Hellfire

NINE

The admiral’s conference room was packed with his staff and representatives from the ship’s company. Despite the early morning hour, no one looked tired or sleepy, though more than one face showed purple bruises under the eyes. No one had slept much, Coyote included.

“Listen up, people. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’ve got a COD inbound as well as message traffic five feet deep. For the time being, I want us all focused on self-protection and preventing another tragedy. I want a full CAP complement up, twenty-four seven. No chances — not until we figure out what’s going on here. That clear?” Coyote scanned the faces of the staff seated around the table.

Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, could we get a clarification on ROE for the pilots?”

Coyote stared at him for a long, hard moment. “You got something on your mind, mister?”

For a moment Lab Rat wondered if he’d overstepped the bounds of propriety. But dammit, he was the admiral’s intelligence officer — he got paid to point out problems, not to suck up like a yes man. “Yes, Admiral, I do,” Lab Rat continued, unfazed by the scrutiny. “INCOS isn’t holding up under these conditions and I don’t think we can count on what the aircrew remember about it. This could get out of hand very quickly.”

Coyote looked away. Lab Rat could see him arrive at a decision. “I’ll brief all squadron commanders in one hour,” the admiral said finally. “And I expect the word to get out to all aircrews. Now, how are we coming on the survivors?”

“Captain Gaspert says he’s got a complete and accurate count,” the operations officer answered. “Current muster was in the deck log, of course. So far, it looks like most of the fatalities are among his crew, especially the ones below the waterline. There just wasn’t time for them to get out.” He stopped, staring down at the list as though he could make the numbers change by sheer force of will. “Eighty-two missing, presumed dead. One hundred and twenty-eight wounded, sixteen of those critical.”

The numbers sank in around the table, and few were unmoved. It was one thing, horrible though it was, to lose military members. Another thing entirely to kill civilians, as they all knew following the World Trade Center massacre.

“We’re maintaining a full SAR,” Ops continued. “The last rescue was two hours ago. Small boats and helos, with the S-3s as well. I think we’ll find some more of them clinging to wreckage.”

“Let’s hope so.” The admiral turned to the flag supply officer. “Any logistics problems I need to know about?”

“No, Admiral. We’ve outfitted the civilians with dungarees and T-shirts, basic toiletries, that sort of thing. We’ll be fine until we can resupply.”

“Okay, then. Anything else?”

Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, so far we’re not certain who was at fault. The missile trajectories were almost exactly reciprocal. We had a near miss, or we had a hit. It’s going to take more information from national sensors before we can be sure of what happened.”

It was not what they wanted to hear. No one could bear the thought that the Jefferson might have been responsible for so many deaths.

But Coyote hadn’t risen to command of a battle group by being afraid to face facts. His face was somber as he said, “We’ll see.”

As the staff meeting broke up, Strike caught Lab Rat outside in the passageway leading back to their offices. “You got it in for pilots in particular for some reason?” he asked.

Lab Rat shook his head. “We put up CAP, they put up CAP. A lot of metal in a finite amount of airspace, with pilots on both sides truly pissed. You slam the ROE down their throats and I’ll make sure it’s in the pre-mission briefs. The last thing we need is a couple of hotheads banging wingtips with one of the Russians.”

“Pilots will be pilots.”

Lab Rat felt a surge of anger. “Weren’t you listening? We don’t know whose fault it was yet.”

“The pilots know.”

“They think they know. They don’t. And I don’t want anyone assuming an aggressive posture in the air until we do.”

Strike shrugged. “It’s inbred in a pilot. What are you going to do about it?”

Lab Rat’s anger boiled over. “You remind them of what they were before they were pilots.”

“What, civilians?”

“No. Officers. They follow orders and avoid confrontations with the Russians or I’ll prefer court-martial charges myself. We clear on that?”

Strike stepped back a bit, surprised at the intelligence officer’s rage. “Yeah, clear.”

As Lab Rat watched him go, he struggled to rein his temper in. It would do no good to give in to the anger, no good at all. There would be enough posturing and storming from the line officers. His job was to keep it under control, to force them to face facts.

Once they knew what the facts were. And then, God help them all if Jefferson was at fault.

Mikhail Gromko put his nimble jet into a hard turn, letting the g-forces wash over him like a wave. He fought off the familiar drag, tensing his muscles just a bit, letting it toy with him. It was like surfing, the ebb and the flow of gravity, an ocean of speed and blue. That he was flying a real combat mission made it all the more exhilarating.

In theory, Gromko knew he could die. He’d seen classmates auger in during Basic, and more screw up during the advanced platform training. He’d attended the funerals, comforted the widows, and rewritten the flight schedules to cover the empty crew slots. There was nothing theoretical about what could happen to you when you flew Russia’s most advanced fighter into harm’s way.

Except that none of it applied to him. Gromko knew, felt it in his Cossack bones, that he was invulnerable. The mistakes and equipment failures that had claimed his peers were impossible for him. He was too smart, too fast, too everything to let them happen. The options others failed to see would be clear to him. The faulty reflexes that had betrayed them — well, that was simply a matter of training and willpower, and Gromko had more of both than most.

Even the two blips homing in on him on his radar screen meant nothing to him. No, that wasn’t exactly true — they represented a challenge, an opportunity. He would show them — in ways that only another pilot would understand — that he was the better pilot. No need to even fire missiles for that. He would show them and let their despair lead them into mistakes.

Hornets — big deal. They might as well have been mosquitoes for all he cared.

Thor could feel his wingman sliding out of position. It was a sixth sense, one that did not require a radarscope or a visual confirmation, as if somehow his own nerves ran the length of the swept-back wings. Some might say it was just experience, some unconscious perception of how the airstream around his own aircraft changed as his wingman changed position, but Thor knew better.

Without even glancing at the HUD, he keyed his mike. “Badger, tighten up.”

“Roger.” Thor could almost hear an audible thunk as the Marine Corps captain off his starboard wing slid his Hornet back into position.

“Antsy little bastard, isn’t he?” Thor commented, now concentrating on his HUD. The Russian fighter that they’d been assigned to cover was jittering around in the sky, making a series of sharp turns and abrupt changes in altitude for no purpose that Thor could discern. His sixth sense extended only to his own wingman.

Suddenly, as the Forger completed a snap roll, Thor understood. He chuckled, then keyed his mike again. “Little asshole is trying to impress us. He’s a hot shot, don’t you know? Guess we’re supposed to be crapping in our pants just watching him do some basic aerobatics.”

“Well, gee. I’m impressed,” the captain replied. “I haven’t pulled some of those maneuvers since — oh, heck. Since Basic, I guess.”

“Yeah. Let’s just sit back a bit and watch. I don’t like the way he’s moving.” Thor studied the gyrations the other aircraft was executing, almost immediately discerning a pattern. The pilot wasn’t bad — in fact, he wasn’t bad at all — but he had some bad habits that were already evident to the more experienced Marine Corps pilot. Like a tendency to go right, right, then left. Like two increases in altitude followed by a roll. Like a little sloppiness in hard left turns. All in all, not fatal flaws in the other aviator’s skills, but little weaknesses that would get him killed.

If it came down to it. And it wasn’t supposed to, not on this flight.

“Maybe I ought to show him how it’s really done,” the captain off Thor’s wing mused.

“Yeah, right,” Thor said. That was just what they’d been briefed to avoid. No horsing around this time, their squadron CO had warned. Sure, show the Russian some fancy moves — entirely inconsistent with every warning they’d had not to provoke an incident. Not.

“Okay, then!” The captain’s Hornet peeled away and headed for the Forger.

The general watched the Russian and American fighters clutter the radarscope, hating the ship more with every passing moment. It was unnatural to breathe stale air, barricaded from the sky and the earth. Men should not die like this, blasted to atoms in the sky or entombed in ships. No, if they had to die, let it be on the ground where they could return dust to dust and ashes to ashes, not suspended in emptiness to drift around the globe forever.

Finally, when he could stand it no longer, he left the dark cave of the ship and made his way to the flight deck. He forced himself to walk slowly and purposefully, aware that even sailors drew confidence and courage from the way he held himself, the confidence on his face. But every second he could feel the fear — no, to be accurate, the terror — beating louder and louder in his veins, insisting that he was about to be trapped forever in this cave of steel, that he would be trapped and drown.

The air, blessed even though redolent with jet fuel fumes and the scorched taste of rubber and metal, blasted him as he opened the hatch to the flight deck. Just a few moments, he promised his pride, aware that any longer away from Combat might be taken as him having something he wanted to hide. Just a few moments to reorient myself, to know the time of day and what the weather’s like. Then we’ll get back to the business at hand.

The moments stretched into minutes. Finally, he forced himself to clang the hatch shut, take a deep breath, and begin the descent back down to Combat. The scent of the outside clung to him down several decks.

“Status,” he demanded crisply as he reentered Combat. The men manning the consoles were pale, colors never seen on a soldier’s face. The officers were pale, too.

“Two Hornets launched for each of our fighters,” the action officer replied. “Standard operating procedures — we have warned all flights to be careful not to provoke an incident.”

“Very well.” The general studied the large screen in front of him, aware of how his eyes were already accustomed to translating the unfamiliar symbols and lines into a tactical picture.

The fighters were ringing the transport, each orbiting close to a symbol marking their assigned station. Arrowing in from the direction of the carrier were five aircraft — no, he corrected, five pairs of aircraft, some of them already closing and beginning to circle around to reach the farthermost Russian fighters. They were all a safe distance away from the transport, if anything less than a thousand miles could even be called safe in the modern world.

“Two zero two,” the watch officer said, a trace of worry in his voice. “Interrogative your intentions. You are not maintaining assigned station.”

“Roger. I am just demonstrating the capabilities of the aircraft for our friends,” the pilot’s voice came back, amused and confident.

“That is not your mission,” the watch officer snapped. “Maintain flight discipline.”

The general felt a deep twinge of worry. This was not his environment; these pale strangers were not his troops. But the instincts born of countless conflicts evidently recognized something in this situation that was very dangerous.

“Badger, get your ass back here!” Thor shouted.

“Hey, you said okay,” the captain protested, already starting a turn in toward the Forger.

“Watch out!” Thor screamed. He could see the geometries closing, his own wingman’s bad habits juxtaposed against the Forger pilot’s, the inevitable approaching too quickly to stop. “Break hard right!”

“Sorry, I just—shit!” The captain’s situational awareness was two seconds slower than Thor’s, and those two seconds proved deadly. As he tried to tighten up his right turn to move back toward Thor, the Forger pilot snapped a roll, decreasing airspeed slightly as he did so. The change in airspeed was just enough to settle him a bit lower in the air — and wingtip to wingtip with the captain.

The captain screamed, wrenching the Hornet way past the normal flight envelope, and for a moment Thor felt an insane surge of hope that he might make it, even as one part of his mind coldly informed him otherwise. Thor’s hand was already moving over to his IFF readout, flicking the code switches to radiate a distress signal. Just as he keyed in the last digit, the Forger’s right wingtip brushed against the captain’s canopy.

It looked like a gentle caress, no more that the lightest stroke of metal on metal, but the effect was instantaneous and disastrous. A spray of sparkling light trailed after the Forger’s wingtip as the Hornet’s canopy disintegrated.

“Get him back on deck. Now,” Gorshenko ordered, not waiting for a naval officer to speak.

There was a moment of hesitation — a moment too long. Before Rotenyo decided to obey the ground officer’s command, one of the pair of Hornets split into two distinct radar blips, one of which headed directly for the Russian fighter.

Stupid young man. Your ego and your insolence are more dangerous here than even on the ground. “Withdraw — now!”

The Russian aircraft started to turn. The blip labeled as an American Hornet shivered on the screen as though it, too, were turning.

Too little too late. The general knew what was already inevitable.

The blips merged briefly, then separated. At the same moment there was a blast of ungodly noise over the aviation circuits. The green radar trace that was the Russian aircraft broke into four smaller blips that blossomed and merged into a cloud of noise in the sky.

Bolshovich arrived and absorbed the tactical situation in a glance. “Launch four more Forgers,” he ordered. “Vector toward the American fighters. They’re not going to get away with this!”

Gorshenko felt the crew respond to their captain’s leadership. He turned back to stare at the radar screen again, a sinking feeling in his gut.

“Badger!” Thor shouted. “Answer me!”

“Huh?” The captain’s voice was woozy but audible. “I’m bleeding.” There was a note of wonder in his voice.

“Badger, listen to me. Are you hurt? Can you fly?”

“I’m bleeding.” A note of panic now as the pilot regained situational awareness. “The canopy.”

“You had a brush with the Forger — can you fly? Are you getting a Master Caution light? Report status,” Thor said, keeping his voice level.

“No. Two hydraulics, the cabin pressure alarm. That’s all. Over temp on right engine.” The pilot’s voice steadied up as his training kicked in.

Thor snapped open his own emergency checklist and began reading down the action items. His wingman’s responses came more and more slowly, his words slurred even over the static.

“Hornet 102, you are cleared priority for green deck,” the air boss said. “Badger, can you get her down?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” The pilot sounded as though it didn’t make much difference one way or the other to him.

Thor keyed his mike reluctantly. “Boss, 103. Sir, recommend 102 eject rather than risk recovery on deck.” He watched as the other Hornet rolled inverted, then sluggishly regained level flight. “He’s losing flight controls, sir.” And it’s only a matter of time before he loses consciousness, too. God help us if he blacks out on the way down to the deck.

“Roger. Wait. Out.” There was silence on the circuit.

As the silence stretched on, Thor watched as his wingman’s aircraft became more and more unstable. Hydraulic fluid was streaming out behind it, some of it perilously close to the engine air intake. Any second now—

The air boss returned. “Roger, 103, concur with recommendations. One zero two, descend to angels fourteen and initiate ejection. SAR will be standing by.”

There was no answer.

“One zero two, do you copy?”

“Badger! Eject, eject!” Thor shouted, hoping his familiar voice would penetrate the fog now descending on his wingman. “Punch out, Badger. Punch out!”

As if in response, the other Hornet banked sharply to the right. It began descending, and for a moment Thor had hope that his wingman had heard him and was descending in response to the air boss’s orders. His hopes were dashed when the Hornet’s angle of attack steepened and its nose drifting down and down and down until it was in a vertical dive.

“Badger! Eject!” Thor flashed out an urgent prayer to someone, anyone, who might have some degree of control over the universe: “Eject!”

Thor followed the Hornet down, shouting and praying, ignoring the equally urgent pleas coming from the air boss. Finally, at seven thousand feet, the last shards of the canopy peeled back from the aircraft. There was a flash of fire, then a long streamer of white parachute slashing across the sky.

“Chute! I have one chute!” Thor shouted.

“Roger, copy, SAR inbound!” The relief in the air boss’s voice was palpable. “Stay with him, Thor, mark on top. They’ll have a man in the water with him before his life jacket fully inflates.”

“Roger.” Thor moved out a bit, watching the parachute billow from a safe distance. It jerked his wingman up in the air as the Hornet continued its final descent. Oddly, a sardonic definition of a successful aviator from Flight Basic came to mind: number of takeoffs should equal number of controlled landings.

Well, Badger might not be a success according to that definition, but Thor would take what the universe offered up. If his wingman was still alive, if they pulled him out before he drowned, if he had survived the ejection without serious injury, then that would be enough.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the chute and its cargo reached the surface of the ocean. Thor watched the improbably small splash, then moved away to allow the helo to descend.

“We’ve lost him,” Rotenyo said, his voice unbelieving. “That bastard shot our fighter down.” Without asking permission, his hand went to the switch that controlled the shipboard alarm system. The hard, insistent gong of general quarters pulsed in the general’s bones.

“No,” the general said. “It was not an attack. It was an accident.”

But Rotenyo was no longer inclined to listen to him. It was too late to stop what one Russian pilot had begun.