Wherever they’d come from, they were at the end of a long journey, in bad weather, and that told Hunter they were probably low on gas. In fact, he could see one buddy pair was still hooked up, hose-to-hose via underwing receptacles. For these two to start a brawl in that configuration could only mean the fighter-plane half of the buddy element must have been down to fumes.
He was dropping at nearly Mach 1.5, and they were climbing at almost the same speed. They opened fire on him at exactly twelve thousand feet, all at once, fighters and tankers. But no cannons this time. Instead, they launched a spread of Aphid-6 antiaircraft missiles—weapons designed to hit targets ten miles away. Using Aphids for in-close combat was like taking a guillotine to a knife fight. It was nasty, but there were easier ways to make your enemy bleed.
But no matter how they were used, Aphids were killers. They didn’t have to hit you; they just had to blow up near you. The resulting storm of shrapnel would do the rest. If just one of the dozen missiles went off in Hunter’s vicinity, he’d be toast.
He yanked his stick sideways and banked hard left. It was such an abrupt maneuver, the shower of Aphids went right by him and continued on to points unknown. At the same time, he’d fired his six-pack of Vulcan nose cannons at the two hooked-up planes. His combined stream of cannon rounds perforated the twin tails of the Su-34 buddy tanker. It instantly flew out of control, catching fire and rolling over to plummet to the sea, pulling the other Su-34 that was still attached down with it, its pilot unable to disconnect the fuel hose in time.
He did a complete horizontal loop, trying like hell to get in back of the two surviving buddy flights, which were still flying in formation. He got within twenty-five hundred feet of them, his finger poised over the six-pack trigger button, when suddenly the four airplanes split apart in four different directions. A diamond burst they called it—and again, it was not unlike an aerobatics display. But in combat? And in the middle of a hurricane?
“Holy Christ!” Hunter heard himself exclaim. Only a Su-34 could have pulled off a crazy jig like that. Small bomber in looks, yes. But these planes were every bit as agile as his XL fighter.
And their pilots were clever. They had drawn him in close. Now, linking back up while doing similar, incredibly sharp turns, they leveled out and were in back of him.
He banked hard left again, pulling on the stick with all his strength. In doing so, his nose went right across the canopy of one of the separated buddy tankers. A quick burst from the six-pack literally cut the Su-34 in two. There was one huge explosion, definitely no parachutes.
Suddenly, the odds were a little better. But it was still three against one.
The trio of Su-34s began turning mightily, trying again to get on his tail. He turned over and headed down again, this time at Mach 2. It was so unbalanced, it was all he could do to keep the XL from slipping into a fatal stall. But he didn’t want to just dump the rare Exocets if he didn’t have to.
Three Aphids were shot at him as soon as he started his plunge. In response, his inner light started him spinning again. The missiles roared by his tail a moment later, his gyrations screwing with their electronic heads. They blew up just a few hundred feet away, one, two, three. He felt the trio of shocks in the air but, luckily, was far enough away not to catch any of the shrapnel from the combined explosions. It had been close, though. At such high speeds, everything was relative. A few inches either way and he would have been reduced to cinders.
He was closing in on the wet deck. Once again battling gravity, aerodynamics, and the physics of balance and momentum, he pulled back hard on the stick, trying to level off before he wound up crashing into the storm tossed water. Finally, at just a hundred feet, he got some air under him. The pursuing Su-34s had backed off much higher, preferring not to follow a madman down to Neptune’s realm. Once they saw his recovery, though, they had to hastily remaneuver to get back to an advantageous position.
This gave him a few seconds to breathe. He was streaking along at seven hundred knots, just a tick above the raging ocean, when suddenly he found one of the convoy’s two battle cruisers began filling up his GEW-40 infrared targeting screen. He looked up, and piercing through the storm clouds with his night-vision goggles, he could just make out the outline of the giant battle cruiser a half mile away.
The people on the ship were very surprised to see him—but their antiaircraft weapons started lighting up right away. It didn’t matter. Even as one of the Su-34s made it down to a hundred feet and began to get a missile lock on him, Hunter pushed his B1 button again and juiced all three Exocets riding under his wings. That’s what it would take to whack this monster. The power light blinked green on the GEW-40IF, and he pushed the live fire switch.
The trio of Exocets flashed away—one, two, three—and headed for the huge warship. Due to electronic jamming or the weather or something else, they did not fly in a straight line. Instead, the big missiles began corkscrewing soon after coming off the rails, bucking their way through the high winds, leaving three bizarre exhaust trails in their wake.
They hit the ship, though. Not at the waterline, as designed, but all three square on its bridge. Close to twelve hundred pounds of explosives blew up, vaporizing the control room, along with the weapons systems room one level below and the officers’ wardroom, which was adjacent to the weapons center. In one stroke, nearly every senior NKVD officer on board was killed. But the ship did not stop or even slow down; it didn’t seem to miss a beat at all. It just kept moving, fighting the storm, but now without any senior officers, steering, navigation, weapons, or a control bridge.
An instant later, Hunter felt his hands grip the stick very tightly and pull it back. The XL was suddenly going straight up again, just missing a barrage of cannon fire from the pursuing Su-34. The other two Russian fighters saw him coming up and each fired an Aphid at him. Luckily, his quick ascent confused the missiles’ homing systems. He hit the throttles and was quickly out of range.
Once again, he found himself three miles above the Su-34s, just about where it all started. Enough of this bullshit, he thought. He wasn’t carrying any more extra baggage, and it was time to really dance. He turned over and started straight down again. At ten thousand feet, he began spiraling madly, engaging his Vulcan cannons as he fell. Hundreds of M61 rounds began gushing out of the XL’s nose, and by twisting as he dove, he created a carousal of continuous fire. Looking not unlike lightning bolts, they were all entwined, but heading in many different directions.
Two of the Su-34 pilots guessed wrong and banked directly into the cone of fire. The buddy tanker of the two caught the worst of it and disappeared in a fireball. His partner tried to fall away, but jagged pieces of the stricken fuel ship got sucked into its air intakes, and he blew up as well.
It almost hurt Hunter to see these beautiful airplanes being destroyed, but this was war. Plus, one enemy fighter still remained.
He stopped spiraling and leveled off at five thousand feet, watching his velocity fall to zero. The XL stopped in midair; a trick not too different from the clown plane. The last Su-34 roared right by his nose.
He engaged his cannons and watched six lines of giant phosphorous tracers slam into the remaining Su-34. Hitting square on the cockpit, both pilots were killed instantly. The big plane turned over one last time and started its final plunge to the sea, spiraling out of control.
That was it. Total time of the fight: one minute, thirty-three seconds.
But no sooner was it over than his radio crackled to life.
It was Dozer, and he was shouting, “You won’t believe what’s going on here!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The chaos aboard the Isakov had only grown in Hunter’s absence.
Positioned on the far end of the deck, near the wreckage of the last two Sherpas, Bull Dozer and a dozen 7CAV troopers were in a brutal gun battle with the combined trained security details for the ship�
��s committee members, by far the best fighters on the carrier, and the fanatical NKVD fighter pilots.
There were about eighty of them in all, and they had taken up positions along the carrier’s starboard gunwales near the bottom of the forward superstructure. Armed with AK-47s and RPGs, they suddenly started pouring it on Dozer’s location and hadn’t let up.
Because Dozer and his dozen men were at the far end of the bow, on the same side as these security troops, it had become a deadlock. There were two clear shooting lanes, which meant no one on either side could move or maneuver. There was a lot of ordnance flying around, but no one was going anywhere.
A much larger portion of the 7CAV force, seventy-two troopers and four deep recon men, had indeed gained entry to the carrier through a hatch in the devastated superstructure. They were now on the first deck, which was an interior passageway one level down from the carrier deck. Their objective was the Isakov’s electronic control center. The ECC was the carrier’s brain; everything that made the ship so dangerous emanated from here. If they could seize it, they might at least bring the carrier to a stop.
The troopers were still battling the ship’s crew, untrained sailors firing AK-47s, many for the first time. But this fight, too, was at a stalemate for a very unusual reason. Just as the secret Convoy 56 documents indicated, the Isakov was jam-packed with cargo. But to the surprise of the American raiders, crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes had been stored right inside the carrier’s main passageways themselves. Deck one was the ship’s Main Street; everybody had to pass through it at least once a day. It was now stuffed with cargo pallets, providing the inexperienced crew members with hidden places to fire.
Literally box-to-box fighting, it was going very slow.
All this pandemonium had a soundtrack. Klaxons were going off all over the ship. Smoke alarms, fire alarms, water breech alarms. The bell calling the ship’s company to battle stations was still ringing. The carrier’s electronic foghorn had somehow gotten turned on and was moaning away. The noise of the gun battle one deck below was almost as loud as the one out on the deck. A blizzard of tracers going in both directions. The occasional bang of an MK19 grenade going off. And a raging fire had engulfed the top of the enormous superstructure now, making it look like a skyscraper aflame. All the while, the enormous storm continued to rage, with titanic waves sweeping the deck at the most unexpected times.
Dozer crouched behind the crumpled wing of Sherpa 3, trying to avoid the incoming fire, as well as being swept off the deck by the monstrous waves. He had been in some crazy spots before, but he’d never seen anything like this.
And then it got crazier.
Dozer could not believe that he could hear anything else above the din. But incredibly, about five minutes into the battle, he detected something else. He was changing the banana clip in his M-16 when he heard a mechanical sound, out there in the wind and rain, faint at first, but getting louder. Not a jet … but another kind of aircraft. Something larger maybe?
He told his troopers to stop firing for a moment. All of them heard it then and agreed it was getting closer.
Suddenly, they saw it. Bursting out of the storm not twenty-five feet over their heads, it went right over the top of them and straight down the carrier’s deck. Black, whirling, whipping the rain around, it was a giant Mi-26 Halo helicopter with a large red luminescent stripe running down its side.
Dozer was stunned—they all were. This was no weather for choppers, no matter who was flying them. But even stranger, Dozer had actually seen this copter before. They’d picked it up on their balloon cam a number of times, flitting around Manhattan at night. The bright red stripe was hard to miss. By tracking its movements and listening to reports on Red Radio, Dozer’s intel guys had quickly determined this was the personal air taxi of Commissar Vladimir Zmeya, head of the Russian secret police in New York.
And now, for some reason, it was here.
The copter went into a shaky hover above the deck way down past the burning superstructure. Even the NKVD guards stopped shooting for a moment, surprised their supreme commander’s chopper had suddenly appeared.
But why is it here? Dozer wondered.
The copter didn’t seem particularly weighed down, as it would be if it were carrying reinforcements. And if it was here to attack them somehow, what was it doing hovering over the deck so far away?
Dozer put his night-vision goggles down just as the pilot’s window opened on the hovering copter. The pilot reached out of the window, exposing himself to the wind and rain whipped up by the downwash of his spinning rotor blades, grasping what looked like a handheld remote control device. He was pushing a button on it madly.
Suddenly, a great opening in the deck appeared below the Mi-26. It was the Isakov’s huge remote-controlled flight-deck elevator. At nearly 120 feet across, it was built to handle even the biggest of Russia’s combat helicopters.
As the elevator slowly started descending, the copter descended with it, disappearing inside the ship. Dozer and his men were incredulous.
A moment later, they received a call from one of the 7CAV officers fighting in the crowded passageway on deck one. He was stationed right next to the elevator on a catwalk looking into the ship’s main hangar. He reported the copter had landed on the elevator by this time and had continued on right to the bottom of the ship, where the carrier’s helicopter storage hangar was located.
He confirmed to Dozer that yes, the copter was the personal ride of a top NKVD.
But he’d also seen something else.
As the trooper put it: “It’s something Hawk should know. …”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Hunter headed back to the Isakov at full throttle.
The NKVD carrier was hard to miss, even in the storm. Huge columns of smoke were rising above the giant warship, explosions were going off all over, fires were sweeping the deck and engulfing the superstructure. The battle was still in progress.
He turned his radio back to the mission frequency; he heard a cacophony of sounds and voices. It was the 7CAV, in combat, calling back and forth, reporting progress, reporting problems, reporting casualties. Hunter heard his own name amid the static. Several people were trying to hail him at once.
Finally, one voice came through.
Bull Dozer. …
He was yelling, “Hawk, can you hear me?”
Hunter quickly responded. “Affirmative—now I can.”
“Hey, it’s fucking crazy down here,” Dozer told him. “We’ve got two major gunfights going on, shit is flying in all directions, and I’m seasick as a bastard. But, in the middle of all this, our pal Commissar Zmeya’s personal chopper just came aboard. Went right down the main elevator shaft. Some of my deep recon guys have gotten down there. They say this copter is now at the bottom of the boat.”
Hunter couldn’t believe it. Zmeya’s copter? Aboard the Isakov? “Who would be crazy enough to fly way out here in this kind of weather?” he radioed back.
After a brief pause, Dozer replied, “Well, we did. …”
There was a burst of static.
“But there’s more, Hawk,” Dozer yelled through it. “She’s here, too. …”
Hunter froze. “Who is?”
“Dominique,” Dozer said. “She’s on the ship. Came in on the chopper. I’m talking to one of my deep recon guys on the other channel. He’s got eyes on her right now.”
Hunter felt a jolt of electricity run right through him. Dozer crossed the channels and had his recon trooper speak directly to Hunter.
“She’s right across the hangar deck from me, Hawk,” he said from his hiding spot, his voice low. “Not twenty feet away. Russian police are getting off the copter, looking like they’re trying to find something. It’s confusing down here, but she’s right in the middle of it.”
“Are you sure it’s her?” Hunter asked. “There
are a lot of Dominique wannabes hanging with the Reds these days.”
“This is ten by ten, Hawk,” was his reply. “I know it’s her. She’s looking right at me. Gotta go.”
Hunter went numb. No feeling in his hands or his feet. Only his mouth could move, and it was only halfway open. He’d only just missed her atop 30 Rock during the firestorm. He didn’t want that to happen again.
That meant he had to get down to the carrier. … And that meant he had to land somehow on the rolling, wave-swept ship.
Dozer came back on the line.
“I’m coming aboard,” Hunter told him, beginning another orbit of the ship.
“You’re what?”
“I’m landing,” Hunter told him. “I’ve just got to figure out how. …”
The radio kicked out at that point, but that was okay with Hunter. He had to concentrate.
The carrier’s deck was pitching madly and it was strewn with wreckage from the crashed cargo planes and other debris caused by the fighting. The ship’s gigantic main mast was in pieces where it had fallen, scattered up and down the deck, much of it still on fire. Because the flight-deck elevator had descended to the bottom of the boat, there was a huge gaping hole on the deck near the bow. Worst of all, even though the XL had an arrester hook, when the second Sherpa had come aboard the carrier, it had snapped the trio of arresting cables stretched across the Isakov’s flight deck, rendering them useless.
The XL was not the clown plane. Its absolute lowest landing speed was 110 knots. Hunter could manipulate his flight controls right up to that point, but anything less, he’d go straight into the sea.
He had no choice but to hit the deck going that fast. But once on board, how could he slow down? He flew over the burning carrier and surveyed it again. Huge waves were coming out of the storm from all directions and crashing all over the ship. More fires around the superstructure had popped up. And the wind was growing even fiercer.
Battle for America Page 18
