the missile dropped clear and ignited. His view of the Russian carrier was
momentarily obscured by the boiling white haze of the missile’s exhaust.
“Pickle hot on number two,” Spoiler said.
“Firing two!”
The A6 lurched again. As soon as the missile was clear, Sluf put the
stick over, breaking into a hard right turn that would take them clear of the
battle zone. The threat warning continued to chirp from the console.
“We got a couple SAMs coming in fast, Sluf.”
“I see ’em. Chaff.”
“Rog.”
They’d done all they could against the Soviet aircraft carrier. Now it
would be a fight for survival in the smoke-laced skies over the Norwegian Sea.
0623 hours Zulu (0723 hours Zone)
Soviet Task Group Soyuz
The Norwegian Sea
Deprived of air cover from its consorts, Soyuz did its best to defend
itself. The Soviet carrier mounted CIWS-type weapons, as well as launchers
for both SAN3s and SAN4s. Her 3-D air-defense radars, switched on moments
before when the carrier’s CIC lost the feed from the damaged Marshal
Timoshenko, painted six Harpoon missiles incoming from three different
bearings.
Had the Kirov still had been part of the carrier task force, perhaps the
outcome would have been different. Kirov-class cruisers could lob volleys of
SAN6s at cruise-missile-sized targets over fifty kilometers away.
But Kirov was forty kilometers astern now, a helplessly drifting,
fire-blackened wreck, and Soyuz simply did not have enough anti-air assets to
deal with all of the incoming targets herself.
Her Gatling cannons shrieked, spraying 30-mm shells across the sky.
Larger, slower antiaircraft guns joined in, hurling round after round into the
sky, which was coming alive with the puffs of antiaircraft fire, tiny white
clouds against the blue.
One Harpoon went down eight kilometers from the ship, sliced in two by a
buzz-sawing stream of lead from Soyuz’s stern. A second Harpoon exploded an
instant later, scattering shrapnel across a carrier-sized patch of frothing
white sea. A third was hit, exploding in flame, CIWS cannons adjusted,
tracked, slewed to new targets …
Running the gauntlet of fire, a Harpoon struck the carrier’s stern,
slamming into the open gallery just below the flight deck that housed one of
the Soviet carrier’s CIWS AK630s. The explosion plucked the Gatling turret up
by its roots and hurled it into the sea. The roundoff curled up, knocking men
to their knees with the concussion.
The next Harpoon struck three seconds later, striking Soyuz’s island aft
and on the starboard side. The warhead plunged through two bulkheads before
exploding in Soyuz’s air department intelligence center. Twenty men were
incinerated outright as the blast knocked out decks and overheads and smashed
computers and severed electronics links. Two hundred men more died as the
explosion shattered an entire level and destroyed the carrier’s primary flight
control center.
The killing blow was delivered by a third Harpoon, whipping in five
seconds after the first and on a slightly higher trajectory. It passed over
Soyuz’s stern and through the expanding cloud of smoke and debris, plunging to
self-destruction among the ranks of MiGs and Sukhois parked aft of the bridge.
Bombs and missiles slung from wings, fuel tanks already topped off with JP5,
fuel hoses coiled across the deck like strands of spaghetti, cannon rounds
tight-packed in magazines, all erupted in a savage detonation that overwhelmed
the initial flash and boom of the exploding Harpoon.
On Soyuz’s flag bridge, Admiral Khenkin dragged himself erect from a deck
covered with shards of broken glass. Men littered the deck, dead and dying,
stunned and wounded. Someone shrieked agony in the smoke-choked darkness.
Khenkin’s arm was broken, and his face was slick with blood, but he scarcely
noticed. What he did notice was a distinct cant to the deck. Soyuz was
listing to port, and settling by the stern as well.
The damage was almost certainly fatal.
Glass crunched under his shoes. Every window on the bridge had been
blown out by the concussion, and the pall of smoke was so thick that daylight
had been blotted out. From one gaping window, he peered down into an inferno,
where the flight deck had been laid open as though by a titanic, white-hot
knife and filled with raw flame.