“How much are we giving 203?” Soleck asked.
Guppy looked up from pencil and paper calculations. “Uh, well. Three thousand pounds?”
“Donuts, will three thousand pounds get you into Trincomalee?”
“Not with any margin.”
“We’ll talk about margin in a minute. Wait one. Break, break. 207, you’re next for Texaco on 706.”
“Roger, 703.”
“706, give 207 three thousand pounds.”
“Roger, copy.”
Not for the last time, Soleck wished for a break, for the control of an E-2, for the steadying voices from the tower and the air boss. He had no idea whether three thousand pounds would get an F-18 across 575 miles of ocean. He wanted to know what was happening in the north, and he took his screen off FLIR and back to the datalink. He had to cycle past the ESM screen and he saw that the display was now littered with cuts from radars, lines of bright green radiating from two points just north and west of the datum he had assigned to the man in the water, and an obvious radar cut from one of the Tomcats.
“101, this is 703, please respond, over.”
“703! We are under fire, repeat, under fire; unknown vessel fired two SAMs.”
Soleck stared at the screen, his mind numb. Then he focused and was able to say, “Roger, 101, copy your under fire from unknown vessel.” His voice was shaky. “Can you provide any ID?”
“Mac says it’s some kinda Russian destroyer.”
“101, is that a Kashin-class destroyer?” Soleck forced himself to focus. He was watching his ESM screen, trying to fly the plane and dial up the AW frequency while maintaining a perfectly steady platform for Donitz’s tanking. He still had time to think that Tomcat jocks never bothered to watch their recce slides and learn ship types, and this was going to prove the pudding. But he had cuts from a modified Godavari-class frigate and a modified Kashin up there where 101 was, about nine miles apart and both close enough to the datum to fire SAMs at the northernmost Tomcat. He fed the ships’ locations from his ESM into the datalink, knowing that without an E-2 aloft to transfer the data and without the bandwidth provided by the antenna array on the carrier, it was unlikely that the information would ever appear on the bridge of the Fort Klock.
“Jeez, 703!”
Soleck took a deep breath. “101, please ID your attacker. You can see him. I can’t.” He left strike common up, called Alpha Whiskey. “AW, this is 703, do you copy 101?”
“Roger. 101 is on strike common.”
I know that! “AW, this is 703. 101 is under fire from unknown enemy vessel. 703 has two possible unid Indian vessels in vicinity and placed them in the link. Do you have the link?”
“Negative link. Repeat that, 703?”
Guppy was waving for his attention. “203 has three thousand pounds and a little.”
“Cut him loose, call the next one in.”
“Who?”
“You decide, you did the math.” No time to baby Gup now. He was swimming so far, and Soleck was gaining confidence in him. He leaned back. “Take the plane, Gup.”
“I got her.”
Soleck took his hands off the controls and flexed them, realizing he had been flying like a nugget with a clench. He looked at ESM, saw a targeting radar come up on the Kashin-class destroyer.
“101, prepare for another missile. Get out of there!”
“Roger, evading. Going to burner. Chaff and flares.”
Soleck pulled up a factoid from his remarkable memory. “Missiles will be first-generation radar-homing.”
“Thanks, 703.”
“101, they should suck at look-down.”
“Roger, copy, going on the deck.”
Soleck waited. He was sure the old Russian missiles would be poor at finding targets below them. Almost sure. For a moment, he could see the missiles on ESM as their radar homing warheads flickered. Then they vanished.
Then 101’s voice: “Two missiles past timeout overhead, I can see the exhaust at burnout. Owe you a beer.”
Soleck made himself breathe. He activated his radio. “AW, this is 703. 101 is under fire from an Indian Navy vessel, Kashin class.” And if I had a Harpoon, I could whack him from here.
“Copy, 703.” Captain Lash, again. “Break, break, 101, what’s your status?”
“Peachy, Alpha Whiskey.”
Soleck thought that was just adrenaline talking. In fact, if that Tomcat had just turned low with his burners on, he’d used more fuel than he had to spare, and Soleck didn’t have any extra. He unclipped his harness, leaned way out over Gup and plucked the kneeboard off his lap.
“We’re going to need gas, Alpha Whiskey,” 101 said.
Yeah. And without Stevens, he could see they were already short. Somebody wasn’t going to make it. He did the math while 101 reported the incident to AW and repeated that there was a man in the water. Soleck walled off the idea that Stevens and Goldy might be gone. He was walling a lot off. He heard Alpha Whiskey scramble his own helo, already busy doing search and rescue on pilots who had punched off the Jefferson‘s burning deck, to get the man in the water up north.
He went to the Alpha Whiskey freq and requested another line. He wasn’t ready to go public yet. Then he got 203 on Donitz’s squadron freq. “Donuts?”
“Yeah, Soleck?”
“I got a problem. The Tomcat had to burn gas—”
“I heard.”
“And Stevens’s plane is down. Somebody is screwed for Trincomalee. Or anywhere.”
“Relax, Ev. We’re not. I can make it—altitude’s good. And if I can make it, all the Hornets—”
“Not the Hornets, Chris.”
Four of the Hornets had already tanked. They couldn’t give the gas back if they wanted. The Tomcats farther north had limited options and their options were getting smaller by the second.
“Gotcha.” Donuts had thought it through without Soleck’s having to spell it out: one of the Tomcats was going in the drink. Almost certainly the one that had just saved itself from that very fate. And Soleck was telling Donuts that he was going to have to make the call. Welcome to command.
Even while he listened for Donuts, Soleck was back on the ESM, watching the Godavari-class destroyer as she closed with the Kashin-class. She had a number of radars, French, German, and Russian, and while they baffled even Soleck’s knowledge he could see their types. The Modified Godavari, a middle-aged Indian ship with a curious mix of British and Russian technology, was illuminating something with a high PRF radar that almost had to be for gun-control. She was way out of range of the Tomcats.
That meant she was about to shoot the Kashin.
The world was going to hell
Bahrain
Two thousand miles away in Bahrain, there was no thought of guns or of death from the sky. Harry O’Neill had taken Mike Dukas off to show him his new Hummer. Harry ran a security company that had contracts all over the Middle East; an armored Humvee