Carrier 14 - TYPHOON SEASON

by Keith Douglass

  "Copy." He was proud of how dry and sarcastic that came out. Just the way his father would have said it if someone had challenged his expertise.

  Nosing the Tomcat over, he started searching the dark water ahead. Of course, odds were he wouldn't spot the helicopter at all; the Tomcat wasn't equipped with infrared targeting, and for that matter Two Tone could have just been picking up random surface clutter, the bane of airborne radar. Then he saw something. "Tally ho!" he cried, the words for "target sighted" leaping automatically to his lips. That pleased him. He'd said exactly what he had been trained to say, without thinking about it. Perhaps everything else would work that way, too. "I see his rotor disk, Too. Right on the deck." He licked his lips. "Um, he's heading for the twelve-mile limit. Better call Homeplate for orders before we do anything; this is a weird situa-"

  Just then the voice from the hawkeye interrupted. "Viper, Viper, you have incoming bogeys, bearing zero niner zero. Four bogeys, repeat, four bogeys inbound on your position. From their radars, they're Flankers."

  The carrier TAO's voice cut in sharp and hard. "Vipers, remain on station. Keep bogeys away from that site; backup is on the way. Repeat, maintain control of that sight if at all possible. You're over international waters. Backup and SAR on the way."

  "Roger," Lobo's voice said. "Hot Rock, Hot Rock, break off and beat feet back to your previous position. I'm going to stay down here and make it real clear nobody gets near this mess but us--especially a helicopter. You copy?"

  "Copy, Viper Leader." Hot Rock heard the slight tremor in his voice, but that was nothing to be ashamed of. He knew from experience that other aviators would interpret it as springing from anger and disappointment. Because they'd be feeling anger and disappointment at being called off potential target to play watchdog. "Damn it!" he cried, cranking the F-14 into a hard right turn and headed back and up.

  "Tough luck, man," Two Tone said from the backseat. "Unless the bogeys will want to play."

  Hot Rock said nothing. His climbing turn was smooth, powerful, and perfectly balanced, and the higher he got, the better he felt. Nobody could take this away from him, nobody could say there was a finer stickman in the entire U.S. Navy. When it came to carving up the sky, Hot Rock Stone was unsurpassed. He should be in the Blue Angels.

  He should be flying in air shows.

  0520 local (-8 GMT) USS Jefferson South China Sea

  As Rear Admiral Edward Everett "Batman" Wayne yanked on a fresh flight suit, he tried to clear his head. Before being awakened by the hard buzz of his direct line to the Tactical Flag Command Center TAO, he'd been dreaming about the last time he was in the South China Sea, about the Spratley Island campaign. Of course, back then he hadn't been a Rear Admiral, in charge of an entire Carrier Battle Group. Back then he'd been assigned to the Pentagon, helping test the new JAST Tomcats with their advanced Doppler look-down, shoot-down radar. When the Spratleys problem heated up, he'd helped ferry a pair of the new birds to Jefferson, and even piloted one in combat, going head-to-head against the finest Chinese pilots above the oil-rich chunks of rock they were trying to claim as their own.

  What he hadn't had to do back then was worry about the "whys" of it. He hadn't had to concern himself with the deployment or tactics of the hundreds of assets that made up a carrier battle group. Back then, that responsibility had fallen on the shoulders of his friend and one-time lead, Rear Admiral Matthew "Tombstone" Magruder.

  And Tombstone had risen to the occasion ... well, admirably. He'd orchestrated the battle group in such a way that it not only fended off the Chinese, but kept the South China Sea open to all naval traffic ... while managing not to start a full-scale war with the People's Republic in the meantime. An amazing job.

  Now, ironically, it was Stony who was back in Washington, fighting the very different war that was life in the Pentagon while Batman was left to deal with the latest Chinese mess ... whatever it turned out to be.

  He mentally reviewed the brief summary the TFCC TAO had given him that had yanked him out of sleep A Tomcat on routine patrol had engaged a Chinese helicopter it caught firing upon an unarmed American pleasure boat. Chinese bogeys were now en route to the site. Batman wasn't sure yet what "engaged" meant, or any other details concerning the episode, but he was about to find out.

  0538 local (-8 GMT) SH-60 Seahawk South China Sea

  Petty Officer Third Class Dwayne Pitcock leaned out the yawning side hatch of the helo and peered down. Although the eastern sky was beginning to brighten, the water below remained black except where the helo's searchlight created a lens of brilliant blue. The lens slipped this way and that, revealing chunks of fiberglass and foam rubber, a coffee table, a couple of ottomans, a glass coffeepot bobbing along. Tons of junk everywhere. And then it passed over a human body, a woman in a sequined gown, floating facedown over a brown-red cloud of blood. Her back had been ripped open like the doors of a cabinet, displaying muscle and bone.

  "Jesus," Pitcock said. Since he was going to be hitting the water pretty soon, he didn't have a headset or helmet on, and he couldn't hear himself over the hammering blast of the Skyhawk's engine and rotor noise.

  The searchlight moved on, finding more bodies, one after the other, all floating with the distinctive liquid movement of the dead, all trailing slicks of blood behind them. The bodies turned slowly as the helo's downwash shoved at them.

  "Jesus," Pitcock said again.

  Then the light found the largest Piece of wreckage he had yet seen--a sleek white expanse like the lip of a dying iceberg, with more of it slanting down into the water below, vanishing into indigo depths. A man's body sprawled across the exposed section. As the light hit him he stirred, turned, and raised an arm to wave.

  The Seahawk immediately swooped over. Leery of the bloody water, Pitcock popped the seals on a couple of antishark packets and tossed them down beside the hull. They stained the water bright yellow as they emitted a chemical that supposedly drove sharks away. Pitcock, who had known sharks to swim toward the stuff, figured pissing into the water would do just as much good, but he was in the Navy, and sailors had a long tradition of superstitious behavior.

  The crew boss manned the winch, Spinning out a length of cable with the rescue collar attached. Before the collar hit the water, Pitcock jumped.

  he hit the water and scooted up the tilted hull of the half-sunken yacht. He snagged an upright on the chrome guardrail a few feet away from where the man clung, then squinted up against the salt spray and pounding air and signaled the helo. It drifted forward until Pitcock was able to grab the rescue collar.

  The man was staring at him now. He was Chinese--well, some kind of Asian--and maybe thirty, thirty-five years old.

  He was wearing a tuxedo. His expression was more vacant than grateful or even comprehending. But at least he was alive. "I gotcha!" Pitcock shouted. "You're okay now, Sir."

  The man didn't respond. Pitcock slid toward him across the slippery fiberglass, dragging the collar behind. The man barely reacted as Pitcock maneuvered one of his arms through the collar, then his head. His other arm was locked around the guardrail. When Pitcock tried to pry it loose, the guy started flailing around and shouting in some shrill, staccato language.

  "Easy, easy," Pitcock said as soothingly as he could, considering he had to bellow. He signaled "raise" at the chopper, and "slowly," and waited until the cable began to pull before trying again to pry the man's arm loose of the rail. Apparently calmed by the firm grip of the cable, the man finally relaxed his arm, and it slipped free. Pitcock whirled his arm, signaling for a faster winch.

  There was a moment when the man in the tuxedo seemed to be standing on the canted hull of his own volition. His black eyes met Pitcock's. "Thank you very much," he said in clear English.

  Pitcock grinned and gave him a thumbs-up, and he sailed into the sky.

  0540 local (-8 GMT) TFCC, USS Jefferson South China Sea

  "COS, what's the situation?" Batman asked as he stepped into the small compartment lo
cated within a few feet of his cabin.

  William "Coyote" Grant, Jefferson's Chief of Staff, looked away from the blue screen in the front of the room. The blue screen was the focal point of this information, distilling input from all over the battle group down to a series of icons representing friendly, unfriendly and neutral assets in the area. "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 enough 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.

  3.

  Friday, 1 August

  1900 local (+5 GMT) Pitts Special Two miles off the coast of Maryland

  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 straight-forward 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 worth living.

  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 got during its 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.

  In his career, Tombstone had flown against a wide variety of aerial weapons, including fighter planes, air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and, once, an UAV--an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that he'd pursued and shot down before it could
deliver a nuclear warhead on Cuba. This thing didn't resemble any of them. Its intent, however, was unmistakable.

  From this angle Tombstone couldn't begin to judge its speed or trajectory. He had no RIO to feed him radar data, and no countermeasures to dazzle its radar or confuse its heat-seeking head--whatever it was using to track him.

  So he used instinct instead, jamming the stick forward and fire-walling the throttle. The Pitts dove as if fired straight down out of a cannon, jolting Tombstone into his shoulder harness.

  The bogey missed again, but it seemed to Tombstone that it adjusted at the last second, almost clipping the Pitts' tail. Whatever it was, if it carried a warhead the explosive wasn't detonated by proximity; that was something. Tombstone hauled back on the stick, pulling the biplane out of its screaming dive. This time he was afraid he'd let it go too long, that he was going to strike the surface of the ocean at a speed that made water every bit as unyielding as concrete.

  Then the crests of the waves were whipping past so close he was sure the biplane's bulbous tires were getting wet. Tombstone kept the stick pulled back, but easier now, lest he lose all his airspeed. Now he really wished he was back in his Tomcat, with enough thrust to yank him quickly up where he could maneuver. The Tomcat might even be able to flat outrun this little bogey, whatever it was.

  He swiveled his head back and forth, squinting against the setting sun, wishing he had Tomboy in the backseat to help. If there were a backseat. Meanwhile, the coolest part of his mind debated his options. Found them to be limited. He had no idea what he was up against. He was flying in an unarmed plane. A propeller-driven plane. An unfamiliar propeller-driven plane.

  But he was a pilot, damn it--not just a pilot, a naval aviator. No one, and no thing, was better in the air.

  He spotted the bogey again, zipping in from the rear, and he executed a left turn so sudden and violent it stalled the inside wings. As he dropped the nose to restore airspeed and circumvent a spin, he heard the whistle of an oncoming jet turbine growing shriller, and pulled his head down into his shoulders instinctively ... then the sound faded again. He straightened the Pitts out and let it dive slightly, building up airspeed.