Poti spread out below, shattered white buildings crowded against the sparkling waters of the Black Sea, a ruin that looked as dilapidated from the air as it did from the ground. Cole could almost imagine the stink of the place fading away as he followed the Hip toward the northeast.
“That guy’s really traveling,” Cole said. The Hip was already a good three miles ahead of them, a black spot just above the horizon. “Wonder if he’s trying to make up for lost time?”
“Maybe so.” Dombrowski pulled out a map from under his seat, folded and attached to a clipboard. “So where to today? Cha-something, they said?”
“Chaisi,” Cole replied. Another last-minute change, decided on just last night by the team’s leaders. “Little village up in the mountains, just outside the NFZ.”
“Outside the no-fly zone? Oh, joy. We get to play tag with Hind gunships today.”
“None have been sighted so far,” Cole told the copilot. “In fact, from everything I heard last night, it looks like the Russian regulars really have pulled up and stolen away into the night. Not so much left behind as a crust of black Russian bread. Piece of cake.”
“Shit. That just means we’re gonna be staying here, L-T! Maybe we should scare up a Hind or two. Might mean we get pulled back to the ships.”
“I’m not sure which is worse,” Cole said. “Sleeping on those damned cots at Tara, or being cooped up aboard a hip-pocket aircraft carrier.”
“Man, look at those mountains,” Dombrowski said, changing the subject.
One particularly rugged range was thrusting up in front of them, its jagged brown walls only a few miles distant now. “We’re not going over that thing, are we?”
“Nah. There’s a valley.” He pointed at the Hip, now reduced to a tiny spot far ahead and to the right. “See? Two-seven’s headed straight for it.”
“Christ,” Dombrowski said as the valley opened up around them. Trees flashed past to left and right, some reaching well above the Black Hawk’s cockpit. “Just like the trench on the Death Star in Star Wars.”
“At least,” Cole said with a grin, “we won’t have Imperial fighters on our tail!”
He wished, though, that Two-seven would slow down a bit. He didn’t want to get lost in these mountains, and with radio silence, he couldn’t call the bastard and tell him to slow down.
Muttering an imprecation against all bureaucrats, Cole opened the throttle a bit wider.
CHAPTER 7
“Bird Dog, Bird Dog, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?”
The E-2C lurched as it hit a pocket of turbulence, but Lieutenant Arnold Brown was as oblivious to the jolt as he was to the steady drown of the Hawkeye’s twin turboprops. He was hunched over his radar console, his full attention focused on yellow splotches of radar returns painted there.
“Bird Dog, Bird Dog, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?” he called again.
The E-2C was orbiting a fixed point fifty thousand feet above the Black Sea, its sophisticated electronics keeping track of air activity across a circle nearly five hundred nautical miles in diameter. As an Airborne Early Warning aircraft, it wasn’t quite as versatile as the land-based AWACS, but the Navy “Hummer” could do things no other AEW plane could do. Specifically, it could fly off of a carrier deck, and with a tracking capacity of over 250 targets it was well suited to warn the ships and planes of a carrier battle group of any activity that might pose a threat to their operations. As the aircraft’s Air Control Officer, Brown was responsible for the coordination of air activity throughout the carrier battle group’s sphere of operations.
The E-2C and her crew, Brown decided, were really pulling down their pay today, that was for damn sure.
“Watch Dog, Bird Dog Leader” sounded over his helmet earphones. “We copy. Whatcha got?”
“Bird Dog, Watch Dog. We have a hit on our screens here. Unidentified contact, bearing zero-eight-five, range eight-eight miles, over.”
“Ah, roger, Watch Dog. We don’t have him on our display. Over.”
“Bird Dog, the target is flying at extremely low altitude. Contact is intermittent, and we think he may be right down on the deck, zigzagging through the mountains. We’ll vector you in.”
“Roger that, Watch Dog.” There was the slightest of pauses. “So tell me, have you seen any flying saucers lately?”
Brown grinned. The flying saucer gag was one of a number of running jokes aimed at the Hawkeye and its peculiar look with the saucer-shaped radome up top. Sailors aboard the Jefferson made jokes about the little green men who flew it… or called it a Frisbee and asked Brown if he’d like to join them for a game of catch on the flight deck.
So far as Brown was concerned, it didn’t matter what the aircraft looked like. It worked… flew like a dream, if a bit on the sluggish side. In fact, the flattened-dish shape created as much lift as was needed to counteract the parasitic drag of the entire assembly and neither helped nor hindered the plane in flight, even during takeoffs and landings. More important than flight characteristics, though, nothing could move on land, on water, or in the air throughout a volume of three million cubic miles and not be instantly pinpointed by the E-2C’s APS-125 radar. Through a wide-ranging suite of communications equipment, including UHF, HF, and high-speed data links, the Hawkeye could pass coded data to any of the Jefferson’s aircraft, engage in a two-way exchange with the Tomcats, and serve as the primary eyes and ears for Alpha Bravo, the battle group’s commander. So far as Lieutenant Brown was concerned, the entire air wing was structured around the Hawkeyes, like the rim of a wheel connected by spokes to the hub.
He watched the blip crawling across the tangled web of returns off the mountains. As far as he could make out, it was about thirty miles out of Poti and moving away from the city at 150 knots. He adjusted the gain on the set, willing more information from the pulsing smears of light before him. It was hard to tell; there might be two aircraft there. According to the schedule passed to the CBG from the UN liaison office ashore, there were supposed to be a couple of friendly helos flying out of Poti this morning… but that flight had been scheduled for a couple of hours ago. And neither of these guys was showing IFF.
Ah, no! There were two aircraft… and the leader’s IFF had just been triggered by the touch of the Hawkeye’s far-seeing radar. Sierra-Delta-Three-Tango… He checked the code group with a list on a clipboard at his side: UN Flight Two-seven, a CAT mission. Flying under radio silence.
But who the hell was the untagged bogey on Two-seven’s tail? …
Batman was holding his Tomcat steady at 25,000 feet, flying south some ninety miles off the Black Sea coast. He’d been aware of Malibu in the backseat talking with Watch Dog, but not really listening in. So far, their flight had been singularly routine. Glancing back over his right shoulder, he saw that his wingman, in Tomcat 218, was in position twenty meters off his wingtip at four o’clock. The helmeted figure in the other aircraft’s pilot’s seat must have seen the movement, for he raised one hand and touched his visor in a bantering salute.
Lieutenant Tom Mason, “Dixie” to the other aviators in Viper Squadron, was a nugget, a new arrival aboard the Jefferson and CVW-20. The kid seemed to know his stuff. He’d been teamed up with one of the women aviators in the squadron, Lieutenant Kathleen Garrity, as his RIO, and so far they seemed to be working well together. Batman hoped, though, that this deployment wasn’t as rough as the last one; nuggets tended to get excited in real combat, like the furballs the Vipers had participated in over Norway and the Kola. They could do something harebrained, like leave their wingmen, or they could freeze up. Either way, the statistics relating to their surviving that first taste of combat weren’t all that good. Cat Garrity had proven herself over the Kola, though, and ought to provide a good, steadying influence if anything nasty went down this time out.