“Aw, fuck you, Fingers. If you’d had the eyesight, you’d have been a pilot, too!”
You’ve made that offer before, Rabbit. Someday I’m going to take you up on it.”
He heard the enlisted technician snicker. “She’ll call your bluff someday, Rabbit,” he said. “Or maybe not — maybe she’s heard how you got that call sign!”
“Hey, you too? What the hell happened to male bonding?” the pilot whined.
“Replaced by RIO bonding,” he said. “I’ll take smart-wearing-glasses over stupid-with-good-eyesight any day!”
“How about taking new contacts over blank screens instead?” Fingers said, suddenly all business. “In your sector, Jamie.”
“Got him,” the technician replied. “Classify it as a Flanker, based on the radar and speed. Loitering in area, it appears. He’s doing the same thing we’re doing, hanging around watching.”
“So we watch him while he watches us,” she said softly. “And we wait to see who blinks first. I’d sure as hell feel a lot better with a TER right now.”
“We don’t need no stinking weapons,” the pilot grumbled. “At least that’s what they told us in the brief. We’ve got the Aegis to protect us, right?”
“YeA, the Aegis and a satellite. I’m feeling real secure,” Jamie said.
“You and me both, brother,” Fingers said softly. “You and me both.”
“Keep a close eye on that Flanker,” the captain ordered. “If the balloon goes up, I want to be ready.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the TAO said. A week ago, he might have been tempted to dismiss the captain’s order as more of the reflexive paranoia he’d come to associate with the man. Now, since the missile shot last week, the CO’s premonitions didn’t seem nearly as unreasonable. Sure, the Chinese were claiming they’d been provoked into firing after the Aegis had locked up their MiG. But with the new cool-down policy, that E-2 had to be feeling awful lonely up there without CAP. No matter that the Admiral thought it’d ease the tensions in the area to stand down the number of flights. He wasn’t the one on the front line.
The TAO was. And he didn’t like the feeling one little bit.
“We’ll be ready, Captain,” he said, keying the Combat circuit as he spoke. A series of clicks cluttered the circuit for a moment, acknowledgment from the other operators. “We are ready,” he amended.
“Phase One,” Tombstone said to Ops. “They know we’re there.”
“Now let’s get them thinking the way we want them to,” he said, glancing at CAG.
“Already scheduled. They’re going to see the Hawkeye relieved every six hours. No tanking, no CAP, just the little ol’ Hawkeye up there all by himself.”
“You’ve got the alert package ready to go?” Ops asked.
“Starting next cycle. We’re skipping this one, giving them some time to look us over and get lulled into the rhythm of it. Get the crews some rest, too. It’s going to be a while before they get that, once we start the next phase.”
“This afternoon,” Tombstone said suddenly. “They’re not going to do anything right now — they’ll have to talk to their staff, try to figure out how to use our operations plan to their own advantage. It’s going to take them a while — I doubt anything is prepositioned on that miserable piece of rock down there. It’s not even above water most of the time, so the self-destruct scenario isn’t going to play.”
“But you think there’ll be another incident,” CAG said. “Something directed at the rock, not at the Hawkeye?”
“I’m betting on it,” Tombstone replied. “Intell agrees with me on this one. China’s not likely to attack us directly, not without some excuse for provocation. As long as Aegis stays under control, and nobody screws up, we won’t give them that excuse. No, they don’t want to attack us — it’s a losing proposition, this far from their shores, with their lousy air refueling skills. Unless they get Vietnam to allow them land-launching permission, China’s aircraft don’t have the legs to reach out and touch us hard.”
“Now if they’d bought that aircraft carrier from Ukraine like they were planning last year, it’d be a different story,” Ops mused. “The Soviet Union was just starting to get the hang of carrier aviation when it collapsed. Those Flankers — I read that they were getting halfway decent at getting on board the Admiral Kutnezsov.”
“It might be, although I’m not convinced they’d be able to operate effectively with it that quickly. Certainly not run flight ops the way we do, not without a sizable contingent of Russian crew members. And somehow I just don’t see Russia getting in the middle of this, not with all the problems they’ve got at home,” Tombstone replied.
“Still don’t like sending the Hawkeye out like that,” CAG said somberly.
Tombstone glanced at him. In a few years, CAG might have the opportunity to find out for himself how it felt to have to order a Hawkeye out alone. Until then, he wouldn’t know if he could do it, wouldn’t understand the true burden of command.
Tombstone knew he hadn’t.
CHAPTER 18
The battle group settled into standard cyclic operations quickly.
Spratly Island surveillance missions by the Hawkeyes were launched every five hours, each flight following exactly the same patrol pattern. Every eight hours, one lone fighter left the deck, occasionally accompanied by a tanker. The Hawkeyes went north, the fighters south, and neither intruded on the other’s operating area. Alert birds crowded the deck, crews in cockpits and maintenance technicians doing busywork around them, waiting.
Further north, the Aegis prowled, silently watching the unarmed E-2C’s. Flankers cut lazy circles in the airspace between the Aegis and the carrier, watching the E-2C that watched them.
To the east, Chinese fighters slipped down the coast from the mainland into Vietnam, occasionally cutting across the South China Sea to the north or south of the battle group to land in one of the other littoral nations. With the Aegis and the Hawkeye tracking them, the battle group kept the world intelligence community updated on the tail count.
By the end of the first full day of the operation, the aircrews were getting edgy. The Hawkeye crews were increasingly uneasy about the Chinese fighters and conducting surveillance without their own fighters nearby for protection. The Jefferson’s fighter crews were unhappy about both the alert schedule and the lack of information on exactly why they were pulling alert instead of flying. The atmospheric conditions continued to generate ghost contacts that flickered into existence for a few minutes, then evaporated.
Rumors and speculation raged around the carrier, each theory more menacing than the last. RIOs and pilots argued continually in the Officer’s Mess about the Chinese’s capability for aerial refueling, and whether or not China could reach out and touch the battle group from the mainland as well as from Vietnam. The RiOs insisted on drawing out the time-distance problem for the pilots, demonstrating time and again how the fighters could not possibly make it to within weapons range, given their fuel package. The pilots disagreed, fundamentally unconvinced that the Chinese were not fully capable of deploying a long-range anti-air weapon on their aircraft, or passing locating data to the submarines. The pilots repeatedly mentioned the possibility that the Chinese F-10 long-range fighter was operational. After all, the pilots argued, intelligence had been wrong before.