CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

“Punch it!”

“Fox three!” John-Boy gave the warning call for a Phoenix launch as he

punched the firing button on his backseat console. The F-14 surged upward as

the half-ton missile dropped from the wing. When its rocket engine ignited,

the missile corkscrewed ahead of the Tomcat at the tip of a billowing white

contrail, arrowing into the hard blue sky.

“Next target! Acquisition.”

“Got it! Fox three!”

Coyote glanced at the crawling blips and symbols on his VDI again and saw

that Scorpion was in trouble.

1425 hours Zulu (1525 hours Zone)

Tomcat 218

Near Grotil, Norway

“We got two on our six!” Juggler yelled. “Two missiles hot for our six!”

As Crandall brought the Tomcat into a hard right turn, he glanced back

and saw the Missiles on their tail, white contrails scratched across the blue

a mile behind them.

“Hang onto your lunch, Jug! It’s pedal to the metal!”

Scattering flares like a string of burning stars, the F-14 dipped briefly

toward the rugged mountain peaks below, trading altitude for speed, then

pitched up, blasting toward the aching blue of the zenith. As the flares

fell, he cut the Tomcat’s afterburners and throttled back. Sometimes it was

possible to fool incoming heat-seekers by giving them brighter, hotter

targets. Losing power, the Tomcat climbed for seconds on momentum alone, then

fell into a vertical reverse, a low-speed maneuver that let Crandall pull an

extremely tight turn.

Then they were plunging toward the mountains, the F-14 shuddering as it

picked up speed. Behind them, one of the contrails angled wildly off to the

left, decoyed by the flares. The second missile corkscrewed in, still homing

on the Tomcat.

Lieutenant Commander Alex Crandall was a big, bluff man, a native of

Mountain View, Missouri, who had begun flying a Piper Cub as a teenager …

and ended up flying Tomcats for the Navy. He loved flying, loved the rush of

cloud past the cockpit and the feeling of solitude hanging between earth and

sky.

He wasn’t enjoying the solitude now, though, as he glanced at the screen

of his VDI, spotting Coyote’s F-14 and the hurtling, pinpoint blips of a pair

of Phoenix missiles. He’d heard the 201 bird’s fox-three call a moment

before, heard the orders from Jefferson’s CIC to concentrate on Group Bravo.

Fine, damn it, but it would be nice to have a little help out here.

Scorpion Crandall was feeling just a bit naked, alone in the wide-open sky

with four MiGs and a couple of AA-8 heat-seekers. Two MiGs were behind him;

two more had circled around in front, boxing him in. Things were not looking

good.

The mountains filled his windscreen beyond the flickering data and

drifting computer symbols of his HUD. Less than a mile above those craggy

peaks, Crandall boosted the throttles to full military power and brought the

nose up.

Acceleration clamped down on his body, pressing him back into his seat,

dragging at his face and eyes and brain. He grunted hard, deliberately

flexing the muscles of his neck and arms, fighting the pressure, fighting the

drain of blood from his head that threatened to make him black out. As the G

readout on his HUD hit 9.2, a black tunnel closed in on his vision from all

sides, narrowing his view.

Then the pressure was gone as the Tomcat leveled off. Crandall gulped

air through his mask, turning from side to side in the cockpit as he tried to

see all of the sky, in all directions. “Jug! Where’s the missile? I don’t

see it!”

There was no answer from the backseat. The high-G pullout had put his

RIO to sleep, a common enough event when the relative positions of pilot and

RIO put slightly higher G-forces on the man in the backseat. Glancin back

over his shoulder, Crandall still could not see the second Russian missile.

Good enough. They’d lost it. If they hadn’t, they’d have been hit by

now. On this new heading, two Russian planes were bearing in on him, almost

head-to-head.

Deciding to go for a Sparrow kill, he brought his stick over, dragging

the targeting diamond on his HUD across the symbol marking one of the MiGs. A

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