Jefferson’s bowels.
A hundred men died in the inferno, as flames roared from the breached
elevator doors, as steam boiled from ruptured lines alongside the catapults,
as smoke erupted like some monstrous black demon above the stricken carrier, a
nightmare giant pronouncing its verdict of doom.
0910 hours Zulu (1010 hours Zone)
Hornet 300
Over the Norwegian Sea
Miles north of the Jefferson, Hornets tangled with MiGs and Sukhois in a
sharp, brief encounter. “Watch it, Red! Two on your six!”
“Comin’ around now! Gonna break left!”
“Roger that! I’m on ’em, Sidewinder lock! Go! Go!”
“I’m out of here!”
“Fox two!”
The Soviet CAP was small and widely scattered. Three Soviet planes were
downed before the others fled, and the way was open for the Harpoon-laden
Intruders thundering west, still bearing on a trio of gigantic radar targets.
The range closed. Tombstone separated from the other aircraft, gaining
altitude to give himself and his radar a clearer view of the entire battle.
Ahead, the sky exploded in the shattering, bursting, tracer-flecked patterns
of heavy antiaircraft defenses. He concentrated on his flying for a moment,
weaving in and out of the triple-A patterns, twice breaking hard and firing
chaff as a missile streaked up to meet him. The second missile exploded
somewhere behind his F/A-18 and rocked the aircraft. For a moment, Tombstone
battled the controls, but then he fell into calm air and brought the Hornet
level. He looked forward through his HUD …
… and then he saw it, seven miles ahead and a mile below, Kreml, pride
of the Soviet fleet, vanguard of the flotilla that was to have been the
fulfillment of Russia’s envy of the massive, globe-spanning fleet of
supercarriers possessed by her arch-rival. Tombstone had overflown that ship
before, during the joint U.S.-USSR operations in the Indian Ocean two years
earlier. Her lines were at once familiar and alien.
She … no, Tombstone thought, for a Russian ship was he. He was not as
big as the Jefferson. A last-minute change in his design had transformed him
from a planned nuclear supercarrier to a conventionally powered vessel, and he
lacked Jefferson’s steam catapults, relying instead on a ski jump forward like
the British carriers to boost launching aircraft skyward.
But he was still impressive … especially now, viewed from five thousand
feet up, as a dozen gun mounts on his deck and superstructure flickered and
winked, hurling shells into the sky.
Tombstone’s Hornet bucked and shuddered. Antiaircraft fire rose like a
wall in front of him, puff upon puff of white smoke, as missile contrails
scratched their twisting ways across the sky, threading toward the American
strike planes in threes, in fives, in whole volleys of surface-to-air
destruction, as green and orange tracers painted the sky in glowing splatters
and broken streams of light.
An Intruder, dropping toward the deck for its attack run, collided
head-on with a SAM from the Irkutsk. The detonation blew the A-6 into fiery
fragments, with no chance at all that either pilot or B/N could have survived.
Seconds later, one of the Hornets twisted wildly right, pumping chaff, but a
Soviet missile snapped in from beneath, shattering his left wing in a flash
and a shower of smoking fragments. Tombstone saw the flash as the canopy blew
clear and the ejection seat hurled the pilot clear of the falling wreck. His
eyes followed the man down, searching for a sign of … yes! Good chute!
One by one, lean, deadly, winged pencils slipped from the surviving
Intruders, spat flame, and cleaved sky toward the Soviet ships. Tombstone
watched the tracks curving in … accelerating. There was a flash as one
Harpoon was struck by CIWS fire well short of the target, but seconds later
two of the big AGMs slammed into Kreml’s starboard beam just forward of the
island. The shock waves from the concussions jittered outward across the sea,
like ripples in a pond.
Damn it! The ship-killers were hitting, but they weren’t enough to do
the job. How were they going to kill this monster?
And two more Intruders had been hit, were going down. With a shock,
Tombstone realized that there were only three Blue Rangers left.