Alpha Strike

CHAPTER 6

A light tap sounded on Tombstone’s door, the one that led to the flag briefing room and TFCC. The chief of staff, usually referred to as COS, stuck his head into the admiral’s quarters. “the new birds are on deck. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Come on in, COS. I saw them coming in on the Plat,” Tombstone replied, referring to the closed-circuit TV that monitored the flight deck. “Sounded like plain old Tomcats landing to me.”

COS pushed the door open and entered the combination office/living room of Tombstone’s cabin. He glanced at the paperback book open on the coffee table. “Didn’t know you were a Western history buff, Admiral.”

“Ah, that. My boss gave it to me at my going-away party. He said that since my call sign was Tombstone, I ought to know a little about the story of Tombstone, Arizona, and the shoot-out at the OK Corral and all. That was Wyatt Earp’s last fight, you know.”

“I do know that, actually. When I was a kid, I read everything I could get on the Old West. It was an escape, I guess. Growing up in Chicago, there wasn’t that much open space. Somehow, the idea of going for days without seeing another person, riding across the ranges with your trusty horse and six-shooter, seemed like the best life in the world.”

“Know what you mean. I never got a pony when I was a kid, but I got a Tomcat when I grew up.”

“At least airspace is still as unlimited as the old Texas ranches were,” COS said.

“Except that now the Chinese are starting to act like the farmers that wanted to put up fences. Maybe my old boss was right. He said the nature of conflict remained constant over the centuries.” Tombstone glanced down at the pile of paperwork on his desk and grimaced. “Wonder if Wyatt Earp had to deal with this much paperwork. It looks like I won’t get to even see one of the new birds for another two hours. Why is everything that ends up on my desk either impossible or screwed up?”

“Because I take care of the easy decisions before they get to you, Admiral. That is what’s left over.”

“All right, all right. Anything here that can’t wait a few hours?” Suddenly, the urge to break free from the confining spaces below decks shook him. How long had it been since he’d flown? At least two months, back when Jefferson was still in transit. With the recent events in the South China Sea, there was absolutely no excuse for the admiral in command of an entire battle group to be airborne. The risk was simply unacceptable.

Back when he’d been a young hotshot pilot, he’d pulled countless hours of alert five duty, sitting in his Tomcat in every kind of weather, waiting for the word to launch that rarely came. Then, it’d seemed the worst sort of tantalizing tedium — deck-bound in an aircraft preflighted, armed, and fueled for flight. If someone had told him that he’d look back on alert five longingly, he would have thought they were insane.

“Nothing easy, but nothing urgent, Admiral,” the Chief of Staff said easily. “Of course, safety is always our top concern on Jefferson. Wouldn’t hurt to have another set of eyes take a look at those tie-down chains, I imagine. Set a good example for the flight deck crew, too, seeing how their admiral had his priorities in order.”

Tombstone looked sharply at the man, but could detect no trace of humor. It was true, of course, that working on the flight deck was the most dangerous and physically demanding job on the carrier. The young men and women who spent most of their waking hours waltzing between vast, sucking jet engines, whirling helicopter blades, and dangerous propellers became almost oblivious to the constant danger. It never hurt to remind them that their admiral knew what they were up against.

“Is the admiral in?” Tombstone heard someone say out of sight behind the Chief of Staff. Tombstone recognized the voice and groaned. The Communications Officer. He silently pointed at the opposite door, the one that opened out onto the flag mess, and quietly slid out from behind his desk and headed for it. With any luck, the Chief of Staff could handle whatever it was that the communications officer wanted while Tombstone snuck out the back door.

As he put his hand on the doorknob, he glanced back and saw the Chief of Staff reading a message. The expression on COS’s face made him pause.

“I’ll see he gets this immediately,” COS said, and shut the TFCC door in the COMMO’s face.

Is there any chance I’ll get to see sunlight in the near-future? Sometimes I think that the Communications Officer has my quarters bugged. Tombstone sighed and walked back across the room.

“I can handle this, but you need to know what it is.” His Chief of Staff handed him the message. The paper was still warm from the copy machine in Comms.

FROM: COMSEVENTHFLT TO: CARGRU14 SUBJ: FREEDOM OF NAVIGATION OPERATIONS

1. CHINA RECENTLY INCREASING TENOR OF CLAIMS THAT SOUTH CHINA SEA VICINITY SPRATLY ISLANDS SUBJECT TO TERRITORIAL CLAIMS. IN LIGHT OF RECENT EVENTS, ESSENTIAL THAT THE UNITED STATES ESTABLISH CLEAR EVIDENCE OF INTENTIONS.

2. CARGRU14 WILL COMMENCE FREEDOM OF NAVIGATION (FON) OPERATIONS VIC SOUTH CHINA SEA IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT. FORWARD OPERATIONAL INTENTIONS TO ORIG WITHIN EIGHT HOURS.

FON ops were intended to establish the right of any nation to travel in and operate on, under, and above international waters. The rest of the message laid out the general geographic area Jefferson was to patrol and ordered CVBG 14 to forward his intentions to Seventh Fleet immediately. Tombstone scrawled his initials on the message to indicate that he’d read it.

“I’ll have our response planned and the message drafted for your signature when you return,” the Chief of Staff said, and opened the door for Tombstone to leave. Gratefully, the Commander of CARGRU 14 escaped toward the flight deck. The Chief of Staff watched him go, amused. A surface warfare officer himself, he understood but never completely sympathized with the longing aviator admirals always felt for their aircraft. Every one that he’d ever worked with eventually seemed to wilt when kept below decks and away from the cockpit for too long. Part of the COS’s job was to keep the Admiral functioning at peak performance. If that included making sure he got to play hooky from his desk once in a while, then it was up to the Chief of Staff to make sure the Admiral got an occasional flight deck fix.

However, the CARGRU operations officer, also a pilot, was several years junior to COS. Humming quietly to himself, COS walked across the passageway and passed the message on. Not every aviator on the carrier was going to get an immediate look at the JAST birds.

Technicians and flight decks personnel crowded around the two aircraft, a rainbow of colors splashed against the dark, gritty gray of the flight deck nonskid. Each jersey color denoted the wearer’s role in the complex ballet that made up flight deck operations: brown for plane captains, red for ordnance techs, purple for fueling crews, and green for maintenance technicians. A few yellow shirts worn by the catapult officers and the aircraft handlers that directed the flow of traffic across the deck were sprinkled through the crowd. The Brown Shirts crowded close to the aircraft, taking righteous possession of it now that it was shut down on the deck. At the perimeter of the crowd, aviators in green flight suits tried to edge their way closer. But sometimes rank just didn’t count. The enlisted technicians ignored them, forming an unyielding phalanx of backs that blocked the aviators from the aircraft.

All but one aviator. The crowd parted to let Rear Admiral Magruder approach the aircraft. He walked up to it and ran one hand over a side panel, reflexively checking to see if the panel was dogged down tightly. The smooth paint gleamed, untarnished by months of sitting on the flight deck exposed to the elements like the other birds under his command. That would change soon, he knew. He touched it lightly and felt the odd ripples in the airframe’s skin.

“Admiral! They look good, don’t they?” How long had it been since he’d heard that voice, Tombstone thought. It could have been centuries, and he knew he’d still remember it. He’d heard it too many times, on too many dangerous patrols — and it’d saved his life more than once. One of the things an aviator never forgets is the voice of his regular wingman. Tombstone turned around.

“Captain Wayne,” he said, reaching out to shake Batman’s free hand. Neither man saluted, since they were uncovered, although a helmet dangled from Batman’s left hand. “Good to see you again! Was that you that boltered?”

Batman smiled. “Not on your life, Admiral. That was Mouse, there,” he said, gesturing toward a pilot surrounded by a flock of enlisted technicians. “Just a youngster out of Pax River. Three cruises under his belt, though, and a damned fine reputation as a test pilot. I caught the three-wire — think I got an okay from the VF95 LSO.”

Aircraft landings were graded okay, marginal, or fault. An okay pass was a clean trap, with the aircraft snagging one of the arresting wires without major problems on the approach or landing. A Marginal grade indicated some weaknesses in the landing that could have resulted in a mishap, while a fault was an evolution entirely below standards with great potential for disaster. Grading was conducted by the LSOs, or Landing Signals Officers, who were stationed off to the port side of the flight deck, slightly below on a catwalk.

“Who else did you bring with you?” Tombstone asked, scanning the crowd for unfamiliar faces. “We’ll have to wait on the formal introductions, I guess. Looks like your boys want to show off their new toys.”

“Well, there’s Mouse, of course. He’s a lieutenant commander, lead test pilot on the program. His RIO is that ugly fucker over by the nose-wheel. Lieutenant Connally Dershowitz. They call him Bouncer. You can see why.”

“No kidding,” Tombstone replied. The RIO Batman pointed out must be barely within the height and weight standards for flying Tomcats. “What’s he run, about two hundred and fifty pounds?”

“About that. He bench presses around four hundred pounds. I wouldn’t want to piss him off. We’ve got one other pilot-RIO team as well. They flew out on the COD.”

“Where’s your RIO?”

“I was hoping to talk to you about that. Right after I talked to you, I found out the dumb bitch broke her leg. I let her have a couple of days of leave, to catch the last trace of snow out in Aspen, and she pulls this shit.”

“So you’re short a RIO. Damn, Batman, bad enough that I have to provide AVGAS and water for your boondoggle — now you want to cadge a RIO out of my Air Wing as well? Besides, I thought this hotshot stuff was too complicated for a mere Fleet Tomcat aviator.”

“The backseat’s not so bad,” Batman argued. “A few improvements, but nothing a sharp RIO can’t catch on to in a few lessons. Bouncer can talk her through it in a few hours.”

“Her?”

Batman had the good grace to look slightly ashamed. “Yeah, well you see, it’s like this, Admiral. I’ve gotten used to flying with a female backseater. Bulldog — that’s my regular RIO — broke me of a number of bad habits in the last six months. I was just thinking that there’s enough going on for a pilot that it’d be counter-productive to have to get used to a male voice in my ear, seeing’s how I’m all trained up to expect some sweet young thing cooing about missile ranges.”

“You said your RIO was called Bulldog?”

“Well, she doesn’t exactly coo. Don’t tell her I said that if you ever meet her, okay? But this is going to take a smart RIO to catch on quick. I was hoping you might let me borrow Tomboy.”

“You want AVGAS and my own RIO?” Tomboy still flew every qualification flight Tombstone managed to squeeze into his schedule. Since she’d been his RIO in combat, it seemed only natural. Unwillingly, though, Tombstone found that he understood what Batman meant about having to get used to new voices from the backseat. And Tomboy was one of the smartest RIOs he’d ever come across. She’d had as much, if not more, combat experience than any man in her squadron.

“You can ask her,” Tombstone said finally. “If she says yes, and on the condition that she still flies with me when I go up, you can borrow her. Understood?”

“Roger that, Admiral!” A strange expression played across Batman’s face. “Um, I’ll look out for her, Tombstone. You know? I mean — well — if she’s your RIO.”

“She’s just an aviator, Batman,” Tombstone said, answering the question that Batman would not dare ask directly. “Now how about these queer Tomcats?” he continued, intentionally changing the subject.

Batman nodded and looked relieved. Message received and rogered for, Tombstone thought.

“What do you think?” Batman said, gesturing to the aircraft.

“Nice paint job. If it works as good as it looks, we can keep you busy.”

“Let me show you the radome. We’ll put some power on her, and I’ll show you what the new avionics look like.” Batman led Tombstone around to the nose of the aircraft with a proprietorial air.

“Hold it! Great shot!” Tombstone heard someone say. Irritated, he glanced back toward the voice. He’d be damned if one of his Public Affairs Officers, or PAOs, was going to turn one of his few moments of freedom into a photo opportunity. The cruise book would have to go without recording this historic event.

He caught sight of the photographer and groaned. Somewhere on his desk, he was sure, was a message detailing the composition of the small civilian press pool that had arrived with the two JAST birds on the COD. It was one thing to tell his own PAO staff to get stuffed — another thing entirely to offend the civilian media.

As the photographer knelt on the flight deck to steady his camera, another figure came into view. Tombstone felt a red flush creep up his neck and caught the trace of amusement on Batman’s face.

“You could have told me, asshole,” he hissed at his former wingman.

“And miss this look on your face, Admiral? Oh, no, Stoney, I don’t think so. Besides, I thought you told me you had a hotshot staff? Didn’t they brief you on the press?”

“Damn it, Batman, I want to see your ass in my cabin as soon as you get these birds tucked in and tied down!”

A woman stepped forward and held out her hand. “Hello, Tombstone — or should I say, Admiral Magruder?” she said warmly, pitching her voice low so that no one else could catch the words. “It’s been a very long time.”

He said the only words that came to mind. “Welcome aboard, Miss Drake.” From the amused look on her face, she knew exactly what that meant.

The demands of planning a response to the FON message kept him from seeing Pamela Drake again immediately, but Tombstone was irritated to find that she was constantly on his mind. He ignored the vivid recollections of her that kept crowding in, distracting him from the brief in progress, but thoughts of the round fullness of her heavy breasts, the smooth, flat lines of her belly gently flaring to the boyish hips, kept intruding. There’d been times when they were together that he could barely tell where she ended and his own body began, so closely locked together had they been. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and glanced at the other officers surrounding the cloth-covered briefing table. Not a one of them would believe that their Admiral, with his legendary reputation for an impassive face and calm demeanor, was sitting there thinking about the last time he’d made love to Miss Pamela Drake.

The lights in the briefing room came up as the intelligence officer finished the slide show portion of the brief. Two ISs darted forward and started unrolling a small-scale chart taped to the top of the chalkboard. It displayed the South China Sea and the littoral countries that bordered it. Running from east to west, a rectangle bisected the middle of the South China Sea.

“Okay, here’s what we recommend, Admiral. This box takes us east to twelve miles off the coast of Vietnam, then due west back out to the Spratly Islands. One day in, another day back out. A little longer if we linger on Vietnam’s coast.” Busby used a pencil-sized laser pointer to trace out the proposed course.

“It accomplishes what Seventh Fleet wants us to do, without getting us too far from the Spratly Islands. I like that. Doing FON ops off China’s coast, moving up north further, might be what they had in mind, though,” Tombstone remarked. He stared at the narrow rectangle on the chart. Something about it seemed familiar — no, not familiar, but it reminded him of something else he’d seen recently.

“We thought of that, Admiral, but we don’t recommend it at this time. There has to be some connection between the political maneuvering in the UN and what we’ve witnessed down here. The Chinese are just too accomplished at this game for it to be coincidence. Moving north to China’s coast puts us two days away from the Spratly Islands,” the CARGRU operations officer answered.

What is it, damn it? Why do I get an uneasy feeling just looking at the box? It’s not any particular operation that I can remember. The only thing I can think of is that fjord we once used to hide the carrier in up around Norway, but that’s not it either. Those double lines around the box — is that it?

A more northern op-area would put us in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands,” Tombstone said, stalling for time while he tried to let whatever random association his mind had made float to the top of his thoughts. “if something odd is going on in the Spratly Islands, I’d lay odds that the Paracels are having their share of unexplained events as well.”

The Paracels were a small group of islands located in the northern half of the South China Sea. Slightly more prominent and stable than the tiny Spratly chain, the islands were also claimed by China, with Vietnam and Taiwan disputing their ownership. China was two hundred miles to the north of the Paracels, and Vietnam slightly closer to the west. Taiwan was almost six hundred miles to the northeast.

“We might gather some information, but we’d also be mounting a more direct challenge to China’s exclusion zone,” the CARGRU Operations Officer chimed in. “It’s one thing to be eight hundred miles to the south of her coast, another to be cruising around the twelve-mile limit. Our best guess is that Seventh Fleet — as well as his bosses — isn’t quite ready to push China that hard. From the box Commander Busby is proposing, we can still reach out and touch the Paracels anytime we need to. Keeping the battle group around the Spratly Islands and testing the twelve mile limit with Vietnam seemed like a good compromise between doing FON and not limiting our options in the South China Sea.”

“Additionally,” Busby added, “Vietnam is currently in a state of flux.”

“When in the last fifty years has it not been?” Tombstone said. “But you’re right — Vietnam knows that whatever her relationship with the United States, she will have to live with China as her neighbor. With all the issues surrounding normalization of relations with Vietnam, it might not hurt to remind them that the United States has the power to intervene in Southeast Asia’s backyard. Okay, let’s go with this plan. Starting tomorrow morning.”

“CAG,” Tombstone said, turning to Captain Cervantes. “Let’s talk about that flight schedule. I want to make damned sure we’re not sending the wrong signals at any point. And make sure your pilots understand how critical the twelve-mile limit is. Under no circumstances are they to go wandering off inside it — in fact, just for safety’s sake, let’s set the limit at fifteen miles for aircraft. We can creep up to the twelve-mile limit a lot more safely at fifteen knots with surface ships than at four hundred knots with an aircraft.”

The CAG looked slightly put out. As I would in his shoes, Tombstone thought. Still, he was not prepared for what followed.

“I’ll brief the aircrews personally, Admiral. But we’ll also need to make sure the surface ships are just as careful. Not all of the battle group,” CAG said, picking his words carefully, “has always understood how critical that limit is. A shoot-out is the last thing we need.”

For a moment, Tombstone was tempted to dismiss CAG’s remarks as simply evidence of the rivalry that had always existed between aviators and the “shoes.” He glanced around the room and saw a number of officers studiously examining the deck. Then it hit him.

Vincennes. Early on in her career, the cruiser had shot down that airbus in the Persian Gulf. Evidence was now surfacing that Vincennes might have been inside Iran’s territorial waters when she’d fired. If the real truth about her location had ever been fully determined, it was classified at the highest levels.

“All of our assets will be very clear on my orders, CAG. And thank you for bringing up that point.”

And now I know what it was I was trying to recall. The shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Wyatt Earp’s last battle. The diagram I saw last night had those same double lines marking off the boundaries of the corral, tracing out Earp’s path to the showdown.

Tombstone had never been superstitious, and he wasn’t about to admit that the strange coincidence of the graphics in a book and the diagram of a FON box had anything in common. This was no calculated warning, no psychic premonition. It was merely more evidence that the human brain was hard-wired in ways that might never be fully understood.

Just the same, whatever else he could roll downhill to his staff and the COS, the matter of the Vincennes required his personal attention and the weight of the stars on his collar to back up his orders. Sometime in the next sixteen hours, Rear Admiral Magruder was going to have to have a very serious talk with Vincennes.