green. The meatball provided guidance, but the LSO, an experienced aviator
himself, was the final word on whether an approach was safe or not.
“Take it easy, Bird Dog,” Gator said quietly. “Little off, that’s all.
You’ll snag it next time.”
“Asshole’s got it in for me,” Bird Dog muttered. “I was good for at
least the four-wire, if not the three. No way I was high–no way!”
“Okay, Okay,” Gator said soothingly. “These guys are just human. They
make mistakes like the rest of us.”
Gator’s well-intentioned words irritated him even more. Until this
afternoon, when something had streaked undetected below him to smash the rock
into gritty mud, Bird Dog hadn’t really believed he was just human. He was a
Tomcat pilot, for Chrissake! Invulnerable in the air, entitled by birthright
to be arrogant on the ground. Immune to the dangers of wrestling his aircraft
back onto the pitching deck of the carrier, and perpetually blessed by the
gods of the air.
Until now. On final approach, he’d suddenly realized how small the deck
of the carrier looked, and how fast it was coming at him. His skin had
prickled as it’d occurred to him what the rough nonskid on the deck could do
to the skin of his aircraft, and he’d felt the tiniest quiver of–of what?
Nervousness? God, could he be afraid?
Bird Dog swallowed hard and forced himself to concentrate on his
instruments. He rejoined the Marshall stack, the aircraft circling on the
port side of the carrier waiting for their turn to land.
Nothing was different, nothing, he insisted to himself. This was just
another landing on the carrier, something he’d done at least two hundred times
before.
“Piece of cake, Bird Dog,” Gator said when they finally broke out of
Marshall and started their final approach. Bird Dog felt sweat bead on his
forehead as he listened to the LSO and his RIO. The pitching deck rushed up
at him, and he ignored the flash of unfamiliar emotion that threatened to
distract him.
“Three-wire!” Gator crowed as the F-14 slammed onto the deck. “Good
trap, buddy!”
Bird Dog felt the tension seep out of his body as he lifted the tailhook
and released the thick steel cable. He taxied slowly toward the
yellow-shirted flight deck supervisor, wondering what the hell had gotten into
him up there, acting like he’d never trapped on the carrier before.
Well, whatever it was, it was gone now. And the bitch of it was, he
still had to pee.
CHAPTER 2
Saturday, 22 June
1100 local (Zulu -7)
Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC)
USS Jefferson, CVN 74
Commander Hillman Busby glanced around the CVIC briefing room, mentally
taking muster. All his key players were there. The junior officers and the
chief petty officers had snagged the few chairs still left out from the
morning brief. The rest of the enlisted men and women packed into the room
leaned against walls or perched on plotting tables.
“Okay, people. Time to do some magic. We need some answers–or at least
some informed intelligence estimates,” Busby said.
The Carrier Intelligence Center, or CVIC as it was commonly known, was
the information fusion center for Carrier Battle Group 14. Pronounced
“civic,” it was home to the battle group intelligence officers, enlisted Data
Systems Specialists (DS) and Intelligence Specialists (IS) ratings that kept
track of the world. CVIC tapped into the most advanced message and
information processing computers in the U.S. Navy’s vast array, and was
capable of monitoring circuits so highly classified that even admitting they
existed was a federal felony. For all its resources, CVIC couldn’t create
probabilities, estimates, or analysis without data. It was completely
dependent on information fed to it by other sources: national assets,
satellites, debriefing reports from the CIA, and tactical sensors such as the
SLQ-32(V4) ESM sensors installed on the ships in the battle group.
The dependence on outside information was at the heart of Commander
Busby’s dilemma. Admiral Magruder wanted intelligence’s best estimate of the
cause of the explosion earlier that morning, and there was simply no data.
Even with all his electronic wizardry, Busby knew no more now than he had when
he was standing his watch in supp plot.