Читать книгу Damage Control - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 18

“Got it,” Soleck said, looking at a first harvest of ESM cuts from his S-3’s back end.

“You said we were in EMCON, Ev.”

“We are in EMCON. I’m not radiating anything; I’m looking at what other folks are radiating.”

Against his own inclination, Guppy leaned forward to look at the screen on his armrest.

“See? That’s the air-search radar on one of the Indian picket ships.” Soleck put his cursor over one of the signals so that Guppy could see it.

“You don’t know that.”

Soleck exhaled in frustration. “Yeah, Gup, I do. So would you if you learned your radar parameters. That’s not one of ours, and it’s too much in the air-search freq to be anything but one of theirs. Civilian ships don’t mount antennas like that, right? See the sweep? And anyway, that’s Owl Screech, a Russian targeting radar on one of their Russian-built ships.”

“And you just know all that.”

“Yeah. I also know that we’re off our altitude by a long shot and starting a long turn to the right because the copilot isn’t really paying attention.”

Guppy swung his eyes to the instruments and the plane snapped to attention. “You—”

Soleck thought Yeah, I’m being unfair. Whatever. He ran the cursor over the battle group and looked. He could read some low-power emissions from the flight deck, guys talking to the tower for launch at radio freqs. In full EMCON, they wouldn’t do even that. Otherwise, the battle group was pretty invisible. Looked tight. He kept widening his search ring, keeping one eye on his nugget’s flying and one ear on the launch of their strike package. He could hear the air boss berating 706, the other S-3, which had some kind of mechanical failure while in tension.

He got distracted by air-search radar off to the south, followed almost immediately by a targeting radar. His stomach fluttered. He understood as soon as he got a second cut. That would be Fort Klock, probably engaging the first Indian strikes. Cool. Soleck liked to see what was going on, and he liked to figure things out. He intended to be an admiral himself, one day.

“706 is ready to launch,” Guppy said.

Soleck decided not to tell Guppy that he could listen to the radio, too. He got another cut way to the north, up near the Lakshadweep Islands, very weak. He played with it a little, got a second cut. The parameters were way up in the comms range and looked naggingly familiar.

Alpha Whiskey came up on the air command freq and passed a vector to an F-18 just launching. Soleck smiled when he heard Chris Donitz responding in his Minnesota voice. Donitz—“Donuts” to everybody who flew—had just made lieutenant-commander. Donitz was being told to intercept a couple of Indian Jaguars. Old aircraft, no match for the F-18, Soleck thought, probably simulating missiles. Get ‘em, Donuts!