He’d never been entirely sure exactly what his first billet there entailed. He remembered going to a lot of meetings, reading countless white papers, and reviewing tech manuals. Some of the material seemed to bear some relationship to the F 14 program, but much of it didn’t. That last puzzling study, for instance, on military health care and Navy Exchange operations. He still had no idea how that’d ended up in his In box, much less in the urgent stack.
Finally, he’d run into Admiral Dunflere, another proud member of the F14 community, in the cafeteria. The Admiral had been a Commander when Batman was a senior Lieutenant, and remembered him.
More importantly, the Admiral had a vacancy on his staff and wanted him. Batman had jumped at the chance to transfer out of whatever it was he was doing into the JAST shop.
It was only later that he learned how to manipulate the system sufficiently to be forced to conduct frequent field inspections on the JAST birds, and to wangle himself into the training pipeline. Admiral Dunflere seemed perfectly content to receive his weekly field reports via the laptop computer and modem, and Batman took full advantage of his new-found freedom.
And this was what it’d gotten him. An extended trip away from the five-sided office building and back in the cockpit. He glanced down at the Chinese camp perched on top of Mischief Reef and wondered if Tombstone really had any idea of what he was in for on his next tour to DC.
Well, at least Batman’s politician days were on hold for a while.
“See anything unusual?” Tomboy asked, breaking his train of thought.
“Nope. You?”
“Not a thing. As long as we’re out here, though, maybe we can take another swing around it. After that incident last week, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“You got it. Let’s do a little more op testing on this Tomcat on the way back, though.” Batman stood the Tomcat on its tail, reveling in the feel of gravity cementing him back into the ejection seat. God, how he’d missed that! He punched in the afterburners and let the full-throated roar wash over him.
At ten thousand feet, he rolled the Tomcat out into level flight, completing the Immelmann. The Mischief Reef camp was now almost two miles below them. He eased back on the throttle and put the Tomcat into a gentle descent, bleeding off altitude and speed at the same time. Experimentally, he flicked off the auto-angle control and swept the wings forward. He felt the increase in drag and speed and let the aircraft slow almost to stall speed before reengaging the auto-control.
“Looks like everything works as advertised,” he advised Tomboy.
“Roger.” Had his RIO not been so much junior, Batman might have been tempted to hear the slightly grumpy note in her voice. He smiled. Backseaters never appreciated aerobatics.
Shih Tan glared at the aircraft circling so far away in the sky. Out of range of the Stinger missiles, no doubt. Despite the destruction of the neighboring rock camp, his superiors had taken no steps to upgrade the offensive capabilities of the island. The missile emplacements that were barely masked by bamboo screens and the Stingers were their only protection.
He’d heard the blast from Island 203 and rushed outside in time to see the rain of litter and rock fall back into the ocean. One sentry said he’d seen the American aircraft dip low over the island and release a bomb, but two other lookouts couldn’t confirm the report. Still, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind where the bomb had come from. The American aircraft had been the only possible source of it.
The lack of defenses on his tiny island bothered him. While it was well within China’s span of control, and should have been sacrosanct in the South China Sea, there was no telling what drove the Americans to do anything. Attacking an undefended, tactically unimportant island was just the latest in a series of American actions that made little sense to the rest of the world. That China should have to tolerate that sort of aggression in her own seas bothered him more than he could say.
Had Shih Tan been in charge, he would have armed the tiny islands to the teeth and ringed them with every capability in the Chinese navy. Not that there were really so many ships, but it was critical to maintaining China’s face in the region to put a stop to the American intervention.
A slight breeze rose up, ruffling the damp hair on the back of his neck. He heard the distant whine of insects, but dismissed it. In the next second, his head snapped up, and he gazed frantically around.
Insects? This far out at sea? It wasn’t-The vast bamboo structure behind him erupted in a fiery explosion. He barely had time to process the information in his brain before the shock wave reached him, blasting him off his feet and into the warm waters of the South China Sea just seconds in front of the fireball.
Shih Tan hit the water hard and plummeted fifteen feet beneath it. He retained just enough consciousness to try to struggle to the surface. He heard a muted series of thuds as debris hit the water around him, flames instantly extinguished and steam churning the water. As he stroked for the surface, he saw a film of flames spreading out above him, broken only by debris crashing through it to the water.
“Shit!” Batman yelled, instinctively putting the Tomcat into a sharp climb. “What the hell was that?”
Tomboy craned her head around and looked back at the surface of the ocean. Thick black smoke flecked with flames covered the surface of the ocean, obscuring Spratly Three.
“I don’t know, Batman,” she said finally. “But it looks like whatever happened to the other camp just happened again.”
“Where’re those goddamn Flankers!” he demanded. Over tactical, the other three Tomcats were buzzing about the explosion, each RIO denying that they’d seen anything out of the ordinary, and double-checking each other visually to ensure that all the weapons they’d left with were still on the rails.
“Fifty miles to the west.” She gave him a bearing to fly, then added, “Thor’s on his now, and I still don’t know if the other three were ghosts or real contacts. The one Thor intercepted didn’t have anything on his rails, and there was no indication of any communications downlink. Whatever happened to that camp, I don’t think Thor’s Flanker had anything to do with it.”
“It’s a damned strange coincidence that he just happened to be out here, don’t you think?” he asked sarcastically. “I mean, a nasty, suspicious mind might just be tempted to think that there’s some connection between a Chinese Flanker cruising toward an American battle group and a Chinese outpost smearing itself across five square miles of ocean.”
“Don’t have to tell me that,” she answered. “But you have any idea about what could have done it? It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t them. So who?”
“I don’t know, Tomboy. But if I had to bet between us being responsible and the Chinese, I know where my money’d be.”
“You and me both. Wait, Homeplate’s talking.”
“Flankers have turned and are headed back toward Vietnam,” she heard the Jefferson TAO say. The TAO then reeled off orders and directions recalling the five Tomcats and the Marine Hornet to the boat.
“And that ought to clinch it,” Tomboy said. “Soon as he saw the explosion, he turned and ran for home base.”
“Not exactly. He ran for Vietnam. And for a Chinese Flanker, that’s a little bit different than home,” Batman said.