Damage Control (5 page)

“I’m trying to find the flag captain.”

“I can’t help you, Madje. I can tell you that I’m conning the ship from here and waiting for somebody senior to take command.” The TAO was a mere lieutenant-commander.

The huge screen in front of the TAO was repeated from a JOTS terminal. It showed the
Fort Klock
alongside the wounded
Jefferson,
with other ships supporting her fire-fighting efforts.

“Tell the admiral we’re going to get through this. We have four ships alongside putting water and chemicals on the fire, and we’ve cleared the O-2 level of fires and started to take back the flight deck. How is he?”

“Badly burned, I think. But he spoke to me a couple of times.”

“That’s good. As to command, eventually some son-of-a-bitch will realize that he’s senior to me and come relieve me.”

A sailor held a radiophone out to the TAO. “Captain Lash on the
Fort Klock,
sir.”

“Give it here,” the TAO said wearily. “TAO,
Jefferson.
Go ahead.”

“Jefferson, w
hat’s the status on command? Air Ops says the CAG and Captain Rogers are out. Where’s Admiral Rafehausen?”

“Sir, I have his flag lieutenant right here. The admiral is injured but should recover, over.”

“Copy injured.” Pause.
“Jefferson,
I’m taking command of the battle group effective twelve forty-nine GMT.”

“Roger, copy.
Fort Klock
has taken command.” The TAO looked around as if he was hoping someone senior would come in the scuttle.

“I’m taking the exercise; effective immediately. I want a status on your fires when you can pass it, and I want to know the fuel status of every plane up, TAO.”

“Air Ops is working on that, sir. We have—” the TAO looked at a sheet of paper being held in front of him—“eleven planes up. Sorry, make that thirteen.”

“Get me their fuel status.”

“I’m on it.”

“You have hull-integrity issues?”

“No, sir. We’ve cleared the fires off the O-2 level, we’re working forward from the bow of the flight deck, and the stern is on fire. I have no working elevator and cat two may be savable. That’s what I know now, sir.”

“Keep me apprised. I’ll get a smallboy on your stern. Does she steer?”

“She does.”

“I have to put out a sitrep to Fifth Fleet ASAP. Any idea of your casualties?”

“No idea, sir. No idea at all.”

Pause. The TAO was looking at the hatch to Air Ops, where an officer was trying to get his attention.

“Stay in touch, TAO.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Madje felt that he knew too much. He was sagging, done with his immediate duty and frightened of the prospect before them. He cleared his throat. “I’ll—I’ll go fight fires. Sir.”

“That sounds like sense to me.” The TAO turned away
from him to the officer who had just entered from Air Ops. “Those the fuel figures?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Somebody’s going for a swim.”

“Yes, sir.”

Madje took a deep breath, tried to ignore his back, and got the scared kid at the hatch to let him out. And then he went to fight fires.

Soleck was keeping his eyes on the air traffic and his brain on the fuel. “Gup, as soon as you get their fuel states, start working out what they need to get to—” He looked down at his card of the day, registered the primary bingo field, the precleared field where planes could land in an emergency, as Mahe. This was certainly an emergency. “—Mahe, India. It’s on your kneeboard.” Guppy looked over at him, trying to say something about being in over his head. “Just
do it,
Gup. Fudge the numbers.
Guess.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Soleck fed radio one into his helmet and dialed up AG 706 on the squadron frequency.

“AG 706, this is 703, over?”

Pause.

“703, go ahead.” That was Scarlatti, known to the air wing as “Mozart,” a nugget only a little more experienced than Guppy, and
damn
Stevens for taking Goldy. They were an inexperienced squadron and Soleck wasn’t sure he was ready to do what had to be done.

“Mozart, this is Soleck. Listen up; we’ve got all the gas that’s in the air and close to the stack. You and me. We’re going to have to set up a fueling station headed inbound as soon as AW gives us a bingo field, and we tank the Hornets until they can go feet-dry. You copy all that, Mozart?”

Pause. Soleck could almost hear the gears grinding in Mozart’s mind.

“Roger, 703, I copy. What do you want me to do
right now?”

“Stay on your assigned track and altitude until I come up again. Stay on this freq and monitor guard and AW. I’ll get back to you. Soleck, out.”

“AW on one, sir.” Soleck wondered if Guppy had ever called him “sir” before. “And nothing from Mister Stevens.”

The AW said, “703, what is your status and give?”

Soleck was pretty sure that was Captain Lash—Alpha Whiskey—himself, not some designated junior officer. That alone told Soleck plenty.

“AW, this is 703. We have twenty-two thousand pounds to give on original mission parameters. AG 706 has the same. AW, I’m prepared to set a track to a designated bingo and tank en route. Request ID on senior officer in the air, and request location of bingo. My card of the day says Mahe Naval Air Station. Over?”

“Wait one, 703.”

Soleck breathed out, relaxed his grip on the controls a fraction. Somebody was in charge down there; the world had not ended; and AW was on the air.

“703, this is AW. I have Air Ops on handheld; I have to transfer fuel data via another line because they have lost their antennas. Copy?”

“Roger, AW.” Soleck tried to imagine the difficulty. Air Ops, if they were in business, would know the fuel needs of every plane—more important, unlike the bridge of a cruiser, Air Ops would be full of pilots who could work the numbers on fuel problems. And Air Ops was where bingo fields were set. But, according to AW, all that information had to flow across a handheld, probably a walkie-talkie.

The AW came back on. “I have Lieutenant-Commander Donitz as senior officer in the air. And 703, just so you know the whole deal, our best information is that Mahe is down
or not responding. We have no response from Calicut, either. We’re trying to find you a bingo field, but something is going down in India, over.”

Soleck felt a cold ball form in his gut.

They had picked up the other three Americans from the HQ building’s bottom storey—an ex-SEAL named Fidelio, whom everybody called Fidel; a female petty officer, Dee Clavers, who had been an almost-Women’s NBA center; and a female jg named Ong, an
anime
princess so small she had barely managed to make the Navy minimum.

There were too many of them now, Alan thought—five Americans and four Indians and the three Indian Marines. Too few with weapons and too many who’d never been in a fight. He muttered to Fidel, whom he’d served with before, “This isn’t any good, Chief.”

Fidel grunted. “What’s the plan?”

“I have to get to something I can communicate with Fifth Fleet on. Everything’s out here, cell-phone system’s swamped.”

“Hotel.”

“Yeah, exactly what I think.” They were staying at a beach hotel ten miles away. The hotel was as close to a home as they had.

Fidel nodded. “Car park, the van, then hotel, gotcha. You any good with that gun?”

“Not bad.”

“I’m a lot better than not bad.” Fidel held out his hand for the gun. “You lead, I shoot, Commander.”

“Sri Lanka,” Soleck said quietly. Every airfield he could find and plot, he had entered into a chart on his computer, complete with range rings.

“203 is inbound for gas, figures he has eight minutes of fuel remaining.” Gup still spoke in a monotone, but tracking the fuel for eleven other planes was keeping his mind occupied.

Soleck had walled off the emergency, taken a bite out of his own responsibilities and was chewing hard. He cycled frequencies on the radio until he had AW. “AW, this is 703, over.”

“Go ahead, 703.” Different voice.

“Any luck on a bingo?”

“Negative, 703.” The speaker’s voice went up an octave. “We’re trying to raise anyone in southern India and we’re—”

Soleck cut him off. “Can you raise Trincomalee in Sri Lanka? They’re a little over five hundred nautical miles from us. Different country. Maybe whatever’s going down in India isn’t there. We’re going to splash a Hornet if we don’t start tanking.”

“Wait one.”

Soleck watched his instruments for a few seconds, thinking of the decision process that would have to happen on the bridge of the
Fort Klock
—the country clearance, the levels of military bureaucracy. He made his decision and turned the plane east, pointing the nose toward the distant island of Sri Lanka. Then he dialed up strike common, which was being used by all the pilots airborne. “203, this is 703, over.”

“703, this is 203, go ahead.” Donitz sounded professional, unhurried, despite the fact that his plane was running on fumes.

“203, am I correct that you are strike lead?”

“703, no one has told me that, but yeah, I think I’m the only el kadar in the air.”

“Sir, I’d like to get the stack moving towards Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. I’m assuming that their field is open and they’ll let us in. The distance is five seven five nautical miles from
my position and my best guess is that we can get all of you there with enough gas to land.”

“Soleck, I don’t even have Trincomalee on my bingo card.”

“Me, either, sir. But Alpha Whiskey says southern India is down and it’s the best I can come up with. Every minute we stay here wastes gas. Worst case, we’ll be feet-dry in an hour and someone will give us a vector to an Indian field.”

“Do it. I don’t have the comms or computers to figure this out. You sure?”

“Sure as I can be. It’ll be close. Break, break. All planes, this is 703. 706 will rendezvous on 703 at angels one-one course 110, speed two hundred knots. Planes will tank as called by 703 in fuel priority. Sound off.”

Soleck was pleased to watch Gup making check marks next to the planes he had listed on his kneeboard as they called in.

The thing was doable.

They parted company with the Marines and the Indian sailors outside the headquarters building and then huddled in a window embrasure while shooting sounded in the street. A car had been blown up down the block, maybe by a rocket-propelled grenade, and the Marine sergeant said that a lot of the firing was coming from a security building down there.

“We’ll have to go the back way,” Alan said. He pointed. Down behind the buildings was a chain-link fence and then weeds—grass, scrub bushes, a few trees. “There’s a creek down there somewhere. Wasteland.” He knew what the base looked like on a map, knew that the creek divided it so completely that a bridge had been built over it. The wasteland might give them cover. He looked at Fidel. “Unless you want to hole up inside again.”

Fidel held up the CZ. “With one handgun? Any kid with
a weapon could waste the lot of us.” He shook his head. “Lead us to the wasteland, Commander.”

A voice in Soleck’s headset said, “This is AG 101, two hundred miles north of your position, will rendezvous en route; I’m good for fuel and can probably make Trincomalee from here, over.” 101 was a Tomcat up north, which rang a bell in Soleck’s head. Two bells, in fact.

“Where’s Stevens?” he said aloud. And he remembered the ESM cut on the rescue frequency. He pressed buttons on his armrest, minimizing the display of the Indian airfields and going back to his ESM screen, where the computer had taken enough cuts on the transmission to locate the original transmission to a point. He overlaid 101’s position and grunted.

“101, this is 703, I have you in the link. Can you turn east to my mark in the link and investigate a transmission on search and rescue, over? We’ve got a plane missing.”

“Roger, 703, I see your mark. I’ll be there in two. Stand by.”

Soleck switched freqs to Alpha Whiskey. “AW, this is 703, over.”

“Go ahead.”

“AW, I’ve conferred with Strike Lead in 203 and we’re taking the stack east toward India with hopes of making Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. Hope you’ll get us permission to land there or another field in the area.”

“703, this is Captain Lash. Make it so, 703.” Lash was decisive, which helped. It was going to be close. Worse than close, if Soleck’s fears for his squadron commander were proven correct.

“Roger. Out.”

“203’s six minutes to empty, two minutes out from us.” Guppy was trying to do three things at once and having some success.

“Get the drogue out, deploy the FLIR camera. We’ll watch them come in, save time and gas.”

“Roger.” The sound of the fuel line deploying was audible even through his helmet.

“203, you’re first at the basket. Drogue should be out and deployed.”

“Copy. I see it. On the way.”

“Roger.”

Strike common was blinking. Soleck dialed it up. “Go ahead?”

“703, this is 101. I have eyeballs on a man in the water, no response on the radio, over.”

“One of ours?” Soleck knew it was. It had to be somebody from Stevens’s plane; there was no use pretending otherwise. Even strict emissions-control procedures wouldn’t have kept Stevens from hearing what was going on on virtually every frequency.

“I’m turning again. Yeah. He’s not waving. Not moving much—shit!”

The last was in a different tone of voice. Soleck listened for a moment and called, “101? This is 703, please respond, over.”

Silence. Not static, but silence. Soleck switched to cockpit-only. “Sorry, Gup. Recalculate your fuel assuming no give from Commander Stevens. Get Air Ops to do it, too. Tell me how it comes out.”

He already had a figure in his head, and it wasn’t good. He looked down, flipped his screen image to FLIR and rotated the FLIR pod to look back and down at the refueling drogue. Almost immediately, he saw Donitz’s plane climbing toward them.

“203, I see you.”

“I’m coming in, 703.”

Donitz’s approach was smooth and even. His probe was out and he rode a spot of turbulence that threw his nose
off-center and then put the probe in the drogue with a little flip that was so fast it was hard to follow in the glowing green image on the FLIR.

“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.”