‘Roger. We could play waterpolo from this height.’
‘No thanks,’ said Corbet. ‘If I wanted to get wet, I’d have joined the navy.’
‘It was the natty white shorts that turned me off, sir.’
Chitchat like this wasn’t normal, but then neither was this sortie. The truth was, both men were nervous as hell.
A burst of static through the ’phones announced an incoming VHF transmission. The reception was poor. ‘Shogun one, Arunta.’
‘Shogun one,’ said Corbet.
‘Earlier sighting of UAV is now confirmed. Repeat, sighting confirmed. Nose position now one-two miles. Estimate UAV’s speed as approximately seven-zero knots. Revise heading one-two-five.’
‘Request INS coords for initial contact with bandit,’ said Corbet. A set of figures came through his headphones. He punched them into his inertial navigation system as they were received and verified them on screen as the Arunta repeated them. He knew Burns would be doing the same. This was a huge break. The UAV had been sighted by the Arunta and its position marked. Now, he and Burns had that position. That made their job of finding the drone a little easier, but it was still far from a done deal.
Corbet allowed himself a minute to put the tactical situation together in his head. They were now cutting the corner and heading directly to the ‘bullseye’, the confirmed spot where Arunta had sighted the bandit. And they had another factor that would help them find the Prowler — they had its track: one-two-five degrees. The bullseye would become the start point for their search. They were coming up on it fast, and when they did, the search pattern had to be established and understood. Corbet checked his fuel load: 8200 pounds. He thumbed the send button on his control stick. ‘Shogun one, eight point two.’
A moment later, Burns returned with, ‘Shogun two, seven point zero.’
Okay, thought Corbet. The flying officer was burning fuel at a higher rate than himself, probably riding the throttle a little to stay on station. He’d had wingmen who were far worse. They’d left their tanker with 12 000 pounds of fuel, roughly two hours of flying time. But the run to the Arunta had been unexpectedly expensive. They had a bit under seventy minutes’ flying time in their tanks in total, including thirty minutes to get back to the tanker with some safety margin. The bingo fuel alarm would sound when there was 3000 pounds of fuel left. Hopefully, they had more than enough to get the job done because there probably wouldn’t be time for a top-up. But no doubt Arunta would also vector the KC-130 to their vicinity anyway. Fuel, or lack of it, was the fighter pilot’s constant concern.
The INS told Corbet that the bullseye was two minutes’ flight time away. He scanned the sea all around him and took a deep breath of the cooled air in his mask. This was going to be a very tricky business indeed, as the sweat pouring from his armpits and staining the Nomex flightsuit black reminded him. ‘Let’s get this shit on the road,’ he said aloud to himself before thumbing the send button. ‘Shogun two, counter-rotating cap, bullseye start. Track one-two-five degrees, twenty-mile legs. Shogun one at 500 AGL searching track and north. Shogun two at 1000 AGL searching track and south. Hot leg one-five zero knots, cold leg two-five-zero knots. Set radar alt at 500 feet.’
Burns kept an eye on the INS, another eye on the sea, flicked both of them up at the boss in his two o’clock, and then cycled through the positions again. He wanted to pull over somewhere and have a nervous dump quietly in a toilet. He’d never experienced this much tension. Indeed, he believed that this moment was the very fulcrum of his existence, and the pressure of it was almost unbearable. At 1000 feet AGL, he had to fly his Hornet more accurately than he’d previously thought humanly possible. It was that or crash. Earlier, and for the briefest moment, the horizon had disappeared and he’d mistaken the sea for the sky. It was all he could do to resist the impulse to roll inverted and pull back on the stick. The two things that had prevented him doing exactly that were instruments that told him the manoeuvre would be fatal, and the fact that he trusted the flight leader in his two o’clock.
The INS informed Burns that the bullseye, now displayed on the HUD, was nearly upon them when the flight leader’s instructions came through his headphones. Those instructions were clear and unequivocal. They were to search for the UAV independently of each other. Burns had been absolved of the wingman’s responsibility of keeping his attention focused on his leader’s six o’clock. The flight lieutenant had told him to climb to 1000 feet, maintain 150 knots, fly down the UAV’s track of one-two-five degrees and concentrate on looking south. The boss would be doing the same thing, only at 500 feet and he would be concentrating his eyeballs on the north of the bandit’s track. Burns dialled 800 feet into the radar altimeter. If he drifted below that altitude, ‘Trailerpark Tammy’, the southern belle living inside his flight control computer, would warn him to check the air under his wings.
Burns thought Shogun one sounded cool and in control, and he hoped his radio work didn’t betray the truth niggling away at his insides that he wasn’t sure he was up to the task at hand. The flying officer throttled back when he reached 1000 feet as instructed.
‘Shogun two, you are cleared off,’ said Corbet. With that instruction, Burns had become his own master. Below him, Corbet banked left and took up the first leg of their search pattern tracking one-two-five degrees.
Corbet cycled his eyes from the smudge that indicated the general position of the horizon to the information on his HUD to the rolling swell off his left wing’s leading edge. He allowed his eyes fifteen seconds out of the cockpit, scanning the sea, before bringing them back to the reassurance of the hard numbers and figures presented by his instruments. The lines of swell were mesmerising, and there was a vast patch of ocean to search framed by the wing’s leading edge and the nose of the Hornet. Even though they had the bandit’s speed and track, finding it against the moving backdrop below was just plain remote. He could be looking straight at the damn thing and not see it. Although Burns had more altitude, the flying officer would have a better chance of spotting the UAV with those eyes of his, picking up its shadow against the sea.
Trailerpark Tammy suddenly cautioned, ‘Warning! Warning!’ Jesus H. Christ. The radar altimeter. Corbet glanced at the HUD. He was heading down through 300 feet at 300 knots and accelerating. That kind of speed would eat up a couple of hundred feet in a few seconds. Corbet felt the sweat trickle down his forehead as he eased the stick back and the aircraft climbed gently. The alarm stopped sounding at 300 feet. In a couple of minutes he would be completing the first twenty-mile hot leg.
A little behind and above Corbet, Burns wasn’t faring much better. His radar altimeter had sounded on two occasions. He’d somehow managed to just float below the minimum altitude. That could happen when you flew low and slow with your head outside the cockpit, he told himself. Burns was thankful for the alarm but, on both occasions, hearing it had almost given him a heart attack. At least he had additional air to play with, and was pleased he wasn’t sitting on 500 feet. He wondered how the boss was doing.
‘Shogun one, turning cold,’ said Corbet as he banked left carefully, staying visual with the ocean off his wingtip. No sign of the bandit. He reminded himself that the Prowler drone was no ordinary target. The thing could wipe out a whole city. He and Burns were the last line of defence. ‘Jesus…’ he said quietly into his oxygen mask. Somehow, the fact that he and Burns were ‘it’ was suddenly driven home, perhaps because the drone was near and yet invisible. This was a mission he’d never trained for, and certainly had never imagined having to perform.