“Roger.” The basket neared his canopy once more, closer . . . closer . . . Tombstone felt a tremor and glanced down. His hand was shaking now. Damn, he thought. Not now! Not now! Teeth grinding, he fought down the feeling of :weakness, blinked through the sweat that pricked at his eyes. He focused his concentration on the belly of the KA-6, aware of the basket’s jostling dance just beyond the canopy’s right front side out of the corner of his eye.
“Three feet, Stoney,” Marusko said, his voice emotionless. “Two feet. You’re right in the groove, guy. Left . . . left a bit more . . . Keep it coming . . .”
The refueling probe speared the basket dead center, with a thump and a jolt as the catches snapped home. ‘ Two-oh-one, contact,” Tombstone said. He snapped up die switches that opened the F-14’s tanks. “Ready to receive.”
14
Kctth Dougbss
ARMAGEDDON MODE
15
“Capture confinned,” the tanker pilot said. “Here it comes.”
Fuel rushed down the narrow hose, greedily devoured by the Tomcat Tombstone kept his mind on maintaining the interval between the two aircraft. Mercifully, both CAG and Batman kept their silence.
Shit, Tombstone thought Sooner or later the odds are going to catch up to me. And when they do …
“We read you full, Two-oh-one.”
“Roger, Tango X-ray.” He snapped the switches closed. “Ready to disengage to port”
“We’re clear.”
Tombstone backed clear of the drogue, then broke left. The two Tomcats flew in formation with the KA-6D for a moment Then (he tanker began dropping away toward the sea, angling into a turn that would take him back toward the Jefferson. ‘ ‘It’s been grand, guys. Look me up again when you feel the need.”
“Thanks,” Batman radioed. “Just put it on Tombstone’s MasterCard, okay?”
Tombstone’s hand was no longer shaking. He flexed it a couple of times, then grasped the stick firmly.
Pamela’s last letters. What was he going to do about them? They’d arrived only three days earlier, both of them on the same COD flight in from Diego Garcia, and they were eating away at him. He’d not answered them because he didn’t know how, didn’t know the answer to what Pam was asking.
Pamela was as sharp as she was attractive. Was she right? Was it time for him to leave the Navy and find a saner job?
He wondered if he’d lost die edge.
it wasn’t the problem spearing the basket Hell, there was nothing wrong with his two-time failure to engage the tanker’s drogue. That sort of thing happened all the time in the day-in, day-out routine of Navy aviation. Danger, as the aviators said, went with the territory, was as much a part of their issue gear as flight suit and helmet.
But that was just it That sort of thing did happen routinely. There were so many ways to screw up in the cockpit . . . most of them deadly. Navy aviators needed an incredible blend of skill, training, reflexes, and luck to make tasks like snagging a fuel drogue in flight or making a night trap on a pitching
carrier deck seem routine, to do them again and again and again as though mere was nothing to them.
It wasn’t that Tombstone was afraid, but he was tired. Every man on board the Jefferson was tired, with eight months of the CBG’s nine-month deployment down.
And tired men make mistakes.
Tombstone said nothing as he took up the Tomcat’s patrol zone and throttled back for a long orbit. Sooner or later, something had to give.
The question was whether or not to get out now, before it did.
1206 hours, 23 March Bridge, U.S.S.Bttfle
Captain Edward Parrel turned in his high-backed chair to take the phone handset from one of the bridge watchstanders. t(Captain speaking.”
“CIC Officer, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Mason’s Voice replied. “We have a passive sonar contact, towed array, bearing zero-five-four to zero-five-six.” , Parrel’s eyes shifted toward the windscreens on the bridge’s starboard wing. The U.S.S. Biddle, one of Carrier Battle Group 14’s two Perry-class guided-missile frigates, was scouting far ahead of the Jefferson. Her primary duty was as part of the carrier’s ASW screen, searching for submarines that could pose a threat to the CBG. The horizon was empty under a brassy, gopical sky. The impulse to keep looking, to try to see X&nething out there against the featureless skyline, was irre-fttfitible. “Can you manage an ID yet?”