CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

effective. The Hawkeye had lost the contact in the clutter.

Jotunheim, Tombstone thought, the abode of the ice giants in Norse myth.

There were giants among those mountains, certainly enough. Sleek, high-tech

giants that could fly … and that could deliver fiery death to the American

carrier group if they were allowed to get within striking range.

Tombstone’s eyes stayed on the radar screen, which repeated the display

aboard the Hawkeye over one hundred miles to the northeast. The Jotunheimen

were visible, hard, bright returns stretching from north to south, the sharp

edges softened by the blurring hash of Soviet ECM. Somewhere in that mess was

a flight of Russian planes. But how many … and what kind? When first

picked up, those bogies had been 270 miles away, traveling toward the

Jefferson at Mach .9. That speed would put them close enough to launch

ship-killers at the Jefferson in fifteen minutes.

They had to find out what those bogies were, and damned fast.

Tombstone glanced at the young, sandy-haired man at his left. “What do

you think, Paul?”

Lieutenant Commander Paul Aiken studied the hash on the display for a

moment, then shook his head. “Whatever they are, they don’t give a damn about

Swedish neutrality.”

“Well, we knew that was coming. Cuts down on the flight time from the

Kola Peninsula, doesn’t it?”

“Amen to that. I wonder if Stockholm has surrendered. Or if the

Russians are just bulling their way through.”

Tombstone glanced back over his shoulder at the transparent flight board

listing the names and aircraft numbers of Jefferson’s aviators now aloft.

“Who’s on BARCAP east?” he asked. With combat possible at any time, Jefferson

was keeping at least two BARCAPs–BARrier Combat Air Patrols–in the air at

all times, positioned to block any surprise Soviet thrust from north or east.

“Two-oh-one and Two-one-eight,” an enlisted rating at the board replied.

“Grant and Crandall. Call sign ‘Icewall.'”

Commander Willis E. Grant, running name “Coyote.” Lieutenant Commander

Alex Crandall, “Scorpion.” Tombstone didn’t know Crandall well, but Coyote

was one of Jefferson’s best aviators, the skipper of Jefferson’s VF-95 Vipers.

And one of Tombstone’s best friends.

Tombstone brought the microphone to his mouth again. “Skywatch

Three-two, Camelot,” he said. “Deploy Icewall for a closer look. Tell them

to watch themselves. They have weapons clear.”

“Roger, Camelot. Skywatch copies.”

Tombstone continued to stare at the hash-streaked radar display, willing

the interference to vanish and the target to appear. The contact had to be a

flight of Russian aircraft. Norway had little air force left, and Swedish

planes would not be overflying Norwegian airspace. That left the Russians.

It was a sure bet that the Soviet high command had decided to send a strike

force against the Jefferson, routing them straight across conquered Finland

and neutral Sweden from bases in the Kola Peninsula. Battle stations had

already been sounded aboard every ship in Jefferson’s battle group, but the

sooner the American force knew what the enemy force’s strength and composition

were, the better.

He drew a deep breath. It was still a little surprising, standing here

in Jefferson’s cavernous red-lit Information Center, directing the eighty-plus

aircraft of CVW-20 in a shooting war. CAG: Commander Air Group … though the

Navy no longer had air groups and the title was a holdover from an earlier

war. Officially, Tombstone was Acting CAG. He still didn’t feel ready to

take on the job. He’d come aboard days before as Deputy CAG, only to find

himself stepping into the senior slot when Captain Joseph Stramaglia had died

in a dogfight over Iceland.

Tombstone was no stranger to warfare. During his previous tour of sea

duty, as CO of VF-95 aboard this same carrier, he’d seen more combat than most

modern naval aviators saw in their entire careers. He’d made his first kill

in the skies over Korea, then gone on to participate in air-to-air combat

during a military coup in Thailand, and in the mercifully brief so-called

“Indian War,” a police action that had brought India and Pakistan to the

negotiating table and–just possibly–stopped a nuclear war before it started.

Looking around the red-lit CIC, he knew that this, this was what he had

trained for all his life … not a police action, not a brushfire war in some

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