mooring bay.” He at least wanted water enough beneath him that the shock
of launching the sixty-ton missile would not slam his keel against the
bottom.
On a television screen above the helm officer’s station, the entrance to
open water was looming larger.
1319 hours
Tomcat 200
Over the Kola Inlet
“Bandits, Tombstone! Multiple bandits!”
“How many and where?”
“Ten … twelve … A hell of a lot, coming in at low altitude, from
one-six-oh to one-eight-oh! Range, five miles!”
“Here’s one,” Tombstone said, choosing one target out of many displayed
on his HUD. He flipped a selector. “Going with AMRAA.M.” There was a
pause, then the satisfying warble of a radar lock in his earphones.
“Lock! And that’s a fox one!”
Below him, the Intruders had spread out but were still bearing south,
arrowing scant yards ahead of their own shadows on the water.
Elsewhere, the sky was empty, save for wisps of contrails far overhead.
“This is Tomcat Two-zero-zero,” Tombstone called. “Coming in north of
Polyamyy. I’ve got a flight of Intruders that could use some help about
now.”
“Two-double-oh, this is Shotgun One-one. Tombstone, what the hell are
you doing out here?”
“Getting my ass into trouble, Coyote. Where the hell are you?”
“Retanking at angels base plus ten, Delta Three-five-five, Charlie
One-eight-one.” Tombstone glanced at his map. That put Shotgun about
eighteen miles to the northwest. “We’re on our way back to the Jeff
after covering White Lightning.”
“Any of you already tanked up?”
“That’s a roger. Three of us are anyway.”
“If you’re still armed, we could use you at Polyamyy. Multiple bogies
coming out of one-eight-zero.”
“I see ’em. Okay, Tombstone. Cavalry’s on the way.”
“Good to hear that, Coyote.” Tombstone locked onto a second target, then
squeezed the trigger. “Fox one!”
“Hey, leave a few for the rest of us.”
But as the MiGs exploded out of the southern sky, Tombstone knew that
Coyote needn’t have worried on that score.
In seconds, MiG-29 Fulcrums were everywhere, sleek aircraft with twin
stabilizers, clutching deadly pods of weapons beneath their wings.
Then Tombstone and Tomboy were fighting for their lives.
CHAPTER 29
Tuesday, 17 March
1320 hours (Zulu +2)
Near Polyamyy, Russia
Lieutenant Ben Rivera balanced himself against the ragged top of the
wall, staring down into the dock facility at the base of the hill. From
his vantage point, at the top of a seventy-degree slope perhaps two
hundred feet above the waters of Polyamyy Inlet, it looked as though a
monster was sliding out of the rock beneath his feet.
Dark gray, most of its surface covered with a brickwork effect, or tiles
like those on a space shuttle, it was Leviathan himself. Even before
half of it had moved into the open water, Rivera knew that he must be
standing directly above the entrance to one of the secret Russian
submarine pens he’d been briefed on before the landing. There were
supposed to be a number of caverns piercing the cliffs overlooking the
tangled inlets near Polyamyy, each sheltering some of Russia’s most
powerful boomers, and by chance he’d been dropped right on top of one.
That monster sliding into the inlet was as long as forever! A Typhoon
ballistic-missile sub, it had to be! Nothing else could be so huge. As
Rivera watched, that long, long forward deck continued to slide out from
beneath the rocks, its upper surface showing the sharply chiseled
grooves of two rows of missile hatches down the forward deck.
And … most merciful God in heaven … one of those hatches was open!
Rivera nearly lost his hold on the wall as he found himself staring down
into the gaping hatch, meeting the gaze of the round, white eye of an
SS-N-20 ICBM peering back from its depths.
“Larson!” He scrambled back from the edge of the cliff, the spell of awe
and surprise that had pinned him there broken at last. “Gunny!”
The Typhoon’s sail slid into view, and then the afterdeck, shorter by
far than the forward missile deck. The rudder had the span of an A-6,
and that broad, flattened, eighty-two-foot beam that made it look as fat
as an aircraft carrier. Hell, with an LOA of 557 feet, it was two