was clear that his only recourse would be to eject, letting the MiG ditch at
sea.
If that was his only alternative, he might as well do it sooner than
later, while he still had marginal control and the aircraft was still more or
less in one tattered but functional piece. Briefly, he’d considered trying to
reach the Russian lines north of Trondheim, maybe setting down at a captured
NATO air base, but he’d discarded the idea almost at once. Soyuz was closer,
and a gear-up landing in the battered MiG was no more appealing on a concrete
runway than it was on the pitching deck of a carrier.
There was another possibility.
Limping through the sky just off the Norwegian coast, he spotted what he
was looking for nearly one hundred kilometers north of the fjord, just beyond
the large Norwegian island of Smola, just over halfway back to the Soyuz.
Smola, well south of Trondheimfjord, was still in Norwegian hands, but he
could see a shark-lean shape ahead, a Soviet Krivak-I frigate, its silhouette
unmistakable with the blocky, four-tube SS-N-14 launcher on the forward deck.
He had noted the vessel earlier, during the southbound leg of this
mission.
Now Doblestnyy, part of Soyuz’s ASW screen, might well be his salvation.
Throttling back until he was barely keeping the MiG in the air, he passed the
frigate close by his starboard side. Contacting the ship was out of the
question with the radio gone. All he could do was position himself close to
the vessel and fire the ejection seat.
With a silent and very un-Communist-like prayer, Terekhov grabbed the
ejection handle and pulled.
As the canopy blasted away, as the powerful rocket engine smashed at the
base of his spine and hurled skyward, he hoped someone on the ship’s deck was
watching.
0445 hours Zulu (0545 hours Zone)
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Romsdalfjord
The cruise missile had struck on the port-side aft of the elevator
support frame, shearing struts, buckling hull plates, and blasting an external
fueling platform into the sea. The explosion tore a yard-wide hole through
the hull, spraying fragments of hot metal across the hangar deck. Fuel
gushing from ruptured pipes ignited, sending jets of flame up the slope of the
flight deck overhang, and exploding into the hangar spaces.
Damage, fortunately, was minimal. Automatic cutoffs sealed the ruptured
fuel lines, and the fire was quickly extinguished by the hangar bay sprinkler
system and by furiously working damage-control parties armed with foam and
CO2. Two men were killed, five wounded by shrapnel or blast. The port-side
elevator was jammed in the up position and the massive, steel-armor doors over
the huge, oval-shaped hangar deck elevator access were locked shut. In all,
six aircraft were damaged, including a Prowler and a KA-6D tanker, but a
preliminary check suggested that all could be repaired at sea, given a few
days without the urgency of battle stations.
The most serious problem once the fire was out was the crippled forward
elevator. Only one of the five Intruders being armed with Harpoon missiles on
the hangar deck was damaged, but tow paths had already been cleared for these
aircraft to the now-unusable port-side elevator. The Deck Handler, in Flight
Deck Control on the 0-4 level, turned to the large plan view of Jefferson’s
hangar deck and began sliding the scale cutouts of A-6s, Tomcats, and other
aircraft across the model, like an interior decorator arranging the furniture
in an especially cramped house. Also known as the Mangler, the Deck Handler
was charged with choreographing the dance of men and machines that maneuvered
the readied aircraft to a working elevator and up onto the flight deck.
By the time Jefferson had reached Otroy Island, the first A-6 Intruders,
each with a pair of Harpoon missiles slung from its wings, was riding the
starboard-side forward elevator into sunlight, as a small army of sailors
commenced a walk-down along the flight deck, retrieving thumbnail-sized bits
of shrapnel and metal that might damage turbine blades in flight deck
operations. Overhead, the only aircraft in sight were friendly, Norwegian
Falcons and American Hornets and Tomcats providing continuing protection for
the slow-moving ship. The first phase of the Battle of Romsdalfjord was over.