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Like Zen, Starship used a special control helmet to help him fly the robot plane; while heavier than the brain bucket he would have do
The MiGs blinked in the sitrep, two red triangles flying above the gray-shadowed coastline toward the light blue ocean. Pe
And the Flighthawk was invisible to just about everybody, with the exception of Pe
On the far right of the sitrep, a green-hued rectangle bore the tagYUBARI. If Starship asked for the information, C3would have looked into its memory banks and a
“Those suckers got to be thirty years old,” said Kick, wearing a headset and standing behind him. He was referring to the MiGs, which indeed had been built before any of the men on the Flighthawk had been born.
“The sucker we’re flying in is close to fifty,” said Zen.
“I meant it in a good way,” said the other pilot.
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“The ground radars picked up the Megafortress and scrambled these guys to take a look,” Zen added, using a voice that sounded to Starship like the one his Philosophy 101 professor used to explain Plato’s theory that humans saw reality like shadows on a cave. “The MiGs are still picking up speed, but they’re not going to come on too much faster or they’ll end up with fuel issues. C3has already figured out an intercept. See it Kick, on the dedicated screen?”
“Got it.”
“Obviously, it relies on you to know the ROEs,” said Zen, referring to the rules of engagement that governed when—and if—force could be used. “As far as the computer is concerned, war is always in order.”
“As it should be,” said Kick.
Brown nose.
“Still coming at us,” said Starship. He’d told Zen he’d gotten the nickname because of his first name—Kirk, as in James T. Kirk, the commander of the starship Enterprise. That was partly true—his parents had been serious Trekkies, and had the show in mind when they named him. But he’d actually earned the nickname during flight training for rashly predicting that he would pilot the space shuttle or its successor someday.
A prediction he meant to make good on.
“Mission commander’s call on how to proceed,” said Zen, still in instructor mode. “On a typical radar mission, the profile we’re following, your job is going to be to run interference. But the pilot of the EB-52
is going to have to balance the situation. Let’s say you have two bandits. If they’re hostile and coming at you, he may be under orders to get the hell out of there. Never mind that a Flighthawk could take them in a snap.”
Zen paused. Starship knew the major was speaking from experience—he had a lot of notches on his belt.
“What you don’t want to do is put the Flighthawks in a position where they’re going to get deadheaded,” said Zen. “So you keep with what the EB-52 is doing.”
Deadheaded meant that the command link had been severed. When that happened, the Flighthawk would revert to a preprogrammed mode and fly back toward the mother ship. It happened just beyond twenty-five miles, depending on the flight conditions. Because the U/MFs were so maneuverable and the EB-52 was flying its own course, it could happen relatively easily in combat.
But loss of a co
“Zen, they’re going to afterburners,” said Major Merce Alou, the Pe
“Roger that. I think we can hold on course,” Zen told him. “We’re plotting an intercept.”
“Roger that. We’re monitoring them up here. They’re not targeting us at this time.”
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“You get all that?” Zen asked Starship.
“Yup,” said Starship. He had the Flighthawk at 27,000 feet on a direct line toward the lead MiG; they were now closing to fifty miles. “If this were an F-15, I could take them out in sixty seconds.”
“Yeah, what’s a little court-martial for creating an international incident?” said Kick.
“What do you think of what the computer is suggesting?” asked Zen.
“It has me slashing down and getting that lead plane, then whipping back for the second in one swoop,”
said Starship. “Awful optimistic with a ca
“Yeah, especially for you,” said Kick.
“Hey, I’ve seen you on the range, Mr. Marksman,” snapped Starship. “They put you in a Hog so the bullets would be big enough that you couldn’t miss.”
“It is optimistic. The computer thinks it never misses. It’s almost right,” added Zen. “But the thing here is that it’s figuring that the MiGs will stay on course. You can tell it to anticipate what they’ll do, and it’ll give you more options.”
“I thought I shouldn’t do that because we’re not in attack mode,” said Starship. He also felt that he was a bit beyond taking combat cues from a computer. That was okay for Kick, whose cockpit time had been spent largely in a ground-attack plane. Starship’s entire training had been for air-to-air combat, and he’d flown against MiG-21s in numerous exercises.
Of course, he’d never gotten this close to real enemy fighters in an F-15.
Not that the Vietnamese MiGs were the enemy. They had as much right to be here as he did.
Starship checked his airspeed and heading carefully, trying to will away the dry taste in his mouth. He could feel Kick hovering over his shoulder, waiting for the chance to jump in.
“They’re not acknowledging,” said Alou after he hailed them, first in English, then with the help of the translation module in the EB-52’s computer. He tried again, giving the MiGs his bearing and location, emphasizing that he was in international waters and on a peaceful mission.
The MiGs still didn’t respond.
“Let’s give them a Dreamland welcome,” Zen told Starship.
Starship took a breath, then flicked the control stick left. The U/MF tipped its wing and whipped downward, its speed ramping toward Mach 1.
The odd thing was the feel. Rather than having his stomach pushing against his rib cage, it stayed perfectly calm and centered in the middle of his body. The disjunction between the Flighthawk and the Megafortress was one of the hardest things for the pilot to get used to.
Zen had warned him about that.
“Flares,” said the Flighthawk pilot. He kicked out flares normally intended for deking heat-seeking Page 63
missiles, making himself clearly visible to the Vietnamese fighters, who were now roughly two miles away.