Afterburn

CHAPTER 17

Major Yevgenni Sergeivich Ivanov divided his attention between the radar display and the view out the cockpit. Flying a high-performance attack aircraft at extreme low altitude was always a challenge; he was skimming the waves of the Black Sea at an altitude of less than fifty meters, where the slightest hesitation, the least miscalculation would slam him and his aircraft into the sea at Mach 1.1.

He was flying a Mig-27M attack aircraft, hurtling along at just above the speed of sound, the variable-geometry wings swept back along the aircraft’s fuselage like the folded wings of a stooping hawk.

Ivanov was an experienced pilot, as experienced as any in Soviet Frontal Aviation. At thirty-eight, he was old for a combat aviator, but he’d been flying a fighter of one type or another for over fifteen years. His first combat missions had been over Afghanistan. Later, he’d volunteered for a special Frontal Aviation program that transferred him temporarily to navy command, and he’d spent five years learning how to land on the deck of the new Soviet nuclear aircraft carrier Kreml, then teaching other, younger aviators how to do the same.

With that experience, he was part of a very special fraternity, one of the smallest and most demanding in the world, the brotherhood of pilots trained to operate off the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d flown off the Kreml in the Indian Ocean, during the India-Pakistan crisis, and again in the great naval battle off the Norwegian coast, the engagement during which the carriers Kreml and Soyuz had both gone to the bottom. With his ship shot out from beneath him while he was in the air, Ivanov almost hadn’t made it home. Short on fuel, he’d nursed his damaged aircraft back across Norwegian and Finnish territory to land at a small airstrip outside of Nikel.

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 of the very best of the best.

“Black Leader, this is Bastion One-one-seven” sounded in his headset.

“Do you read me? Over.”

“Bastion One-one-seven, Black Leader reads. Go ahead.”

“We are being painted by American radar, almost certainly from their naval AWACS.”

“What about ECM?”

“We have been jamming steadily for fifteen minutes, sir. The Americans have been increasing the power of their scans and at this point are probably burning through our interference. They will not be able to judge our numbers, but they know we are here, and probably where we are going.”

“That does not matter. They will not be concerned with us unless they believe us to be threatening their battle group.”

“Just keep your ears sharp, Yevgenni,” the voice of Captain Oleg Nikiforov added over the tactical channel. “Once they figure out what we’re up to, they will be after us like a cat pouncing on mice.”

“The cats will find they’ve cornered a pack of wolves, Captain,” Ivanov replied, and he heard the others chuckle in response.

As a military pilot, he had a healthy respect for American naval aviators ― the men, anyway; he’d flown with them in the Indian Ocean and against them off Norway and could accept, with some few unspoken reservations, the fact that they were the best in the world. This time around, however, it was going to be different.

There would be no massed attacks against layered American carrier battle group defenses, for one thing. That type of antiquated strategy had been dictated by the old Soviet military command, back when they’d been faced with the problem of how to wage war in the air, on the land, and both on and under the sea against a technologically superior enemy, overcoming them with forces whose only advantage lay in their numbers. No, the first direct attack against the Americans would come only after their battle group had been seriously weakened.

And weakening their forces was precisely the objective of today’s low-level raid.

Ivanov thrilled to the sheer, joyous power of his machine. He was never more alive than when he was in the cockpit of the sleek attack aircraft, peering ahead across the broad, wedge-shaped nose known affectionately to the aircraft’s pilots as utkanos, the duck nose. The Mig27, known as “Flogger-D” in NATO’s code, was a venerable aircraft by now; it had entered service with Frontal Aviation in 1974, and for most of that time had been the mainstay of Soviet air-to-ground attack. Most pilots held a genuine affection for the machine; up until its appearance, odd Mig designation numbers had been reserved for fighters, while even numbers identified attack planes. Like the American F-111, however, an attack plane with the completely inappropriate F-for-fighter designation, the Mig27 carried a somewhat confusing identifier. Pilots who liked the way the plane handled, however, insisted that it was as fast and nimble as most fighters and therefore carried exactly the right ID. Indeed, besides his main armament of air-to-surface missiles, the Mig carried both two AA8 infrared-homing missiles for air-to-air dogfighting, as well as a powerful six-barrel rotary cannon for close-in work. At need, the Mig could play the fighter’s role, though Ivanov knew he would be at a disadvantage if he found himself tangling with American Tomcats or Hornets.

That was what the Mig29s in Bastion were for.

He checked the flight’s position on his terrain-mapping radar. Less than ninety kilometers to go. It was too late for the Americans to stop them now, even if they guessed what their true objective was.

There was still one remaining chance that the attack would be aborted, and it was time now to find out, one way or the other. Reaching down, he dialed his radio frequency selector to the channel assigned for Operations.

“Tower, Tower, this is Black One. How do you read me? Over.”

“Black One, Tower. We read you.”

“Dostoyevsky,” he said, the writer’s name serving as a code informing Operations that the attack group was on course, on time, and ready to proceed with the mission. The reply would be either “Tolstoy,” which would mean abort and return to base, or…

“Chekhov,” the voice said. “I say again, Chekhov.”

“Confirm Chekhov,” he replied. The mission was on! “Proceeding as ordered.”

Switching back to his tactical channel, he contacted the other five aircraft of Black Flight. “The word is Chekhov, men,” he said, and the relief he felt as he said it was almost palpable.

“Excellent!” Piotr called. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time!”

“Radio silence from now on,” he warned. “Vsevaw harashiva y pabeda!”

Good luck, and victory.

The flight of deadly Mig27s arrowed toward the still-invisible coast of Turkey.

“Dog House, Dog House, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?”

Lieutenant Arnold Brown checked again the sweep of green-white fuzz and blips on his main display screen. There was no doubt about it. Something big ― several somethings, in fact ― were moving out there, over one hundred miles to the southwest.

“Watch Dog, this is Dog House,” the voice of the Operations watch officer replied. “Go ahead.”

“I have a contact, designated Mike One-five, bearing two-zero-five, range one-zero-eight. There is heavy, repeat, heavy ECM, but I believe the contact to be multiple air targets down on the deck.”

“Copy that, Watch Dog. We’ve got your screen up here in front of us now.

How long you been tracking them?”

“Five, maybe six minutes, Dog House. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t picking up waves.”

“Met says the sea’s flat and calm today, Watch Dog, so whatever you have, it’s a hard target. Besides, I doubt that the Ukes are jamming to keep us from seeing waves off the Turkish coast.”

“Ah, roger that.”

Brown puzzled a moment at Ops’ assumption that the targets were Ukrainian. On their current heading, they could have come from either Odessa or Sevastopol; the reciprocal of their course drew a line lying almost directly between those two cities on the map. They could as easily be Russian aircraft as Ukrainian.

The real question, though, was what were they up to? With all of that jamming, it was clear they didn’t want the Americans ― or anybody else, for that matter ― to see what they were up to. They weren’t threatening the CBG. They weren’t anywhere near the battle group. If Brown had been ordered to take a guess, he’d have sworn they were lining up for an attack on the Bosporus. “Watch Dog, Watch Dog, this is Dog House.”

“Dog House, Watch Dog. Go ahead.”

“Hey, Twenty XO is down here, and he wants to know if you think those bogeys are setting up for an attack on Istanbul.”

Brown grinned. Twenty XO meant Commander Grant, the executive officer of CVW20.

“Tell the Coyote that that’s a big-time roger,” he said. “Either Istanbul or the straits themselves would be my guess.”

“Could it be a practice run, Watch Dog?”

“Dog House, there’s no way to tell that until they goddamn launch!”

“Ah, copy that. Wait one, Watch Dog.”

“Whatcha got, Lieutenant?” Lieutenant Commander Jake Garner, Watch Dog Six-one’s commander, asked over the ICS.

“Bogeys on the road to Istanbul, Commander,” he replied. “I’m on the horn to Jeff and they have me on hold.”

“What, the Russkis are attacking Turkey?” Garner asked. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Could be a training exercise,” the enlisted radarman at Brown’s side put in. “You know, our subs are always practicing attack runs on friendly ships, just for practice, like.”

“Yeah, but then the target doesn’t know he’s the target,” Brown said thoughtfully. “If I were the Turkish air defense command, I’d be freaking right about now, but good.”

“Suppose it’s not for practice?” Garner asked. “What could they be after down there?”

“We have some UNREP ships coming through the straits about now,” Brown said. He punched several keys, changing the scale of the radar map display until the Turkish coast in the vicinity of the northern mouth of the Bosporus was just visible. Though the storm of radar interference extended all the way to the mainland, it was thin enough in the south for him to see strong returns from several ships emerging from the straits. Most of those would be Turkish vessels, but one bore the ID tag of an American UNREP fuel tanker, the Falcon Patriot. “I suppose if they were mad at us for some reason, they might be after our UNREP.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Garner said.

“I know. What the hell are they after down there, anyway?”

“What the hell are they after down there, anyway?” Lieutenant Brian Crosby asked aloud, and Coyote was forced to agree. As nearly as they could tell through all of the snow and clutter, a number ― possibly a large number ― of unknown aircraft were bearing down on the entrance to the Bosporus Strait. The CBG was already beginning to pick up the frantic and uncoded radio cries of Turkish air control officers and pilots, who believed themselves to be under attack. No one had yet ventured a guess, however, as to what actually might be going on.

Coyote watched the confused tangle of blips on the main display in Ops and swore softly. What, he wondered, would Tombstone have done in this situation?

But Tombstone was ashore, with the transfer ceremony well under way, and Coyote as Deputy CAG bore the responsibility for deploying Jefferson’s air assets.

Lieutenant Brian Crosby was the Ops duty officer at the moment, and he was watching Coyote now, obviously more than happy to allow the acting CAG to make the tough calls.

“Okay,” he told Crosby. “Who’s in place who could go take a look?”

“Well, we’ve got BARCAP One here,” Crosby said, indicating an oval “racetrack” path marked on the screen south of Yalta. “That’s Two-oh-one and Two-oh-five, Batman and Libbie.”

“But they’re covering the ceremony and are in place to escort the helo back here.”

“Yes, sir. Then there’s BARCAP Three, over here to the east. They’re out of the running. It’d take half an hour for them to get down to where the action is. BARCAP Two is up here, to the west. They’re in a pretty decent position for an intercept, actually. Ten, maybe twelve minutes.”

“Who is it?”

He checked the duty board. Two-one-eight and Two-one-oh. Dixie and Badger.”

Dixie! Shit. Tombstone had recommended that Dixie be kept clear of anything but strictly routine patrolling for a few days, at least until he’d had time to settle down after the helicopter shoot-down incident. But sending him to get a positive ID…

On the other hand, it would take Batman longer to reach the bogeys and there was still the need to cover that helo flight.

No. It would have to be Dixie.

And maybe, just for a backup, he could redeploy Batman and Libbie to cover Dixie and Badger. BARCAP Three could be routed north to take BARCAP Two’s place off Yalta. He glanced at the Air Ops clock on the bulkhead. Yeah, that would work. The ceremony wasn’t due to end for another half hour or so. The Yalta party could stand to be uncovered for a few minutes, anyway, especially since all of the activity seemed to be way the hell and gone off to the southwest, near the mouth of the Bosporus.

Of course, the jamming and unknowns down there could be some sort of diversion, designed to get him to leave the Yalta ceremony unguarded, but he didn’t think that was the case. It didn’t feel like a diversion ― a judgment based on a number of years of combat experience ― and, even if he was wrong, even if Yalta was the real target, BARCAP Three would be close enough to station to employ their AIM54S in… what? Make it ten minutes.

“Okay,” Coyote said, deciding. “Here’s what we do. Tell BARCAP Two to hot tail it down there and give us a fly-by ID, pronto. Nothing fancy, just a probe, shake ‘em and see what rattles. If he can get close enough to eyeball ‘em, we’ll have some answers.”

“We’ll have some answers if they take a shot at him, too.”

“There is that. Tell Batman and Libbie to leave station and fly overmatch for Two. And have Three leave station and take over for One. Got it?”

“Got it, sir.” He shook his head. “Damn, it’s getting busy this morning.”

Coyote snorted. “What I’m worried about is how much busier it’s going to get. I want to know what those-“

He broke off in mid-sentence, eyes widening. “What is it, sir?” Crosby asked, looking at him.

“I just had,” Coyote said slowly, hoping desperately that he was wrong, “a horrible thought about what those bastards might be after!”

“BARCAP Two, BARCAP Two, this is Dog House,” the voice of Jefferson’s Air Ops watch officer said over Dixie Mason’s headset. “Come left to two-two-zero and punch it.”

“Two-one copies,” Dixie replied. He brought his stick over, watching the heading numbers on his HUD flicker to the right as he swung the Tomcat into a southwesterly heading. “Coming to two-two-zero and going to Zone Five.”

“Two-two copies” sounded over the Ops channel. Tomcat 2 1 0 was flying Dixie’s wing, with Lieutenants Cunningham and Burns in the cockpit. He shoved the throttle forward through the last of the detents, reveling in the familiar surge of power as the aircraft’s afterburners kicked in, rocketing him past the speed of sound in seconds.

“What do you think the hurry is, Dixie?” his RIO called over the ICS from the backseat.

“I expect they’ll tell us when they get around to it, Mick,” Dixie said.

“Anything on your scope?”

“Someone’s still jamming the hell out of it, off to the west, somewhere.

Maybe a Hawkeye could see through this shit, but I can’t.”

Dixie’s RIO for this flight was Lieutenant Commander Kevin Moss, handle “Mickey,” a young, sandy-haired guy who nevertheless passed for what the squadron thought of as “an old hand,” since he’d been flying with the Vipers for almost a year now. For the past several days, ever since the helicopter incident when Cat had told him flatly that she wouldn’t fly with him again, Dixie had been paired off with a succession of Rios from the duty pool. He was beginning to suspect that they drew lots every day, with the loser assigned to backseating with him. The only qualification seemed to be that the man assigned as his RIO had to be more experienced than he was. It was humiliating… and unfair, and Dixie had had just about enough.

At least CAG had allowed him to keep flying. If he’d been ordered to stay on the deck, he’d be approaching critical mass just about now.

“BARCAP Two, this is Dog House” sounded over his headset. “We’ve got bogeys about two hundred fifty miles southwest of your position, and we need a positive ID. Deputy CAG wants you to go check them out.”

“Roger, Dog House,” Mickey replied. “We’re on the way.”

Dixie felt the tiniest bite of worry. A positive ID?

With the Tomcat cruising comfortably at Mach 1.5, they would be close enough to the intruders to get a visual in about twelve minutes, and this time Dixie was going to make damned sure of his target recognition.

At least this time the target wasn’t likely to be U.S. Army helicopters.

Ivanov pulled back slightly on the stick, bringing his Mig’s altitude up to just under two hundred meters. He could see the Turkish coast ahead; they were well into Turkish airspace now, and he could imagine the faces of the Turk air force officers turning purple as they screamed for identification. Casually, he glanced left, then right, searching the skies. He could see vapor trails on both sides, but those were almost certainly other aircraft of the attack group. They’d be scrambling interceptors by now at half a dozen nearby air bases, but it was already too late.

“Black Leader, this is Flashlight.” Radio silence had been broken now.

If the Turks didn’t know they were here before, they certainly did now. “The target is illuminated.”

Ivanov flipped a line of switches, checking his laser targeting pickup.

A light winked on and a tone sounded in his helmet; his number-one AS14 missile had registered the hot, optically invisible pinpoint of laser light gleaming on the target, now less than thirty kilometers ahead, and was tracking it.

Not much longer…

His Mig27 was carrying a warload of two AS14 air-to-surface missiles, the laser-guided monsters known in the NATO lexicon as “Kedge.” His port-side missile had a solid lock on the target now, though it was still just beyond the weapon’s twenty-kilometer range, Somewhere further out and higher up, “Flashlight,” another Mig27 with a laser designator pod, was illuminating the target for the entire attack squadron.

The blurred impression of water flashing beneath Ivanov’s keel flashed suddenly from blue to browns, grays, and greens. He was over the beach now, thundering above peasants’ stone huts and tangled complexes of larger-scale architecture. Black Flight’s sonic booms must be rattling windows in their wake. For several seconds, he hurtled above the brown-streaked earth, and then he was over water once more, this time flashing low above the dark waters of the northern mouth of the Bosporus Straits. A pair of ships appeared ahead, a long, gray, knife-prowed destroyer and a far larger and clumsier-looking tanker, painted black with a white superstructure. Ivanov glimpsed the American flag fluttering from its truck.

Then he was past both vessels. He glanced down at both his radar display and his threat warning indicators, half expecting the Turkish destroyer to pop a SAM up his tailpipe, but there was no reaction from the surface.

Perhaps they’d managed to catch Turks and Americans alike by surprise.

A warning light winked on. He was within range now of the primary target. Since Turkish interceptors would be in the area at any moment, the mission parameters called for launch at maximum range. He double-checked his target lock, then brought his thumb down on the firing button. “Black One, missile away!” he called.

His Mig lurched skyward as the Kedge missile, weighing some six hundred kilograms, dropped from his left-side inlet duct pylons. Its solid-fuel motor ignited with a yellow-white flash, and though the engine was supposed to be smokeless, condensation in the air boiled into a sharp, white contrail arrowing out ahead of the hurtling Mig.

“Black Three,” Mikhail Mizin, his wingman, called. “Missile away!” A second contrail chased the first, swooping low toward the surface of the strait before leveling off just a handful of meters above the water.

“Black Two! Missile launch.”

“Black Four. Aborting run. I have malfunction. “

Damn… that was bad luck, but not unforeseen. Russian military technology tended to be blunt, tough, and simple; when it had to be complex, as in the case of Migs or AS14 missiles, there was always a stubbornly unpredictable but high chance of equipment failure of some sort. That was why attacks like this one were planned with multiple redundancy in mind. Each aircraft in Black Flight would loose one of its two missiles, then loiter until the damage could be assessed. If necessary, the second missile would be used on the primary target; if the initial attack proved successful, they would be free to seek targets of opportunity for their second shots, before turning back for the north and home.

He checked his indicators, noting that the missile was running hot and smooth. Flight time to the target would be just over one minute.