Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, could we get a clarification on ROE for the pilots?”
Coyote stared at him for a long, hard moment. “You got something on your mind, mister?”
For a moment Lab Rat wondered if he’d overstepped the bounds of propriety. But dammit, he was the admiral’s intelligence officer — he got paid to point out problems, not to suck up like a yes man. “Yes, Admiral, I do,” Lab Rat continued, unfazed by the scrutiny. “INCOS isn’t holding up under these conditions and I don’t think we can count on what the aircrew remember about it. This could get out of hand very quickly.”
Coyote looked away. Lab Rat could see him arrive at a decision. “I’ll brief all squadron commanders in one hour,” the admiral said finally. “And I expect the word to get out to all aircrews. Now, how are we coming on the survivors?”
“Captain Gaspert says he’s got a complete and accurate count,” the operations officer answered. “Current muster was in the deck log, of course. So far, it looks like most of the fatalities are among his crew, especially the ones below the waterline. There just wasn’t time for them to get out.” He stopped, staring down at the list as though he could make the numbers change by sheer force of will. “Eighty-two missing, presumed dead. One hundred and twenty-eight wounded, sixteen of those critical.”
The numbers sank in around the table, and few were unmoved. It was one thing, horrible though it was, to lose military members. Another thing entirely to kill civilians, as they all knew following the World Trade Center massacre.
“We’re maintaining a full SAR,” Ops continued. “The last rescue was two hours ago. Small boats and helos, with the S-3s as well. I think we’ll find some more of them clinging to wreckage.”
“Let’s hope so.” The admiral turned to the flag supply officer. “Any logistics problems I need to know about?”
“No, Admiral. We’ve outfitted the civilians with dungarees and T-shirts, basic toiletries, that sort of thing. We’ll be fine until we can resupply.”
“Okay, then. Anything else?”
Lab Rat cleared his throat. “Admiral, so far we’re not certain who was at fault. The missile trajectories were almost exactly reciprocal. We had a near miss, or we had a hit. It’s going to take more information from national sensors before we can be sure of what happened.”
It was not what they wanted to hear. No one could bear the thought that the Jefferson might have been responsible for so many deaths.
But Coyote hadn’t risen to command of a battle group by being afraid to face facts. His face was somber as he said, “We’ll see.”
As the staff meeting broke up, Strike caught Lab Rat outside in the passageway leading back to their offices. “You got it in for pilots in particular for some reason?” he asked.
Lab Rat shook his head. “We put up CAP, they put up CAP. A lot of metal in a finite amount of airspace, with pilots on both sides truly pissed. You slam the ROE down their throats and I’ll make sure it’s in the pre-mission briefs. The last thing we need is a couple of hotheads banging wingtips with one of the Russians.”
“Pilots will be pilots.”
Lab Rat felt a surge of anger. “Weren’t you listening? We don’t know whose fault it was yet.”
“The pilots know.”
“They think they know. They don’t. And I don’t want anyone assuming an aggressive posture in the air until we do.”
Strike shrugged. “It’s inbred in a pilot. What are you going to do about it?”
Lab Rat’s anger boiled over. “You remind them of what they were before they were pilots.”
“What, civilians?”
“No. Officers. They follow orders and avoid confrontations with the Russians or I’ll prefer court-martial charges myself. We clear on that?”
Strike stepped back a bit, surprised at the intelligence officer’s rage. “Yeah, clear.”
As Lab Rat watched him go, he struggled to rein his temper in. It would do no good to give in to the anger, no good at all. There would be enough posturing and storming from the line officers. His job was to keep it under control, to force them to face facts.
Once they knew what the facts were. And then, God help them all if Jefferson was at fault.
Mikhail Gromko put his nimble jet into a hard turn, letting the g-forces wash over him like a wave. He fought off the familiar drag, tensing his muscles just a bit, letting it toy with him. It was like surfing, the ebb and the flow of gravity, an ocean of speed and blue. That he was flying a real combat mission made it all the more exhilarating.
In theory, Gromko knew he could die. He’d seen classmates auger in during Basic, and more screw up during the advanced platform training. He’d attended the funerals, comforted the widows, and rewritten the flight schedules to cover the empty crew slots. There was nothing theoretical about what could happen to you when you flew Russia’s most advanced fighter into harm’s way.
Except that none of it applied to him. Gromko knew, felt it in his Cossack bones, that he was invulnerable. The mistakes and equipment failures that had claimed his peers were impossible for him. He was too smart, too fast, too everything to let them happen. The options others failed to see would be clear to him. The faulty reflexes that had betrayed them — well, that was simply a matter of training and willpower, and Gromko had more of both than most.
Even the two blips homing in on him on his radar screen meant nothing to him. No, that wasn’t exactly true — they represented a challenge, an opportunity. He would show them — in ways that only another pilot would understand — that he was the better pilot. No need to even fire missiles for that. He would show them and let their despair lead them into mistakes.
Hornets — big deal. They might as well have been mosquitoes for all he cared.
Thor could feel his wingman sliding out of position. It was a sixth sense, one that did not require a radarscope or a visual confirmation, as if somehow his own nerves ran the length of the swept-back wings. Some might say it was just experience, some unconscious perception of how the airstream around his own aircraft changed as his wingman changed position, but Thor knew better.
Without even glancing at the HUD, he keyed his mike. “Badger, tighten up.”
“Roger.” Thor could almost hear an audible thunk as the Marine Corps captain off his starboard wing slid his Hornet back into position.
“Antsy little bastard, isn’t he?” Thor commented, now concentrating on his HUD. The Russian fighter that they’d been assigned to cover was jittering around in the sky, making a series of sharp turns and abrupt changes in altitude for no purpose that Thor could discern. His sixth sense extended only to his own wingman.
Suddenly, as the Forger completed a snap roll, Thor understood. He chuckled, then keyed his mike again. “Little asshole is trying to impress us. He’s a hot shot, don’t you know? Guess we’re supposed to be crapping in our pants just watching him do some basic aerobatics.”
“Well, gee. I’m impressed,” the captain replied. “I haven’t pulled some of those maneuvers since — oh, heck. Since Basic, I guess.”
“Yeah. Let’s just sit back a bit and watch. I don’t like the way he’s moving.” Thor studied the gyrations the other aircraft was executing, almost immediately discerning a pattern. The pilot wasn’t bad — in fact, he wasn’t bad at all — but he had some bad habits that were already evident to the more experienced Marine Corps pilot. Like a tendency to go right, right, then left. Like two increases in altitude followed by a roll. Like a little sloppiness in hard left turns. All in all, not fatal flaws in the other aviator’s skills, but little weaknesses that would get him killed.