climb-and-turn when the missile had struck, he’d seen the flash and the smoke. Now he was angling back into the valley for a closer look. “Target Sierra One is down!” he radioed, exultant. “Scratch one Hind!”

“Roger that,” Batman replied. “Good spotting, Dixie!”

But Dixie didn’t respond, not immediately. As he passed low over the valley, he had a clear view of the downed helo. Most of the main cabin directly beneath the engine compartment and the twisted, shattered rotors was gone, crumpled up in a fire-blackened skeleton that was rapidly being consumed by fiercely burning flames. The tail section was more or less intact, however, extending out of the fireball at a jaunty angle. He could just make out the words UNITED STATES ARMY stenciled in yellow on the olive-drab paint.

Nearby, a Russian-made Hip Mi-8 was settling to the ground, and figures were running from the open rear door. Then the F14 was past the valley, and he couldn’t see anymore… couldn’t see if there were survivors, couldn’t see the flames.

“Oh, my God!”

Cat’s words over the ICS said it all. Dixie felt a cold, hard lump in his chest and throat, felt sweat sticking the skin inside his helmet, felt the hammer of his heart beneath his safety harness.

Years of training, years of work, years of battling idiocy and prejudice to get him his one golden chance as a Navy combat aviator.

And it had just ended with a downed U.S. helicopter.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No!”

“Tomcat Two-oh-one, Charlie now.” The voice of Commander William Barnes, Jefferson’s Air Boss, sounded over Batman’s headset, giving the order to commence his final approach to the carrier.

Batman pulled the control stick over, guiding the Tomcat into a 4-G turn toward the carrier deck. He cut back on the throttles and hit the Tomcat’s speed brakes to slow the fighter to below three hundred knots. The computer started to reset the position of the wings to a forward position to compensate for the reduced speed, but Batman overrode the controls without really thinking about it. Most naval aviators liked to come in with the wings in their swept-back position, claiming the computer’s preferred wing setting made the Tomcat look like an oversized goose. Batman’s actions were virtually automatic after years of handling carrier landings, but this morning he was doubly distracted.

He still couldn’t believe that he’d just scored an own goal downing an American helicopter. Damn damn damn! How in hell had that happened?

He forced himself to concentrate on the approach. Batman flicked on the switch to lower the Tomcat’s landing gear as he continued the turn. His HUD display showed his speed falling below 230 knots, and Wayne dropped the wing flaps to further reduce the speed of the aircraft. He scanned his console readouts, noting the rate of descent, 615 feet per minute, and the range to the carrier, just over three-quarters of a mile. His angle-of-bank was twenty degrees as he finished his turn and lined up on the flight deck, making his approach from astern.

Jefferson was making fifteen knots, steering east through relatively calm waters under a clear blue sky. Landing conditions were almost ideal, and for a pilot who had made landings in the most difficult weather conditions ― and, worse yet, at night ― it should have been an easy approach. But Batman Wayne was finding it hard to stay focused, and on something as tricky as a carrier landing that could be deadly. From his vantage point behind and above the carrier, the flight deck seemed an impossibly small target set in the wide blue expanse of the sea.

He could see the ship’s Fresnell landing system mounted on the squat tower on the port side of the carrier, the “meatball” that helped a pilot estimate his glide slope. “Tomcat Two-oh-one, seven point one, ball,” he radioed. Calling the ball was the signal that he had the meatball lined up and was starting his final approach with 7 1 00 pounds of fuel on board.

“Roger ball,” Barnes acknowledged. That passed control of the approach from Pri-Fly to the Landing Signals Officer stationed on a platform just below the Fresnell lens.

“Glide slope’s a little steep, Batman.” The voice of Lieutenant Gene “Lassie” Lassiter, the LSO on duty for the Vipers this morning, was flat and calm. “More power.”

He pushed the throttles forward and pulled the Tomcat’s nose up, cursing under his breath. There was no reason for this to be anything but a routine trap on the flight deck.

No reason beyond the simple fact that he couldn’t get the image of that burning helicopter out of his mind.

“Easy now,” Lassiter said. “Don’t overcompensate now.”

The very best LSOS in the fleet were the ones like Lassiter who could keep calm and unflappable, giving guidance without sounding like world-class nags.

“Ease off, Batman!”

Shit… he had overcompensated. The fighter was coming in too high now.

The red lights on either side of the meatball came on, but he was almost up to the carrier’s roundoff and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it now.

“Wave off! Wave off!”

His landing gear shrieked as they touched the deck, too far forward for the arrestor hook to snag a cable. Batman pushed the throttles forward and pulled up on the stick, cursing aloud this time. The engines thundered, the acceleration pressing him into his seat as the plane lifted clear and headed back into the open sky once again.

“Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!” the LSO called. Batman felt himself flushing behind his oxygen mask. Of all the stupid rookie tricks to pull!

“Take it easy, man,” Malibu said behind him. “Don’t let it get to you.

Just circle around and get your focus back.”

“Shit, Malibu! If you don’t like my flying, you can get out here and walk back to the boat!”

“Chill out, dude,” the RIO responded with a trace of his usual bantering style. “Just stay frosty, right? You can cool off while they bring Dixie down. Nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah. Nothing to worry about.”

Except for the fact that he’d just downed an American aircraft, maybe killed its flight crew.

Nothing to worry about at all.

The Tomcat snagged the arrestor wire with a jolt that flung Tom Mason hard against his shoulder harness. “Good trap! Good trap!” the LSO was calling on the radio as he cut the throttles back. The roar of the engines faded to a low rumbling whine. A yellow-shirted traffic director ran onto the flight deck in front of the fighter, waving his twin rods to guide Mason on his taxi path.

He backed the plane up far enough to take the strain off the arrestor cable and let it drop to the deck, “spitting out the wire,” as it was called. Then he folded the fighter’s wings and started slowly forward, following the Yellow Shirt.

“Good trap” echoed in his mind. He’d made it down in one try, at least.

After Batman’s bolter, Mason had been worried he’d have trouble, too. After all, if the commander had been shaken up by the downing of a U.S. chopper, how much worse should it have been for the man who made the bad call in the first place? Somehow, though, when the time had come to start the approach, Dixie had been able to push his concerns aside and concentrate on the landing.

“Does that make me a good aviator or a callous one?”

“I’d vote for callous,” Garrity said from the backseat.

Mason suppressed a curse. He hadn’t realized he’d been thinking out loud. “Hey, lay off, Cat,” he said. “I made a mistake back there. But just because I didn’t bolter…”

“Relax, Dixie,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Pressure hits different people in different ways. The Batman was probably shaken up by a lot more than that Black Hawk. He’s got a whole squadron to worry about.”

“Yeah,” Mason said. He pulled into the space reserved for his plane and killed the engines, then paused before opening the canopy. “Just between us, Cat, what do you think’s gonna happen?..”

She didn’t answer for a long moment. “Look, I don’t have any answers,” she said at last. “I didn’t get a good look at that helo when we made the pass. From back here, though, it looked to me like you saw exactly what you wanted to see, and that was a hostile bird you could go after.”

“But-“

“You asked for my opinion, Dixie. I’m not saying you were making things up, or anything like that. I just think you were a little too eager, that’s all.” She paused. “If CAG thinks the same, he could throw the book at you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since I started carrier duty, it’s to play everything as chilly and professional as possible. Magruder doesn’t tolerate anything less and he shouldn’t.”

“Cat, I know what I saw-“

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure you’re convinced of it now.” There was an even longer pause. “But I’ve got to tell you the truth, Lieutenant. I’m going to ask to be assigned to another plane for a while. I don’t think I want to ride with somebody I can’t trust to keep his head in a tight spot.”

The canopy lifted slowly, and the plane captain was alongside to unfold the ladder so Mason and Garrity could climb out. He didn’t answer her.

The problem was, he wasn’t sure he could answer her.

Because, deep down, Tom Mason was very much afraid she was right.