With another part of his head Hot Rock kept track of other reports flashing over the air. Splash one, splash two, splash three Flankers. Then a Mayday. One American down. Another. Mayday. Mayday. Unimaginable to bail out in these weather conditions; what hope of surviving the trip down, far less being in the water?
Don’t think about that. Do your job. Fly, watch, fire. Follow the leader.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Missile blips appearing unexpectedly on the radar screen, other blips disappearing. Vipers disappearing.
“The stealth bogey,” Hot Rock blurted over ICS. “Two Tone, that UAV they briefed us about, it’s here. It’s taking people out left and — ”
“Do your job, goddammit!” Two Tone snarled. “Stop trying to figure out — ”
The blip appeared and vanished from his HUD almost before it registered on his eye. At the same time, Neanderthal’s blip disappeared, too. There was a throbbing glow in the clouds, swiftly consumed by darkness.
“Neanderthal!” Hot Rock shouted. No response.
Then came Two Tone’s cry from the backseat: “Shit, Hot Rock, get us out of here! That thing’s gonna be after us next!”
But Hot Rock had noticed something. A pattern in the vanished Vipers. The UAV was cutting straight across the Americans, from east to west. Nothing fancy. Locating American aircraft and firing at them from very close range.
Hot Rock saw this, and once he did, it was his responsibility. He owned it. He had to do something about it.
“Shut up, Two Tone,” he said, and banked hard to the right. Now, instead of staring at his HUD, he gazed through it. Let his eyes take in the radar information peripherally, while he searched for holes and gaps in the clouds.
And he saw it. Briefly, almost hallucinogenically, the UAV was there, swimming like a great sea creature through the sky. And Hot Rock remembered something from the briefing: Like American stealth aircraft, the UAVs had their engine exhausts located on top, where they could not be easily spotted by ground-based infrared detectors. But airborne sensors were a different matter….
“Fox One!” he cried, and triggered a Sidewinder. The missile hurtled off his left wingtip, unraveling a garland of smoke behind it as it went, and curved toward the bogey. Instantly, the bogey nosed over in a maneuver so abrupt it formed almost a right angle. Hot Rock couldn’t conceive of the G-forces involved… then realized the UAV was indifferent to G-forces. As long as its wings didn’t snap off, it was fine.
And it was turning toward him. That was the next thing Hot Rock saw before a raft of fast-moving clouds swept across his sight, and the manta disappeared.
Two Tone was howling from the backseat. Hot Rock felt an unnerving moment of doubt, of fear that once again he was screwing up, but of course it was too late to back out now. The manta was after him.
His mind skipped through bits of information the red-headed woman, Tomboy, had fed to the Vipers concerning this bogey. He already knew one thing: She’d been wrong that it depended on visual targeting data. Not in this weather. It had radar, too.
But maybe it liked using sight the best. If it did…
That reminded him of something else: The UAV was subsonic.
The missile-lock alarm sounded in his headset at the same instant he yanked the stick to the left and slammed the throttles forward. A brilliant yellow streak ripped the darkness, passing beneath the Tomcat as it pulled into a vicious, diving left turn. Hot Rock had already tightened his belly against it, but the special darkness of blackout spiraled in from the fringes of his vision. He waited until all he could see was the center of the HUD, then eased the stick forward. The darkness receded; in comparison, the edge of the typhoon looked almost bright and cheery.
The Tomcat was diving now, afterburners throbbing, propelling the aircraft past mach one, and then mach two. Below, the gloom peeled back and he saw the ocean, a savage froth of white and gray. Back came the stick, as did the spiraling darkness. Then he eased out, a hundred feet above the water. “Two Tone!” he cried. “Check our six!”
No answer. “Two Tone!”
Nothing. He realized he’d lost his backseater to G-force blackout. He was on his own.
And he realized something else: That made him happy. Relaxed. Now, whatever he did was entirely his own responsibility. No one to blame, no one to receive blame from.
He banked to the right, then the left, looking over his shoulder. Thought he saw a discoloration dropping out of the clouds. Eased back on the throttle. Let it catch up a bit. Let it —
There was nothing on his radar screen. No one to keep an eye on his tail. He grabbed the control to manually extend the wings, and did so. From behind, the extension would be invisible. Then he waited. Waited…
Over the headset, a moan. “Wha… Hot Rock — ”
“Goodnight,” Hot Rock said, and simultaneously yanked back on the stick and jammed the throttles full forward. This time he actually felt the blood rush out of his head, like water swirling down a drain; the spiral of darkness closed down fast. He pushed the stick forward and grunted as he slammed up against the shoulder straps of his harness. Below him, through his clearing vision he saw the manta-shaped UAV zip through the airspace he had lately occupied.
Putting the nose over, Hot Rock dove and opened up with his cannon. The tracers cut across the UAV like bright needles, but the UAV immediately cranked to the right in one of its physics-defying maneuvers.
Hot Rock executed a more gentle turn in the same direction, and watched his radar screen. There it was. There it was! The cannon hits might not have put the UAV out of commission, but they had holed it, destroyed the integrity of its radar-deflecting slants and curves. There was its signature on his screen, bright as daylight.
“Fox One,” Hot Rock said calmly to anyone who might be listening, and triggered his next-to-the-last Sparrow. The missile leaped away, boring off into the haze. On the HUD, its signal merged with the UAVs. Up ahead the clouds brightened, then dimmed, in artificial lightning.
On the HUD, both signals were gone.
Hot Rock realized something strange had happened to his face; it had an achy, stretched feeling to it. God, what if all the high-g maneuvers had permanently damaged something? Some muscle or nerve? What if…
Then he realized what it was: He was grinning.
Like everyone else in the hanger bay, Jackson was expected to help battle the fires and damage the missile had done in the hanger bay. There were tons of debris to get out of the way, blackened and useless aircraft to shove into the passing waves, bodies to help move. Time passed in a sweaty, terrifying blur. So this is war, Jackson kept thinking. So this is war.
And outside, the storm just got worse and worse. All the exterior doors were wide open because of the smoke, and wind-driven rain kept blasting in, hard enough to hurt if any of the spray caught you. It also made the decking slippery and dangerous. But the most terrifying thing was the waves. You didn’t expect to look out through those doors and see the crest of a wave pass by, all white and sharp on top like something with teeth. You never expected to see waves that big.