“Good morning, Admiral,” Coyote said. “Thirty minutes ago we got a report from one of our BARCAP Tomcats. Lobo. She spotted a PLA helicopter firing on an American civilian vessel and its passengers. Her wingman pursued the helicopter to the edge of the twelve-mile limit, then turned back when a flight of four SU-27s scrambled.” He gestured at the screen. “I made the decision to claim the wreck site as our own until all the bodies have been picked up.”
Batman nodded as he examined the display, noted the positions of icons representing the Chinese assets, including a couple of surface vessels. “Looks like the bogeys are hanging back.”
“For now. I vectored two more flights of Tomcats to the area to establish a perimeter, and so far there’s been no challenge. The bogeys just keep cruising their side of the twelve-mile limit.”
“Have we heard from the PRC yet?”
“Oh, sure; they’re claiming rights over the entire area. Of course. Demanding we back off. Naturally. We keep reminding them the wreckage is in international waters, and they keep ignoring us — but like I said, so far they’re not pushing it.”
Batman frowned. His first thought after being awakened had been that he would be facing another Spratleys-type situation. There, the PLA had committed carefully planned atrocities designed to look like the work of the United States… and publicized, immediately and loudly, as such.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said, mostly to himself. He knew that the Chinese military was willing to murder its own people, as well as those of its allies, in order to lure the U.S. Navy into a self-defeating combat situation. But killing American civilians could only damage their own international human rights reputation, which had never been exactly laudable. Why would they do that when there was apparently nothing to gain?
“How sure is Lobo of what she saw?” he asked.
“Absolutely sure, sir.” To Batman’s surprise, Coyote half smiled. “Evidently she gave the helo a low enough pass to scare the bejeezus out of it; that’s why it took off. But Lobo was cool; she never even switched on her targeting radar.” The smile vanished. “She reports bodies in the water, sir. A lot of them.”
“SAR?” Batman asked. In warm waters like these, the sooner Sea Air Rescue got under way, the better the chances for survival of anyone who had been on that boat. Hypothermia wasn’t the problem — sharks were.
“Two Seahawks are already on station,” Coyote said.
Batman weighed the situation. “I want everything picked up, COS,” he said. “The bodies, the survivors, whatever’s left of the boat, everything. Clear space in Jefferson’s hangar bay if necessary. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Batman looked back at the tactical display, all the assets arrayed there, and again found himself wishing for the relative simplicity of the combat pilot’s role. Then he thought about Lobo, and the kind of near-instant decisions she’d been forced to make out there in the darkness, and decided maybe there were no simple answers for anyone anymore.
God, he wished Tombstone were here.
If there was one thing Tombstone Magruder hated, it was admitting that he enjoyed flying something other than a Tomcat.
He’d earned his call sign because of the lugubrious cast of his face and the fact that he was supposedly devoid of emotion. Yet here he was, grinning like a fool as he cranked the toy-like Pitts Special through its sixth barrel roll in a row, spinning the biplane so fast the ocean and sky turned into one mottled blur. Six rolls, seven, eight — it could go on forever, or at least as long as his stomach could take the abuse.
He eased the stick to the right to end the last roll, being careful not to overdo it: The Pitts was a sensitive beast, with a damned impressive power-to-weight ratio… for a prop-plane, anyway.
Hell, why deny it? Flying this thing was fun as hell. No, the Pitts wasn’t capable of crushing you into your seat hard enough to make you black out; couldn’t rip a hole in the fabric of the sound barrier; couldn’t fly with impunity in clouds or fog. On the other hand, it didn’t make you concentrate on a Heads-Up Display instead of the sky and ground; didn’t feed your hands and feet synthetic control surface pressures because a set of computers stood between you and the ailerons, rudder and elevator; didn’t have an E-2 Hawkeye peering over its shoulder all the time. There was just you, the pilot, all alone with a single propeller, a pair of wire-braced wings, and a solid blast of wind in the face.
Wonderful.
And there was no denying that this little bird could do things a Tomcat couldn’t. Rolling… hell, the Tomcat’s roll rate was terrific given the plane’s size and mass, but the Pitts could whip around twice in the time it took an F-14 to make it through one full revolution. And landing a Pitts was as easy as stepping off a curb; nothing like the sweaty-palm work of dropping 72,000 pounds of Tomcat onto the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier.
Time to be meandering back to the field, though. His wife, Joyce — although he still thought of her as “Tomboy,” her call sign from her days as his RIO — would probably be waiting for him, and none too patiently. They were supposed to have dinner with his uncle, Admiral Thomas Magruder.
He sighed. Not that he didn’t enjoy his uncle’s company, but the conversation was certain to turn to politics and Pentagon infighting. God, he missed the straightforward banter of Tomcat drivers: clean traps, aerial maneuvers, missiles launched, bogeys splashed.
Thank God for the Pitts Special, and for a wife who knew her husband well enough to insist that he buy it. If it weren’t for those two things — and the stick time he still occasionally got in an F-14, of course — he didn’t think life would be bearable. During what the media called the Second Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d flown his last combat mission. He knew that. He’d never go up against a MIG again. For that matter, he’d even given up the command of Carrier Battle Group 14 for a billet in Washington. A promotion, supposedly.
But now… he was at loose ends. An advisor here, a consultant there. A guy standing around in the hallways of the Pentagon, looking for something to do. Waiting, he supposed, for a war.
It didn’t help that Tomboy’s assignment took her down to Pax River all the time, where she got to test fly the latest Navy aircraft while he sat around in stuffy meeting rooms.
Life just wasn’t fair.
But a smart man could make it fairer. Grinning again, he put the biplane’s nose down hard and listened to the wind’s shriek rise in the rigging as the surface of the ocean swooped up at him. Turned a couple of barrel rolls in the meantime. Too bad there was nobody to watch except the herons and ducks in the nature preserve a mile or so to the west.
Although he tried to resist, he pulled out of the dive too soon — another holdover from flying Tomcats, with their infinitely greater inertia. He’d have to pract —
He cringed as something shot underneath the Pitts with a whistling shriek. What the hell? That had sounded for all the world like a jet engine. The Pitts jolted through a disrupted airstream, then steadied. Looking down, Tombstone glimpsed a dark arrowhead shape racing just above the waves, then shooting upward. It rose vertically, trailing a faint string of vapor behind it. Against the pale glow of the eastern sky, it was shaped not like one arrowhead but two, joined in tandem. The impression he’d gotten during its close pass was that it was only a little longer than the Pitts — but far faster. As he watched, it arched over in the sky, then seemed to disappear. Finally he spotted it — a tiny dot, growing larger by the second. Coming straight at him.