Armageddon Mode

CHAPTER 25

Batman closed to within fifty yards of the Sukhoi Su-7BM, close enough to see the Indian flag and tail numbers painted on the curiously bright orange tail. The rest of the aircraft was a dull blue-gray with camouflage dark olive blotches. A pair of 500-kilogram GP bombs was slung from the wings. The Sukhoi Fitter was weaving back and forth, trying to lose its relentless pursuer. Batman held tight on the Fitter’s six. The other plane broke left, trying to snap free of the Tomcat. Batman found himself looking into the Fitter’s cockpit. He could see the other pilot, his helmet turned to watch Batman’s approach.

Batman squeezed the trigger and the Tomcat shuddered. Tracer rounds snapped across the Fitter’s nose, missing by feet, then walked back into the aircraft’s blunt nose intake with its distinctive pointed shock cone. Holes appeared in the nose And then Batman’s cannon clicked empty. The ARM display on his HUD guns discrete was off, and the number of rounds left now showed 000.

He pulled back on the stick and cleared the slow-turning Su-7 by yards.

“He’s still turning, Batman!” Malibu called. “Still turning. I think he’s headed back to India!”

“Good thing,” Batman replied. He dropped the Tomcat’s right wing, banking to starboard and away from the Su-7. “We won’t tell him our gun just went dry.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. I think we’d better start thinking about setting down and rearming.”

“Yeah,” Malibu said. “If we still have anyplace left to set down on.”

“What’s the word from the bird farm?”

“Under attack. The Indies are hitting the Jeff with everything they’ve got.”

Batman swallowed the fear rising in his throat. They’d thrown everything at the Indians, and still they were coming!

Batman pulled the stick over, heading back toward the heart of the fleet. “Let’s get back there and see what we can do, Mal,” he said.

“What do you have in mind, dude?” Malibu said quietly. “Ramming them?”

“If we have to.”

He held the F-14 in its starboard turn until it was again headed for the Jefferson.

The threat warning sounded in his helmet, and an orange light flashed urgently on his console. Colonel Singh’s Jaguar had been targeted by an enemy missile. Death was on the way.

Singh searched the horizon ahead, then looked up in the sky. He’d been expecting his target to launch. The enemy’s computers would be set to trigger SAM fire as soon as a target approached within certain parameters of speed and altitude. There … a white contrail, arcing sharply down from the zenith. That would be the missile intended for him.

Still calm, the Indian pilot waited, watching the missile’s descent. At the last possible moment, he fired the Jaguar’s chaff dispenser, then rammed the throttle into full afterburner. The Jaguar, already traveling at Mach.9, slammed through the sonic barrier, the shock wave raising spray in a straight line across the ocean’s surface.

The American SAM fell. Decoyed by the expanding cloud of chaff, the missile smacked into the sea fifty meters behind Singh’s aircraft. He neither felt nor heard the blast. At the Jaguar’s maximum low-altitude speed of Mach 1.1, he flashed across the sea toward his target, a ship visible now as a tiny black silhouette on the horizon.

He’d studied that shape in recognition manuals often enough, the sharp-prowed hull, the twin, blunt towers housing the vessel’s sophisticated radar and electronics.

He pressed the missile release and felt the jolt as the Martel dropped from the Jaguar’s belly. Unarmed now save for a Magic AAM mounted above each wingtip, Singh brought his aircraft up and banked toward the east.

“Bandit! Bandit!” Malibu called. “Four o’clock, on the deck! He’s launched!”

Batman saw the Jaguar, a tiny, toy-plane shape just above the Vicksburg, now some twelve miles to the south.

“What are we gonna do?” Malibu asked.

“Call Vicksburg!” Batman snapped. He pushed the stick over and dropped the F-14’s nose. “Warn them!”

“Oh my God, you are going to ram!”

Batman didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer as he tried to line up with the speeding missile. He could hear Malibu in the backseat, fiercely chanting a litany of warning. “Vicksburg, Vicksburg, this is Tomcat Two-one-six. Emergency! Missile launch! Launch!”

Singh banked right, angling toward the other Indian aircraft that were already beginning to straggle back toward the north and their home bases. As he glanced back over his shoulder in a reflexive check of the sky around him, though, he saw the distinctive nose-on silhouette of a Tomcat plunging toward him. With no way of knowing that the American carried neither missiles nor ammunition, he turned left, toward the east.

To the east, however, lay the Jefferson, thirty kilometers from the Vicksburg and battling for her life against the Indian planes that continued to attack her at close quarters. Another ten kilometers to the northeast, the guided-missile destroyer Lawrence Kearny was adding her firepower to that of the Jefferson, swatting down Indian planes as quickly as her weapons and Vicksburg’s Aegis controllers could identify them.

Seconds after he was into the turn he saw that he was not going to make it. The silhouette of the Jefferson, looming huge on the horizon beneath the ghostly white traceries of Sea Sparrow contrails, was unmistakable. Singh held his turn, angling toward the northeast as he pushed for more altitude. At better than Mach 1, his turn radius was impossibly large. He passed the Jefferson less than a mile off her bow.

Jefferson’s starboard-side forward Sparrow launcher swung about and fired, and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow slashed from its container in a shower of packaging fragments mingled with white smoke. The SARH-guided missile streaked skyward at Mach 3, slamming into the Jaguar’s tail two seconds later. Ninety pounds of high explosives detonated in a searing flash, igniting the Jaguar’s fuel in a blazing fireball.

A pair of Standard antiair missiles fired from the Kearny flashed into the expanding cloud of debris seconds later, adding their detonations to the fury. Very little recognizable as any part of an aircraft reached the water’s surface.

Batman knew almost at once that he was never going to catch the cruise missile. Drag had slowed it to subsonic velocity immediately after launch, but its solid fuel motor slammed it past the sound barrier as it homed on the Aegis cruiser’s radar. The pursuing F-14 had been moving at barely 300 knots as it went into its dive, and the missile was now four miles ahead. Batman could no longer see it, save as a targeting square painted by his plane’s AWG-9 radar on his HUD.

Malibu continued trying to raise the cruiser. “Vicksburg! We have a missile launch, bearing one-eight-three degrees, homing on your position. Do you copy?”

Batman watched the hollow square settle across the Vicksburg’s silhouette on the horizon, a raging frustration and helplessness burning in his throat and eyes.

Since it gave off no radar emissions of its own, the Martel antiradar missile was not immediately spotted or recognized. Vicksburg’s communications department recorded Malibu’s desperate warning, but seconds were lost because an inexperienced radio watch-stander took Malibu’s report bearing—183 degrees — and thought he meant a bearing of 183 degrees from the ship.

He alerted the men handling tactical to the wrong part of the horizon, south of the Vicksburg instead of north.

At the same moment, Vicksburg’s computer registered the target approaching the cruiser at Mach 1, but the warning was delayed several crucial seconds by higher levels of electronic alarms, a priority system established to deal with each target in the order of its perceived threat to the ship.

It failed because there were too many threats. Machines and humans alike were swamped at the moment with targets of every kind, in every part of the sky. By the time another human operator noted the alert-flagged blip racing in from the north, it was already too late.

Even if everything and everyone aboard the Aegis cruiser had reacted perfectly, it would have been too late.

More seconds were lost when the human operator turned his attention to a second blip lagging miles behind the first. The Aegis system’s computers had registered that target’s IFF and recorded it as a friendly aircraft; for a fatigue-blurred moment, the sailor working the console thought that the blip it was chasing must be friendly too, a missile launched at some other target. The electronic displays in Vicksburg’s CIC were enough like video games that it was sometimes possible to lose track of what those moving points of light actually represented.

A human error … The Martel struck Vicksburg close to the angle between her deck and the forward deckhouse tower, smashing through the deck plating and light armor on her starboard quarter. The warhead was triggered by a proximity fuze, but some minor fault delayed that triggering for the tenth of a second it took for the missile to literally tunnel into the ship’s electronic entrails. Over three hundred pounds of high explosives detonated within a few yards of Vicksburg’s CIC.

Admiral Vaughn did not feel the blast. One moment he was standing in front of the primary battle board, watching, beginning to hope that possibly, just possibly the Indian aircraft were starting to turn away.

Then he was flying through air suddenly and unaccountably filled with whirling fragments of glass and plastic, bits of wire, pieces of bodies, whole sections of the overhead and bulkhead plating and insulation. He slammed into an instrument console, rolled across it, and dropped to the deck. The console gave way an instant later, smashing down on top of him.

Already unconscious, he was unaware of that final blow.

Batman watched the mushroom cloud of black smoke shot with flame rise above the stricken command cruiser. He banked left but kept his eyes on the ship as they passed her to starboard, still under way but slower now, wallowing in the heavy seas as flame broke from the smashed-in hole on her forward deckhouse.

“Batman?” Malibu’s voice was subdued, almost stricken, over the ICS.

“Batman, check your fuel.”

He glanced at the fuel gauge. They had about fourteen hundred pounds.

They’d burned a lot on a long patrol, most of it in fuel-burning ACM.

“Okay,” he said. He felt drained … defeated. “Raise the boat, Mal.

Tell ‘em we’re coming in. And …” He hesitated, watching the burning ship. Was Admiral Vaughn still alive? “Better tell them that Vicksburg’s been hit.”

Tombstone closed his finger over the red firing button on the stick.

“Fox one, fox one!” His last missile, an AIM-7M Sparrow, ignited in a blast of white smoke and flame and streaked away from the Tomcat. At forty-five thousand feet, the air was diamond-clear, the sky an endless deep and crystal blue. The Sparrow’s contrail stood out in sharp relief as it twisted to the north like a chalk line scrawled across a blackboard.

“He’s turning, Tombstone,” Hitman announced. Tombstone glanced down at his VDI. The target, a lumbering IL-38 reconnaissance aircraft thirty miles away, appeared to be banking away toward the north … and Kathiawar.

“They’re running,” Tombstone said, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. The wave of Indian aircraft had struck against the combined squadrons full-force — and broken.

He checked his fuel. It was low … down to thirty-five hundred pounds.

They’d burned a hell of a lot on Zone Five.

“Hey, Tombstone?” Hitman said. “I’m getting a-“

Tombstone heard it over his headset as well. Batman was calling the Jefferson, reporting the Vicksburg hit by a missile.

It was too early to tell how badly the Aegis cruiser was hit, but it didn’t sound good.

“He’s right,” Hitman said a moment later. “Looks like the Aegis net is down. Shit, Tombstone, the squadron’s naked now!”

With a stubborn determination, Tombstone held the Tomcat in level flight, continuing to paint the fleeing Illyushin with his Tomcat’s radar. At Mach 4, the Sparrow traveled the thirty miles to the target in less than fifty seconds. The blips marking missile and target merged on Tombstone’s VDI.

Hit!

He took a deep breath, watching the blips scattered across his VDI. It was clear that the Indian aircraft were in full retreat now. The Russian-American force had won.

But at what cost? Kreml was still burning at last report. And now Vicksburg, shattered by a missile that had knocked out the battle group’s Aegis network.

The Tomcat squadrons had suffered as well, the two replacements, Maverick and Trapper and their RIOS, shot down during the aerial melee.

And Army and Dixie.

It took several minutes more for the IL-38 to die, falling from almost fifty thousand feet. By the time the radar trace fragmented and vanished, Tombstone and Hitman were already heading south and descending.

On the horizon, they could just make out the black speck that was the Jefferson, almost lost against the unending sea.

Admiral Vaughn became aware first of the pain, a sharp-edged throbbing in his right arm that grated when he tried to move. The darkness was next, a stinking, pitch-black night that lay across his face, choking him with each breath.

He tried to call out but heard nothing, felt nothing but the pain in his arm and a searing rasp in his throat.

Hearing returned, gradually, beginning with a high-pitched ringing that slowly subsided, replaced by shouts and screams, by the crackle of an open flame and the hiss of a ruptured steam pipe, by the sobbing, agonized moaning of someone lying close by but out of his sight. The darkness was relieved now, he saw, by the orange tongues of flame dancing above a shattered radar console. Vicksburg’s CIC suite had been transformed into a black and twisted cavern, illuminated only by the acrid glare of burning wiring.

“Syoodah!” a raw voice beside him. “Skaryehyeh! Pamageeteh!”

Hands closed on his shoulders and Vaughn screamed, “My arm! It’s broken!”

“Sorry, Admiral.” English this time. Vaughn recognized Sharov’s voice.

“Lie still. Help is coming.”

“My legs,” he said. “Can’t … feel them.”

“Skaryehyeh, pahzahloostah!” Sharov yelled. “Hurry, please!”

The glare of flashlights danced and stabbed in the near-darkness. Vaughn heard other voices, speaking English, and the scrabble and clatter of men moving through the wreckage. The shoosh-shoosh of someone triggering a fire extinguisher cut above the babble.

“Admiral? Can you hear me?”

“Y-yeah. Cunningham?”

“No, Admiral. I’m Thurman. I’m a Corpsman.”

Vaughn opened his eyes. In the dancing, smoke-wreathed light, he could make out a short-sleeved white shirt moving above him. On the right sleeve was the crow and caduceus of a Hospital Corpsman First Class.

“We’re gonna get you out of there, Admiral.”

“Okay. Doc. I think I’ve had it. Can’t move.”

“You’ve got a console on your legs, sir. They’re getting it off you now.”

He still couldn’t feel anything below his waist. There was a sharp jab as the Corpsman jabbed the needle of a morphine syrette in his arm.

“Astarawina!” someone called. “Gatovoh … tykes j’ehr!”

Vaughn managed to raise his head. In the uncertain light, he could see two of the Commonwealth liaison officers, Sharov and Kreml’s Tactical Officer, Besedin, straining together to lift the shattered console from his legs. Besedin wore a bandana torn from someone’s white shirt, stained over his left eye with blood.

The console stirred, then lifted between the two straining men.

“Harohshee! Harohshee!” They gave a concerted heave, and the wreckage crashed to the deck several feet away. Vaughn glanced down at his legs, half afraid of what he would see. They were still there, though the right leg was turned at an awkward angle. But he could not feel them at all. Turning away, he saw the bodies, blood-stained and crumpled by the force of the blast. One looked like the Russian Pokrovsky.

The other was Bersticer, his chest crushed and bloody. Six men crowded around Vaughn, blocking the sight, the horror. “Careful now,” Thurman ordered. “Get that board under his back. Strap it tight … under his arms. His legs. Good. Okay, ready? Lift!”

Working together, they lifted him from the deck and lowered him into the wire embrace of a Stokes stretcher. Thurman began strapping him in.

“I think my back’s broken,” Vaughn said. Strange, he felt no emotion.

“Well, now,” Thurman said. “We won’t know until we get you back to the Jeff for some pictures, will we?”

“You can drop the bedside manner, Doc.” He paused, listening to the shouts from outside the shattered CIC. “How bad is the ship?”

“I don’t know, Admiral.” Thurman reached down with a grease pencil and scrawled something across Vaughn’s forehead. It would be the letter “M” for morphine and the time, he knew. “You’ll have to talk to whoever’s in command now.”

Whoever’s in command. Cunningham had been standing a few feet away before the explosion. Was he dead?

“We’re evacuating casualties,” Thurman continued as he pocketed the grease pencil. “We have helos working in relays, taking them across to the Jefferson. She’s got the best sick bay facilities in the battle group.”

Thurman started to turn away. Vaughn caught his arm. “Call Captain Fitzgerald,” he said. “Have him see me when I get there.”

Thurman smiled. “That shot I gave you might have you under by then, Admiral.”

“Do … it! Must see … Fitzgerald.” He could feel the muzzy-headed dopiness as the morphine took effect.

He had to fight it, to stay awake. He had to see Fitzgerald …

Tombstone eased his Tomcat into the slot astern of the Jefferson and cut back on his power. He checked his stores listing on his VDI and was startled to see that he’d expended all of his missiles and was down to his last eighty rounds for his M-61A1 Vulcan, and he wasn’t even sure how many Indian aircraft he’d downed. The fight had been so confused, the sky so filled with planes and missiles. There was no way to sort it all out.

The fight had left him feeling so drained he didn’t even feel the usual charge of adrenaline as he approached for his trap. He almost felt relaxed. “Tomcat Two-double-oh,” he called. Ball. Three point three.”

“Roger ball,” the LSO reported. “You’re right in the groove. Check your hook.”

Tombstone slapped the switch that lowered his tail hook. He’d been so relaxed he’d forgotten.

Somehow, the Jefferson’s flight deck had never looked so good from this vantage point, half a mile astern and coming in for a trap. He held the stick steady, making slight, second-by-second corrections.

The Tomcat swept in over the ramp, settling to the deck in a perfect approach. Tombstone rammed the throttles forward as the tail hook snagged on the number-three wire, and he felt the familiar wrench of deceleration as he hung by his harness straps for a second. He cut back on the power as the LSO called “Okay” over the radio.

“Let’s clear the deck,” the Air Boss said in Tombstone’s headset as a yellow shirt started to direct him across the deck. “On the double. We have helos inbound.”

Okay. It was good to be home.

Captain Fitzgerald was waiting as several Corpsmen lowered the Stokes from the helo and eased Admiral Vaughn to the carrier’s deck. The admiral found himself puzzling over an odd movement above his face, until he realized that he was lying on his back, looking up through the still-turning rotors of a Navy Sea King helicopter. Had he been asleep?

No matter. Fitzgerald’s creased, anxious face bent low over his own.

“Admiral? How are you?”

“Can’t complain,” Vaughn said, weakly. “Doesn’t do any good.”

“My people’ll get you to sick bay, Admiral. They’re good. They’ll patch you up-“

“Listen, Captain,” Vaughn interrupted. “You’ve got command of the battle group.”

“They told me half an hour ago you were wounded, sir,” he said, nodding.

“As senior officer, I took command then.”

“The … group?”

“We took a pasting. Can’t deny that. Kremlin and Vicksburg are both hit pretty bad. But the Indian air force damn near busted a gut doing that much. We estimate they’ve lost fifty aircraft of all types. They turned tail and started running shortly after Vicksburg took that missile.”

“Good. One … one more order, then.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Complete the mission.”

“Sir?”

“Carry out mission.” The pain in his arm was back, growing steadily worse despite the morphine. “We’ve got to follow through. If we don’t … it’s all been for nothing. Nothing …”

“Admiral, it may not be possible. We’ve got fifteen F-14s flying, period. And they’re going to have to rearm and refuel. We have to guard the battle group.”

“Use … Russians,” Vaughn said.

“They haven’t exactly been cooperative,” Fitzgerald pointed out. “I don’t-“

“Russians … have squadron up. Can’t land. Use them. Somehow …”

Suddenly, it seemed terribly important to Vaughn that their losses not be in vain. A waste.

Fitzgerald grinned suddenly. “Don’t you worry, Admiral. They tell me the Jeff’ll have all four cats back on line in another hour, max. After that … well, like they say. Charlie Mike.” Continue mission.

“Good.”

The blue sky behind Fitzgerald’s head was darkening … darkening.

Admiral Vaughn slipped into oblivion.

Fitzgerald watched as they carried Vaughn off toward the island, then moved back out of the way as a deck officer waved for personnel to stand clear. The Sea King’s pilot began gunning the helo’s rotors. The deck officer lifted his hands in a final all-clear. With a roar, the helo lifted from the deck, then angled across the carrier’s port side and out over the ocean.

On the horizon, he could see the smoky stain where Vicksburg was burning.

He checked his watch, then glanced toward the carrier’s bow. He couldn’t see the damage control parties, of course. They were all below, working on the steam lines that had been damaged by the Exocet hit.

They’d better have them ready in an hour.

Fitzgerald breathed a long, slightly unsteady sigh of relief. Before they’d flown the admiral back aboard, he’d already given the orders to continue readying the strike aircraft for the raid on India. Not that it would have made a lot of difference one way or the other at some later, formal board of inquiry or court-martial. It was just nice to know that he wasn’t entirely alone in his decision.

The joint task force had been hit hard, but they could still carry out the mission. Hit the Indian supply columns. Force them to end their invasion of Pakistan.

Charlie Mike.