“I’m up. What’s going on?”
“Hey, Colt, they’re suspending the launch. Alpha Whiskey reported unknown air contacts in the area.”
He chuckled. “Isn’t that the whole point of an ADEX?” he asked, referring to his Defensive Counter Air mission in the Area Defense Exercise.
“Yeah, but these are interlopers. Real-world bogies.”
His smile vanished. Just his luck, he was flying in the strike group’s most capable fighter but had no weapons loaded. There wasn’t much he could do other than gain a visual on the unidentified aircraft and bring back video from his EOTS, or Electro-Optical Targeting System, for the intelligence types to pore over.
“Copy. How many made it airborne?”
“Just you.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The rep keyed the microphone to speak, but then released it. The E-2D Hawkeye was still airborne, and they were probably trying to decide whether it was worth pushing him to their control or just recover him early. He began a climbing turn to the left to set up an orbit over the carrier while awaiting their decision.
“Three oh seven, push Banger.”
“Three oh seven,” he replied in an even tone with a silent fist pump, thankful they had pushed him to the Hawkeye controller for tasking instead of leaving him sidelined.
2
“Right full rudder,” Beth said. “Steady on course zero nine zero.”
“Steady on course zero nine zero, aye, ma’am,” the helmsman said, spinning the wheel to the right while watching the gyro compass. Every few seconds, his eyes shot up to look through the forward windows at the glowing lights swirling above their ship.
“Abe suspended the launch, but not before a JSF got airborne,” her XO said.
Shit!
She kept her face passive, trying to shield her sailors from her concern. If she remained calm and collected, they would follow suit and be the professionals she knew them to be. But dammit if it didn’t bother her — they had unknown air contacts swirling around the strike group while one of the air wing’s most valuable assets flew around defenseless.
“Let’s put some distance between us,” she said, hoping to use her ship as a decoy and draw the swirling lights away from the carrier. As the strike group Air Warfare Commander, known as Alpha Whiskey, it was her responsibility to protect the carrier from air threats. And until they had more information, the swirling lights were definitely threats.
“Ma’am, steady on course zero nine zero,” the helmsman said, centering the needle on his compass to point due east.
“All ahead flank three,” Beth said.
“All ahead flank three, aye,” the lee helmsman replied, smoothly advancing the throttles to full power, opening up the gas turbine engines to propel the five-hundred-and-sixty-seven-foot guided-missile cruiser through the dark waters.
“Ma’am,” Master Chief Ivy said over her shoulder. “Do you want to call the crew to general quarters?”
This can’t be happening, she thought. They were off the coast of California for a pre-deployment exercise, not in hostile waters. She shouldn’t have to rouse her crew to prepare for combat. She turned and looked into Ben’s stoic face, then nodded reluctantly.
The Master Chief picked up the handset for the 1MC public address system and flipped the brass switch to sound the klaxon before speaking into the microphone. “General quarters, general quarters. All hands, man your battle stations. The route of travel is forward and up to starboard, down and aft to port. Set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. Reason for general quarters is imminent unidentified aircraft. This is not a drill.”
Beth leaned forward and rested her knuckles against the porthole as she stared through the fog at the glowing lights. They no longer appeared to swirl around her ship but matched pace with the cruiser as it raced east for the California coast.
She glanced up at the digital display above the centerline pelorus.
Thirty knots.
What the hell are these things?
She ignored the flurry of activity around her as the rest of her four-hundred-sailor crew moved to their battle stations. Her eyes drifted from one glowing orb to the next, trying to discern a pattern in their positioning but seeing only randomness.
Her confusion only multiplied when a speaker set to Net 15 squawked with a report from Combat: “Aside from the strike group’s other ships, the surface picture is clear.”
“Well, these things had to come from somewhere,” she said to herself, knowing full well she was losing her battle to keep emotion from her voice. She turned to the Gunnery Liaison Officer standing near the Mk 20 Electro-Optical Sensor System. “Get me an ID on these targets, Chief.”
“Aye, ma’am,” he replied.
Though designed to provide accurate targeting information for the ship’s five-inch gun, the EOSS was a capable system that might allow them to gain a visual on the unidentified flying objects through the fog and track them to their place of origin. Her first thought had been that they were commercial drones operated from a civilian ship in the area, but the speeds they could maintain and the absence of unidentified surface vessels in the area ruled that suspicion out. Maybe the EOSS would offer another clue.
“Range to Abe?” Beth asked.
“Eighteen miles,” the radarman replied.
Not enough, she thought. She needed to put more distance between them and the carrier and draw the orbs away, maybe close enough to shore where other Navy ships could aid in identifying them.
“Ma’am!” the Officer of the Deck shouted, pointing through the window.
The lump in her throat returned.
Colt saw the glowing orbs right away. Once Banger control had vectored him in the right direction, he spotted them circling the dark Navy ship without the aid of his advanced sensors, but he directed his targeting system onto the ship anyway. Without weapons of any kind, the only thing he could do was be a high-speed cheerleader and record the event for posterity.
Between the EOTS’s Infrared Search and Track capability and his visor-projected night vision, he only had to look through the canopy into the night sky to see nearly a dozen tiny squares surrounding the lights. As he neared the Mobile Bay’s location, the sight of the swarming orbs left him speechless.
“Bolt Four One, Banger, status?”
“I…uh…”
He couldn’t find the words. His jet’s core processor had designated the targets, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was witnessing. They looked like bright orbs of light encircling the ship and keeping pace as it raced through the water.
“Bolt Four One, Banger, take angels twenty and reset.”
He shook his head, his eyes bouncing from one square to the next. For whatever reason, the Hawkeye controller wanted him to climb to twenty thousand feet and return to his CAP location twenty miles to the west.
Well, that’s not gonna happen.
“Negative, Banger. I’ve got a visual on multiple bogies,” he said.
From his vantage point, he could see a green-hued guided-missile cruiser steaming at maximum speed to the east, her massive props churning the water to create a bioluminescent wake visible through the dense fog. Instead of climbing to twenty thousand feet, Colt banked the Joint Strike Fighter and entered into an orbit over the ship.
“Bolt Four One, Banger, Shogun actual directs reset,” the controller said in a firm tone.
He knew what that meant. The Commander of the Air Wing, CAG himself, had directed him to depart station and return to CAP.
“Stand by, Banger,” he replied.
He might as well have said “Fuck off, Banger,” since that’s what he really meant. He didn’t become a fighter pilot to tuck his tail and run, but he was a guest pilot and didn’t want to rock the boat either. If he pissed off CAG, his commanding officer back at the US Navy Fighter Weapons School in Fallon would get an earful. And that meant he would get an earful. That combination usually didn’t bode well for future career aspirations.
Dammit.
He keyed the microphone to acknowledge the order but stopped himself when the eight-by-twenty-inch PCD flickered in front of him. It lasted less than half a second before returning to normal, but he felt his face flush. He had more hours in the F-35C than almost any other pilot in the Navy, and nothing that unnerving had ever happened to him before. His skin prickling with anxiety, he wondered if it was the first indication of an impending electrical failure — the absolute last thing he wanted to deal with at night over the water.
“Banger,” the controller replied.
Colt again keyed the microphone to let the controller know he intended to comply when the portal on the right side of the PCD shuffled through multiple pages on its own. He reached up to navigate back to the air-to-surface radar page just as the adjacent sub-portal maximized and replaced his flight controls display with an air-to-surface weapons page.
“What the hell is going on?”
He glanced over his left shoulder as he passed abeam the cruiser and cut across its bow, still bewildered by the mysterious lights circling it. He wanted to stay and provide whatever support he could to the tin can sailors, but the electrical anomalies were starting to worry him.
Again, he tried replying to the Hawkeye controller, but his words caught in his throat when the jet suddenly overbanked, almost as if rolling in to begin a bombing run. He tried countering the roll by slamming against the sidestick, but it continued until he was inverted and hanging in his straps.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…
As his nose fell through the horizon, he abandoned his attempt to reverse the roll and added left pressure instead. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But his wings remained level with the greasy side up and shiny side down.
Ten degrees, he thought, watching his nose track lower into a dive.
Colt stared through his visor at the ship racing up at him, hardly noticing the glowing halos around the orbs shrinking.
Twenty degrees.
He yanked his throttle to idle, trying everything he could think of to slow his closure with the water. But the engine refused to respond, and his airspeed ticked upward rapidly. The gnawing fear he felt just under the surface threatened to erupt into full-blown panic, and he stabbed at buttons and switches, seemingly at random, hoping to stumble upon a solution. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this, and his efforts seemed futile.
Thirty degrees.
Suddenly, the jet rolled upright but continued diving directly at the Mobile Bay. The whoop-whoop of his radar altimeter warned him that he was racing through five thousand feet and only seconds from impacting the ship, or, if he was lucky, the black abyss of the Pacific Ocean. He pulled harder on the sidestick, wishing the JSF had a physical connection to the flight controls he could muscle into submission.
Four thousand feet.
“Come on!”
Colt dug his forearm into the armrest and tried to increase his leverage on the immobile stick. Sweat poured from underneath his helmet and down the front of his face and stung his eyes. He blinked it away and ignored the aching in his forearm as he stared in horror at the increasing airspeed and decreasing altitude.
Three thousand feet.
He took his hand off the throttle and positioned it between his legs, wondering at what point he would decide to abandon his attempt to save the jet in favor of saving himself. Over his thousands of hours at the controls of a Navy fighter, he had never considered pulling the ejection handle. Not once.
Two thousand feet.
The fingers of his left hand wrapped around the knurled black-and-yellow ejection handle, but his right wasn’t willing to give in and continued pulling back on the sidestick to try to level off before it was too late.
“PULL UP… PULL UP…”
The Ground Collision Avoidance System aural warning and flashing red X’s across his displays shook him free from his paralysis. He took his hand off the stick and mated it with the one already on the ejection handle, prepared to do what he never thought he would. He pressed his helmet back against the headrest and braced himself for the ejection, only partially aware that his PCD had flickered again.
This can’t be happening…
As Colt tensed his shoulders and prepared to pull the handle, the engine wound down to flight idle, and he felt the G-forces increase as his nose began slowly tracking up to the invisible horizon. He hesitated, knowing the envelope for ejection was shrinking. He needed to either commit to making a last-ditch effort to save the jet or get out. Indecision was a killer, and it was time to shit or get off the pot.
One thousand feet.
He took his hands off the ejection handle and snatched at the sidestick, overriding the G-limiter to increase the pull and stop his descent before it was too late. His vision narrowed to the size of a soda straw that was filled almost entirely with the guided-missile cruiser.
“PULL UP… PULL UP…”
He wanted to scream at the jet but grunted instead as his narrow tunnel of vision disappeared. The last thing he saw was the ship’s superstructure and main mast reaching up to knock him from the sky.