onto a steel deck.
Jefferson’s roundoff grew rapidly. There were no corrections from the
LSO, just the impression of a last-second rush of speed as the lines painted
onto the flight deck rose to meet the F14, the squeal of wheels as he opened
the throttles, followed by the solid snap-unh! as the tailhook snagged the
three wire and dragged the Tomcat to a halt.
Coyote felt a surging, adrenaline-charged buoyancy.
He felt free.
0935 hours Zulu (1035 hours Zone)
Near Molde, overlooking the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Romsdalfjord
There were four of them, tall, athletic men with wind-tanned features,
wearing the high, zip-necked shirts of the Norwegian army under olive-drab
jackets. One wore the double green rank stripes, one thick, one thin, of a
sergeant. The others were privates. The bulky tube of an 84-mm Carl Gustav
antitank gun was slung over the shoulders of one, The others had NATO-issue G3
rifles.
The sergeant lay on his belly in a clump of spring flowers on a bluff
high above the fjord and peered down through 7 x 50 field glasses. From this
vantage point on the north side of the fjord, he was staring down onto the
Jefferson from her starboard side. From less than a mile away he could
clearly see an F14 floating toward the deck, wings spread wide, nose high …
then jerk to a halt as it snagged the arrestor cable.
“I would say that we’ve found what we are looking for, comrades,” the
sergeant said, speaking Norwegian. His real name was Ivan Finenko, and he was
a lieutenant, not a sergeant. All four men were Spetsnaz, one of hundreds of
teams throughout Norway. Their mission was to investigate fjords between
Trondheim and Nordfjord, searching for a hidden American aircraft carrier.
Finenko was not sure why such tactics were necessary in this day of spy
satellites, but he was not the sort of man who questioned orders. They’d
begun with Trondheimfjord and worked their way slowly south, examining each
inlet large enough to conceal an American carrier.
They had found it. Perhaps now their superiors would let them get on
with their primary mission, which was to infiltrate the headquarters of the
Norwegian resistance near Bergen. A hundred other teams must be trying the
same thing, and this detour to examine the fjords had put them behind the
rest. Finenko checked his watch, a Casio digital. There was plenty of time
to pass the word back to headquarters on the regular broadcast at 1200 hours.
The roar of an engine made him look up. The tracked vehicle thundered
and roared over the ridge line one hundred meters behind them, belching black
diesel fumes. It was a Norwegian army M-109, a SAM carrier mounting Roland 2
anti-air missiles. Skynd Dem! was painted on the side of the turret. A young
lieutenant was shouting at him from the vehicle’s turret, but Finenko could
not understand a word above the deep-throated clatter of the engine and the
squeal of metal tracks.
Standing, he held one hand to his ear and shook his head in a clear “I
don’t know” gesture.
The Norwegian lieutenant vanished into the turret for a moment, and the
M-109 slewed to a stop, its engine idling. The officer reappeared, scrambling
out of the turret hatch, then dropping to the ground beside the massive
treads. “Steady, Aleksandrov,” Finenko murmured to the man with the Carl
Gustav. “Be ready if I give the word.”
“Da, tovarisch leytenant,” the man growled, so excited that he’d
forgotten both his Norwegian and Finenko’s role of sergeant. He was on his
stomach at Finenko’s feet, the Carl Gustav across his shoulder, squinting
against the sight.
The Norwegian lieutenant was coming down the ridge toward the Spetsnaz
team. He obviously believed the four of them were Norwegian soldiers; he
either thought they were stragglers and intended to round them up for some
mission of his own, or he was lost and wanted to ask directions.
Finenko fingered the greasy slick receiver of his G3. They could play
along and pretend to be Norwegians separated from their unit, but so much
could go wrong with that approach. None of the Spetsnaz commandos had heard