Hadley paced the bridge, anxiously watching the sky.
0904 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 216
Over Arsincevo
Dixie couldn’t see the enemy plane yet, but he could follow the symbol marking it on his HUD, shifting from left to right as the other pilot tried to position himself for a launch.
Tomcat 216 was momentarily alone; Tomboy and Hacker in 207 had dropped back a few miles, deploying in a “loose goose” formation that gave the defense maximum flexibility. The attackers, as nearly as Dixie could tell, weren’t even employing wingman tactics. Possibly, the volley of Phoenix missiles had so broken up the approaching formations that only scattered, individual aircraft were left.
“Damn!” Cat said from the backseat. “This bastard’s taking us head-to-head! Range five miles!”
“Going for Sidewinder,” Dixie said, flipping a selector switch. He still had two Phoenix missiles left from his original four, but he wanted to save those for a difficult shot or longer-ranged targets. The AIM-9L was an all-aspect heatseeker, meaning he didn’t have to be looking up the target’s tailpipes in order to get a solid lock. Still, head shots were risky, and in more ways than one. Since the target gave off far less heat from its forward aspects than from its tail, it was always easier to elude an incoming heatseeker by dropping flares.
“Range three miles!” Cat warned. They were closing rapidly.
He heard the warble in his headset, indicating a heatseeker lock. “I’ve got him!” Dixie yelled. “Fox two!”
0904 hours (Zulu +3)
Flogger 550
Over Arsincevo
Major Yevgenni Sergeivich Ivanov had been holding his Mig-27M steady, angling toward the oncoming American aircraft until he saw the flash of its launch, just three miles ahead. There was no buzzing tone warning of a radar lock, so the incoming missile had to be a heatseeker. He held steady for another three beats, then pulled back sharply on the stick, going into a steep, twisting climb as he triggered a string of flares. At twelve thousand feet, he flipped the Mig over onto its back, dropping out of a perfect Immelmann that put him well above the American, and slightly to the right. From here, looking down on the enemy, he let his port-side AA-8 Aphid missile “see” the F-14’s heat plume and triggered the launch.
As soon as the Aphid slid off the launch rail, Ivanov rolled hard to the left, trading altitude for speed as he plummeted toward the sea far below.
While the American was dealing with the heatseeker, perhaps he could slip through down on the deck.
0905 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 216
Over Arsincevo
“We missed,” Cat said. “He suckered us with a flare.”
“I’m going after him,” Dixie said. His heart was pounding, his breath coming in short, hard gasps behind his oxygen mask.
“Watch it, Dix!” Cat warned. “He’s launched!”
“I see it!” Dixie adjusted his course slightly, angling straight toward the oncoming missile, holding steady for an agonizing three seconds… then cutting back on his throttle while simultaneously popping flares.
Another few seconds passed, and then the missile streaked past, a hundred feet off; there was a loud thump from astern as the AA-8’s proximity fuse detonated the warhead, but no indication of damage. Dixie rolled hard to port, pulling the F-14’s nose around, centrifugal force mashing him down into his seat as he whipped around through sixty degrees of the compass. He’d lost sight of the other plane.
Now where the hell?..
“Tomboy, this is Dixie! Where are you?”
“About five miles behind you, at base plus five.” That put her at eight thousand feet, slightly above 216.
“We just missed a Flogger coming through the line. Did you see him?”
“Negative on that, but we’ll keep an eye out.”
“Rog.” He thought the Flogger must have dived; that’s what he would have done in that situation ― give the opposition something to think about, then head for the deck, where the ground clutter might hide him from enemy search radar. “I think he’s on the deck. What’s your warload, now?”
“We’re down to one AIM-9,” Tomboy replied. “We’re empty on the 54s.”
“Shit. Okay. If you spot him, coordinate with Cat. We have two Phoenixes left, and maybe we can take him if you can spot him.”
“I COPY.”
Dixie pulled into a turn, giving Cat a chance to probe the entire area with the F-14’s AWG-9, as well as to query the Hawkeyes that were orbiting further south, outside of the main battle area. The AWG-9 had the impressive capability known as “look down-shoot down,” meaning it could pick a target out from the background clutter even when it was mingled with returns from the sea or ground. But Cat would need time to narrow her beam and carry out a search.
The problem, he reflected, in fighting a major engagement in such a tightly confined area was that you didn’t have much of a second chance against leakers. Once they slipped past you, they were into your inner defensive zone in minutes or seconds, and then it could well be too late.
They had to find that Flogger, and fast!
0906 hours (Zulu +3)
Flogger 550
Over Arsincevo
Major Ivanov had pulled out of his dive a scant five hundred feet above the sea, then dropped even lower, skimming above the fuel tank farm of Arsincevo at an altitude of less than fifty meters. He swung left, avoiding the fractionating towers of the refinery. Directly ahead, the sea was crawling with ships, boats, and the odd-looking tracked vehicles the American Marines used as landing craft.
There were targets there… tempting targets, but Ivanov was after bigger game. He’d already noted the position of the biggest game of all, a big, fat aircraft carrier slipping in close to the fueling dock off Kerch.
He was carrying two AS-7 air-to-surface missiles under his Mig’s wings, the kind of big, ugly ship-killers that NATO called “Kerry.” If he could slip that pair of ship-killing one-hundred-kilogram warheads into a carrier while it was taking on fuel…
And he was now well inside the Americans’ fighter envelope. It was certainly worth a try.
0906 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 216
Over Arsincevo
“Got him!” Cat called. “He slipped past us after he popped that Aphid.”
“Where is he?”
“Down on the deck, like you said. Bearing zero-five-five. Shit!”
“What?”
“He’s locking onto the Jeff!”
“Guide me onto him, Cat. We’ve got to take him down!”
“Right. Tomboy, this is Cat. You copy?”
“Cat, Tomboy.” Her voice sounded strained, as though she were enduring a high-G turn. “Copy.”
“Tomboy, we’ve spotted our leaker.” Cat gave her the coordinates of the Flogger that had broken past. “It looks like he’s trying for a radar lock on the Jefferson!”
“Okay, Hacker and I’ve got him. You’re a little closer, though, and I need a minute to lock him with my Sidewinder.”
“Just cover us, Tomboy,” Dixie said, “in case we miss this one. We’re not getting another chance!”
0907 hours (Zulu +3)
Flogger 550
Over Arsincevo
Range three miles ― practically point-blank ― and if that carrier was taking on fuel, as Ivanov thought it must be, the detonation of two antiship warheads ought to send up a fireball powerful enough to shake the dachas at Yalta.
He heard the tone of radar lock, and his thumb came down on the firing switch. There was a hard bump as the first four-hundred-kilogram Kerry dropped free, its solid fuel motor igniting. Instantly, Ivanov locked with the second missile. Fire!
Two ship-killers accelerated to Mach 1 in seconds, streaking across the sea toward the helpless supercarrier.
CHAPTER 25
Saturday, 7 November
0907 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 216
Over Arsincevo<
br />
“He’s launched!” Cat yelled. “One… no, two cruise missiles, in the air!”
“He’s fired on the Jefferson,” Tomboy echoed over the tactical channel.
“Cat! Take them!”
Dixie yanked his thumb off the firing button that would have released one of his two remaining Phoenix missiles. In the backseat, Cat wiped the lock they’d just achieved on the Russian Flogger and was shifting instead to the two tiny, fast-moving blips streaking out in front of the Mig.
The AIM-54C ― together with the Tomcat’s AWG-9 radar-fire control system ― had been designed with two specific missions in mind. One was the standoff intercept, allowing the Tomcat to target and kill enemy aircraft approaching from a range of 120 nautical miles. The other, however, was dictated by the ever-changing requirements of modern naval warfare. Cruise missiles ― large, relatively slow, but extremely deadly ship-killers like the AS-7 Kerry ― had emerged during the past decades as the single deadliest threat to surface ships. The Phoenix and the look down-shoot down AWG-9 had been designed with the express capability of tracking and destroying large missiles in flight.
But with the high speeds and short response times that characterized modern warfare, success or failure often hinged on one man’s reactions, on his experience, on his training, and on his ability to separate a great deal of confusing, even conflicting information, analyze it, and do the right thing instantly.
Dixie didn’t have to think it through; he couldn’t. Traveling at the speed of sound, the AS-7s would travel the three miles to the Jefferson in just over thirteen seconds. He was five miles from the Flogger ― a flight time of a hair under five seconds for a Phoenix ― but in five seconds, the Kerrys would have traveled almost half the distance to the carrier. Dixie had less time than that to decide that the Kerry missiles had to be his target and not the Flogger, to abort his launch on the Mig, and to let Cat lock onto the missiles and fire both AIM-54s.
“Take the missiles!” he yelled at Cat, an instant after Tomboy’s order.
But she was ahead of him, already punching the new target into the computer. “Fox three!” she yelled, and a Phoenix shrilled off the Tomcat’s launch rail. “Fox three!” she yelled again, and their last missile streaked after its companion.
Dixie found he was holding his breath. He could see neither the Kerry missiles nor the Mig that had launched them, but he could see the Jefferson less than ten miles ahead, huge and gray and vulnerable.
And somewhere between him and the carrier, four missiles were flying a deadly, high-speed race.
0907 hours (Zulu +3)
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Arsincevo fueling dock
“Missiles incoming!” the voice of someone in CIC yelled over the intercom. “From the southwest!”
Hadley spun just in time to see a white flash above the water halfway between the beach and the fueling dock; he heard the crash of the explosion a moment later. A second missile, dragging a vapor trail through the air, arrowed across the water toward Jefferson’s exposed starboard side. At the last instant, the missile seemed to skip, rising high; the maneuver, often programmed into antiship missiles, was designed to bring it down on the relatively unarmored topside of the target, rather than into steel-plated sides.
The maneuver took the Kerry out of a direct flight path into the carrier’s fueling port, where grapes were still frantically pumping avgas aboard, but would bring it down squarely in the center of Jefferson’s four-acre flight deck, where one Hawkeye, three Hornets, and four A-6s were being refueled and rearmed after the day’s early morning operations. A detonation among those aircraft would cause a major fire on the flight deck, a fire that would spread instantly to the avgas fumes to starboard.
The Kerry had just reached the apex of its climb, coast, and dive when the second Phoenix missile streaked in from behind. The explosion felt as though it had struck the bridge, a savage bang that shattered windows and knocked several of the bridge watch-standers to their knees.
Hadley stood there for a long, desperate second or two, waiting for the far larger roar of exploding aviation fuel to follow. The roar did not come, and after a moment he allowed himself to breathe again.
God in heaven, but that, that had been close.
0908 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 207
Over Arsincevo
Tomboy hauled her F-14 into another hard turn, trying to follow the fleeing Mig as it twisted hard toward the north. She was three miles behind it now, and it was little more than a speck… though Hacker had a solid lock on the aircraft with their AWG-9.
Unfortunately, she had only the one Sidewinder left, and the target was jinking so sharply across the folded landscape that she was having trouble getting a lock.
Tone! “Fox two!”
Her last missile streaked toward the target.
0908 hours (Zulu +3)
Flogger 550
Over Arsincevo
Turning in his seat, Ivanov saw the missile arrowing toward him.
Cursing, he dragged his aircraft hard to the left and punched in the afterburners ― normally not a good idea when being pursued by a heatseeker, but he needed altitude, fast, and the only way to get it was ― as the Americans said ― to “go ballistic.”
As he climbed almost vertically, he cut his burners and released a string of flares, letting his Mig fall over onto its back with the nose pointed almost directly at the approaching Tomcat. The Sidewinder, deprived of its easy, hot targets, nosed over as it simple-mindedly pursued a flare, missing Ivanov’s aircraft by a generous margin.
He grinned into his mask. This American, whoever he was, was good.
Schooled in the warrior’s mentality, Ivanov welcomed this head-to-head exchange, the chance to test himself against another expert aviator. He was glad he wasn’t facing one of the rumored female pilots employed by the American battle group.
That would have been too easy, no challenge at all.
0909 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 207
Over Arsincevo
“He’s coming at us, head-to-head!” Hacker warned.
“I think he wants to play chicken,” Tomboy replied. “Hold on!”
She pulled the stick back, climbing fast; the enemy plane went into a climb at almost the same moment, and the two hurtled skyward, twisting as they passed, rolling into the deadly aerial maneuver known as a rolling vertical scissors. For an agonizing second, Mig and Tomcat flew back-to-back, practically canopy-to-canopy, and Tomboy could pull her head back and look “up” into the Russian’s cockpit, only a few deadly yards away.
0909 hours (Zulu +3)
Flogger 550
Over Arsincevo
Ivanov looked “up” and found himself scant yards from the American Tomcat; he could see the pilot and his radar intercept officer, their helmeted, visored heads tipped back to return his stare. He was so close he could actually read the lettering picked out on the F-14’s fuselage, just beneath the canopy: CDR JOYCE FLYNN “TOMBOY.” Behind was LT BRUCE KOSINSKI “HACKER.”
He frowned, puzzled. He could read English lettering fairly well. He knew the name “Bruce,” but “Joyce”? What kind of a man’s name was “Joyce”?
It sounded almost like a woman’s name…
0909 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 207
Over Arsincevo
For several deadly seconds, Mig and Tomcat rolled around one another as they continued their climb, still canopy-to-canopy. Tomboy cut her power and let her aircraft slew sideways, coming within a hair of stalling and going into a pancake dive.
That second or two was all she needed, though, as the Mig continued its climb, rolling onto its back and twisting clear of its aerial embrace with the Tomcat.
She’d anticipated his break; ninety percent of being a good tactical combat flyer was being able to guess what the other guy was going to do and matching or countering the move almost before he made it. Her port engine stuttered, dangerously close to
a stall, but she nursed the throttle, felt the engine resume its accustomed thunder, and watched the Flogger drop across her gun sight.
Tomboy had already shifted to guns, since her M-61A1 was the only weapon she had left. Reacting instantly, and at a range of less than fifty yards, she squeezed the firing button on her control stick; the six-barreled cannon howled, sending a tight-spaced volley of 20mm rounds into the Flogger’s left wing, sawing through from front to back in a splintering, slashing burst. The skin of the wing pocked, then shredded; fuel from the wing tank gushed into the air, then ignited in the hail of white-hot shells. A fireball erupted scant yards from the nose of Tomboy’s F-14 as the Flogger disintegrated. Jagged fragments hurtled past her head; shrapnel pinged and rattled from her aircraft’s skin ― and then she was hurtling through the fireball with a hard jolt and smashing through into open sky.
“Whee-ooh!” Tomboy exulted, her voice shrill. “Got him!” Then, sobering as she eased into a gentle turn, she said, “Did you see a chute?”
“Negative,” Hacker told her. “I didn’t see anything but fire.”
“Too bad,” Tomboy replied. “He was good.”
0910 hours (Zulu +3)
Near Arsincevo
By now, Tombstone knew that he simply was not cut out for life as an infantryman. In the sky, strapped into the cockpit of an F-14, he had an impressive array of sophisticated electronics and high-powered weaponry at his command, available literally at the touch of a button. His machine spoke to him, in the warble of warning tones and flashing threat indicators, in the yellow-green glow of radar blips scattered across his VDI, in the feel of the aircraft as he pulled it into a turn or nursed it out of a plunging, hell-bent-for-leather dive through thirty thousand feet.
Here, in the mud and cold and blood of man-to-man combat, there was nothing to speak to him but his own pounding heart and his own ragged fear. Combat, for the aviator, still possessed something of the romantic, medieval flavor of single combat between knights. Here, though, there was no glory, no romance of single combat. There was only stink, pain, fear, and death.
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