CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

quaint and old-fashioned.

That interplay of men and machines was precisely the atmosphere in

Jefferson’s CIC, where combat directors relayed orders and received reports,

where radar data from far-seeing Hawkeyes was received and distilled into

glowing flickers on computer screens and remote displays. It set the one, the

backdrop for the battle, tense, but somehow remote and detached, not at all as

if the lives of thousands of men depended on the decisions and orders made in

that high-tech cavern of subdued lighting and glowing monitors.

But on Jefferson’s deck, the battle was immediate and very real.

Sweating, cursing, weary men yelled to make themselves heard above the

cacophony of gunfire and jet thunder, of roaring catapults and the raucous

clatter of steel on steel. Most orders were passed through the Mickey Mouse

helmets they wore, devices that filtered out the raw noise to protect the

wearers’ ears, leaving only the weirdly distorted gabble of men yelling

against an electronic silence.

The sky was filled with aircraft, a scene that would have been familiar

to veterans of Midway or Leyte Gulf save that these machines were larger,

faster, and far louder than anything in the air during the Second World War.

A Norwegian F-105, its left wing blasted away by a Soviet AA-10, tumbled

wildly across the sky and slammed into the rock cliffs to the north in a

brilliant orange fireball. Contrails wove and squirmed overhead, like

skywriting gone amuck, punctuated by the soft, harmless-looking puffs of white

marking plane-killing missile detonations. With a shriek, another Sea Sparrow

left the Mark 29 launcher on the carrier’s port-side aft sponson, stabbing

into the sky atop a writhing string of white smoke. An AS-7 Kerry

air-to-surface missile homed on the Jefferson from ahead, was decoyed by

blossoming clouds of chaff fired from steadily thumping RBOC launchers, and

struck the water fifty yards off the port bow with a roar. A white column of

water geysered into the air; the spray fell like a torrent, drenching men in

the catwalk above the starboard bow sponson and on the flight deck near Cats

One and Two.

To the south, a MiG-27 Flogger-D, duck-nosed, swing-winged, and deadly,

shouted thunder above the tiny village of Vikebukt, skimming rooftops and

church steeples in a silver blur before emerging over the Romsdalfjord,

hurtling toward the Jefferson scant meters above the water. The Flogger was

not a naval aircraft, but one of a flight of Soviet Frontal Aviation attack

planes out of Bodo ordered to join the Soyuz strike against the American

carrier. Slung from pylons beneath its wing roots was a warload of ten

OFAB0250 quarter-ton fragmentation bombs, weapons better suited for an attack

against soft ground targets, but capable of doing terrible damage to the

relatively thin skin of a carrier, especially when that carrier was literally

a floating bomb crammed with jet fuel and high-explosive ordnance.

Aboard Jefferson, the CIWS mounted port side forward slewed to the left,

its radar tracking the incoming target, processing data far faster than would

have been possible for any human combatant, verifying what it had already

deduced from the absence of an IFF code, that the target was hostile. With a

shriek like a diamond drill bit biting steel, the Phalanx fired; the head-on

shot required no second burst for correction; but sent depleted uranium slugs

slicing through a MiG-27’s airframe like buckshot fired through tissue paper.

The effect was spectacular, a pyrotechnic nightmare of flame and

disintegrating wreckage that came hurtling low across Jefferson’s flight deck

aft of the island. It missed deck and island superstructure and tight-packed

aircraft all by a hair. Fragments snapped a cable on the towering neck of the

carrier’s Tilly crane, punched holes in the SPS-49 radar dish atop the

superstructure, crumpled an SH-3 helicopter and the F/A-18 Hornet parked next

to it, and sent deck crewmen scattering for cover as, for half a second, the

sky exploded. The wreckage sprayed into the water one hundred yards off

Jefferson’s starboard side, the detonation of 250-kilo bombs sending a gout of

spray skyward higher than the radar mast atop Jefferson’s superstructure.

Shaken crewmen rose from the deck and went on with their work. The

helicopter was burning, and men wheeled one of the yellow fire trucks called

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