CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass
CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass
Synopsis:
The Communist hard-liners are attempting to regain power in the former
Soviet Union which has sparked a violent civil war. The United States
does not want to get involved, but when it is discovered that the rebels
are planning a submarine-launched nuclear strike, the U.S. decides to
intervene. Carrier Battle Group 14, along with two other carrier battle
groups, form a carrier battle force tasked with keeping the Russian
ballistic missile submarines in port where they cannot launch their
nuclear weapons. A massive air, sea and land battle ensues. Violence.
6th novel in the “Carrier” series, 1994.
Also by Keith Douglass
The CARRIER SERIES:
CARRIER Carrier 2: VIPER STRIKE Carrier 3: ARMAGEDDON MODE Carrier 4:
FLAME-OUT Carrier 5: MAELSTROM Carrier 6: COUNTDOWN
THE SEAL TEAM SEVEN SERIES:
SEAL TEAM SEVEN SPECTER NUCFLASH
PROLOGUE
Friday, 20 February
The Kremlin
Moscow, RSFSR
Jackboots crunched through the shards of glass and splintered masonry
littering a floor once richly carpeted, now charred by blast and fire.
The tapestries that had covered one wall had all been torn down, as had
the gilt-framed, life-sized portraits of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and that
bastard Leonov. Filing cabinets had been overturned, their contents
scattered and burned. The smell of fire and high explosive still clung
to the place. An ornate desk lay half buried beneath a fallen, inner
wall, while windows smashed by the concussion of multiple RPG rounds
gaped open to Moscow’s leaden February sky, allowing a bitter swirl of
snowflakes to dance across the debris.
Marshal Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov surveyed the wreckage of the
office for a grim moment, then holstered the Makarov pistol he’d been
gripping in one black-gloved hand. The traitor had fled, but damn it,
how had he known? How had he known?
A soldier crowded past the half-opened, partly unhinged door to the
shattered office. “Comrade Marshal!”
“Yes, Sergeant Borodin.”
The soldier, an AKM assault rifle clutched at a rigid port arms,
stiffened to attention. “We have searched the entire office wing,
including the basement. He is not here.”
“Has Doctorov arrived yet?”
“I do not know, Comrade Marsha-”
“Find out. If he has not, notify me the moment he does. And put your
best men to searching and guarding the prisoners. It may be that some
know of Leonov’s whereabouts. It would be inconvenient if they died
before telling us what we need to know. Most inconvenient. Do you
understand?”
“Completely, Comrade Marshal.”
“Good. I hold you responsible, Lieutenant Borodin.”
The man clicked his heels and smartly slapped the bright orange butt of
his AKM, sounding a crisp, military crack that echoed in the charred and
smashed office. “Thank you, Comrade Marshal!”
He turned, and Krasilnikov was left alone once more in the ruin of what
just five hours earlier had been the command center of a democratic
Russia.
Demokratichyeskii Rossiya. Krasilnikov snorted at the absurdity of the
thought. Pah!
The anarchy unleashed across the Rodina during the past decade was
unmatched by that of any period of history since the Great Patriotic
War, since even the epic sacrifices of 1917. First there’d been the
so-called glasnost and perestroika of Gorbachev … followed by the
abortive coup of ’91, the accession of Yeltsin, and the wholesale
dismemberment of the Soviet Union, she whom Krasilnikov had pledged to
defend with his life. The Communist Party banned, the state-run economy
plundered, the Warsaw Pact vanished with the winds of counterrevolution
howling from Berlin to Vladivostok.
Krasilnikov and a dedicated handful of other senior officers had worked
to set things straight, restore order where chaos reigned as a new and
manic Czar. The puppet “democrat” who’d followed Yeltsin to power over
the pathetic tatters of a great nation had been assassinated in
Oslo–ostensibly by western anarchists, but in fact by agents of
Aleksandr Doctorov’s revitalized and rededicated security apparatus–and
in the wake of that assassination, an alliance of KGB, military, and
hard-liner party men had secured power once again in the capitals of the
former Commonwealth of Independent States.
That had been only the beginning, of course, as the Soviet Union rose
reborn from the ashes. The operation known as Rurik’s Hammer, the