Joint Task Force #1: Liberia

by David E. Meadows

  “Then we fight them,” Holman said softly.

  Upmann straightened up, a deep sigh escaping. Holman thought he saw his tall Chief of Staff come to attention.

  Upmann nodded curtly. “Then, Admiral, may I have one of those cigars, sir?” Leo said after a slight pause.

  Below them, the Air Boss’s voice reverberated. “ Lieutenant, what the hell are you doing on my deck? If you don’t have anything to do, get hell off it.”

  SHE GRABBED THE RAG FROM THE POCKET OF HER FLIGHT suit and wiped her hands. “Wow! It’s hot,” Pauline Kitchner said. She stuck her lower lip out and blew upward. “Damn.” Pauline reached up and brushed her wet hair off her forehead.

  “Gripe, gripe, gripe,” Shoemaker replied standing near the step leading into his UFAV cockpit a few feet away.

  “I prefer bitch, bitch, bitch.”

  “Lieutenant, why haven’t we ever met Admiral Holman?” Ensign Jurgen Ichmens asked, looking up from a squatting position near the cables running from the rear of his UFAV cockpit. “I would have thought he would have wanted to see this project. Isn’t he a pilot also?”

  Shoemaker shrugged. “I am sure the admiral has more important things to do than run down here and hold our hands.”

  “He could have invited us for lunch—or tea even,” Valverde offered, trying to imitate a British accent.

  “You have the worst British accent—”

  “It’s that Southern drawl,” Kitchner said, tossing a screwdriver into the toolbox at her feet. She wiped her hand across her forehead. “Damn, I can’t take this,” she said, reaching up and pulling the flight suit zipper down to her waist. “I’m at least going to be comfortable until they tell us to suit up, take off, and be fighters.” She struggled out of the sleeves, wrapped them around her waist, and tied them loosely, leaving her in a sweaty T-shirt easily revealing the low-cut white bra beneath.

  Shoemaker and Valverde already had their flight suits at half-mast. Ensign Ichmens stood, wiped the back of his right hand across his forehead, and did the same with his flight suit.

  “Told you before we started this,” Valverde said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve told me many things, Alan.” She looked over at Nash Shoemaker. “Okay, fearless leader, why don’t we go over once again what we’re supposed to do.”

  The screeching of the elevator on the other side of the hangar bay drew their attention. They watched for a few seconds as the Unmanned Fighter Aerial Vehicles and the working parties moving them ascended.

  “Looks as if they are getting serious about this.”

  As if hearing Shoemaker’s comments, the hatch leading from the front of the ship opened. Captain Buford Green and Captain Mary Davidson stepped into the cavernous hangar bay. Davidson carried a brown briefcase grasped tightly in her left hand. Shoemaker glanced behind the other UFAV pilots, noticing row upon row of helicopters, mostly CH-53 Super Stallions and four Cobras. These four attack helicopters separated the twenty-foot UFAV cockpits from the troop-transport helicopters.

  “Attention on deck!” shouted Ichmens, drawing a stern look from Nash Shoemaker.

  “Remind me to kill him later,” Pauline whispered as she snapped to attention with the others. While at sea, you seldom shouted attention unless in the wardroom or at some official function, and then only for the commanding officer or a flag officer. These two were neither.

  Shoemaker thought he detected a slight smile on the Operations Officer’s face. He stopped himself from nodding in agreement.

  “Stand at ease,” Buford Green said, a broad smile breaking out.

  Lieutenant Nash Shoemaker stepped forward as the other three pilots stood still. Green stuck his hand out and shook Shoemaker’s.

  “Well, Lieutenant, looks as if we’re going to launch you and your wingmen in the next thirty minutes. Y’all know Captain Davidson, our intel officer.” Green glanced over at the bulkhead and pointed. “Come on, let’s take some of those folding chairs and go over your mission. Then, I’ll let Captain Davidson brief you on what Intel has.”

  Through the open hatch, a broad-shouldered senior chief petty officer ducked as he came into the hangar bay.

  “Senior Chief! Over here,” Mary Davidson called. Turning to the others, she continued. “This is Senior Chief Oxford, my imagery specialist. As you mentioned earlier, Lieutenant, about needing ground support, Senior Chief Oxford has experience interpreting UAV imagery. He’ll man the mother system while you’re airborne along with a couple of his sailors. They’ll be connected to both my shop on the third deck and with Combat Information Center on deck two. This way, we’ll be able to see what you are seeing and keep Admiral Holman updated. At the same time, it’ll ensure that Captain Green and his warrior buddies are aware of the situation.”

  The six officers pulled open some chairs normally used by the crew for movie night, and sat down in a semicircle in front of the four cockpits. Senior Chief Oxford remained standing behind Captain Davidson. Fifteen minutes later, the update to their mission completed, they shook hands, and the pilots moved to their cockpits.

  Green and Davidson stood watching as the four stepped into the mock-ups and strapped on their headsets.

  “Hey, Nash!” Pauline shouted across the hangar. “What’s going to be our call sign today? How about something heroic instead of Prototype formation?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she slipped her headset on and, in one smooth movement, slid down into the seat.

  Shoemaker turned toward Valverde, but the low hydraulic noise of the top closing around his wingman hid Alan’s face. From the other side of Valverde, he heard the clicks of Ensign Ichmens’s cockpit closing. Shoemaker looked back at Kitchner. Pauline smiled and waved as she lowered her head to match the closing rate of the cockpit.

  Nash tugged the headset down, slapped the red close button, and slid into his own seat. He wondered for the umpteenth time as he clipped himself in why they had harnesses like those on ejection seats. It wasn’t as if they were ever going to crash, burn, and die.

  He flipped the radio switch. The chatter between Lieutenants Pauline Kitchner and Alan Valverde greeted his entry.

  “Black formation, this is Black leader,” Nash said.

  “Oh, great! We gotta be a color formation?”

  “You said—”

  “I changed my mind. Let me or Alan pick it.”

  Across the intercom, came the voice of the Air Traffic Controller located in Combat Information Center. “Lieutenant Shoemaker, this is Petty Officer Watts. Are you going to be Proto formation for this event?”

  “No, we’ll be—”

  “Deathhead formation,” Kitchner interrupted, her voice trying to sound low and menacing.

  “Sir?” Petty Officer Watts asked.

  Shoemaker read the confusion in the sailor’s voice. She was probably thinking they had bit the big one.

  “Deathhead formation,” Nash confirmed.

  “Sir, Captain Upmann wanted us to ensure your call signs would be something an F-14 Tomcat would use.”

  “I understand, Petty Officer Watts, but it’s not as if any of our conversation is going to be transmitted anywhere. We’ll stick with Deathhead. It pleases the number two pilot.”

  “One,” Kitchner corrected.

  “Wait, I’m one,” Valverde argued.

  “Why don’t you two take a lesson from our ensign and keep quiet,” Shoemaker said.

  “That’s what ensigns are supposed to do,” Kitchner replied tartly.

  “Deathhead Leader, CIC; prepare to launch. Flight deck clear. Waiting for your clearance,” Petty Officer Watts announced.

  “Roger, CIC,” Shoemaker replied. “Deathhead Two, Three, and Four. Request confirm systems check.”

  The three wingmen answered “check” one after the other.

  Ten minutes later, the four UFAVs were airborne at fifty feet heading southwest toward the USNS Mispellion.

  “THEY’RE AIRBORNE, ADMIRAL,” UPMANN SAID, STRAIGHTENING up
from over the air traffic console where he had been watching Petty Officer Watts.

  “TAO, Air Warning,” the petty officer manning the air-search radar said in a loud voice to the commander who was the Tactical Action Officer.

  “Sir,” the air-search petty officer continued. “I have multiple bogies inbound from the northwest.”

  “They’re French, Commander,” said the electronic-warfare technician manning the AN/SLQ-32(V)6 console. “Their noses are pointed our way.”

  “Have they checked in?” Holman asked.

  Stephanie Wlazinierz, deputy operations officer for Amphibious Group Two and TAO, shook her head. “Not yet, sir. I was going to—”

  “Give them a call and ask them what their intentions are.”

  The commander shut her mouth and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Holman listened to two conversations ongoing in CIC. One was the TAO leading the CIC team in trying to establish contact with the inbound French fighters, and the other was the ongoing dialogue between Shoemaker and his UFAV pilots. What was his world coming to? French flexing their aviation muscles and American pil—operators sitting on their asses in a hangar bay flying fighters. Nothing ever stayed the same. No matter how much you wanted to go back to a place you really enjoyed, it was never there. Maybe it was getting time for him to find that mythical piece of God’s Green Acre. It had to be located somewhere between West Virginia and Georgia. Let the Navy move toward its future without him stomping his feet and shaking his head like some old bull watching a younger bull work his way through the herd.

  “Where are the UFAVs?” he finally asked.

  “Fifteen miles southwest of us.”

  Holman nodded at Upmann. “Go ahead, Chief of Staff. Tell Mispellion to start the script.”

  A couple of minutes later, over the clear-voice ship-to-ship channel, a deep bass voice broke over the low murmur in CIC. “Boxer, this is the aircraft carrier Teddy Roosevelt. We are one hundred miles southwest of your position. How copy, over.”

  A shiver rode up his spine. This had better work.

  “Roosevelt, this is Boxer. I read you loud and clear.”

  “Okay,” Holman said, reaching forward and tapping Petty Officer Watts on the shoulder. “Turn those UFAVs around, start bringing them up in altitude so they’ll reflect off the French radars, and tell them to activate their package.”

  “Deathhead Leader, CIC; come to course three-zero-zero. Ascend to altitude two-zero-zero,” Petty Officer Watts said over her intercom.

  Below in the hangar deck, hidden from sailors who strolled by the four odd-looking cocoons, the four UVAF pilots turned their four-plane formation to the right, in a long semicircle, bringing the unmanned fighters around in a 180-degree turn. Only when they steadied up on course 300 did they start their climb to twenty thousand feet as Petty Officer Watts had directed.

  Holman walked over to the holograph display. The information technicians and cryptologic technicians were working the data input for the three-dimensional table. Above the faint white light shining across the tabletop, a green shimmer identified the holograph display. A few inches above the top of the table, images of the USS Boxer, USS Spruance, USS Stribling, and USS Hue City rode on virtual waves. The formation was heading southeasterly, closing the Liberian coast. Northeast, a pattern of four French Super Etendards headed toward them. A quick glance at the display numbers showed the French fighters were fifty nautical miles away.

  Behind Holman, the CIC operators and those on board the Mispellion, nearly one hundred miles from them, acted out the Mispellion masquerading as an aircraft carrier. He knew if he was Colbert, he would easily see through the charade. It was up to the electronic simulators on board those unmanned pieces of shit to convince them otherwise.

  “The fighters are ascending, sir,” Upmann said.

  “Whose? Ours or theirs?”

  “Ours. The French should see them on their radar within the next minute.”

  “Let’s hope this works, Leo. If those fighters see us sitting here with turning helicopters and Ospreys, they’ll know we’re about to launch.”

  “Screw them.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know them that well. Unfortunately also, I don’t know how much they’ve worked themselves into believing they can attack us and get away with it.”

  Upmann shook his head. “Sir, for once I have to disagree. Sure, we’ve our differences, but I can’t see the French attacking us. At the very least, who’d buy their wine and water?”

  Holman bit his lower lip, his eyes squinting as he thought about it. “You’re probably right, Leo, but let’s play it out. If the French fighters turn, then they believe it. If they don’t, then we’ll launch while they watch. Enough of this. Launch our Marines. By now, Thomaston needs them.” Even as he gave permission, he knew being out at sea, away from the watchful eyes of the media, meant no one would ever know for sure what really happened—if anything did. He sighed. He wanted to agree with Leo about the French, but for all the bluster they sometimes dished out, they could also surprise you. You never knew whether what they were saying was for public consumption or if they actually meant it. Whatever French diplomacy did, it always complemented some hidden political scheme.

  The French blamed the Americans for handing control of NATO’s Southern Command to the British, effectively returning the Mediterranean Sea to their historical enemy. They were reluctant partners in the Middle East peace process, throwing up small political obstacles for the Israelis as the agreement gap closed. Ankle-biters, Holman called them—obstacles not so large they brought everything to a stop, but small and continuous enough that they created distractions, making sure everyone knew the French were still around. He wondered if this veiled confrontation out of sight of the world was France’s way of warning the United States to not ignore this European ally. If so, it was a piss-poor way of doing it. As much as he hated to admit it, the military was sometimes an unwilling cog in the conundrum of foreign diplomacy.

  “Commander,” the ATC called. “I have video return on our fighters.” The ship’s air-search radar had picked up the UFAVs.

  Fighters, she called them! Damn, this world of the twenty-first century was changing too fast. “Transformation,” they called it. “Amazing,” Holman thought. Throw a few polished words together. Make sure they complemented something politicians wanted, and you were their golden boy. Probably why Lieutenant General Lewis Leutze was doing so well at the Pentagon. Leutze had been Holman’s Joint Task Force commander during the North African crisis two years ago, when the United States Sixth Fleet had been left on its own to rescue American hostages held by Islamic terrorists. Now, the dynamic Army officer had moved from being the Director Joint Staff J-3 in charge of Operations to the number-three slot on the Chairman’s staff. Even as Holman weighed French reaction to the imminent amphibious landing he was launching, his mind traveled down what most would consider unconnected logic trails. Holman listened to the air-search radar operator reporting the latest contact information, and he watched quietly as his Chief of Staff flittered from operator to operator. The Holograph Display Unit drew his attention as it shimmered for a moment, shifting the icons for the aircraft and ships slightly in response to a computer update on contacts and locations.

  “Boxer, this is Roosevelt. We’re closing your location. I have launched four F-14 Tomcats your way to provide CAP,” came the male voice from the Mispellion. CAP was short for Combat Air Patrol, and identified a mission where air-to-air-combat-capable aircraft orbited overhead to defend a battle group against enemy aircraft.

  “Deathhead Leader, Combat,” Petty Officer Watts said, seated to the right of Holman. “TAO said start simulating Tomcats. We have video on your aircraft now. They are bearing one-six-zero, forty-five nautical miles from battle group.”

  Aircraft! It bugged the shit out of him for them to call those unmanned aerial vehicles aircraft. He opened his mouth to say something, and realized it would sound like whining, but—shi
t!—aircraft have pilots on board. These were nothing but a maze of electronics, computers, and data downlinks. The way things were going in the military, all you needed was a computer degree and you too could be a fighter pilot.

  It would take some getting used to directing fighter operations via internal communications. Some of the things the young lady was saying to Shoemaker and his bunch would never be broadcast in the clear. Too many operational details revealed.

  “Ma’am,” the air-search radar operator to his left said to the TAO. “Three of the French fighters have reversed course. They’re setting up an orbit halfway between us and their battle group.”

  “Combat air patrol,” Upmann offered.

  “What about the fourth?”

  “He’s still coming—wait!” A few seconds later, the air-search radar operator continued. “He’s turning toward our fighters, Commander. He may be heading southwest of us to see if he can confirm the presence of an aircraft carrier.”

  “Let’s call them UFAVs, not fighters.” He saw the questioning look in Stephanie Wlazinierz’s eyes, but it passed quickly as she acknowledged Holman’s command.

  Commander Stephanie Wlazinierz, Tactical Action Officer for Commander, Amphibious Group Two, pushed the talk button on her headset and passed the order through Combat. Then she turned to the admiral. Her short-cropped hair was pressed against her head by the headset. She shoved the headset up and off her right ear, pushing her brown hair into a large wing. “Admiral, French fighter approaching the UFAVs, sir. Request instructions.”

  Holman bit his lower lip. “Turn two of the UFAVs toward the approaching French fighter and let’s see if we can scare him off. The other two—the other two, send them to form up on the helicopters and Ospreys once they’re airborne.”

  She nodded curtly, brought the headset back down, and passed Holman’s orders verbatim to the Air Intercept Controller, Air Search Operator, and the Air Traffic Controller. Her stout legs were spread slightly to maintain balance. Holman couldn’t hear his deputy operations officer’s instructions through the intercom, but seconds later he heard Petty Officer Watts relay the orders to the UFAV pilots. Pilots! Ought to be another word he could find to describe the operators of unmanned aerial vehicles. Maybe drivers. Yeah, he liked that word! Drivers never left the ground. They just motored about! Seconds later, Watts transferred control of Deathhead Leader and Deathhead Four to the Air Intercept Controller manning the console to her right. The first class operations specialist manning AIC pushed his mouthpiece closer to his lips.