growing resentment at home, the ultimate threat Of People power … and civil
war.
“Only time will tell whether the deployment of a single U.S. carrier
squadron–a token force by any standards–will buy the time America needs to
marshal its diplomatic armies against this renewed Soviet threat.
“For ACN, this is Pamela Drake reporting live from the Pentagon.”
CHAPTER 1
Wednesday, 18 June 1997
1420 hours Zulu (1520 hours Zone)
CIC, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Viking Station, the Norwegian Sea
Cruising steadily through calm seas, the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson followed
the northward leg of the imaginary racetrack labeled Viking Station by the
wits in her Combat Information Center. She was America’s newest
nuclear-powered supercarrier, a high-tech leviathan almost eleven hundred feet
long, with the population of a small town crammed into the miles of
passageways and living quarters and work spaces beneath the four and a half
acres of her flight deck.
The seas were calm, but the atmosphere aboard mingled exhaustion with the
electric crackle of tension. Jefferson was at war. No declarations had been
made as yet, but the first battles had already been fought, the first
casualties taken. After years of Cold War, of revolution, of wild shifts in
world politics, military confrontation and miscalculation had brought the
United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. And Jefferson was on
the firing line. In the Air Ops suite of the carrier’s CIC, a cold, blue-lit
cavern of dungaree- and khaki-clad men hunched over consoles and the ghostly
sweeps of radar screens, Commander Matthew “Tombstone” Magruder reached past
the arm of a second class radarman and snatched up a headset. “Skywatch
Three-two,” he snapped, pressing one earpiece against his ear and holding the
throat mike to his lips. “This is Camelot One. What the hell do you mean,
‘contact lost’?”
There was a long hesitation before the reply. Camelot was Jefferson’s
current call sign, and Camelot One meant CAG, the commander of Air Wing 20.
The men aboard the orbiting E-2C Hawkeye would be thinking carefully about how
they answered.
“Ah … Camelot, we’ve got quite a bit of ECM going in that sector. And
the Russkies are using the mountains for cover. They just dropped off the
screen.”
“Well, drop them back on the screen, damn it. Go to base plus twenty and
find them!”
“Roger that, Camelot. Skywatch Three-two proceeding to base plus
two-zerO.”
Communications with the Hawkeye were on tight beam and
computer-scrambled, but against the possibility that the enemy was still able
to listen in, explicit instructions were coded. The “base” for the day was
twelve thousand feet. Magruder had just ordered the Hawkeye radar plane to
climb from its current altitude of twenty-five thousand feet up to thirty-two,
the better to peer down into the mountainous heart of Norway one hundred miles
to the east.
Less than two hours earlier, a priority flash from Washington had warned
the American carrier battle group of a sharp increase in air traffic over and
near air bases up and down the Kola Peninsula, twelve hundred miles to the
east. Less than twenty minutes ago, the circling Hawkeye had picked up
ominous signs–radar images, now revealed, now obscured in a fog of intense
electronic countermeasures–of aircraft moving west. Aircraft, many of them
moving from bases within the fastnesses inside the reborn Soviet Union, across
occupied Finland and into neutral Swedish airspace.
Tombstone shivered. The air-conditioning in CIC was always going
full-blast to protect the complex, expensive, and temperature-sensitive
electronics that filled the suite of rooms located just beneath the carrier’s
flight deck, or “roof.”
But his shiver was not from the cold. Forty-eight hours earlier,
aircraft from the Jefferson had dealt a brutal setback to the Soviet Union’s
invasion plans for Norway, sinking a number of amphibious-warfare ships and
even getting in at least one hit against a Russian aircraft carrier. Now, the
battle group’s radar picket had reported multiple bogies coming west across
the mountains of Jotunbeim. While not particularly high as mountain ranges
go, they were the highest in Norway, with some of the peaks reaching above
eight thousand feet, and the bogies were using the mountains for cover.
Worse, their electronic countermeasures were turning out to be too damned