Woods was tired of getting beaten up for trying to do his job. “We’re slamming our heads against the wall, Skipper. You’ve seen the BDA photos. We’re just blowing up rocks—”
“Then that’s what we do until we’re told to do something diff—”
“Yes, sir, but I had an idea.”
“The 28.”
“Yes, sir. Why not? It’s made for this!”
“Maybe. But who the hell do you think you are contacting the Air Force? What were you thinking about?”
“I thought the Gunner was going to contact a friend of his at Eglin. Unofficially. E-mail. I thought he was going to check on availability. How practical it would be. See if there are any around, and if they could get shipped out here. I didn’t think he’d make an official request.” Woods began to breathe more normally. He tried to relax, but one look at Bark’s face as he stood over him with his hands on his hips would deter the most ambitious. “If I had come to you the first thing you’d have wanted to know is whether it can really be done. Are the weapons there, can they be shipped, how long would it take. I was trying to find out first whether it was a stupid idea. If it was, I didn’t need to bother you with it. I never intended—”
Bark was not humored. “It’s never your bright ideas that get you in trouble, it’s your disregard for the chain of command. You see senior officers as a nuisance. You—”
“No, sir—”
“Shut up! Let me finish. You see senior officers as functionaries. They do their jobs, but aren’t courageous or smart like you. You use the chain of command only when you want someone to do something for you. Never to filter your brilliant ideas and tell you that they’re bullshit. Which some of them are. All of us have bullshit ideas, Trey. That’s why we have to tell them to others in the Navy, to keep a stupid idea from becoming something that kills us. Senior officers make mistakes too, but they’ve got a lot of experience and usually a staff to help them. You don’t have a damned staff, Trey. Quit acting like you run the show here. It’s what keeps you from being a 4.0 officer. You’re 4.0 in almost everything. But when it comes to doing things the way they should be done, through proper channels, you’re about 2.0. You following me?”
“Yes.” He purposely didn’t add the “sir.” It was his small way of registering a protest. He pushed back a little. “Do you want me to tell the Gunner to stop asking?”
Bark sat down in the chair next to Woods. He didn’t want to acknowledge that Woods’s latest renegade idea had any merit, but he also knew it did. It annoyed the hell out of him to admit it, and he knew he would even have to ask about it. He had no choice. “What’s the status?”
“Gunner is supposed to hear back within the hour. He contacted him by e-mail. He’ll get the gouge.”
“Who did you have in mind to carry this pig of a bomb?”
“Me. Us.”
“We’re not certified.”
“The testing was done. I saw the results. Tom Stenner did the testing. You know him? He’s at the RAG now.” Stenner was an instructor pilot at the F-14 RAG, the Replacement Air Group where new pilots and RI0s were taught to fly the Tomcat.
“Sure. TPS grad.” Test Pilot School, one of the most highly respected jobs in Navy Air.
“Exactly. He said it’s heavy and tricky, but drag, fuel, and performance characteristics were the same as if carrying two two-thousand-pounders. I e-mailed him this morning to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. He still had the test specs on his laptop in a PowerPoint presentation. He sent them to me in his return e-mail.” Woods opened the desk drawer slowly. He pulled out the copy of the PowerPoint presentation he had printed out and handed it to Bark. “Here it is.”
Bark glanced at it and handed it back to Woods. “When did he do the tests?”
“Five years ago.”
“Anything since?”
“No, sir. Wasn’t ever funded.”
“F-18 ever drop it?”
“No, sir. Never been done.”
“So if anyone’s going to do it, it’s got to be us.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly. And I’ve done the flight planning.”
“Shit, Trey, there you go—”
“No, just to see if it can be done. See if we can get there.”
“Get where?”
“Alamut.”
“That’s in Iran.”
“Yes, sir. Four hundred fifty miles one way.”
“And then what? Drop it into a mountain?”
“No, sir. Drop it exactly where it needs to be.”
“How?”
“Our LANTIRN may be able to do it. But the best way is to have somebody on the ground.”
“I’ll bet you have a plan.”
Woods lowered his voice and glanced over his shoulder. “I figure somebody’s already on the ground.”
“Where do you get that?”
“Reading between the lines on the message we got, watching Pritch’s face when I asked her—”
“Good—”
“The only way anyone could really know the Sheikh is there is if they had seen him. There’s no way a satellite is going to tell us that that one person is there.” His eyes grew darker as he moved closer to Bark. “Someone’s looking at him. Either one of ours, or someone friendly. Either way, he may have the ability to lase the target for us.”
“Dare I ask,” Bark said, with deep annoyance, “what you have in mind this time?”
“I asked Pritch to push the question uphill. Find out if what I suspect is true.”
“Damn it!” Bark exclaimed. “You don’t screw with intelligence, Trey! They don’t even like people to ask whether they have someone on the ground. They don’t want anyone to know if they do.”
“That’s what she said. But I thought this might be the one time where intelligence is actually good for something.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Woods nodded. He could feel his Commanding Officer relax. Bark was on his side again.
The SDO interrupted them from the front. “Skipper, Commander Chase is on the phone for you.”
Chase was the Strike Ops Officer, the one in charge of final strike planning and targeting. He was also in charge of the ATO, the Air Tasking Order that designated when and where everything that flew went. It had airplanes, ordnance, fuel, and target information included on one document. When the Air Force arrived to join the fight, they would be on the ATO and would probably control it.
Bark stood and stepped toward the front of the ready room, then turned back. “Anything else I should know?”
Woods hated the timing. “I stopped to see him to ask him the feasibility of a two-plane strike on the flight plan tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow?” Bark asked, shocked. He walked toward the SDO’s desk muttering under his breath. He stopped again and spoke to Woods. “Don’t do anything, or talk to anybody about this, until you talk to me about it.” Bark hesitated as something occurred to him. He looked at Woods, his eyes brighter than they had been one minute before. “I want you and Big to plan on going. If it’s going forward, I want to see the final planning before we approach anybody. And I want Wink doing the planning. At least I can trust him not to fake the gas figures.”
Woods watched Bark walk away. He had gone from being furious with Woods to handing him the biggest, most important mission the squadron had ever flown without any explanation. Woods pondered what it meant, but finally quit, accepting the gift horse for what it was.