“Do you see any guns, Reed,” Jake asked as he concentrated on the attitude instruments and fought the temptation to roll the plane to put the flare directly overhead.
“Nope.” Reed had never removed his head from the hood. He was staring at the IR scope, using the camera’s lens magnification to see much more than Jake could with the naked eye.
The flare was drifting beneath them now, which increased Jake’s disorientation. He kept the plane circling and limited himself to peeks at the boat. He toggled the stick trigger and glanced at the IR display, remembering to cross-check the gyro and the other flight instruments as he did so. He was perspiring profusely. This was hairy, dangerous flying. Any mistake would be fatal.
“Strike, Shotgun,” Jake said. “The surface bogey has something we can’t identify on his deck. No guns visible. He’s headed your way, over.”
“Concur.” The ship also had him on radar. “Drop another flare.”
Jake put the plane in a climb while Reed reset the armament panel. Dropping flares was not going to solve the admiral’s problem. If the boat had a missile and got within range of the American ship, their close-in weapons systems, the Phalanxes, would have to knock the missile down before it reached its target. These automated guns were aimed by computers and each of them fired fifty very heavy bullets a second at the incoming missile.
The Phalanxes had better work, Jake whispered to himself. He knew Cowboy Parker was at this very moment thinking the very same thing as he stared at the NTDS displays, weighed the options, and maneuvered his forces. Aircraft, ships, guns, missiles, and lives — many lives — men with moms and wives or sweethearts, men with pasts and maybe futures, all packed into these gray ships on this dark sea. And Rear Admiral Earl Parker was the officer responsible for them all. To shoot or not to shoot? Justified or unjustified? Decisions made in seconds would be weighed for weeks by men who had never made a life-or-death decision in their lives, politicians who read the newspapers and keep wetted fingers permanently aloft.
When the second flare was burning, Jake carefully descended again and circled the boat at 500 feet, about four miles away, just as he did the last time. He was far enough away that he was invisible to the men on the boat, hidden in the darkness beyond the flare’s light.
The boat maintained its course toward the task force.
Jake thoughtfully fingered the wing fuel-dump switch, checked the small needle on the fuel gauge, then toggled it. He watched the gauge as three thousand pounds of wing fuel ran out into the atmosphere. He listened to Strike directing the other A-6, now airborne, to a holding fix. When the wing fuel was gone, Jake closed the dump valves. Without the wing fuel the plane would maneuver better, and there was less chance of an explosion if a flak shell went through the wing.
“You ready?” Jake asked Reed.
“For what?”
Jake turned on the exterior lights. He cranked on a four-G turn and pointed the plane’s nose at the boat. The radio altimeter warning sounded. He didn’t have time to reset it.
Down they came, 400 feet, 300, the throttles forward against the stops. He leveled at 250 feet, two miles from the boat. Above them shone the ghastly white light of the magnesium flare.
A string of tracers reached for the cockpit from straight ahead. “He’s shooting!” Reed shouted in disbelief.
Jake rolled hard right and flipped off the lights with his left hand. He kept the nose coming up and the turn in. The tracer stream weaved, trying to correct. It was a belt-fed weapon, maybe 14.5-millimeter.
The shells reached for them, crossing just under the plane. Jake was rolling and jinking, turning hard to get away from the boat and the gun.
The gunner was shooting bursts of five or six shells. God, they were close!
Jake jammed the stick forward and they floated under negative G as the streaks crossed above the cockpit. As the end of a tracer string went by he hauled the stick aft and began a four-G pull up, toward the clouds above.
Reed was on the radio, “He’s shooting.” His voice had gone up an octave.
Now they were up into the clouds, which glowed from the flare underneath.
Jake kept climbing. “Well,” he said to the bombardier.
“It sure as hell ain’t no fishing boat.”
“Battlestar Strike, Shotgun. We took some tracer fire from the bogey, which appears to be some kind of speedboat. It has no fishing gear or missiles that we could see, but it’s carrying an X-band radar, which it’s using occasionally. Tracers were probably fourteen point five mike mike, over. Looks like he’s laying his gun with some kind of an optical night-sight, over.”
“Roger. Your vector One Eight Zero degrees.” Jake pulled the throttles back and soared to 3,000 feet, where he leveled and turned to southern heading.
“Do you think we’ll have to bomb it?” Reed asked.
“I suspect so,” Grafton replied. He didn’t think the admiral had any other choice, except possibly sink it with naval gunfire. And every mile the boat closed the task group increased the missile threat to the ships.
Twenty miles south of the target Jake swung the plane around and Reed checked that the computer crosshairs, the cursors, were still on the boat. The boat was still on a westerly heading.
“What’s the bogey’s speed?” Jake asked.
“About nineteen knots, sir.” At last, Grafton noted, Reed thought he was worth a ‘sir.’”
“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sink the bogey. I repeat, sink the bogey. Use Rockeye, over.”
“Understand sink it with Rockeye.”
“That’s affirmative.” Apparently the admiral didn’t want to expend this million-dollar Harpoon missile Jake was carrying. A penny saved …
Jake set up the armament panel to train off all eight of the Rockeye canisters, two at a time. He deselected the flares on station two and selected stations one and five, where the cluster bombs hung. Each of the Rockeye canisters contained two hundred forty-six 1.7-pound bomblets. After the canister was dropped, it would open in midair and the bomblets would disperse into an oval pattern. Each bomblet contained a shaped charge that could penetrate nine inches of cold-rolled steel. Reed was watching him. The BN inadvertently keyed his ICS mike and Jake could hear his heavy breathing. He was muttering to himself, “Jeesuss, ooooh Jeesuss …”
“You ready?” Jake asked as the nose came around toward the target.
“Yessir.”
Jake jammed the throttles to the stops and centered the steering. “Shotgun’s starting the bomb run,” he reported to Strike.
“He’s still heading west and I’m in attack,” Reed said.
“Expect him to turn as we close. Go for a radar lock. Forget the FLIR.”
The X-band warning lit as they passed ten miles inbound. Jake punched chaff and held the plane steady.
The ADI on the panel in front of him was alive with computer symbology which gave him steering commands, time to go to release, drift angle, and relative position of the target. Jake concentrated on keeping the plane level and the steering centered. At five miles to go he pulled the commit trigger on the stick and held it. The weapons would be released by the computer when the aircraft arrived at the release point, that precise point in space where the computer calculated the bombs would fall upon the target given the aircraft’s height, speed, and heading.
The glare from another string of tracers reflected through the clouds. The weaving yellow finger probed for the aircraft, searching like the antennae of a hungry insect, as Jake punched chaff and checked the computer steering against the glow of the rising fireballs. Dead ahead. The gunner was firing blindly, Jake decided. He concentrated on the ADI as the release symbol on the display marched down.