And not to Admiral Magruder. The unvoiced caveat was clear.
No one moved. All eyes were fixed on Tombstone. While the habit of obedience was deeply ingrained, so was the loyalty they felt to this one man, the one who’d brought them safely home from so many other battles.
Tombstone sat immobile and considered his options. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Right now, right here, Arkady was challenging him. And in front of his own people.
Yet not his people, not this time. He felt the cheap paper of the message slide between his fingers, negating anything he could possibly say about the procedures Arkady had outlined. As wrong as it felt, and terribly wrong — Arkady was right.
Tombstone gave a small nod, an almost imperceptible inclination of his head. He felt the tension in the room break as each officer realized that while they might some day be called to choose sides, to make hard decisions, it wouldn’t be just now. That moment was postponed — not finally settled, but at least held in abeyance while they occupied themselves with matters that they knew better.
Arkady beamed in triumph. “Well, then.” He turned to Colonel Zentos, who was standing off to one side. “My chief of staff will conduct the remainder of the briefing. I will see you in battle, my comrades.” He turned and left the room, leaving a deeply worried Tombstone behind him.
The noise of forty aircraft in various stages of startup flooded across the tarmac, warm and welcome to Thor’s ears. There was nothing like it, not even on the flight deck of a carrier. This was a real strike.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” The Marine Corps lieutenant colonel assigned to the detachment was blunt. “They blow the SAR effort last mission and expect us to roger up on following them in again.” He pulled his shoulders back and stuck his chest out. “At least there’s some serious SAR planning this time. And better intelligence on the SAM sites.”
“We asked for that last time,” Thor said. Maybe the bird colonel could extract more information from Arkady’s staff than Thor had been able to, but he doubted it. Their orders were clear — regardless of how they personally felt about the mission that had been laid out for them, the president had made his wishes clear.
Not that there was much to complain about in the mission planning. On the face of it, it seemed competently done. A wave of Tomahawk missiles to soften up the area, specially targeted to seek out suspected command and control points. Then electronics birds with HARM missiles leading the charge, taking out any remaining radar sites to avoid a repetition of the disaster of the first strike. Two waves of fighters again, the first composed of Greek aircraft, the second a mixed bag of U.S. and other forces. A final sweep through by a couple of Tomcats, one loaded with TARPS, the other with dumb bombs and orders to pick up any targets that the more structured waves had missed. A couple of drones for BDA, some of the high-tech ones that had been flooding the fleet since Hong Kong. He wondered a little at that, exposing that much advanced technology to possible compromise.
Five SAR helos, all with fighter protection. The Americans had drawn four of those assignments in addition to their attack tasking. Special forces on standby for any hostile extractions. Even the Marines hadn’t been able to find much fault with that part of the plan.
The only real problem was the attack itself. The whole thing was starting to remind Thor entirely too much of Vietnam. Telling who was a civilian and who was a combatant was the first problem. The second was that rebel forces such as the Macedonians rarely operated out of fixed positions. Sure, there’d be some structures that could be identified as command centers. But if the Macedonians had any sense, their actual commanders would be somewhere else.
Thor started his walk-around of the aircraft, running through the checklist. Some people might skimp on the routine items, counting on the ground crew to catch any major problems, but not a Marine. And most particularly, not this Marine.
Finally, he was ready. He popped down the first rung of the boarding ladder and started crawling up the side of the Hornet. Her skin felt smooth and thin under his fingers. He pulled himself up and over the edge of the cockpit, easing down into his seat. A plane captain followed him up and helped him buckle in. At the last moment, the young corporal pulled the safety pins from the ejection mechanism.
“Semper Fi, sir,” he said.
“Semper Fi, Marine.” Thor flipped open the pre-start checklist, worked his way through it, then followed the corporal’s hand signal to start engines. When they were both, major and corporal, completely satisfied that the Hornet was good to go, the corporal snapped into a picture perfect salute. Thor returned it from the cockpit and released the brakes.
“This one’s for you, Murph,” he said aloud as he taxied toward the runway. “And for me.”
The ship rocked slightly in the gentle current. She was making bare steerageway, just enough forward speed to enable her to retain rudder control in case she needed to maneuver. At two knots, she seemed to rest gently upon the surface of the ocean rather than steam through it.
“All stations report ready, Captain,” the TAO said.
Captain Daniel Heather nodded. “Any last words from UNFOR?”
“No, sir.” The TAO held up a sheet of paper. “The last message we got was that the strike was airborne and would remain in orbit over the airfield until we’d launched.”
“Very well.” Captain Heather glanced at the chronometer on the wall, then double-checked the time displayed on the edge of the computer screen. “Thirty seconds, I make it.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waited, watching the digital figures click over on the screen. A routine launch — if any weapon launched in anger could be called routine. But if anything, there was less tension in Combat than there’d been during their last exercise firing. Then the spacious compartment had been stuffed with civilians, contractors, and CRUDES staff all wanting to offer their opinions and assistance.
Assistance. More like a pain in the ass than anything. In Navy tradition, it was one of the three great lies in the world: “I’m from the staff, I’m here to help.” What they were really there to do was grade the entire ship on how the evolution was conducted, looking at everything from how well the watchstanders in Combat did their jobs to whether the galley managed to get meals on the table on time.
Well, this time there was just one grading criteria. And that was how well JPJ put a huge, smoking hole in one particular spot in the ground.
In actual fact, the Tomahawks were relatively easy to fire. A separate weapons console housed the software, but the actual targeting package for the terrain-following missing was loaded into the missile from a CD. The shape of the terrain, the points it could check its flight path against, the speed of the missile, all were out of the control of the ship. As long as they were in the basket, in the piece of area designated as the launch area, and as long as they got the weapon off on time, everything should go just according to plan.
“Ten seconds,” the TAO announced. “Weapons free. Tomahawk, you have permission to fire.”
“Permission to fire, aye, sir.” The petty officer first class perched on a stool in front of the Tomahawk Engagement Console, or TEC, had his finger poised over the keyboard. “Five seconds, sir.”
The final moments clicked by without incident. A low shudder ran through the ship and a faint ringing as the launch warning buzzer on the forecastle sounded. It was almost anticlimactic when the petty officer announced, “Missile away, sir.”