And she had to admit that Mason was a superb flier, one of the best she’d ever seen. Despite the enthusiasm, technically he was an iceman, cold and hard and precise. The emotions showed through when he was under stress, but all he really needed there was some seasoning.
“Bird Dog, this is Dog House.” That was Lieutenant Chadwick’s voice, from Ops. “Do you copy, over?”
“Bird Dog Leader copies, Dog House,” Batman replied over the open channel. “What’s the gouge?”
“Bird Dog, we confirm your bogey, but we still don’t have an India Delta yet. Repeat, no confirmed identification on the bogey. Nothing on radio and no IFF signal. Before we take further action, we need a positive visual ID. Until we do, we’re calling it a possible hostile. Over.”
“Ah, roger that, Dog House,” Batman replied. “With stress on the possible, right?”
“That’s affirmative, Watch Dog. You’ve got weapons free, but stick to the ROES. Get a positive visual identification before you do anything. The last thing we need is a friendly fire incident to lead the news stories today.”
“Understood,” Batman said. “We’re on it, Dog House. Bird Dog clear.”
He paused. “Dixie, you still with me?”
“Bird Dog Two, roger,” Mason answered.
“You hear all that? We’ve got weapons free, but mark your targets.”
“That’s a roger.” Cat heard him pause. “Uh, Skipper? You think this one’s for real?”
“Hell, that’s what we’re here to find out. You keep your eyes peeled up there, or I’ll have you in for another session of sensitivity training.”
“Oh, no, not that, Skipper,” Mason said, his tone mock-serious.
“Anything but that!”
Cat laughed. The politically correct crowd back in Washington had been leaning hard on the Navy to provide sensitivity training to teach tolerance, understanding, and acceptable behavior toward women and minorities both. It was thoroughly loathed by all concerned and didn’t seem to do very much good, though the people issuing the directives seemed less concerned with results than with the actual issuing of the directives.
It was a strange world, sometimes.
“Don’t worry, Dixie,” she said over the ICS. “Even if this run turns up dry, I’m sure we’ll see action pretty soon. Up at North Cape and the Kola, it was one damned crisis after another. I’m beginning to think the old Jeff just kind of draws trouble like a magnet.”
“Just my luck if everything goes quiet as soon as I get in the game,” Mason told her. She could hear just a trace of bitterness in his voice. “You train every day of your life for something that never comes… know what I mean?”
“Hey, don’t forget who you’re talking to back here. Of course I know what you mean. And believe me, if women can get a piece of the action out here, your turn’s bound to come up!”
Cole had never particularly liked low-altitude flying in rough terrain, and today was no exception. But the Hip with its VIP passengers up ahead was flying NOE so that they could get a good look at the terrain below as they passed, and Cole knew better than to argue with the brass. Especially when most of the brass belonged to self-important UN twits who tended to retreat behind language problems anytime they didn’t want to understand a complaint or a protest.
“Keep your eyes on the road, L-T,” Dombrowski said. “That’s about the only way to tell we’re on course.”
“Yeah. Right.” The road, in this case, was a track that might have been paved once, but which had deteriorated under harsh weather, hard use, and lack of maintenance. According to the map, it followed this valley all the way up to Chaisi, up among those ice-capped peaks ahead.
He saw something up ahead, a squat vehicle parked alongside the road. He touched Dombrowski’s arm and pointed. “Shit, Ski, that looks like a Zoo down there.”
“Got news for you, man. It is a Zoo.” Dombrowski grinned at him. “One of our freedom fighter buddies told me about ‘em last night. His people have a few of them, compliments of the Reds when they pulled out. It knows we’re coming, and it won’t fire. Probably.”
Cole muttered a curse. “You might tell a guy, you know. The altitude we’re pulling now, we’d be dead meat before I could get us high enough to dodge those suckers.”
The “Zoo” ― slang for the ZSU-23-4 ― was a deadly air defense weapon that was one of the most dangerous pieces of equipment in the ex-Soviet arsenal. A self-propelled tracked vehicle mounting quad AZP-23 cannons, it fired 23mm shells directed by the B-76 radar code-named Gun Dish by the U.S. military. A Zoo could wreak havoc with any low-flying aircraft unlucky enough to stray into its line of fire.
Neither man spoke for a long moment. Then Cole looked across at Dombrowski, scowling. “And just what the hell do you mean by ‘probably,’ anyway?” he demanded.
Dombrowski laughed.
The blip winked onto Dixie’s Vertical Display Indicator with the suddenness of a thrown switch… a hard signal from the Tomcat’s own AWG-9 radar, not a data link feed from the Hawkeye. “Contact!” he yelled. “I’ve got him now! Bearing oh-one-oh, range four miles.”
“I keep losing him in the ground clutter,” Cat added. “Getting an eyeball on this guy’s going to be tough.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.” The typical helicopter cruised at less than 150 miles per hour, a snail’s crawl to a Tomcat howling in at just below Mach 1. And with the helo flying down on the deck in these rugged mountains, spotting would be that much harder.
Mason craned his neck, straining to get a visual on the bogey even though he knew they were still too far out. At four miles, an aircraft was a speck when it was back-lit by the sky; this clown would probably be wearing camouflage, and he’d be down on the deck. But at almost six hundred miles per hour, they would cover four miles in just twenty-four seconds. In that same period of time, the bogey would cover just about another mile; thirty seconds and he and Cat would be smack on top of them.
Mountains rose to left and right, gray granite walls, some cloaked with pine trees, others barren. He was following a river valley now, relatively flat and a couple of miles across but bounded by sheer cliffs and woods-cloaked slopes. Snow flashed at the highest elevations.
“Hey, Dixie?” Cat called from the backseat. “Maybe we should back off from the wall a bit.”
She wasn’t referring to the valley wall, he knew, but to their speed.
Flying slower would be safer… give them both a chance to see something.
But he was eager. He wanted to get there, now.
“Just another few seconds, Cat. We’re almost there.”
The radar contact vanished off the screen, less than two miles ahead.
Dixie could see why ― the valley took a sharp turn to the left up there, and the slopes to either side went vertical, turning the valley into a tight, rock-walled canyon. The bogey must have just gone around the bend.
“Keep your eyes sharp,” he told Cat. “The bastard’s just around-“
“Radar contact!” Cat cut in. “We’re being painted!”
“The helo?”
“Negative! Negative! I read it as Gun Dish!”
“Christ!” Dixie swore. “A Shilka!”
Shilka was the Russian name for the quad-mount ZSU-23-4. Dixie’s first instinct was to haul back on the stick and grab some sky, but he held the Tomcat’s altitude steady as he eased into the dogleg of the canyon. Shilkas were relatively short-ranged and couldn’t reach targets at altitudes of more than a mile or so, but Dixie knew that he would offer a perfect sighting picture if he suddenly popped his Tomcat up out of that valley.