0700- off Oahu.
"Striker three, Striker four we've got four unidentified radar tracks one six zero and sixty one clicks from your position. Intercept bogeys and walk identification." The E-2 Hawkeye AWACS radar craft, call sign "Telescope" cackled over the pilot intercom.
"Solid Copy, Telescope." Pierrera tugged the stick to the right as he pulled the Bobcat interceptor on a long leisurely turn toward the target. "Hulk?"
"On your four Diamondback." Hulk seconded. The two F-19 Bobcats, invisible to enemy radar streaked toward the intercept point. A hundred miles away the Heads Up Display began tagging the bogeys with yellow boxes which were the colors unknown contacts.
"Striker three and four, Telescope, come right to one eight zero we're going to try to bring you in behind them."
"Solid Copy, Telescope. Turning right one eight zero." Pierrera pressed his foot down on the rudder pedal to slide to the position. If the AWACs craft could detect these fighters, they weren't the stealthy profile of the F-19 and were probably F-18 Hornets from the CAPNID force. There wasn't any conflict between the two fleets yet, but PACIFICA was on a hair trigger here, the entire fleet was at Condition 2: ready to go to war in a heartbeat.
Pierrera and Monroe turned left and around to slot themselves twenty miles behind the target craft.
"Telescope, Striker three, Bogeys are ID'd Foxtrot eighteens." Pierrera said as his pilots eyes picked out the curious angled twin tail configuration of the Superhornet. Those were old, good back in the day but certainly no match for the F-19.
"Striker three and four, cock your pistol and walk ID on bogeys. You are not to fire unless fired upon, say again weapons are tight." Telescope ordered from a safe two hundred miles away.
"Good copy. Four, let's get in close and start 'em with 'winders." Pierrera kicked his throttle up to a thousand knots, supercruise speed, and then notched it down to 800 knots as he came within twenty miles. The grey fighters were keeping a tight formation, "Finger four" with the leader up front two fighters at his four and eight o'clock positions and a fourth fighter at his four o'clock's four. Pierrera took a deep breath. Okay, it was show time. He flipped open a missile bay door to break his stealth profile and reveal an AIM-9 Sidewinder onto the lead target.
"Incoming fighters, this is the PACIFICA force at your six." Pierrera said in his clearest voice over the open channel. "You are in restricted PACIFICA airspace, exit the zone immediately or we will use deadly force."
Even as he said that the four fighters split into a well organized scatter, separating into two plane elements and branching in opposite directions. Pierrera went left to stay on the Leader pair and hoped that Hulk was smart enough to follow as he was trained.
"PACIFICA, CAPNID, we are in our designated air space. You are ordered to turn around and exit CAPNID air space at this time."
Pierrera followed the evasive Lead pair through the clouds, they climbed 60,000 feet then dove for the deck to try to throw Pierrera off and get in on his tail, but Pierrera inverted and followed them straight down. His neck craned briefly upward searching for the other pair of F-18s which had mysteriously disappeared from his Heads Up Display. He opened the channel with Telescope again.
"Telescope, Striker three, bogeys are ID'd CAPNID fighters, they aren't turning and I've lost the other pair."
"Striker three, Striker four, the other two bandits are thirty miles south of you. Weapons free. Smoke' em."
"Got it." Pierrera grinned as he thumbed the pickle trigger to activate the 'winders infrared tracking software, looked directly at the twin burn trails of the F/A-18 to lock it in with his HUD and almost immediately the pipping tone in his helmet screeched a good lock. With a simple identification, the unidentified fighters had become hostile and therefore: targets.
"Good tone! " He couldn't help but shout, he could feel his adrenaline spiking as he became a sky hunter.
"Good tone!" He thought he heard Hulk say through the channel as well.
"Fox two!" Pierrera squeezed the trigger and the training software on the sidewinder simulated a launch and-
" Striker three and Striker four, good kills good kills."
"Yes!" Pierrera inverted and dove thumbing flares on the way down as he heard the warning tones of the other pair of F/A-18s began seeking heat seeker locks. Pierrera turned towards the other two Hornets-where was Hulk? Pierrera's wingmate disappeared amongst the clouds but the other two fighters were coming right at him, Pierrera snaprolled left while using his rudder pedals to keep his fighter in line with the bandits and then jinked right to avoid a collision as the two other fighters screamed past his left wing.
"He's comin on the flip side!" Hulk called out – where was he? Pierrera hauled back on the stick and climbed to take an inverted snap shot on the other two fighters which were now completing a half circle to engage in another head to head pass-
"I've got good lock-Fox two!" Hulk shouted
"Striker four, good kill good kill!"
Pierrera watched the HUD flash an X overlapping the image of the F/A 18 to his right which tumbled away as it was labeled "dead" for the exercise. So he set his HUD sights on the remaining F/A 18, and flipped open the missile bay door for another Sidewinder. There was no point in running now, the bandit was already commited to battle and to turn now meant a missile up the tailpipe. The only hope for this generation 3 fighter, old and now obsolete in the skies of stealth fighters, was to turn and attack both of his predators. The HUD screeched a good lock.
"Fox two!" Pierrera called and fired the imaginary missile which was tracked on the radar of the E-2 Hawkeye far away. Diamondback watched the F/A-18 drop chaff and dive-
"That's a clean miss Striker three."
Pierrera scowled turned onto the tail of the F/A-18 and locked in a second missile, screeching good lock but was rudely interrupted by a ping. Out of fuel! Out of goddamn fuel! Shit. Pierrera stayed with the bandit, just this one last shot-
"Fox two!" Pierrera shouted and immediately turned. "Telescope, Striker three is bingo fuel and RTB."
Pierrera hit the burners, he needed to get some distance between him and the bandit.
"Striker three, good hit good hit." Telescope said. "That ends the drill guys, go ahead and RTB. Nice flying."
"Good copy and thanks." Pierrera let himself to let out a long breath he didn't know he'd been holding. He'd done okay. His first major exercise and he did okay. "Hulk?"
"I think you're lagging a couple klicks behind me Miles." Monroe said. "Nice flying out there."
"Yeah, you too." Pierrera smiled.
0710 – CVN-1, USS ENTERPRISE
The flight deck was bustling with activity. Enterprise had gone to battlestations almost as soon as Telescope had called in that two F-19s on Barrier Combat Air Patrol (BARCAP) had engaged four bogeys. Red shirted crewman pushed training munitions across the deck to load up the fighters, and to top off fuel tanks. Blue shirt mechanics made last touches on their fighters before the pilots jumped into the cockpits in preparation for launch.
The squadron leader of the 166th Naval Aviation Interceptors, The Deep Strikers, had just finished his morning coffee and was feeling good. He had 200 hours of stick time, 20 of those had been combat serving first with Artemis Corp before reenlisting to keep himself busy. The thing about being a Naval Aviator was that there was always something to keep himself busy, there was the controlled chaos of the flight deck and below decks like a choreographed Broadway number.
His bobcat was painted with 7 kills he had made serving with Artemis but the Navy was kind enough to carry those kills over. He was one of the only Aces in the United States that had made kills while flying for another interest.
A red shirt had been working since 0300, and had failed to secure the racks of the SLAMRAAM missile on the bobcat properly but the red shirt had already moved onto the next fighter-
The flight leader strolled up to his fighter sipping another cup of joe as he crouched down and brushed the undersides of his fighter lovingly. The new SLAMRAAM missile didn't fit into the missile bay doors of his F-19 but could be bolted on outside and then ejected racks and all to make the fighter stealthy. He watched the red safety flags on his pylon attached missiles flutter in the sea wind-
The gust of wind was enough to loosen the bolt ever so slightly and the entire front end of the two thousand pound long range missile crashed onto the flight leader's thigh with enough force to flatten him and crush the femur.
"Ah fuck!" was the cry that repeatedly rang out over the flight deck as medical corpsmen rushed over.
2100 – Vladivostock (close to the North Korean border)
It took awhile to send over the audiofile. First, Blanco had to run it through a tape recorder she bought from a pawn shop (which had gotten an unusual stare in the process) and then to convert that to MP3 format which took an hour for her computer to synthesize. She couldn't wait to get out of this country. It was always cold here, there wasn't much to do. Spy work was often boring, often lonely. She wasn't even CIA, she was supposed to monitor the electronic communications here in Vladivostock where the Russians communicated with their satellites which was what the NSA did. If she wasn't doing on site recon – a job she had only done three times in her entire six month stay – she would be stuck in her crusty apartment scanning secure satellite frequencies through the hijacked and revamped CUTTER chord she had hooked up to the satellite television dish her neighbor used for entertainment. True if she began her search at a time when her neighbor was watching the tube his connection would get screwed over but satellite entertainment was so fidgety anyway it would probably be brushed off. That gave Blanco a freedom to operate in the restrictions of her apartment.
There wasn't anything new today, she noted duly as she read the Iridium encrypted messages that were fed through and decrypted by one of her machines. The SGB and GRU units in Vladivostock weren't mobilizing although they trained endlessly. There was a little word at the end of each message. Pier viet. Hello. What did it mean? It was too regular for that to be an accident. Blanco had thought that over for many days before growing tired of it and collating it in her report – once again – to Sam Fisher and the NSA.
Things were very monotonous in the underworld of intelligence. The media conversion had completed and with that she attatched the sound bit to her email and sent it on its merry way through a program the NSA used for covert officers called KINGPIN.
KINGPIN received the email, immediately encrypted the file, switching it to code and then changing the text to a WINGDINGS format before pushing it through an email it randomly generated. This process went through a hundred times in the space of a millisecond with KINGPIN guiding the message through each and every step. Once its initial encryptions were completed, it forwarded Blanco's message over to her first dead drop site which then folded it into a randomized encryption called TAPDANCE, expanding the text and audiofile into a randomly generated series of numbers and letters to be sent – ten figures per six minute cycle – to the dead drop email of Sam Fisher.
With that part of her day accomplished Blanco got up from her seat by the computer and began to fix dinner. Asian foods were easy to acquire this close to Japan, China and Korea so Tofu was a very regular part of her diet in Russia although she appreciated the Russian's love for steaks. She switched on the tube; the television in Russia was good, there was a nice soap climaxing tonight and although the story was just the same crap she would find in America (someone was going to get amnesia eventually and she bet it was Sergei, the down on luck banker) the acting was top notch and it gave her a chance to continue practicing her Russian.
It also gave her a chance to work out, she pulled out her yoga ball and began her stretches. Tomorrow she needed to get out, maybe another swing by the GRU army base would do her good. It was about that time to check up on their official movements, maybe snap a couple shots on her concealed camera. It was nice to get official work done while stretching the legs, she decided as Sergei woke up in his hospital bed not knowing who anyone was.