Final Flight (12 page)

“Uh…”

“This is for fucking keeps, kid. You have to know this
shit.” Ten miles. Reed was tuning the IR screen.

They would never see the boat in the mist at this
altitude with the IR, Jake decided, and lowered the
nose as he advanced the throttles. He reset the
radar altimeter warning for 450 feet and dropped
quickly to 500, where he leveled. 480 knots.
Five miles. The plane felt sluggish, no
doubt because it was still full of fuel.

“The bastard will probably turn, Reed.”

The bombardier dropped his gaze to the scope and
reached for the cursor control. “He’s turning
left.” Jake’s steering slewed left slightly and
he eased the plane left to follow.

“I see him,” Reed announced. The X-band was
back. More chaff. The X-band radar stayed with him.

“I don’t seen any missiles.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, there’s something on the deck, but it’s
covered up with something and I can’t tell what it is.”
Reed sounded frustrated. Jake pulled the commit
trigger on his stick grip to the first detent and
instantly the usual symbology on the ALL was
replaced by the infrared video.

There was the boat! They were almost on top of it,
looking straight down at it. There was something under a
dark cover on deck, all right, but Jake couldn’t
tell what. Even as he looked, the boat was
changing aspect as the turret under the plane’s
nose swung to keep the boat in view. Now the
boat appeared upside down, as if the plane were
diving over it.

The radar altimeter warning sounded. The pilot’s
eyes flicked to the gyro. Inadvertently
he had eased the nose over. He released the stick
button and pulled the nose back to the artificial
horizon as it replaced the IR video on the
ALL.

Jake reported what they had seen to the strike
controller. No doubt the admiral, Cowboy
Parker, was listening to the radio conversation. He
couldn’t be enjoying what he was hearing. Under the rules
of engagement dictated by Washington, the admiral
could not use weapons except in self-defense. As
currently interpreted by the Pentagon, this rule
meant that U.s. ships could not open fire unless the
target “demonstrated hostile intent,” i.e.,
shot first. One was left with the frail hope that the
evil in the rascals’ hearts would spoil their aim,
a straw that apparently gave the politicians some
comfort.

“He’s back on his original course,” Reed
reported. No doubt the admiral was moving his
destroyers and frigates forward to intercept the
intruder and keep it away from the carrier.

“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike. We
have just launched another A-6. In the interim,
drop a flare On the bogey and attempt a
visual ID.”

Which means, Jake thought grimly, the admiral
wants us to troll and see if the bastard will open
fire. “Shotgun wilco.”

Reed turned the safety collar on wing station
two and pulled the station selector switch down.
Then he set the armament panel to release one
flare. Jake turned the aircraft back toward the
boat. He decided to drop the flare at a thousand
feet to give himself a little time to look around underneath as
the flare parachuted toward the water.

A minute from the boat, he turned on the master
armament switch, which put electrical power to the
panel. “Let’s drop the flare about five
hundred yards in front of the boat,” he told
Reed.

“Roger.” Reed’s head was firmly against the
scope hood as he slewed the radar cursors.

The X-band warning squawked. Jake eyed it as
he continued inbound. He squeezed the commit trigger
as far as it would go, authorizing the computer to release
the flare. The release marker marched relentlessly
down the ALL display as they approached the boat,
then dropped off. The flare was gone.

A few seconds later a brilliant light
illuminated aft and below them.

“Strike, flare’s burning,” Jake reported
as he dropped the nose and left wing and began a
descending spiral turn.

He was below the clouds a few seconds before the
flare came out. The naked white light, a
million candlepower, reflected from the black sea
and the ragged tendrils of dirty cloud which covered it.
He saw the boat. He contented himself with glances at
the boat as he constantly rechecked his altitude and
nose attitude. It would be desperately easy
to fly into the water under that artificial sun, which
fooled his sense of the natural order of things and
gave him vertigo, the aviator’s name for spatial
disorientation.

“Do you see any guns, Reed,” Jake asked
as he concentrated on the attitude instruments and
fought the temptation to roll the plane to put the flare
directly overhead.

“Nope.” Reed had never removed his head from the
hood. He was staring at the IR scope, using the
camera’s lens magnification to see much more than
Jake could with the naked eye. The flare was drifting
beneath them now, which increased Jake’s disorientation. He
kept the plane circling and limited himself to peeks
at the boat. He toggled the stick trigger
and glanced at the IR display, remembering
to cross-check the gyro and the other flight instruments
as he did so. He was perspiring profusely.

This was hairy, dangerous flying. Any mistake
would be fatal.

“Strike, Shotgun,” Jake said. “The
surface bogey has something we can’t identify on
his deck. No guns visible. He’s headed your
way, over.

“Concur.” The ship also had him on radar.
“Drop another flare.”

Jake put the plane in a climb while Reed
reset the armament panel.

Dropping flares was not going to solve the
admiral’s problem. If the boat had a missile
and got within range of the American ship, their
close-in weapons systems, the Phalanxes, would
have to knock the missile down before it reached its
target. These automated guns were aimed by computers
and each of them fired fifty very heavy bullets a
second at the incoming missile.

The Phalanxes had better work, Jake
whispered to himself. He knew Cowboy Parker was at
this very moment thinking the very same thing as he
stared at the NTDS displays, weighed the Options, and
maneuvered his forces. Aircraft, ships, guns,
missiles, and lives-many lives-men with moms and
wives or sweethearts, men with pasts and maybe
futures, all packed into these gray ships on this
dark sea. And Rear Admiral Earl Parker was the
officer responsible for them all. To shoot or not
to shoot? Justified or unjustified? Decisions
made in seconds would be weighed for weeks by men who
had never made a life-or-death decision in their
lives, politicians who read the newspapers and
keep wetted fingers permanently aloft.

When the second flare was burning, Jake
carefully descended again and circled the boat at
500 feet, about four miles away, just as he did
the last time. He was far enough away that he was invisible
to the men on the boat, hidden in the darkness beyond the
flare’s light.

The boat maintained its course toward the task
force. Jake thoughtfully fingered the wing fuel-dump
switch, checked the small needle on the fuel
gauge, then toggled it. He watched the gauge as
three thousand pounds of wing fuel ran out into the
atmosphere.

He listened to Strike directing the other
A-6, now airborne, to a holding
fix. When the wing fuel was gone, Jake closed the
dump valves.

Without the wing fuel the plane would maneuver
better, and there was less chance of an explosion if a
flak shell went through the wing.

“You ready?” Jake asked Reed. “For what?”

Jake turned on the exterior lights. He
cranked on a four-G turn and pointed the
plane’s nose at the boat. The radio
altimeter warning sounded. He didn’t have time
to reset it.

Down they came, 400 feet, 300, the
throttles forward against the stops.

He leveled at 250 feet, two miles from the
boat. Above them shone the ghastly white light of the
magnesium flare.

A string of tracers reached for the cockpit from
straight ahead. “He’s shooting!” Reed shouted in
disbelief. Jake rolled hard right and flipped off
the lights with his left hand. He kept the nose coming
up and the turn in. The tracer stream weaved, trying
to correct. It was a belt-fed weapon, maybe
14.5-millimeter.

The shells reached for them, crossing just under the
plane. Jake was rolling and jinking,
turning hard to get away from the boat and the gun.

The gunner was shooting bursts of five or six
shells. God, they were close!

Jake jammed the stick forward and they floated under
negative G as the streaks crossed above the
cockpit. As the end of a tracer string went by he
hauled the stick aft and began a four-G pull
up, toward the clouds above.

Reed was on the radio, “He’s shooting.” His
voice had gone up an octave.

Now they were up into the clouds, which glowed from the flare
underneath.

Jake kept climbing. “Well,” he said to the
bombardier. “It sure as hell ain’t no fishing
boat.”

“Battlestar Strike, Shotgun. We took
some tracer fire from the bogey, which appears to be some
kind of speedboat. It has no fishing gear or
missiles that we could see, but it’s carrying an
X-band radar, which it’s using occasionally. Tracers
were probably fourteen point five mike mike,
over. Looks like he’s laying his gun with some kind
Of an optical night-sight, over.

“Roger. Your vector One Eight Zero
degrees.” Jake pulled the throttles
back and soared to 3,000 feet, where he leveled and
turned to southern heading.

“Do you think we’ll have to bomb it?” Reed asked.
“I suspect so, “Grafton replied. He
didn’t think the admiral had any other choice,
except possibly sink it with naval gunfire.
And every mile the boat closed the task group
increased the missile threat to the ships.

Twenty miles south of the target Jake swung
the plane around and Reed checked that the computer
crosshairs, the cursors, were still on the boat. The
boat was still on a westerly heading.

“What’s the bogey’s speed?” Jake asked.

“About nineteen knots, sir.” At last,
Grafton noted, Reed thought he was worth a”"

“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sink the bogey. I repeat, sink the bogey.
Use Rockeye, over.

“Understand sink it with Rockeye.”

“That’s affirmative.” Apparently the admiral
didn’t want to expend this million-dollar
Harpoon missile Jake was carrying. A penny
saved .

Jake set up the armament panel
to train off all eight of the Rockeye canisters,
two at a time. He deselected the flares on
station two and selected stations one and five, where the
cluster bombs hung. Each of the Rockeye
canisters contained two hundred forty-six
1.7-pound bomblets. After the canister was dropped,
it would open in midair and the bomblets would disperse
into an oval pattern. Each bomblet contained a
shaped charge that could penetrate nine inches of
cold-rolled steel. Reed was watching him. The
BN inadvertently keyed his ICS mike and
Jake could hear his heavy breathing. He was muttering
to himself, “Jeesuss, ooooh Jeesuss “You
ready?” Jake asked as the nose came around toward
the target.

“Yes sir.”

Jake jammed the throttles to the stops and centered
the steering.

“Shotgun’s starting the bomb run,” he
reported to Strike.

“He’s still heading west and I’m in attack,”
Reed said.

“Expect him to turn as we close. Go for a
radar lock. Forget the FLIR.”

The X-band warning lit as they passed
ten miles inbound. Jake punched chaff and held the
plane steady.

The ALL on the panel in front of him was
alive with computer symbologyz which gave him steering
commands, time to go to release, drift angle, and
relative position of the target. Jake concentrated
on keeping the plane level and the steering centered.
At five miles to go he pulled the commit trigger
on the stick and held it. The weapons would be
released by the computer when the aircraft arrived at the
release point, that precise point in space where the
computer calculated the bombs would fall upon the
target given the aircraft’s height, speed, and
heading.

The glare from another string of tracers reflected
through the clouds.

The weaving yellow finger probed for the aircraft,
searching like the antennae of a hungry insect, as
Jake punched chaff and checked the computer steering
against the glow of the rising fireballs. Dead ahead.

The gunner was firing blindly, Jake decided.
He concentrated on the ALL as the release
symbol on the display marched down.

We’ll make it! The bombs were released in a
quick series of thumps, and he rolled hard
right away from the rising tracers and pulled as the
Rockeye canisters flashed open to disperse their
bomblets.

“Weapons away,” Jake told the ship.
“Roger.”

In about twenty seconds the antiaircraft
fire ceased abruptly. Jake eased the nose
down and slid below the clouds. The pilot turned the
aircraft slightly and looked back. Gleaming through
the darkness was a smear of yellow light. Fire!

“Where’s the coast?” Jake asked the BN.
“Twenty miles east.”

The pilot checked his heading. “Get the FLIR
humming. We’ll turn back at eight miles and
make another low pass to see what we hit.”

The yellow glow of the fire was the only light
visible in the dark universe under the clouds when they
turned back inbound. Now a brilliant flash
split the night, a fireball that grew and
blossomed on the water ahead, then faded almost as
suddenly as it appeared.

Jake turned away to avoid the debris that he
knew would be in the air.

“He blew up,” Reed breathed, amazement in his
voice. “Tell the ship,” Jake
Grafton said, and pulled the throttles back to a
cruise setting. At ten miles inbound to the ship
Jake Grafton coupled the autopilot to the
Automatic Carrier Landing System, the ACLS.
He felt the throttles move slightly in
response and kept his fingertips lightly on top
of them. Now the computer aboard the ship would tell the
plane’s autopilot where the plane was in relation
to the glideslope and centerline, and the autopilot would
fly the plane down, all the way to the deck.