CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

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

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