“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.