Skeeter and his RIO were another story altogether. They didn't look happy, no, not that. More like relieved. And worried ― deeply worried. Laurel, in particular, a young woman on her first cruise with the squadron, looked shaken.
"So I circled, looking for chutes," Bird Dog finished. "There were none in the air, so I checked at sea level. None there. No chutes, no bodies, no rafts. Nothing." I was almost relieved when his eerie voice stopped.
"Why did you choose to use the Sidewinders versus the Sparrows?" CAG asked, after shooting a glance at me. "What about the range?"
"I thought I could make it," Bird Dog said, his voice almost inaudible. "I thought I could-"
"Admiral, if I may," Gator broke in, attempting a save.
I shook him off. As admirable as RIO loyalty is, this one was all Bird Dog's.
"You thought you could make it," I repeated.
"My Sidewinders were the weapon of choice," Skeeter said, the first words out of the young aviator. Even as junior as he was, he should have known better than to break into an admiral's inquisition. His gaze met mine, confident and aggressive. "The Sidewinders were working, Admiral. Bird Dog had a bad load-out, that's all."
"That's all?" I came up out of my chair like a snake had bit me on the ass and leaned across the heavy desk to stare at him. I planted both hands palms down on it, and raised my voice. "That's all?"
A deadly, cold chill invaded the room. Skeeter and Laurel were slowly tumbling to what Bird Dog already knew ― that over-confidence had killed four aviators in that E-2.
It wasn't my intent to be unkind, although kindness sometimes has little bearing on the decisions I'm forced to make. It was a combination of factors sheer anger and sorrow over losing the four aviators, maybe the possibility that I could bring home the seriousness of this to the two junior ones in front of me. Maybe I could catch them before they made their mistakes, before they repeated Bird Dog's. But not unless they knew just how deadly, deadly serious it was.
"I mean ― uh-" Skeeter fell silent, following a quick jab in his ribs by his backseater.
Bird Dog looked oddly crumpled, a still, motionless figure, in his seat. He was frozen in time, a time maybe only thirty minutes earlier when it had all happened. It was replaying in front of his eyes, in an endless loop, his imagination adding details that had never really happened. Things like the sound of the E-2 pilot's voice just before the missile hit, how clear and obvious it had been that he should have tried the Sparrow first, the fireball growing in size and intensity every time he thought about it.
I motioned to CAG, who reached out and shook him by the shoulder. "Snap out of it, Bird Dog."
Bird Dog looked startled, as though we'd awakened him from a sleepwalking episode. He glanced around the room, his eyes finally settling on the one most familiar figure in the room. "I blew it, Gator," he said softly, ignoring the rest of us. "That bird ― they were counting on me. And I blew it."
"You got a bad missile," Gator said gently. It wasn't a denial, it was just another reason.
But bad missiles happen, even during peacetime missions. Or what should have been a peacetime mission. I looked over at Lab Rat, sitting on the couch. He was practically quivering in eagerness to ask a few questions. I started to shake my head, then thought better of it.
If ever a man has been accurately pegged by his squadron mates, it was Lab Rat Busby. He was a small man, pale blond hair cropped close to his head, with brilliant blue eyes that made him look almost albino. He was tougher than he looked ― I'd seen him down in the gym bench-pressing a quite respectable stack of weights, and I suspect he'd always really wanted to be a Marine.
Or an aviator. But he must have known from the first that his vision would disqualify him, even for the backseat position. He'd gotten as close to it as he could, though, as an Air Intelligence Officer. He worked with what he couldn't have every day, and apparently took a great deal of pride in his aircrews being the best briefed on any ship ― and the best debriefed.
I nodded at Lab Rat. He fairly sprang off the couch in his eagerness to ask his questions.
"This SAM site," he began, picking his words carefully. "You say it came up out of nowhere?"
It was Gator that answered, stepping forward as the man with more knowledge than the pilot. After all, it was his ESM gear that would have given the first warbling indications of the SAM site if they'd held it. "Snoopy got it first, and I picked it up a little later. No doubt, it was an SA-6 site. We were right at the edge of the envelope, proceeding inbound. We talked about it, and finally decided it was probably just a mission maintenance fire-up of the gear." A faintly challenging look came over his face. "Naturally that was our conclusion. Since there was no intelligence briefing on any real threats in the area."
Lab Rat nodded impatiently, as though he'd already considered how and when the intelligence briefing he'd provided to the aircrews might have been in error. If there had been a mistake made by his people, I had no doubt that heads would roll.
"But there was nothing else unusual about it?" he pressed, clearly after something, and just as clearly not wanting to put words in their mouths. "The parameters all fit?"
"From what I saw, they did," Gator answered slowly. The grief swept over him now, hard and deep. "But the guys who got the first good look were-"
Lab Rat looked slightly chagrined, and an oddly human and vulnerable expression took its place on his face. "I'm just asking about what you saw," he said. "I didn't mean to imply-" Gator waved him off, now recovered. "The pulse repetition rate and frequency all matched. It looked to me like a normal SA-6 site."
"Did you see anything else unusual?" Lab Rat asked again. "Anything that might not have shown up in the link." He was referring to the tactical data net that bound the ships I to the carrier, providing a comprehensive display of every single platform's radar and ESM contacts. Gator shook his head. "Nothing." Lab Rat sighed, evidently disappointed at the response.
"Were you looking for something in particular?" CAG asked. Now there was an uneasy expression on his face. I knew what was going through his mind. It was the essential down-side of intelligence, one that all aviators faced from time to time. Very excellent info can be quite highly classified, far beyond the level of information that would be given to a pilot flying missions over a foreign country. It's not that the intelligence is inaccurate ― on the contrary, it is composed of the most precise on-scene reports and reports from national assets ― read satellites for that ― that the United States possesses. The information is detailed, dependable, and highly accurate.
And too classified to use. It was much like the problem with the British during World War II. Even though they'd broken the Enigma code and were reading German General Staff traffic, they were faced with the Devil's own choice. If they acted on the information, evacuating Coventry and other German bombing targets, the Germans would know that their communications were no longer secure. Since Britain wasn't ready to take the war to the Germans, they had to wait until they were to use the information. In other words, to use the information was to reveal its source and to compromise that asset forever.
Had the British evacuated Coventry, the Germans would have known that they were reading German radio traffic. The ciphers would have been changed, perhaps to something that could not have been broken in time for the D-Day assault. As massive as the casualties that the British took were, they would have been even worse had the British not held off on using that information.
Better gear, same problem today.
Then CAG looked at me, questioning. I kept my face impassive. Nothing on the ship was too classified for me to know, nothing. The same could not be said for CAG.