CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

turnin’and burnin’!”

“Rock and roll!”

Tombstone turned to the CIC officer at his side, a young, black

commander named Frazier. “Who’re ‘King’ and ‘Rodeo’?” he asked.

The officer glanced up at a plastic board where a petty officer was

marking up additions to the order of battle.

“King’d be VF-142, CAG,” he said. “Rodeo is VF-143. The Ghostriders

and the Pukin’ Dogs, off the Ike.”

Carrier battle force. Combining Jefferson’s fighter squadrons with the

squadrons off the Eisenhower gave the American task force a fighting

chance.

Tombstone moved to one of the big repeater screens, showing the location

of each CBG element, ships and aircraft, identified by circling Hawkeyes

and compiled and transmitted from the Shiloh.

Several of CBG-7’s outer defensive zone pickets were already showing on

the board, 150 miles north of Jefferson’s position, the frigates

Blakely, John C. Pauly, and Simpson, and the Arleigh Burke-class

destroyer David D. Porter.

All four ships had already added their Standard missile firepower to the

battle and were knocking down incoming Russian cruise missiles as fast

as they appeared on the screen.

As he kept listening to the bursts of radio communication between the

men and women in the fighters, however, Tombstone knew that the real

brunt of the fighting was being borne not by the CICs of the surface

ships involved, but by the aviators. As minute dragged after minute,

the Tomcats and Hornets from both CBGs continued to claw at the

neo-Soviet aircraft formations pressing in across Jefferson’s eastern

combat perimeter. One wave had largely been wiped out of the sky by the

long-range AIM-54Cs; there’d been a brief pause, but now a second wave

had appeared, and the Hawkeye radar pickets indicated that still more

aircraft were beginning to appear in the skies above the Kola Peninsula

air bases.

Sooner or later, the repeated Russian assaults, crashing like

storm-driven waves across the CBF’s slender defenses, would break

through.

When that happened, the water would come crashing through the breach,

and there would be nothing left with which to stop it.

0740 hours

Tomcat 105

Over the Barents Sea

“Low Down!” Bouncer cried in his ear. “Watch it! We got two dropping

in from our five o’clock!”

Lieutenant James Stanley Lowe, call sign “Low Down,” was a new arrival

aboard the Jefferson. A member of the carrier’s other Tomcat squadron,

the VF-97 War Eagles, he’d come aboard during Jefferson’s refit at

Norfolk some two months before, having flown before that with a reserve

squadron at Oceana.

He’d brought his RIO with him, Lieutenant j.g. Beth Harper. After

she’d thrown an abusive drunk out the door of a squadron watering hole

in Norfolk, everyone had called her Bouncer.

They worked well together, and he’d enjoyed the notoriety of being one

of the first in his reserve group to team with a female NFO.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he spotted the slim, nose-on

silhouettes of the MiGs following the Tomcat into a long right turn.

Damn … a pair of MiG-29 Fulcrums, flying welded-wing. They were

still perhaps a mile off. He pulled the stick farther to the right,

tightening his turn.

“Keep … watching … ’em …” he called back, battling the

increasing G-forces of the turn.

This was bad. Fulcrums were hot … as fast and as able as the F-15

Eagle they’d been designed to combat, and in some ways better. Worse,

Lowe and Harper had launched with a warload of six Phoenix missiles.

They’d expended them all at long-range targets and been on their way

back to the Jeff to rearm when these jokers had slipped through the

perimeter and jumped them.

Trading altitude for speed, Low Down straightened out of the turn to

starboard; the two MiGs, still flying in tight side-by-side formation,

punched across his flight path a good mile to the rear. With twin

stabilizers and large underslung intakes, they looked a lot like U.S.

Air Force Eagles.

“They’re turning,” Bouncer told him. “They’re coming right and

following us down!”

He’d lost sight of them behind the aircraft. “Are they still turning?”

“Yeah! Still coming! Turning our way!”

Lowe went into a reverse turn to the left that made the Tomcat shudder

in protest. He’d practiced this stunt a lot, had even pulled it once on