Iceman and Maverick, pt I
Twenty thousand feet above the glistening Indian Ocean, two United States Navy fighter jets rushed northeast to the aid of a friend in distress. Both were heavily armed. The friend was a spy ship, a recent victim of a sea mine that left its engine disabled. The ship now drifted powerlessly, carried by the waves slowly closer to the territorial waters of several nearby countries, including the one responsible for the mine attack.
This situation was not unheard of for the 60 man crew of the SS Layton, who were fighting to restore power to their vessel, determined not to reenact the Pueblo incident near the Korean Peninsula eighteen years earlier. The feeling was shared by the pilots and Radar Intercept Officers of two F-14 Tomcats approaching from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, whose mission was to protect the Layton from further hostile action. When an ambiguous airborne contact appeared on the radar scopes of both Tomcats, Lieutenant Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, the pilot in the lead Tomcat sensed that the six missiles under his jet would soon be needed.
Bogey is the word used to describe an aircraft on radar whose identity and intentions are undetermined. Bogey was the word used by his Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant (Junior grade) Ron "Slider" Kerner, as he radioed what he was seeing to everyone: to the other F-14, to a distant E-2 Hawkeye surveillance plane from the Enterprise, and to the Enterprise herself. The bogey was ninety miles away and creeping towards a head on meeting with Kazansky and his RIO. More importantly it was also coming dangerously close to the Layton, close enough to employ one of several ship-killing missiles that the militaries of local countries were known to have, including the French made Exocet.
Who was this and what was he doing? Was it a fighter? Was he armed? With what?
As the bogey neared within sixty miles, the Tomcat's huge AWG-9 radar, operated by Slider, offered a clearer picture, and Iceman had half his answers. The single unknown contact became three. The contact was in fact three aircraft, flying in a formation tightly enough to appear to long range radar as a single contact. Clarity came as distance closed. Fighters tended to behave that way. Slider corrected himself accordingly.
It was, in fact, more than three.
"Five! Make that five bogeys!" Slider called a moment later.
This was seconds before two groups of armed fighter jets "merged", crisscrossing each other at a combined speed well over the speed of sound. The supersonic shockwave shook Iceman's F-14 as he started bringing the twenty ton jet around for another pass.
Even from the split second glimpse, he knew exactly what they were. Hours of studying photographs made sure that the profile of these strange, but oddly familiar jets was etched into memory.
Slider said what Iceman was thinking. "MiG-28s! Six of them!"
Things took a disturbing turn. The MiGs were small, light, and easily able to maneuver into firing positions behind the big, heavily armed Tomcats. The radar warning klaxon indicated that these MiGs weren't here for a friendly chat. The radio came alive when Hollywood, the pilot of the other F-14, spoke. "They just fired at me! Evading, evading!"
That call from Hollywood was soon followed by another, more frantic call.
"We're hit! We're hit! It's on fire and we're coming apart! I can't control it! We're getting out… mark!"
Both crewmen in Iceman's F-14 saw it. Their wingman's jet with seemingly its whole rear half on fire plummeted towards the Indian Ocean. The emergency beeper of an ejection seat soon came alive, eerily detached from the cacophony of hostile radar indications already blaring in the cockpit of Kazansky's Tomcat.
The patter of relief from knowing that Hollywood and his RIO escaped from their downed F-14 lasted for about half a second. Slider interrupted it delivering even less good news. "Now we've got a missile too!"
Iceman flipped the twenty ton Tomcat on its back and threw it into a high speed dive. This desperate, last ditch defense was executed with enough violence to fling both aviators' heads sideways into the glass canopy.
An Aphid missile from the MiG-28s veered into the cloud of burning flares streaming behind Iceman's Tomcat, exploding an empty piece of sky the Navy jet occupied seconds ago.
Slider was no doubt in an unnatural position from twisting around in his ejection seat harnesses in the back of the wildly gyrating fighter jet, just to keep eyes on the MiGs behind them. His next words came out in a grunt. It was a forced, disjointed warning to Iceman sitting in front of him. Like he was shitting the words out.
"They're going guns!"
"Hang in there!" Iceman replied. He hauled the Tomcat out of its dive, and instantly afterwards remembered catching, in the corner of his eye, a flash of glowing cannon rounds whipping past his canopy.
Iceman and Slider were alone. All six other planes sharing the sky with them were doing everything in their power to kill them both. So many flight hours of training in some of the worst tactical scenarios possible prepared them for two to one odds, even four to one: not six. Staying alive for the next minute, then the minute after that, became the entire extent of their life ambitions. Nothing else mattered.
Nothing but the slim hope that one of these MiGs would blunder into the path of his cannons and help him even out these numbers.
The skirmish-turned raging air battle played out across radar scopes in the dimly lit Combat Information Center deep inside the USS Enterprise 200 miles away. Cathode ray tube displays with rotating cursors raked the vast sky in a steady circular pattern, revealing glowing blips where each plane was. It could never succinctly convey the desperate struggle for survival that Iceman and Slider were locked in against multiple enemy pilots. The planes were all so close together they were bunched into a fat glowing blob.
Commander "Stinger" Jordan was not looking at any of the radar plots. Cigar pressed between his lips, he was listening to the radio channel on which the F-14 crewmen were communicating.
He heard them call out the first shots fired by the MiGs and issued his next order to the CIC staff around him immediately. "Launch the alert five. We need them out there yesterday."
He did not have to tell them to launch the search and rescue Seahawk helicopters as well.
It would take the Seahawks a while to get where they needed to be, 150 miles away, to find Hollywood and his RIO in the water. In the meantime, Stinger had one concern and one only.
The one F-14 pilot still in the fight was desperate, but not panicked, and that counted for everything. What was the kid's name again? LT Kazansky. Commander "Stinger" Jordan was beginning to understand where Iceman's callsign came from. Even in his dire situation, Iceman communicated quickly and cleanly.
"They're all over us!" then, "We've lost Hollywood!"
And now, "Voodoo One is entirely defensive!"
These Tomcats were newer and fancier than the Phantoms the old Commander once flew and loved; the same Phantoms that got him and his own RIO through fights like this. From that Tomcat two hundred miles away, CMDR Jordan heard his own voice, but younger. He heard bits and pieces of the last war he was in. It had been a different era, and with the memory of that era came memories from his own fighting career; moments of triumph and of tragedy and those with whom he shared those moments. It had been a different Navy and a different DoD.
The naval field grade exhaled his cigar, unleashing, into the dimly lit space of the Combat Information Center, ghostly white smoke from a war long passed. The young men in this room had beads of sweat glistening on their faces and necks even in the ship's heavy air conditioning.
"Come on, kid," Stinger whispered to the lone F-14 two hundred miles away. "Hang in there…"
Outside, under a mockingly sunny sky, another F-14 pilot was listening to the same radio channel. Lieutenant JG Pete "Maverick" Mitchell was buckled tightly into the front ejection seat of one of two fighters sitting Alert 5, meaning that he was ready to fly in five minutes' notice. From what it sounded like, it was getting uglier by the second out there. Iceman may very well be in the center of the opening shots of World War three.
Maverick and his RIO, one of two F-14s acting as the Alert 5, received the order to launch at the same time two SH-60 Seahawk helicopters started spinning up for takeoff.
Maverick allowed himself a moment of self reflection as jet engines noisily spooled to life around him. Before he started bringing the F-14 forward, the naval aviator stared down at a pair of dogtags in the palm of his hand.
Bradshaw, Nick
"Goose"
USN
Maverick reverently enclosed the item in gloved fingers, then slid the item into his pocket. In the backseat was a different RIO, Merlin, whom Maverick couldn't quite call a "friend" the same way, but whom Maverick hoped would perform his backseater duties half as well as Goose once did.
Getting the notoriously difficult Tomcat onto the catapult was a team effort between the enlisted linesman with glow wands and Maverick, the pilot sitting up in the jet. Once positioned, Maverick waited for the yellow-vested shooter to secure his nose wheel onto the launch bar. He unlatched the F-14's variable sweep wings, spreading them out wide, then setting the flaps to takeoff. Maverick pushed the engine throttle handles all the way into full afterburner. The fighter bucked and rocked, restrained by its nose wheels. The Tomcat was a twenty ton predator eager for her fangs to be bloodied.
Past the left wing, the yellow vested "shooter", touched the deck with one hand.
Go time.
The twenty ton jet fighter leapt forward with a roar of engines off the front end of Enterprise and into a warm afternoon. A cloud of steam wisped upwards from the catapult track in its wake.
Maverick and Merlin were airborne. The F-14A, burners blazing, rose high above scattered cloud formations. Its wings mechanically swept backwards towards its tail, streamlining the Tomcat out of takeoff/landing configuration and into high speed flight mode. The speed indicator climbed through the sound barrier, then twice the speed of sound, as they sprinted north twenty thousand feet above the Indian Ocean.
Maverick kept one eye on the fuel gauge. Another eye on his radar scope. The two search and rescue helicopters were soon far behind and below them. The afterburners would gobble up the F-14's large gas tanks in minutes. Ice didn't have minutes. Maverick would get there on fumes if it meant saving a wingman. He trusted that the other alert F-14 would be following him closely behind.