South China Sea
Tomcat 205
Bird Dog slammed the stick to the right, rolled the F-14 Tomcat over onto
its back, and craned his neck back to stare down through the canopy at the
South China Sea fifteen thousand feet below. From that altitude, the
whitecaps were mere fly specks on the dark blue water. A gash of silver cut
east to west across the sea, the last remnants of the aircraft carrier’s wake.
He hung suspended between sky and water for ten seconds, blood pounding in his
head, and then rolled the Tomcat back into level flight.
Angels fifteen, CAVU (Clear Air, Visibility Unlimited) and a Tomcat
strapped to my ass–life doesn’t get any better than this! If it doesn’t trip
the Master Caution Light or yell at me over tactical, it’s not worth worrying
about. Not as long as I’m up here.
Lieutenant Curt “Bird Dog” Robinson was long overdue for a little slice
of heaven. In the last three weeks of Navy life, he’d learned that being an
F-14 pilot was a lot more complicated than they’d told him it would be. It
wasn’t the flying–no, not that at all. That was the only thing that was
sweet about being a junior nugget in VF-95, the sharpest fighter squadron
onboard USS Jefferson. It was all the other stuff. The paperwork, the
endless administrative details that occupied far too much of his waking hours,
and the problems that plagued his work center, the Aviation Electricians
Branch.
A weary sigh came over the ICS. “You want to let me know the next time,
asshole?” Lieutenant Commander Charlie “Gator” Cummings, his Radar Intercept
Officer (RIO) asked. “What if I’d been taking a leak? And wasn’t this
briefed as a straight and level mission?”
“I was straight and level,” Bird Dog said hotly, sidestepping the issue
of whether or not he should have alerted his backseater before rolling the
Tomcat inverted. “What wasn’t straight and level about that?”
“Upside down?”
“So? No one told me I couldn’t. They just said straight and level.
And, if you had any judgment at all, you’d have to agree that that was about
the straightest, levelest inverted flight you’ve ever been privileged to
experience!”
Another deep sigh was the only response from the backseater.
Automatically, Bird Dog kept up his scan, glancing down at the cockpit
instrumentation every few seconds and then back up at the horizon. The line
between water and empty air blurred into haze in the distance. He
concentrated on the hard throb of the Tomcat’s engines, the familiar growl
radiating into his body at every point that it touched his ejection seat.
Now, if his backseater would just stay quiet, maybe he could escape back into
that perfect union of man and aircraft where nothing mattered but airspeed and
altitude.
No such luck.
A metallic flash off to his right brought him back to reality.
Irritated, Bird Dog toggled the communications button. “Jeez, Spider, give me
a little airspace! What’s the matter, afraid you’re going to get lost?”
“Sorry.” His wingman slid back and away from Bird Dog’s aircraft.
“Better,” Bird Dog mumbled. He tapped the throttle forward slightly,
increasing his airspeed just enough to pull ahead and put Spider out of view.
“Ten minutes, Bird Dog,” Gator announced.
“I know, I know. You think I’ve been somewhere else for the last hour?”
His backseater fell silent again.
Bird Dog sighed and tried to recapture the euphoria he’d been feeling a
few minutes earlier. The daily look-see presence patrol over the Spratly
Islands in the South China Sea was the most boring, useless waste of the
powerful fighter’s capabilities that he’d ever seen, but at least he was
flying instead of playing Navy. Flying he could do. It was the Navy business
that went along with it that was giving him problems.
Below him, the Spratly Islands were spread over an area about the size of
Montana. The cluster of sandbars, rocks, and occasional islands was a key
flash point in the South China Sea and the Far East. China, Vietnam,
Malaysia, and the Philippines all laid claim to the area and the rich
oil-bearing seabed below it. Lately, both China and Vietnam had started