The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

Rules of Engagement, you'd better do it fast. Anything that might be construed
as a threat to us may be engaged and destroyed on my authority as battlegroup
commander. Questions?'
'Sir, we don't know what is happening,' the ops officer pointed out.
'Yeah. We'll try to think first, but, people, let's get our collective act
together. Something bad is happening, and we're at DEFCON-TWO.'
It was a fine, clear night on the flight deck. Jackson briefed Commander Sanchez
and their respective RIOS, then the plane captains for the two Tomcats sitting
on the waist cats walked the flight crews out to them. Jackson and Walters got
aboard. The plane captain helped strap both in, then disappeared downward and
removed the ladder. Captain Jackson ran through the start-up sequence, watching
his engine instruments come into normal idle. The F-14D was currently armed with
four radar-homing Phoenix missiles and four infra-red Sidewinders.
'Ready back there, Shredder?' Jackson asked.
'Let's do it, Spade,' Walter replied.
Robby pushed his throttles to the stops, then jerked them around the detente and
into afterburner, and signaled his readiness to the catapult officer, who looked
down the deck to make sure it was clear. The officer fired off a salute to the
aircraft.
Jackson blinked his flying lights in reply, dropping his hand to the stick and
pulling his head back against the rest. A second later, the cat officer's
lighted wand touched the deck. A petty officer hit the firing button, and steam
jetted into the catapult machinery.
For all his years at this business, his senses never quite seemed to be fast
enough. The acceleration of the catapult nearly jerked his eyeballs around
inside their sockets. The dim glow lights of the deck vanished behind him. The
back of the aircraft settled, and they were off. Jackson made sure he was
actually flying before taking the aircraft out of burner, then he retracted his
gear and flaps, and started a slow climb to altitude. He was just through a
thousand feet when 'Bud' Sanchez and 'Lobo' Alexander pulled alongside.
'There go the radars,' Shredder said, taking note of his instruments. The entire
TR battlegroup shut down every emission in a matter of seconds. Now, noone would
be able to track them from their own electronic noise.
Jackson settled down. Whatever this was, he told himself, it couldn't be all
that bad, could it? It was a beautifully clear night, and the higher he got, the
clearer it became through the panoramic canopy of his fighter. The stars were
discrete pinpricks of light, and their twinkling ceased almost entirely as they
reached thirty thousand feet. He could see the distant strobes of commercial
aircraft, and the coastlines of half a dozen countries. A night like this, he
thought, could make a poet of a peasant. It was for moments like these that he'd
become a pilot. He turned west, with Sanchez on his wing. There were some clouds
that way, he realized at once. He couldn't see all that many stars.
'Okay,' Jackson ordered, 'let's get a quick picture.'
The Radar Intercept Officer activated his systems. The F-14D had just been
fitted with a new Hughes-built radar called an LPI for 'low probability of
intercept.' Though using less power than the AWG-9 system it had replaced, the
LPI combined greater sensitivity with a far lower chance of being picked up by