Resigning from the Navy. The words carried an eerie feel to them.
For the better part of ten years he’d thought he’d known precisely his career’s future course. The Academy, flight school at Pensacola, each decision along the way had led naturally and inevitably to the next. Memories of his father—a carrier pilot killed over Hanoi in 1969—had been one strong factor in those decisions. His uncle, Admiral Thomas J. Magmder, had been another.
If he stayed in, promotion would come within a year, and with it confirmation of his rather tenuous position as skipper of VF-95. Usually the COs of air wing squadrons were full commanders; he’d been made skipper because of a shortage of qualified aviator commanders with the fleet and, he still strongly suspected, a word or two in the right quarters from his uncle. The title of squadron skipper had rested uneasily on his shoulders for eight months now. Once he got his promotion, it would ride there a bit more naturally.
And after that? A few more years and he’d have had his shot at a CAG slot . . . with the ultimate goal of skippering a carrier of his own.
Yeah, his whole future had been planned out in year-by-year, step-by-step detail. And now the whole thing had been wiped away. It left him feeling shaky.
But he couldn’t keep going with it, not this way. He’d lost his edge. He was starting to hold on too tight, maybe because of Pamela . . . maybe because he’d come too close too many times. The air-to-air refueling incident yesterday and the near-crash on the deck afterward had convinced him that it was time to pack it in.
Usually when an aviator faced that kind of personal crisis, he had the option of turning in his wings. That meant accepting some other Navy flyer’s billet—piloting COD aircraft or
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transports, for instance—but escaping the deadly day-in, day-out stress of combat flying. Such a move was usually looked upon as a kind of death by the aviator’s former comrades. It excluded him from that special, inner circle that was so much a part of the mystique of carrier aviation. He knew all about that. He’d wrestled with the decision several months earlier, had nearly turned in his wings because he’d been having a rough time with the responsibility of running a fighter squadron . . . with giving the orders that could get other guys, his friends, killed.
He’d managed to resolve that one. This was something different, a problem that couldn’t be solved by something as simple as asking for a different assignment. What it came down to was the realization that he could have his career … or Pamela.
What kind of money was United paying for experienced pilots? Better than Navy pay, that was for sure, even with flight pay, combat pay, and Navy perks thrown in.
In another month he would sure as hell find out.
If he survived whatever it was that the Indians were about to do with the U.S. battle group trespassing in their ocean.
1435 hours, 24 March
Headquarters, Indian Defense Ministry, New Ddhi, India
Rear Admiral Ajay Ramesh took his seat at the conference table as other men, admirals and generals, filed into the room. He’d been summoned to Defense Ministry headquarters with unseemly haste. The haste was fully justified, of course. He’d made certain suggestions during his report to the Ministry the day before . . . and it appeared that those suggestions were to be acted upon.
He glanced at the map dominating one wall of the room, showing the Indian-Pakistan frontier from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea. Arrows and the cryptic symbols identifying various military units had been marked in, showing troop movements and deployments since the beginning of the war almost thirty-six hours earlier. So far, the front had remained more or less static, though the Pakistani towns of Gadra, Nagal Parkar, and Satidara—all in the south—had been taken. Units
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in the Punjab, opposite Lahore and Sahiwal, were still bogged down at the border.
But slow progress had been expected. Much of India’s armor had been held back in anticipation of Operation Cobra.