Alpha Strike

CHAPTER 8

We will be increasing the size of the garrison here immediately,” Mein Low said. “Your logistics officer will meet with mine to discuss the details.”

“May I ask why?” Bien forced a neutral tone into his voice. The ten Chinese Flankers currently on “temporary assignment” to Vietnam were already straining the resources of the small training base.

“Increased training opportunities,” the Chinese officer replied. “Your men have made excellent progress in air combat. It is time to take the next logical step in this evolution and begin experimenting with squadron-level tactics rather than one-on-one combat. To support that, I need more than one squadron here.”

“I will have to discuss this with my superiors, of course,” Bien said politely. “It will take some time to make preparations for more aircraft.”

“The next squadron will arrive next Tuesday,” Mein Low said, as though his Vietnamese counterpart had not spoken.

“I’m not certain-“

“Four days from now, Bien.” Mein Low fixed Bien with an impassive, vaguely threatening look.

So finally the Chinese show their hand! Bien thought. I warned the government against this very scenario. Once China has a presence inside a country, they can be very difficult to dislodge. They are the perpetual unwanted houseguests who far overstay their welcome — haven’t we at least learned that during the last twelve centuries? And to refuse this additional deployment will be an invitation for them to extend their presence by force.

The politicians who were eager to consolidate their recent gains in power had been eager to take advantage of the advanced air-power training the Chinese had offered. Bien’s concerns had been dismissed as old-fashioned, his fears as paranoia.

“In addition to more advanced training for your countrymen,” Mein Low puffed, “there will be other exciting opportunities to advance your regional security. Our squadrons will also be deploying to Malaysia and Brunei, to assist their programs. Within months, you will have the capability to make the South China Sea an impenetrable fortress. Never again will you see the Americans invading your soil, destroying your unity! With our help, you will be invulnerable.”

I heard those arguments six months ago, when your first aircraft arrived It was that very concept that sold the politicians on this entire evolution — that we would develop the capabilities to withstand another American invasion. But if the Soviets were difficult masters, how much worse the Chinese will be!

But there was nothing to be won jousting with the Chinese commander, not when his own politicians failed to see the dangers. Bien bowed politely, leaving Mein Low’s office deeply worried about the future of his country’s independence.

Most of the battle group wheeled to the west, steadied on a course of three hundred, and headed toward the coast of Vietnam. Jefferson turned into the wind, generating thirty-five knots of wind across the deck, and set flight quarters.

Inside Hornet 401, Major Frederick Hammersmith, call sign Thor, cycled his stick forward, back, and then side to side, testing his aircraft control surfaces. He watched the Yellow Shirt and nodded when he got a thumbs-up. He shoved the throttle forward, coming to full military power. The Hornet vibrated eagerly as he went to afterburners.

Thor returned the Yellow Shirt’s salute and settled the small of his back against what passed for a lumbar support pad in his seat. Two seconds later, the steam-driven catapult screamed forward, accelerated the Hornet to 130 knots in just under four seconds, and threw it off the forward end of the carrier.

The Hornet dropped sickeningly. Thor felt the usual second of sheer terror, wondering whether he had enough airspeed to fly. Of all the things that could go wrong in carrier aviation, a “soft cat” was his personal nightmare.

With gas and a combat load of weapons, a Hornet weighed 49,244 pounds. In order to loft it into the air, the steam piston below the flight deck had to be charged to the correct pressure. Too little, and the fighter would simply dribble off the bow of the ship, unable to claw its way into the air. Too much, and the catapult might snap his wheel strut off, and the rest of the aircraft would do a final impersonation of a NASCAR stock car crash, probably sweeping the handler and several other technicians off the flight deck as well.

Marine F/A-18 squadrons had been deploying off of carriers for several years now, as more and more often amphibious ships were married up with carrier battle groups for those strange conflicts the Pentagon insisted on calling “military operations other than war” or MOOTW. The strange acronym was pronounced “moot-wah.” Monitoring the precarious political situation around the Spratly Island fell into that nebulous mission.

Seconds after the cat shot, Thor felt the Hornet grab air and steady up. As his speed increased, he hauled back on the stick to gain altitude. Leveling off at five thousand feet, he waited for his wingman to join him.

Thirty seconds later, Hornet 307 snuggled up to him on the right. James “Killer” Colburne waved. Thor clicked his radio once and pointed left, to the west. Killer nodded and followed 401 into a gentle turn.

Thor waited until they were steady on course and then made his next call.

“Redcrown, Jigsaw One checking in.”

“Roger, Jigsaw One, we hold you, flight of two,” the Operations Specialist on the Aegis cruiser said. The brief exchange told Thor and his wingman that their IFF transmitters were working, and the Aegis would be able to distinguish them from enemy aircraft if necessary.

Thor clicked his mike once in response and then settled down for a routine CAP mission. Whatever had tried to shoot at the Viking the previous day would find that shooting at a Hornet — and a Marine one, at that — was a whole different ball game. Especially one that carried a few cluster bombs snugged up on the center pylon.

Vincennes, Tombstone noted, was meticulously locked into the center of her screen position. After the initial flurry of maneuvers, she settled in fifteen thousand yards dead ahead of the carrier. Tombstone doubted that life was very pleasant for the officers and crew of the Aegis cruiser.

An hour later, Thor was shifting uneasily in his ejection seat. “Jeez, my back’s already aching,” he complained to Killer over tactical. “Twenty minutes to get out here, and forty minutes of clockwise circling. Just for the fun of it, I’m going to go the other direction for a while.”

“That’s what we get for being disciplined. If we were in the Navy, we’d be able to have some fun out here.”

“Yeah, but we’re not. Thank God for that, anyway. Still, the colonel’s obsessed with neat little circles in the sky. It’s getting to be a pain. Man flies a jet, he oughta be able to have some fun with it.”

“Guess he doesn’t see it that way.”

And the Colonel did see what his pilots were up to while on CAP. Thor had seen his commanding officer park his tail end in CDC and watch a scope, watching his pilots cut neat, symmetrical circles in the sky.

“Take a leak. That helps sometimes,” his wingman offered.

Thor snorted. “I’d just as soon wait. Wish Grumman built these birds instead of McDonnell-Douglas. At least they have the common sense to put relief tubes in their aircraft. I hate these damned piddle packs.” MD’s solution to the inevitable calls of nature was a small plastic Baggie with elastic on one end. Might as well use a Coke bottle, Thor thought, disgusted.

Suddenly, the E-2C Hawkeye NFO’s voice cut in on the radio static. “Homeplate, Snoopy 601. Strangers, bearing 318, range 130 miles. Negative mode four IFF.”

Unidentified aircraft, ones that did not broadcast the IFF modes and codes that would mark it as a friendly military aircraft. For a moment, Thor was interested. It was, he immediately decided, probably a commercial airliner, heading southwest and hugging the coast. He waited. So far, there was nothing on his own radar.

“Roger, Snoopy. Hold that contact on course 135, speed four hundred.”

Well, this was getting interesting. The unknown contact’s course would take it directly toward the battle group. Thor’s adrenaline kicked in with a little tingle.

It still could be a commercial airliner, headed across the South China Sea to Brunei or Malaysia, but most of the commercial routes curved slightly to the north, following a great circle route as the shortest distance between two points. He glanced at his radar and noted that the E-2C’s contact was now entered into LINK, the electronic data-sharing and targeting system that let the battle group elements share radar information.

“Break, break, Jigsaw One, Homeplate,” the Operations Specialist said, indicating a change of call-ups. “Jigsaw One,” Thor answered.

“Roger, come to new course 325. Request you close and VID contact in question. Jigsaw 2, maintain current station.”

“Roger.” Thor pulled out of his gentle CAP turn and headed northwest to intercept the contact and visually identify it.

“You get all the fun,” he heard his wingman mutter over the tactical circuit.

“You got any modes and codes on that contact at all?” the carrier TAO asked the operations specialist.

“Negative, ma’am. It’s off the normal COMMAIR corridor by at least a hundred miles. No modes at all.”

The TAO felt vaguely uneasy. A senior lieutenant commander, an E-2C Naval Flight Officer herself, she’d heard the slight change in pitch in her airborne counterpart’s voice. So far, there was no real cause for alarm, but experience born from thousands of hours in the back of an E-2C kept setting off alarms in her mind. Better safe than sorry, she finally decided.

“Get the alert five Tomcats in the air,” she said to her assistant. He nodded and reached for the 1MC microphone to broadcast the order. Seconds later, she heard scurrying feet pounding down the passageway as the Air Boss and his crew headed for Pri-Fly.

She picked up the telephone and punched the button for the TFCC TAO. If the world was about to go to shit, she wanted to make sure the admirals watch team was awake.

“Okay, what’ve we got?” Tombstone asked as he stepped into TFCC.

“Nothing solid yet, Admiral. The E-2 picked up an unidentified air contact, and a Hornet’s vectoring to intercept. Alert five Tomcats are on the cat — excuse me, sir, airborne,” the Flag TAO corrected himself as the distinctive grumble of the forward catapult launching aircraft interrupted his summary. The TAO rolled his trackball and positioned the pointer near the symbol for the contact.

Tombstone studied the screen, watching the symbol representing the Hornet track slowly across it. If it was a military aircraft, then it was probably Vietnamese. Its speed leader pointed directly back to the Vietnamese coast, near a major military airfield. Vietnamese fighters had every right to be in international airspace, and were probably just flying out toward the battle group to exercise their right to do so.

The Vietnamese air force flew a collection of Russian-built fighters. Until recently, the most advanced airframe in their inventory was the MiG-23F Flogger, a smaller and less capable version of the airframe reserved for Russia’s own use. The single-pilot fighter had limited-range “Jay Bird” radars, with little or no capability beyond fifteen nautical miles. With no infrared or Doppler tracking capabilities, and carrying only the ancient Soviet Atoll and Aphid air-to-air missiles, the export version of the fighter was considerably less threatening than the original model. Russia stopped building Floggers in 1980, although Tombstone recalled that India still built some versions of the airframe under license from Russia. The MiG-29 Fulcrum and the SU-27 Flanker had replaced most of the Floggers in the Soviet inventory.

However, Vietnam had upped the ante in mid-1994, when it had taken delivery of a squadron of SU-27 Flankers. The Flanker was a Russian-built multipurpose fighter aircraft used for air intercept by the former Soviet Union’s ground defense forces. There were six versions of the advanced fighter, all produced at Komsomolsk in the Khabarovsk Territory. While the basic airframe had entered service in the Soviet Union in 1984, new versions of the Flanker were reportedly under development. Interestingly enough, in 1991 the fighter had been observed undertaking ground attack roles as well.

The Flanker was also the first Soviet aircraft to make a non-VSTOL landing on a ship. That particular development had caused immense concern in the U.S. military establishment, since the Soviet Union had relied on its land-launched aircraft as the mainstay of its air power until then. Being tied to land bases naturally limited Soviet strategic options in pursuing domination of large areas of the world, and had helped to limit efforts at expansionism. But with a potent carrier air wing and fighters in its inventory, the Soviet Union could dramatically expand its theater of influence — and combat. Fortunately, the Evil Empire had collapsed under its own corruption before developing a truly workable carrier aviation program. Engineering details, such as developing a reliable catapult steam system, had stymied them long enough.

Equipped with afterburners and a relatively traditional airframe containing titanium components but no advanced stealth composite materials, the Flanker was a tough, versatile fighter. It would have been a deadly adversary flying from a carrier, and was no less potent as a land-based fighter in the relatively constrained waters of the South China Sea.

Still, Tombstone reminded himself, this was Vietnam’s backyard. There was no good reason for the country not to conduct surveillance on an American battle group in their pond. Given Seventh Fleet’s orders to exercise FON peacefully, it would not be appropriate to provoke a confrontation unless the battle group’s safety was at stake.

“VID and watch him. Unless his wings are dirty, I’m not opposed to a fly-over look-see,” Tombstone said finally.

“Yes, Admiral. The Hornet should be in position any minute now.” The two aircraft were closing in on each other at a thousand knots.

“Tomcat 201, airborne,” Tombstone heard a woman’s voice drawl. Tomboy, flying as RIO in the alert five. He felt a momentary irritation that he hadn’t known she was launching, and then realized his feeling was ridiculous. Why would they have told him who the alert five crew was? And, to be honest, if it had been anyone else, he wouldn’t have cared.

“Homeplate, Jigsaw One.” Another RIO’s voice cut in on the circuit, a hard edge of excitement in the tone. “This ain’t no MiG! It’s an SU-27—a Flanker, two-seater version. Wings are clean — no weapons on this boy — and Chinese insignia on the fuselage and tail. I’m moving off to his right, about five hundred yards away. Looks like he’s headed your way,” the Hornet conducting the intercept said.

“Roger, Jigsaw One. Escort him on in,” the calm voice of the carrier TAO answered.

“Chinese!” Tombstone said thoughtfully. “I’d heard there were some Chinese aircraft down there with a detachment conducting training, but what are they doing flying operational missions with Flankers out of Vietnam?”

In 1991, Tombstone recalled, China’d taken delivery of the first eight Flankers. Since then, the remainder of the first order of twenty-two had been delivered. Intell sources believed that China might buy up to twenty-eight more of the agile, fast fighters before Russia closed the door on foreign sales. Other sources reported that China was developing her own prototype advanced fighter, code-named the F-10.

It’s supposed to be years away from being fully operational, Tombstone thought. But that’s what I thought about the JAST program, too, and I’ve got two of them sitting on my deck right now. No sure bets on anything these days.

“This would be the Flanker-C or -1B — those are the two-seater versions,” an intelligence officer chimed in. “The C version was primarily a trainer, but it was fully combat capable. The 1B was the fighter-bomber that was supposed to deploy from their carriers. And Admiral, while the Flanker is equipped for in-flight refueling, the Chinese have had notoriously little training in it. If they wanted to come out and take a look-see at us, they’d probably rather be launching from Vietnam than China’s southern coast. It’s a hell of a lot closer, and they can get out and take some pictures with their onboard stores.”

“Let’s not get completely convinced by the tail artwork. A Flanker is a Flanker, be it Chinese or Vietnamese,” Tombstone said. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, let’s play this one like pros. The Flanker — whoever he belongs to — gets a look as long as he plays nice. But keep that Hornet on him every second. Something starts looking hinky, I don’t want us scrambling for cover.”

A whiff of light, clean perfume floated through the air. Tombstone turned to find the source.

“Good morning, Admiral,” Pamela said, stepping over the knee-knocker threshold to TFCC. “The Chief of Staff told me I’d find you in here.”

“We’re a little busy right now, Miss Drake,” he said, momentarily grateful for the subdued red lighting in the operational center. Damn it, he couldn’t afford to be distracted right now!

“I’ll stay out of the way,” she answered, moving over to an unoccupied corner of the tiny space.

While his nose quickly became accustomed to the scent of her perfume, and Pamela was now out of his direct line of sight, Tombstone could feel her in TFCC. Apart from the normal physical sensations and memories just thinking of her generated, her presence was doubly uncomfortable with Tomboy flying CAP on the unknown contact.

As much as he tried to deny it, there was something about the female aviator that inevitably drew his eyes to her. Tomboy had been his RIO when Jefferson had faced down the Russians on the Kola Peninsula, and during their mission over the Polyamyy submarine base. Their Tomcat had taken a hit, and they’d punched out. Tomboy had come out of it with a broken leg and an extended hospital stay.

She’d been lucky. Not every female pilot had been, he thought. Lieutenant Chris “Lobo” Hansen had been shot down on the same mission. The militia that’d captured her had gang-raped her and left her naked and shivering, displayed in a wire cage. When the Marines rescued her a few hours later, she was already deep into psychological and physical shock.

Tombstone had heard from Tomboy that Lobo had completely recovered and been sent to an instructor’s billet at Top Gun school. There’d been some talk of barring her from further combat duties, but in the end the Navy did the right thing. Lobo had finished her tour as an instructor, and had received orders to VF-95 as the Safety Officer. Whatever else the Navy had learned from the integration of women into combat squadrons, it was that there was only one personnel policy that worked — treating each and every aviator as a professional. Tombstone approved.

He wondered if he’d feel the same if it had been Tomboy who’d undergone the same experience. Involuntarily, he remembered how her head barely came up to his wings on his chest, and how her voice sounded over the ICS. A pilot and regular RIO were always close. During combat, the RIO’s voice merged with the pilot’s thoughts, until every comment from the backseat sounded like his own mind. Was that what he was feeling? The traditional psychic bond between two aviators that depended on each other in the air? Or was it something else?

He turned his attention back to the screen and forced himself to depersonalize the aircraft on the screen. It wasn’t Tomboy and Snoopy — it was Tomcat 201. If the Navy had the intestinal fortitude to insist on equal standards for its male and female pilots, the least its admirals could do was the same. Anything else would have been a slap in the face to the aviators, both male and female, that had worked so hard to make the policy succeed.

Finally, since there was nothing else that really required his attention, he turned and faced Pamela. It felt odd to be facing his old lover while listening to Tomboy’s voice on the net. But when you got right down to it, why should it be difficult? What was Tomboy to him? She certainly wasn’t his lover — couldn’t be, not while she worked for him and they were assigned to the same ship. But whatever she was to Tombstone, he could feel her presence behind him as the arcane symbology representing her aircraft crept across the screen.

“That was her, wasn’t it?” Pamela said softly.

“Who?” he managed to say. Damn her, she always could seem to read his thoughts.

Pamela shot him a wry grin. “Don’t worry, Tombstone, nobody noticed it but me. She was your RIO last cruise, wasn’t she?”

“She was a lieutenant then,” he said, and then swore at himself for sounding like a blathering idiot.

“Ah,” Pamela said, as though he’d just made sense.

Thor eased back on the throttle and slid behind the other aircraft. Its slipstream buffeted the light Hornet. Although the Flanker looked like it was about the same size as the Hornet, the slipstream of the Chinese fighter carried a punch.

Something about the aircraft bothered him, although he couldn’t have said exactly what it was. He slid the Hornet over to the Flanker’s other side and studied it carefully. Nothing unusual caught his attention. It was, he decided, just the other pilot’s attitude that seemed strange. During peacetime, most military pilots would at least wave to each other, acknowledging the bond that all airmen felt. Weeks later, if hostilities broke out, they’d do their damnedest to kill each other.

The Flanker pilot had not even glanced his way, much less proffered a friendly, universally obscene gesture. Thor shrugged. At least being able to move around a little eased the cramp in his lower back.

“TAO! I’m picking up communications downlink from the Flanker!” the Electronics Warfare Specialist, or EW, said over the CDC net.

“You sure?”

“Positive! Frequency, everything’s right on.”

“Make sure the Hornets know,” the TAO snapped to the OS monitoring the two fighters, picking up the TFCC telephone again. “And get the alert 5S-3B up. That bogey is talking to somebody we don’t hold contact on. That means one thing.”

A submarine. Had to be. The tactical picture was really starting to stink.

Minutes later, the distinctive sounds of an S-3B engine spooling up overhead vibrated through CDC. She watched the two symbols on the large-screen display, the Hornet and the Flanker flying so close together that their symbols occasionally merged. The carrier SPS-49 radar alone couldn’t have broken the two contacts apart. Only the powerful SPY-1A radar on the Aegis cruiser could positively distinguish between the two. She glanced at the information display screen to the right of her desk and confirmed her suspicion. The radar symbol displayed on the screen came from the Aegis’s radar, relayed to the carrier over LINK II.

Four minutes after the video downlink was detected, she heard the Hoover go to full military power, the roller-coaster rattle of the steam catapult, and the final surprisingly soft thud as the catapult piston reached the end of its run and tossed the S-3 into the air. Seconds later, the Operations Specialist controlling the ASW aircraft reported radar contact on Hunter 701. The S-3B vectored toward the bogey, scanning the ocean’s surface with radar and FLIR, trying to find the bogey’s playmate.

It could be anywhere, she thought. The bogey’s altitude gave him enough horizon to cover at least a thousand square miles of ocean. Somewhere out there, the nondirectional video downlink was giving someone accurate targeting positions on the battle group. A brief shiver ran up her spine. Irrational as it might seem, she would have given anything to be airborne herself right then instead of trapped inside steel bulkheads on the 03 level of the carrier.

“We got the last one — let’s get the next,” Rabies said grimly.

“And he almost got us,” Harness muttered from the backseat.

“We’ll stay a little further away this time,” the pilot acknowledged. “One nice thing about torpedoes — don’t have to get all that close to drop them.”

The S-3B Viking carried two Mk torpedoes on its inboard weapons stations. The high-speed torpedo was the most widely deployed lightweight torpedo in the Fleet, although its five-hundred-pound weight made the classification “lightweight” seem like a misnomer. Capable of speeds up to forty-five knots, the torpedo had a maximum range of approximately six nautical miles. Its ninety-five-pound warhead was composed of PBXN-103 high explosives.

Two Harpoons graced the outer weapons stations. At Mach 0.85, the missile could deliver a five-hundred-pound conventional high-explosive warhead against a surface ship or a surfaced submarine target seventy-five miles away. The 1,172pound Harpoon was a massive drag on the aircraft, but each one carried enough destructive power to make the weight trade-off well worth the cost in additional gas and loss of speed.

“How far is far enough?” Harness asked.

“Max range on that surface-to-air missile is probably around six miles,” the TACCO replied. “We can stand off and safely drop the torpedoes.”

“We’re going to get attack criteria without a MAD run?” the AW persisted. Getting accurate positioning data from the MAD book extended out the back of the S-3 required being virtually overhead the submarine.

Neither the pilot nor the TACCO replied.

Great. Just great, Harness thought, fuming. We can shoot from outside the missile’s range, but we can’t get attack criteria unless we get in close and personal.

Still, the possibility of actually firing a shot in anger was an attractive one. He let that thought console him, and pushed away the thoughts of the very real danger they were standing in.

“Got something,” the TACCO announced. “Possible periscope, bearing 120, range seven thousand yards. He punched a “fly-to” point into his computer, and the location was transmitted to the pilot’s screen. The aircraft heeled to the right as Rabies stomped on the rudder controls.

“Let’s take a look, shall we?” the pilot said calmly.

“Bingo,” the TACCO said softly a few minutes later. “You see anything?”

The copilot squinted out the window. “Yeah, I think so. Still at communications depth — it looks like nothing but a snorkel mast and a couple of antennas. The sail’s still submerged. Call it positive visual identification, though.”

“She doesn’t have to surface to be dangerous,” the TACCO warned. “Intell says they can still fire those Grails from shallow depth.”

“I’m watching her,” the copilot answered. “Hold on, let me get some guidance from Homeplate.” He switched circuits and updated the carrier on the tactical situation.

The TAO listened to Hunter 701’s report with a sinking feeling. The situation stunk, outright stunk. There was no clear-cut answer as to whether the battle group could attack the submarine immediately, or whether it had to wait for some indication of hostile intent. Moments later, the bitch box that connected her with TFCC buzzed angrily.

International rules of engagement contained so many vague requirements that deciding when it was legal to shoot was a matter for a court rather than naval officers. While there was no requirement that U.S. forces take the first hit before they could open fire, they did have to determine that the submarine had committed a hostile act, or demonstrated hostile intent.

The communications downlink was certainly evidence of something. The most probable explanation was that the aircraft was passing targeting information to another platform, either a surface ship or a submarine. Rule out surface ship, she thought, studying the display. Any combatant of significant size would have been detected and reported immediately. And the fact that a submarine — perhaps even this one — had fired on an S-3 only days before added strength to her inclination to have the S-3 blow the bastard out of the water.

Still, there was no evidence that this was the same submarine. So many nations now owned production models of the Russian-built Kilo diesel sub that there was no way to be certain.

Additionally, they all knew that tensions in the area were at the highest level they’d been at since World War II. Killing the submarine now could be that final element that pushed China and the other nations over the brink into open warfare. And, more likely than not, all the nations clamoring for ownership of the Spratly Islands would put aside their differences long enough to unite against the American forces. While she was confident that the battle group could take care of itself, the purpose of a presence mission was to deter wars — not to start them.

She toggled the lever on the bitch box, hoping that the Flag watch officer would give her permission to follow the most ancient adage of warriors.

Kill them all, and let God sort them out.