“The Serbs managed it,” Kyra said. “They shot one down near Sarajevo.”
“Dumb luck with an assist from our stupidity,” Jonathan said. “Orders forced the pilots to fly the same approach routes from Aviano every night, so the Serbs had a pretty good idea where to point their radar.”
“Any of those three would stick in the Pentagon’s craw,” Kyra admitted.
“It’s great fun being the only person with a particular technology. It stops being fun the moment someone else gets it,” Jonathan agreed. “The question is how do we prove any of this.”
“That one’s easy.” Kyra put her head down and smiled slightly. “We go out there and debrief Pioneer.”
Jonathan rocked back in his chair, surprised at the suggestion. “You’re serious?”
“Better to interview the asset in person than just read somebody else’s reports about it. Let’s cut out the middleman.” And get out of this office.
The senior analyst cocked an eyebrow. “There’s no way with PLA tanks rolling that NCS is going to let a pair of analysts go to China to talk to one of their prize assets.”
Coward. Cynic? The two were not mutually exclusive, though Kyra suspected that only the latter was true. There was no question about that one. “It’ll never happen if we don’t ask.”
“Feel free,” Jonathan replied without hesitation. “While you’re tilting at windmills, see if you can get NCS to cough up copies of those disks that Pioneer handed over.”
Captain (USN) Moshe Nagin rolled the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter ten degrees to give him a wider view of USS Abraham Lincoln. Truth be told, and he never admitted it to his fellow naval aviators, he hated trapping on aircraft carriers. Landing a jet fighter on a moving Nimitz-class carrier at night in a squall was a task so hard it made grown men want to wet their pants, and it never got easy with practice. Runways are supposed to sit still and be a mile long. Landing on a ship’s deck that was only five hundred feet long and moving at thirty knots was unnatural, and his life depended on some too-young-to-drink boatswain’s mate below decks setting the proper tension on the deck cables. Too little tension on the wires and the plane would roll off into the water. Too much and only divine intervention would keep the cable from ripping the tailhook out of the plane. The other possibilities all involved varying amounts of burning jet fuel, live ordnance, and pilot spread over the deck.
Nagin looked past the Lincoln and picked out an HH-60H Seahawk flying its own pattern low and slow. Some of his younger pilots mocked the helo pilots, as though flying jets was the only job on a carrier that mattered, but time would solve that. Bold pilots sometimes got to be old pilots only through the gracious courtesy of helo search and rescue teams. He had found religion the first time a Seahawk had pulled him out of the water. One of the engines on his first Hornet malfunctioned a half second into a catapult launch, rupturing the cowling and sending shrapnel into the other. The catapult had obediently thrown his Hornet off the carrier anyway. Nagin ejected just before the plane hit the Persian Gulf. The Seahawk crew that lifted him from the water hadn’t even cracked a joke about his flying skills, and that earned them a share of the love he otherwise saved for his wife.
“Break to line up,” the landing signal officer ordered through his helmet. Nagin sucked in a breath of sterile, recycled air through his mask and pulled the plane into a turn, rolling hard left.
“Call the ball,” the LSO said.
Nagin sought out the “meatball” light on the port side. The yellow dot emitted by the Fresnel lens was agreeably where it was supposed to be, sitting between horizontal green lights above and below. He was riding the glide slope straight as a ruler.
“Fencer eight-zero-one, juliet sierra foxtrot ball, eight-point-eight,” Nagin called out.
“Roger ball,” the LSO acknowledged.
Nagin held the turn until he’d come around 180 degrees from his previous course, then rolled the plane level. Lincoln was ahead and the absurdly short runway was a thousand feet below and moving to the right. Nagin corrected for the drift and nudged the nose up a bit to kill some speed. The LSO stayed silent — Nagin’s best indication that he wasn’t completely screwing up.
The exact moment the landing gear hit the deck was always a surprise. The plane touched down moving at a hair under 150 miles per hour. White smoke poured off the tires as the rubber went molten from the friction, and for a moment the plane was sliding on liquid made from its own wheels. Nagin jammed the throttle full forward and heard the F-35’s single engine scream as it spooled up to full power.
Inertia threw Nagin against his harness, and he knew that the tailhook had caught a wire — the number three — which held with the right amount of tension. His speed dropped, the tires stopped melting, and they caught traction on the nonskid deck. Nagin yanked the throttle back, the engine went quiet, and his speed went to zero.
It wasn’t the moment to relax. The carrier deck was a busy and cramped space, and it wouldn’t do to drive the new stealth fighter into the water. His shoulders ached where the harness had pressed into the muscle. He wondered if he’d bruised them again.
Lincoln’s hangar deck reeked of jet fuel. Everyone aboard ended up in the hangar sooner or later, where the smell of refined hydrocarbons attached itself to their clothing, and they carried the odor out to their shipmates like missionaries spreading the gospel. Rear Admiral Alton Pollard had lived a quarter century on carriers, which was long enough for his mind to learn to ignore the smell the same way it ignored the feeling of clothing on his skin. He had to think about the odor to notice it, and it was smarter not to think about it.
The hangar deck was almost 700 feet long and 110 wide but still felt cramped when more than a few fighters were parked inside. The new F-35s were off the hardtop above and more than a few off-duty sailors were down to see the planes. The Lightning II was clearly American, looked like a fighter, but it was not fearsome. What’s scarier? the Pentagon desk pilots had reasoned. The plane they see up close in combat or the one they never see coming at all? But in the back of Pollard’s mind something nagged at him, telling him that a psychological weapon had been lost. Maybe he was just finally old enough that he couldn’t embrace change with any enthusiasm. He shook his head, cleared his mind, and approached the senior pilot, who was holding class on the new plane with enlisted sailors young enough to be his children.
“Admiral.” Nagin’s posture straightened and he gestured to the F-35. “The replacement for the Hornet,” he said. “What do you think?” The senior pilot aboard was still dressed in his flight suit and cradling his helmet in his arm like a football. As commander, air group (CAG), Nagin had exactly one superior aboard. Pollard was the only man who outranked him. The admiral thought a CAG had the best job in the Navy, had been one himself, and missed the job most days. Nagin had the privileges of elevated rank and still got to fly a fighter every day. Being the commanding officer of a battle group had its own rewards, but they never quite equaled the logging of flight hours in the cockpit.