Viper Strike c-2 Read online

  Bayerly followed.

  1408 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 201

  "I have him!" Tombstone said. "One o'clock and low!"

  "Tally-ho!" Batman replied, announcing that he too had the other plane in sight.

  "Homeplate, this is Sharpshooter Leader. We have visual on Cowboy Leader and one bandit." He checked his altitude and realized with a jolt that Bayerly was well below the ten-thousand-foot hard deck. "Cowboy is in hot pursuit."

  "Copy, Sharpshooter. Stand by."

  "Tombstone!" Dixie called from the backseat. "MiG, bearing two-seven-five. He's going for Made It's six!"

  Tombstone looked to the left, searching the sky. He saw the second MiG, a thousand feet below and already lining up on Bayerly's tail.

  "Cowboy Leader, this is Sharpshooter," Tombstone called. "Wake up, Made It! Watch your six! Bandit coming in hard!" but he knew it was already too late to stop the MiG from lining up the shot.

  1408 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 101

  Bayerly heard the warbling growl in his headphones that told him he had a heat-seeker lock on the plane ahead. The target pipper on his HUD turned from a square to a circle, with the letters ACQ flashing beside it. "Target acquisition!"

  "Cool it, man!" Stratton warned. "We don't have release yet!"

  The MiG ahead leveled out two thousand feet above the jungle. Bayerly followed the target onto the deck. Green mountains flashed past on either side as the fleeing aircraft wound its way up the Nam Mae Taeng Valley. He'd heard Tombstone's warning and knew the MiG's wingman was somewhere behind him, but decided to hang on for a few more seconds. There was still time.

  "Come on," Bayerly muttered, willing the carrier to give him permission to fire. "Come on, you bastards."

  The target circle jittered back and forth on his HUD, but Bayerly kept the F-14 pressing in on the MiG's tail. A brilliant pinpoint of light broke free from the target, then a second and a third, all trailing smoke in graceful arcs toward the jungle. The bandit was popping flares, trying to break Bayerly's lock.

  "Made It!" Stratton yelled. "I see him! The other bandit's all over us!"

  "Hold on, Kid! I'm on this one."

  "Oh, shit! He's going' for a lock, man!"

  "Cowboy Leader, this is Homeplate. Your request for weapons release is denied. Repeat, denied. Standard ROEs apply. Fire only if fired upon."

  "Kid! Where's our tail?"

  "On our six, range one mile! He's got a lock! Made it, he's got lock!"

  Bayerly could hear a second tone over his headset. The Tomcat was being targeted by the second MiG. "Tell me when he launches!"

  "He's closing, Made It! Still no launch."

  "Come on… come on…

  1409 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 201

  Tombstone saw the second MiG lining up on Bayerly's Tomcat. He'd heard the order relayed from Homeplate, but he couldn't wait and do nothing while the enemy plane took a shot at Made It and Kid. He dropped the Tomcat's right wing and slipped into a steep dive. "Hang back, Batman," he called. "We're going in."

  "That'll violate the hard deck, Tombstone," Batman replied.

  "We'll discuss my fitness report later." He saw three aircraft symbols on his HUD now, Bayerly sandwiched between two MiGs. "Dixie! Tickle that guy with a radar lock."

  He lined up on the trailing aircraft, waiting for the warble that told him he had a lock. If he couldn't fire the missile, at least he could startle the MiG's pilot, who would hear the radar lock as a tone in his own headset and know an American plane had him in its sights.

  "Tone," Dixie called.

  The target MiG did not waver. Either he wasn't aware of Tombstone's weapons lock, or he was gambling that the Americans would not fire first.

  "He's not going for it," Tombstone said. "Going to buster. He rammed the throttles full forward, cutting in the Tomcat's afterburners.

  Acceleration slammed him against his seat.

  With startling swiftness, the trailing MiG swelled to fill his HUD.

  Tombstone cut the burners, then finessed the stick to starboard, angling the F-14 so that it would pass the MiG on its right side with a few yards to spare. At close range, Tombstone could see details of the other plane's construction down to the individual rivets along the fuselage. It was not a Soviet export aircraft, he saw, but a Shenyang J-7, a Chinese copy of the MiG-21 built under license. He'd faced them before over Korea. It was silver with red control surfaces, and he could read the numbers on the nose. There were no national markings or unit ID, however. Was it Chinese, Burmese, or something else?

  The pilot looked back at Tombstone across the narrow gap between the aircraft, eyes wide above his oxygen mask. Tombstone brought his stick back to the left, closing the gap slowly, drawing closer… closer…

  The J-7 pilot needed no further urging. As Tombstone brought the F-14 tight across the Shenyang's bow, the other pilot cut his aircraft sharply to the left, breaking contact with Bayerly's plane and angling away from Tombstone with his own afterburner blazing. Tombstone held the turn, pulling a full circle as he began climbing once more.

  "Cowboy Leader, this is Sierra Bravo." Tombstone could hear the Hawkeye calling Bayerly. "Cowboy Leader, be advised you are entering Burmese airspace. Come to course one-eight-zero, execute immediate."

  Tombstone leveled off at ten thousand feet, searching the northern horizon. Dixie spotted Bayerly's plane first on radar and gave him the bearing. Tombstone could see him then, the second of two contrails flitting across the jungle, two miles to the north and down on the deck.

  The border was invisible, but Tombstone knew that Bayerly had already crossed the line and was plunging deeper into Burmese territory with every second.

  1409 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 101

  Bayerly's thumb caressed the trigger as the MiG grew large in his HUD.

  "Cowboy Leader, this is Sharpshooter Leader," Magruder's voice called over the radio. "Break off, Made It. Break off!"

  "Cowboy Leader, this is Homeplate," a second voice added. "Terminate pursuit. Repeat, break off and RTB."

  Return to base? Bayerly shook himself. He was sorely tempted to fire.

  But no, his career was in a tailspin already. A stunt like that would make him crash and burn for sure.

  "Shit!" Bayerly snapped. Savagely, he yanked back on the stick, hauling the F-14 vertical as he cut in his afterburners and clawed for the sky. The MiG continued to race toward the north, dwindling into the haze on the horizon. At ten thousand feet Bayerly leveled off, bringing the Tomcat around to a southerly heading. He could see Magruder's plane loitering in the distance, Wayne and Costello circling beyond that. The realization that he'd pursued the enemy MiG miles into Burmese territory hit him like an icy wave.

  Quickly, he checked the sky around his Tomcat, but it was empty of hostile aircraft.

  "Where's the guy on our tail?"

  "Tombstone brushed him off, man," Stratton said. The RIO sounded shaken.

  "That bandit's heading out of Dodge at Mach 1."

  Bayerly groaned inwardly. Magruder again. That made it worse. He pushed the throttles forward, going to buster.

  The air battle, such as it was, had ended.

  1411 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 201

  "Cowboy Leader, Sharpshooter." Tombstone was angry. Bayerly had deliberately violated the ROEs on two points… three if you counted mixing it up with the intruder aircraft in the first place. "What the hell were you playing at?"

  "Get off my six, Magruder," Bayerly's voice replied. "I'm not in the mood." A short string of profanity followed, harsh and biting.

  "Whoa there, don't go ballistic on us, Made It," Tombstone said. "You're way out of line!"

  "Tell it to your damned uncle, hero," Bayerly snapped. The words carried suppressed fury, and his voice nearly broke. "I've had it with all of you bastards!"

  Tombstone opened his mouth to deliver a burning reply, then stopped.

  Something was riding the other aviator, and until Tombstone knew what it was, he wasn't going to push. He didn't know Bayerly that well, but he could tell that the man was on edge, more than could be explained by post-combat jitters.

  The CO of the VF-97 War Eagles was a big, bluff man given to occasional bursts of temper, but he was a competent pilot. He wouldn't have been given a squadron skipper's slot if he wasn't.

  In any case, the other skipper was not under his command, and the tactical frequency was not the place to chew out another pilot. The whole matter would have to rest until they got back to the carrier.

  Then the voice of the Air Officer back aboard Jefferson broke in on the tactical net. "This is Homeplate. Ninety-nine aircraft, RTB. I say again, ninety-nine aircraft, RTB."

  The radio call "ninety-nine aircraft" referred to all of the carrier's airborne planes. "That's it," Batman said. "They're calling us back to the bird farm."

  That wasn't surprising, Tombstone thought. Not after the incident he'd just witnessed, an incident tracked on the Hawkeye's long-range radar.

  Bayerly was not going to need his report to get himself hung.

  But the man's attitude still puzzled Tombstone. Crossing a border in hot pursuit of a MiG he could understand. In combat, nothing existed save your plane and your opponent's plane, and the adrenaline rush of battle could wipe everything else from your mind.

  It was the acid… the pain in Bayerly's voice that bothered him, that and the crack about his uncle. Made It had seemed withdrawn for the past few weeks, worried presumably, by something he'd not shared with the other men in the wing. For the first time, Tombstone wondered if the other aviator's personal problems were interfering with his flying.

  Navy aviators joked about living on the edge, referring
to that wild mix of speed, bravado, and arrogance which characterized the life of the typical fighter pilot… at least in the perceptions of Hollywood and the public.

  They did not talk about going past the edge, about losing the self-assurance which alone let them put their lives on the line day after day, week after week.

  Had Bayerly just lost it? With a trap coming up, they might all be about to find out.

  1515 hours, 14 January

  Tomcat 101, Marshall Stack

  Bayerly was still seething as he held his aircraft at two thousand feet, maintaining his position several miles astern of the U.S.S. Jefferson. The holding pattern, called a Marshall stack, was primarily used in rough weather or at night, but with all of the carrier's far-flung aircraft lining up for their traps, several low on fuel, the Air Marshall had shuffled them into the stack, giving each its own priority on the big green board in Ops which kept track of aircraft status.

  From fifteen miles out, the Nimitz-class nuclear carrier looked tiny, a sliver of a gray rectangle almost lost on the wide, gray sea. The other ships of CBG-14, Jefferson's Carrier Battle Group, were scattered across the ocean in all directions. Bayerly could make out the lean shape of the U.S.S.

  Vicksburg, the group's Aegis cruiser, trailing the carrier astern; the DDG Lawrence Kearny and the DD John A. Winslow were positioned well out on either flank. Farther out still, mere specks on the western horizon, were the CBG's two ASW frigates, Gridley and Biddle.

  "Tomcat One-oh-one," Jefferson's Air Marshall said over Bayerly's headphones. "Charlie now." That was the signal to leave the Marshall and begin his approach to the carrier.

  "One-oh-one, roger." He banked the F-14, descending to eight hundred feet and going into the final turn which would bring the aircraft in above the Jefferson's wake. Pulling out of the 4-G turn, Bayerly cut the throttles back to idle and popped the speed brakes. As the F-14 dropped below three hundred knots, the Tomcat's wings began to slide forward. Bayerly overrode the wings with the manual control, keeping the Tomcat looking clean and sleek as it went into the break.

  Don't go ballistic on us, Magruder had said. Bayerly reached up to wipe the sweat from his eyes and found his hand blocked by his helmet visor.

  Magruder's words still burned.

  Bayerly's discontent had been gnawing at him, ever since the drama of Operation Righteous Thunder had played itself out in the skies over Wonsan three months earlier. He was hard pressed to even identify the emotion, but he knew it was connected with Tombstone Magruder and the lionization which had been directed at him ever since the Korean raid.

  They'd been treating the guy like a genuine grade-A hero… press interviews, TV, the Navy Cross from the Secretary of Defense, the works! What Bayerly felt was not jealousy, exactly, but it was closely akin… a sense that blind luck had once again shown a vicious prejudice. As if the nephew of the carrier group's admiral needed any more luck!

  His speed dropped quickly. At two hundred eighty knots Bayerly let the wings slide forward, providing extra lift and control at low speed, then lowered the landing gear. At two hundred thirty knots he lowered the flaps, still slowing, still descending, now at six hundred feet above the waves and a mile abeam of the Jefferson.

  The carrier looked bigger now, but she still carried the impression of being an impossibly small target on a very large ocean. The Jefferson's island rose along the starboard side of her flight deck in a tangle of radar antennae and masts, of catwalks and windscreens. From off her port side, he could see the aircraft arrayed on her deck, appearing tiny and white against the dark surface of her "roof."

  Passing the carrier's stern, Bayerly set his rate of descent at six hundred feet per minute and initiated a twenty-two degree bank to the left.

  Sweeping across Jefferson's wake some three quarters of a mile behind her, he worked the controls to line up for his approach to the deck. From here, he could see the Fresnel lens system on the port side, across the flight deck from the island. The Fresnel lens, or "meatball," an arrangement of lights which changed their relative positions as he changed his, showed him whether or not he was aligned properly with the carrier's deck. It was time now to "call the ball."

  "One-oh-one," he said, identifying his aircraft. "Tomcat ball. Six point one." The number gave his fuel state, sixty-one hundred pounds.

  "Roger ball," the voice of Jefferson's Air Boss replied from the carrier's Primary Flight Control, "Pried-Fly" in popular jargon. The acknowledgment had just passed from the Air Boss to the Landing Signals Officer, or LSO, standing at his station just below the Fresnel lens. Bayerly was half a mile astern of the Jefferson now, seconds away from the roundoff of her flight deck.

  Damn Tombstone Magruder, anyway! Him and his Top Gun airs. He never boasted about having been through the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar, but he managed to let you know without saying it. There was an arrogance about the man, an assumed superiority.

  "Power up!"

  Damn! He'd let his speed fall too fast. His Tomcat was dropping too quickly down the glide path. He pulled back on the stick and nudged the throttles forward. The F-14 rose… too much, damn it!

  "Wave off!" the LSO sang in his ear. "Wave off!"

  His wheels touched the deck, but too far forward, missing all four of the arrestor cables stretched across the aft end of the flight deck in his path.

  He was already jamming the throttles to full forward, building enough thrust to get the F-14 back in the air.

  "Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!" The LSO's call was an embarrassing litany as the Tomcat raced down the deck, the island a gray blur off his starboard wingtip. Then he was airborne once more.

  CHAPTER 3

  1525 hours, 14 January

  Flight deck, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

  Tombstone watched the Jefferson's stern spread out before and below his F-14 as he held the aircraft's angle of attack steady. He spared one final glance for the ball, noted that he was square on target, then let the Tomcat slip over the roundoff and down to the deck. His wheels touched with a jolt; at the same moment he rammed the throttles to full military power, just in case his tailhook failed to engage one of the arrestor cables.

  He felt the reassuring forward surge of deceleration and dragged the throttles back to idle as the hook snagged the number-three wire. After checking his instruments for fire or warning lights, Tombstone let the F-14 roll backwards slightly to "spit out the wire," then followed the hand signals of a yellow-shirted deck director.

  In the sky, a Tomcat is the epitome of grace and maneuverability; on a carrier deck it has all of the delicate grace of a beached walrus, especially when the flight deck is wet or rolling in heavy seas. Carefully, he folded the Tomcat's wings, then nudged the throttles up slightly, using his feet to control brakes and rudder pedals for the turn into his designated parking space.

  Chief Bob Smith, crew chief for Tomcat 201, was already unfolding the ladder on the port side beneath the cockpit when Tombstone cracked the canopy.

  "Smooth mission, Commander?"

  "Not bad, Chief." He was still worried about Made It. He'd heard the LSO call the bolter for 101 over the radio, knew that Bayerly would have been directed out and around for another pass. He decided to make his way across the deck to the LSO's platform aft of the meatball.

  Batman's Tomcat 232 swept in across the stern for a graceful trap on the number-three wire. Tombstone waited for an opening, then trotted across the open flight deck, past the small army of deck crewmen and handlers who were working on the recoveries.

  Lieutenant Commander Ted "Bumer" Craig stood with a cluster of other officers behind the collapsible windscreen mounted at his console on the LSO platform. Bumer was VF-95's LSO, a tall, blond man from Indianapolis who was dividing his attention between the incoming planes themselves and their TV images on the Pilot Landing Aid Television screen on his console. In one hand he held the "pickle," a handle with a guarded switch which triggered the red wave-off lights bracketing the meatball at his back like the rings around a target's bull's-eye. In his other hand he gripped a telephone handset for communicating with the Air Boss up in Pried-Fly, as well as with the incoming pilots.