With gas and a combat load of weapons, a Hornet weighed 49,244 pounds. In order to loft it into the air, the steam piston below the flight deck had to be charged to the correct pressure. Too little, and the fighter would simply dribble off the bow of the ship, unable to claw its way into the air. Too much, and the catapult might snap his wheel strut off, and the rest of the aircraft would do a final impersonation of a NASCAR stock car crash, probably sweeping the handler and several other technicians off the flight deck as well.
Marine F/A-18 squadrons had been deploying off of carriers for several years now, as more and more often amphibious ships were married up with carrier battle groups for those strange conflicts the Pentagon insisted on calling “military operations other than war” or MOOTW. The strange acronym was pronounced “moot-wah.” Monitoring the precarious political situation around the Spratly Island fell into that nebulous mission.
Seconds after the cat shot, Thor felt the Hornet grab air and steady up. As his speed increased, he hauled back on the stick to gain altitude. Leveling off at five thousand feet, he waited for his wingman to join him.
Thirty seconds later, Hornet 307 snuggled up to him on the right. James “Killer” Colburne waved. Thor clicked his radio once and pointed left, to the west. Killer nodded and followed 401 into a gentle turn.
Thor waited until they were steady on course and then made his next call.
“Redcrown, Jigsaw One checking in.”
“Roger, Jigsaw One, we hold you, flight of two,” the Operations Specialist on the Aegis cruiser said. The brief exchange told Thor and his wingman that their IFF transmitters were working, and the Aegis would be able to distinguish them from enemy aircraft if necessary.
Thor clicked his mike once in response and then settled down for a routine CAP mission. Whatever had tried to shoot at the Viking the previous day would find that shooting at a Hornet — and a Marine one, at that — was a whole different ball game. Especially one that carried a few cluster bombs snugged up on the center pylon.
Vincennes, Tombstone noted, was meticulously locked into the center of her screen position. After the initial flurry of maneuvers, she settled in fifteen thousand yards dead ahead of the carrier. Tombstone doubted that life was very pleasant for the officers and crew of the Aegis cruiser.
An hour later, Thor was shifting uneasily in his ejection seat. “Jeez, my back’s already aching,” he complained to Killer over tactical. “Twenty minutes to get out here, and forty minutes of clockwise circling. Just for the fun of it, I’m going to go the other direction for a while.”
“That’s what we get for being disciplined. If we were in the Navy, we’d be able to have some fun out here.”
“Yeah, but we’re not. Thank God for that, anyway. Still, the colonel’s obsessed with neat little circles in the sky. It’s getting to be a pain. Man flies a jet, he oughta be able to have some fun with it.”
“Guess he doesn’t see it that way.”
And the Colonel did see what his pilots were up to while on CAP. Thor had seen his commanding officer park his tail end in CDC and watch a scope, watching his pilots cut neat, symmetrical circles in the sky.
“Take a leak. That helps sometimes,” his wingman offered.
Thor snorted. “I’d just as soon wait. Wish Grumman built these birds instead of McDonnell-Douglas. At least they have the common sense to put relief tubes in their aircraft. I hate these damned piddle packs.” MD’s solution to the inevitable calls of nature was a small plastic Baggie with elastic on one end. Might as well use a Coke bottle, Thor thought, disgusted.
Suddenly, the E-2C Hawkeye NFO’s voice cut in on the radio static. “Homeplate, Snoopy 601. Strangers, bearing 318, range 130 miles. Negative mode four IFF.”
Unidentified aircraft, ones that did not broadcast the IFF modes and codes that would mark it as a friendly military aircraft. For a moment, Thor was interested. It was, he immediately decided, probably a commercial airliner, heading southwest and hugging the coast. He waited. So far, there was nothing on his own radar.
“Roger, Snoopy. Hold that contact on course 135, speed four hundred.”
Well, this was getting interesting. The unknown contact’s course would take it directly toward the battle group. Thor’s adrenaline kicked in with a little tingle.
It still could be a commercial airliner, headed across the South China Sea to Brunei or Malaysia, but most of the commercial routes curved slightly to the north, following a great circle route as the shortest distance between two points. He glanced at his radar and noted that the E-2C’s contact was now entered into LINK, the electronic data-sharing and targeting system that let the battle group elements share radar information.
“Break, break, Jigsaw One, Homeplate,” the Operations Specialist said, indicating a change of call-ups. “Jigsaw One,” Thor answered.
“Roger, come to new course 325. Request you close and VID contact in question. Jigsaw 2, maintain current station.”
“Roger.” Thor pulled out of his gentle CAP turn and headed northwest to intercept the contact and visually identify it.
“You get all the fun,” he heard his wingman mutter over the tactical circuit.
“You got any modes and codes on that contact at all?” the carrier TAO asked the operations specialist.
“Negative, ma’am. It’s off the normal COMMAIR corridor by at least a hundred miles. No modes at all.”
The TAO felt vaguely uneasy. A senior lieutenant commander, an E-2C Naval Flight Officer herself, she’d heard the slight change in pitch in her airborne counterpart’s voice. So far, there was no real cause for alarm, but experience born from thousands of hours in the back of an E-2C kept setting off alarms in her mind. Better safe than sorry, she finally decided.
“Get the alert five Tomcats in the air,” she said to her assistant. He nodded and reached for the 1MC microphone to broadcast the order. Seconds later, she heard scurrying feet pounding down the passageway as the Air Boss and his crew headed for Pri-Fly.
She picked up the telephone and punched the button for the TFCC TAO. If the world was about to go to shit, she wanted to make sure the admirals watch team was awake.
“Okay, what’ve we got?” Tombstone asked as he stepped into TFCC.
“Nothing solid yet, Admiral. The E-2 picked up an unidentified air contact, and a Hornet’s vectoring to intercept. Alert five Tomcats are on the cat — excuse me, sir, airborne,” the Flag TAO corrected himself as the distinctive grumble of the forward catapult launching aircraft interrupted his summary. The TAO rolled his trackball and positioned the pointer near the symbol for the contact.
Tombstone studied the screen, watching the symbol representing the Hornet track slowly across it. If it was a military aircraft, then it was probably Vietnamese. Its speed leader pointed directly back to the Vietnamese coast, near a major military airfield. Vietnamese fighters had every right to be in international airspace, and were probably just flying out toward the battle group to exercise their right to do so.
The Vietnamese air force flew a collection of Russian-built fighters. Until recently, the most advanced airframe in their inventory was the MiG-23F Flogger, a smaller and less capable version of the airframe reserved for Russia’s own use. The single-pilot fighter had limited-range “Jay Bird” radars, with little or no capability beyond fifteen nautical miles. With no infrared or Doppler tracking capabilities, and carrying only the ancient Soviet Atoll and Aphid air-to-air missiles, the export version of the fighter was considerably less threatening than the original model. Russia stopped building Floggers in 1980, although Tombstone recalled that India still built some versions of the airframe under license from Russia. The MiG-29 Fulcrum and the SU-27 Flanker had replaced most of the Floggers in the Soviet inventory.