Balance of Power: A Novel by James W. Huston

muck things up. “Those cigarette boats eluded the S-3, but we’re sending out attack planes to find them.”
    “We can help,” Caskey said. “We can check out ships on our radar, with our IR or our TVSU—we might be able to ID ’em.”
    Bradford regarded them with skepticism. “They’re probably all fiberglass and going like hell. Besides, the bastards launched a missile at you when you flew over the cargo ship and they probably still have shoulder-fired missiles—it could be a real problem.” Bradford shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Come on, Captain. We’ll be flying anyway. May as well let us try,” Caskey said. “If we don’t find anything, no harm done.”
    Bradford frowned, “Unless one of your junior officers with his fangs out flies into the water…”
    “Won’t happen,” Caskey said, trying to answer every objection. “I’ll make sure the crews are second cruise or above only.”
    Bradford’s resistance weakened. “What do you think, Drunk?” he said to Commander Dave Driver.
    Drunk nodded almost imperceptibly. “We can definitely help. I’m just wondering whether we should assign quadrants or radials so we’re not all out there running into each other.”
    Bradford nodded. “I already did, but we can make them smaller areas though, if there are more of us airborne.”
    Drunk looked at the air wing commander. “What are we supposed to do if we find ’em? We supposed to shoot ’em?” he asked, almost rhetorically. He pulled up the sleeves of his flight suit. “What looks like a sixty-knot cigarette boat to one pilot may be a thirty-knot ski boat to someone else.”
    “That’s the big problem. The plan isn’t to shoot ’em, it’s to find ’em. Then we can watch where they go and do what we need to later.”
    “You think they’re going to let us follow them?” Drunk said. “If they’ve got any sense at all, they’re going to be in those boats only about a minute —just long enough to get over the horizon. They’ll transfer to another ship as soon as they can—some ship that looks like your generic cargo ship found by the thousands all over these oceans. This is only about the busiest ocean in the world.”
    Caskey nodded. “I agree, CAG,” he said, calling the air wing commander by his generic initials. The title Commander of the Air Group was used widely in the Navy even though air groups haven’t existed since the fifties. “But we’ve got to look. One thing’s for sure—if we don’t look, we’ll never find them.”
    “You have an amazing grasp of the obvious,” Bradford said as he unconsciously straightened up, pulling his shoulders back. “Let’s get everybody airborne as soon as possible.”
    “Roger that,” said Caskey enthusiastically. “I’m gonna go rewrite the flight schedule. We gonna go with a flex deck or cyclic ops?”
    “I’d like to do a flex deck, but with two cycles of planes up at once. We can burn more gas to find themand not worry about recovery times. We’ll keep everybody out there for four or five hours. After that, we’ll go to cyclic if we haven’t found them. And if we haven’t found them by sunset, we’re cooked. We’ll have to report our failure to Washington and wait for further instructions, which will probably be to come home and turn in our commissions.”
    Caskey and Drunk left quickly to order their squadrons into the air.
    Caskey walked into his squadron’s ready room. “Messer, Mario, and Beef, we’re first up. Ops O,” he said, looking at his operations officer, “find three aircrew to be ready for the next go, which will be in a few hours. We’ll do flex deck for four hours to look for the three cigarette boats, then cyclic after that if we haven’t found them.” He looked at Lieutenant Barry Thacker, the SDO, the squadron duty officer. “You got a good ship’s posit on the chart?”
    “No, sir.” The lieutenant jumped up. “I haven’t updated it in a couple of hours.”
    Caskey