Toad called Jake Grafton. “I want to see that ship,” Jake said. “As soon as possible. We’ll take an F-14 with a TARPS package.” TARPS stood for tactical air reconnaissance pods. Each pod contained two cameras and an infrared line scanner.
Cuba is an island surrounded by islands, over sixteen hundred of them. Most of the islands on Cuba’s north shore are small, uninhabited, rocky bits of tropical paradise, or so they looked to Jake Grafton, who saw them through binoculars from the front seat of an F-14.
The ship was about three miles offshore, stranded on rocks that just pierced the surface of the sea. The breaking surf looked white through the binoculars.
The freighter was plainly visible, listing slightly. Some of the weapons containers were visible on the main deck. Jake checked the photo in his lap, which was taken yesterday by an F/A-18 Hornet pilot with a hand-held 35-mm camera. Yep, the containers visible in the photo were still in place aboard the ship.
Although the Cubans claimed a twelve-mile territorial limit, the United States recognized but three. Nuestra Señora de Colón was stranded on a reef in international waters, the AIs assured Jake. They had checked with the State Department, they said.
South of the ship was the entrance to Bahia de Nipe, a decent-sized shallow-water bay.
Was the ship on her way into the bay when she went on the rocks?
Jake was making his initial photo passes a mile to seaward of the Colón. In the event the Cubans chose to send interceptors to chase him away, he had a flight of F-14s ten miles farther north providing cover. Above them was an EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare airplane, listening for and ready to jam any Cuban fire-control radar that came on the air. According to the electronic warfare detection gear in Jake’s cockpit, he was being painted only by search radars. That, as he well knew, could change any second.
He had just completed a photo pass from west to east and was turning to seaward when the E-2 came on the air. “Battlestar One, we have company. Bogey twenty miles west of your posit, heading your way. Looks like a Fulcrum.” A Fulcrum was a MiG-29.
Jake keyed his radio mike. “Roger that: I’ll make one more photo pass before he gets here, then exit the area to the north.”
He tucked the nose down and let the Tomcat accelerate. The plane was alive in his hand — the descending jet bumped and bounced in the swirling, roiling tropical air under the puffy cumulus clouds drifting along on the trade wind.
“Cameras are on and running,” Toad Tarkington said from the back seat.
Staying just outside the three-mile limit, Jake flew past the stern of the stranded freighter one more time, which meant he was probably getting fine views of her stern and oblique views of her flanks.
“Since we’re here …” he muttered, and dropped a wing as he eased the stick and throttles forward.
In the back seat, Toad Tarkington was monitoring the recon package. “I sure am glad we’re staying out of Cuban airspace,” he told Jake. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable outside the twelve-mile limit, but that’s asking too much of this technology. A ship sitting on the rocks like this, looks like a setup to me. They’re looking to mousetrap some dude flying by snapping pictures and perforate his heinie.”
“Yeah,” said Jake Grafton, and leveled off at a hundred feet above the water. He had the F-14 flying parallel with the axis of the ship, offset with the ship to his right since the recon package was mounted under his right engine.
“Got the cameras and IR scanner going?”
“Oh, yeah, looking real good,” Toad said, just as he picked up the seascape passing by the canopy with his peripheral vision. He looked right just in time to see the freighter flash by, then Jake Grafton pulled back on the stick and lit the afterburners. The Tomcat’s nose rose to sixty degrees above the horizon and it went up like a rocket, corkscrewing back toward the ocean, as the E-2 Hawkeye radar operator called the bogey for the Showtime F-14 crews who were Jake’s armed guard. Both RIOs said they had the bogey on radar.
“Like I said,” Toad told Jake, “sure is great we’re staying outside Cuban airspace.”
“Great,” his pilot agreed.
“Don’t want to piss anybody off.”
“Oh, no.”
“Wonder why that ship ended up where it did?”
“Maybe the photos will tell us.”
“Bogey is six miles aft, Battlestar One,” the E-2 Hawkeye radar operator said, “four hundred knots, closing from your eight o’clock.”
“You wanna turn toward him, Admiral, let me pick him up on the radar?” Toad asked this question.
“No, let’s clear to seaward.”
“I got him visual,” Toad said as the Tomcat climbed past fifteen thousand feet. “He’s a little above us, pulling lead.”
“Pulling lead?” Jake looked over his left shoulder, found the MiG-29.
“He could take a gunshot anytime,” Toad said.
“He’s rendezvousing,” Jake said, “Gonna join on our left wing, looks like.”
And that is what the MiG did. He closed gently, his nose well out in front, his axis almost parallel, a classic rendezvous. The MiG stabilized in a parade position, about four feet between wingtips, stepped down perhaps three feet. Despite the bumpy air the MiG held position effortlessly.
Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington sat staring at the helmeted figure of Carlos Corrado in the other cockpit. Toad lifted his 35-mm camera, snapped off a dozen photos of the Cuban fighter and the two air-to-air missiles hanging on the racks.
“Think he knows we were inside the three-mile limit?” Toad asked Jake.
“His GCI controller told him, probably.”
Corrado stayed glued to the F-14. He paid no attention to the other Tomcats that came swooping in to join the formation, didn’t even bother to glance at them.
Jake Grafton slowly advanced his throttles to 95 percent RPM. The MiG was right with him. Leaving the power set, he got the nose coming up, began to roll away from the MiG, up and over to the inverted and right on through, coming on with the G to keep the nose from scooping out … a medium-sloppy barrel roll.
Now a barrel roll to the left. The two F-14s behind Carlos Corrado moved into trail position, behind and stepped down slightly, to more easily stay with the maneuvering airplanes, but Corrado held his position in left parade as if he were welded there.
Now a loop. Up, up, up and over the top, G increasing down the backside, the sea and sky changing position very nicely, the sun dancing across the cockpit.
“This guy’s pretty good,” Toad remarked grudgingly.
“Pretty good?”
“Okay, he’s a solid stick.”
Now a half loop and half roll at the top, fly along straight and level for a count of five, roll again and half turn into a lopsided split S, one offset from the vertical by forty-five degrees. Coming out of the dive Jake let the nose climb until it was pointed straight up; he slowly rolled around his axis, then pulled the plane on over onto its back and waited until the nose was forty-five degrees below the horizon before rolling wings level and beginning his pullout. Through it all Carlos Corrado stayed glued in position on Jake’s wing.
Coming out of the last maneuver, Jake Grafton turned eastward. The MiG-29 stayed with the American fighters for fifteen more minutes, until the flight was near the eastern tip of Cuba, Cape Maisi, and turning south. Only then did Carlos Corrado wave at Jake and Toad and lower his nose to cross under the F-14.
Out of the corner of his eye Jake saw Toad salute the MiG pilot as he turned away to the west.
“Wonder why that ship ended up on those rocks?” Toad Tarkington mused aloud. Jake Grafton, Gil Pascal, Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, Toad, and several of the photo interpretation specialists were bent over a table in the Air Intelligence spaces studying the photographs from the F-14’s reconnaissance pod.