The Disciple

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The ready room of VFA-196, the Savage Horde, aboard USS United States, was packed, with an officer in every seat. The doors to the space were locked when the squadron commanding officer, Commander Harvey “the Fly” Burgholzer, walked to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Instantly the conversations stopped.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, this is a classified meeting. The information you hear in this ready room is classified Top Secret and will not be discussed with or repeated to anyone outside of this space.”

His audience, the officers of his squadron, well knew what classified information was, so Burgholzer continued. “One of the items of classified information is the name of our guest.” He nodded toward a man seated beside the executive officer, or XO. This man was wearing a khaki shirt and khaki trousers but had no rank insignia or name tag, which meant he was a civilian. “Let’s give Rear Admiral Jake Grafton a rousing Savage welcome.”

As Grafton got out of his chair and made his way to the podium, carrying a small wooden box, the officers let out a tremendous, “Helloooo Asshole!”

Grafton set his box on the podium and grinned at his audience. “Thank you, thank you. It’s good to be back where I am appreciated. Now, one question.” He leaned an elbow on the podium and looked expectantly at the squadron skipper. “Why ‘the Fly’?”

Almost as one, the junior officers roared, “He’s the Fly in the Wine.”

When the laughing ceased, Grafton got serious. “Folks, I want to reiterate, everything said in this room is classified. As you know, loose lips sink ships, and loose lips will destroy a naval career.” He glanced at the faces in his audience. Apparently satisfied, he muttered, “ ’Nuff said.”

He opened the box and pulled out two instruments. One was merely a black box, about six inches square, and the other was an instrument with a faceplate on it that obviously was intended to be installed in the instrument panel of an airplane. He held up the instrument bearing the faceplate. “This cockpit instrument probably looks familiar,” he said. “It’s driven by an early version of the ALQ-199, the ALQ- 198.” He held up the black box for them to see, then put it back on the podium. “With your help, we are going to give this thing to the Iranians.”

A murmur swept his audience.

“We’re going to put the ALQ- 198 in one of your planes in place of the 199, ensure it is working, then the pilot of that plane is going to jump out of it in such a way that the plane crashes in Iran.”

Dead silence.

“There were several possible ways to handle this operation,” Jake Grafton continued. “I believed the best way to stop tongues from wagging and keep the secret was to just tell you, the officers of this squadron, the truth, so that is what I’m doing. Any questions so far?”

One hand went up. Jake nodded at the owner of the hand, a female in a flight suit who asked, “Who do you work for, Admiral?”

“CIA.”

Another question. “Why do you want the Iranians to have this box?”

Grafton tugged thoughtfully at his ear. “I’m tempted to pass on that one, but I think I’ll put it this way: They don’t know we have a better one, nor do they know that the better one is actually put together differently and uses different algorithms.”

He pointed at another hand.

“What is the plan, sir?”

Grafton’s face brightened into a smile. “Well, the first requirement is that the Iranians believe a U.S. Navy F/A-18 crashed accidentally in their territory. Second, they have to believe we don’t want them to have this box. Finally, and most importantly, we have to get everyone involved back alive and in one piece.” He looked thoughtful again. “I hope that your skipper and ops officer can help me put together a scenario that is realistic enough for the Iranians and yet doesn’t cost us any American lives. It’s a tall order, and it’s going to take some guts and finesse to pull it off. By necessity, we are going to violate Iranian airspace. Once we have a script for our passion play, we’ll run it by your battle group commander, Rear Admiral Stan Bryant, and the folks at State. If we can get their blessing, we’ll give it a go.”

“Who gets to fly this puppy?” one of the junior officers asked.

“I thought I was going to,” Grafton said dryly, “but my boss in Washington thought that I wasn’t.” That one drew a laugh. “So I’ve talked with the Fly, and he tells me he and your XO can come up with an equitable way to pick the lucky person. Skipper?”

Jake sat down, and Burgholzer arranged himself at the podium. “Any volunteers?” he asked.

Every hand in the room shot up.

“That’s what I thought would happen,” the Fly said, grinning. “Damn, you people make me proud.”

The squadron ops officer was Lieutenant Commander Harry Lampert. He was about six feet tall and skinny, with a crew cut and a chiseled profile. This was, he said, “an interesting problem.” He was huddled with Jake Grafton, Burgholzer and the squadron Executive Officer, the XO.

If the plane had much fuel in it when it crashed, everyone agreed, the wreckage might well be destroyed by fire. On the other hand, if the plane lacked fuel, that might give suspicious Iranian minds something to chew upon.

Then there was the issue of where the pilot would eject. If over water, the plane would have to be on autopilot to reach land. If over land, an in-country rescue situation would develop.

The best option, they decided, was for the pilot to eject over water and the plane to continue on autopilot into Iranian airspace and run out of fuel somewhere over the Iranian desert.

“Why does the pilot need to eject?” the Fly asked. “The Iranians are going to ask that question.”

“It’s going to be a pile of rubble,” Lampert argued. “The people who examine this wreck won’t be able to figure out why it crashed.”

“Never underestimate your enemy’s technical savvy,” the XO said. “That’s usually a mistake. After all, they can get Russian help any time they ask.”

“How long do you need to fool them, Admiral?” Burgholzer asked Jake Grafton.

“A while,” he said and smiled.

“That’s what I like-a man who keeps his cards close to his vest,” Burgholzer told his officers.

Eventually they had a plan, and Jake asked each of the squadron officers to sleep on it.

He was a guest that evening of Admiral Bryant in the flag mess. The two renewed an old acquaintance and, inevitably, found themselves discussing the situation in the Middle East. “Forty million barrels of oil a day come out of the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Sea,” Bryant said, “on its way to ports all over the earth. That’s just a smidgen less than half the earth’s production. Any disruption for any significant period of time will have a huge impact on the world’s economies. What happens in this corner of the world matters to everyone on the planet.”

When they were alone, they discussed Jake’s plan. “Should work,” Bryant said. “There’s a frigate stationed in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. She has a helo on board. I can make sure she has that helo on alert or in the air when your guy goes out, and we can run one of ours partway up there, having him practice smoke hovers.”

The admiral also decided who would need to know what was going down. He named the captain of the ship, the commander of the air wing, his chief of staff and a couple of other officers. “Tell me when you’re going and I’ll brief them,” Bryant said.

They sliced and diced it, two professional naval aviators talking carrier aviation, then moved on to discuss mutual friends and naval matters.

For Jake Grafton, it was all very pleasant. Being at sea on a carrier again, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, walking through the endless passageways, thinking about flying-all of it brought back pungent memories. He walked out of the flag spaces after dinner with a light step, certain that all was right with the world.

Up on the flight deck he found that the sun had set and the wind was up, a wind laden with salt and the smell of the sea. It tore at his clothes and messed up his hair as he picked his way between the tied-down planes and walked between the catapult tracks to the bow. There was a good sea running, so the bow was rising and falling at a rate that made it difficult to stand. In the darkness, the rising bow tried to throw him off his feet, and the descending bow, dropping out from under him, made him feel light.

These were old sensations, ones Jake Grafton had first known as a young man. Periodic tours on carriers through the years kept the sea and the ships fresh in his memory. You can never go back, they say… but if only you could!

After ten minutes savoring the sensual feel of the eternal wind and the ship riding the restless sea, he went below to the empty cabin he had been assigned. He undressed and lay down on the small bed, but in minutes he was thinking about the plan, about how it would go. When finally he drifted off to sleep, he found himself dreaming about it.

The ship was launching aircraft the next afternoon when Harry Lampert walked into the Mission Planning spaces with one of his pilots, a woman wearing a green Nomex flight suit. She was of slightly less than medium height, perhaps 130 pounds, with dark brown hair that she wore fairly short. She was trim and fit, solidly muscled.

“Lieutenant O’Hare, sir.”

Jake Grafton was in Mission Planning looking at the latest satellite photographs of the Iranian coast. Above their heads on the flight deck, planes were being launched. The subdued, muffled howl of the jet engines at full power reached them occasionally, then disappeared as the catapults threw the planes into the sky. The thuds of catapult spears slamming into the water brakes could be felt all over the ship.

Grafton nodded at each of the junior officers and said, “Commander Burgholzer told me he thought you two could pull this off if anyone could.” He handed them a single sheet of paper containing four paragraphs.

“This is the plan. We submitted it this morning to the battle group commander, who approved it and sent a message describing it to CENTCOM, the theater commander, who will undoubtedly send it on to Washington. Don’t expect to hear back for a day or two.” Grafton unrolled a map and spread it over the huge photo he had been studying. He had marked up the map carefully and showed them the points mentioned in the plan.

When they had run out of questions, he said, “Still want to give it a try? You can walk away right now without a backward glance.”

“How’d you get into the spook business, Admiral?” Harry Lampert asked.

“Can’t play golf, so none of the defense contractors would hire me.”

“Tough break,” said Chicago O’Hare with a grimace. She was still staring at the map, trying to visualize how it would be.

“So which of you is going to jump out of our sacrificial goat?” Grafton asked.

“How about a game of acey-deucey?” O’Hare said, glancing at Lampert. “Winner jumps.”

“The hell with that,” Harry Lampert shot back. “We’ll do it the tried and true navy way-the senior officer will decide. And I have. I’ll fly it.”

“Oh, be a sport,” Chicago urged.

Lampert made a rude noise with his lips and tongue as Jake Grafton chuckled.

Even though Grafton’s operation had been approved at the highest level of the U.S. government, it took three days before the State Department gave a cautious, qualified approval, and then only after citing a classified National Security document to which none of the people in the military had access. During this time a civilian technician who had flown out to the ship swapped the ALQ- 199 in one of the Horde’s planes for the ALQ-198 Grafton had brought with him. Grafton had also brought a set of backup boxes with him, just in case, but they would not be used unless the first set went into the ocean and the Iranians didn’t try to recover it.

Meanwhile Commander Burgholzer ordered a squadron “safety stand-down day” in which all of the pilots were required to get refresher training on the ejection seat and the ejection sequence while wearing all their flight gear. They even hung in a harness from hooks installed in the ready room overhead while finding and touching every piece of equipment attached to them. Harry Lampert and Chicago O’Hare took their turns with everyone else.

The following day the southern half of Iran was under a low pressure area that generated desert windstorms, so Grafton ordered the operation delayed for a day.

Low clouds covered the Persian Gulf and southern Iran the next day, yet after consultation with the battle group commander, Commander Burgholzer, Harry Lampert and Chicago O’Hare, Grafton said, “Do it.”

The flight schedule had Lampert and O’Hare scheduled for a surface surveillance mission into the Persian Gulf. The carrier was in her usual position, where the Gulf of Oman widens to meet the Arabian Sea, about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. The E-2 Hawkeye early warning plane would be airborne, the helo detachment had two “up” helos ready to pull airmen from the ocean…

Jake Grafton watched Lampert and O’Hare walk across the flight deck to their planes from a perch behind the Air Boss’ chair in Pri-Fly, the “tower” of the carrier. Both were in flight suits, over which they wore G-suits, which covered their legs and lower abdomen, and over that, a parachute harness and survival vest. They carried their helmets, oxygen masks and charts in a bag especially designed for that purpose.

The Boss and his assistant, the Mini-Boss, were busy monitoring the activities on the flight deck and the arrival of the planes awaiting recovery overhead, under the clouds, so they ignored Grafton, who was, as far as they knew, just another civilian.

Only the officers of the squadron, and other key officers the battle group commander had briefed, knew that Lampert’s plane would not be returning. For everyone else on the ship this was another routine launch, another day at sea, another day far from home.

Grafton’s attention was riveted on Harry Lampert, who preflighted his airplane and the ejection seat, then climbed into the cockpit. The plane captain helped him strap in. Lampert and the plane captain had a lively conversation, and Grafton saw the pilot grin at something the young sailor said.

Ejecting from a tactical jet was damned risky, and everyone who knew the plan was well aware of it. Especially Lampert and Grafton.

Even as Grafton watched, the squadron skipper, Burgholzer, came strolling along the deck. He paused and chatted with Chicago O’Hare, who was now in her cockpit, and then had a word or two with Harry Lampert. He casually looked over Lampert’s jet-said good-bye, probably-and then walked along to speak with the pilots of the other two Savage Horde Hornets going on this launch.

After a glance at his watch, the Air Boss ordered “Start Engines” on the deck loudspeaker and the deck intercom system. Yellow-shirted plane directors twirled fingers, and jet engines came to life all over the flight deck. Out on the angle, the rescue helicopter started its engines, engaged the rotors and took off straight ahead. It would orbit to the right of the ship, ready to come to a hover over any pilot that ejected nearby.

Grafton kept an eye on Lampert’s plane. If Harry had a problem with it, the operation would have to be postponed since only that plane had the ALQ-198 installed.

Would that box fool the Iranians? Would they think Lady Luck had smiled upon them, or would they smell a rat?

The flight deck ballet began. One by one the airplanes were queued up for the catapults. The E-2 Hawkeye went first on Cat Two, then a couple of S-3 tankers were shot off the waist, then the Hornets were launched. Lampert was second in the queue for Cat One. He taxied onto the catapult and cycled the controls. The cat officers today were shooting from the flight deck. Jake saw the catapult officer signal for full power, then afterburner. The cat officer returned Lampert’s salute, looked toward the bow, checking everything one last time, then swept down and touched the deck. One potato, two potato… and the catapult fired. In less than three seconds Harry Lampert was airborne. He made a clearing turn, the gear retracted, then the flaps, and the Hornet accelerated away, between the sea and the overcast.

Jake watched O’Hare launch, then wandered out of Pri-Fly. He found himself going down the ladder toward the flag spaces-TFCC, the Tactical Flag Command Center. The admiral would be there. It was there that the message that Lampert had ejected would quickly arrive. The rescue he li copter the admiral had ordered to practice open sea rescues in a clear area would be immediately vectored northwest, and the frigate would be directed to launch her chopper.

Jake Grafton felt nervous. He hoped to heaven he hadn’t sent Harry Lampert to his death. As he thought about that, he realized he hadn’t even asked Lampert if he was married. Or had any kids. Of course, even single people had parents and brothers and sisters.

Maybe, Grafton decided, he was better off not knowing.

He was only a few steps into the flag spaces when one of the sailors said to him, “Sir, this is a secure space. You aren’t cleared to be in here.”

Jake opened his mouth to speak-and found himself face-to-face with Admiral Bryant, who took in the situation at a glance. “He’s with me,” the admiral told the sailor. He grabbed Jake by the arm and steered him into TFCC.

Harry Lampert was a hundred miles northwest of United States flying on autopilot at twenty thousand feet when he opened the fuel dumps. Jake Grafton wanted this plane to penetrate about fifty to seventy-five miles into Iran and crash due to fuel exhaustion, which would maximize the chances that the black box that was the ALQ-198 would survive the crash. He didn’t want it to fly until the Iranians managed to shoot it out of the sky.

As he jettisoned fuel he nudged the stick to the left, and the plane settled into a fifteen-degree angle-of-bank turn. Chicago O’Hare was glued out there on his right wing.

Harry checked his moving map display and compared the information it gave him to the picture his radar presented. He had the radar in the surface search mode. The coastline of Iran was quite distinct, and behind it, lots of land return. The left hairpin of the Strait of Hormuz, and beyond it the Persian Gulf, appeared on his scope as black ribbons of no return. The coastlines were quite distinct ribbons of light. Since the plane was still turning, the land disappeared off the scope.

The sea immediately below was empty of ships. He had been watching this area for the last fifty miles. The nearest ship was twenty miles northwest, going into the strait.

Lampert was more than a little nervous. Grafton hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t volunteered the fact that he had never ejected from an airplane. Let’s face it; most naval aviators never have to jump. Minimizing the necessity to bail out is what aviation safety is all about.

He was going to have to jump, descend into the sea, get into his little oneman life raft, then wait for the help from the carrier to arrive. It would take perhaps half an hour or more for the helo to make the trip to his area; then it had to find him, one man in a tiny raft in the great wide sea. If he was injured going out, or the chute failed to deploy properly, or his survival vest failed to inflate, or he couldn’t get the life raft to deploy or was too banged up to get into it, things could get dicey. In fact, there were about a thousand things that could go wrong, and all of them were bad.

Still, Harry reminded himself, this was no different from the chance he took every time he climbed into one of these flying war machines. Naval aviation was a risky business. Things could go to hell damn quickly: A guy might have to pull the handle and jettison the airplane just any ol’ time. The odds were pretty good that it wouldn’t happen, but luck was such a fickle bitch…

As the fuel in his tanks streamed out into the atmosphere, Harry Lampert thought about his wife and son. He and Stella had waited for years to have a kid, and finally Stella said the waiting was over. She wanted the baby now, before she got too old, before their parents were too old to come visit and enjoy their grandchild.

With two thousand pounds of fuel remaining, Harry Lampert secured the dump valve and steadied the plane heading 350. Pointed it at Iran. Then he turned off his airplane’s transponder.

He glanced right, and Chicago O’Hare gave him a thumbs-up. He flashed her one right back. He eased his butt back in the seat and straightened his spine, put his head back in the headrest.

With the coast just tickling the fifty-mile range line on the radar display, Harry Lampert whispered, “I love you, Stella,” took a deep breath of oxygen and used both hands to pull the ejection handle above his head and bring the face curtain down over his face.

A tremendous force hit him in the ass and he was up and out and the wind blast was tearing at him. He kept his elbows in tight. He heard the drogue chute come out and felt the seat stabilize. He had a ways to fall before the main chute opened.

“Black Eagle, Black Eagle, this is War Ace Three Oh One,” Chicago O’Hare said over the radio. “Mayday. War Ace Three Oh Five has just ejected. He went out a hundred and two miles from the ship on the three-four-nine radial. Did you copy?”

The controller repeated the numbers. “I have no emergency squawk,” he added. “Are you certain about the location?”

“Yep. Vector the angel,” O’Hare replied.

She consciously dropped back from the Hornet flying along without a pilot so she could watch the falling seat with Harry Lampert aboard heading toward the cloud deck below. The tops, she knew, were about ten thousand, and the base about a thousand feet above the sea. Harry’s chute should open at thirteen thousand, and if she dove, she should see it. But she didn’t leave the now pilotless jet, and in seconds, she lost the seat in the vastness of the sky.

She had her orders. “Make sure that plane goes to Iran,” Jake Grafton had said. “Or into the water. Nowhere else. Shoot it down if you have to.”

Her armament switch was in ready; the gun was selected and charged. She added a little throttle to close the distance to War Ace 305. The autopilot was holding it steady as a rock.

So far so good.

As she flew along, the Black Eagle controller began questioning her. The controller, a woman, had no idea that this was a scripted scenario, and she wanted to know if O’Hare had the chute in sight.

“No. I’ve lost sight. Do you have the angel headed this way?”

“Yes. Why did the pilot eject?”

“Not sure,” Chicago said, “and, for some reason, my transponder is acting up.” She turned it off.

The controller let that go by… for now. “Can you get underneath the clouds and find the pilot in the water?” she asked.

“I’m going down now.” She wasn’t, but she didn’t think the Iranians would know that if they were listening, and they probably were. Grafton said they monitored these freqs, and he should damn well know.

She was thirty miles from the coast when War Ace 305 began the gentlest of right turns, into her.

O’Hare gently eased her left wing under the right wing of the other plane and held it there. She didn’t want it to make contact-but to allow the air slipping between the two wings to exert upward pressure on the right wing of the other plane, and that was what happened. War Ace 305 returned to level flight. The heading change had been about ten degrees.

She could live with that, she decided. She moved several yards aft and sat monitoring the empty jet’s flightpath.

Lampert’s ejection from War Ace 305 would have caused the transponder in his aircraft to began broadcasting an emergency code, had the transponder been turned on. The emergency code would have been picked up by the radar in the airborne E-2 Hawkeye and by the big search radars aboard the carrier and the guided missile frigate only fifty miles southeast of the place where Lampert would enter the ocean. Since Harry had secured the transponder before his ejection-after all, the Iranians could receive the transponder codes on their radars, too-and there was no transponder code, some hurried radio exchanges between the Hawkeye and the frigate occurred before the frigate began the launch sequence for her ready helo. A long ten minutes would pass before the chopper was airborne, yet this bird would reach Lampert before the angel from the carrier. If he was on the surface of the sea and hadn’t been pulled under by his chute. And if the chopper could find him.

In United States’ flag portion of the Combat Direction Center, Jake Grafton saw and heard the news of the ejection, and heard the communications that diverted a flight of Hornets from their scheduled mission to the site of the ejection to search for the survivor. Air Ops also ordered the angel helo on deck scrambled and talked to the CDC aboard the frigate on one of the ship-to-ship voice circuits.

All this took less than a minute, almost a reflex action.

Harry Lampert’s parachute opened with an audible bang and his ejection seat fell away toward the cloud deck, which was right under his boots. He inspected the chute, which looked blessedly full of air and intact.

Then he fell into the clouds.

Chicago O’Hare’s nudge of the pilotless Hornet seemed to work. The wings stayed level as it closed with the Iranian coast. The Black Eagle controller came back on the radio, informing her that her transponder was malfunctioning and asking for a location. O’Hare turned the volume on the radio down as low as it would go and ignored it.

She watched the coastline march down her radar display toward the apex. Fifteen miles, ten, five… She could hear the deep beep of an Iranian search radar as it swept her plane periodically.

At two miles her ECM warnings lit up. A fire control radar was looking. Chicago turned on her ALQ-199. This black box should fool the Iranian radars and protect both planes until War Ace 305 ran out of gas.

The fire control radar failed to achieve a lock. After a moment it went off the air. The search radar continued to sweep. The two Hornets crossed the coast and continued northwest into Iran.

When he came out of the clouds, Harry Lampert was unsure of his height above the water. He took off his oxygen mask and threw it away, then deployed his seat pan, which fell on a lanyard until it dangled about twenty feet below his feet. His life raft fell out of the seat pan, inflated and hung below it. He got a firm grip on the parachute riser release fittings on his harness and watched the life raft. It would hit the water first, signaling him he had twenty feet to go until he went in.

He realized he could see whitecaps, then swells, then the life raft splashed, and he had time to draw exactly one breath before he went under.

He was still underwater when he toggled the riser releases. The emergency life vest on his harness inflated, squeezing him like an anaconda. In seconds he felt himself bobbing to the surface.

The chute was still in the air, within a foot or two of the water, safely downwind. Lampert spit water and gagged and tried to draw a breath. He didn’t see the parachute go into the ocean.

He was floating with his head well out of the water, still wearing his helmet. He began looking for the seat pan and life raft. Not finding either due to the height of the swells, he felt around for the lanyard and started pulling. Eventually the seat pan, then the life raft, appeared in front of him.

Now to get in the damned thing. He tried pushing it under him and working himself over it. Fell off twice. This was always so easy in the pool during refresher survival training, he thought.

The third time was the charm.

He was sitting in the thing, wet and cold and happy, when he heard the first jet. Now he needed his flares. He fumbled in his survival vest until he found one, lit it and shouted as orange smoke began pouring out. The jets were running under the clouds and apparently didn’t see him.

Two minutes later they were back, working on a different track, when one of them peeled away from the formation and came diving toward him. He waved the flare, which was spewing a tremendous amount of smoke.

The two jets set up an orbit over Harry, and it was only then that he remembered his survival radio, which was in his vest. He tossed the flare into the water, got out the radio, turned it on and squeezed the transmit button.

“Hey, this is War Ace Three Oh Five,” he shouted into the thing.

“Hey yourself, shipmate. We saw your smoke and decided to drop in. A helo is on the way. You okay?”

“Yeah yeah yeah. I’m okay.” Actually he was shivering uncontrollably and felt his first twinge of nausea, but he wasn’t going to say that. He was so very happy.

“You sit right there and behave yourself while we get on the horn to the guys on the big boat. Okay?”

“Yeah yeah yeah.” Harry Lampert sat in his tiny life raft, with his ass partially submerged, shivering and smiling. Life was good, he decided. And he wasn’t parting with his anytime soon. Yeah! He vowed then and there to buy a bottle of the best whiskey he could find for the guys and gals in the parachute shop. Yeah!

He raised his helmet visor so he could see better and waved at the circling jets.

The Iranian search radar was still beeping in Chicago’s ears when War Ace 305 ran out of gas. It was 110 miles deep into Iran. Chicago realized the fire had gone out when the plane began to decelerate and its nose came down.

It seemed to find a new equilibrium as it descended, something like eight degrees nose down. The wings stayed level.

She was in a level turn by then, watching the descending jet fall away.

Chicago O’Hare leveled out heading back the way she had come and got on the radio. She sent a prearranged code over the two-way, secure Link 16 to Black Eagle and the carrier, where it would reach Jake Grafton.

War Ace 305 came out of the clouds several thousand feet above the desert floor. The autopilot had disengaged, and the plane was in a shallow left turn, its nose about eight degrees down. It was still in that attitude when it met the earth and began sliding along. The plane shed a cloud of pieces as the wreck decelerated. Finally the largest piece, the engines and the remainder of the airframe, came to rest and the remainder settled to the ground. The dust cloud drifted away on the wind and dissipated.

Chicago O’Hare was twenty miles from the coast when she saw the two MiG-29s at least five thousand feet above her and to her right. They were crossing from right to left, heading generally east.

Uh-oh!

She advanced her throttles from cruise to full military power. Her airspeed began to build. The jets crossed in front of her, and then the nearest one began a left turn. He’s looking me over, she thought. The second one turned behind the first.

Chicago O’Hare didn’t want to engage either of them, but trying to run away was probably begging to get shot down, and that had no appeal whatsoever.

In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought and slammed the throttles forward into burner while she pulled up and into the wingman. She was wearing a joint helmet-mounted cueing system (JHMCS) today, so she designated them both as targets. The F/A-18 used a hands on throttle and stick (HOTAS) system for managing the plane’s armament, so she didn’t even have to take her hands off the stick or throttle to arm the AIM-9Xs, the Super Sidewinders, she carried on the wingtips. These employed a focal-plane array seeker and a thrust-vectoring tail control package, so they were fire-and-forget short-range dogfight weapons with the capability of turning square corners.

Chicago turned into the lead, which meant the wingman was out on her right. She got a tone in her ears: Her right ’winder was locked onto the wingman.

The Iranian wasn’t a good fighter pilot. He continued as if she weren’t there, following his leader. Maybe she wouldn’t have to shoot.

Perhaps he hasn’t looked to see what I’m doing. Perhaps he thinks his leader will take care of me.

But right in front of her the leader was pulling Gs, turning hard, trying to get his nose around toward her.

At a push of a switch, the missile designated for the leader came alive, locking on. She pulled the trigger, and it left in a flash of fire. She turned hard into the wingman, who was proceeding straight ahead, obviously not into the fight.

The safe thing to do was to just zap him, but maybe he wasn’t a real threat.

Even as that thought went through her mind, she saw the flash as the Sidewinder she had fired impacted the leader.

Chicago O’Hare rolled down and into the wingman, pulling smoothly right up to five Gs, and kept going until her nose was vertical, pointed straight down. Only then did she ease off on the G. Her burners were still lit, so the airspeed built quickly.

Then the clouds surrounded her and she came out of burner and off the throttle and began pulling for all she was worth. Passing fifteen thousand, six Gs. ALQ-199 flashing green. Now that Iranian was trying for a radar lock, but it wasn’t happening for him.

She pumped off some flares from her chaff box, just in case the guy behind her triggered a heat-seeking missile into the clouds, and kept the G on until her nose was back to the horizon. She was down to four thousand feet, still in the clouds.

Weren’t there some mountains on this coast?

She pulled hard and rocketed back up toward ten thousand. There she stabilized and began an eighty-degree turn toward the coast.

As the coast went under her nose she broke out of the clouds, which seemed to be dissipating. No Iranians in sight. She came out of burner, checked her fuel, turned on her transponder and called Black Eagle on an encrypted frequency.

“I need Texaco,” she said. “Send him toward me.”

“And where are you?”

She gave the controller her position. He didn’t say a word.

After a last look behind her, she pulled off a glove and used it to wipe the perspiration from her face. Too bad about that MiG, but…

“Black Eagle, War Ace Three Oh One. Did they find my playmate?”

The helo pilot had Harry Lampert pop another smoke so he could see the wind direction and get a good idea of its velocity as he made his approach. Lampert lowered his helmet visor to keep spray raised by rotor wash out of his eyes. The pilot circled to approach him into the wind, then came into a hover over him. The horse collar was already in the water.

Lampert grabbed for it and fell out of his raft. He managed to get the thing around him and give a thumbs-up to the man in the door. He felt himself being pulled out of the water. The rhythmic pounding of the rotor wash reminded him that he was completely alive.

The winch raised him up beside the helo’s door; then the operator grabbed his parachute harness with both hands, pulled him in and relayed that to the pilot on the ICS.

“We have him,” the pilot told the controller in the E-2 Hawkeye, and she relayed the news to Chicago O’Hare in War Ace 301.