Chapter 1
Fantan
Somewhere in the southwest Pacific...
Static crackle. “Ready on the cat.” an accented female voice said.
Another crackle of static. “Throttle up.”
“Roger, throttle up.”
“Standby...”
“Standing by.”
“Throttledown, throttledown, throttledown. Standby for adjustment.”
“Roger, standing by.”
“Okay...throttle up and standby.”
“Roger, throttling up.”
“Cat one!” and there was a rush of steam.
“Gunslinger Two airborne.”
“Good luck.”
Twenty minutes later...
“Contact, bandit, two ship formation, your ten high, heading one-six-two.
Please advise.”
“Roger.” the male voice was quiet for a moment. “Eagle Eye, this is
Gunslinger 102. Contact fantans.”
“Roger that, Gunslinger. Targets hot. See if you can’t warn ‘em away.”
“This is Gunslinger 102 to Chinese aircraft, you are approaching the
defensive zone of a US carrier group. Turn back now or be engaged.” No
answer. “I repeat, turn back now or I will be forced to fire.” Still
nothing. “Eagle Eye, Gunslinger 102. Targets are not responding.”
“Copy, Gunslinger. You are weapons free.”
“Hear that, Mercury?”
“I sure did, Dutch. Weapons free.” the female voice answered.
“I got the north guy.”
“As always.” They were both quiet for a while.
“Gunslinger 102, fox three!”
“Gunslinger 106, fox three!”
“Splash one fantan.”
“Shit, I missed. Engaged defensive Archer. That yellow SOB is mine.”
“Okay, okay, Merc. I won’t touch him.”
“Got him now. Gunslinger 106, fox three.” she was quiet again for a moment
before her next outburst. “Sierra-Hotel! Splash two fantan.”
“Roger, Gunslinger 106.” Eagle Eye came back, “I show blue skies. Good
work.”
Ten minutes later...
“One mile, slower.”
“Roger, slowing.”
“Gunslinger 106, three-fourths mile, call the ball.”
“Control, Super Hornet ball, fuel state nineteen-point-one.”
“Roger ball.”
Thump, grind, squeal. “Gunslinger 106, good trap.”
Lieutenant Amy Elizabeth Anderson unclipped the buckles of her restraints
and popped the canopy of her F/A-18E open. She let the breeze blow across
her face as she rechecked that all of her systems were shut down. They
checked out and she clambered down the yellow ladder to stand next to a
waiting seaman in a yellow shirt and brown helmet.
“Mercury’s out.” he said into his mike. He received orders as to how he
would return her from her fighter to the safety of the carrier’s island. A
pilot was not allowed on the flight deck without a handler to keep the pilot
from being squashed or sucked up by deck traffic.
He waved for her to follow and she did so, walking behind him so close that
she was just short of stepping on his heels. The deck below her rolled and
pitched. The noise of a dozen aircraft filled her ears. To her right, an
F-14 Tomcat was hurled from catapult number two into the sky beyond. At the
stern end, an EA-6B Prowler landed heavily on the deck. Not twenty feet away
from that, the E-2 Hawkeye she had been reporting to was being lowered down
to storage. This was the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), a Nimitz-class
aircraft carrier.
Ahead of her, the yellow shirt stopped in his tracks and Amy nearly bumped
in to him. She found out why as another F/A-18 in the markings of VFA-131
came rolling forward with the aid of another yellow shirt with a pair of
day-glo orange batons.
As it passed, she looked back at her own plane. Right now, a crew of
handlers was locking it down while the brown shirted armers were removing
the ordinance from it. The aircraft was painted low visibility grey. On the
outside of the twin tails was the black chess knight and AG tailcode of
VFA-105 (the Gunslingers). Her name and callsign were painted in dark grey
below the canopy and the sign of Mercury was painted blue infront of the
port intake.
“Lieutenant?” the young handler called her attention, “C’mon.” She followed
him to the forward bulkhead of the superstructure and then around to the
side. The door was open and he left her there, going to get his next pair of
charges.
She stepped inside and took off her helmet, shaking the short blue hair
loose. With her helmet tucked under her arm, she glided gracefully down the
stairs to the briefing room. Once inside, she yanked her debrief from the
printer and read it:
You and Dutch did a good job slapping down those Q-5s. From what the rec.
guys said, it was a good thing. They had some Exocets on board. Good job.
It was short message from the Commander of the Air Group congratulating her
and Dutch on the job well done. It still bothered Amy that she had to fire
twice, but the other guy must have been pretty good.
She took a sortie report from the stack on the table and filled it out
before filing it in the CAG’s “in” box.
As she headed for the pilot’s breakroom, she caught Dutch on the way.
Lieutenant Commander Jason “Dutch” Robinson was not a handsome man. Most
pilots weren’t in fact. Many were nerdy, and several were bald from wearing
helmets day in and out. Every one of them was no taller than five-foot-ten,
for they had to fit in the cockpit of the aircraft they flew. Robinson
barely made the mark for stature, and he had a tiny gap between his two
front teeth. The mustache on his face was scraggly and there were bags
beneath the black eyes.
“Wassup, Mercury?” he said, giving her a high five.
“Not much, man.” She responded in her silvery voice, “You?”
“Ah, just headed to a favorite part of pilot country is all.” The two
turned for the lounge. “You where hot on the stick today.” Dutch finally
said.
“Is that sarcasm?” Amy looked up at him.
“Nah, kid. You did some pretty good missile avoidance with that inbound
AA-12.”
“Still, I had to make two fox threes. I hate it when that happens.”
“So what? So you spent an extra million to get a kill, big deal.”
“I don’t know.” the blue-haired pilot shrugged, “CAG might not like it. He
already has a disliking for me.”
“Ah, Mercury!” Dutch waved her off, “You’re just paranoid. CAG just has a
bug up his butt.”
“Yeah, me.” she said as they entered the pilots lounge. As the door slid
open, she could see a dozen different faces look up. All of them were
familiar.
“Hey, Mercury.” Lieutenant Ryan “Wax” Burnan said from the pool table.
Burnan was assigned to VF-143 and was on his second cruise. He was about
Amy’s age of twenty-four. With brown hair and blue eyes he might actually be
the only cute pilot onboard. “Heard about that extra fox three you had
today.” Amy rolled her eyes. On a ship of five thousand tightly knit people,
word gets around.
“Who’d you tell, Dutch?”
“Just Rotchinson.”
“Weezer?” Amy’s eyes went wide, “You told Weezer? That guy can’t keep his
mouth shut for two seconds.”
“So tell me about it.” Wax pocketed the next ball, “Here you made him spend
some money.”
Somehow, pilots are always cocky. It must be the cocktail of adrenaline and
testosterone (or in Amy’s case, estrogen) that sometimes seems to float
through the air. Or perhaps the cockiness is just a way for pilots to hide
their fears of an accident on the catapult or finding onesself unable to
manhandle a fifteen ton machine onto the pitching deck of an aircraft
carrier at night with the fog closing in like the hands of death. Yes,
pilots had to hide those fears or be controlled by them. Most chose to be
cocky. Amy was one of these.
“Well, seeing as how I’m still flying and he’s in the water, guess I did
just fine.” she said, taking a seat in her favorite chair, “Besides, that
guy will make a great tally mark on my fighter’s nose. Yep. It sure will
look great right next to the other one.” There was a round of “oooohs” that
was indistinguishable from the fight circle in a playground. “Yeah, me and
my two kills to your... what was it? Let me think...oh yeah, zero!” The
playground noise went up again as Mercury smiled sweetly and held up a pair
of fingers. “Besides, how many Phoenix missiles have you spent on that
Tomcat of yours? Four, and nothing to show? I’m two for three so you and the
rest of the Pukin’ Dogs can keep your mouths shut.”
Every one of the present VF-143 pilots and radar intercept officers went
into embarrassed sweat. Indeed, none of the ones present could claim a
higher kill tally than Mercury or Dutch, who had three.
“Okay, Anderson, you’ve had enough fun.” Dutch patted her shoulder.
“Hey,” Mercury shrugged, getting up to get a cola, “It’s not my fault I fly
the hottest fighter with the hottest squadron.”
“Hey, now.” on of the VFA-131 aviators piped up. “I’ll agree with the
plane, but not the squad. Wildcats can kick y’alls asses any day.”
“Should I bend over for you?” Mercury asked before popping the top on her
coke. “Or just remember to save your sorry tail from a nylon letdown next
time you got a bandit on your six?”
Once again, the playground noise
sounded. The real Amy knew that naval aviators were a close bunch, yet like
a pack of dogs in that they occasionally snapped at one another. Rough play
was just their way.
Later that evening, Amy managed to catch the sunset from the Stennis’
number three elevator. The lift was lowered and not to far from her, some
crewmen played basketball. Behind her, the angry noises of aircraft
maintenance echoed in the vast storage area. She had originally come down to
check her Hornet, making sure that her repairs on the Gripes List were seen
to. She had just inspected the jet and was pleased to find that the latest
kill was already represented by a black tally mark on the nose just above
the three formation lights.
There was a loud thump above her as another jet, probably an A-6 Intruder,
came down a little hard. Not too long afterwards, the scream of turbojets
told her someone was spooling up. The rush of steam and the rumble of the
catapult confirmed this and she looked fore to see an F/A-18 with the
growling panther of VFA-131 launched off catapult number three.
She returned her attention to the sun as it began to slip beneath the black
ocean. Momentarily, she began to think about how she had gotten here. Like
some of the other pilots this was her third deployment. It had been in
highschool when she got her first taste of the Navy. She had been aiming to
be a doctor like her mother and so was doing joint enrollment at a local
college. Since she was to be a biology major, she had to take a slew of
related classes, including a marine biology course that placed her and
twelve classmates on the research vessel Atlantis III in the middle of the
Aegean Sea. No sooner had they arrived on board than Serbian leader Slobadan
Milosovik began making mischief in the Balkans. Again.
The next morning as her class piled out on deck, they noticed Atlantis III
was floating in formation with a number of US Navy warships of the carrier
group attached to the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). As the days wore on, Amy
would come out on deck at night to admire the big carrier and watch the
flight operations. She was instantly hooked on this as she watched the
fighters and attack jets launch into the fading light or come down in a
controlled crash on the deck.
One evening, she was watching the operations when an F/A-18C streaked in
over the deck of the research ship. She noticed that the nose gear had not
come down and a large section of the starboard rudder was missing. As the
aircraft came closer and closer to the water, one of the engines sputtered
and the pilot punched out. The ejection seat threw him into the air and then
tossed him away, yanking the parachute ripcord. It slowed him down just
enough so that splashdown wasn’t fatal.
Without thinking, Amy was over the rail and into the water, swimming for
the downed pilot. She found him unconscious and so he had not set off his
smoke signal. With the ships moving too quickly for her, she found a flare
on him and lit it. Soon, a helicopter descended upon them and two divers
dropped into the water. No more than ten minutes later, Amy found herself
aboard the Enterprise, drying off and being simultaneously congratulated and
chewed out by one Admiral James Stark.
As it happened, the Atlantis had no pad on which to land a chopper, and so
Amy spent the next two weeks on board the Enterprise. Much to the
embarrassment of both Amy and the Navy Department, her story broke on the
national news. Shortly afterward, there was a public outcry to “rescue” the
seventeen-year-old from the warship. So to appease the public, a very
unhappy president ordered the entire battle group to port in Italy after
being relieved by another fleet attached to the John F. Kennedy.
Amy became a minor celebrity and the instant her foot hit American soil
again she was whisked to the White House for a very public meeting with the
president and a very private scolding in the Oval Office.
“I had to turn around an entire carrier group, Ms. Anderson.” he said as
she stood before the decorative desk. “That was a serious waste of military
resources.” Afterwards, she was flown home to Los Angeles on an Air Force
VIP transport and once again made a big deal of in her home town.
It was a positive experience in many ways, as it helped Amy rid herself of
shyness and helped build her character. She no longer said stupid things in
front of people and had become rather articulate, an advantage when facing
Barbara Walters on an edition of 20/20.
The experience had also shown her something else. Something she really
wanted to do with her life. On the Enterprise, she had been exposed to that
singular and fascinating institution that an aircraft carrier is build
around: naval aviation. She had more than once been allowed to sit in
pri-fly and watch the jets take off and land from the non-skid decking. Her
curiosity had been so piqued about the sensations of flying that she was
allowed to backseat an F-14 in the place of a reporter on a Combat Air
Patrol. Nothing had happened, of course, but it was still exciting. Indeed,
the adrenaline was still rushing through her that night as she struggled to
sleep.
The next semester, she dropped every biology class she had and picked up
math courses like there was no tomorrow. The next year she applied and was
accepted to the naval academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She went there and
graduated at the top of her class. Afterwards, she spent the next eighteen
months at the naval flight school in Pensacola. After earning her golden
wings in the F/A-18E Super Hornet multirole fighter, she was assigned to
VFA-34 (the Blue Blasters) with Carrier Wing Nine on CVN-69, the Dwight D.
Eisenhower. She still had her patch from the “Ike” hanging in her apartment
in San Diego. The commanding officer, one Captain Gregory Brown, had been
taken with the “blue-haired pilot chic” and made sure the press didn’t
harass her for being a female combat pilot. She had earned her first kill on
that cruise, a Sudanian MiG-21.
However, the Ike was forced to go in for nuclear reactor refueling, a
process that takes approximately three years, and so Lieutenant Amy Anderson
was bumped from her flightline.
It was a sort of disgrace, being a naval officer without a boat, and for a
brief time she worked at Barber’s Point Naval Air Station. It was then that
she was approached by Captain Brown about an opening onboard the USS John C.
Stennis with VFA-105.
Amy took it instantly.
Blessedly, the “Johnny Reb” as she was nicknamed, had just recently been
assigned from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific Fleet, replacing the
recently decommissioned USS Kitty Hawk (CVA-63). She was greeted rather
warmly by Captain Douglas Raulstone, a friend of Brown’s, and less so by
Captain Richard Muldoon, commanding officer of Carrier Wing Seven.
As it turned out, Brown had done a lot of string yoinking for her.
Raulstone rightfully believed it to be because she was a hard worker.
Muldoon believed otherwise.
She was now on her second cruise with the Stennis, and even though the CAG
still had it out for her, she was enjoying it.
Another loud thud brought her back to the present. An S-3 had just hit the
deck clean and was now grinding to a stop.
She looked up to find the sun now gone. Even the basketball players had
moved inside. Suddenly, a klaxon sounded with the flash of yellow lights.
Amy hurried from the elevator before it began its rise to the flight deck.
