Narvik strip was littered with patches. Marine combat engineers had been
working all morning to repair shell holes and craters in the tarmac, covering
them with swaths of wire mesh and filling them with asphalt. Ironically, most
of those craters had been made by A-6s during the raids to draw out the Soyuz.
He hoped the Marine engineers knew their jobs.
It was strange not having a deck officer, a cat crew, or the ritual of a
catapult launch. He had his clearance; pressing the throttle forward, he set
the Hornet moving, rolling faster and faster down an uncharacteristically
motionless ramp. His right hand gripped the stick, holding it steady against
the bumps and thumps of the uneven terrain beneath the fighter’s wheels, then
easing it back. The Hornet’s nose came up and the roughness vanished. He
soared toward blue sky.
He exulted.
Captain Matthew Magruder, CAG of CVW-20, was airborne again, unshackled
after what seemed like months of confinement within Jefferson’s gray
corridors.
The faces of two people hovered at the edge of his mind, friends, one
dead, one living, both a part of him. For you, Coyote, he thought. And for
you, Pamela.
Tombstone felt complete, victorious, the professional warrior vaulting
skyward to give battle, man-to-man, among the clouds.
He was where he belonged.
0855 hours Zulu (0955 hours Zone)
MiG 1010
Over the Norwegian Sea
Captain Sergei Sergeivich Terekhov held his MiG-29 on course, his eyes
scanning the horizon ahead. They were almost there … close enough to the
American carrier that he could taste it.
He savored the coming rematch. The humiliation of his defeat three days
earlier burned like a living fire. Pulled from the sea by the crew of the
Doblestnyy, who joked about the big fish they’d caught, put ashore two days
later at Bodo, where he learned that Soyuz had been sunk and the Marines come
ashore at Narvik, he’d had to beg for an aircraft from the Soviet base
commander there. He’d flown across to the Kreml early that morning, learning
only after he landed on the carrier that Bodo had been captured by enemy
forces shortly after he’d taken off. Later he’d learned that his promotion to
captain first rank had not been forwarded to Moscow before Soyuz had gone
down.
Needless to say, he was no longer air wing commander. Soyuz’s air wing
had been obliterated with the carrier, save for a few that had been in the air
and managed to flee to nearby air bases. Most of those had been captured when
the Marines landed.
It was like a personal insult. Twice now he’d narrowly escaped death at
the hands of the Americans. Terekhov possessed a rigid and uncompromising
pride, a fierce arrogance born of steel and flame that demanded he give back
to the Americans what they had given him. His MiG-29 was configured for
precision attack, with two AA-8 infrared homing missiles on his outer pylons
and two AS-7 tactical air-to-surface missiles slung from mid-wing pylons.
Those AA-7s would bury themselves inside the huge, vulnerable target that
was the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson–that Terekhov had promised himself. Admiral
Ivanov, strangely, did not seem that interested in Jefferson, was content to
neutralize the threat the American carrier posed to his rear and pass it by,
so intent was he on reaching the Marine landing beaches at Harstad and
Tennevik.
Terekhov knew better. Destroy the Jefferson, and the heart and soul were
gone from the American effort in Norway. The American carrier had been behind
every reverse, every delay, every defeat the Soviets had suffered in their
invasion of Scandinavia, from the stubborn and irrational resistance by
Norwegian freedom fighters and Home Defense forces, to the sinking of the
Soyuz himself. He wanted to see the Yankee carrier burn.
The wing commander aboard Kreml was an idiot, a Party-nurtured aparatchik
named Chelyag. It had not been difficult for Terekhov to impress Chelyag with
his previous experience in combat with the American carrier, and to suggest a
course of action. At his urging, Chelyag had agreed to let him try a
low-altitude approach with a flight of six MiG-29s. It would, he promised the
pudgy-faced wing commander, divide the American defenses, and allow the main