The Art of War c-17

by Keith Douglass

  “Roger. I want to do a high-speed sprint and then we’ll slow down. You let us know when we quit generating the flow tones, okay?” the captain said. He then turned to the XO. “Five miles, that ought to give us a head start. I’m open to suggestions.”

  He was open to suggestions. After the one time he left the control room and the XO had run the sub into a pipeline. A feeling of unworthiness swept over the XO. If he could just come up with the right answer now, just find some way to… wait. That was it.

  He thought it through a second time, then turned back to the captain. “Sir, I recommend we return to the area where we struck the pipeline. If they’re not paying attention, they may mistake our flow tones for current rushing over the broken pipe. Additionally, it’s going to take a while to shut down the oil flow. I bet it’s still pumping. That will foul up the water enough that there won’t be any chance of a visual, and will also reduce the acoustic propagation characteristics of the area. It’s the best place to hide right now.”

  The captain’s face was unreadable. “Downside?”

  “Fresh water,” the XO said. “There’s a real danger it will foul our sea chest, and that could mean serious trouble. But not as bad as being detected right now, I suspect. We can deal with the fresh water problem later.”

  The captain’s face relaxed slightly. “I agree completely. Make it so. And pass the word to the crew — we’re on strict water hours until I say otherwise. No showers, no flushing. I know, I know, it’s going to get pretty foul. We can’t waste a drop until we’re certain we can clear the area safely.”

  The XO nodded, gratified that the captain had approved his suggestion. “Come right, steady on course zero three zero.”

  Bellisanus watched his orders translated into action. Yes, they’d clear the area all right — of that he was confident. But at what price? How long could Seaman Harding hold on without advanced medical facilities? He felt the pain deep in his gut as he forced himself to acknowledge what he was doing. Yes, Harding desperately needed to be medically evacuated to the carrier, and if he’d asked anyone in Harding’s family — or most civilians, for that matter — he suspected the reaction would be the same. Surface, insist that the carrier send a helo immediately for the young man.

  Yet this was why the burden of command was such a grueling, demanding pressure. You spent years honing the judgement and skill of your officers, inculcating in them the ability to make decisions such as this. You hoped and prayed that when the time came, they’d make the right ones, but you knew that it would twist them into knots just like it did him. Because as much as he wanted to get Harding off the ship, take care of him the way a captain is entrusted to care for his or her sailors, he couldn’t. His priority had to be the safety of the ship, the mission, and other hard priorities that were so distant from the concerns of one family over one sailor.

  And you hated doing it, but you did it anyway. And the day that it quit hurting, that you stopped caring about your sailors and still forced yourself to make these decision, why, that was the day that you ought to retire.

  He’d visit Harding later today, after things settled down. He’d tell the lad that they’d get him off as soon as they could, urge him to hold on. And the real bitch of it was, the thing that would keep him awake at night would be the look of understanding in Harding’s eyes, the forgiveness he’d see there.

  ELEVEN

  Tomcat 103

  0319 local (GMT +3)

  “Two minutes,” Rat announced. “Then descend to two thousand feet and come left to course 340.”

  “Got it,” Fastball said. He let the aircraft slide back slightly until he was behind Bird Dog rather than on his wing, and then descended. He stayed slightly to Bird Dog’s right, avoiding the turbulence directly behind the Tomcat in front of him.

  Below him the land was clearly visible now, flat, hard baked desert sand, filthy blue water lapping at the shore. The compound itself was no great shakes either. The three sets of fences strung around it looked ominous but tattered. Guard towers and searchlight emplacements were set in each corner. Inside were three concrete buildings, none of them with any windows. They were crammed together in the middle of the compound, with wide open spaces between the buildings and fences. For increased security? he wondered.

  Men were running around a compound, obviously alerted to the incoming aircraft. Rat peered around over Fastball’s shoulder, then blinked. It looked as if… as if…

  “Fastball,” she said urgently. “The sand — it’s moving. I think I’m seeing—”

  A blast of smoke blew up from the shifting sand, and then, impossibly, an antiair missile was barreling straight for them.

  Immediately in front of them, Bird Dog broke hard to the right. Fastball broke to the left, and started climbing, kicking into full afterburner as he did so. Rat was jammed back against the seat, and she tensed her muscles and grunted, forcing oxygen into her brain. It wouldn’t do to gray out now — not when everything depended on what she did in the next few moments.

  Then Bird Dog completed his circle, descended to one thousand feet, and continued on in. “Hammer flight, on me,” he said. “It should be a piece of cake — these guys are bad shots.”

  Fire flared briefly under Bird Dog’s wing, then a HARM missile shot out. In seconds, it nailed the entire radar, thus effectively eliminating the SAM threat.

  “On me,” Bird Dog repeated. “We’re on our own for about forty-five seconds, people. Then its back up to altitude with our fighters. And there’ll be one less dirty little SAM sight in the world. Fused glass — that’s what the admiral asked for and that’s what he’s going to get.”

  Rat shut her eyes for a moment, and offered up a prayer. Please let Fastball be good enough. Please let Fastball do what I know he can do. Thank you.

  Fastball was gyrating the Tomcat through the atmosphere like a rock and roll dance partner. The tail end of the Tomcat slew around violently, throwing her first against one side of her ejection harness, then the other. She fought the blackness that nibbled at the edge of her vision, forcing her breath out in hard grunts as she tried to remain conscious.

  “Stay with me, Rat,” Fastball grunted, his own voice tight. “Fifteen seconds — get ready.”

  They continued to descend, the compound and the men so close she thought she could make out their individual features. She watched the target marker inch along their flight path, and then, at precisely the moment indicated, she toggled off the payload.

  The Tomcat jolted upward violently, suddenly two thousand pounds lighter. At the same instant, Fastball broke hard to the left again, kicking in the afterburners and pitching the Tomcat into an almost vertical climb.

  This time, Rat lost the battle. She saw the gray creeping in, saw the color leach out of her vision. She tried to fight it, but the blackness eventually met in middle of her field of vision as she passed out.

  “Rat! You okay?”

  No answer.

  “Dammit, Rat, stay with me!” Fastball tried to lean forward, as though that would somehow magically increased the speed of the Tomcat and get them safely out of antiair range. While the SAMS might be destroyed with their radar, they could not ignore the possibility that there was another site somewhere nearby.

  Finally, at altitude, he cut back on the afterburners and converted into level flight. “Rat?”

  “Oh. I’m here,” she said, her voice groggy yet determined as she fought her way back to consciousness.

  “I got it,” she said, as she regained her tactical awareness. She had only been out for about five seconds, but it was the longest five seconds Fastball could remember in a long time.

  As he formed up on Bird Dog, staying within the circle of their accompanying fighters, it occurred to him that that was the essential difference between a Tomcat fighting team and single-seat fighters. In a Tomcat, you were part of a team. You depended on your RIO to feed you information, became accustomed to the steady patter of instructions, advice, and second
opinions echoing in your ears. During combat, it was as though you were one person, one person with two brains. In a good team, your thinking eventually synchronized almost completely with your RIO, and sentences became shorthand, clipped phrases that were incomprehensible to anyone else.

  Not so in an aircraft like the Hornet. There, you were completely alone, with no one to second-guess your judgment or give you a sanity check. There would be a certain freedom about that, he supposed, somewhat like the trainers he learned in. But in combat, two brains and two sets of eyes were always better than one. And in those few moments when he thought — even rationally knowing exactly what happened — that he has lost her, he had known real panic.

  “Tomcat flight, good job,” a new voice said on tactical. “It looks like a direct hit for everyone.”

  “Yes!” Fastball said. “Good going, Rat. Good going.”

  “Thanks.”

  For a few minutes, Fastball concentrated on maintaining his position in formation as he vectored toward the tanker waiting for them. Then he said hesitantly, “Rat? About what I said… I really am sorry. I was wrong.” And he was — this time he meant it. It wasn’t just words to keep her from punching out — and really he had no doubt she would have done it — but an honest admission of his error.

  “Some good flying back there, Fastball. Not everybody could’ve gotten us out of that alive.”

  “So… we still a team?” he asked.

  There was a long pause, and he felt a flash of dread at what her answer would be. But finally she said, “Yeah, sure. Just as long as you remember I’ve got an ejection handle back here, too.”

  “Put it in command eject. From now on, if you go, I go.”

  “Touching,” Rat said dryly. “I’m very moved. But you know, I think right now I would be even more touched if you just concentrated on getting this bitch tanked and back on deck.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Fastball let it drop, but inwardly he was fuming. Hey, he made this big reconciliation thing, and what did she do? Take the cheap shot, remind him of the last time he lost his nerve on a tanker approach. Well, she might be a good RIO, but she was still a bitch as far as he was concerned.

  In terms of pucker factor, tanking was right up there with landing on the carrier. At least they were fortunate that the weather was good. And from looking at the flight schedule, Fastball had seen that Rabies Grill was in the cockpit of the tanker. Now that was good news, as much as Rabies bitched about tanker duty. No one flew a steadier pattern than Rabies.

  “How about it, 103? You ready for a drink?” Fastball recognized the voice of Rabies’s copilot.

  “I sure could use a tall cold one about now,” he answered. “How about you just funnel one on back here? I hear the S-3 has a cooler full of beer onboard just to keep you guys occupied.”

  “Yeah, right,” Rabies broke in. “Listen, junior, you just take care of business, okay?”

  Now what was that all about? What had he done to incur Rabies’s wrath?

  Fastball concentrated on lining up on Rabies, approaching from below and slightly behind. He eased the Tomcat into position, concentrating on the basket, trying not to overcontrol. On his first pass, the probe slid smoothly home. The green light lit up on his console, indicating a solid plug. “I have a green board,” he announced.

  “Green board,” the copilot agreed. “Three thousand pounds, Fastball. Don’t say I never gave you nothing.”

  Fastball watched as the fuel indicator showed aviation fuel flowing into his tanks. He probably wouldn’t need that much, although his two runs on afterburner had eaten at fair amount of fuel. Still, he could feel this was a good day for the deck. Three wire, first pass. There was no doubt in his military mind that this was going to be one hell of a landing. No doubt.

  Within just a few minutes, the refueling was completed. “Disengaging,” Fastball said, watching the indicator. As soon as the light turned red, he slowed ever so slightly, and dropped down below the tanker. Once he was well clear, he broke right, descending in a clean, sweeping turn as he headed back to the carrier.

  “That went well, I thought,” he said cautiously, trying to find some noncontroversial subject to approach with Rat.

  “Not bad,” she replied offhandedly. “I’ve seen better.”

  Damn the bitch! Couldn’t she find anything nice to say? Fastball concentrated on putting it out of his mind, compartmentalizing and maintaining his focus. He slid smoothly into the starboard pattern, taking his place in the queue of aircraft waiting to get back on deck. He watched the aircraft ahead of him, descending and spiraling down as one by one, the lowest Tomcat in the stack broke off to make an approach. Finally, it was his turn.

  “Tomcat 103, inbound,” he announced.

  “Roger, 103, maintain course and speed and call the ball,” the operation specialist said.

  The ball was a Fresnel landing light located on the port side of the carrier. The combination of green and red lights told a pilot whether he was too high or to low on approach. The last two miles behind the carrier were a critical time during which Fastball lined up with the carrier, shot his approach, and eased 60,000 pounds of Tomcat down gently onto the deck in a controlled crash.

  In addition to the Fresnel lens, he would rely on the judgment of the landing signals officer, or LSO. The LSO was an experienced Tomcat aviator who would make visual observations on Fastball’s approach, verifying the correctness of his needles, or his glide path indicator, and pitch into a perfect landing attitude.

  When he spotted the ball, Fastball said, “Ball, 103,”

  “103, ball,” the LSO agreed. “Say needles.”

  “Needles high and right,” Fastball said.

  “103, disregard needles. I have you on path, at altitude. Continue on.”

  Damn. A slight annoyance, but no major problem. For a wide variety of reasons, the needles were often off.

  The carrier deck which looked so small at altitude now loomed before him. It looked like a cliff rising out of the water, a dangerous cliff at that, as though the ship was an iceberg just waiting to smash his Tomcat to bits. He concentrated on looking at the lens rather than the shape of the ship. As long as the light was white, he was on the correct glide path and would not smash into the ass end of the ship, called a ramp strike.

  “Looking good, 103. Keep coming,” the LSO said. His voice was calm, confident, pitched so as to reassure any pilot strung out on adrenaline or shaky on his approach. It was like having a RIO, Fastball thought. A RIO standing on the stern of the ship.

  Three wire, three wire… it would be a perfect landing, he decided. People would talk about it in the ready room later, as they always did. Each squadron LSO maintained a list of each pilot’s landings, rating them according to whether there were any problems or whether they were satisfactory. The ratings were posted daily on the bulletin board for everyone to see.

  Still, there were good landings, and there were good landings. The really good landings and traps were those that might draw a quiet comment from the captain, maybe a slap on the back in the dirty shirt mess. Yes, this was going to be a good one.

  Suddenly, the Tomcat coughed, an abrupt sound that made his balls draw up close against his body. Microseconds later, the Tomcat rolled hard to the left, trying to do a barrel roll on its own. Red lights lit up all around the cockpit.

  “Fire in the port engine,” the LSO shouted, his voice more agitated now. “One zero three, you’ve lost your left engine — punch out. Eject, eject.”

  But it was already too late. Fastball looked up to the canopy and saw black, hungry water. If he ejected now, the rocket engines mounted beneath their seats would simply drive both he and Rat far below the surface of the ocean. But they had to get out — the Tomcat was clearly out of control and there was no way to survive hitting the water in her. Incandescent jet engines plus cold seawater equal explosion. Even if the impact didn’t kill them, fragments of metal and turbine blades from the jet engines would shred the cockpit, de
stroying everything in the path. No, they had to eject, but—.

  “No!” he shouted, knowing that Rat was already reaching for the ejection handle. “No, hold on two seconds while I…” the Tomcat completed its wing-over and rolled back into level flight for just a few moments. Just at the right instant, Fastball yanked down hard on the ejection handle.

  The explosive bolts on the canopy fired, blowing the canopy away from the fuselage. Microseconds later, the ejection seats themselves fired, the RIO’s four-tenths of a second ahead of the pilot’s. They arced out at different angles, so as not to collide, both clearing the fuselage.

  The next few seconds were a dizzying kaleidoscope of flashes of sky, water, and gut-wrenching, all-encompassing nausea. He spun violently through the air, the seat falling away and his parachute deploying. His hand went instinctively to the handle of the secondary chute, even as he knew that there would be no time. They had one shot, maybe not even that. So close to the water, too close — no ejection should take place at this altitude. It simply wasn’t survivalable. He felt a hard jerk upwards on his groin and shoulders, and saw the canopy billowing overhead. It tried to fill with air, but there simply wasn’t time. It was enough to break his fall, but no more.

  Too fast, black water closed over his head. He lost consciousness on impact, for only a split second, then the warm water lapping over his face, filling his nose and stinging his eyes shocked him back into consciousness. He tried to scream, and was rewarded with water trying to flood his lungs.

  Actions practiced so often in flight school came back to him as though they were instinct. It was reflex, ingrained so deeply on purpose into every pilot that they might have a chance of doing the right thing even under the most grueling circumstances. He slapped the release latch, freeing himself from the now-deadly parachute cords. He was still descending into the water, the pressure on his ears growing more painful. It was dark, as though the sun had been doused as well. Something snaked around his right arm, and he jerked, disoriented, trying to figure out which way was up. A sea snake, small, yet deadly? But it was only a line from his parachute trying to trap him.