Stramaglia was flying as his wingman, and that worried him. The man was a
brilliant instructor and a natural fighter jock, but he’d never heard a shot
fired in anger in his entire Navy career. Two years behind a Pentagon desk
had changed Matt Magruder. What had nearly a decade ashore done to
Stramaglia?
Too many worries … too many distractions. Coyote knew what that could
do to a pilot. He remembered his first time back up in a Tomcat after the
North Korean incident, when the memory of being shot down and captured, the
fear of losing Julie, had been overwhelming. The same kind of uncertainty
gripped him now.
“Hey, dudes, I got something!” Malibu’s cheerful voice roused him from
his reverie. “Bearing three-four-five multiple targets! Multiple targets!”
“Three-four-five …” he heard Nichols muttering over the ICS. “Where
…? Yeah! I got ’em, Skipper! Got ’em! It’s faint with all this clutter,
but I got bogies on the screen!”
Over the radio Coyote heard Stramaglia’s growl. “Tighten up and go to
afterburner. This is the real thing!”
“Range is one-for-oh, closing,” Nichols reported. “Angels one.”
“What’s the count?” Coyote asked as he shoved the throttles forward.
“Can’t tell … damn this shit!”
“Easy, John-Boy,” he said with a steady voice that belied his own inner
turmoil. Everyone was on edge, not just him. This time there was none of the
uncertainty they had felt the day of the Bear hunt, but knowing the score
didn’t necessarily make things any easier. The Soviets were far more capable
opponents than Libyans or Iraqis or North Koreans.
“Range one-twenty,” someone said on the radio.
“All right, weapons are free,” Stramaglia said. “Let’s get some use out
of the Phoenix today.”
Coyote already had his selector switch set to launch the AIM-54 Phoenix.
It was the Navy’s longest-ranged air-to-air missile, capable of reaching out
and knocking down a target over a hundred nautical miles away. The Tomcat had
been specifically designed to carry Phoenix, using the sophisticated AWG-9
radar/fire-control system. Each aircraft in Viper squadron carried four of
the deadly missiles plus two Sidewinders for close-in attacks. Given the high
success rate of the Phoenix–eighty-five-percent accuracy was the usual
figure–the squadron stood a good chance of knocking out most, even all of the
Soviet bombers they had detected earlier.
If only they could be sure of the enemy numbers now. The intense jamming
could have covered a group breaking off from the main body.
“All right, boys, show ’em what you’ve got!” Stramaglia said over the
radio. “Fight’s on!” That was the traditional call to Top Gun students
announcing the beginning of an exercise.
“Got a lock!” Nichols said. “Got a lock!”
Coyote’s finger tightened on the fire control, and a Phoenix leapt from
the Tomcat’s wing with a roar of flame and thunder.
CHAPTER 15
Thursday, 12 June, 1997
0927 hours Zulu (0927 hours Zone)
Soviet Attack Submarine Komsomolet Thilsiskiy
Northeast of the Faeroe Islands
“Torpedo! Torpedo in the water!”
Emelyanov looked up at the call from the sonar operator. The atmosphere
in the cramped, red-lit control room had been thick with tension ever since
the passive towed sonar array had first detected the passing American aircraft
above them. It hadn’t taken the enemy long to begin the hunt, using sonobuoys
to send out pings of sound that had echoed through the sub’s steel hull.
Nonetheless the captain had counted on more time before the hunters
triangulated on the Komsomolets Thilsiskiy. Whoever the American was, he’d
been incredibly lucky to spot the boat before Emelyanov’s evasive maneuvers
had taken him out of harm’s way.
Too late now to dwell on the question of luck. “Take him to three
hundred feet,” Emelyanov snapped. “Fire control, ready decoys.”
“Fifteen degrees down angle on planes.” That was Captain-Lieutenant Yuri
Borisovich Shvachko, the submarine’s starpom. The Exec picked up a PA
microphone and pressed the switch. “Dive! Dive!”
As the deck began to angle downward Emelyanov swallowed and looked across
the control room toward the sonar repeater station. “Sonar, report.”
“Range eight hundred meters, closing,” the sailor at the repeater
answered promptly. “Bearing one-one-six. Speed fifty knots”
The Americans had dropped the torpedo almost on top of the sub.