time, instead of just locking us up like last time.”
Bird Dog shoved the throttle forward and felt his ass sink into the hard
seat. Around him, the comforting scream of the twin engines deepened. He
held his hand on the throttle for a moment, reveling in the sheer power of the
vibrations there. Sweet and even, reassuring reminders that every bit of this
finely tuned machine was running perfectly.
“We’re not going to do a fly-over,” he said softly. “Not this time. But
somebody ought to remind them to watch out for friendlies. That damned CIWS
locked me up last time. I don’t appreciate it. Not one little bit.”
The Phalanx Mark 15 20-mm CIWS–pronounced seewhiz–was the Close-In
Weapons System, a ship’s last defense against a fast-moving inbound missile.
Its J-band radar tracked both incoming targets and the gatling-gun stream of
bullets it fired, self-correcting its aim. Theoretically, the Block I version
on the Vincennes could fire 4,500 rounds each minute within two seconds of
detecting an incoming object that matched its threat parameters.
“What’re you going to do, Bird Dog?” Gator asked, a sudden note of
concern in his voice. “Don’t go screwing with that ship. CAG already reamed
you out for the fly-over, and he’ll castrate you if he catches you dicking
around out here.”
“Hang on!” Bird Dog said, and punched the throttle forward into
afterburner. He nosed the aircraft down, letting gravity add speed to the
power generated by the afterburners.
Bird Dog leveled out at five hundred feet, increasing his speed to .8
Mach. At 480 knots, the aircraft was traveling eight miles every minute. The
cruiser was thirty-five miles away, and would have a surface radar range of
approximately thirty miles against a decent target. Bird Dog hoped he’d
dropped off their radar screens when he’d descended.
“Damn it, Bird Dog! You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? I swear to
God, one of these days I’m punching out! I’ll let you try to explain why you
got back to the ship minus your backseater!”
Bird Dog watched the ocean streak by below. One more minute.
Six miles from the cruiser, Bird Dog yanked back on the stick and stood
the screaming jet on its tail. He let it claw for altitude, and felt the
slight decrease in pressure against the back of the seat as his speed fell
off. At six thousand feet, he leveled off and continued on toward the
cruiser.
“There,” he said, satisfied. “CAG can hardly gig me for a fly-over if
I’m at angels six, can he?”
“Oh, no, hardly a fly-over. You idiot! Are you trying to give that ship
a hard-on for you?”
“What? Me?” Bird Dog said innocently.
“Asshole,” Gator muttered. “You know exactly what they thought, and CDC
is going to be screaming in my ears any second. Disappear off everyone’s
radar, come in fast and low and pop up–you know what they thought!”
“That I was a sea-skimmer missile popping up on them? Oh, surely not,
Gator! Not that finely trained bunch of black shoes that tried to sic CIWS on
me last week! After all, they’re watching the scopes, tracking the
friendlies. They had to know it was me, didn’t they? I mean, we talked to
them last week about not causing a blue-on-blue engagement. Surely they’re
paying more attention this time!”
“If I had any sense, I would have punched out an hour ago and taken my
chances with the sharks! Better them than CAG.”
“So touchy,” Bird Dog murmured. “You RIOs never have the right stuff.
You know that, Gator?”
His backseater sighed and gave up.
Twenty miles from the carrier, something blipped into existence on the
RIO’s radar screen for two sweeps. “Hold on, I got–wait, it’s gone,” Gator
said.
The note of excitement in Gator’s voice cut through Bird Dog’s daydream
of a perfect world where pilots flew every day and every trap was a
three-wire. “Got what, Gator? What?” Bird Dog demanded.
“Nothing now,” his RIO said, frustration edging his voice. “I thought I
saw a high-speed blip break out of the ocean clutter. Just for a second–it’s
gone now.”
“I saw it, too,” Lieutenant Commander Joyce Flynn, Spider’s RIO, chimed