Terminal Run

The room responded, then quieted. The air operations officer returned to his command chair at his large console and donned his headset. Ericcson puffed the cigar to mellow life, glancing through the smoke at the tactical display, a busy plot that took some time getting used to. The east coast of White China was the left border, the Formosa Strait at the bottom. The NavForcePac Fleet’s Task Force Alpha to the east, Red Chinese Battlegroup Two to the north. A display next to it was a blown-up scale plot of Battlegroup Two, showing individual ships in their dispersed antisubmarine formation. Vector arrows were drawn from each ship indicating ship’s course, the length indicating ship speed. The ship symbols identified each ship. The aircraft carrier Nanching was the primary target, the Beijing-class nuclear battle cruisers next, the missile cruisers also highly targeted. The information on the plots came from the fleet’s drones, a set of sixteen UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, the Mark 14 Predators, launched during the evening watch. Each Predator was tiny, wrapped in stealth radar absorbing material, and flew at nearly forty-five thousand feet, orbiting the Chinese fleet and looking down with an array of infrared and visual sensors. The fleet’s positions would normally have been confirmed with satellite updates down loaded from the tactical Keyhole satellites through the Navy Tactical Data System, but since the network was compromised, Ericcson had to make the attack using fleet resources. The Viking nodded in satisfaction at the display. The Predators were worth every nickel of the billions spent developing and procuring them.

“Sixty seconds, Admiral. Would you like to shift to the gallery?”

Ericcson nodded to the air ops boss and went through the light lock doors to the observation deck, the inclined windows overlooking the flight deck. On the forward catapults two F-22s were connected to the cats, the canopies down. Their jet exhaust glowed in the wee hours’ darkness, the exhaust deflector shields rising slowly out of the deck behind the aircraft. Support crew swarmed over the planes, but backed away as the moment for launch neared. A single man on the deck stood near the cockpit of the port F-22, the first jet that would be launched, wearing a large helmet with a Mickey Mouse headset. He carried two large red-lit wands, handling them with the deftness of a drummer holding his drumsticks. As the hour of strike aircraft launch approached, he exchanged signals with the pilot in the F-22. Ericcson watched with mixed emotions, wistfully missing the sensations of the cockpit, but loving this moment of fleet command, his men and machines moving to his conductor’s baton.

Far below the island on the flight deck, the port catapult’s F-22 throttled up, then down. The jet’s whining was loud enough to deafen a bystander. The tail’s elevators rotated up and down, the rudder moved left and right. In the dimness of the flight deck lights, the tail’s emblem could be made out, a black field with a white skull and the crossed bones of the Jolly Roger squadron, Ericcson’s former command.

In the cockpit of the port fighter, Squadron Commander Diane “Fuzzy” Whitworth took one last run through the checklist, testing the interphone to the radar intercept officer and squadron executive officer, Commander Jane “Baldy” Felix. Whitworth’s nickname came from her degree in artificial intelligence and her fondness of fuzzy logic. Baldy Felix’s moniker had come from her comments that when she was anxious, she was “going bald over it.” The two had clicked early in their careers, the detailers keeping them together as Whit worth took over the Jolly Rogers. The deck officer below gave her the signal that she had permission to take off. She curled her nomex-gloved fingers over the throttles on the port kneeboard, the “keys,” and pushed them smoothly to the forward stops. The engines howled behind her. The needles on the faces of the electronic instrument panel displays rotated to show a hundred percent thrust. She pulled the keys to the right to the detent, then pushed them farther forward, engaging the afterburners.

If the jets had been roaring before, they were screaming now. The jets became rocket engines as the JP-5 flowed into the jet exhaust and the nozzles constricted. Twin twelve-foot long flame cones flared out of the tailpipes. The fighter vibrated beneath her with the shear power of the thrust on afterburner. Whitworth checked the panel and nodded to the deck officer, then threw him a salute, indicating she was ready for launch. He saluted back with one of the wands, then turned his body so that his feet were widely spread on the deck, in line with the catapults. In one graceful motion, he quickly waved the wand high over his head in an arc that pointed forward, extending his wand all the way to the deck, then brought it up to point straight ahead, the catapult officer’s signal to activate the catapult.