He turned his attention back to the screen and forced himself to
depersonalize the aircraft on the screen. It wasn’t Tomboy and Snoopy–it was
Tomcat 201. If the Navy had the intestinal fortitude to insist on equal
standards for its male and female pilots, the least its admirals could do was
the same. Anything else would have been a slap in the face to the aviators,
both male and female, that had worked so hard to make the policy succeed.
Finally, since there was nothing else that really required his attention,
he turned and faced Pamela. It felt odd to be facing his old lover while
listening to Tomboy’s voice on the net. But when you got right down to it,
why should it be difficult? What was Tomboy to him? She certainly wasn’t his
lover–couldn’t be, not while she worked for him and they were assigned to the
same ship. But whatever she was to Tombstone, he could feel her presence
behind him as the arcane symbology representing her aircraft crept across the
screen.
“That was her, wasn’t it?” Pamela said softly.
“Who?” he managed to say. Damn her, she always could seem to read his
thoughts.
Pamela shot him a wry grin. “Don’t worry, Tombstone, nobody noticed it
but me. She was your RIO last cruise, wasn’t she ?”
“She was a lieutenant then,” he said, and then swore at himself for
sounding like a blathering idiot.
“Ah,” Pamela said, as though he’d just made sense.
1210 local (Zulu -7)
Hornet 401
Thor eased back on the throttle and slid behind the other aircraft. Its
slipstream buffeted the light Hornet. Although the Flanker looked like it was
about the same size as the Hornet, the slipstream of the Chinese fighter
carried a punch.
Something about the aircraft bothered him, although he couldn’t have said
exactly what it was. He slid the Hornet over to the Flanker’s other side and
studied it carefully. Nothing unusual caught his attention. It was, he
decided, just the other pilot’s attitude that seemed strange. During
peacetime, most military pilots would at least wave to each other,
acknowledging the bond that all airmen felt. Weeks later, if hostilities
broke out, they’d do their damnedest to kill each other.
The Flanker pilot had not even glanced his way, much less proffered a
friendly, universally obscene gesture. Thor shrugged. At least being able to
move around a little eased the cramp in his lower back.
1220 local (Zulu -7)
Combat Direction Center
USS Jefferson
“TAO! I’m picking up communications downlink from the Flanker!” the
Electronics Warfare Specialist, or EW, said over the CDC net.
“You sure?”
“Positive! Frequency, everything’s right on.”
“Make sure the Hornets know,” the TAO snapped to the OS monitoring the
two fighters, picking up the TFCC telephone again. “And get the alert 5S-3B
up. That bogey is talking to somebody we don’t hold contact on. That means
one thing.”
A submarine. Had to be. The tactical picture was really starting to
stink.
Minutes later, the distinctive sounds of an S-3B engine spooling up
overhead vibrated through CDC. She watched the two symbols on the
large-screen display, the Hornet and the Flanker flying so close together that
their symbols occasionally merged. The carrier SPS-49 radar alone couldn’t
have broken the two contacts apart. Only the powerful SPY-1A radar on the
Aegis cruiser could positively distinguish between the two. She glanced at
the information display screen to the right of her desk and confirmed her
suspicion. The radar symbol displayed on the screen came from the Aegis’s
radar, relayed to the carrier over LINK II.
Four minutes after the video downlink was detected, she heard the Hoover
go to full military power, the roller-coaster rattle of the steam catapult,
and the final surprisingly soft thud as the catapult piston reached the end of
its run and tossed the S-3 into the air. Seconds later, the Operations
Specialist controlling the ASW aircraft reported radar contact on Hunter 701.
The S-3B vectored toward the bogey, scanning the ocean’s surface with radar
and FLIR, trying to find the bogey’s playmate.
It could be anywhere, she thought. The bogey’s altitude gave him enough
horizon to cover at least a thousand square miles of ocean. Somewhere out