ball if I could see it. It’s getting damned thick up here.”
“Is Two-one-eight the last one up?” Tombstone asked.
“Yup.” Suddenly, Barnes’s voice was tight and sounded as dry as
Tombstone’s. There was no light banter in the compartment now.
“Two-one-eight,” the voice crackled over the speaker. “Tomcat ball.
One point eight.”
Eighteen hundred pounds of fuel left? They were damned near running on
fumes.
“Roger ball. Deck coming up, power on.” Tombstone found himself holding
his breath …
… and then the Tomcat boomed out of the darkness, red and green
navigation lights winking, arrestor hook groping for a wire, but high
… high as the LSO’s voice shouted, “Wave off! Wave off!” and the
meatball flared red. The Tomcat hit the steel hard, sparks exploding
into the night well beyond the number-five wire, too far up the deck for
the tailhook to snag hold, but the aviator’s hand had already rammed the
throttles full forward, sending twin spears of yellow flame thundering
against the night in a desperate bid to regain suddenly precious
airspeed.
“Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!” someone was yelling over the intercom
system, as Tomcat 218 screamed past Jefferson’s island, rushing down the
angled flight deck and back into the night.
Stoney was still holding his breath as he watched the twin flares of
light marking the engines, like glowing eyes, stagger beyond the deck,
dipping toward an invisible sea, then come up, rising … rising …
struggling aloft against wind and gravity and drag.
Then the Tomcat was gone, swallowed once again by the night.
“Okay, Brewer,” Barnes was saying into his microphone. “Once again
around. Just like a walk in the park.”
“Ah, roger that, Home Plate,” the voice replied. “Just remember that
the parks are getting damned dangerous. ‘Specially at night.”
“So, Captain,” Barnes said conversationally after a moment. “What’re
the chances that the Russkis are gonna fold?”
It was clearly a ploy to ease the atmosphere of growing tension that
filled Pri-Fly like some noxious cloud. The Russian War had been the
steady, number-one topic of conversation aboard every ship in CBG-14
ever since they’d left Norfolk the week before.
“Zero to none,” Tombstone shot back. His heart was pounding hard enough
that Barnes could surely hear it. “The Reds don’t dare show the cracks
in the foundation of their coup. It looks like Leonov is going to keep
hammering away until something gives. The only out the neo-Soviets have
is to turn this into a general war. A world war.”
“My, CAG, but you’re just full of cheerful thoughts tonight,” Barnes
said. “Think it’ll go nuke?”
“It could. I don’t think anyone wants it to, not even Krasilnikov. And
yet …” He shrugged. “This is the first time we’ve had an
honest-to-God civil war in a country where both sides have nuclear
weapons. And, well, fratricidal wars are always the bloodiest, the most
down-and-dirty vicious wars of all.”
“Hey!” Barnes said. “Remember when we all thought the world would be a
safer place with the Soviet Union gone?”
“What do you want,” Stoney replied, grinning. “A return to the good old
days of the Cold War?”
The neo-Soviet empire had appeared to collapse in the wake of the brief,
hard-fought naval campaign off Norway nine months earlier. Tombstone
could close his eyes and still remember the roar and thunder of battle,
the pillars of smoke climbing heavenward marking the funeral pyres of
ships, the hurtling aerial combat machines jousting in tournaments of
death at Mach 2 and beyond.
Tombstone himself had been in a Hornet flashing low across the deck of
the Soviet supercarrier Kreml–just as the Baltic Fleet’s flagship had
exploded in flames. His heart still raced each time he thought about
it.
The Thomas Jefferson had been hurt badly off the Lofoten Islands in the
final chapter of the Battles of the Fjords. She’d limped back under her
own steam, first to Scapa Flow, then to Norfolk, but her flight deck had
been so badly ripped up that nothing could land on it but helicopters.
By the time the old girl had reached her home port, there’d been talk of
scrapping her.
Events across the Atlantic had dictated otherwise. UN troops had