The Edge of Honor (30 page)

“Evaluator, Special Tracker: I have video in the Dong Ha Mountains, two-eight-five for sixty-seven miles. Possible bandits. Initiating special tracks.”

“Awright! Migs!” exclaimed Garuda as a buzz of excitement swept through D and D and especially among the AICs. The feint had provoked the launch of air defense Migs.

“Now what happens?” asked Brian.

“The strike birds will all go in, right up to the turn away line. Behind them, probably these guys right here, are some Migcap, six F-Eight Crusaders, three sections of two each. Gunman-wingman pairs. When the strike birds turn outbound, the Migcap will go supersonic, fly through them and see if they can kill a Commie for Mommy.”

“Where are the Migs?”

Garuda pointed to three triangular symbols that were larger than the rest of the symbology. The three appeared to be loitering inland and were difficult to distinguish in the smear of video clutter representing the rugged mountains that ran north-south along the coast of North Vietnam. As they watched, bright white lines suddenly shot out from a small group at the back of the attack wave to attach themselves to the Mig symbols.

“Yeah, there’s the assignment. The E-Two’s paired the Migcap up with the Migs. The lines show which CAP’s been paired against which bogey. The controllers on the E-Two have begun the engagement. The E-Two’s computers’ll have ‘em go supersonic in about thirty seconds.

The bad guys’ controllers won’t see ‘em because there’s that crowd of attack birds out in front of ‘em.

When the feint groups turn back out, those F-Eights’ll be on them Migs like snakes. Look, see the speed leaders?”

Brian could indeed see that the Migcap symbols now had arrowlike lines projecting from them, lines that grew in length as the F-8s went into a shallow dive and ignited afterburner, building up to velocities of 1200 miles per hour, and hurtling toward the back of the attack formation.

As the strike group’s symbols began to diverge in a turn-away maneuver, the Migcap symbols speared through the dissolving formations and flashed down from altitude to catch the unwary Migs ahead and beneath them, perfect targets for their missiles. The AICs were out of their chairs with excitement, itching to get into it but disciplined enough to keep their hands off their keyboards as the airborne controllers in the E-2 pressed home the attack.

Brian held his breath as the symbols converged over the mountains, trying to visualize the Crusaders and Migs dogfighting down the mountain valleys, missiles blasting into the night in supersonic pursuit of glinting gray shapes maneuvering frantically to evade the bolts of death stabbing out for them in the darkness.

“Splash! Splash!” yelled one of the controllers, his voice high with excitement. Brian watched the symbols pause, seemingly suspended in the area of the dogfight.

The rest of the strike was forming back up into orderly outbound corridors, pointed back toward the carriers, seemingly oblivious to the dogfight going on behind them.

There were more splash calls and then a moment of silent tension as the controllers counted heads. First section out, then the second section.

Silence, excruciating seconds.

“There!” Hoodoo pointed on the FCSC scope, his finger tapping the scope to indicate the video of the third section. “South. They went the long way. The Migcap is feet-wet!”

There was jubilation in D and D. The Migcap had bagged two, perhaps three Migs and come out clean.

“Oughta hear these bad boys,” said Hoodoo, laughing and pressing his earphones to his ears. “Jubilation T. Cornpone going’ on up there.”

“Fuckin’-a good deal,” said Garuda, taking a tremendous drag on his cigarette before dropping it into a butt kit. “We haven’t had a Mig kill in a coon’s age. The flyboys’ll be doin’ barrel rolls all the way back to the bird farm. Who were those guys, Hoodoo?”

“They’s Black Eagles, off the America. Talkin’ some shit, now.” Hoodoo was actually smiling, even though slightly disappointed that the E-2 had controlled the kills instead of the Red Crown controllers. But getting to watch it on 3-D radar was almost as good.

The PIRAZ controllers remained poised over their screens, physically counting heads with a grease pencil, toting up the symbols to make sure that the numbers tallied. Brian noticed that the crowd was beginning to thin out in Combat. Austin made some concluding reports on Green and then Wager reported going off-station for his nightly “happy hour” with the KC-135 tanker. Brian realized that the captain had swiveled around in his large armchair and was speaking to him. , “Well, Brian, what’d you think of an Alfa strike?”

“Quite a show, Cap’n. And Migs for dessert.”

“Yes, that was an unusual dividend. The Migs don’t usually show their noses until after the carrier formations are on their way out. That was a pretty good Mig trap.

Sometimes it goes the other way, though.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“Sometimes the Migs come up and orbit on top of some recently emplaced SAM sites that we didn’t know about. Our CAP goes blasting in after them; the Migs run like hell and drag our guys over a missile battery, which can be a very nasty surprise.”

“How did the E-Two know that wasn’t what was going ”’ on tonight, sir?”

“He didn’t. But it’s kind of an unwritten Gulf rule out here, Brian. You see Migs, you go for them. You can be sure any Hood controller is going to vector for bogey the instant he thinks he has a valid target. That’s the way they’re all taught: The other side shows his face, you draw and shoot.” The captain climbed down out of his chair and winced, clutching at his side. Brian saw the exec start toward him and then stop as the captain straightened out. The captain saw Brian’s expression.

“Old bones, Brian, just old bones. XO, I guess I’ll secure. Count, you let me know if there’s any residual activity. Sometimes after they lose a Mig, they put up a couple more and come out to the coast, like a kid who gets brave after the bully’s gone home. Keep us in the western sector of the box. Night, all.” As the captain left Combat, Brian asked Garuda what that was all about.

“Cap’n’s dyin’ to bag his own Mig with our Terrier missiles. Only one Red Crown’s actually shot down a Mig before.”

“Wouldn’t they’d have to really come feet-wet for us to actually reach them?”

“It’s real close. You know the envelope better’n me, but theoretically we can shoot forty miles. So if we was to hang around forty miles offshore and one of ‘em got careless and came feet-wet, even, say, five miles, they’d be in the envelope.”

“Not really. That would be a very doubtful shot, Garuda. Guy would have to remain inbound to make the geometry work.”

Garuda shook his head. “Guy would just have to be there for this Old Man to take a shot.” He looked at his watch. “Tree time; I’ll see you ‘round the midwatch.”

“Roger that, Garuda.”

The Migs did not come out to play that night or the next.

The captain had ordered Hood to resume normal box position, abandoning his perch on the western edge. But on the third night after the feint, at 0230, Garuda was over at the coffeepot getting a refill when the duty AIC, Hoodoo, leaned over his scope, made an adjustment, looked hard, and then said the magic word softly.

“Bandits.”

Garuda slopped coffee on the deck plates getting back to his chair, and the word flashed around Combat like lightning. Garuda switched the range scale down to sixty miles and studied the faint smudges of video shimmering under the two unknown symbols Hoodoo had put in the system.

“Where are the BARCAP?” asked Brian, assuming that the F-4s would be used if the Migs presented a reasonable target.

“They be tankin’; they on a basketball, two-three-five for eighty-five miles. They off-station. ‘S why these boys came up, most like. BARCAP’s outta position.”

Brian examined the scope and saw the faint trace of Hood’s missile circle reaching just over the beach to the west. The unknowns’ video was barely ten miles beyond the circle.

“Surface, SWIC. How much room we got in the box to go west?”

“Wait one,” responded Rockheart. “Seven miles, SWIC.”

Garuda turned to Brian. “Recommend tell the bridge to turn west, come up to fifteen knots, and close the western boundary. Then call the Old Man, tell him we got Migs up.”

Brian nodded, set the maneuver in motion via the bitch box, and then informed the captain of their contacts and that he had turned the ship to close the beach.

“Good move. I’ll be right up. Get the Count and the exec up there.”

Brian hung up and made the calls, a little disappointed that the captain’s immediate reaction was to get the first team up into D and D.

On reflection, though, it made sense. He was still a makee-learn.

“What’re they doing?” he asked.

Garuda adjusted his scope. “Orbiting, just west of Vinh military airfield. Altitude’s unreliable from the forty-eight, which means they’re low, keeping down in the mountains for radar cover. Bet the fuckers know the BARCAP’s off-station, too.”

“Should we assign a missile director to them?”

“Negatory. That would tip ‘em off. Old Man, he’s gonna want to see if they’ll come east, see if they’ve forgotten about us while they fixate on the BARCAP.”

“Shouldn’t we break off the BARCAP and get ‘em back?”

“Negative. They’ve just started fueling; they’d come back below minimum combat package, no good for anything.

Hoodoo’s not even telling them what we got, ‘cause they’d come back on their own, most likely.”

The captain came through the door, followed by Austin.

“Okay, Garuda, lemme have it,” he said. Austin stepped in front of Brian to look at the scope. Brian suddenly felt superfluous as Garuda briefed the captain and answered Austin’s rapid-fire questions. When he was finished, the captain turned to Brian.

“Tell the bridge to bring her up to twenty knots, then get your Weapons people ready. Count here will take evaluator. Maybe we can get a shot at one of these guys.

You told CTF Seventy-seven yet?”

Garuda answered for him. “The unknowns went out over the link, and they’ve called in over the HF net asking us to confirm validity. I told him affirmative, we had skin, that we were watching and waiting for the BARCAP to finish tanking. I’m keeping the symbology at unknown for now.

We’ll need to change that to hostue before we engage them.”

The captain nodded and climbed into his chair. He was dressed in khaki trousers, slippers, and a green foul weather jacket over his undershirt.

Once again, Brian noted that he looked a hundred years old in the harsh lights of CIC. Austin was fully dressed and did not appear to have been roused from a sound sleep.

“This is Mr. Austin, I have the evaluator watch,” Austin declared peremptorily.

There was a chorus of

“Aye, aye, sir” throughout Combat, and Brian retreated to the weapons module as the exec came into Combat. Chief Vanhorn had the FCSC watch, and a first class petty officer named Carter was sitting in the engagement controller position. Van Horn was aware of the Migs and also of the fact that the ship had turned west at twenty knots.

“Old Man wants a shot.” It was not a question, and Brian, who had moved over to the weapons module, nodded in confirmation.

“Apparently so, but these guys are way out of the envelope.”

“These Terriers been known to go fifty miles, if the conditions are right,” observed Vanhorn. He looked up at Brian with an amused expression.

“You know as well as I do, Chief, that the kill probability goes to shit beyond thirty, thirty-five miles. We’d be throwing one away, we try to take a crossing, low altitude jet at eighty thousand yards.”

“Bet he takes the shot,” muttered Vanhorn.

“You just better hope your one director holds up,” replied Brian.

“What’s the system status, anyway?”

Vanhorn became all business. He punched out some codes on the keyboard and a display came up showing that the missile fire-control system was in two-minute standby, with one director available and the launcher unassigned and empty. The second missile director was still down for parts after the last power transients. Courtesy of the Engineering Department, Brian thought unkindly.

The ship trembled as the engineers brought the main engines up to twenty knots. Brian computed that they would reach the western edge of their station in twenty minutes at that speed. He stared down at the scope, watching the unknown symbols. He could no longer see video underneath the symbols.

Austin was making a radio report to the CTF 77 staff down on Yankee Station. With Wager gone for the night, the unencrypted high-frequency circuit had to be used, so there was a great deal of code-making.

Everyone had been taught that Soviet HF intercept stations all over the east coast of Asia were listening constantly and that they could flash a warning to the North Vietnamese if Hood revealed that she was tracking two of their Migs.

The exec came over. “Your systems up and ready, Brian?”

“Yes, sir, although it’s system, not systems. We’re down to one missile director. But the launcher reports ready, and I’ve got a wing-and-fin crew standing by in the magazine.”

“Hate to only have one director,” said the exec.

“Goddamn Spook-Fifty-fives are unreliable enough when they’re working.

At least with two, you’ve got a chance of completing a shot.”

Brian nodded in agreement. As a graduate of the Navy’s Guided Missile school, he knew that the A/N-SPQ55B missile fire-control radars, called Spook-55s, were highly complex systems. Contained in two turrets mounted on barbettes above the CIC, they looked like giant gray searchlights.

Within each director mount were three radars bore-sighted concentrically on a common axis. One emitted a narrow cone of energy called the acquisition beam. The second emitted a very high-energy beam barely the thickness of a pencil lead, called the tracking beam. The third broadcast a wide cone of energy called continuous wave illumination. The Spook-55s were the eyes and claws of the Hood’s missile system.

Brian knew the launch sequence by heart. When a designation was ordered by SWIC, digital data from the SPS-48 air-search radar would be streamed to the directors, which swiveled around to the appropriate bearing and elevation so that the acquisition beam could pick up the designated target, often at ranges of one hundred miles or more. Once the acquisition beam saw the target, the director moved to center the target in its tracking circuits so that the second tracking beam could see it.