“Okay, CAG,” Toad said over the intercom, the ICS. “I’m receiving the E-2’s data link. Our targets are about a hundred and eighty miles away, bearing zero two zero.”
Jake came right to that heading and adjusted the brightness and gain on the Horizontal Situation Display on the instrument panel in front of his knees. On this scope he could see a copy of the picture the RIO had on the Tactical Information Display in the rear cockpit. Sure enough: there was the threat display.
Even though the American fighters and ships were not emitting, they could see the Russians. The United States was keeping an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane airborne around the clock. This twin-engine turboprop had waited until it was over a hundred miles from the ship before it turned on its radar, and then it data-linked everything it saw back to the ships and to any fighters aloft. The Hawkeye was an eye in the sky. It had located two Tupolev Tu-142 Bear bombers approaching from the north, still scanning the sea with their radars, searching. And aboard the United States, Jake, as the air wing commander, had decided to intercept the Bears.
Now the ECM warning light on the right window frame directly in front of Jake began to flash. “We’re receiving radar signals from Ivan,” Toad said. The main ECM panel was in his cockpit, since in combat the pilot would be too busy to check it.
“I don’t want these guys to know we’re coming until we’re on their tails,” Jake told his RIO. “What’s their heading?”
“They’re going two eight zero at about four hundred knots, sir. You may want to come right another twenty degrees — then when we pass behind their port beam, we’ll turn left and accelerate and come in on their stern quarter.”
“Gotcha,” Jake said, and turned right. He pumped his fist at his wingman and received a nod in reply. The other pilot dipped his nose and crossed under Jake, surfacing on the right wing. From this position he could ease further out and turn in behind the second bomber while Jake took the one on the left.
Jake scanned the instrument panel once again. It was still new to him. He had flown the A-6 Intruder attack plane throughout most of his career and had been checked out in the F-14 only after he had received orders to command this air wing. He still had less than sixty hours in the airplane, yet he enjoyed flying it immensely. It was high-performance luxury compared to the A-6, which was subsonic and designed in the late fifties as an all-weather bomber. The “D” version of this supersonic fighter-interceptor was affectionately known as the “Super-Tomcat” and was equipped with more powerful, more fuel-efficient engines than those which powered the F-14A, engines less prone to compressor stalls and capable of being jamaccelerated in high angle-of-attack, high G-load dogfights. Fast, agile, and stuffed with the latest in air-to-air electronic wizardry, the F-14D was also going to sea for the first time aboard the United States.
The view from the cockpit took some getting used to, Jake mused. One large rounded piece of plexiglas covering both the front and rear cockpits, and broken only by a lone canopy bow between the cockpits, constituted the canopy. The seats were mounted high so the pilot and RIO would have the maximum field of view when the aircraft was maneuvering against an enemy. Jake was sitting high and forward on a large projectile shaped like an arrow head. One felt naked, but the view in all directions was spectacular. It was almost as if you were riding through the sky in a chair without the benefit of an aircraft.
As he learned to fly this airplane, Jake found it difficult to keep his right thumb off the trim button on the stick. With a computer automatically adjusting the horizontal stabilizers to compensate for flap changes, speed brakes, wing sweep, and speed changes, an F-14 pilot didn’t spend much time trimming. The other trait of the aircraft he found difficult to master was the sluggish pitch response and slow power response when the aircraft was in the landing configuration. To ease the pilot workload, Grumman had installed a thumb-operated switch on the stick that allowed the pilot to raise and lower wing spoilers to control descent on the glide slope instead of adjusting the throttles.
It was the swing wings that made this plane such a sweetheart. The Air Data Computer automatically moved the wings forward or aft for maximum maneuvering efficiency. As the aircraft accelerated through.75 Mach, the wings left their medium-speed position, twenty-two degrees of sweep, and progressed aft, until at 1.2 Mach they were fully swept, at sixty-eight degrees, and the machine had become a delta-winged projectile. To optimize maneuverability, a computer automatically adjusted the flaps and slats when the machine was maneuvering in the subsonic and transonic speed ranges. All this aerodynamic aid allowed the pilot to squeeze more performance from the airplane than Jake had ever dreamed possible.
Jake waggled the stick slightly. The stick had a self-centering bungee installed in the artificial feel system and resisted displacement from center. This control heaviness had bothered him when he first flew the aircraft, but he rarely noticed it anymore.
He scanned the sky. It was great to be flying again, off the ship and out here in the great blue empty. Under his oxygen mask Jake Grafton grinned broadly.
Sixty miles from the bombers Toad turned on the television camera system, the TCS, in the nose of the Tomcat. This camera had a powerful telephoto lens which would enable the crew to see the bombers while they were still too far away for the human eye to acquire them. Toad slewed the camera, searching. The camera automatically pointed at the target being tracked by the Tomcat’s radar, but since the radar was silent, the camera was aimed in the direction that the computer calculated was appropriate. So now Toad had to fine-tune the camera.
“I got ’em. Or one of them, anyway. I think they’re a couple thousand feet above us.”
Jake checked the picture on the Horizontal Situation Display (HSD) in his cockpit. The crew did not see raw video, but a picture optimized by computer. Now the picture was merely a small dot, recognizably a big aircraft, but just a dot nevertheless.
He looked around. To his right and rear, his wingman’s plane hung motionless, suspended in space. The clouds above were too indistinct to give an impression of motion. Far below, the top of the gray and lumpy stratus layer slowly rolled along from front to rear. It was almost as if the planes were stationary and the earth was moving beneath them. It was an illusion, of course. These machines were really hurling through the sky toward an uncertain rendezvous.
“We’re just about to cross their beam, CAG. Turn ninety degrees left.”
Jake did so. This course would lead the bombers by forty degrees, necessary since they were moving. He eased the throttles forward, then pushed them into afterburner. The wingman was right with him. He advanced the throttles another smidgen.
The fighter sliced through the sonic barrier with only the barest jolt. Mach 1.3 … 1.4 … 1.5, 605 knots indicated, true airspeed 820 knots.
Now Jake could recognize the target on his HSD. It was a Soviet Bear bomber, a huge four-engine turboprop. But at which one was he looking? The lead or the wingman? The second plane might be a mile or so away to the left or right. Bomber pilots weren’t known for flying tight formation, not over the distances they covered. These bombers were out of Murmansk. They had flown around the Scandinavian peninsula, down through the Iceland-U.K. gap, and then another twenty-five hundred miles south. After hours on station they would return to the Soviet Union or fly on to Cuba.