Alpha Strike

CHAPTER 11

“What the hell is that?” Bouncer muttered. The carrier was vectoring the JAST Tomcat to the last position of the submarine to provide air cover for the helicopters and Vikings sowing the ocean with sonobuoys.

“You got something?” Mouse demanded.

“Wait a second — let me tweak and peak a little. Come on, come on,” the RIO coaxed, practicing his expert knobology on the radar.

“There,” he said a few seconds later. “Things just got shook up a little on the launch, that’s all. I’m picking up some air contacts to the west. Low fliers, about five hundred feet off the deck. Flight of four, it looks like.”

“Anybody else got them?”

“Nope. Vincennes is checking right now, but they’re not holding anything along that bearing.”

“But you’ve got video there?” Mouse persisted.

“Sure do. Four solid blips, speed 450 knots, on a bearing that will take them just north of the carrier.”

“Let’s go take a look, then,” the pilot said, tilting the nose of the modified Tomcat down. “We might as well find out if this PFM gear works.”

“Might want to have some backup. You got people firing missiles around here, Mouse,” Bouncer said uneasily. At that airspeed, and heading for the carrier, the contacts weren’t likely to be commercial airliners.

“One Tomcat is enough for a look-see,” Mouse argued. “We need help, the carrier will get it to us ASAP.”

“I don’t think they’re going to wait for that,” the RIO said, listening to the tactical circuit chattering in his right ear. “They’re getting ready to launch the other bird right now.”

“Let me guess,” Mouse said. “Batman’s driving.”

“You got it. I never thought that flight rotation schedule would last for much longer than it took to get here. It surprised the hell out of me when he let us launch.”

“The launch, you mean! It’s not like he’d steal your hop, Bouncer. He likes to sit up front with the adults.”

“No accounting for taste,” Bouncer mused. “Me, I’m kinda happy back here. My ejection seat fires three-tenths of a second before yours does, don’t forget. And I’ve got a handle for it!”

“Launching four more Tomcats,” the Air Boss said over the flight deck circuit. With the alert five Tomcats already launched, as well as one JAST bird and Thor’s Hornet, that put seven American fighters up to intercept four Flankers. The JAST air contacts, fed to all the ships’ radar displays through the LINK had initiated a flurry of action. Even though the SPY-1 radar on the Aegis had not detected the contacts, the carrier TAO was making the safety play — get help and gas in the air before it was needed. The Air Boss thought that Batman had probably had some input into that decision, said input resulting in said Captain grinning like a possum in the front seat of the other JAST bird.

The Air Boss picked up the mike for the flight deck circuit. “Shoot that queer Turkey now,” he ordered. The Yellow Shirt on the deck whirled around, stared up at the tower, and flashed a big smile and a thumbs-up. With Batman airborne, there’d be less chance that he’d be able to kibitz anything else that happened on the flight deck.

“Damn!” Tomboy gasped, as the acceleration off the catapult slammed her back hard. “Sir, you sure about those settings?” she asked, referring to the weight figures the Cat Officer had displayed on the grease pencil board. The weight was used to determine the pressure settings on the piston that drove the catapult shuttle forward.

There was no answer for a few moments as Batman concentrated on getting the JAST bird airborne and gaining altitude. “It’s Batman up here, Tomboy,” he said finally. “And yeah, I’m sure the weight was right. You’re just used to flying with that old lady, Tombstone. Got to get you used to a tactical launch again!”

“There’s tactical and then there’s tactical, sir. Batman, I mean. You talking about the latter tactical?”

“You betcha. Speaking of tactical, how’s your gear?”

“Up and sweet. Need to screw with it for a while to figure out the finer points. Bouncer gave me a real solid rundown on it, but it’s one thing to talk about it, another altogether to get tactical.”

“That’s what we’re up here for. Play with it until you’re comfortable, but learn it fast. And don’t worry — we’ve got plenty of company up here. If things get hot and you don’t feel one hundred percent yet, we’ll buster out. Not that we’re expecting any trouble. Most likely this is just a routine fly-over.”

“Routine-right,” she said, letting her hands wander over the dials, feeling the familiar shapes and watching the display change in response to her tweaking. “Nothing’s ever routine when you’re tactical, sir!”

“Who’d you learn that from, Tomboy? Tombstone? And it’s Batman, damn it!”

“Not Tombstone,” she said. Batman glanced in his small rearview mirror as the low chuckle in her voice caught his attention, but her head was still buried in the scope. “Better teacher than that.”

“And just who might that have been?” he said, his curiosity piqued by both her tone of voice and her answer.

“Best teacher of all, for a Tomcat RIO. A MiG driver was kind enough to continue my education, back when we were over Norway,” she said, referring to the combat she’d seen on her first cruise. “And when a MiG teaches you a lesson, you don’t forget it. Not for a long, long time.”

“About time!” Bird Dog muttered. He might be the last bird off the cat, but at least he wasn’t sitting alert five. He eased forward on the throttle, feeling the vibration from the jets transmitted to his seat. The Tomcat, as clumsy on land as it was agile in the air, rolled forward. Bird Dog let it pick up a little speed, steering it toward the Yellow Shirt, and then eased back on the throttle. He tapped the brakes gently, chafing at the slowness of the flight deck ballet, as it became apparent from the Yellow Shirt’s frantic waving that the Tomcat was bearing down on him just a little too fast.

Airman Alvarez scanned the flight deck, got his bearings, and then started across the hot tarmac. Although the sun was already dipping below the horizon, the rough nonskid still held the heat of the day. He could feel it through the soles of his boots, the prickle of the heat making his feet sweat and aggravating the athlete’s foot he’d picked up last week. It had to be from the showers, he thought, desperately wishing he could rip his boots off and scratch.

The tie-down chains slung across his right shoulder bit into his flesh, the weight making him list slightly. He shrugged, trying to hitch the chains up closer to his neck as he felt one trying to slide off his shoulder. Carrying them on one shoulder had been a mistake, since he was now unevenly balanced, but putting one over each shoulder increased the probability that he’d step on the trailing ends and stumble.

He squinted at the sun, which was merging with the horizon off the carrier’s port side. The flight deck throbbed faintly under his soles as the carrier accelerated. He saw the sun shift relative positions slowly as the carrier turned into the wind. He’d better get moving, or the Air Boss would have his ass for fouling the flight deck.

Alvarez started across the flight deck. The yellow-shirted handler, forty feet away and slightly to his right, was lost in the setting sun. If he hurried he could get the tie-down chains over to Groucho before the Air Boss caught sight of him.

Only two more years of this shit, he reminded himself, Then his enlistment would be up and he’d be back to cruising the beaches of sunny San Diego, feeling the heat beating down on his back from the sun instead of radiating up through his flight deck boots from the baking nonskid and steel decks. The way he felt right now, he’d have to spend the first month of his new civilian freedom sleeping, just to catch up. But he wouldn’t have to sleep alone, he mused, and certainly not with eighty other men, the way he did now, in the packed berthing compartment six levels below the flight deck. His thoughts drifted away from the flight deck and into a series of explicit daydreams that lacked just faces on the girls to make them come true.

Bird Dog felt the brakes slip and stamped down harder on the pedal. He swore, feeling the mush beneath his feet. Hydraulics, it had to be! Suddenly, the problem was not how fast he could get to the catapult, but how much deck space he had in which to stop. The time-distance calculations flashed through his mind intuitively. Not enough distance heading toward the catapult, he was sure. He stamped down, slewed the taxiing Tomcat into a hard left-hand turn, and dropped the tailhook. If he could get it headed back down the flight deck toward the stern, the drag produced by the tailhook and the extra time might let the marginal brakes act. As a last resort, he could snag one of the arresting wires with his tailhook and get the jet stopped before it rolled off the stern into the ocean.

Ten knots had never felt so damned dangerous before.

“Nothing here,” Mouse said.

“Still showing contacts on the scope. Hell, according to this, we ought to be right in the middle of them!” Bouncer muttered, disgusted.

“Can’t help what isn’t here. Maybe the avionics took a hit from the cat shot.”

“Or maybe it’s ghosts. The way conditions are out here, all that warm, unstable air, it could be something else. A reflection off a contact miles away, multipathing through the atmosphere, an air burble, anything.”

“Wouldn’t be unheard of in the South China Sea. Well, whatever it was, it’s not here now. I guess the Aegis guys were right — if they don’t see it, it’s not here.”

“Shit,” Bouncer said, disgusted. “Better let the carrier know before they get all spun up about nothing.”

Alvarez felt as much as heard the jet wash from the F-14 dissipate. One moment he was leaning into the blast to stay upright. As it disappeared abruptly, he fell to his right, the heavy tie-down chains unbalancing him. He hit the deck hard and felt the nonskid scrape the skin off the back of his hand. One chain bounced off the deck and landed across his legs, curling between his ankles. He swore and struggled to his knees, wrapping the tie-down chain even more tightly around his ankles. He reached back to loosen the knot and looked forward toward the catapults for the first time.

“Jesus, Bird Dog!” Gator shouted. “Wrong end!”

The Tomcat was now nearly halfway through its 180-degree turn. Bird Dog was staring at the side of the carrier, trying to increase the rate of turn through sheer willpower. Two E-2C’s were parked directly in front of him. It looked like his wingtip Would just barely clear them. For a second, he wondered if he could fold his wings, decreasing the amount of room the massive aircraft took up. No, it wouldn’t be necessary, he decided, estimating that his wing would clear the E-2C’s by at least three feet. He shifted his gaze down to the end of the flight deck, focusing on the arresting gear, and caught his first glimpse — and last — of Airman Alvarez.

The F-14 that had been headed for the catapult was now staring straight at him. Alvarez felt the wind scream by his head, first tugging, then jerking him off his knees. He screamed and grabbed for a pad-eye inset on the deck, desperate for something to hold on to to stop his roll toward the catapults and the F-14. His fingers slid into the pad-eye loop and caught. The tendons in his wrist and the muscles in his arm flashed into instant agony. The F-14, now only ten feet away, was generating typhoon-strength winds, the hungry jets sucking up everything in their path. Alvarez screamed again as the bones in his first three fingers snapped, and he began rolling back down the nonskid toward the jet engine intakes.

Bird Dog jerked the throttle back, killing the twin jet engines. He felt them immediately start to spool down. But for the airman on the deck, it wasn’t soon enough.

Alvarez’s body lost contact with the ground when the jet was five feet away. His head hit the edge of the nacelle and was crushed just seconds before the screaming turbines inside pulverized his body.

The Yellow Shirt who’d been directing Bird Dog onto the catapult was behind the Tomcat, flat on the deck to avoid the jet wash from the engines. He caught a glimpse of the airman on the deck in front of the aircraft and had just enough time to scream a warning out on the flight deck circuit before a hot red wash of liquid and flesh spat out of the back of the engine nacelle. The spooling-down whine of the engine changed to a gritty clatter.