LITMIR.BIZ

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Alex, sure.”

      “Sir, I’m calling to protest two inbound ‘missiles.’ I’ve called Exercise Control four times to note them as intercepted and they don’t respond.” The “missiles” would really be aircraft imitating missiles as part of the exercise.

      “Roger, Alex. I hear you. We haven’t been able to raise ExCon since a few seconds after startex ourselves. Something’s gone down at their end.”

      Rafe could hear the relief in the Canadian’s voice. “That’s okay, then. But be aware that two Indian Air Force Jaguars went over my position about six minutes back and went into a missile profile.”

      “Got it, Alex. I’ll pass that to Air Ops.”

      “Out here, sir.”

      “Stay alive, Alex. Keep up the good work.”

      Rafe turned to Madje. “You get all that?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Get it through to Air Ops and Supplot.” Supplementary Plot was where electronic-warfare-intelligence information and various other sources were cross-indexed to update the carrier’s picture of the ocean around her. Rafe turned to the boat’s captain, a former F-18 pilot. His leather flight jacket’s patch said “Hank Rogers.” Only a score of old buddies like Rafe knew his name was really Reginald.

      “Hank? Launch the alert five, okay? I have to put some teeth down there to cover the Canucks.”

      “On the way,” Hank murmured, already on the phone to the air boss.

      AG 703, in the Stack 2NM NNE of the USS Thomas Jefferson

      Lieutenant Evan Soleck’s had been the fourth plane to launch after the local Combat Air Patrol and he got it into the air without a hitch. He had no back end to worry about, because he was a mission tanker for a sea-strike package that would launch later in the event—twenty thousand pounds of fuel to give while airborne—but intellectual curiosity made him get the back end up from his pilot console so that he could run his passive electronic-surveillance antennas and follow the action.

      His copilot, a nugget from Iowa called “Guppy” because of the facial expressions he generated while concentrating on his instruments, had his hands full merely following the checklists and couldn’t believe his pilot was wasting time on backseater crap. “If the skipper wanted us doing that stuff, he’d have sent us up with guys in the back,” Guppy said in a put-upon tone.

      Soleck watched him flail through the checklist. That was me, last cruise, he thought. And continued the ritualistic pattern of bringing the computers on line. Oh, for the MARI we had at the det. New computers, enhanced antennas, the works. Soleck had flown in a special det under Al Craik and it had spoiled him for these old planes and their antique systems.

      USS Thomas Jefferson

      In the windowed bubble below the Jefferson‘s bridge, the air boss was trying to launch forty aircraft for the opening reconnaissance of the exercise. Every F-18, every S-3, all the EA-6B Prowlers—it was a major launch, and it took his full concentration to keep the overcrowded flight deck from becoming a disaster. A sailor pushed a yellow sticky into his line of sight. Launch the alert five AAW.

      The air boss looked at the line waiting to get off cats three and four. The event had started, and he had planes five deep in the queue already.

      “Tell the tower to hold three and four until the alert is launched.” The alert—an aircraft held on the shortest tether, ready to launch in five minutes—was sitting on cat two, with the second plane somewhere toward the stern. He held the note out to a spotter and motioned that they needed to get that second plane through the traffic jam and on the cat.

      “Now launch the alert five AAW,” the air boss said into the ship’s 1MC. He cycled his comms from the Guard frequency that he monitored in his headset to the AAW net while trying to read the spidery writing on the launch board behind him. Donitz. AG 203.

      “Alpha Gulf 203, you ready?” he said.

      “Green and green.”

      Lieutenant-Commander Chris Donitz was already in the shuttle. The air boss watched the twin vertical stabilizers tremble in the heat distortion as Donitz moved the plane to full power, and then he was off, rotating just off the cat to clear the hull of the ship.

      Alpha Whiskey, the air warfare commander off to starboard on the missile cruiser Fort Klock, came up before the air boss had toggled back to Guard, giving orders to Donitz as he roared away from the ship in his F-18. “Alpha Gulf 203, intercept two goblins inbound on the 090 radial at 9000.”

      Somewhere above him, Donitz said, “Roger,” before the air boss had switched freqs and noted from his comm card that “goblins” were Indian Air Force Jaguars. He didn’t question why Indian Jaguars had to be intercepted; his job was down here. He watched a sailor put a check next to AG 203 on the launch board, then looked down at the deck and saw that AG 114 was next to launch for the alert five.

      “Spot, you got 114 moving yet?”

      “Trying to get the S-3 off cat three so I can move the E-2 and get him space.”

      The air boss looked down at the deck again and saw the S-3 on cat three as the jet-blast deflector rose out of the deck to protect the planes waiting behind her from the backwash of her engines. “What’s that S-3 doing?” he said into his mike.

      “Something about their shuttle.”

      The air boss stifled his desire to say something savage. Out on the deck, a sweating kid was struggling with some bent piece of metal under the nose wheel of a plane older than he was, surrounded by fumes and jet blast and God knew what else. No amount of attitude from the air boss would make it happen any faster.

      AG 703

      “Got it,” Soleck said, looking at a first harvest of ESM cuts from his S-3’s back end.

      “You said we were in EMCON, Ev.”

      “We are in EMCON. I’m not radiating anything; I’m looking at what other folks are radiating.”

      Against his own inclination, Guppy leaned forward to look at the screen on his armrest.

      “See? That’s the air-search radar on one of the Indian picket ships.” Soleck put his cursor over one of the signals so that Guppy could see it.

      “You don’t know that.”

      Soleck exhaled in frustration. “Yeah, Gup, I do. So would you if you learned your radar parameters. That’s not one of ours, and it’s too much in the air-search freq to be anything but one of theirs. Civilian ships don’t mount antennas like that, right? See the sweep? And anyway, that’s Owl Screech, a Russian targeting radar on one of their Russian-built ships.”

      “And you just know all that.”

      “Yeah. I also know that we’re off our altitude by a long shot and starting a long turn to the right because the copilot isn’t really paying attention.”

      Guppy swung his eyes to the instruments and the plane snapped to attention. “You—”

      Soleck thought Yeah, I’m being unfair. Whatever. He ran the cursor over the battle group and looked. He could read some low-power emissions from the flight deck, guys talking to the tower for launch at radio freqs. In full EMCON, they wouldn’t do even that. Otherwise, the battle group was pretty invisible. Looked tight. He kept widening his search ring, keeping one eye on his nugget’s flying and one ear on the launch of their strike package. He could hear the air boss berating 706, the other S-3, which had some kind of mechanical failure while in tension.

      He got distracted by air-search radar off to

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