Rabies didn’t like it much, but on balance it made little difference. After all, if he wanted to head back to ship, there wasn’t much anybody was going to do to stop him.
“Nothing yet,” the bored voice of the TACCO replied. “Let’s give this pattern another fifteen minutes, then move it to the south a bit. They may be near the entrance, lurking around that new pipeline down there.”
“Roger,” Rabies said cheerfully. He glanced at his copilot, a young woman on her first cruise. “It’s always like this, you know. Like watching grass grow.”
“Could be worse. We could be assigned surface surveillance,” she answered.
Rabies shuddered. “Bite your tongue.” There were few things that the Viking pilot liked less than flying down near to the surface and buzzing commercial ships looking for identifying characteristics and recording the rigging. For one thing, whoever painted the ships usually had lousy handwriting. And for another, it wasn’t that unusual to find that some nations made frequent military use of their commercial fleets. All too often, there was some raghead hiding behind a couple of containers with a Stinger propped up on his shoulder ready to take out the first American he saw.
No, hunting submarines was what they were for. But the youngsters had to do their time on surface surveillance and taking tracking — he had put his time in when he was a junior pilot.
“Rabies, head south,” the TACCO said, his voice a notch higher than it had been before. “You got the mark.” A new symbol appeared on Rabies’s display, indicating a fly-to point from the TACCO.
“You got something?” he asked.
“Maybe. Faint indications of a diesel engine — it fits for the one they may have on board, according to the intelligence summary. But it’s real intermittent and long-range — we won’t know until we get closer. It’s worth looking at, though.”
That final assessment, Rabies knew, came from the enlisted technicians. Although the TACCO was in tactical command and Rabies might be the pilot in charge, all the people on board knew who really held the keys to their success. It was the first-class petty officer seated next to the TACCO, the one with the finely trained eyes and ears who could sniff out the sound patterns made by machinery from among noise, signals from noise, submarines from surface ships, and friend from enemy.
AW-1 Greenberg, the antisubmarine warfare specialist flying this mission with them, was exceptionally good, even among the elite community of aviation subhunters. He had recently completed a tour with the intelligence staff in San Diego, and was completely familiar with all the intelligence that was too highly classified to ever make it to the fleet. That was probably why the XO had him on this mission, hoping they could pull something out of their ass on this one. Because if there was anything that made a carrier nervous, it was having undetected submarines in the area. What you couldn’t see, you couldn’t kill, and the only thing that worried them more than submarines was chemical or biological weapons.
“Dropping two,” Rabies said, nodding at the copilot. She dropped a sonobouy at the indicated point, then watched as he navigated from point to point as directed by the TACCO. When he finished, the electronic plot indicated a long line of sonobuoys.
“All buoys cold and sweet,” Greenberg reported, indicating that each of the new sonobuoys deployed was working properly but not detecting any contacts. “Hold it—got it. Buoy thirty-four, sir. Buster.” Buster meant bust your ass getting there.
“Let’s go get them,” Rabies said gleefully. He put the Viking into a sharp turn heading east. They were at the very edge of their assigned area, maybe just a touch closer to the coast than he would like, but well outside of the known Iraqi shore-based missile ranges.
Known ranges. He wondered if anyone else noticed that little phrase.
“I’m holding a diesel engine, a couple of pumps, sir,” Greenberg said, his tension evident only in the fact that his voice was a little faster than normal. “Could we make a pass and check out the surface?”
“You got it,” Rabies said, putting the aircraft into a descent. It was a sanity check of sorts, to take a good look at the surface of the ocean where you thought you had a submarine to make sure there were no ships in the area that corresponded to it. It was an especially necessary precaution in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf, all of which had heavy merchant traffic.
Thor sat ramrod straight in his ejection seat, his head turned so that he could watch the catapult officer. He circled the stick, got a thumbs-up in return, and nodded with grim satisfaction. Of course the Hornet’s control surfaces worked well. They always did. The light, easily maintained fighter was always in perfect condition — at least, the ones that he flew were. The Marine Corps quality-assurance technicians made certain of that.
On signal, he eased the throttles forward to full military power. They clicked past the detente and into afterburner. The catapult officer stood, snapped off a sharp, proper salute, then crouched down and touched the deck and pressed the pickle. In the space of a microsecond, Thor returned the salute, faced forward, and braced himself.
As always, the first jolt was hardly impressive. An instant later, what began as a gentle jolt changed into crushing pressure on his chest as the light fighter slammed down the catapult. The Hornet rattled, steam boiling up from the shuttle, clumsy and ungainly while still bound to the carrier by the shuttle, yearning to be away from the steel and in her natural element. Finally, when the noise had built to an almost unbearable level, he felt the sudden, sickening drop and release of pressure that told him he was airborne.
Now, the trick was to stay that way. He let her grab the air and pick up speed before putting her in a steep climb, heading for altitude to wait for his wingman to join on him. Ten seconds later, he heard the announcement that his wingman was airborne. Precise, exactly as scheduled — just the way the Marine Corps liked it.
They joined up with the ease of two pilots long used to working with each other and headed for the fighter sponge. It was a designated bit of airspace where the fighters would assemble in an orderly stack, waiting till the flight was at full composition, then breaking off into fighting pairs to seek out and engage the enemy. It took far less time to actually execute than explain, and soon Hornets were peeling away from the stack.
“Hornet 102, vector. Bearing zero-seven-zero, range ten. Probable Forger. Good hunting.” The E-2’s voice reeled off initial vectors for the rest of the flight, disbursing them along different angles of the approaching wave of aircraft.
“Going to be hot,” Red Tail remarked. “Damned SAM sites. They ought to let Special Forces loose on them.” Understood, but not voiced, was the assumption that if Marine units had been ordered to destroy or neutralize the SAM sites, there would have been no question about it.
“Just like playing dodge-’em ball in grade school,” Thor said. “You ever play that?”
“No, not that I recall. What was it?”
“You take about thirty of those damn red bouncy balls, you know, the kind you never see anywhere except grade school. Maybe a volleyball or two. Put them all in the center of the gym and divide the kids up into two sides. At the whistle, everybody races out and grabs a ball, streaks back to the line, and then does his damnedest to nail somebody on the other side with a ball. Hell of a lot of fun, as long as you keep moving.”
“I like the sound of that,” his wingman said, his voice studiedly casual. They both knew they were simply making conversation for something to do while they waited. “Maybe we should get a gang up on the flight deck to play.”
“No. Have to be the hanger bay. We’d lose too many balls over the side.”