by Robert Gandt
Okay, Maxwell said to himself. Let it happen.
He pulled both throttles back. As if the engines had flamed out, the Hornet lost airspeed rapidly.
Maxwell rolled out of his steep turn and rocked his wings. It was a signal of surrender. DeLancey could either fire on him now or wait and strafe him in his parachute.
He saw DeLancey’s Hornet roll in for the kill.
The Hornet was closing rapidly. He hoped DeLancey was eager. So eager he would wait for an extremely close range before he opened up with the 20 mm. The Hornet carried only 400 rounds of ammunition. At the Vulcan cannon’s high rate of fire, the ammo would be gone in a few seconds.
He saw the shape of the Hornet swell behind him. A thousand yards back, closing.
Eight hundred yards. Any second the Vulcan would fire —
Now. Maxwell rolled the Hornet inverted and jammed the throttles forward to full thrust. He pulled hard on the stick, yanking the nose of the Hornet toward the earth below.
He saw tracers arcing past his wing. The surprise move had gained him a split-second’s advantage. But no more. DeLancey was dangerously close behind him.
Maxwell was betting everything on DeLancey’s ego. DeLancey had been so sure of a kill, he might make a mistake. He would follow him down.
And he did.
Maxwell abruptly reversed his own turn and hauled the nose of his jet back up. Up toward a vertical line.
DeLancey’s nose was already deep below the horizon, and he was too fast. He was committed. By the time he reversed, pointing his Hornet upward again, it was too late. He had veered outside Maxwell’s tight climbing turn.
Maxwell had a precious altitude advantage. Keeping the nose of his Hornet pointed high, he reversed direction again. Beneath his nose he saw DeLancey going into a high-G roll, trying to initiate another scissors duel.
Maxwell didn’t join the scissors. He kept his jet perched on its tail as he executed a rudder pirouette, changing directions, pulling his nose back below the horizon.
DeLancey’s F/A-18 was directly in front of him.
Maxwell rolled upright and eased the nose of his fighter back up, fanning his speed brake to keep from overshooting. He was pointed at DeLancey’s jet, so close he could read the numbers on the tail. He pulled the throttles back to keep from overrunning.
DeLancey’s jet was inverted, at the apogee of its scissors roll. The sleek gray shape of the Hornet filled Maxwell’s windscreen.
Maxwell’s radar gun director was locked on. He tracked DeLancey’s jet with the gunsight pipper in his HUD. The range indicated only 500 feet.
Peering through the gunsight, he flew the pipper onto the forward half of DeLancey’s jet.
He had a clear view of DeLancey’s helmet in the cockpit. He slid the pipper directly over the helmet. His finger wrapped around the trigger.
He hesitated.
You can’t do this. For an instant he argued with himself. You can’t kill a friendly.
Then he remembered: The tape in the pocket of his flight suit. DeLancey had killed Spam Parker.
DeLancey was trying to kill him.
Maxwell squeezed the trigger. And held it.
Brrrrrraaaaaaaaaaap! The airframe of the fighter vibrated as the Vulcan spewed out bullets at 6,000-rounds-per-minute.
He was shocked by the ferocity of the cannon. The cockpit where DeLancey’s helmet had been exploded in a blur of fragments.
Brrrrrraaaaaaaaaaap! The stream of bullets worked aft, opening the fuselage like it was a tin can. The F/A-18 in his gunsight disintegrated. The fuselage fuel tank ignited. DeLancey’s Hornet erupted in a pulsing orange blob of fire.
A cloud of debris appeared in front of his nose. Instinctively, Maxwell ducked.
Whap! Thunk!
He emerged from the cloud into clear sky. No more debris. No more hostile fighters. No one trying to kill him, at least for the moment.
But his troubles weren’t over. He glanced at his fuel quantity display. He was down to less than one thousand pounds of fuel.
He wouldn’t make it out of Iraq.
He heard something else. “Engine Left, Engine Left,” said Bitchin’ Betty, the robotic aural warning.
His left engine was no longer running.
<>
Butch Kissick ran his hand through his close-cropped hair. “Would someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“I had two targets,” Tracey Barnett said. “Chevy Five and someone else.”
“Whaddya mean someone else? Someone who else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe another Hornet. Chevy One went EMCON, no squawk, no reply. It could have been him. But now he’s gone.”
“You mean —”
“Like he was morted, Butch. It looked like they were in a furball. Then something happened. Someone — or something — took him out.”
Kissick stared at her. “You mean Chevy Five? No. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. But I didn’t see anything —”
“Sea Lord,” came a voice over the tac frequency. “This is Chevy Five.”
Kissick and Tracey looked at each other. Kissick grabbed his microphone. “Sea Lord copies, Chevy Five. What’s going on out there?”
“I’m low state. I’ll flame out in five minutes. I need the tanker.”
“Texaco tanker is on East Chicago station. Can you make it that far?”
“Negative. My left engine is shut down. I don’t have the fuel to make it out of country.”
Kissick lowered the microphone and stared at the console. Jesus, this entire strike was turning into a world class cluster fuck. One Hornet confirmed lost, another probably down under very strange circumstances. Now Chevy Five was about to punch out over a country full of extremely pissed-off Iraqis.
He needed a miracle.
“Hang in there, cowboy,” Kissick said. “I’m working on it.”
<>
“Texaco Tanker, this is Sea Lord. Got a hot vector for you. You ready?”
The voice of the KC-10 tanker pilot crackled back over Butch Kissick’s headset: “Say the bearing and distance, Sea Lord.”
“He’s heading south, Boston one-four-five degrees, two-two-five miles.”
“Sorry, Sea Lord. Unable.”
Kissick blinked as if he’d been slapped. “Guess I didn’t copy right, Texaco. Sounded like you said ‘unable.’”
“Affirm, Sea Lord. Rules of engagement. We can’t go in country.”
Kissick couldn’t believe this shit. He knew that big lumbering tankers like the KC-10 — a militarized version of the DC-10 commercial jetliner — were considered too vulnerable to send into combat areas. Instead, they orbited at the periphery of hostile territory, like airborne gas stations.
But damn it, this was war. You did what you had to do. You took risks.
“What are you talking about, rules of engagement? We got an egressing shooter about to flame out in Indian country.”
“Rules are rules, Sea Lord. Wish I could help.”
Kissick’s eyeballs bulged to the size of golf balls. Rules are rules? Kissick wanted to wrap his hands around the tanker pilot’s windpipe. He knew the guy from back in Riyadh. He was an Air Force captain named Dexter who could quote chapter and verse from the operations manuals. Dexter was going to make a great airline pilot someday.
“Listen, jerk face, I don’t give a flying fuck about your rules. This is Hammer, your Airborne Command Element, and I’m in charge here, understand? I’m giving you a direct order. Steer three-five-zero degrees and descend to 22,000 feet.” Kissick’s voice was rising in a crescendo of wrath. “Now! Do you copy?”
Kissick knew that he had overplayed his hand. He glanced over at Tracey Barnett. Her lips were moving in a silent supplication.
For several seconds the frequency was quiet.
They heard the tanker pilot’s voice: “Texaco copies. We’re steering three-five-zero and descending. We’ll try to pick up your shooter.”
Kissick sighed an
d put down his microphone. Before this day was over, he knew he’d be on the carpet in the general’s office. Dexter was right about rules being rules. But what the hell. He’d had a good career. Maybe it was time to go fishing.
<>
Forty miles.
They were closing rapidly, but not rapidly enough. Still a hundred twenty miles inside Iraq.
As much as he hated doing so, Maxwell forced himself to glance again at the fuel quantity indicator. Three hundred pounds. It was no longer a precise number. At such a low quantity the Hornet’s fuel quantity indication system could have a plus-minus error of several hundred pounds.
Thirty miles. He saw the distant speck appear in his windscreen.
On his situational display, he could see that the tanker was in a turn. By the time the big ship had completed the one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, Maxwell would be in position behind him.
If he didn’t flame out. He glanced down again.
Two hundred pounds.
“Chevy Five, this is Texaco. You got us in sight?”
“Gotcha, Texaco.”
“That’s good. You gonna last long enough to plug in?”
“If I don’t, you’ll be the first to know.”
Almost close enough to glide out of country. But not quite. He was down to twenty thousand feet. From this altitude, he still wouldn’t make it clear of Iraq. Maxwell checked the Colt .45 still holstered beneath his torso harness. He reached down and reassured himself he could find the ejection handle. Just in case.
The speck in the windscreen was growing in size. The big three-engine ship was still in its turn. Maxwell could see the basket-like refueling drogue trailing behind the tanker.
He reached down inside his cockpit and actuated the switch that extended the Hornet’s refueling probe.
One hundred pounds.
It was a joke among fighter pilots that air-to-air refueling was easy — except when you really needed it. You had to fly the probe that was affixed to the side of your jet into a three-foot basket dangling at the end of the tanker’s long refueling hose. If the air were turbulent or, worse, you were so filled with adrenaline that you missed the basket, then you had to back off and try again. That was providing you hadn’t broken your canopy with the flailing basket. And providing you had enough fuel for another try.
Fifty feet behind the drogue. He slid the jet down, flying beneath the great mass of the KC-10. He had no time to waste making his approach to the drogue. He had fuel for one shot.
Maxwell lined up the Hornet with the drogue, then eased forward.
Ten feet. He knew the fuel quantity was indicating zero.
Five feet. Hurry. Keep it moving.
Two feet.
Klunk. The probe poked into the center of the drogue. A bow briefly rippled down the length of the hose as the probe shoved the basket forward.
“Here comes your gas, Chevy Five,” came the voice of the tanker pilot. “Now can we get the hell out of this place?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Deliverance
USS Ronald Reagan
1630, Friday, 30 May
Through the window on the admiral’s bridge, Maxwell could see the flat brown shoreline of Bahrain. A jagged row of modern hotels and office buildings rose above the ancient dwellings along the seafront. The Reagan had dropped anchor off Bahrain exactly twenty-five minutes ago.
Admiral Mellon, CAG Boyce, and the Reagan’s captain, Roger Stickney, sat across from Maxwell. They were listening to the tape player in the middle of the table. They heard the voice of Killer DeLancey.
“Eeeeasssy with it.”
A couple of seconds later, “Don’t go high, don’t go high!”
It was easy to imagine Spam Parker’s jet descending through the darkened sky toward the deck.
“Easy with it,” they heard DeLancey say again. “Right for line up.”
“That was a bogus line up call,” said Maxwell, “just to get her to drop the nose and go lower on the glide slope.”
A steady aural tone sounded on the tape.
“What’s that?” asked Stickney.
“He’s holding the transmit button down,” Maxwell said. “It’s blocking out the LSO’s calls on the other radio. Right now the LSO is yelling for her to add power, to wave off, but it sounds garbled to her because she’s hearing both radios transmit at once.”
Click. The tape abruptly ended. “The tape is time-stamped,” said Maxwell. “That’s exactly when Parker hit the ramp.”
For a while no one spoke.
Finally, Admiral Mellon said, “I don’t know what to say. This is just too hard to believe. Her own commanding officer killed her.”
“And then tried to kill his executive officer,” said Boyce. “You all saw Brick’s HUD tape. Killer fired a Sidewinder at him, and Brick took him out with the gun.” Boyce banged his fist on the table. “I wish I’d had the chance to shoot the sonofabitch myself.”
Stickney was shaking his head. “Killing a woman pilot, then a deliberate blue-on-blue engagement in a war zone. All based aboard America’s newest and most expensive aircraft carrier. This is going to look great on the evening news. It’s gonna make Tailhook look like a taffy pull.”
“What about Congress?” said Boyce. “Wait till that woman senator finds out how the Navy treated one of her precious female pilots.”
No one wanted to touch that one.
Admiral Mellon seemed not to be listening. He rose from the table and stood gazing toward the Bahrain shoreline, his hands clasped behind his back.
He said in a low voice, “Thirty-four years.” He continued looking out the window. “I’ve seen it all — Vietnam, the Gulf, Tailhook, the Balkans, downsizing, rebuilding, downsizing again.”
None of the officers spoke. Maxwell thought that the admiral looked old and tired. His shoulders seemed hunched, his thinning hair whiter than before.
“Enough is enough,” Mellon said, speaking to no one in particular. “I’m not going to give them another sword to use against us.”
He turned to the officers at the table. “Okay, gentlemen, get this straight. Here’s the way it’s going down. Commander John DeLancey will get a memorial service with full honors and a posthumous Navy Cross.”
The three men at the table stared at him. Boyce could not restrain himself. “But, Admiral, the sonofabitch —”
“Listen carefully, all of you. During yesterday’s strike DeLancey shot down another enemy aircraft, becoming the first active-duty ace since the Vietnam war. He is a national hero. Regardless of what else he did, we won’t take that away from him.”
Boyce shook his head. “Admiral, that still doesn’t account for what he did to Spam Parker. And it doesn’t explain how he happened to get killed.”
“DeLancey was killed in action. We don’t know how. He was the last jet out of the target area. Whether it was a SAM or a MiG or a lucky AA hit, we’ll never know.”
“What about the AWACS controllers? Don’t they have an idea what happened?”
“I’ll call Joe Penwell, the Joint Task Force Commander. He doesn’t want this to explode in our faces any more than we do.”
“What about the tapes?” said Stickney. “Brick’s HUD tape and that audio tape we just heard prove that DeLancey was a murderer.”
Mellon didn’t reply. He walked over to the VCR and extracted the HUD cassette. Then he picked up the audio tape player and ejected the tape. Ignoring the curious stares of the three men at the table, Mellon pulled a metal gun case from his desk drawer. He slipped the two cassettes into the case.
He shoved open the door to the outside catwalk. Using a sidearm swing, he hurled the case in a high arcing path, over the rail and out to sea. He watched the gun case disappear in the murky water.
Admiral Mellon strode back into the flag bridge. “What tapes?”
No one answered.
He dusted his hands off and said, “That, gentleman, was probably the last significant act of my naval career.”
The admiral picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “My orders came in on the fax this morning. I’m being relieved.”
The three officers stared at him, surprised.
“In two weeks I turn over command of the Reagan battle group. I’m taking mandatory retirement, by directive of the Undersecretary of the Navy.”
Stickney was aghast. “That doesn’t make sense, Admiral.” said Stickney. “Is it because of the alpha strike? Did anybody look at the intel photos? Don’t they realize the attack on Latifiyah was a total success?”
Boyce spoke up. “Admiral, if I may say so, sir, you and your staff ran the most effective coordinated strike I’ve ever participated in.”
“No,” said Mellon. “It’s Mr. Whitney Babcock who gets the credit for the strike. And he did it despite the interference of me and my bungling staff. At least that’s the way it’s being reported in Washington. Babcock’s at the White House this very minute accepting congratulations from the President. The word is that he’s going to be promoted to the National Security Council.”
Boyce jumped to his feet. “That’s bullshit!” he exploded. “Damn it, sir. Somebody in this Navy has to stand up to that little prick. We’ll set the record straight.”
Mellon shook his head. “It’s the system, Red. Civilians oversee the military, not us old squareheads. It’s the way the founding fathers set it up. It may be a flawed system, but it’s the one we have taken oaths to support.”
The admiral paused and gazed out the window again. “It’s time for me to exit. I’ve had a great career, with damn few regrets.” He looked pointedly at the empty tape player on the table. “And that includes what I just did here today.”
An awkward silence settled over the room.
“There’s just one other item,” said Mellon, “and that concerns you, Commander Maxwell.”
“Sir?” Maxwell rose from his chair, not sure what was going on.
“Your new orders.”
Here it comes, thought Maxwell. I’m the next to retire. “Orders to where, Admiral?”