Arsenal

SIXTEEN

“You’re out of options. Admiral.” Senator Williams swiveled away from the tactical display. His presence here in the Joint Chiefs of Staff war room was unusual, but not unprecedented. As a member of the military subcommittee, he had access on a need-to-know basis. This, Williams figured, was the most need-to-know opportunity that had arisen since the original Cuban Missile Crisis incident.

Admiral Loggins’s voice got tight. “Jesus, you are insane!

Nuclear weapons? And in Cuba? If we use the UAV option, the fallout alone will have consequences in the United States.”

Williams shook his head. “Not so. If you’ve been listening to the experts, the chances of radiation reaching American soil are minimal.”

“I have pilots in the air right now,” Loggins thundered.

“What do your so-called experts say about them? Are they in any danger? You know as well as I do that the EMP is liable to knock them all out of the air! I’m not taking that chance not today, not ever.

They don’t deserve that.”

“Hard choices require hard men,” Senator Williams shot back. “You think it was easy for my predecessors, deciding to leave those POWs in enemy hands after each war? To sacrifice men and women in combat? Do you think we’re that heartless?”

And that. Admiral Loggins realized, was essentially the question. Did he really think that the good faith on the part of men such as Senator Williams was sufficient for him to entrust the safety of the men and women under his command to them? Would Williams make good decisions, decisions that would strengthen the nation rather than weaken it? Or did the larger picture” national strategy,” as Williams was fond of referring to it outweigh the safety of the men in the air, and his commitment to keep them alive?

“It’s set up now, isn’t it?” Williams asked.

Loggins nodded. “We’ve already programmed the vector to the command post. And the link between Arsenal and the missile is working well.

All we have to do is authorize the divert and it’ll be on its way. But I think we ought toNO!” Admiral Loggins grabbed at Williams’s hand, which was poised over the execute switch. The admiral’s fingers grazed the back of Williams’s hand as me senator quickly flipped the lever into execute position.

Four rows of green lights flickered on Loggins’s console as the UAV ran its self-check verifying what it had known all along, that everything was in working order and commenced executing its last given instruction.

As an additional safety precaution, the UAV was programmed to lock out further orders after it received a go signal, to prevent the possibility of enemy jamming or cryptological deception making it deviate from its course.

Loggins watched in horror as the UAV gently rolled out of its orbit, shuddered, and pitched its deadly rounded snout up. He saw the exhaust spit a whiff of black smoke, then steady into a clear, turbulent blast of hot gas. Seconds later, the missile was no longer under visual observation and could only be tracked by its small blip on the radar scope.

That, too, was intermittent, given the Stealth technology of the missile.

“Dear God, what have you done?” Loggins gasped. “You had no right to ” Williams leaned back in his chair and smiled, an ugly, twisted parody of a pleasant expression. “If you had the guts, you’d have done it yourself. Remember that, Loggins.

Remember that.”

“Stoney, it’s starting a rollout!” The first trace of excitement entered Tomboy’s voice.

“I see it, I see it I’ve got it now.” Tombstone identified the UAV’s green blip on his heads-up display. “How long?”

“Minutes. Stoney, if that missile detonates on target, we don’t have a chance. Neither do those men in the air to the south.”

“I know it.” Tombstone jammed the throttles forward into full afterburner. “It should be accelerating keep giving me range and bearings to it. Tomboy, as well as a vector to intercept. There’s going to be a very small window when it’s within range.”

“Sidewinder,” Tomboy suggested.

Stoney clicked the mike twice. “Roger. It’s the only one reliable enough to trust for one shot.”

And one shot is all he’d have. One chance to knock the missile out of the air, to send it tumbling helplessly to land before the nuclear warhead armed, to detonate it into a conventional explosion in the atmosphere without invoking the deadly hellfire contained in its nose cone. One chance, one shot.

“You’re insane,” Loggins blurted out. Suddenly, the sheer lunacy of their position struck him full force. How had he gotten involved in this, one part of his mind wailed. To wander so far from the traditional honors and values of the United States Navy, to allow political control to assert itself over the very targeting decisions the military made? If anyone ought to know better, it should be you, he chided himself. After Vietnam, you swore you would never let this happen again. Not only did you let it happen, but you’re part of it.

“They’ll think you did it, you know,” Williams said softly. “Some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome you should be able to blame it on that. They might even let you keep your retirement.” The senator smirked. “I’ll say I tried to stop you, but if they compare our records, they’ll know who’s really behind it. You were all the way; it was all your idea.”

“No,” Loggins said, his voice strong and firm. “I don’t think so. You see, if nothing else, war has taught me a little bit about being prepared.” He leaned forward, pushed a button on the speakerphone.

“Senator, did you hear that?”

“I surely did,” Senator Thomas Dailey said. The strong Midwestern drawl was unmistakable. “So did the rest of us, Admiral.”

“And Arsenal is taking the appropriate action?” Loggins said, a savage good humor fighting its way up out of the depression that had plagued him for the last several months.

He glanced at Williams, saw the man wilting visibly in the chair. “Has it?”

“The chairman gave the order three minutes ago,” Dailey said. “The warhead is disarmed. Too bad they didn’t build a self-destruct function into it. As it is now, it will impact the target as strictly a conventional warhead.”

“Thank God for the pickiness of nuclear triggering circuitry,” Loggins said.

“You knew all along,” Williams said, his voice defeated.

“Where did I screw up? What made you think I’d really do it?”

“Just a promise I made to myself a long time ago,” Admiral Loggins said softly. “And whatever else happens, those men and women on the front line will know I kept the faith.”

“It’s below us,” Tomboy warned. “Altitude, two thousand feet.”

“Roger.” Tombstone nosed the Tomcat down slightly, quickly trading altitude for speed. Lower altitude, lower speed, as the air created more friction. The airspeed he’d gained by descending would be quickly bled off fighting the thicker air. Still, it wasn’t as though he had much time. Or choice.

He craned his head aft, searching through the clear bubble of the canopy for some sign of the weapon. According to Tomboy’s radar picture, it was almost on them, less than one mile aft. He’d matched altitude with it, though he had no hope of ever matching its speed.

“Twenty seconds.” Tomboy began counting down the time to intercept.

Tombstone kept his hand glued to the weapons selector switch. There it was, a tiny black speck on the horizon, barely discernible to the naked eye. His gut tightened down into a thin hard knot, and more intimate parts of his anatomy attempted to snug up to the rest of his body. The thought of the sheer destructive power contained in that tiny object that could’ve been a dirt speck on the canopy was overwhelming.

“Ten seconds.” The moments clicked by inexorably, the missile growing larger with each ticktock of eternity.

Finally, he could see it all. The slim, almost graceful looking fuselage of the missile. White, with cruciform fins standing out from the body. It was moving fast, so fast had he ever encountered anything so awesome in the air?

Even normal air-to-air combat weapons couldn’t match the sheer grace and power of this devastating land attack missile.

It was by him in a flash, almost too quick to see. His retinas shone with the afterimage of it, white against the brilliant sunrise behind him.

“Two seconds,” Tomboy said.

Tombstone’s finger tightened, then initiated launch. Two Sidewinders leaped off the wings, one from each side, and started streaking out into the empty air in front of the Tomcat Although the missile was still behind him, there was no way he would ever catch it once it was past. No, the only option was to shoot before it got to him and hope he’d calculated the intercept correctly. It was a long shot, maybe the longest one he’d ever taken. And the most important.

As the missile shot through his field of vision, he automatically toggled the weapons selector to guns and ripped the atmosphere apart with a continuous barrage of pellets from his gunport. It had little chance of downing the titanium-cased missile, but there was a chance the impact would jar some delicate triggering mechanism inside it, maybe prevent it from detonating or maybe detonating it early, it suddenly occurred to him. If that happened, he’d never know it. For a moment, the thought of the hellfire fireball that would erupt so close to the Tomcat shook him.

An instant later, he was certain that was what had happened. A brilliant flash of white light filled the air, brighter than the rising sun 180 degrees offset from it. He yelped, slammed his eyelids down, too late. The fiery incandescent ball seared his eyes, immediately invoking a protective flood of tears. He dabbed at his eyes ineffectually with one hand, wondering why it was taking so long to die.

“You did it!” Tomboy’s voice was jubilant. “Damn it, Stoney, I don’t believe it you hit the intercept dead-on.

That was the Sidewinder igniting, not the missile those poor suckers on the ground below,” she finished, suddenly quiet. “Shit, I hate to see what happens to anything underneath those two.”

“It didn’t detonate,” Tombstone said wonderingly. “I thought it might” “It was a chance we took,” Tomboy said quietly. “You made the right decision. Again.”

Tombstone drew a deep, shuddering breath, suddenly filled with a joyous exhilaration. He was alive, still alive he’d just faced down the deadliest weapon known to mankind and survived. After this little encounter, the Cuban command and control center would be a piece of cake.

“Come on, shipmate we’ve got a mission to finish.”

“Lost video,” the lieutenant commander manning the weapons tracking console announced. He glanced uneasily at the two civilians and the one admiral standing next to the command console. He hadn’t tried to overhear. God knew he hadn’t.

But duty inside this war-fighting center of the most powerful nation in the world occasionally made him privy to discussions that no lieutenant commander should ever hear. So far above his pay grade that he couldn’t even begin to breathe in the rarefied air of power filling the unexpectedly small compartment. Would he survive this tour? He shook his head, not knowing. Junior officers who happened to overhear discussions not intended for their ears sometimes found themselves with an immediate, high priority posting to a billet as fuel officer in Adak, Alaska, there to languish out a three-year tour waiting to be passed over for promotion. No one ever said it, but there were ways that the admirals and generals had of communicating their desires to the promotion boards.

A flurry of angry shouts and enunciations filled the air behind him.

The lieutenant commander hunched down behind his console, desperately wishing he were somewhere else.

Finally, it was over. He heard feet moving rapidly behind him, a harsh, barked order from a Marine sentry, then silence. One set of footsteps started toward him, paused, and finished the short trip over to stand behind him. He didn’t dare look up.

A hand landed on his shoulder, squeezed it reassuringly; then a familiar voice said, “Son, none of this happened today. You understand that?”

The lieutenant commander nodded. “Yes, Admiral Loggins. Nothing happened.”

“Look at me.”

It was definitely an order, and the lieutenant commander obeyed. He tore his eyes away from the green spikes and blips still streaking across his console and gazed into the hard, craggy face of Admiral Loggins. Senator Dailey was standing two paces behind the admiral, looking grim. His urge to jump to his feet was almost overwhelming.

“You just saw me keep faith with an entire battle group out there on the front line,” Admiral Loggins said. His voice was soft and ragged.

“I know what you’re worried about hell, I sat in that chair when I was a lieutenant commander.

For the record and I have a witness,” he said, nodding at Senator Dailey, “I take full responsibility for the actions that took place here. You understand?”

The lieutenant commander struggled to find his voice.

“Yes, Admiral. Although,” he dared, “nothing happened today. I’m sure I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.”

The admiral’s face cracked into a small grin. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Some things never change, do they?” Senator Dailey added. He shifted his gaze to the admiral. “Still build ‘em like they did when I was in the Navy. Admiral, I see a lot of potential in this man. I think I’ll be taking a personal interest in his career from now on. You hear that, son?” the senator queried the young officer.

The poor lieutenant commander struggled to find his breath. One wrong move, the wrong interpretation, and “Quit messing with him, Tom,” the admiral said good naturedly. “I’ll take care of him. We always take care of our own in the Navy. You remember that.”

As the two senior officers walked away, the lieutenant commander drew a shaky breath. He looked back down at his screen, and stopped in mid-exhalation. “Admiral I think you might want to see this.” Damn it, it was the right thing to do, call the admiral back, as much as he’d been relieved to see the two men step away from him. “That Tomcat it’s inbound on the Cuban command center.”

From some yards behind him, the admiral’s voice said, “I know that, son. The senator and I are going to watch the last part of this from my console. When it’s over we’ll tell you what actually happened. You got that?”

“Aye, aye. Admiral.” The lieutenant commander hunched back up to his controls and settled in to wait.

The prior air strike had silenced most of the antiair batteries on the ground. A few sites spat up tracers, but the Tomcat avoided them easily. Antiaircraft fire was no big deal when there were no overlapping fields of fire and when the Tomcat owned the air.

“Time to rejoin the world.” Tombstone reached out and flicked on the communication circuitry. His earphones immediately filled with the loud tactical chatter from the furball still going on out to the east.

From the sound of it, the Americans were continuing to dominate. Not surprising though he wished he were there himself to see it. Still, maybe that’s what getting more senior earned you going head-on head with UAVs instead of MiGs. If that was true, he was damned sure he didn’t want that next star! What would that entail taking on a satellite single-handedly? Maybe a space shuttle? Surviving near death always brought with it its own sense of giddiness.

“I’ve got a visual,” he said, surveying the landscape ahead of him.

The Cuban naval base was easily visible in the sunlight now pouring out from the east. Brilliant white buildings set against the lush tropical foliage, some of them partially concealed by towering palm trees. A thin line ran around the compound, undoubtedly a fence of some sort.

Tombstone could see people moving around, the damaged building still smoldering from the strike the day before, and heavy construction equipment invading the open field that had contained the alleged missile silos.

Farther to the west, he established a visual on his target.

From the air, the command center looked innocuous a single-story building no different from its fellows. But according to intelligence, it burrowed deep into the earth, and the actual command center was cut off from the Potemkin village structures aboveground.

“Home Plate, this is Tomcat Two-zero-two,” Tombstone said into his microphone. “Commencing bombing run.”

“Stoney!” Batman snapped over the circuit. “Goddamn it, one of these days I’m going to” Tombstone cut him off. “Listen, shipmate, I don’t have time to talk right now. I’m gonna blast this bastard back to the Stone Age. As for the details well, if you come clean with me when I get back to the ship, I’ll fill you in on them.

Otherwise, you’re permanently out of the loop.”

“Not on the circuit,” Batman snapped. “Jesus, don’t you think that I” “I’m betting you didn’t do anything,” Tombstone interrupted again.

“You remember a certain conversation we had in the Flag Mess two days ago? About Vietnam and what we learned from that?”

“Yes.” Batman’s voice was wary. “You’ve been thinking about that?”

“You bet. And I think I know how this whole thing developed and how to keep it from happening again.

We’ll talk about that when I get back, but the priority right now is preventing Cuba from launching on the U.S. Quick now I’m almost in is there any later intel?”

“It’s as we suspected, Stoney,” Batman said. “It’s that command center we ID’d from the photos. We believe the complete command staff is down there and they’ve got tactical control of every weapon on that island.

If you damage them, even take out all their antennas, they’ve got no way to launch. Not unless they’ve got a remoted capability to each of their silos that we don’t know about.”

Tombstone sighed. “If we don’t know about that for certain, we’d better assume the worst case. I want vectors back to the silos, the ones you know about. I’ll drop a few HARMs at the command center and save the five-hundred pounders for the three silos we identified. Are there any others?”

“No new reports of them. But Stoney, you’d better hurry,” Batman said, his voice taking on a new note of urgency. “We’ve got targeting indications.”

“On my way. Just keep the Libyans and the Cuban air power occupied to the east for a bit while I take care of business, okay?”

“You got it.” Tombstone could hear Batman giving a series of orders to someone in the background. Finally, he came up on the circuit. “Think you can manage a little air-to-ground attack strategizing?”

Tombstone chuckled. “After what I’ve been through today, I think I probably can. But if you try sending me up against a satellite, you can forget it.”

“All systems green,” the senior missile officer reported. He glanced up at Mendiria. They’d done this so many times as a drill surely this wasn’t the real thing? The echoes of the bombs that had exploded around him yesterday still rang in his ears. Yes, he conceded, his hands suddenly sweaty and shaky: This was it. The moment they’d been training for, the decisive point in the battle that their Libyan advisors had been coaching them for for the last two years. One strike, they’d all agreed, and the U.S. would crumble. They’d never be able to stand the political pressure at home following an attack from the Cuban mainland.

He wished he were as certain about that as his superiors.

He laid his hand over the launch button, and tried to stop his finger from trembling.

As Tombstone bore in on the target, he rolled the Tomcat over and stared downward at the ground through the canopy. Land streaked by in a haze of brown and green, the colors almost indistinguishable at this speed. He watched for a few seconds, craned his head to get an accurate visual on his IP, then rolled the Tomcat back over into level flight.

Four seconds later, he was over the command center bunker. He flipped the weapons release switch, felt the Tomcat leap up into the air as missiles left its rail, then jerked the aircraft away to the right in a hard, screaming turn.

The two HARM missiles seemed to hang in the air.

Suddenly, something seemed to catch their attention the invitingly enticing scent of electromagnetic radiation. Rocket motors kicked in, seeker heads aligned on the emissions, and the missiles dove in on the target.

When they were seconds away from impact, the radiation suddenly ceased.

No matter they were too close now, too certain of a kill, to disarm or detonate harmlessly. The two missiles exploded, the first one half a meter in front of a delicate microwave communications assembly and the second at the base of a high-frequency antenna whip.

The microwave structure exploded into a hail of shrapnel, shredding two guards located outside the front of the command center. The destruction of the high-frequency antenna was less dramatic, but equally telling. The thirty foot whip exploded up out of the ground as though it were a javelin, arcing across the compound to clatter to the ground just outside the officers’ club. Wires that were ripped out of the ground and out of the power supply trailed around it before settling into awkward, half-described circles on the ground. The base structure sputtered once, then shorted out in a spray of sparks.

“Commander! We’ve lost data link with the launch site.”

The senior missile officer felt a vague trace of relief, then felt guilty over it. It was wrong to be relieved that a commander’s strategy had been foiled, entirely wrong.

Nonetheless, if he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn he was grateful for it.

“Come right, steady on zeroone-five,” Tomboy ordered.

“Twenty seconds to IP.”

The Tomcat groaned as it took the high-G turn, racing between ground targets like a car negotiating a set of orange pylons on a test track.

The Hornet, while it would have done better on the quick turns and maneuvers required to hit the missile launcher sequentially, couldn’t have carried enough armament to take out everything. Not that and the command center as well.

The first target was an easy one. Tombstone didn’t even bother with the rollover maneuver to take a visual sighting on his target, but simply followed Tomboy’s direction in. By now, her ESM indicator was screaming about launch indications from the farthest-away site, and that had to be the top priority. Still, he doubted there was time to take that one first and then come back for the others. No, they would do them in sequence, the way they’d planned.

The first five-hundred-pound bomb hung up on launch.

Tombstone swore, dropped the Tomcat down into a hard dive, then jerked it up. As the Tomcat pulled up violently, he toggled the launch button again. The sudden change in force vectors shook the bomb loose from the rack and sent it hurtling toward its intended target. The decrease in weight increased the Tomcat’s angle of attack. The massive aircraft stuttered for a moment, momentarily approaching stall speed, then grabbed hard at the air for lift.

“Now, due north, Stoney,” Tomboy coached. “Longer this time. Thirty seconds. Counting now ” Her quiet voice ticked off the moments.

This time the five-hundred-pound bomb fell smoothly away from the Tomcat. Again, the shudder as its weight left the fuselage, the sudden extra lift and speed he felt take the aircraft afterward.

“Fish in a barrel,” Tombstone said cheerfully. “What’s that last vector?”

“Zero-eight-zero, the last one.” Tomboy glanced down at her ESM indicator. “And Tombstone it might be a good idea if we hurry.”

Tombstone slammed the Tomcat into afterburner again, taking note of his fuel status. The high-speed race in, the battle with the UAV, and carrying a full load of heavy weapons onto target had taken their toll.

The Tomcat was sucking down fuel like a Hornet. Much more of this, and he’d be lucky to make it back to the boat. He switched his circuit over to tactical. “Batman, get some gas in the air. I think I’m gonna need it.”

“Already there, buddy.” Batman chuckled. “You think I’d forget how you abuse the afterburner?”

“Tell him to expect me in ten mikes,” Tombstone said.

“I’m going to need to make it on the first approach.”

“Five seconds.” Tomboy’s voice sounded relieved. “Stoney, it’s the last one. Let’s make it a good one.”

This time. Tombstone rolled over inverted for another look at the target. Smoke and fumes were boiling away from the hole in the ground, indicating that launch preparations were under way. There was not a person in sight they’d all taken cover, not wanting to be exposed to the poisonous fumes and gases generated by a launch. Even more important, if there were an accident no one would have any chance of surviving a misfire by a nuclear weapon on the ground.

Not that they’d survive what he was about to do if they were anywhere in the vicinity. He rolled back into level flight, bore in for the last five seconds, then jerked the Tomcat up sharply as he released the final bomb. The motion of the aircraft, coupled with the weight of the bomb, acted like a slingshot, lofting the weapon through the air and toward the launchers.

He peeled out in a hard starboard turn, taking a quick glance back at the bomb. It was still in the air, now descending, smack-dead on target. He watched it go, occasionally glancing forward to make sure his flight path was clear, and saw how deadly accurate his shot had been.

Just as the bomb approached the launch structure, a thin, poisonous gray spear emerged from the ground. It was traveling slowly, still being boosted out of the silo by compressed gas in a small igniter rocket. That would soon change as the main battery kicked in, sending it arcing toward the mainland.

The deadly javelin was halfway out of the ground when the five-hundred-pound bomb hit. It landed immediately next to the missile, instantly crushing one wall of the silo.

The silo collapsed, pinching the missile at its waist and holding it in position. Tombstone saw the silo shudder, then break in half. Its forward portion had not even hit the ground when the area erupted in an orange fireball.

Tombstone jinked the Tomcat away from the scene, satisfied. Three up, three down.

“Good shooting, Stoney,” Tomboy said. “Glad I came along for the ride.”

“I’m glad you did, too, love,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t have had you miss it for the world.”

“How about we grab a quick drink and buster back to the carrier?”

Tomboy suggested.

“Next stop, Texaco,” Tombstone said. He felt his spirits lift with the Tomcat as they rose into the air.

“That’s it, then.” Senator Dailey’s voice sounded relieved.

“At least until next time.” He turned to the admiral standing next to him. “What about you, Keith? I’m not going to forget what you did here today.”

Admiral Keith Loggins shook his head. “I was stupid, criminally stupid.” He glanced up at the senator. “Ambition, personal power I forgot the oath that I took so long ago to protect this country. Those things … well, maybe that’s okay in your world. Senator no disrespect intended, sir.

But for us there’s got to be a higher purpose in life. We’re here to prevent wars, not start them. If we let personalities get in the way of that, let our own personal ambition override our sound operational thought, then we deserve what we get.” He looked back toward the console from which Senator Williams had launched the weapon. “You understand that. He never would have.”

“Maybe our worlds aren’t all that different, Keith,” the senator said.

“Or at least, they shouldn’t be. If you’ve got a moment during the next few days, I’d like to spend some time talking about what happened.

Maybe we can work out some ways to avoid its happening again, some approaches toward preventing the command and control structure from getting in the way of the operational commander. I think we’ve both learned a lesson out of this one.”

“I’d like that. Senator, although how much longer I’ll be in the service I couldn’t say.” The admiral shrugged, then felt a weight lift off his shoulders. “It might be time to retire.

Hell, three stars is enough for any man, don’t you think?

And Pamela well, it might be fun to spend some time alone with my new wife.”

Senator Dailey looked startled. He quickly rearranged his; face into a look of congratulations. “Well, that is good news.

When’s the big date? I will be getting an invitation, I hope?”

Admiral Loggins smiled. “I haven’t asked her yet, Tom.

But nowwell, I’m starting to see things in a different light. And yes, if she’ll have me, you can count on an invitation. We’d be honored by your presence.”

The two men shook hands, the grip hard and certain. The disaster they’d diverted today had cemented their friendship.

Santana heard one last yelp on the tactical circuit connecting him with the Cuban naval base, and then the hissing silence that indicated the transponder on the other end was destroyed. He swore, jinked his MiG around in an impossibly tight curve, and nailed the Hornet that had been glued onto him like a leech with a withering barrage of gunfire.

He was so close he caught a brief glimpse of the other pilot’s face, partially masked by helmet and visor, before the entire cockpit disintegrated into a scathingly hot ball of metal, flames, and flesh.

The base! That was the key. There was no point to this losing air battle if he and his compadres didn’t buy enough time for the missiles to ripple off their launchers. The air battle was not winnable, not in the long run. There was too much firepower massed off the coast, too many fighters waiting in the wings to relieve their battle-weary front line.

Not that it looked so injured, he had to admit. Results thus far had been startlingly disappointing. Even though they had practiced MiG on MiG for the last two years, growing increasingly efficient in pinpointing each other’s weaknesses and exploiting the high maneuverability and low wing loading factor of the MiG, they’d had no real adversary aircraft to train against. Not like the Americans, who since World War II had made it a practice to carefully maintain adversary air for the credibly trained force.

Had he actually gone up against the Hornet one-on-one, he would have known that the wing loading factors he’d read about in Aviation Weekly were illusory. With the fuselage providing a good deal of lift, the Hornet was considerably more nimble than its specs would warrant. As with the Tomcat, the lack of credible intelligence on the performance capabilities of these two aircraft flown at the edge of their envelope by pilots who knew them like their family car was astounding.

And meaningless. If the missiles didn’t launch …

Santana peeled away from the furball and put out the call over tactical. RTB return to base. If there was anything left to protect, that was their place now, not holding off this force so far away.

“What the hell are they doing?”

Batman grumbled. “Just when we’re winning, they want to turn tail and run.” He switched his gaze back over to the far left-hand side of the screen, where the small blip representing Tomcat 202 was just going feet wet. “At least Stoney’s out of the area.”

But maybe he’d spoken too fast. As he watched, the gaggle of remaining Cuban fighters turned toward the southern boundary of the air base.

The American fighters milled about in the air uncertainly for a few moments, awaiting direction from the carrier. Taking on Cuban fighters in the air was one thing chasing them back down to their home base over Cuba was another. Absent orders, they’d remain where they were.

Batman snatched up the microphone. “Get on them!”

Within moments, the small blue blips turned to follow the MiGs back toward Cuba. “It’s what you want to do anyway,” he muttered. He glanced at Tombstone’s aircraft symbol. The tanker was only thirty miles away, patiently circling with an anxious fighter aircraft. If he had any sense of how his shipmate flew, Stoney would be sucking fumes in another twenty minutes. Batman always did like the afterburner.

“Stoney, you’ve got a load of Cuban MiGs inbound on your nine o’clock.

They’re at altitude, and the rest of the wing’s giving chase. You might want to vector to avoid them until you can tank.” Batman knew how much Tombstone would hate doing that, but it was the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances.

“Nothing to come home to, boys,” Tombstone said to the incoming MiGs.

“Nothing at all. You might as well park those puppies on the tarmac for all the good they’re gonna do from here on out.”

‘Tombstone, there’s one out in front of that pack,” Tomboy’s worried voice reported. “He’s got a big lead on the Hornets and Tomcats Stoney, he’s gonna be here before they are.”

Tombstone glanced down at his fuel gauge. It was dropping perilously low, far out of the acceptable range for beginning a dogfight. And the tanker with its fighter escorts was too far ahead to provide cover for them. He sighed it was always like this. Just when you thought it was over, the fat lady failed to sing.

“Been a while since our last dogfight, my love.” He slewed the Tomcat violently back toward the incoming raid and grabbed for altitude.

“Let’s get up where we can get a good look at what’s going on.” And where I’ll have some reserve altitude when this bird runs out of fuel, he added silently. Altitude was safety, safety and reserve airspeed and maneuverability. With it, he might have a chance. But without it, the starving Tomcat was no match for a MiG.

Santana tweaked his radar, looking in vain for the flight of attack aircraft he’d been so certain were outbound from his home base.

Regardless of his delicate twiddling of the knobs, the radar insisted on showing only one air contact a Tomcat, according to the ESM gear that had made it an AWG-9 radar in search mode.

But where were the others? There should have been at least three other Tomcats in Bombcat configuration, along with some fighters armed with antiair missiles for protection, not one lone Tomcat straggling off toward the boat. No, he corrected, not straggling already alerted to what was happening around him, and climbing for altitude to gain a superior fighting position.

It was inconceivable that only one aircraft could have so fatally damaged Cuba’s master plan. Inconceivable and unacceptable. The Tomcat pilot was probably congratulating himself right now, dreaming of the awards and medals he’d receive for such a daring mission. Even more unacceptable.

Santana pulled the nose of the MiG up and headed for the sky. He needed some altitude, something to force this into a horizontal-plane battle of angles as he’d had earlier with the last Tomcat victim. For if he had anything to say about it, this particular Tomcat pilot was going to see his dreams of glory turn into his worst nightmare.

“Not so fast, buddy,” Tombstone murmured. He was concentrating on the attack geometry between the MiG and the Tomcat, seeing in three dimensions the advantage that the MiG was trying to obtain. “If you’re like the other MiG pilots I’ve been up against, you have a much better idea of what your aircraft will do than mine, although my former squadron may have given you just a little refresher course on it very recently. Still, I’m betting that you’re a lot more familiar with MiGs than you are with Tomcats. Let’s just see, shall we?” Tombstone kicked on the afterburners again and watched the fuel gauge spiral down. The Tomcat seemed to stop in midair, ceasing all forward movement to turn into a flaming arrow launched toward the sun. “Can you match that rate of climb? I don’t think so not with your low thrust-to-weight ratio. You may have the maneuverability, but I’ve got the power.”

At least until I run out of gas. He winced to see how far to the left the arrow pointed. There wasn’t going to be time to try this twice it would be a close-in-knife fight, first punch-wins engagement. And after that … well, he’d try to make it to the tanker, and if not.

.

.

well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d ditched an aircraft.

He radioed Batman and asked that the tanker be brought in as close as feasibly possible. “Already on it,” Batman said. “And he’s got two fighters buster with him, just aching to get a piece of a MiG.”

“Not a chance. This one’s mine.” Tombstone brought the Tomcat into level flight, now at thirty-five thousand feet.

His fuel consumption rate was much lower this high, but not sufficiently economical to make up for the gas he’d sucked up on afterburners. Still, the MiG probably didn’t know that.

He watched the MiG ascend, climbing at a shallower angle, but still impressive. He vectored toward it, intending to cut him off before he reached Tombstone’s altitude. One of the purposes of gaining altitude was to force the MiG into playing Tombstone’s game, into trying to match the Tomcat’s rate of speed. He couldn’t all the MiG could do would be to gain altitude while-losing speed. With any luck, he’d be going too slow to maneuver quickly out of Tombstone’s way.

The second reason for taking the MiG now was to avoid an angles fight.

It was a battle that the Tomcat pilots were trained to avoid at all costs. Never play the adversary’s game make him play yours. The key to successful fighter tactics was an aggressive, heads-up attitude, exploiting the adversary’s weaknesses while playing to your own strengths.

For the Tomcat, that strength was power. The MiG had the corresponding weakness.

Tombstone flipped the Tomcat over to watch the MiG ascend, then nosed down still inverted to meet him. He heard the low growl of a Sidewinder insisting it had acquired an interesting target. Tombstone was headed east, right into the rising sun. Did the Sidewinder have the MiG or was it going to begin one of its famous solar attacks, veering off in the atmosphere toward the rising sun until it ran out of fuel? There was no way to tell, not with the angle as it was between the two aircraft. He would either have to let the MiG proceed up a bit farther and gain some separation from the sun, or take a chance on losing the missile.

What the hell he had two. In fact, in relative terms, he had more missiles than gas. Tombstone toggled off a Sidewinder, crying “Fox Three, Fox Three” into the ICS.

Santana glared suspiciously at the Tomcat loitering above him, inverted in the air. When it nosed down to point at him, still inverted, he slewed the MiG around to put the Tomcat directly on his nose. Too far away for guns, but the Tomcat pilot might not know that. At any rate, seeing the tracers might distract him. He fired off two quick bursts.

A missile leaped off the Tomcat’s rails, headed almost directly for him. Almost Santana watched with something that approached amusement as the missile vectored determinedly away from his aircraft and toward the rising sun.

His confidence slowly returned. Perhaps he’d overestimated the Americans even he knew better than to take an eastern shot at the sunrise with the Sidewinder. He glanced down at the airspeed indicator, saw the MiG was still struggling to ascend. He swore quietly. Soon he’d have to either pull out of the climb or resign himself to ambling through the sky like a wounded turkey. At any lower speed, he’d be too easy a target for the Tomcat. He’d lose maneuverability, and his low speed vector would be no problem for the Tomcat to overcome.

He reached a decision, dropped nose down, and plummeted one thousand feet within seconds. His airspeed picked up satisfyingly, and he quickly rolled back around to face the Tomcat.

He was on the Tomcat’s six now, with a beautiful view of the Tomcat’s glowing tailpipes. He toggled off his own missile, another heat-seeker, satisfied that the angle might be almost sufficient to distinguish between the aircraft and the sun. Had the American made that same assumption, he wondered, studying the Tomcat’s undercarriage.

Three more Sidewinders hung there, more than enough to waste one shot as the pilot had done earlier. Suddenly, he wasn’t quite so certain that the Tomcat pilot had been foolish.

Tombstone heard the shriek of the missile indicator before Tomboy’s voice cut through the ICS, warning of it. He swore, slewed the Tomcat around to virtually pivot in midair, and pointed nose down at the MiG.

The heat-seeker came on, clearly fixed on the Tomcat rather than the sun.

The Cuban pilot had taken the same chance he had, with better results.

Fortunately, he hadn’t touched his countermeasures so far.

The Tomcat shook lightly as three packets of flares were ejected from the undercarriage. They burst into brilliant white phosphorescent fire, easily outshining both the sun and the heat signature of Tombstone’s exhaust. Later generation heat-seekers were trained to ignore targets that were too good, thus correcting for the tendency to vector on a flare rather than an exhaust and reducing the probability of its racing off toward the sun. Tombstone was betting that the Cubans used an earlier version of the missile, given to them by their Soviet master or their new friends, the Libyans.

“Got it acquiring the flare,” Tomboy said. ‘Tombstone, he’s coming around.”

“I’ve got him. I’ve still got altitude on himhe’s not going to like this.”

Santana was already setting up for his next shot as his first heat-seeking missile exploded harmlessly into a flare. He hardly spared it a thought-he was too busy trying to coax the Tomcat into descending into an angles fight. He could understand the other pilot’s refusal to take the bait, but he was determined not to fight it out in a wild yo-yo of shifting altitudes that would inevitably provide the Tomcat with a marked advantage.

Now what the he watched as the Tomcat nosed over and headed down toward him, surprised to see the pilot descending. Would he actually do that?

Enter a horizontal battlefield, knowing that it would put him at a disadvantage?

Well, he’d seen the pilot make one mistake. Perhaps it had been a mistake, and not a calculated chance. At any rate, this was the battle that a MiG excelled at. And if it was a mistake, it would be his adversary’s last.

“Stoney,” Tomboy gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”

“The only thing I have time to do before we run out of fuel,” Tombstone said grimly. “Start the pre ejection checklist. If this doesn’t work, we’re going for a swim.”

The Tomcat was indeed descending to his level. Santana smirked. It was as he’d thought Americans were not nearly as well trained and proficient as they pretended to the rest of the world to be. Here, in the sky, mono a mono, there was no disguising their foolishness. He swung the MiG around, calculated the intercept, and bore in for the kill. In the last twenty minutes, he’d discovered a real taste for knife fights.

“I see what you’re up to, buddy,” Tombstone said. “It worked on that youngster you splashed, but I’ve been around guys like you too often.

Your kind always does like the close-in fight. That’s because you treat those funny little things hanging on your wings like your balls, protecting them and not using them like you should. Well, if you want to learn some knife fighting, I’m not above teaching it to you.” He watched the MiG bore on in until he was almost within range. The Cuban pilot would be running the geometry through his mind, calculating the exact intercept.

To encourage him to continue thinking the American had made a mistake.

Tombstone toggled off another Sidewinder.

He knew it was well inside the minimum range for shooting one, but he hoped the Cuban would think he didn’t.

It seemed to work. The Cuban MiG didn’t even flinch from its course, continuing to bore on in toward him.

Tombstone felt his eyes go squinty and a muscle in the side of his jaw start to jump. One more kill, one last kill that would be it.

Just as the vectors approached range and optimum angle for firing.

Tombstone did three things simultaneously. First, he swept the wings of the Tomcat forward, overriding the automatic angle configuration that selected appropriate sweep angle for speed. Moving the wings forward decreased his lift, rendering the Tomcat slightly more ungainly in the air, but from this angle was also an almost imperceptible way of draining off airspeed without the other pilot’s noticing. Second, in one quick motion, he popped the speed brakes and dropped his landing gear. Dirtying up all of his airflow surfaces peeled one hundred knots off his airspeed almost instantaneously. Instead of a graceful, powerful fighter, the Tomcat was now a lumbering aircraft configured for landing.

An ugly turkey in the air with a MiG right in its sights.

Third, Tombstone switched the selector over to guns, pressed the buttons, and heard the delicate beelike hum of the gun in his port wing firing. It was almost anticlimactic at first, watching the delicate line of bullets trace their way down the fuselage. He jinked the Tomcat slightly to the right, watching the tracery elevate up and penetrate the other aircraft’s canopy. An explosion of glass and body, followed shortly by a fireball.

“Fuel,” Tomboy insisted, for all the world sounding as though she’d completely ignored the knife fight going on in front of her. “Stoney, vector three-two-zero. Now!”

Tombstone did as ordered, then said, “No comment?

Aren’t you going to congratulate me on that last kill?”

“If it is your last kill, you idiot,” she snapped. “The next one will be us if you don’t get some fuel into this bird.”

The tanker was waiting only one mile away. Tombstone vectored straight in on it, and pulled off the most remarkable plug of his entire aviation career. The probe slid in smoothly, as if the basket had been coated in Vaseline. Two other fighters hung nervously off his port and starboard bow, acting almost as though they could somehow buoy him up should his fuel tank suddenly run dry.

Ah, but the luck was flowing his way now. A smooth plug, fuel good at probe tip within minutes. The tanks sucked the fuel in, and within moments he felt the Tomcat start to grow heavier. He corrected automatically, keeping the probe centered in the basket while the sun rose behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, they’d topped off enough to make a run on the boat. Tombstone thanked the tanker crew, then peeled away from the formation.

“Now about that last kill …,” he said casually. “Not bad for an old guy, huh?”

Tomboy was silent for a moment, then said, “It was brilliant for any pilot. And that it was you just makes it that much better.”

A grin crept across Tombstone’s face. Nothing like having your new bride admiring your latest kill.

Four minutes later, he dipped quickly into the starboard marshal, then was vectored in toward the ass end of the carrier to make his approach.

The trap went smoothly, as professionally done as anything he’d ever executed in his life. He followed the yellow shirt’s direction across the flight deck, moving the Tomcat into an unoccupied spot right behind the island. He popped the canopy and waited for the plane captain to safe the seat and assist him in unfastening the ejection harness.

“Really something. Admiral,” the airman said as he climbed up the side of the Tomcat. “I heard about that MiG sir, I mean it was-I mean.

Admiral” The airman’s voice trailed off into a confused panic as he realized who he was talking to. Behind him. Tombstone could hear Tomboy chuckling.

Finally unstrapped. Tombstone sauntered back into the carrier and headed for Flag Plot. Bird Dog might have thought he was hot shit flying JAST birds back at Par River, but he was willing to bet that he’d earned bragging rights after today’s kill.

Tombstone strolled into TFCC and was greeted by a wave of cheers. He started to wave in a self-deprecating manner, ready to display the traditional false modesty over a daring aviation exploit. Then he realized that none of the cheering men and women were even looking at him. Batman clapped him on the back. “Good news. Tombstone! An American sailboat just outside of Cuba’s territorial waters just picked up one of our aviators. You probably remember him Gator, Bird Dog’s RIO. That damned ejection seat of his must have had an extra forty pounds of charge or something.

He was way the hell off where he ought to have been.”

Tombstone tried to smile. “That sure is good news. Hey, about that MiG” “Hold on, old buddy. I need to get some SAR on this boy, then we’ll talk.”

Tombstone stood silent for a moment in the middle of the roiling pack of aviators, each one celebrating Gator’s rescue. Finally, he Chuckled and headed off for his stateroom. It was always dangerous, getting too damned impressed with oneself. He’d be better off going to the Dirty Shirt and grabbing a quick slider than looking for a pat on the back.