“Listen, guys,” Batman added. “Drinks are on me when we get back to the bird farm!”
“If the bird farm’s still there,” Coyote said. “I’m not sure I like the idea of CAG’s ‘newbies’!”
“Only game in town, Coyote,” Tombstone replied. “They’ll hold the fort for as long as they can fly. Meanwhile, 1 mink the locals are going to be way too interested in us to worry about aircraft carriers.”
“Roger that.”
Tombstone checked left and right once more. VF-95 consisted now of just six aircraft, a fraction of its usual strength: Tombstone and Batman, Coyote and Shooter, Nightmare and Ramrod. All were friends, all comrades in the sharp and bitter air engagements of the past nine months. The chances were good feat not all of them would make it back to fee carrier when this flight was over.
For perhaps the first time, Tombstone saw fee odds and accepted them. He remembered his decision to leave fee Navy, made during a string of accidents and near-misses . . . what? Was it only three days ago? He felt as though he’d lived a lifetime since then.
He was no longer certain about feat decision.
Let me get through this fight, he thought. Then I’ll decide. But right now, I’m needed here.
“Viper Leader to Vipers,” he called. “On my command . . .
The six Tomcats of VF-95 banked right in perfect unison, angling toward fee Indian fighters rising to meet them.
296
Kdtti Dougtes
1218 hours, 26 March
Soviet Fulcrum 515, over the Arabian Sea
Captain Kurasov saw the lumbering aircraft’s approach and felt like crying with pent-up relief.
The bomber known to NATO as the Tu-I6 Badger had been a mainstay of Soviet aviation for over three decades. Large, powered by a pair of massive turbojets slung close to the roots of swept-back wings, the Badger had a combat radius of nearly 2,000 miles. Nine major variants served a variety of roles with both the Russian strategic aviation forces and the Russian navy: anti-shipping, ELINT, ECM, conventional medium bomber, reconnaissance, and tanker.
This particular variant, a Badger-A fitted out for the tanker role, had taken off from the air base at Dushanbe among the mountains north of the Afghanistan border three hours earlier. Cruising southwest at its service ceiling of forty thousand feet, it had avoided Pakistan air space by violating Iran’s hostile but poorly watched Baluchistan frontier until it was over the Gulf of Oman, before turning southeast on the final leg of its 2,000 mile journey.
The decision to send the Badger had been made with uncharacteristic haste by the officers of the small Russian naval aviation staff stationed at Dushanbe. Maintained by the Department of SNA to support Russian naval forces operating in the Indian Ocean, the facility had dispatched the tanker within minutes of learning mat KremT$ flight deck was burning, and that no fewer than twelve of the new navalized MiG-29 fighters were aloft at the time.
By loitering over the area and conserving fuel, the MiG-29s had hoped to stay airborne until the tanker reached them. They had the endurance . . . barely. They’d used lots of fuel during their launch, and they’d not begun flying conservatively until after the cruise missile hit Kreml at 0859. After more than three and a half hours aloft, the MiG squadron was running on fumes.
Captain Kurasov looked at the fuel gauge on his console. Things were desperate. His squadron was down to ten now. Uritski and Denisov had run dry minutes ago. The first to
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launch, they’d been the first to run out of fuel with no place to . land, ejecting into the sea close by the American carrier. Both men had been rescued by one of Jefferson’s helicopters.
That would be the fate of the rest of the MiGs soon, if they could not get refueled in time. Kreml*s flight deck was still a . rain of twisted metal and debris, though the fires were out now, at last report Attempting to land on the American carrier was oat of the question. There were too many technical variables, too many differences in the technology. The aircraft did not ; have die Americans’ ELS equipment for instrument landings and didn’t know bow to use American signaling and course-correction techniques—”calling the ball,” as they referred to it