was clear of its tube, nothing!
But there was no further word from Polyamyy, and no confirmation from
Moscow that the missile had descended on Chelyabinsk. Perhaps, after
all, something had gone wrong.
Damn the American carrier forces! Somehow, they’d managed to take out
the pride of the Russian Northern Fleet, spoiling for a second time an
attempt to end once and for all the civil war destroying his country.
Always, it seemed, it was the U.S. Navy, the Americans and their
far-ranging carrier aircraft.
Ironically, it was not the U.S. Navy at all, but an F-117 Stealth
aircraft that punched home the final seal of Karelin’s destiny.
The Kandalaksha base had been identified the day before by its microwave
transmissions. During the night, several cruise-missile attacks and
bombing strikes had been made against Karelin’s bunker, a low, concrete
blockhouse squatting on the plain north of Kandalaksha’s military air
base. Now, a Stealth Fighter was holding a targeting laser steady on
the target, a three-foot-wide ventilation grill on the bunker’s roof.
The bomb, released moments earlier, was gliding toward the spot of
reflected laser light, its control surfaces twitching this way and that
to keep its glide path on target.
Smoothly, as though placed there by hand, the one-thousand-pound bomb
slipped through the ventilator, bursting through aluminum slats and
fittings as though they were cardboard, penetrating yards of concrete
and steel before detonating at last in a savage blast.
Admiral Karelin never felt the explosion that killed him.
EPILOGUE
Wednesday, 18 March
1530 hours
Flight deck
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
The SH-3 helicopter settled gently to Jefferson’s deck. Tombstone
unsnapped his harness and, clutching at his cranial with one hand,
jumped through the open door to the deck. Ducking to avoid the
still-spinning rotor blades, he trotted across the flight deck toward
the carrier’s island.
Admiral Tarrant, Captain Brandt, Coyote, and several aides stood there,
waiting for him.
The fighting ashore was winding down, though God alone knew how much
longer it would continue. The last word he’d heard was that the Marines
now held a twenty-five-mile perimeter from Polyamyy to Port Vladimir,
but that they would be pulled out soon. The Marines who’d picked him
and Tomboy up off the tundra had regaled him with stories of the
fighting, including a hand-to-hand gunfight inside one of the huge,
underground Russian sub pens.
For the Most part, it seemed, the Russian defenses were collapsing.
Dozens of their ICBM subs had already been seized, dozens more crippled
or destroyed by the constant bombing raids. Everywhere, Russian troops
were surrendering. The civil war had had a terribly demoralizing effect
on them, and the situation had been complicated by continuing problems
with logistics and poor communications. Morale throughout the Red Army
was virtually nil, and some POWs brought with them tales of food
shortages, of corruption or cowardice among the officers, even of mutiny
and defection among the enlisted men. The crew of the Jefferson might
have been facing morale problems, but nothing as serious as that.
He’d learned something else while he’d been with the Marines ashore.
Late during the previous afternoon, a Marine patrol had entered the town
of Sayda Guba after a sharp, short firefight with some rather raggedly
undisciplined MVD troops. There, they’d found a wire cage with
Lieutenant Hanson locked inside. Gang-raped and badly beaten, she was
still alive. The Marines had flown her out to the LPH Iwo Jima, which
had an excellent and well-equipped three-hundred-bed sick bay. Tomboy
had been heloed out to the Iwo as well, as had a badly wounded female
RIO from VA-89 called Sunshine.
At last report, all three women were going to be fine … although some
wounds might take longer to heal than others. Chris Hanson, he’d been
told, might never recover fully, though Tombstone wasn’t willing to take
odds on that. Naval aviators were tough–they had to be–and if anyone
could find the strength and resiliency and sheer willpower to bounce
back from an experience like that, Tombstone thought Lobo could do it.
But … had the Great Experiment been worth it? He wondered. Women in
combat. They’d proven they could take stress as well as men, or better
in some cases. And in the acid test of combat, they’d shown that they