by Glynn James
Which might yet come up.
His wingman appeared just below and behind his left wingtip. This was LT Tomassetti, the second-ranking pilot in the squadron, and Cole’s Assistant CAG. An air wing was like a warlord’s fiefdom: the strongest and best fighters ruled. Today, the two top dogs were out in front, leading the fight.
Cole turned west and put them on a heading to their first waypoint, far offshore. At close to their top speed of nearly 1,200mph, they wouldn’t be long getting into position and lining up their attack, even with the roundabout route which kept them safely out of range of the enemy’s long-range SAMs. In a few minutes, they would do what no other Navy pilots had ever done – sink a Russian ship of the line, with a devastating spread of long-range anti-ship missiles.
And they would not only be keeping the flat-top safe by doing so. They might actually be helping to save all humanity. Cole grinned out loud behind his oxygen mask, handsome crinkles appearing around his eyes.
Today was shaping up into the best day of their lives.
* * *
Drake almost smiled himself, as he slumped back in his chair and knitted his fingers behind his head, seeing the birds safely away. He had exactly eight seconds to savor how well things were going.
“Multiple air contacts!” shouted the radar officer, cutting through and silencing the ambient chatter on the bridge. “Two signatures, rotary-wing – way down flat on the deck, coming in fast!”
“Range, heading, and speed,” Abrams barked, before Drake could even sit up straight.
“Bats out of hell, sir, over 180mph. Range two-two, closing fast – both helos on a dead intercept for us.”
Drake looked around. There were still no working air defenses on the carrier. But Abrams was already up on the air mission net.
“Balerion One and Two, RTB now! I repeat, return to base.”
“Roger that, turning back. ETA one mike.”
People started breathing again. Their two airborne fighters, still their only real protection, might make it back before these totally unexpected attacking helicopters got there. An unescorted supercarrier, with its close-in weapons systems destroyed or depleted, was more vulnerable than any of them had ever imagined.
Drake finally stood up. “Point of origin – are they the Nakhimov’s helos?” He could already hear the other officers thinking: Who the hell else’s would they be?
“Sir, they’re coming out of the south-west, on heading three-four-five. Point of origin is inland.”
“SAS Saldanha?”
“That or somewhere behind it—”
Campbell cut in from CIC on the open channel. “Aircraft signatures show one Russian Ka-60 transport utility, an ‘Orca’ – and one Ka50 attack helo, a ‘Black Shark’. Those can only be from the battlecruiser.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Abrams said, locking eyes with Drake. “They’ve got to know they’re doomed if they bring that shit near our fighters. What the hell are they playing at?”
Drake frowned. “Not if they know our top cover’s out to lunch – and that our air defenses are down. They could pretty much fly over us dropping rocks at that point, and we couldn’t stop them—”
“Sir, bogeys have changed course… they’re breaking off.” They could hardly have missed seeing the returning F-35s on their own radar.
“Back toward the Nakhimov?”
“Negative, sir – back inland.”
“Right toward the naval depot,” Drake muttered.
At the back of the bridge, where he’d taken up a position against a bulkhead to observe, Handon squinted deeply, trying to puzzle out the strategic picture. He was a little out of his area of expertise, but hardly lacked for acumen. And special operators tended to be polymaths, knowing a bit about everything. He’d learn what he needed to.
Abrams said, “Do we re-task the fighters?”
Drake looked at the radar station. “Update on the bogeys.”
“Sir, we’ve just lost them in the ground clutter over land. They’re flat on the deck. But we’ll pick them back up if they overfly the water again.”
Drake thought furiously, but he couldn’t clear his head enough to do the math or geometry. Actually, since every piece on the board was in motion, what this really required was calculus. “CIC, Bridge,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Run some logistical calculations for me. First: minimum time for those two helos to get within striking range of us, at their top speed, from the nearest point of the water’s edge. Second: time for our fighters to get back to us, at their top speed, from their final waypoint – at the edge of their attack radius of the Nakhimov.”
“Wait out…” No more than five seconds passed. “Commander, the second number is smaller than the first.” That’s all he needed to hear – their fighters could get back to them before the Russian helicopters could. This was pretty damned close-hauled, but numbers didn’t lie. Also, Drake looked up to the countdown clock on the wall. They were down to twelve minutes, until the Russian ship was close enough to hit them.
Drake grabbed his hand mic. “Balerion One, resume mission. Repeat, you are re-tasked for attack sortie. Execute mission.”
“Roger that, will comply.”
On the bridge, they could just hear the afterburners kick in, not quite overhead, as those supersonic jets banked back around toward the west and south.
Going back to put the damage in.
Before the Nakhimov did it to the Kennedy first.
Post-Apocalyptic Badass Survivor Shit
SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse
The six hard men now arrayed against Juice in close quarters were, completely transparently to him, Spetsnaz – Russian special operators. There was nothing else like them, in the old world or this new fallen one, or in any conceivable world. Their identity just spilled out of them.
Spetsnaz might not have had the technology or training infrastructure of the Americans or Brits.
But they had been, it was equally obvious just looking at them, trained and tormented to within an inch of their lives: tattooed on any and all surfaces (not necessarily with real tattoo needles), dunked in ice water, cut with knives, drop-kicked, cleverly beaten to leave no bruises. They’d had flaming boards broken across their bare backs, been dragged behind jeeps, involved in quite a lot of bare-knuckle boxing matches, and had concrete blocks laid across their abs and broken with sledgehammers.
The shit these guys did to each other was absolutely legendary. There were some things even the SEALs wouldn’t do to their candidates in Hell Week.
Juice, personally, wasn’t totally convinced that kind of training really made you elite or highly capable.
But it definitely made you seriously fucking scary.
He now saw one of the Spetsnaz dudes fiddling casually with an entrenching tool, which he seemed to be using to clean his nails. And that’s when Juice remembered.
The infamous spade.
It was the first thing every Soviet soldier was issued. And he used it for everything – to dig in wherever he halted, creating great warrens of defensive trenches, covering the whole Eastern Front and protecting Mother Russia. To dig graves, as many as were required – there were always more bodies to send to the front. To chop frozen bread – waiting for the lethal Russian winter to do its work on Napoleon or Hitler’s legions.
But one thing about Spetsnaz – they never took up defensive positions, so they never dug trenches. Instead, they sharpened their spades. And they used them for fighting and killing – sometimes at a distance, learning to throw them with deadly accuracy and lethal force. There was that famous image that used to be on the web, of the Spetsnaz dude doing a backflip, ten feet off the ground – and hurling a hatchet, with unerring accuracy, into a human-shaped target.
The version with the shovel probably just never leaked out.
And now Juice flashed back to all those destroyed Zulus he’d found littering the naval base. All with perfect killing strokes, right to the
brainstem.
Should have known, Juice thought. They were all shoveled to death.
And now that shovel was pointed at him.
* * *
He stole a quick glance up into the thin glare of the overhead lights, eyes adjusting, though not quickly enough. He didn’t know for sure where the power had come from, but it wasn’t hard to guess. There was plenty of fuel here, and no doubt a generator had been set up nearby – if not by the South Africans themselves, then by the Russians as part of their scavenging op.
Misha spoke again now, in his terrifyingly deep voice – not, evidently, all that happy to have to repeat himself. “I said… What’s up, cracka? Or perhaps you’re too elite to be down with our crew. Your ops are blacker than ours? Is that it?”
There was an edge to his voice that said this was a man you really didn’t want to offend. And, just beneath that edge, there was the sense of some great storm front of barely controlled anger – one that threatened to come crashing down at any second into a thundering shit storm.
Juice wondered if maybe this guy was still pissed off about the death of the Soviet Empire. In his experience, Russians could be touchy at the best of times, and a blow to the national ego like that wouldn’t help matters.
Ah, hell, Juice thought. Who am I kidding? They still had the end of the world to look forward to. And they’re no doubt loving this post-apocalyptic badass survivor shit.
No one could be better suited for it.
Juice kept his hands real still and out in plain sight, angled his head to the side – without taking his eyes off them – and spat messily again on the bare concrete floor.
“V kulake vse pal’tsy ravny,” he said, finally.
It was an old Russian proverb: “Teeth are all friends among one another.”
The terrifying Russian commando roared with laughter, the deep and throaty sound echoing around them in the cavernous space. “On dazhe govorit na russkom!” he bellowed. “Fantastika!”
The others roared with him. And it sounded like howler monkeys, or male lions, or lowland gorillas. Some big, mean, thick-chested predators, declaring their dominance.
Juice tried to smile in response.
Because if six Spetsnaz had shown themselves, that meant there were almost certainly at least six more out of sight somewhere, probably circling around on his flanks. And he needed a few seconds here, to work out who these guys were, what exactly the hell it was they wanted – and which way this clusterfuck was likely to go. He was hopelessly outgunned – which meant he had to rely on his wits. And with those, he knew he might still prevail.
Okay, Juice thought, moving real slow and thinking real fast. What are these guys trying to do here?
First, he had to assume they had been alerted by their command element on the battlecruiser that the American carrier was here – and almost certainly that they had a shore party inbound. The Admiral Nakhimov would also be their ride out of the naval depot – but it had now been driven off by the John F. Kennedy.
Like a lion driving a pack of hyenas off a kill.
Given that, what would the Spetsnaz shore team do first? Prepare a reception? Probably, Juice figured. But they also wouldn’t necessarily want to start a fight, if they could avoid it. Not least because gunfights are noisy. And noise attracts the dead, who would ultimately finish any fight.
The 60-second fuze on that VOIED… Juice thought. That was there just to scare us off. Otherwise, it would have been a zero-second fuze – and all Juice’s problems, and probably those of at least three of the Marines, would now be over. Now that he thought about it, maybe it was never even going to go off at all. They wouldn’t want to risk the noise.
But if that didn’t work?
Maybe they’d try negotiation. And that was what this was now. An attempt at some kind of accommodation?
Nah. Juice dismissed the thought. If scaring them off didn’t work, then he was pretty sure he knew what the Russians’ next priority would be.
Defend the supply depot.
At all costs, and by whatever means.
And, in almost any way things were likely to play out, by killing all the Americans sniffing around.
So Juice wasn’t the least bit surprised when he saw the half-dozen hard men lined up opposite him, moving as one, raise their primary weapons to their shoulders.
But he was pretty damned surprised when he clocked their expressions, and saw they actually looked worried. They were all now looking over, behind, and around him.
He did the same now, stealing a glance to his six.
And what he saw was a variety of tan and black barrels and optics, peeking around from behind crates and pallets. In an excellent tactical configuration.
Oh, you leatherneck sons of bitches, Juice thought.
His Marines were back.
Knife to a Dogfight
Over the South Atlantic
Cole leveled out his two-aircraft formation again, having gotten them back on track for their first waypoint, after that brief distraction and order to RTB. Now the world spread out below them in silence like a lovely blue marble, and the curvature of the Earth could be seen out 270 degrees of cockpit glass. Despite the roaring engine, the Earth below, stretching out to the horizons, looked peaceful.
What it really was, of course, was dead.
But Cole was mainly looking at the target designator for the Russian ship on his moving map display. He and Tom-o were now up high enough to get their own radar signature back for the battlecruiser, without need of the Predator up above them at 15k feet.
With the enemy vessel showing up clearly, Cole had no concerns about staying out of their 200km kill radius – nor about getting it inside their own 370km circle of death. They’d passed into that outside border zone a few seconds ago. But he was going to give it another few seconds, just as margin for error.
While he did so, he let the peace envelop him, and also let his mind range back – to before the fall, before his command of the air group, even before flight school, all the way back to his childhood in the Midwest. He’d come so far, and the world had taken such crazy twists, to get him to this point. He only wished more of his brothers in naval aviation were still around to see it.
Not to mention my parents, and my sisters…
“Arm LRASMs,” he said across the air mission net.
“Roger that,” Tom-o said, flying just behind and beside him.
Cole reached a black-gloved hand down and armed his weapons. The F-35 was run almost entirely on a panoramic cockpit display – basically a huge touchscreen – which required that they wear touchscreen-compatible gloves. He wasn’t sure he preferred it. Touchscreens were fiddly, and hardly worked at all without looking down at them. Familiar buttons and knobs could easily be operated by touch. Oh, well. The future was here.
Whether it sucked or not.
Cole felt the plane judder slightly as the weapons-bay hatches opened, and the missile rails descended. To stay elusive to radar, nothing on the F-35s protruded, until the second it was needed.
Cole took a deep, richly oxygenated breath.
“Engage target,” he said.
He tapped the launch button and felt the plane shudder and rise as the two big missiles went off the rails.
“Balerion Two, weapons away,” Tom-o said in his ear.
“Balerion One, weapons away,” Cole echoed, mainly for the benefit of CIC.
The JFK would already be seeing the four missiles appear on their own radar screens. These would be in flight for less than ten seconds. Then the CAG and his wingman would see if it was safe to fly in closer to do a battle damage assessment (BDA). Depending on what they saw, they might finish off the burning or listing warship with their Joint Strike Missiles, which had a shorter range than the LRASMs.
Or, hell, maybe we’ll just strafe them.
That made Cole smile, and his eyes crinkle up again.
The Russian ship was unlikely to be much of a threat at that point.
&
nbsp; * * *
“Enemy SAM launch detected!”
The tactical officer in CIC shouted this out loud enough to get picked up in the bridge. This was critical intel – and, while it shouldn’t be a crisis, neither was anyone expecting it.
What the hell? Campbell thought. “Profile those launch signatures,” she ordered.
“We’re showing missile lock,” the CAG reported back to them over the air-mission net.
Campbell’s expression darkened with growing confusion and concern.
* * *
Drake stood up at this report. Half the bridge crew were standing now. He and Abrams locked eyes again. They both knew the Russians’ SAMs weren’t going to make it as far as their attacking aircraft – they would simply fizzle out and drop harmlessly into the sea, long before they got anywhere near them.
Abrams said, “What’s their game?”
“Desperation, maybe? Shooting just to get a shot off?” But Drake’s brow wrinkled with alarm.
Something wasn’t right.
Off in his corner, Handon felt the cresting tension in the room. Right now, most of his team was down at or near the rear dock of the carrier – ready to get the hell off it, in case the ship went down. And some primal instinct had the cells of Handon’s own body desperate to go join them…
“Missile profile is S-400 Triumf!” the open channel from CIC barked. “Sixteen launches, two waves, target is Balerion!”
Handon watched Drake and Abrams look at each other like they had just received unexpected proctological exams while walking down the street. Handon had never seen either man’s eyes so wide.
Finally Drake said, “Oh, you’ve got to fucking be kidding me…”
Abrams sounded stunned when he said, “Those never got deployed to Russian naval units… The world ended before they rolled out!”
What these two knew, and Handon was now intuiting, was that the S-400 was the upgraded, next-, and last- generation of the S-300 air defense system. It used three different missiles to cover the entire performance envelope. And one of them was the extremely long-range 40N6.
Which had a range of 400 kilometers.
