Carrier 13 - Brink of War

by Keith Douglass

  "Just wanted to get a look at her, Gator." I patted the double nuts bird lightly on the fuselage. "You're pretty early, yourself."

  My RIO shook his head. "Got bored so I thought I'd come on down here and take a look at her." I read the unspoken suspicion in his face. We went over the Tomcat thoroughly for about an hour, lapsing into the easy companionship a pilot-RIO team should have. We talked tactics, emergency procedures, and we both had one factor clearly in mind during that. There would be no ejection over water, not if there were any way to avoid it.

  Our chances of survival would be so close to zero as to preclude any discussion of the matter.

  Our adversaries showed up about an hour later, along with the umpire selected for the engagement. Of course, the MILES gear was the ultimate arbitrator of win-loss. We reviewed again the ground rules for the engagements, reemphasizing the altitude limitations. Off to my right I saw Skeeter wince slightly at that, but there was no help for it.

  Grueling and brutal honesty is the only way to keep pilots from repeating each other's mistakes.

  Neither Admiral Ilanovich nor I made any mention of our discussion over breakfast. But the understanding hung in the air, a clear gentleman's agreement between us. We'd both adhere to it, I knew, as long as we were certain the other fellow was, but national pride would demand that that all change in a heartbeat if it looked like the other guy was cheating.

  Cheating--an oddly mild word to use about aerial combat. But then, these were odd circumstances.

  Finally, interminable safety discussions later, our aircraft were towed out of the hangar by the ubiquitous yellow gear that dots every airfield, and positioned on their assigned spots. Gator and I ran one final preflight around the outside, double-checking the smell and consistency of the fuel. We agreed that everything looked all right, and Gator stepped back to let me precede him into the aircraft. I could feel the cold seeping in through my flight boots, even though I'd worn two pairs of socks. It gnawed away at my leather gloves through the steps up the side of the Tomcat, and if any part of my skin had been exposed, I know it would have frozen to the metal immediately.

  I slid into my seat, wincing slightly as the cold plastic of it seeped in through my butt. My nuts drew up close to my body, frantic to escape the icy temperatures. The Russian technician who followed me in was thoroughly professional, checking the ejection harness and removing the safety cotter pins from the ejection seat. I kept my hands carefully clear of the ejection handle--surviving an inadvertent ejection while on the ground was only slightly more probable than living through an ejection over the frigid Northern Sea.

  Off to my right, I saw Admiral Ilanovich undergoing a similar procedure in his aircraft. He ran through his checklist, and I heard the metallic grumble of his engines start up before we were ready. Gator and I paced through the required items on our NATOPS thoroughly, following the book letter by letter. Finally, we, too, were ready. The air inside the cockpit was starting to warm up from our combined body heat, and a huffer was standing by in case we needed its auxiliary compressed air to get a clean start on the engine.

  At the signal from the yellow shirt, I engaged the engines, letting them idle and warm up for a few minutes before applying any additional power. Start-up had to be done carefully in these climates, since uneven heating as the engine turned could warp the micro-millimeter clearances in our powerful engines. There was a little roughness in the beginning, nothing out of ordinary, and then the turbofans settled into their voracious, all-encompassing roar. I double-checked our radio circuits, got clearance from the tower, and then commenced the taxi. I let the admiral precede us into the air, waited until the turbulence he'd started up on the strip had dissipated, then eased the Tomcat forward.

  We picked up speed quickly, and I luxuriated in the expanse of runway before me. Ever since I cleared the training pipeline, most of my takeoffs in a Tomcat had been off an aircraft carrier. Now there was no catapult to worry about, no jam-packed acceleration and quick leap into the air. I eased the Tomcat up off the runway, rotated smartly, and started climbing.

  Following directions from the air traffic controller, radar still in a standby mode, I proceeded to our assigned patch of air to orbit and wait for the signal to commence. It came quickly, and I could hear Skeeter in the background in the control tower monitoring everything that went on.

  Gator flipped the radar into search mode, and the picture sprang to life in my heads-up display. A few seconds of noise, which quickly dissipated into normal clutter and one solid, sharply outlined target.

  "Tally-ho," I said. Gator clicked his mike once in acknowledgment. I put the Tomcat in a turn to the right, vectoring in on the admiral's position. I slammed the throttles forward, edging into afterburner zone, but refrained from kicking it in just yet. While Admiral Ilanovich was right about having made some excuses for extra stick time during the last month, I knew that I was still not at my best.

  I'd been better, during the days that I was flying every day, launching in all sorts of weather and seeking out the elusive three wire under the worst imaginable conditions. Better to let it come back slow, get back in the saddle, and to squeeze every bit of enjoyment I could out of this hop. I hoped the admiral in the other aircraft was doing the same.

  As though by telepathy, we settled in for a gentle game of angles, maintaining altitude and whipping our aircraft around in increasingly tight turns without varying altitude. I let the admiral sneak in behind me, gave him two seconds to set up for a shot, then cut hard away. He stayed on my tail easily, dropping back a bit so he could cut inside my turning radius if he wanted to. He didn't, but the way he handled his aircraft let me know that he could if he wanted to.

  Good, so far he was abiding by the rules. The private ones we'd set up between ourselves, not the ones for public consumption.

  I heard Gator scratching some notes in the back, recording his impressions of the Mig's maneuverability while I did the flying.

  Admiral Ilanovich broke away suddenly, putting the Mig into a steep climb. I gave him a head start, then tipped the Tomcat's nose up and kicked in the afterburners. In the backseat, Gator grunted, performing what we call the M1 maneuver. It's a series of tensing gut muscles and exhaling and grunting, intended to force blood to keep circulating in the brain during high G operations.

  The Tomcat quickly overtook the Mig, easily catching her and passing her in a matter of seconds. Under normal combat circumstances, I would have eased off, slid in behind him, and gone for the killing shot up the tailpipe. As I passed him, the admiral waggled his wings, indicating by our private code that he would have initiated chafe and flares at that point to distract the Sidewinder. Even odds in my mind as to whether or not the decoys would have worked.

  "Watch the sun," Gator warned.

  "I've got it, I've got it," I said. And indeed I did--keeping an eye on the sun was an essential part of fighter tactics, particularly when you like to use a Sidewinder or IR seeking missile. The dumber shots get decoyed by the heat source and can sail off toward outer space, trying to home in on the sun.

  But there was little way I could miss it now, since it was glaring through the windscreen at me, bouncing hard and brilliant off every metal surface around me. The heads-up display looked slightly washed out, and I turned the Tomcat slightly to clear up the image.

  We were leading the Mig now, still widening the gap between us and demonstrating the superior weight-to-power factor inherent in the Tomcat's design. I stayed well inside the edge of our envelope, not wanting to give away any more tactical information than I had to. Undoubtedly the Russian admiral knew a whole lot about Tomcats--but there was no point in confirming anything that might still be theoretical at this point.

  We fell into a series of gentle yo-yos, the same maneuver that had trapped Skeeter the day earlier. Admiral Ilanovich repeatedly cut out of the pattern and rolled back in on my tail, while I hope I surprised him a couple of times by pulling up well short of where he thought I was goin
g to be and circling in behind him. This wasn't a dogfight--it was more like two cats playing with a mouse. Each stalking and pouncing at the other without really intending to kill.

  The sheer joy of flying carried me up on a wave of euphoria, giving me a feeling of sheer exhilaration and joy. This is what I had joined the Navy for, this all-encompassing and engrossing business of bonding with a piece of metal and putting it through its paces in the air. Who would have thought twenty years ago that I would be soaring out under the frigid northern sun, twisting and maneuvering in the air against a Russian Mig without one of us dying?

  In the last fifteen minutes of the engagement, as we'd agreed upon, we both got down to business. We were still in a rolling scissors, when Admiral Ilanovich cut sharply in behind me, turning the formerly gentle banks and turns into a hard, braking reversal. Before I knew it, he'd come around and was climbing up my ass. Gator's AILR-67 gear spouted off a quick series of beeps, indicating that he had us targeted.

  I activated countermeasures, spewing out flares and chaff over the frozen ground below. Just as they departed the fuselage, I jammed the Tomcat's nose down, increasing the altitude separation between us to almost two hundred feet. He may have been dogging it on his turn characteristics, but I had a trick up my sleeve as well. It was one that he'd no doubt read about, had probably even studied, but I hoped he was as lulled into the rhythm of our aerial maneuverings as I had been. We drew ahead of the Mig, and the tempo of the beeping increased. Just as I was sure Ilanovich was about to launch, I popped the wings out of their swept-back design, overriding the automatic configuration control. I also popped the speed brakes.

  The effect was like stomping on the brake of a moving car. The Tomcat lost speed dramatically, immediately, quickly slowing to almost stall speed. Within a second, the Mig overshot us, and I jammed the throttles back forward to full afterburner and restored the swept-wing configuration of the aircraft. Now we were on his tail, our radar in targeting mode and IR seeking missiles at the ready.

  "Fox two, fox two," I said over tactical, indicating that I'd launched a heat seeker at the Mig. I rolled out of the pursuit, rolled away from his line of travel, pitched the nose of the Tomcat up, and started gaining altitude as fast as I could. Ilanovich saw me, pulled off one of those amazingly tight turns that I now knew he was capable of, and started following me into the air. There was no way he could catch me, but as soon as he steadied up on a course behind me, I cut to the right and broke out of the turn, circling back around to go head-on-head with him. "Fox three," I called, claiming a Sparrow launch.

  Even as the words left my mouth, I saw the Mig jink violently, curving around underneath me and coming up behind in an attempt to break the missile lock. I heard the seeker head warble, then die out, indicating we'd lost lock.

  Before Ilanovich could settle in for the killing shot, I tipped the Tomcat over and was heading for the deck. Mindful of the seven-thousand-feet altitude limitation, I pulled up well ahead of the boundary, giving myself a margin of safety. Ilanovich appeared to have lost me briefly, but quickly reacquired. He came down after me, staying slightly above me and attempting to prevent another wild race for the sky.

  I was trapped between the Mig and the imaginary earth. I needed airspeed and distance.

  Back in the afterburners, jinking and rolling and trying to prevent a missile lock. I turned at every opportunity, trying to avoid presenting that all too attractive engine exhaust to his heat seekers. Finally, I twisted away from him and headed for the open sky again.

  Instead of the beautiful textbook example of a vertical rolling scissors, this was true dog-fighting. I broke off my ascent suddenly, striving for minimum turn radius, wheeling and darting about in the sky as the Mig kept up with me. He could cut inside my turn radius at every opportunity, if he knew which way I was going. I feinted once, then curved back around to climb up his ass again. "Fox three!"

  "Time is up, admirals," the air controller announced. "Please return to base, at your convenience." The message was repeated in Russian, although we knew Ilanovich's English was good enough that he'd understood it the first time.

  "Well, what do you think?" I asked Gator, as I put the Tomcat in a gentle bank back toward the airfield. "We win that one?" "I think so, Tombstone," Gator said thoughtfully. "That first Sidewinder shot--he wouldn't have had a chance after that. The one after you guys got serious, I mean."

  "Yeah, I think so. But then again, he was within guns range for a bit there. We could have sustained some damage and not even known about it.

  If it had been for real." I let his reference to our initial easy pace go unchallenged.

  I landed first, with Admiral Ilanovich not far behind. Being back on deck brought me down off the high I'd been experiencing in the air, and I felt almost disgruntled as I ran through the preshutdown checklist.

  Admiral Ilanovich met us on the tarmac, midway between the two aircraft. I offered a salute as he approached, but he surprised me by simply walking up and throwing his arms around me for a quick, hard hug.

  "It was good, so very good," he said enthusiastically. His pale face had taken on a new ruddiness, and his eyes were shining with the sheer pleasure of the flying we'd gotten in.

  "It was, wasn't it?" I punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Damn you, for that last turn." He knew which one I meant, the one that would have surely sent a heat seeker up my butt if it had been for real.

  "Ah, but your altitude--may I compliment you, Admiral, on your airmanship? It was truly a pleasure to fly with you." There was no denying the sincerity in his voice.

  "And you as well. Perhaps we should call this one a draw, do you think?" I asked. I gestured up to the tower. "There may be points scored and decisions made, but between you and me, it was very, very close."

  "Agreed--it was a draw." He rubbed his face with one hand, leaving a bright, ruddy mark on his skin. "I do have some influence with the judges, you know."

  "I don't doubt it. Again tomorrow?"

  "If the weather permits," he agreed.

  We were back at the hangar by then, still buoyed up by the feeling of companionable competition. Skeeter and his counterpart were walking out to meet us, and the atmosphere between them was clearly not one of good fellowship. I nudged Ilanovich in the ribs, and he laughed. "I hope they don't realize how much fun we've been having," I said.

  "I will not tell them if you do not."

  We left it at that and went over to talk to our respective team members. I heard the younger Russian aviator's voice. Hard, almost sharp, but maintaining the line between courtesy and inquisition. Skeeter was just barely more tactful with me.

  "Admiral Magruder!" I turned to see a man walking across the tarmac toward me, a pleasant expression on his face. "Congratulations on the fine flight, sir." His English was clear and unaccented. I frowned, trying to remember his name from the banquet the night before.

  "I have some information for you," he said, when we were clear of earshot of everyone else. "I am to tell you--go west." With those words, he passed a small packet over to me, shielding his movements from view with his body. I took the packet immediately, and tucked it into my flight suit, careful to keep anyone, even Skeeter, from noticing.

  Lab Rat had told me we might meet men such as this, contacts from the other agencies that had interests around the world. With those two words go west this man had irretrievably engaged my interest. I knew instinctively, with a sudden, deep surety, that within the package I would find the next step on the trail to finding my father.

  He hadn't mentioned the woman I'd met the previous night, though.

  What was her name--Anna something? Were they working together? Anna was undoubtedly Russian, and Skeeter had filled me in on her occupation as an agricultural spy. Just what did her duties include? I'd made it a point to remind Skeeter to keep his little head under control, warning him I'd have the Cossacks castrate him if he slept with her. He'd assured me of his pure and innocent intentions, although from the l
ook that Sheila sent him, I had some doubts. But I thought if anybody could keep him under control, she could.

  So what now? Wait for Anna's people to contact me again? Or break off on my own, follow whatever instructions were included in the package that'd just been passed to me?

  Or--last and least satisfying--do nothing. Look through whatever the man had slipped me and wait for one of them to approach me again.

  I decided to do just that. After all, I'd been waiting for thirty years already. A few more days wouldn't hurt.

  5.

  Saturday, 19 December

  1300 Local (+3 GMT) Arkhangelsk, Russia

  Lieutenant Skeeter Harmon

  Lunch was pretty decent, probably better than decent by Russian standards. There was something that looked like beef stroganoff in one dish on a hot serving-line buffet and I filled up on that. I saw Sheila watching me and grinned evilly at her. We had a deal--no more burritos before flying--but I figured that the Russian version of beef stroganoff wasn't included in that agreement. Last time I'd splurged on Mexican before flying, she said she was either going to start carrying a gas mask or get a new pilot.

  I was surprised at the crowd. There were a lot of the same faces as the night before, all evidently wanting another look at the tame Americans.

  I shot my sleeves a couple of times, showing off my fake Rolex. I figured they wouldn't know the difference.

  Anna was there again, too, and promptly attached herself to my side.

  It was good to see her, and my reaction to her was even stronger this time.

  Even when your mind knows somebody is probably a Russian spy out to pick your brain for everything you ever knew about the national defense strategy, it's still nice to see a good-looking chick sitting next to you at lunch. Sheila's tame American attache turned up as well, all big white teeth and crinkling blue eyes of him. He was maybe an inch taller than me and looked like he worked out a lot. Still, I figured I could take him if I had to.

  "So, you are flying again this afternoon?" Anna asked. She pulled a dish of fresh rolls toward me, nudging me slightly. "Homemade--the very best bread in Russia," she said proudly.