Batman didn’t reply right away but continued changing to his uniform.
“How did you handle it, Will?” he asked after a long moment. “Being skipper of the squadron, I mean. How did you know when to get tough and when to go easy?”
Coyote raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me if you should cover for Mason and Garrity?”
“I didn’t say that,” Batman said.
“You want to tell me what happened up there? I mean exactly.”
Batman shrugged. “Dixie was eyeball, I was shooter. He led the way in by three miles or so. Watch Dog wasn’t picking up IFF on the target. Neither did we, when we got close. Then Cat reported that they were being painted by a Zoo, and I guess she was busy turning knobs about then, because she didn’t see the target. Dixie reported a Hind.
“About that time, Malibu picked up something about the UN flight being under attack. Since the bogey was trailing UN Two-seven, I assumed, I mean, it looked like the bogey was after the UN bird, right? Anyway, I launched.”
“Was there any way you could have checked on Dixie’s ID?”
“What was I supposed to do? Ignore him because he’s a rookie and insist on another pass before I made up my mind? I might’ve flown us right into triple-A if that Zoo had turned out to be a hostile. Anyway, I can’t treat the rest of the squadron like they’re a bunch of idiots.”
“No, you can’t,” Grant agreed. “You have to trust their training. I remember Tombstone chewed my ass once in Norway because I wasn’t letting the other guys do their jobs while I did mine.”
“Well, the leader still has the responsibility, right? I was supposed to be looking out for him.” Batman gave a hollow laugh. “Good job, huh?”
“New guy. Just out of a RAG and trying to prove himself.” Grant paused.
“Is he wearing a chip? Black guy in a white-bread world?”
“I wouldn’t say he’s got a chip on his shoulder, no. He’s all right.
Seems to fit in with the others okay. But he does work extra hard to prove he can cut it.”
“Yeah.” Grant looked away. “Look, Ed, I wasn’t out there. I don’t know what I would have done in your place… but I don’t see where you made any wrong decisions. Mason missed the ID call. Hell, that can happen even to a veteran. But you can’t second-guess your people all the time, veterans or newbies. If you do, you’ll burn yourself out ― and you’ll take the squadron with you.”
Batman nodded. “You’re right. But, God, I could’ve killed someone, one of our guys.”
“Well, you didn’t. Concentrate on that. If you let it get to you, it’ll screw your head up so bad you’ll never pull out of the spin. You’re too good an aviator to lose your wings because of something that almost went down.”
“I may be a good flier,” Batman said. “The question is how good a CO I am. When I was your XO, it was pretty easy, you know? I fielded some gripes for the guys, I helped you with the paperwork, I did my turn on CAP or on combat ops. No big deal. Shit, Coyote, you should’ve told me what you were going through, running the show. Then maybe I’d’ve told them what to do when they decided to stick me in this slot.”
“You’ll handle it, Batman. Trust me. Inside a few weeks, you’ll be the same old arrogant, cocksure hot-dog bastard we all know and love.”
Batman finished dressing and closed his locker. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. He managed a grin. “Of course, first I have to survive whatever old Stoney decides to throw at me. If I don’t make it out of debriefing alive, Coyote, you can have my CD collection.”
1110 hours (Zulu +3)
CAG office, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Tombstone Magruder looked up at the four officers standing in line in front of his desk. He didn’t speak right away. His emotions were in turmoil, caught between horror at the incident that had so nearly turned tragic and relief that the ultimate tragedy had somehow been averted. The fact that two of the four were among his best friends didn’t make his job this morning any easier. Friends are a luxury you can’t always afford in the Service, his uncle, now a desk-bound admiral in Washington, had told him once.
He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s have it,” he said.
No one answered. He studied them, one after another. Mason and Garrity were at rigid attention, looking far too young and vulnerable to be part of the carrier’s front line of defense. Batman and Malibu were older, steadier hands, officers he had long relied on. Friends…
Coyote shifted in his chair to Tombstone’s right. “Friendly fire happens sometimes, Stoney… CAG.”
“That’s not an explanation,” he shot back. “You can’t just say “Shit happens’ and leave it at that.”
Still, Coyote was right. He knew that. Friendly fire, accidental attacks against your own people, had probably been a factor in warfare since the first cavemen duked it out over the local water hole. In the Persian Gulf War some of the most serious battlefield casualties taken by Allied forces had been the result of friendly fire, especially when fast-moving ground support aircraft misidentified vehicles on the ground. The press had spent a lot of verbiage agonizing over those incidents, of course, but anyone with combat experience knew they were inevitable. The fog of war was as real on today’s electronic battlefield as it had been in the days of Napoleon… or Sargon the Great.
He was thinking in particular of an incident hauntingly like this one, back in 1994, when two U.S. Air Force fighters had engaged and destroyed two Army helicopters in the no-fly zone established over northern Iraq. The pilots had been edgy, the AWACS procedures had broken down, the IFF systems on the choppers had been turned off. And then, as now, someone had confused the U.S. Army Black Hawk with the Soviet-made Hind. That time, over twenty men had died.
Murphy’s Law still ruled, especially when men were excited, frightened, or tired. But there were supposed to be safeguards in place to keep these things from happening, and Magruder needed to know just what had gone wrong.
“Sir, I take full responsibility…” Batman began.
Magruder cut him off. “You bet you do, Commander,” he said harshly.
“But that’s not much better than “Shit happens’ either! Do you know the difference between a Hind and a Black Hawk?”
“Yessir,” Batman said quietly.
Mason cleared his throat. “I made the ID, CAG,” he said. “It was my fault, not the skipper’s.”
“You made the ID,” Magruder said, turning his angry gaze on the younger man. He let the words hang there for a moment before reaching into his top desk drawer and extracting a manila folder. Inside were several photographs, drawn from the files of Jefferson’s OZ Division, the carrier’s intelligence department.
He spread the photos out on the table, turning them so Mason could see.
“This is a Hind,” he said, tapping one of the photos. “Recognition features: five-bladed rotor; tapering, anhedral stub wings shoulder-mounted on the fuselage; separate, stepped pilot’s and gunner’s cockpits; cannon mounted in a nose turret; five-bladed tail rotor mounted to the port side of the boom.” He tapped another. “This is a UH-60 Black Hawk. Recognition features: four-bladed rotor; large, single cockpit with broad windows; four-bladed tail rotor mounted to starboard of the tail boom, and canted at twenty degrees to provide additional lift; large tail planes. Is there anything here you don’t understand?”
“No, sir. I know what a Black Hawk looks like. I know what a Hind looks like. I only saw the target for a second or two, and from behind, so I couldn’t see the double cockpit. But I did see the weapons pylons on either side. I’ve never heard of a Black Hawk with weapons pylons.”
“For your information, son, what you saw was an External Stores Support System, ESSS.” He looked at Cat. “What about you, Garrity? Did you see it?”
The woman shook her head slowly. “No, CAG,” she said. “My head was down at the time.”
“Your head was down. So you were the only one who saw it, Mason?”
“Yes, CAG,�
� Mason said. “I… I really thought it was. The aspect was from the rear and above, and it really looked like a Hind configuration to me. I honestly thought…”
He held up a hand. “We’ve established what you thought you saw.”
“They were being painted by a Gun Dish signal from the ground, CAG,” Batman said. “Probably a ZSU. I made my decision based on the report of one of my aviators. I could have ordered a double check of the target, but thought it would be unwise to risk possible triple-A from the Zoo. There was also the possibility that the enemy was engaging the UN flight. Time was critical.”
Tombstone let himself relax a little. “You’re right. You made a mistake. Wrecked an aircraft that cost the taxpayers something like fifteen mil. And before any of you points it out to me, I’ll say the rest. It would also have been a mistake to get confirmation if those Zoos had opened fire and brought one of you down. And it would have been a mistake if you’d let the sucker go on about his business and he turned out to be a Hind on his way to shoot down the UN Hip.”
“Hell, CAG, we can’t win for losing,” Cat Garrity said. There were a few chuckles in the room, and the tension eased a little.
“That’s exactly right, Cat,” Magruder said. “This no-fly zone crap is one of the trickiest damned ops we’ve taken on. There’s no clear-cut enemy out there, nothing but a set of vague rules that we have to interpret well enough to keep everybody off our backs while we try to do our job at the same time. Right now, our biggest worry about this incident is the fact that there were reporters on that UN helo.”
“Reporters!” Malibu said.
“Oh, shit!” Dixie added.
“The headline news tonight may lead off with a real humdinger of a story.
Something like “Navy Downs Army Helo Over Georgia.’”
“If we’re lucky,” Coyote said with a grin, “they’ll play it on the sports segment. “Navy Scores Over Army, 1–0.’”
“More likely we’re going to get a storm of inquiries. Congressmen calling. Interviews. Hell, maybe somebody will start asking some intelligent questions. Like what the devil is a carrier battle group doing way the hell out here? But in the meantime, we have to do our part to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“What the hell happened with the helo’s IFF?” Batman wanted to know.
“As near as we can tell, no one bothered to tell us that a couple of Army helos had been sent into Georgia to work with the UN team.”
“I thought the Navy was supposed to be handling no-fly zone security?”
Garrity said.
Tombstone shrugged. “You know how it goes. One service gets a plum assignment, and suddenly everyone wants a piece of the action.”
“Grenada,” Coyote added, and Tombstone nodded.
That monumental foul-up was still a reminder ― and a warning ― of how not to conduct joint military operations. When America decided to invade the tiny Caribbean country in 1983, the op had started off as a relatively small mission. Then invasion fever had started spreading through the Pentagon. One service after another had wanted in… as did each of the elite combat units within the larger branches. The SEALS. Delta Force. Army Special Forces. No one knew what anyone else was doing, radio frequencies and call signs weren’t distributed to the proper people, and in one classic case of idiocy, orders describing an air assault gave a time but failed to say whether that was EST, GMT, or local time.
A lot of Americans died unnecessarily in that invasion.
Tombstone let out a sigh. “Okay, people. There will be no disciplinary action from my office. I should warn you all, though, that I don’t have the last say here. Depending on how big a noise this makes with the brass Stateside, or with the news media, there could be a further investigation.”
“You mean we’re still on the hook,” Batman said. He looked resigned.
“What do you want us to do, CAG?”
“First thing, I want reports. All four of you get a complete report on the incident done and on my desk by 1600 hours. And I mean complete. I don’t want excuses, but I damn sure do want anybody who reads these reports to know what we’re going through to police these damned zones. We’ve got Zoos and helos…”
“And bears, oh my,” Cat Garrity put in with a grin.
Tombstone caught Batman’s eye and smiled. “No, thank God, no Bears this time.” Both men had been through some harrowing encounters with the Russian aircraft code-named Bears. As a matter of fact, the first time Magruder had ever chewed out Batman Wayne was over a Bear hunt, back when Tombstone was the squadron CO and Batman a young hot dog just joining the squadron. Some things, it seemed, never changed. He let the smile drop. “Next. Dixie, I’m taking you off the zone patrols for a few days. You’ll be limited to flying CAP until further notice.”
“Sir-“
“No arguments. I know your record; I know you think you’re the hottest pilot Viper Squadron’s ever seen; I know how much you want to be out there. But until this has a chance to settle out, I don’t want you in the no-fly zone.” He looked at Batman. “You’ll see to the scheduling?”
“Aye, aye, CAG,” Wayne said. He sounded unhappy.
“All right, then. Case closed, at least for the moment. You’re all dismissed.”
The four from Bird Dog Flight filed out of the office, but Coyote didn’t leave. “You have a problem?” Magruder asked him when the door closed behind Garrity.
“More than you can imagine,” Grant said. “But a couple of immediate concerns. Don’t you think you could’ve been a little nastier? Like maybe call off Christmas or something?”
“We’ve had this talk before, Will,” Magruder said with a sigh. He leaned back in his chair. “CAG staff’s not like being in the squadron, not even like being squadron CO. You know how I feel about Batman and Malibu. And those two kids are going to be hot when they get some seasoning, as good as we ever were.”
“Better, maybe.”
“Maybe. But I can’t be their buddy anymore. Neither can you. our responsibility isn’t to the individuals, or to the squadron. it’s to the whole Air Wing, to the Jefferson, and to the mission. If this incident had resulted in Americans being killed due to friendly fire, I’d’ve been forced to recommend relieving them of duty. A court of inquiry. You think I’d want something like that hanging over Batman? Next to you, he’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“I don’t like it much,” Coyote said quietly. “Sometimes I think I wasn’t cut out for this staff shit. Maybe I should’ve turned you down.”
“You can’t sit in the cockpit forever, Coyote,” Tombstone told him. He jerked a thumb at a mug that sat on the corner of his desk. A dozen cigars stuck out of it, still in their original wrappings. They had belonged to Tombstone’s predecessor as CAG, the man who’d taught him at Top Gun school years before. He kept them on his desk as a reminder of the lessons the man had taught him, both at Top Gun and later, when Magruder was his Deputy CAG and Jefferson was sailing into the Norway crisis. “Stinger Stramaglia made my life a living hell when I was his deputy. But he also taught me that if I didn’t grow I’d end up being left behind. The first time I realized just how big this damned job was I almost cracked. All I wanted was a chance to strap on a Tomcat and go up with the Vipers again. Trouble is, that isn’t an option. Sometimes you have to sit behind the desk and cope with all the petty little details so the other guys can get in the air.”
“I’m just not sure I can cut myself off from everything that’s gone before,” Grant told him. “I’m not a machine.”
“Neither am I. I’m worse. I’m the CAG.” Magruder looked away. “You said there were a couple of things bothering you. What else?”
Coyote frowned. “Just wondering if you knew what you were doing with Mason.”
“By rights, I should’ve grounded him. I have the impression he saw exactly what he wanted to see out there, and we damn near lost an American air crew. I took it easy on him because… well, because I’m not a machine. He’s
got the makings of a good aviator, but he needs some drudgery to put things into perspective.”
“I read his file. He’s got friends in high places.” Magruder raised an eyebrow. “His sponsor when he applied to Annapolis. Sammie Reed represented his district and made the recommendation.”
“Well, well. Our brand-new Secretary of Defense.” Magruder shrugged.
“If I read Mason, he isn’t the sort to run for help just because he gets his ears pinned back.”
“Yeah, but you know how these things get out. He mentions it in a letter, somebody back home gets outraged, phone calls get made…”
“You really think it could be a problem?”
“Come on, Stoney, wake up and smell the avgas! George Vane resigned as Secretary of Defense because of policy disagreements with the President. Mostly the Kola deployment, but also all the damned social experiments. Our new fearless leader doesn’t share any of his reservations. Look at Directive 626.”
“I try not to,” Tombstone said wryly. Directive 626 was a new order from the upper levels of the Pentagon requiring women in combat units to be worked into command slots on a quota basis, regardless of relative seniority or experience. The Air Wing had been forced to make a number of adjustments to accommodate the order, and it was one more blow to the unit’s morale. “And Mason?”
“Is a minority, in case you were too color-blind to notice it. Sam Reed would love to have a cause like that to get behind if it would make the Navy look bad. You remember the trouble a couple of years back? The Top Gun graduation?”
Magruder nodded. Before moving to the cabinet, Reed had been on the House Armed Services Committee, one of the liberal voices pushing hard for unpopular reforms in the military. After the committee had recommended relaxing the standards for female pilots to compete for slots at Top Gun and other advanced schools, a graduating class had displayed banners calling Reed some extremely derogatory names. That had sparked an ongoing feud between Reed and the Navy, particularly in Naval Aviation.
Now Samantha Reed was America’s first female Secretary of Defense, and she was well placed to carry on that feud.
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