The Disciple

Jake watched O’Hare launch, then wandered out of Pri-Fly. He found himself going down the ladder toward the flag spaces-TFCC, the Tactical Flag Command Center. The admiral would be there. It was there that the message that Lampert had ejected would quickly arrive. The rescue he li copter the admiral had ordered to practice open sea rescues in a clear area would be immediately vectored northwest, and the frigate would be directed to launch her chopper.

Jake Grafton felt nervous. He hoped to heaven he hadn’t sent Harry Lampert to his death. As he thought about that, he realized he hadn’t even asked Lampert if he was married. Or had any kids. Of course, even single people had parents and brothers and sisters.

Maybe, Grafton decided, he was better off not knowing.

He was only a few steps into the flag spaces when one of the sailors said to him, “Sir, this is a secure space. You aren’t cleared to be in here.”

Jake opened his mouth to speak-and found himself face-to-face with Admiral Bryant, who took in the situation at a glance. “He’s with me,” the admiral told the sailor. He grabbed Jake by the arm and steered him into TFCC.

Harry Lampert was a hundred miles northwest of United States flying on autopilot at twenty thousand feet when he opened the fuel dumps. Jake Grafton wanted this plane to penetrate about fifty to seventy-five miles into Iran and crash due to fuel exhaustion, which would maximize the chances that the black box that was the ALQ-198 would survive the crash. He didn’t want it to fly until the Iranians managed to shoot it out of the sky.

As he jettisoned fuel he nudged the stick to the left, and the plane settled into a fifteen-degree angle-of-bank turn. Chicago O’Hare was glued out there on his right wing.

Harry checked his moving map display and compared the information it gave him to the picture his radar presented. He had the radar in the surface search mode. The coastline of Iran was quite distinct, and behind it, lots of land return. The left hairpin of the Strait of Hormuz, and beyond it the Persian Gulf, appeared on his scope as black ribbons of no return. The coastlines were quite distinct ribbons of light. Since the plane was still turning, the land disappeared off the scope.

The sea immediately below was empty of ships. He had been watching this area for the last fifty miles. The nearest ship was twenty miles northwest, going into the strait.

Lampert was more than a little nervous. Grafton hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t volunteered the fact that he had never ejected from an airplane. Let’s face it; most naval aviators never have to jump. Minimizing the necessity to bail out is what aviation safety is all about.

He was going to have to jump, descend into the sea, get into his little oneman life raft, then wait for the help from the carrier to arrive. It would take perhaps half an hour or more for the helo to make the trip to his area; then it had to find him, one man in a tiny raft in the great wide sea. If he was injured going out, or the chute failed to deploy properly, or his survival vest failed to inflate, or he couldn’t get the life raft to deploy or was too banged up to get into it, things could get dicey. In fact, there were about a thousand things that could go wrong, and all of them were bad.

Still, Harry reminded himself, this was no different from the chance he took every time he climbed into one of these flying war machines. Naval aviation was a risky business. Things could go to hell damn quickly: A guy might have to pull the handle and jettison the airplane just any ol’ time. The odds were pretty good that it wouldn’t happen, but luck was such a fickle bitch…

As the fuel in his tanks streamed out into the atmosphere, Harry Lampert thought about his wife and son. He and Stella had waited for years to have a kid, and finally Stella said the waiting was over. She wanted the baby now, before she got too old, before their parents were too old to come visit and enjoy their grandchild.

With two thousand pounds of fuel remaining, Harry Lampert secured the dump valve and steadied the plane heading 350. Pointed it at Iran. Then he turned off his airplane’s transponder.

He glanced right, and Chicago O’Hare gave him a thumbs-up. He flashed her one right back. He eased his butt back in the seat and straightened his spine, put his head back in the headrest.

With the coast just tickling the fifty-mile range line on the radar display, Harry Lampert whispered, “I love you, Stella,” took a deep breath of oxygen and used both hands to pull the ejection handle above his head and bring the face curtain down over his face.

A tremendous force hit him in the ass and he was up and out and the wind blast was tearing at him. He kept his elbows in tight. He heard the drogue chute come out and felt the seat stabilize. He had a ways to fall before the main chute opened.

“Black Eagle, Black Eagle, this is War Ace Three Oh One,” Chicago O’Hare said over the radio. “Mayday. War Ace Three Oh Five has just ejected. He went out a hundred and two miles from the ship on the three-four-nine radial. Did you copy?”

The controller repeated the numbers. “I have no emergency squawk,” he added. “Are you certain about the location?”

“Yep. Vector the angel,” O’Hare replied.

She consciously dropped back from the Hornet flying along without a pilot so she could watch the falling seat with Harry Lampert aboard heading toward the cloud deck below. The tops, she knew, were about ten thousand, and the base about a thousand feet above the sea. Harry’s chute should open at thirteen thousand, and if she dove, she should see it. But she didn’t leave the now pilotless jet, and in seconds, she lost the seat in the vastness of the sky.

She had her orders. “Make sure that plane goes to Iran,” Jake Grafton had said. “Or into the water. Nowhere else. Shoot it down if you have to.”

Her armament switch was in ready; the gun was selected and charged. She added a little throttle to close the distance to War Ace 305. The autopilot was holding it steady as a rock.

So far so good.

As she flew along, the Black Eagle controller began questioning her. The controller, a woman, had no idea that this was a scripted scenario, and she wanted to know if O’Hare had the chute in sight.

“No. I’ve lost sight. Do you have the angel headed this way?”

“Yes. Why did the pilot eject?”

“Not sure,” Chicago said, “and, for some reason, my transponder is acting up.” She turned it off.

The controller let that go by… for now. “Can you get underneath the clouds and find the pilot in the water?” she asked.

“I’m going down now.” She wasn’t, but she didn’t think the Iranians would know that if they were listening, and they probably were. Grafton said they monitored these freqs, and he should damn well know.

She was thirty miles from the coast when War Ace 305 began the gentlest of right turns, into her.

O’Hare gently eased her left wing under the right wing of the other plane and held it there. She didn’t want it to make contact-but to allow the air slipping between the two wings to exert upward pressure on the right wing of the other plane, and that was what happened. War Ace 305 returned to level flight. The heading change had been about ten degrees.

She could live with that, she decided. She moved several yards aft and sat monitoring the empty jet’s flightpath.

Lampert’s ejection from War Ace 305 would have caused the transponder in his aircraft to began broadcasting an emergency code, had the transponder been turned on. The emergency code would have been picked up by the radar in the airborne E-2 Hawkeye and by the big search radars aboard the carrier and the guided missile frigate only fifty miles southeast of the place where Lampert would enter the ocean. Since Harry had secured the transponder before his ejection-after all, the Iranians could receive the transponder codes on their radars, too-and there was no transponder code, some hurried radio exchanges between the Hawkeye and the frigate occurred before the frigate began the launch sequence for her ready helo. A long ten minutes would pass before the chopper was airborne, yet this bird would reach Lampert before the angel from the carrier. If he was on the surface of the sea and hadn’t been pulled under by his chute. And if the chopper could find him.