For a time after that, he’d been back in FA–Frontal Aviation–on more
traditional assignments, flying ground-attack missions for Krasilnikov
against the Leonovist rebels. With two of the former Soviet Union’s
three aircraft carriers destroyed, and the third kept in careful
seclusion in its port facilities at Sevastopol, everyone in FA assumed
that the Russian aircraft carrier experiment was dead. If nothing else,
Russia was no longer a world power, neither able nor willing to project
military force to some far-off corner of a hostile globe. Something as
large, as expensive, and as complex as a nuclear-powered aircraft
carrier was a serious drain on the military’s fast-vanishing resources,
and with no strategic purpose to its existence, it would soon be
consigned to the wrecker’s yard.
And that, Ivanov reflected as he glanced briefly left and right,
checking the positions of the other Mig27s in his attack formation,
would have been a tragedy. Pobedonosnyy Rodina was a proud, noble
vessel, for all that he’d never yet left port for more than a brief
Black Sea shakedown. Operation Miaky had given him the chance to live
again.
Ivanov had developed a feel for carriers during the years he’d served
aboard them in the naval aviation program. Despite the long-standing
rivalry between the Fleet and Frontal Aviation, he liked carrier
service. Rodina deserved better than rusting away at his moorings or
being broken into scrap to feed the starving, inefficient civilian
industries ashore. His affection for carriers and his love of naval
flying were shaped, as much as anything else, by the knowledge that he
was part of that elite fraternity shared by only a tiny handful of
aviators from Russia, Great Britain, France, the United States, and the
very few other countries whose navies operated aircraft carriers.
Fraternity. The word he used was bratstvo, “brotherhood.” He’d heard,
though, that the Americans had begun allowing Women to fly carrier
aircraft. He snorted behind his oxygen mask. Women? The very idea was
preposterous. During the long Soviet reign, women had been promised full
equality with men, but that was an idea that had never really been
reflected by the real world, one composed more of words than of
substance. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet government,
there’d been an ultraconservative backlash against the whole concept of
women’s rights; female equality with men was an idea linked inextricably
in the public mind with the Communists, and there was a tendency now to
relegate women to the kitchen and a select few professions outside the
home–actresses and street sweepers and doctors and the like.
Ivanov grinned. Like most fighter pilots of his acquaintance, he thought
of women as simple and delightful perquisites of his profession, the
faster and hotter the better. As far as he was concerned, women belonged
in bed, naked and with legs welcomingly spread, not in the cockpit of a
jet aircraft.
He thought he would like to meet some of the American women aboard the
Thomas Jefferson, however. If even half of the scandalous stories he’d
heard were true. ..
Such a meeting seemed unlikely at best, just now. Once again, politics
and the relentless tides of history were about to bring the American and
Russian navies into conflict, and if he met an American fighter pilot at
any time in the near future, it would be as an opponent, a minute,
wildly twisting speck trapped in the targeting reticle of his Mig’s HUD.
Pathetic. .. the thought of women attempting to meet men on equal terms
in combat. The idea was ludicrous in ground combat, since women were so
much weaker than men; it was even more ludicrous in air combat, for the
demonstrable fact that women simply didn’t have the brains for the
highly technical aspects and details of flying high-performance jet
aircraft. He’d heard that several American women had been shot down over
the Kola; if Black Flight encountered any today, it would be an even
more complete slaughter. In the Kola, the Americans had been flying
against second-rate units and rear-echelon squadrons, the leftovers
after the debacle in and around Norway. Black Flight, and the attendant
formations code-named Bastion and Flashlight, were made up of combat
aviators scoured from Loyalist units all over Russia and were comprised