The stick and rudder skills were easy, but this kind of fight wasn’t something they had ever trained him for. He knew how to fight another jet and had trained against adversary pilots who were skilled in replicating all manner of threat aircraft, but he had never had to fight a pilot who wasn’t in the jet. Or fight a jet without a pilot.
Colt’s nose was stuck in lag, behind the other jet, and he looked through the top of his canopy as the possessed JSF banked right to complicate him gaining a weapon’s solution. Colt rolled left to preserve weapons separation and again avoided a costly overshoot that would put him on the defensive.
Acting on a honed instinct drilled into him over hundreds of hours of training, Colt put his jet into air-to-air mode and selected one of the two AIM-120D AMRAAM missiles. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot down his friend, but if the fight went from offensive to neutral, he would have no choice. There was no way he could risk losing this fight and allow the other jet to continue its mission and launch its Joint Strike Missiles at the unsuspecting aircraft carrier.
“I’m jamming you, Colt!” Jug said. Then, after realizing what that meant, added, “Wait… are you trying to shoot me?”
He glanced down at his radar display and saw indications that the other aircraft was indeed disrupting his attempt to maintain a lock. But his radar had its own built-in anti-jamming capabilities, and it was an even fight as to who would win — the most advanced radar in the fleet or the most advanced jammer.
“I don’t want to!” he replied.
He banked right and descended in trail of the other JSF as it went into afterburner and extended, trying to race for the hapless carrier floating in the waters south of San Clemente. He shoved his own throttle forward, dumping fuel into the hot exhaust as his own afterburner shoved him back into the seat.
Beth stood tall at the center of the bridge, hiding her fear from the sailors around her as they performed the individual tasks required of them to keep the warship afloat. She marveled at how the Navy had taken kids from diverse backgrounds and trained each of them in specific skill sets, then placed them into positions of responsibility. She didn’t know them all by name yet, but she knew they would all perform their jobs with flawless precision. “All ahead flank three,” she ordered.
“All ahead flank three, aye, ma’am.”
The lee helmsman at the central control station advanced the throttles slowly, tapping into all eighty-thousand-shaft horsepower available from the four gas turbines. Beth leaned forward onto the balls of her feet to counter the momentum of the ship surging forward under her, glowering behind her mask of indifference. In the days of her grandfather’s Navy, the movement of the throttles was accomplished in the engine room after receiving a corresponding signal from the engine order telegraph, also known as a Chadburn. But in the modern Navy, the lee helmsman had a direct linkage to the engines. Even the advanced
“Range to target,” she said, staring through the windows at the darkness beyond the bow.
The sailor standing at the Mk-20 console fired a laser to update their distance from the former
She felt his presence before smelling the coffee, and she turned to see Master Chief Ivy handing her a steaming ceramic mug. She accepted the coffee and brought it to her lips, savoring the subtle taste of chocolate, citrus, and brown sugar, as she looked up at the clock and noted the time. She knew it was running out but wasn’t sure how many more grains of sand could fall.
“How much longer?” Ben asked, reading her thoughts.
“It will be close,” she said.
“The crew are at their battle stations, material condition Zebra has been set, and all weapons are green,” he said, giving her the confidence that if it came to a shooting war, the
“Very well.”
He sipped from his own mug adorned with a fouled anchor and two inverted silver stars, then nodded in quiet contemplation. Much to the Master Chief’s delight, the former warship turned floating target had been given a brief stay of execution, though Beth suspected he would have preferred seeing his former ship at the bottom of the ocean instead of the circumstances that saw them racing south to find the stealth fighter on their radar.
