CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

“We’ve got track-and-lock. Fox three!”

One of Mustang’s white Phoenix darts dropped clear, ignited, and

swooshed into the distance.

“Hey, Coyote!” Mustang called. “What about those cruise missiles?”

“We’d have to backtrack to get a lock,” he told him. “We’ll leave them

for the follow-up crew. Or Jeff’s CIWS.”

“Okay, copy. Here’s another fox three.”

The sky was rapidly becoming filled with the twisting white streamers of

missile contrails arcing toward the southeast.

0715 hours

off North Cape

The basic tactics of modern aircraft carrier warfare had been laid down

in World War II, when Admiral Chester Nimitz took on a far larger

Japanese force with three aircraft carriers, their air groups providing

both offensive strike capability and defensive CAP over the fleet, plus

eight cruisers and seventeen destroyers dedicated to providing close-in

antiaircraft defense for the carriers. His tactics–and the luck that

blesses or curses every plan of battle–won the Battle of Midway, and

the concept of hard-hitting, well-protected carrier groups quickly

became the guiding combat doctrine for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific War.

During the next fifty years, the aircraft became larger, faster, and

farther-ranging; the weapons became smarter, more destructive, and

capable of superb accuracy across ranges unthinkable in 1942. The

Nimitz doctrine, however, remained essentially the same.

The modern aircraft carrier battle group, variously called CBG or CVBG,

was built around the supercarrier. Some, like Jefferson or Eisenhower,

were nuclear-powered. Others, like the Kennedy and the America, had

originally been designed for nuclear power but, thanks to Congressional

budget cuts, were driven instead by conventional, fuel-oil-fired

boilers. Depending on their class, their flight decks stretched from

990 to 1,040 feet long, just six feet less than the height of New York

City’s Chrysler Building. Their full-load displacement ranged anywhere

from 80,000 to 96,000 tons–compared to the 19,900 tons of the U.S.S.

Enterprise at Midway.

The rest of the battle group was devoted to protecting the carrier and

consisted of one or two guided-missile cruisers, a mixed force of four

to seven frigates and destroyers, and one or two Los Angeles-class

attack submarines. As it approached its patrol area off North Cape,

Jefferson’s battle group included the Aegis cruiser Shiloh; three

guided-missile destroyers, John A. Winslow, William B. Truesdale, and

Alan Kirk; four Perry-class guided-missile frigates, Dickinson, Esek

Hopkins, Stephen Decatur, and Leslie; and the attack subs Morgantown and

Galveston.

It was a powerful force. CBG-14, already understrength by the time it

reached Romsdalfjord nine months before, had been badly hurt during the

Battles of the Fjords, and the decision had been made to reinforce it

big-time. The Truesdale, Kirk, Dickinson, Leslie, and Morgantown all

were new additions to the battle group.

In modern warfare, a carrier battle group is deployed across an

incredibly vast stretch of open ocean. If CBG-14 could have been

magically transported to the eastern seaboard of the United States, with

the Jefferson herself planted on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C.,

her escort ships would have been ranging as far afield as central

Pennsylvania, southern Virginia, and West Virginia; her defensive air

units would have been patrolling the skies over Maine and South

Carolina, Kentucky and Michigan; and her attack subs and S-3 Vikings

would have been searching out enemy submarines somewhere in Ohio. Her

attack planes, meanwhile, could have struck targets as far off as

Chicago.

As the first wave of Russian bombers entered Jefferson’s outer defensive

ring, Tomcat-launched Phoenix missiles drew the first blood. Russian

longand medium-range bombers–Bears, Badgers, and Backfires–began

exploding in flames as far off as the Russia-Norway border.

As Tomcat after Tomcat locked on and fired, the losses within the

approaching Russian horde mounted. In the first five minutes of the

battle, eighteen Tomcats launched ninety-six AIM-54Cs. The Phoenix had

a reliability rating of about ninety percent, meaning that in ideal

conditions, nine out of ten would hit what they were aimed at.

In warfare, conditions are never ideal. Badger-J electronic-warfare

aircraft were accompanying the bomber formations, and they were able to

kill or blind a number of AIM-54s before they reached their targets.

Seventy-eight struck, however, all but annihilating the first wave of

bombers.

0718 hours

Tomcat 201

Over the Barents Sea

All four Phoenix missiles were gone, but Coyote still had two