Gator fell in behind me. "Good move," I said.
"Thanks. Skeeter's OK, he's just-"
"A lot like Bird Dog," I finished for him.
Gator fished a message out of his pocket and passed it over to me.
"You need to see this one. Came in a couple of hours ago from the carrier.
There's some odd stuff in it ― figured it might mean something to you."
I scanned the text, not surprised to find a coded message from Lab Rat. But what he was proposing ― well, it wasn't something I would have tried to pull off. It was a good thing he let me know, though. The MiG forays at the carrier, the problems the submarine was having ― all could quickly go critical.
The checklist went quickly, and before I knew it we were up the boarding ladder and settling into our aircraft. I plugged my ZIP drive into its slot. Since our own support personnel had gone ahead, Russian technicians performed the duties of checking our restraining ejection harnesses, pulling the pins from the ejection seats, and getting us settled in. They spoke passable English, albeit with a rough accent.
From their movements around the aircraft, I surmised they'd spent a fair amount of time studying our own people during our short stay here.
That was confirmed as we taxied off the apron and toward the runway. The plane captains directing our motions could have been American, for all you could tell from their hand signals. Another data point. Had we learned as much about them as they had about us?
I rolled out first, followed ten seconds later by Skeeter and Sheila.
We followed the vector given to us to depart the airfield, as we had done in the previous days, then turned north toward the coast and open water.
"We're gonna have company, Admiral," Gator said. Somehow, I'd figured we would. "Looks like MiGs ― yeah, MiGs," he said, checking the electronic warfare detection gear to confirm his guess. "That's their radar."
"We're going home, that's all," I said. I clicked on to tactical.
"Skeeter ― I don't want any problems with our escort, you hear?"
It wasn't his RIO I was worried about. She'd already proved her levelheadedness too many times to count. No, that little message was for Skeeter alone. "All they're going to do is escort us to the coast, maybe to the twelve-mile limit," I said, hoping they didn't know I was guessing.
"But keep your heads up ― we're not going to be the aggressors, but neither will we take the first shot. That clear?"
"Admiral, I-"
"We've got it, Admiral." Sheila's cool voice broke in. "Message sent and received."
I laughed. "Skeeter, son, you just stay welded to my wing. If there's any heavy thinking that needs to be done, you let Sheila do it."
Two sharp clicks on his microphone key ― Skeeter's or Sheila's, I wasn't sure which ― acknowledged my transmission.
There were six MiGs, grouped in sets of two. They took station on either side of us, with a final pair trailing and slightly higher. A good formation, one that gave them a fairly clean shot no matter what we decided to do. A little too close for comfort ― except for the trailing pair, the MiGs were only three hundred feet off our wings.
I had the carrier's TACAN loud and clear by now, and I adjusted my course slightly to vector in on it. Once we were settled in, I clicked on the ICS. "Eyes peeled," I said. "That goes for you, too."
"Of course, Admiral," Gator replied, his voice calm and unruffled.
"Anything in particular I should be aware of?"
I hesitated for a moment, wondering just how much to tell him. It was instinctive, this need for secrecy and caution, a lesson I had learned the hard way during the Cold War. Yet there was something to be said for briefing my backseater in full, to a degree that not even Batman knew. If anything happened, it was going to happen fast, and I needed his immediate reaction without explanation. Skeeter and Sheila, too, for that matter, but they'd follow my lead.
"Our approach on the carrier ― it may be a little bit different than you're normally used to," I began, thinking my way through it. "I'm not sure exactly why, but ― oh, hell. There's something on the seaward side of the aircraft carrier that we don't want them to see. So, if whatever it is is still there when we get to the carrier, we'll have to make up some excuses to delay trapping. Jefferson will help us out on this, I know. We may tank, we may take a couple of practice looks at the deck, but whatever it is, we have to keep the MiGs away from the ship."
"Yes, Admiral, I understand." Again, there was no trace of curiosity in his voice. That worried me a little. But then he said, "If you can't tell me, I understand. But it would help."
"I'm not entirely sure why it is myself," I said, faintly relieved.
"But it's got something to do with our submarine."
"Our submarine?" Finally, a break in the professional monotone of Gator's voice. So he was surprised ― that wasn't anything like what I was going to face when I hit the deck of the carrier and Batman found out about my little collusion with Lab Rat. "Yes, our submarine. There's been one trailing the battle group the entire time. It was supposed to be a covert mission, but I take it something's gone wrong."
"Huh." And that was it, no further comment.
We were almost there now. The carrier had been painting on the radar for several minutes, and I thought I could see it out on the horizon, a small irregular bump on the otherwise flat horizon. There was an E-2 Hawkeye up for command and control, as well as a KA-6 tanker. I let out my breath as a friendly voice spoke reassuringly in my headset.
"Roger, Admiral, I hold you at sixteen miles, inbound on radial one-eight-zero. State souls and fuel status, sir."
"Two, and," I glanced down at the fuel indicator, "eight thousand pounds."
"Roger, sir, copy eight thousand pounds. Recommend we top you off before your first pass at the ship, Admiral." The E-2 pilot's voice betrayed no emotion, but he and I both knew that at eight thousand pounds I ought to be taking a look at the deck first before I tanked. If I got on on the first pass, there would be no need for it. Still, Batman's message had warned me to be ready to respond instantly to any unusual approach guidance, and I quickly complied. "Roger, Hawkeye, copy all. Give me a vector to the tanker, if you would."
"Roger, Admiral, turn left and come to the new heading two-niner-zero."
The same query and directions were repeated to Skeeter, and I heard Sheila answer the call. Evidently she'd decided to take her hotheaded young pilot out of the loop of talking with the rest of the world.
We turned smoothly, moving as one, Skeeter never varying a millimeter out of position. I swear, that man drives me to distraction some days, but truth be known, he's an excellent pilot. One of the very best, and if we'd been in the same Top Gun class, at the same age, he might have been the only one who could have beaten me.
Might have been. Even now, I wasn't willing to admit that anyone could have pulled it off back then. But still… I knew the MiGs were listening in on our frequency. There was only a second's hesitation before they, too, joined the smooth turn east. "Give me their positions relative to us," I said over the ICS.
"They're out of position a bit, Admiral," my backseater replied. "The one trailing us has descended by three hundred feet, and is only four hundred feet above our altitude at this time. The two on the wings look like they're not as comfortable with night formation flying. They've moved out a little bit, increasing separation to three-quarters of a mile. And… that's funny," he said, a worried note in his voice. "Admiral, I thought they would return to the briefed distance when we finished the turn, but they're still opening. Not opening, they're ― Admiral, they're peeling out of formation. One set's going high, the other low."
"Combat formation," I snapped immediately over tactical. "Skeeter, you take high. Get that guy off my tail first. Break right, break right."