carrier itself. Bringing the stick to the left, Terekhov banked sharply
toward the east, swinging onto a new heading that would take him well north of
Otroy and across the cliffs and hillsides that formed the northern side of the
Romsdalfjord canyon.
The warbling screech of a missile radar lock-on sounded in his ears.
Glancing around sharply, he saw the threat, the thread-thin contrail of a
surface-to-air missile lancing into the sky from one of the ships off Otroy.
“Hunter Leader to all Hunters!” he called. “Independent action!”
Like wasps stirred by a stick, the MiG-29s in his flight scattered.
Soviet tactical doctrine generally called for a tighter, more controlled
deployment of forces. But the airspace in the fjord was going to be limited,
too limited to allow maneuvers by large groups of aircraft. Better, he
thought, to catch the Americans by surprise and overwhelm their defenses, with
aircraft coming at them from every point on the compass.
Angling slightly toward the north, he waited … waited … an eye on the
missile, but his attention centered on his instruments and on the rippling
flow of land and water, of rocks, hills, and cliffsides flashing past only
centimeters, it seemed, beneath his wings. The missile was definitely locked
onto his aircraft now. Wait … wait …
Now!
He cut sharply to the left, sweeping low across the cliff top. A village
exploded into view. He was so low that for one frozen instant, he could see
steeply pitched tile roofs, the squat thrust of a Lutheran church steeple, the
crisscross complexity of narrow streets and winding, hilltop roads,
automobiles, people, bicycles.
Terekhov punched the countermeasures button, releasing clouds of chaff.
A cliff loomed in front of him and he cleared it, with ten meters to spare.
He heard the roar seconds later, a far-off thud as the American missile
slammed into the cliffside. The hills that protected the American carrier
could be used to advantage by the hunter as well. With victory surging in his
veins, Terekhov whipped the MiG-29 back toward the fjord. Trees blurred
beneath his aircraft, interspersed with scattered houses, a road, the
burned-out shell of a Norwegian SAM carrier.
There!
The MiG shrieked into clear sky above the vast, four-mile-wide gulf of
the Romsdalfjord, and ahead, almost directly below, was the American carrier
… a gray monster over three hundred meters long, her deck crowded with
aircraft. He could see some of them now, like toys hanging in the sky between
his eagle’s vantage point and the water. The carrier was under way, its
V-wake ruffling the calm of the dark waters as it cruised slowly west toward
the open ocean some twenty miles distant. A column of water erupted in the
distance, a wide miss by a blindly launched air-to-surface missile.
“Victory!” He shoved the control stick forward and watched the U.S.S.
Thomas Jefferson swell in his forward windscreen.
0416 hours Zulu (0516 hours Zone)
Tomcat 200
Over Romsdalfjord
Coyote saw the Russian MiG almost as soon as he cleared Jefferson’s bow
and started grabbing altitude. The enemy aircraft flashed into view above the
wooded ridge top north of the carrier like some huge, silver-bodied bird of
prey. “Viper Two-zero-zero!” he called. Without a specific call sign for his
flight, he would use the squadron name for VF-95. “Tallyho at zero-zero-five!
Engaging!”
“Copy, Viper Two-zero-zero. Go get him.”
Coyote was on top of the target almost before he had a chance to react.
Modern air battles tend to be sprawling things that crisscrossed hundreds of
cubic miles of sky. This battle was something beyond Coyote’s experience, an
all-out, toe-to-toe slugging match confined to the narrow strip of sky above
the Romsdalfjord, walled in by cliffs and filled with hurtling,
high-performance jet aircraft.
There was no time to think, no time to react as he almost closed with the
MiG from the other plane’s starboard bow. The range was too close for
missiles, and Coyote instinctively snapped the weapons-selector switch on the
stick. “Going to guns!” he called. The circular target ring of his Lead
Computing Optical Sight, or LCOS, floated in the center of his HUD,
accompanied by the data line that told him he had 675 rounds available. He