The Gulf (16 page)

“ATO, ATACO.”

It was the voice from the ship, a petty officer in CIC. He took his orders from the TAO, theoretically welding ship and plane into a coordinated tactical whole. Before Hayes could answer, Schweinberg pressed the trigger. “Yo.”

“Killer Two One, hold you too high and too far east. We need you to scout out ahead of us along our track, one-two-zero.”

There was a leash in the sky, and he was on it. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Two One, ATACO, say again your last.”

“I say again, roger, coming right. I'll mark on top and head out on the one-two-zero, angels four.”

“ATACO aye.”

Leaving the channel open, Schweinberg sang tunelessly: “If I had the wings of an eagle, and the ass of a great buffalo-o-o, I'd climb to the highest church steeple, and shit on the blackshoes below.” Beside him, Buck Hayes grinned. He finished the postlaunch, slammed the book closed, and stuffed it into a pocket. Then he stretched his arms, eased his chin strap, and looked down.

The chin bubble was transparent, and through it now he saw a distant point of darkness on the sea. It threw a shadow against the wrinkled Gulf, and drew behind it, like a bride's train, a widening V of wake.
Van Zandt,
far and small, a tin purgatory for two hundred men. But they, at least, could escape.

*   *   *

They spent the next hour floating along at four thousand feet while Kane monitored the passing traffic on the scope. After a while, the ship asked them to check out a surface contact. Schweinberg rogered and headed toward it at 140 knots. They seemed not to be moving, just hanging like a balloon above the immense curve of sea. A band of dirty brown lay just above the horizon, a thick layer of haze, smoke, and airborne sand. But it was below them, and their sky was the normal blue one seldom saw from sea level in the Gulf.

Hayes wiggled his toes. Cramps nibbled at his arches. Part of his mind was on the instruments. Part of it was wondering whether he'd be happy with a desk job, nine to five and an hour for lunch. But then he'd be home every night. Dustin and Jesse were getting to the age they needed a dad. And still a third part was back in Montana. Ghost riders in the sky … not one of the Rambling Hayeses, footloose though they'd been, had ever gotten this far, he thought. Then he remembered that at least one of them must have. The first one. Chained in the guts of a slaver.

“Two One, ATACO, you see him yet?” crackled the petty officer's voice.

Hayes glanced at Schweinberg; he was leaning back, staring out at the horizon. He pressed the foot switch. “No, we don't have him.”

“Two One, I still hold you too high. Get down to around four hundred. Maybe you can see it then.”

“Oh, fuck that,” muttered Schweinberg. “I'm just gettin' cooled off.”

Buck glanced at him. But the collective was easing down, as requested. He couldn't tell whether his HAC had been serious or not.

Finally, Hayes picked up the wake, a scratch on the sea, like a diamond dragged across blue glass. They edged in gradually, paralleling it. Both pilots stared out the windscreen. Hayes focused the gyrostabilized binoculars. A speedboat, white, no flag. “Not fishermen,” he said.

“What are they?”

“I don't know. Looks like bales on deck.”

“Druggies?”

“Could be.”

They peeled off before they got inside small-arms range. Hayes called it in and asked whether they wanted a positive I.D. After a while, the ship came back and said no, unidentified smuggler was good enough, as long as they stayed clear of
Van Zandt.

Schweinberg turned south again and gradually climbed back to radar altitude. They droned along high above earth and sea. From time to time, Kane came over the intercom with a contact, or the ship vectored them around. But for the most part they just sat and logged time. Neither man minded. It was daylight, and once they met the convoy, they'd fly mostly at night. Besides, being bored was better than most of the alternatives.

After three hours in the air, Hayes started to get sleepy. He was considering telling Schweinberg he was going to flake out for twenty when the radio crackled again. “ATO, ATACO.”

“ATO, go.”

“Heads up, Two One. Be advised you got two bogeys closing from the north.”

“What kind of bogeys? Fast movers?”

“Affirm, look like fighters, not sure yet whose—hold on, we just got ESM. F-14s, batch one. Iranians.”

Hayes felt more awake now. He said, “SENSO, check up to the north of us, ship says—”

“Yeah. I got 'em too. Range fifteen, our eight o'clock, high.”

Schweinberg's grunt: “They closin'?”

“Yes, sir.”

Two One rolled left. Both pilots narrowed their eyes, concentrating on sky. Hayes clicked from one block of blue to the next, watching not for shape but for movement. “Think it's Peeps's thumpers?” he muttered.

“Could be.”

“Emitter tag!” shouted Kane. At the same moment, the data link said, “ATO, ESMO, fire-control radar bearing two-nine-zero from you.”

“There they are. Eleven o'clock, above the horizon.”

“Padlock 'em!” Schweinberg instantly pushed down collective and cyclic together. He just glimpsed them as the horizon rolled up, two flyspecks on blue immensity.

Air-combat training over Lake George came back to him. He came left and steepened his dive. Airspeed, 175. The sea filled the windscreen, the airframe shook, the wind screamed by. Eight hundred, five hundred. The altimeter unwound downward faster and faster. The vertical-speed indicator passed 3,500 feet per minute.

“Christ, Chunky, how low you going?”

“Till I run out of air.” Nobody going eight hundred knots liked to point his nose into the water. “You still got 'em? What're they doing?”

“They see us. One's inbound. The other guy's hanging back, high orbit.”

High orbit; waiting for the leader to complete his pass. That was good. Helicopter evasive tactics were predicated on one jet. Once they both mixed it up, though, he wasn't really sure what he'd do.

Now Chunky concentrated on the oncoming fighter. On a head-to-head pass, there were maybe three seconds when the jet pilot could see you and was in range. He had to lead you slightly to let the missile seeker lock on before he fired. So you had to keep him guessing wrong as to which way you were turning, keep him out of phase with you.

Now, watching the jet, he suddenly slammed the cyclic to the right. Yes, Christ, the left wing came down!

“Don't let him acquire!” shouted Hayes. “Passing two hundred.”

Schweinberg's whole attention was on the fighter. It was closing at an alarming rate. Its right wing came down and he jerked the stick right. Two One skidded around as the horizon went momentarily vertical. Normally, you banked no more than forty-five degrees, but limits were out the window now. He was trying to stay alive.

The airframe began shaking violently. Hayes glanced sideways, and found himself looking straight down on the waves. His skin tried to inchworm up his neck. “Christ, Chunky! You can't bank like this at one-seventy-five, air's hot, you're gonna blade stall!”

“Death—but first, cheech!” howled Schweinberg. The shaking intensified till their teeth buzzed and their vision blurred, but he kept the stick hard right.

The fighter's nose came up suddenly and it flashed over them, so close they could hear its engines over the scream of their own. “SENSO! Padlock left on number one, call position!”

Hayes shouted, “Number two, ten o'clock, high high!”

“Altitude, altitude!” shouted Kane. Schweinberg flinched. If a rotor tip hit the water, they were fucked. He was startled to see they were no more than sixty feet off the deck, so low their tip vortices sliced into the water, leaving a path on the sea. He pulled out of the bank and brought the cyclic back slowly, keeping the tail rotor clear of the waves.

“Fuck me, I wish I'd took the fucking gunner along.”

“He couldn't shoot down an F-14, Chunky.”

“It'd improve my morale. Shit. Shit!”

“Number one's opening to starboard,” reported Kane.

“Keep your eye on him,” muttered Schweinberg. The drill was that once he was past, you watched him, then turned inside him. Jet jocks thought they were hot squat; they always figured they could get around you onto your six. But a Seahawk could outturn a jet all day long. If he tried to get smart and hauled ass straight up, you skated around underneath him. Then when he rolled in, he found himself looking past you at a water impact—a bad position for a jet at low altitude.

Two attackers, though, made it a lot harder. The wingman was coming in now. Kane was watching the leader. If he tried for their tail, Schweinberg would have to break off number two. But he couldn't face in two directions at once. Once they got coordinated, 421 was dead meat.

Schweinberg had reasoned to this conclusion in less than a second. Meanwhile, the second fighter had dropped and was rapidly growing larger. Shaking his head to fling sweat out of his eyes, he hunched at the stick like a poker player over a hot hand. Couldn't make your play too soon or he'd outguess you, had to time it just right.… If the Iranian fired a missile, he'd have maybe two-tenths of a second to get a flare off and bank. The sky was big, but not big enough when your combined closing rate was a thousand miles an hour.

“Break left!” shouted Hayes. The F-14's wing dipped and Schweinberg slammed the stick to port so hard his eyes went dim.

“Hundred twenty knots, torque's too high, two hundred feet and dropping.”

Was that a flash? “Flares!” he screamed. Hayes pickled the button and the fuselage jolted. The data link hummed and then they heard, “Lieutenant Schweinberg, this is Captain Shaker. Understand you are being—”

“Get off the circuit! Where you got him, where you got him?” screamed Schweinberg.

“Number two's inbound again, on our eight—”

“ATO, ATACO, we're picking up another fire-control radar, bearing two-seven-zero from you.”

“I got the fucker, shut up, I'm trying to get out of this fuckin' nutcracker!”

“Number one's on our six!”

“Shit!” They were wise to him now, boxing him. In a minute, they'd come in simultaneously, from ninety degrees apart, and he'd be shit out of luck. Shaker tried to interrupt again; no one answered him. “What's two doin' now?” Schweinberg said, almost breaking his neck as he craned around the sky.

“Turning inbound, two o'clock. Hey. Chunky.”

“What?”

“Oil rig.” Hayes pointed off to a straddled spider five or six miles away. Schweinberg hadn't noticed it before, but took his meaning instantly. He whipped around so hard the low rotor RPM light flickered and poured on power. They roared along forty feet off the deck, flat out at 165 knots. The fighters wobbled, undecided or coordinating, then steadied.

He got to the rig just before the lead F-14 and ducked immediately behind it. His rotor arc was still visible, but he didn't care. With his maneuverability, he could keep the structure between him and them forever, and there was no way they could fire through the mass of beams and derricks.

The Iranian pilots realized it, too, and broke off. He allowed Two One to drift out from behind its makeshift shield as they joined up, dwindled to specks again, then finally disappeared to the southward.

“ATO, ATACO, hold two bogeys opening your posit.”

Hayes rogered, his voice high. Schweinberg pried the fingers of his left hand off the collective and groped behind the seat. At last he grunted, “Kane, you got a canteen back there?”

“Hold on.” It came forward. He uncorked it and gulped greedily, his eyes still mincing the sky. Then held it out. “Buck?”

“Yeah.” Hayes took a swig. He was handing it back when he became conscious of something warm and squishy-soft on the seat under him.

“What?” muttered Schweinberg.

“What?”

“I said, what'd you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Man, that hot water's gonna feel great when we get back,” said Schweinberg, looking down at the sea. With a strange detachment, he saw that his hands were shaking. He peeled off his left glove and examined his sweaty, beet-red palm. “Hey, good thinkin' there, Buck, on the oil rig, I mean.”

Hayes nodded, then remembered that the new CO was trying to reach them. He pressed transmit and said, “Uh,
Van Zandt,
this is ATO; sorry, we kind of had to concentrate there for a minute. Over.”

“This is Shaker. I understand. Buck, did they fire on you?”

How did he know my name? Hayes thought. “No, sir. Thought for a minute they did, but it was the sun on the wings.”

“But they made passes at you?”

“Yessir, no shit.”

“What I need to know is, was there hostile intent? They weren't just playing around, were they?”

Beside him, Schweinberg snorted. Buck said carefully, “That's hard to say, sir. We dived away as soon as we saw 'em. I guess that might have, you know, sucked them in. Invited 'em to hotdog a little. But it looked serious to me, like they were just waiting for a good-enough setup to justify expending a missile. We never gave them one, so they didn't. But I can't say what was in their raggedy heads.”

“Well…” Was it his imagination, or did the new captain sound disappointed? “Anyway, good flying, guys. Stay alert, and look, stick a little closer to us, all right? We could have put a missile out there if you'd been closer.”

“Aye, sir.” He clicked off and tried to relax. They were at two thousand and climbing. It was cooler now and the sky was turning blue again. He cracked his knuckles slowly, relishing being alive.

“Want to take it for a while?” said Schweinberg. Buck Hayes took a deep breath. Then another. The trembling in his diaphragm eased off. He set his boots on the rudder pedals, nodded, and took the stick.