He turned his attention back to the screen and forced himself to depersonalize the aircraft on the screen. It wasn’t Tomboy and Snoopy — it was Tomcat 201. If the Navy had the intestinal fortitude to insist on equal standards for its male and female pilots, the least its admirals could do was the same. Anything else would have been a slap in the face to the aviators, both male and female, that had worked so hard to make the policy succeed.
Finally, since there was nothing else that really required his attention, he turned and faced Pamela. It felt odd to be facing his old lover while listening to Tomboy’s voice on the net. But when you got right down to it, why should it be difficult? What was Tomboy to him? She certainly wasn’t his lover — couldn’t be, not while she worked for him and they were assigned to the same ship. But whatever she was to Tombstone, he could feel her presence behind him as the arcane symbology representing her aircraft crept across the screen.
“That was her, wasn’t it?” Pamela said softly.
“Who?” he managed to say. Damn her, she always could seem to read his thoughts.
Pamela shot him a wry grin. “Don’t worry, Tombstone, nobody noticed it but me. She was your RIO last cruise, wasn’t she?”
“She was a lieutenant then,” he said, and then swore at himself for sounding like a blathering idiot.
“Ah,” Pamela said, as though he’d just made sense.
Thor eased back on the throttle and slid behind the other aircraft. Its slipstream buffeted the light Hornet. Although the Flanker looked like it was about the same size as the Hornet, the slipstream of the Chinese fighter carried a punch.
Something about the aircraft bothered him, although he couldn’t have said exactly what it was. He slid the Hornet over to the Flanker’s other side and studied it carefully. Nothing unusual caught his attention. It was, he decided, just the other pilot’s attitude that seemed strange. During peacetime, most military pilots would at least wave to each other, acknowledging the bond that all airmen felt. Weeks later, if hostilities broke out, they’d do their damnedest to kill each other.
The Flanker pilot had not even glanced his way, much less proffered a friendly, universally obscene gesture. Thor shrugged. At least being able to move around a little eased the cramp in his lower back.
“TAO! I’m picking up communications downlink from the Flanker!” the Electronics Warfare Specialist, or EW, said over the CDC net.
“You sure?”
“Positive! Frequency, everything’s right on.”
“Make sure the Hornets know,” the TAO snapped to the OS monitoring the two fighters, picking up the TFCC telephone again. “And get the alert 5S-3B up. That bogey is talking to somebody we don’t hold contact on. That means one thing.”
A submarine. Had to be. The tactical picture was really starting to stink.
Minutes later, the distinctive sounds of an S-3B engine spooling up overhead vibrated through CDC. She watched the two symbols on the large-screen display, the Hornet and the Flanker flying so close together that their symbols occasionally merged. The carrier SPS-49 radar alone couldn’t have broken the two contacts apart. Only the powerful SPY-1A radar on the Aegis cruiser could positively distinguish between the two. She glanced at the information display screen to the right of her desk and confirmed her suspicion. The radar symbol displayed on the screen came from the Aegis’s radar, relayed to the carrier over LINK II.
Four minutes after the video downlink was detected, she heard the Hoover go to full military power, the roller-coaster rattle of the steam catapult, and the final surprisingly soft thud as the catapult piston reached the end of its run and tossed the S-3 into the air. Seconds later, the Operations Specialist controlling the ASW aircraft reported radar contact on Hunter 701. The S-3B vectored toward the bogey, scanning the ocean’s surface with radar and FLIR, trying to find the bogey’s playmate.
It could be anywhere, she thought. The bogey’s altitude gave him enough horizon to cover at least a thousand square miles of ocean. Somewhere out there, the nondirectional video downlink was giving someone accurate targeting positions on the battle group. A brief shiver ran up her spine. Irrational as it might seem, she would have given anything to be airborne herself right then instead of trapped inside steel bulkheads on the 03 level of the carrier.
“We got the last one — let’s get the next,” Rabies said grimly.
“And he almost got us,” Harness muttered from the backseat.
“We’ll stay a little further away this time,” the pilot acknowledged. “One nice thing about torpedoes — don’t have to get all that close to drop them.”
The S-3B Viking carried two Mk torpedoes on its inboard weapons stations. The high-speed torpedo was the most widely deployed lightweight torpedo in the Fleet, although its five-hundred-pound weight made the classification “lightweight” seem like a misnomer. Capable of speeds up to forty-five knots, the torpedo had a maximum range of approximately six nautical miles. Its ninety-five-pound warhead was composed of PBXN-103 high explosives.
Two Harpoons graced the outer weapons stations. At Mach 0.85, the missile could deliver a five-hundred-pound conventional high-explosive warhead against a surface ship or a surfaced submarine target seventy-five miles away. The 1,172pound Harpoon was a massive drag on the aircraft, but each one carried enough destructive power to make the weight trade-off well worth the cost in additional gas and loss of speed.
“How far is far enough?” Harness asked.
“Max range on that surface-to-air missile is probably around six miles,” the TACCO replied. “We can stand off and safely drop the torpedoes.”
“We’re going to get attack criteria without a MAD run?” the AW persisted. Getting accurate positioning data from the MAD book extended out the back of the S-3 required being virtually overhead the submarine.
Neither the pilot nor the TACCO replied.
Great. Just great, Harness thought, fuming. We can shoot from outside the missile’s range, but we can’t get attack criteria unless we get in close and personal.
Still, the possibility of actually firing a shot in anger was an attractive one. He let that thought console him, and pushed away the thoughts of the very real danger they were standing in.
“Got something,” the TACCO announced. “Possible periscope, bearing 120, range seven thousand yards. He punched a “fly-to” point into his computer, and the location was transmitted to the pilot’s screen. The aircraft heeled to the right as Rabies stomped on the rudder controls.
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” the pilot said calmly.
“Bingo,” the TACCO said softly a few minutes later. “You see anything?”
The copilot squinted out the window. “Yeah, I think so. Still at communications depth — it looks like nothing but a snorkel mast and a couple of antennas. The sail’s still submerged. Call it positive visual identification, though.”
“She doesn’t have to surface to be dangerous,” the TACCO warned. “Intell says they can still fire those Grails from shallow depth.”
“I’m watching her,” the copilot answered. “Hold on, let me get some guidance from Homeplate.” He switched circuits and updated the carrier on the tactical situation.