Carrier 12 - Chain of Command Read online

  We touched down gently, right where the three-wires would be at the field if it were configured for carrier landing practices. I let her run out a little, slowly applying the speed breaks until our forward speed had decreased to a gentle taxi roll. The landing signals fellow was already out there, fanning the air with slow movements like a bird trying to take off, attracting my attention. I waved, turned the aircraft toward him, and decreased my speed even more.

  We followed him in to the VIP ramp, and I slid the Tomcat onto her spot. Kames and I went through our shutdown checklist, and the last noises of the engines faded away as they spooled down.

  I popped the canopy, and eased myself over the side of the bird, climbing down the handholds. Kames followed a few seconds behind me. It was a seniority thing--last in, first out.

  A small delegation awaited me on the ground. I returned the salutes politely, and held out my hand to shake hands with the guy who looked like the most senior.

  "Welcome to Vietnam, Admiral Magruder." The English was clear and fluent, only a slight trace of accent tingeing the vowels. I felt my hand tighten around his.

  "I appreciate your cooperation," I said. It had taken me a long time to decide on those words, to figure out how to phrase my gratitude for what the Vietnamese were evidently willing to do.

  That is, what they said they were willing to do.

  "I am Bien Than, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. I will be your primary contact during your time in our country for these matters." He glanced from side to side at the rest of the delegation and the reporters, and his face took on a slightly guarded expression. "We should talk. Perhaps I can assist you in refining your plans."

  Now, this was curious. What was it that Than evidently wanted to say to me that he didn't want to advertise to the members of the media crowding around us?

  "It would be my pleasure." I started to elaborate on that, but then followed his lead and fell silent.

  After we posed for a few pictures, Than led us away from the gabbling horde. I heard a few voices call out, some almost unintelligible and others were clear American accents. I smiled, waved, and followed Than off, repeating the magic phrase "No comment" as though it were a mantra that would carry me through their midst.

  "Tombstone." That one particular voice stopped me dead in my tracks. Kames, following close on my heels, bumped into me, and I heard her mutter a quick apology.

  I turned to scan the crowd. There she was, at the forefront of the mass of media now being held back by security forces. As stunning as ever, with the years adding a patina of grace and confidence that was missing in her younger counterparts. She held the microphone down low, an indication that she knew her viewers would be at least as interested in her words as anything I'd have to say. This was in sharp contrast to the others, who thrust the foam-covered mikes at me in some sort of phallic symbolism.

  Pamela Drake, star reporter for ACN News. She'd dogged my path for the last twenty years, first as a news reporter, later as friend and lover, then as an adversarial representative of the media that refused to admit that there was any reason that they should not be present for every second of every military maneuver. Our disagreements over the First Amendment versus the safety of my people had escalated to the point where we'd broken off our engagement.

  Lucky break, that. After being married to Tomboy for one and a half years, I knew that there was no way that Pamela and I could have ever had a life together.

  Pamela had always insisted that I give up my career in the military. Tomboy, with her own career skyrocketing, would never even have considered such a thing. She knew how important flying was to me--almost as important as it was to her.

  "Hello, Tombstone," Pamela said. Her voice reached me even over the clamor of the rest of the crowd. It was an odd, deadly sensation starting at her. Like watching sharks circle your underwater cage. Dangerous, deadly dangerous, both for me and my people--but somehow still so compelling, so hard to look away from.

  I don't know how long I would have stood there. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my back. A jab, an elbow if I weren't mistaken. The momentary pain, not to say the sheer shock that a junior lieutenant commander would attempt such a thing, broke the spell. I looked away from Pamela and back at Lieutenant Commander Kames. She just stood there, her eyes calm and staring. "Sorry, Admiral. I slipped." The expression on her face bore no trace of guilt.

  Pamela faded back from a foreground figure into just one of the reporters, yapping like baying hounds after the stories that were their life's blood.

  Pamela had intruded too often in my military operations for me to believe her presence here was anything but an extremely well-planned example of her almost psychic nose for news. She'd capitalized on our relationship several times in the recent past, most notably during the last conflict in the Mediterranean. There she'd counted on my good graces to provide access to the story, and had gone so far as to throw herself into the ocean from the deck of an old fishing vessel nearing the carrier, knowing that the sea-air-rescue helicopters would undoubtedly pick her up.

  That had been a mistake. A big one. She hadn't realized how much of one until I'd placed her under armed guard in a stateroom. How her lawyer had ever managed to finagle her out of the criminal charges that had been pending, I'll never know.

  "Let's get going," I said to Than, who had stopped to watch this side play with an expression as inscrutable as Kames's. I swore silently to myself, uncomfortable at being on the receiving end of a stone-faced expression.

  That's how I got my nickname, of course. It had had nothing to do with the fight at the OK Corral. No, my orderly squadron mates had decided that my face was so expressionless that it reminded them of a tombstone. It had stuck all these years, as first call signs usually do. My friends abbreviated it to "Stoney."

  It was a short walk into the icy air of the terminal building. Than led us around Customs, through a few side passageways that were luxuriously carpeted and decorated. A moment later, we were at the VIP Conference Room located immediately in the front of the airport terminal building. Than opened the door, and stepped aside to let me precede him in.

  I stepped into a conference room much like any other. There was a certain ineffable sameness to these rooms, characterized by heavily draped windows--when windows were even allowed--gleaming wooden tables, and relatively comfortable chairs. The obligatory water pitcher and coffee urn stood in the center of the table, and a stack of brown folders at the head of it.

  I slung my flight bag onto the table, not worried about how out of place the battered green canvas satchel would look amongst the trappings of power. I wasn't in the mood for courtesies, formalities, and the other rituals that had been handed to me along with my first set of stars. Then, I had not been senior enough to reject them. Now I was. I turned to Than. "It's been a long flight, sir."

  Than nodded, and a grave smile crossed his face. "And a long time. I am hoping that the material I have for you will make it seem that much more worthwhile."

  He picked up the top folder, and handed it to me without comment. I opened it, started to take a deep breath, and felt the air catch in my lungs. It was as if all power to make even the slightest voluntary motion had left me, like a deep sucker punch to the gut. I stared down until basic instinct took over and I found myself sucking in another deep, shuddering breath. I looked up at Than. He was concerned now, more than he had a right to be. He must have known how it would affect me.

  "Where did you get this?" I asked.

  "From a resistance fighter, a very old one. He says he has more--hard evidence, he says. Not just photos."

  I glanced back at the photo, a face I thought I'd forgotten. It was so like my own, even more so now that the passing years had carved their marks on me. Was this how I would look in later years?

  The photo showed three men in cut-off shorts and T-shirts, standing comfortably together. The man in the middle had his arms slung over the two on either side, and was grinning for the
camera. The man to the left held up a newspaper, printed in English, with the words "Clinton Wins Second Term" emblazoned across the front of it.

  There was no mistaking that face, not even after all these years. The skin was darkly burnished by the sun, rough and shiny on the nose as though peeling from a recent sunburn. The eyes were dark, maybe gray--I couldn't tell from the photo. Even with a smile for the camera, there was a sense that deep secrets hid behind those eyes, more eons of experience than any one man could have had. The eyes were alert, keen, confident without being arrogant. It was my father.

  2

  Lieutenant Commander Curt "Bird Dog" Robinson 23 September

  The E-2C Hawkeye off to my left was an ungainly-looking bird. Slap a huge rotating radar dome on the Navy's all-purpose -2 series airframe, add a weird cross-framed tail assembly, and you've got a bird that maxes out at 450 knots. And that's downhill with a tail wind.

  I pitied the poor bastards riding sidesaddle in the E-2C Hawkeye. Bad enough that it's a prop plane instead of a jet, but the danged consoles are mounted along the fuselage. The aviators--yeah, we call them that even though they're really scope dopes--get to sit face-forward during takeoffs and landings. That's about it. The rest of the time, they've got the seats swiveled ninety degrees to the side and they're staring at tiny little blips on radar screens instead of all this big blue sky.

  No jet engines, no missiles. What's the point of being an aviator?

  About five minutes after we went feet dry over Vietnam, one of the Hawkeye Radar Intercept Operators answered that question.

  "Viper 201, Snoopy 1. We're getting prelaunched emissions, probable SAM site." The RIO on tactical rattled off some range-bearing info, the sort of stuff my backseater, Gator Cummings, just loves. "We holding it?" I asked Gator.

  "Nope. But they've got better gear. If Frank says it's there, it's there."

  "What the hell's an active SAM site doing down there?" That worried the shit out of me.

  "Probably the reason we're taking Snoopy out for a look-see," Gator said calmly.

  That's one of the things I like about Gator. He stays cool, stays loose, when other RIOs would get all bothered about a minor detail like SAMs.

  "How close can I get?" I asked Gator. I still wasn't convinced we had an active SAM site down below.

  "Thirty miles--no closer," Gator warned. "We're almost at the edge of the envelope now."

  I mulled that over for a moment, trying to decide how serious he was about that. Gator always builds in a safety factor when he's talking to me, one that he says gives him time to punch out. Yeah, right. Like I've ever had a backseater punch out on me. While Gator's my usual RIO, I've flown with others. Never lost a one.

  Still, there had been moments when I knew he'd come damn close to jerking down on that orange-and-black-striped lever and departing the aircraft prior to landing. Probably the last time he'd been serious about it was when we were over the Arctic, and then only the fact that the weather would probably kill him faster than I could had kept him in the aircraft.

  I knew there were still some long-range bastards down in that foliage below. But why would they be targeting us? Vietnam was at peace as much as it had ever been in its shattered last century, and there was no reason to believe that we were wandering into hostile territory.

  "Probably just normal maintenance," I suggested, wondering if I could get Gator to agree to that.

  "You want to take that chance?"

  I had my answer. Gator believes that serious paranoia is the beginning of sound operational planning, and I have to admit that he's usually right. Still, I wasn't within range just yet, and I hadn't done formation flying in a long time.

  "Bet it goes off-line in three minutes," I said, with more confidence than I felt. Some of Gator's paranoia was starting to affect me, slithering down my backbone and creeping into the ends of my fingers. If there were bad guys down there, then the problem wasn't ours. Hell, I thought I could probably outrun anything they could shoot at us. However, the unarmed E-2C still in position off my right wing was another matter.

  As capable and competent as it is at what it does, there's a reason they send it out with fighter escorts. Not usually in close formation like this, but then there'd been a couple of us that needed a little formation-flying practice, and we'd decided this was an excellent opportunity to catch up. The E-2 hadn't minded; the pilot had only warned us to stay out of his blind spot in that ungainly high-winged airframe he'd be flying.

  "Viper 201, suggest we turn back." The E-2 pilot now, making it clear by his tone of voice that consenting to play pigeon in some Tomcat formation flying didn't include getting any closer to this SAM site.

  Damn. Another paranoid aviator. What happened to the good old days? Gator would have pointed out that my good old days weren't all that long ago.

  "Roger, Snoopy." It wasn't like I had a lot of choice.

  The E-2 had us increase the separation between all three aircraft, giving him forty-five degrees and two thousand yards of lead on both of us. As my wingman slid back into position, I noticed him shaking his head, and he waggled his wings slightly in greeting. I waggled back.

  "What the fuck--missile launch, missile launch!" My wingman's RIO was the first to pick up the radar trace of the missile leaving the rail and ascending into the atmosphere.

  "Snoopy, get the hell out of here!" The E-2 knew I wasn't kidding. He curled into a tighter turn than I'd ever seen one of those birds pull before, and started beating feet for open water, leaving us to deal with the incoming threat.

  "Take low position," I ordered our wingman. He slid down and below, peeling off into a steep dive to take him two thousand feet below me. I climbed up, keeping my aircraft interposed between the incoming missile and the bird we were supposed to be protecting.

  "Two--no, three." Now Gator was holding them as well, singing out the range and bearings as the missiles spiked up from the tree cover.

  "I'm going after the first one," my wingman said. I saw him bank hard right, heading for the course that he thought would put him on an intercept with Sparrows against the slower surface-to-air missile.

  "Don't chase it--stay in formation and wait for it," I ordered. It was too late. Viper 202 was already well out of position, the pilot chasing that perfect firing slot that would put him in perfect firing position.

  "Damn, damn, damn," Gator swore quietly over the ICS. "Asshole's going to--hold it."

  The cry of "Fox two, Fox two" echoed over tactical as 202 toggled off two Sparrow missiles at the deadly incoming fire.

  "No good." Gator's voice was slightly higher now as he relayed to me the details of the geometry between missile, fighter, and target. "He needs to go with a Sidewinder--now."

  "202, Fox three time," I said over tactical.

  "Roger, I'm on it." The old man's voice made it clear that I was a distraction rather than a help at this point.

  I swore quietly, picturing Skeeter Harmon in the cockpit swearing back at me.

  Skeeter Harmon--a hot stick, one of the best. Hell, Gator'd had the audacity to suggest that my problem with Skeeter was that I felt threatened. Threatened--not likely. Not from a junior nugget just starting his second cruise on board Jefferson. I had more time in the shitter than he had in the cockpit, and there wasn't a damn thing for me to feel insecure about.

  Skeeter had gotten off to a rocky start in the squadron, but had quickly come around once we saw he could fly. That's all that really matters in the long run anyway--how hot a stick you are.

  But Skeeter seemed to think that there were other issues at work in the squadron, and he was the first to start wailing whenever he didn't get exactly the flight he wanted. One night when we were out drinking in Singapore, Skeeter had even had the audacity to suggest that it was because he was black. I almost popped him at that point. Gator, that asshole, damn near agreed with him. Hell, if you can't count on your RIO in a bar, where can you count on him?

  Anyway, that missile now getting too
damn close for comfort didn't know whether Skeeter was black, white, or pink with purple polka dots. Missiles are like that. So are MiGs.

  Skeeter rolled into position, slightly above the missile's altitude, and toggled off two Sidewinders. "Fox three, Fox three," he chimed over tactical.

  "201, say your intentions." The voice was as familiar to me as Gator's, and almost as important.

  Great. Now the carrier was getting in on the act. That was all I needed at this point, one other voice babbling out good ideas and suggestions while I was in a ready fire mode.

  "I'll get back to you." I said it fast enough to let the Operations Specialist 6n the other end of the circuit know I was pissed. But hell, it wasn't really his fault. Some surface-puke Tactical Action Officer was undoubtedly riding his ass, howling for intentions and indications. Like there was anything he could really do about it.

  "Got it!" Skeeter crowed seconds before his lead Sidewinder intercepted the first missile. "Man, am I hot or what!"

  "Not as hot as the E-2 is going to be if you don't get the second one," I reminded him. "You take that one--I'll go for number three."

  "Break right, descend to eight thousand feet," Gator ordered quietly from the backseat. "Recommend the Sidewinder for the first shot."

  "You don't want to take a shot with the Sparrow?"

  "No--let's just do it right the first time."

  I nodded. The Sparrow had a longer range, but the Sidewinder was considerably more accurate at this kind of angles fight. Plus, the Sidewinder was faster. Not that the ground-launched missile could outrun a Sparrow, but the Sidewinder just felt like the right weapon to use. For once, Gator and I agreed.

  I selected a Sidewinder and waited for the tone. The distinctive warbling of a Sidewinder that had acquired a sufficient-heat target filled the cockpit. I toggled it off. My Tomcat rocked slightly as the weight left the wing, and I corrected us back into a level flight immediately.

  The missile wheeled off, picking up speed rapidly and nosing around a bit in the air as it found its heat source.