Damage Control

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 the south, followed almost immediately by a targeting radar. His stomach fluttered. He understood as soon as he got a second cut. That would be Fort Klock, probably engaging the first Indian strikes. Cool. Soleck liked to see what was going on, and he liked to figure things out. He intended to be an admiral himself, one day.

“706 is ready to launch,” Guppy said.

Soleck decided not to tell Guppy that he could listen to the radio, too. He got another cut way to the north, up near the Lakshadweep Islands, very weak. He played with it a little, got a second cut. The parameters were way up in the comms range and looked naggingly familiar.

Alpha Whiskey came up on the air command freq and passed a vector to an F-18 just launching. Soleck smiled when he heard Chris Donitz responding in his Minnesota voice. Donitz—“Donuts” to everybody who flew—had just made lieutenant-commander. Donitz was being told to intercept a couple of Indian Jaguars. Old aircraft, no match for the F-18, Soleck thought, probably simulating missiles. Get ‘em, Donuts!

USS Thomas Jefferson

“Where the hell is Al Craik?” Rafe barked at his flag lieutenant.

“Nothing on any of our freqs. Nothing on satcom. It’s like the whole of Mahe has gone off the air.”

“Fuck me.” Rafe realized that he had uttered the words and regretted them. Admirals were encouraged to avoid the foul language so normal at every other level. Hank flashed him a smile, as if he was glad that Rafe was still one of the boys.

“Skipper?” a sailor behind the captain said. “CAG on two. He has a plane missing.”

Rafe looked at Hank while he took the call. “Yeah,” was all he said, and a few seconds later “yeah” again. Then, to Rafe, “AG 702 hasn’t been up on link or radar for ten minutes and CAG is worried.” AG 702 was the S-3 that Rafe had allowed to go out early.

“Stevens is lying low out there.” Rafe was staring at the mess around cat three. “He’s in EMCON, too.”

“Yeah,” said Hank.

“Tell CAG that once the E-2 is airborne, we’ll get a squeak out of 702.”

“Yeah.” The captain murmured into his headset. “He says thanks.”

Rafe thought that the CAG was a nervous ninny who had been promoted above his level of competence, but he kept that view strictly to himself. So far, the worst thing about being a battle group commander was finding that many of the people he liked as drinking buddies were not up to the challenges of big command. Right now, for example, he was ready to kill Alan Craik, whose silence was ruining his day.

“Alpha Whiskey for you, sir.”

“Admiral, 203 is a minute from intercept with those goblins and they won’t respond to radio calls. 203 wants to know how you want to play it.”

This was the gray area where exercise and reality and pride and pilot envy could all get messed up. Rafe didn’t want the Indians to even have an argument that their “missiles” had hit his ship. He worried, too, that the Indian “missiles” would turn back into airplanes when they spotted 203 and prompt an engagement that would waste fuel. He wanted them to admit that they were exercise-dead—and stay that way.

“Tell 203 to get them up on exercise guard and tell them they’re dead from surface-to-air-missiles back before their launch point. If they ignore him, he’s to engage.”

Even while he spoke, the S-3 on catapult three rolled forward into the shuttle at long last, dipped her nose as she went under tension, and leaped like a fat old cat into the air. That S-3 had cost his ship five minutes of launch time, and he could imagine the mayhem it had wreaked down in Air Ops, with pilots aloft clamoring for gas and pilots on the deck eager to launch. He was hot even in the air-conditioned comfort of the flag bridge. Rafe looked at the flag JOTS repeater and waved to one of his staff. “Can you raise Commander Craik on the JOTS?” Even if all of Mahe was down, Al’s JOTS should still function. Why isn’t he thinking this shit? Rafe thought irritably. He took a swallow of coffee. Cold. Ugh.

On the screen of the JOTS, Rafe saw 203 intercept the two Indian Jaguars. One of them turned away at once and headed back for the coast, changing his flight speed and course as prescribed in the exercise book to show that he was exercise-dead. Score one for the good guys.

But the other kept coming.

“Goblin Two will not respond to calls and is inbound toward the missile engagement zone,” Alpha Whiskey said.

The ship’s captain called from his big chair on the port side. “I want to turn to starboard to unmask my aft CIWS.” The Close-In Weapons System was a cannon capable of incredible bursts of very accurate fire to hit missiles at close range.

Rafe wanted to ignore the “dead” Jaguar and continue the launch of aircraft, but he understood that exercises were to train everybody and that ship handling mattered, too. Faced with real missiles, the captain would try to get every defense system on target. Broadside on, just like the age of Nelson.

“Do it.”

Hank leaned over his mike. “Execute,” he said.

Instantly the noise of the ship changed and she rolled to starboard as her helm was put over. It was one of the fastest turns he’d experienced on a carrier.

Madje caught his eye and pointed at the JOTS, shaking his head. “Mahe master terminal is off the air,” he said.

Rafe felt a little chill in his gut.

The ship leaned harder to starboard. The whole deck was vibrating. Rafe saw Hank’s grin, realized that Hank had planned this maneuver and was on the ball. It was well executed, too, and he saw the helmsman beaming.

Good for them, he thought. Glad I let him. Somewhere in the back of his mind where he kept score, Hank Rogers got a little plus sign on a future fitrep.

Down a level, the air boss was putting the whole deck on hold as they heeled sharply. He’d had less than a minute’s warning about what the captain intended. The flight deck was still jammed, but the respite was giving the spotters time to get the second alert five up to cat two and the E-2 command plane up to cat three, despite the cant to the deck.

Almost there, he thought.

AG 703

“Turn us to 180, Gup,” Soleck said, craning his neck. “Sounds to me like the Indians jumped the gun and we have a missile strike coming in.” He looked out over the sunlit sea and up to the clouds, trying to find the two Indian Jaguars mentioned on the AAW frequency. They were clearly in radar silence, as he didn’t have anything on the S-3’s primitive ESM. Now if they were in the water—

In the water fired a synapse somewhere in his brain. That weak signal up north was a rescue transponder. That’s why the freq looked familiar. Man in the water!

He was reaching for the radio when he saw the Jaguar, a high glinting in the sunlight, starting its steep descent to imitate a missile heading for its target—the carrier.

USS Thomas Jefferson

“Goblin’s not responding to the tower.”

“Fuck him.” Rafe couldn’t remember an exercise with such dicked-up comms. Was the guy really an asshole, or had someone put out the wrong freqs? Who knew?

“He’s less than a minute out and starting his pop.”

A pop-up was a typical terminal maneuver in most anti-ship missiles. The missile would climb sharply after it chose its target, then come down as nearly vertical into the deck of the target as possible. The Indian pilot was going for realism.

“He’s too fucking close,” from Air Ops.

The Jefferson was still turning, her aft anti-missile systems unmasked and “firing” for exercise purposes, but the rate of turn had slowed and Rafe felt the thunk of a plane launching, almost certainly the second F-18, headed south.

“Get him the fuck out of our airspace!” the same voice in Air Ops shouted.

Rafe glanced around, and something moved in his peripheral vision, and then the world exploded.

AG 703

Soleck was two miles to the north of the stack of the carrier and just turning inbound to establish his refueling track, more attention on his armrest data screen than on his instruments, when movement in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flick into an instrument scan and out over sea—

“Holy mother of God,” Soleck said.

There was a fireball rising from the deck of the carrier like a Hollywood special effect, orange and white and spreading from the bow to the stern, the violent red pulses punctuated by streaks of white rising from the flames. The fireball itself rose so high that the island, the command node of the carrier, vanished in an orange bloom.

His plane shook, and then a fist of air nearly struck them from the sky.

4
Mahe Naval Base, India

The commodore’s pistol was a Czech CZ75 with a full fifteen-round clip but no extra ammo. Alan figured it would be about as good as a peashooter against the automatic weaponry he could hear, but it helped him fight a feeling of loss of control.

The Marines were herding them like school kids down a back stairway, two of them leading and one covering the rear. “I feel like I’m back at Adirondack High,” Benvenuto muttered. “Fucking fire drill.”

Crossing the third-floor foyer, the Marines had met two others; there had been a tense moment when both groups had got ready to shoot, and then they had identified themselves, and the two newcomers had said something to the sergeant and veered off down another corridor toward the office of the Commander, West Fleet—God knew what they’d find there. The building was chaos, three bodies and a wounded man scattered along the central corridor like sacks dropped off a truck, a trail of blood down the tile where the first wounded Marine had been dragged. Twice, they had seen other people at a distance; both times, everybody had flinched, crouched, and then the others had run away and they had moved on in their hurrying file. Indian file, he had thought grimly. But different Indians. They passed office after office with closed doors. Inside, he suspected, unarmed people were trying to wait out whatever was going on. Or were dead.

USS Thomas Jefferson

Fire. All around him, fire, and something on his legs.

Rafe flailed his arms, seeking to get them free. A tumble of images, separated by flashes of darkness.

“Sir! Stop fighting me! Sir!”

Rafe pushed against something and the vertebrae of his back impacted against a sharp corner, sending more pain through his body in a jolt. He curled up, and the weight settled all over him. Weight and pain. He lay still. More tumbles. No sense of time.

“That leg might be broken. Move him carefully.”

“Sir, we got to get him clear of the bridge. The whole fucker could go!”

“Roger that. Down to the O-3 level.”

“Anyone else alive up here?”

“Captain Rogers is dead. Helmsman is over there, I tried to wrap him, everyone forward of this bulkhead died when the fucker hit us. Admiral was coming back for coffee, that’s why he’s—”

Rafe moved his head under the fire blanket and tried to speak. “—hit us?” he tried to say, but it only came out as a croak. He hurt. But time was moving now.

He felt them putting him in a clamshell. His back and legs hurt so much he couldn’t really think, felt himself going into shock, tried to breathe. The fire blanket fell back from his face.

“—what hit us?” he tried, but again, it was like a hiss of air.

Madje’s face appeared in his arc of vision. It was red and there wasn’t any hair on it.

“Sir? Can you hear me?”

“Whahitus?” Rafe got out.

Madje leaned closer. “That Indian plane hit the deck just forward, sir. The fires are pretty bad. We’re moving you to the O-3 level, and we’re fighting the fires.”

“Whuzinc’mand?”

Madje shook his head. “Captain Rogers died a few feet from you. CAG Lushner may be alive but the flight deck is—no one can go out there.”

Rafe scrabbled at Madje like a corpse rising from the grave. His hands were burned claws and the angry red flesh on his sides showed under the ruins of his flight suit, but he rose almost to a sitting position.

“You—find senior now! Take command!”

Madje nodded, almost saluted, but Rafehausen had fallen back into the stretcher. The admiral coughed in pain as a portion of his left index finger, complete with the nail, remained stuck to the clamshell where he had gripped it to sit up.

AG 703

From the moment Soleck saw the Indian fighter plow into the after deck of the Jefferson, his mind focused on what would have to be the prime interest of every airplane aloft. Fuel.

Soleck’s AG 703, flying as a mission tanker, had twenty thousand pounds of JP-5 to give when the carrier ceased to be a haven. AG 706, the last plane to launch before the catastrophe, had as much again. Scattered across two hundred miles of ocean were eleven other planes, mostly F-18 Hornets, famous for their short legs and suddenly bereft of their home base. Some of them had been on Combat Air Patrol since the last launch event more than an hour before, and their fuel tanks were as close to dry as their flight parameters and safety allowed. Down to the south, Donitz had already gone to burner and made at least one turn against exercise opposition from another flight of Indian Air Force Jaguars before the accident; he had less fuel than any of the others. Up to the north, two F-14 Tomcats from VF-171 were on picket with the northernmost fleet elements, and somewhere up there was supposed to be Stevens’s S-3 with a buddy store holding more gas. The rest of the planes were close at hand, waiting in the stack for the launch of the rest of a sea-strike package that would never come.

“Where we gon’ to land?” Guppy said. He was shaken, his voice a monotone, his face as gray as his flight helmet.

Soleck had the plane under control and the altitude even. Now he was trying to watch the whole sky for other planes. The tower had been off the air from the moment of the accident. He could see that the initial explosion and the resulting fire had stripped every antenna from the carrier, and that meant that the planes in the stack were on their own. Soleck feared that other pilots might leave their assigned altitudes and start flailing around, increasing the risk of collision.

“Gup, we could fly to China with this much gas. Shut up and get me Alpha Whiskey on radio two. And try and raise the skipper in 701.”

Soleck could hear a babble of pilot exchanges on Alpha Whiskey, with every plane in the stack clamoring for fuel and information. Alpha Whiskey, the radio frequency reserved for air-warfare command and usually controlled from the Ticonderoga-class cruiser Fort Klock, was being clobbered. “Start writing that shit down, Gup. Get their fuel states. Hey, Guppy! Stay with me, man.”

Soleck had completed his turn at the north end of their track, and they were now nose-on to the burning carrier, just a mile out. The plume of smoke rose more than a thousand feet, and the tower leaned out over the starboard side. Guppy couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Soleck reached over and slapped the side of his helmet. “Gup!”

“Sorry.” Guppy mumbled something but opened his knee-board pad and started following the voices on AW.