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