Afterburn

CHAPTER 18

The newest and northernmost of the three bridges spanning the Bosporus was crowded this morning, with cars, trucks, bicycles and scooters, ox-carts, and even people on foot. The big show ― the passage of the American aircraft carrier the week before ― had drawn a much larger mob, but there was always heavy traffic both ways over the span, crossing in a few moments from one continent to another.

The bridge was of the same general design as others among the world’s largest spans ― the Golden Gate, the Verrazano Narrows, and, longest of all, the Humber Bridge in northern England. It consisted of a gently arcing deck suspended from two massive cables. Each of those main cables was just less than a meter thick and composed of hundreds of tightly woven wire ropes; the cables, in turn, were draped from two towers rising from either side of the strait’s main shipping channel. The towers were paired, hollow-core, reinforced concrete pillars straddling the suspended deck; the span between the two towers across the channel was just over a thousand meters.

The first Kedge missile arrowed south across the waters of the Bosporus, scant feet above the dark and oily waters. Striking the base of the westernmost of the two huge concrete towers, the warhead triggered, one hundred kilograms of high explosives detonating in a savage blast, raising a vast cascade of white spray and hurling chunks of concrete far out into the water.

Three seconds later, a second missile struck the tower. Those towers, designed to exacting engineering specifications to support tremendous weight or withstand hurricane-force winds, were simply not designed to absorb that brutal and sudden a punishment. With both northern legs of the suspension system damaged, the span between them sagged. The hangers, the vertical wire ropes supporting the deck, began snapping, first one by one, then in rippling, crashing volleys. The deck itself; individual sections like shallow boxes and paved over with a one-and-a-half-inch layer of mastic asphalt; the design provided flexibility, as it had to on an engineering project of such scope, but it also allowed the two explosions to generate shock waves that rippled out from the towers, with the deck itself convulsing in a titanic game of crack-the-whip.

Vehicles and people alike were scattered like toys as the asphalt flexed, tossing them into the air and smashing them down again. A third missile detonated against the eastern tower, somewhat higher up the leg than the first blast, gouging through to the pillar’s hollow core. With a vast and thunderous shudder, the northern leg of the tower shattered, cross struts crumbling, suspension cables writhing, hangers snapping apart like rapid-fire gunshots. Three more missiles arrowed in out of the north in rapid succession, two striking the span near the eastern side, the third hitting the western pylon once again. The deck tilted even more precipitously to the north, spilling vehicles and people into the yawning gulf below.

With the failure of the northern half of the suspension rig accelerating, the southern half began to go, too. The eastern tower sagged heavily toward the north, an avalanche of splintering concrete cascading into the water. The entire thousand-meter-plus center span of the northernmost of the Bosporus bridges whipsawed back and forth, the oscillations building until the main cables snapped, spilling the box sections of the deck into the strait far below.

The navigable channel up the center of the Bosporus was not wide, a few hundred yards across at most, and as the smoke and spray cleared, observers aboard nearby vessels could see that it was almost completely blocked by fallen deck boxes and a vast and incoherent tangle of wire rope. Miraculously, there were survivors, struggling in the wreckage as small craft moved in to begin rescue efforts; the screams of the injured mingled with the continuing splash and crack of falling concrete, and the mournful hootings of ship horns.

Almost immediately, a Turkish naval vessel, the guided-missile patrol boat Gurbet, moving toward the center of the channel at high speed, shuddered, then slewed to a dead stop, two of her four propeller shafts fouled by the unraveling strands of wire rope that stretched above and below the surface of the water like a deadly trap designed expressly for ships.

Clearing out that tangle of debris would require a major engineering effort… and weeks, possibly months of time.

And until the wreckage of the fallen bridge could be cleared, no vessels would be passing between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara… or to the Aegean Sea beyond.

At eight thousand feet, Dixie and Mickey flashed southwest between the impossibly blue sky above and the deep, ultramarine sea below. Glancing right, he could see “Badger” Cunningham and “Red” Burns off his starboard wing in Tomcat 210.

“I’m making multiple bogeys ahead,” Mickey said. “At least ten… ah, make that twelve contacts in three groups.”

“Roger that, BARCAP Two,” Watch Dog replied. “We’ve got them.”

The radar picture ahead was clearing slightly as the Tomcats drew closer to their contacts, until the F-14s, AWG-9 radars gave a better picture than the more powerful but far more distant electronics of the orbiting Hawkeye. With the onboard data link, Tomcats and Hawkeye could share an incredible volume of two-way data, all of which the Hawkeye was relaying immediately to the Combat Information Centers aboard both the Shiloh and the Jefferson.

“Shit,” Mickey said. “I wish I could see! It looks like the bogeys are inside Turkish airspace. Tango Six-one! Do you make some of those bogeys going feet dry over the coast?”

“Ah, roger that, Two. We’re having a little trouble sorting it out.

Some of those contacts might be Turkish air force.”

“Oh, yeah. Hell, I don’t know what it is I’m seeing up here. It looks to me like an attack run, though.”

“Roger that.”

What was happening? Dixie wondered. The nearest contact was just one hundred miles ahead now, invisible to the naked eye but clear enough on Mickey’s display, despite the jamming interference. Moments before, Jefferson had alerted the BARCAP flight that a pair of EA-6B Prowlers were on the way as well. The ECM gear on those babies would be enough to burn through any jamming, as well as provide electronic cover for the Tomcats. Four more Tomcats, BARCAP One, and the two aircraft covering the Prowlers were on the way as well, but BARCAP Two would be in position to get an ID on the unknowns long before anybody else could reach the area.

Dixie’s Tomcat was carrying a standard Barrier CAP interception warload ― four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, two AIM-9M Sidewinders, and a pair of AIM-120A AMRAAMS. The Sidewinders were strictly for close-in work, of course, and the radar-guided AMRAAMS had a killing range of about thirty miles. At one hundred miles, however, the bogeys were comfortably within kill range of the AIM-54s, which had the astonishing ability to reach out and touch someone 120 nautical miles away.

But the Americans hadn’t been attacked, yet ― were not even being threatened ― and so no “weapons free” had been granted by Ops. They would need a visual identification first.

Still, Dixie thought, something must have really stirred them up back at the bird farm, using aviator’s slang for the carrier. BARCAP Two’s patrol area had been seventy miles southwest of Sevastopol, and about fifty miles west of the Jefferson, positioned to spot and block any hostile aircraft approaching from the general direction of Ukraine and the northwest. BARCAP One, however, Batman and Libbie Bell, had been patrolling north of the Jeff’s position, just off the Crimean coast. Their primary mission of Barrier Combat Air Patrol included the secondary mission of covering Boychenko’s helicopter when he flew from Yalta to the carrier. If Ops was pulling them out of position, something really hot must be on.

Something that was a direct threat to the Jefferson, her battle group, and her mission.

They would know in a few more minutes.

Ivanov brought his Mig higher and dropped his left wing, staring down at the destruction wrought by Black Flight’s salvo of missiles. Perfect… perfect! Three-quarters of the center span was gone; he could see pieces of the deck strewn across the shipping channel like tumbled-down dominoes, and the northern main suspension cable had parted like a thread, spilling a forest of hanger cables and unraveling wire rope into the water. The southern halves of the two towers were still standing, and the suspension cable between them was still above water, but the northern halves were shattered, one fallen completely, the other half gone, like a jagged, broken tooth. The water between the towers was a seething cauldron of dirty foam, struggling antlike forms, ragged chunks of steel deck segments, and floating debris. Smaller craft would continue navigating up and down the Bosporus no doubt, simply by avoiding the center channel, but larger, deeper-draft vessels ― such as the monstrous three-hundred-meter-plus bulk of an American nuclear aircraft carrier ― would be unable to pass without risking serious damage to screws, shafts, and keel.

“Tower, Tower, this is Black One,” he called over the radio. “Come in!”

“Black One, Tower. Go ahead.”

“Seagull! I say again, Seagull!”

The word was the title of one of Chekhov’s more successful plays and was the code for the mission’s success.

“We read you,” Tower replied. “Proceed to Uncle Vanya.”

And that code phrase: the title of another well-known Chekhov play, gave Black Flight and Flashlight permission to engage targets of opportunity.

“Affirmative, Uncle Vanya,” he replied. He nudged the rudder pedals and felt the sudden pile-on of positive Gs as the Mig-27’s nose swung toward the west. Pulling back on the stick, he sharpened the turn as he passed over land once more, bleeding off both velocity and altitude as he brought the aircraft around 180 degrees. He was traveling north once more, flying less than a hundred meters now above the gray-brown, building-dotted terrain.

“Black Leader, Bastion,” a voice called. “We have red intercepts incoming, bearing zero-nine-five, range three-zero kilometers. Blue intercepts incoming, bearing zero-one-eight at one-five-zero kilometers.”

“Black Flight reads you, Bastion. Take out red intercepts first. The blues can wait.” The color codes referred to nationalities ― the red of the Turkish flag, the blue of the American Navy.

“Black Leader, this is Flashlight. Secondary target is illuminated.”

He checked his readouts, confirming target acquisition and lock on his second AS-14. Range ten kilometers… “Firing missile!”

Again, the Mig-27 bucked skyward as though kicked from below and behind as the three-hundred-kilogram missile dropped from its launch rack. The engine ignited, sending the deadly package streaking toward the north.

“Target lock!” Piotr added. “Firing missile!”

Captain Richard Calvin walked out onto the port-side flying bridge and leaned over the railing, craning his head for a long, searching look aft. He wasn’t sure what those flyboy idiots were playing at, but someone had just flown a pair of high-performance jets over his command so fast and so low that his bridge windscreens had rattled, and he didn’t care for that one bit.

Falcon Patriot was a brand-new member of the old Falcon Leader class, a tanker of 42,369 tons, with a length overall of 630 feet and a transport capacity of 225,100 barrels ― very nearly ten million gallons. Despite her long-term charter through the Maritime Administration, she was a civilian vessel, owned by Falcon Sea and operated by Seahawk Management.

Normally, smaller oilers were used for Underway Replenishment of naval vessels at sea, but the unusual isolation of the Jefferson battle group inside the Black Sea had called for special measures, and the Patriot had been taken off her normal duties as a prepositioning shuttle tanker in the Med and assigned UNREP duties. She mounted two fueling stations abeam, one port, one starboard, allowing her to pass fuel to two ships at once.

Calvin didn’t like jet jockeys. More than once, while the Falcon Patriot was attached to the Sixth Fleet in the Med, frisky Tomcat pilots had made low passes over his command, rattling windows and upsetting crockery in the galley. He had a reputation, he knew, among the various commanding officers and high-ranking brass clear up the ladder to Sixth Fleet HQ at Gaeta, Italy, for his loud and pointed complaints after each such incident. Damn it, you didn’t play games with ten million gallons of highly flammable petroleum products. If the pilot of one of those sea-skimming aircraft had been just a hair off, his plane and the Falcon Patriot would have gone up in a fireball that would be seen and heard clear back to Istanbul, and the burning oil might block the straits for days.

Brady, the ship’s second mate, was already on the wing, looking aft through a pair of watch-stander’s binoculars.

“What the hell were those two playing at?” Calvin demanded.

“Damfino, Skipper,” Brady replied without lowering the binoculars. “But if I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone just stole themselves a bridge.”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We heard that thunder aft a moment ago, right?”

“Yeah, just after those jets went over. Sounded like a sonic boom.”

“Maybe.” He sounded doubtful. “I been taking a look-see through these.

I can’t see the bridge back there.”

Calvin could still hear thunder rolling in the distance, a kind of faint thump-thump that hung above the still waters of the Bosporus. Or was that the continuing roar of the jets in the distance? He glanced up. An unusual number of white contrails were scrawled across the blue sky this morning, aircraft at high altitude. Exercises of some sort, most likely.

He held out his hand for the binoculars. “Lemme see a minute.”

This far north of the third Bosporus bridge there was little to see of the structures long, gray, spidery shadow on the horizon. Focusing the binoculars, he thought he could see one of the towers… but he couldn’t be sure. There was a fog or ground haze moving in, and the area close to the water was obscured. It almost looked like smoke.

He couldn’t hear the thunder any longer.

“Did you get a look at those planes, Captain?” Brady asked. “They weren’t ours.”

“What do you mean, not ours?” Calvin had been buzzed by U.S. Navy jets often enough during fleet operations with them that he’d simply assumed that this was more of the same. He’d never paid much attention to the different classes of aircraft, though.

“They weren’t ours,” Brady insisted. “I used t’be in the Navy, remember.

Navy planes are painted gray, dark on top, light underneath. These were kind of brownish. Couldn’t see any Navy insignia, either.”

“Maybe they were Turks,” Calvin suggested. He lowered the binoculars, thoughtful.

“What the hell is that?”

Brady said the words in such a curious, unexcited manner that Calvin simply glanced toward where he was pointing. He could see something moving across the water, something small and dark and very, very fast. He realized what it was just as it flashed past the port side of the Falcon Patriot’s bridge and slammed into the hull amidships. The explosion followed instantly, the detonation sending a rippling shudder through the tanker’s deck. A ball of black and orange erupted from forward as Calvin and Brady both were pitched to the deck.

“What the bloody hell-” But Calvin’s words were lost in the thunder of the blast, followed in an instant by a hurricane roar of furiously burning aviation gasoline. The missile had ruptured Three-port, loosing a torrent of JP-5 and igniting it.

A second missile ― he thought it was a second missile, though in the thunder and boiling smoke he couldn’t be sure of anything ― struck forward. He could feel the ship lurch to starboard with the impact, could feel her bows drifting…

Smoke was pouring aft across the bridge wing, so thick now he could scarcely see more than five feet. On hands and knees to avoid being pitched over the safety railing by further explosions, he crawled toward the bridge door, tumbling inside as Brady staggered in close behind him. The bridge watch, most of them, were on the deck; the helmsman was still at the wheel, clinging to it as if to life itself. The broad, slanted windscreen had shattered, the safety glass spilling across the bridge deck like millions of tiny glass spheres. Smoke made visibility worse, if anything, inside than out.

“Johnson!” he yelled at the helmsman. “Bring her to port! Full speed!”

The helmsman gaped at him, unseeing, uncomprehending. Heaving himself up off the deck, Calvin staggered to the wheel, shoved Johnson aside, and shoved the throttles forward. He could still feel the bite of the rudder as he spun the wheel left; tankers were ponderous beasts and slow to respond to the helm, but the Falcon Patriot had enough way on that she ought to be able to get clear of the shipping channel.

Calvin had several goals in mind, all urgent. The missile or missiles had struck the Patriot’s port side; by bringing the bow to port, he could slow the flooding somewhat and possibly keep the damaged hull sections from tearing themselves apart as they plowed ahead through the water. Too, the vessel was currently in the deepest part of the navigable channel; if she sank here, salvage would be difficult at best, and her hulk would block the channel for weeks, maybe months. If he could steer her to the shoal water to the west, however, he could ground her keel on hard bottom, keeping the channel clear and also making salvage and on-site repair efforts easier.

“Mr. Brady!”

“Yes, Captain!”

“Pass the word for all hands to abandon ship.”

He could feel the pain in his ship, feel her wounds in the way she was shuddering and grinding with the turn to port. The Falcon Patriot was finished; she would break apart soon if she didn’t burn to a cinder first. His instrumentation showed that automated fire control systems were engaged, but the flames from amidships were so hot, so violent, he knew that any firefighting efforts mounted by the automatic systems or by his twenty-man crew were doomed to failure. Better to get his people off now, while they could.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Brady replied. He reached for the intercom mike.

“And Brady?”

“Sir?”

“Make sure you have a head count before you go over the side. I don’t want anybody left behind to fry!”

“Yes, sir!”

Another missile struck, the impact smashing at the bottoms of his feet through the steel deck. Damn, what was this? Someone was deliberately slamming missile after missile into his vessel! All he could imagine was that a full-fledged war had just broken out, and the Falcon Patriot was squarely in its eye.

The fire forward was so thick he could not see where they were going.

Heat was blasting back at the face of the bridge, turning the compartment into a furnace. He kept his eyes on the compass, however, bringing the ship around into a more and more westerly heading, praying that she stay afloat and responsive to the helm for just a few more precious moments…

“It’s confirmed, Commander,” Lieutenant Crosby said as he hung up the telephone handset. “At least a dozen Russian aircraft just hit the northern Bosporus bridge and dumped it in the water. The Falcon Patriot was hit and is afire. Her skipper appears to be trying to put her aground near Sariyer, but her cargo is going up in flames.”

Coyote felt a dawning horror… not just at the loss of the UNREP ship ― though that was certainly a factor ― but at what the attack meant. The Falcon Patriot had been carrying almost ten million gallons of fuel ― three million gallons of aviation gasoline, and the rest diesel fuel for the nonnuclear elements of the carrier battle group.

Without avgas, Jefferson’s aircraft would not fly. Worse, while the Jefferson, the Shiloh, and the attack subs were all nuclear powered, the battle group’s guided-missile destroyers and frigates were powered by gas turbines fired by diesel fuel. With their current stores, they could operate under normal routine for perhaps another ten days… but then the entire carrier battle group would virtually have to shut down completely. And if they found themselves in combat, making rapid surface maneuvers and flying aircraft off the roof round the clock, that ten-day leeway would be cut back to two to four days at the most.

And after that time, Jefferson and her escorts would be little more than large, expensive, and utterly useless toys, locked into the Black Sea by the closing of the Bosporus Strait.

It was impossible to escape the obvious conclusion ― that someone, Russians or Ukrainians, had just found an indirect but deadly means of rendering the CBG impotent.

“Deputy CAG?”

He turned. “What is it?”

Crosby was holding out a headset. “Sir, CAG’s on the line. Something’s going on ashore.”

Coyote felt cold. Had the attack on the Bosporus bridge been timed to coincide with an attack against the UN party ashore?

He took the headset and slipped it down over his ears. “CAG? This is Coyote! What’s happening?”

“Coyote!” Tombstone’s voice sounded distant and static rough. “There’s just been an attempt on Boychenko’s life! The Ops duty officer just told me you pulled our air cover out! What the hell’s going on?”

Oh, God, no…

“Tombstone, we’ve got trouble, big-time. We picked up a flock of bogeys heading toward the Bosporus.” Quickly, he told Tombstone about the reshuffling of the three CAP groups, explaining that BARCAP Three would be on station south of Yalta in another few minutes. “But things have already started going down,” he concluded. “We’ve just had a report that unidentified aircraft dropped the northern Bosporus bridge across the channel, and fired on one of our UNREP ships.”

“Sounds like someone doesn’t want us leaving,” Tombstone said. He sounded grim.

“That’s the way it looks. We have BARCAP One and Two investigating, but it’s going to be another few-“

“Coyote!” Crosby said. “BARCAP Two’s engaging!”

He gestured toward a speaker mounted on the bulkhead, and Coyote became aware of the crackle of voices emerging from it. “I’m closing, I’m closing with bandit India-three,” Dixie’s voice was calling. “Range seven miles!”

“Watch yourself,” another voice, the voice of the air control officer aboard the Hawkeye, warned. “You have multiple bogeys swinging in on your six.”

“Okay! Okay, I see him!” Dixie replied.

Damn. Who did he see, Coyote wondered? The guy he was chasing, or the “multiple bogeys” closing on his tail?

“Badger!” Dixie’s voice called, suddenly anxious. “Badger! Where are you?”

“Missile! Missile! Bandits have launched!”

“We confirm bandit launch at one-zero-zero-niner and thirty seconds,” one of Crosby’s officers said. “Weapons free!”

“Gotta go, Tombstone,” Coyote said into the headset’s mike. “Looks like we have a situation developing here.”

“Go take care of it. We won’t be moving until we know we have air cover.”

“We’ll keep you posted. You keep your head down, Stoney, you hear me?

The natives aren’t as friendly as we thought.”

“Roger that.” He could hear Tombstone’s grin on the other end of the radio link. “And you take care of my boys and girls! You’ve got the wing, Coyote.”

“I copy. Dog House out.”

“I’ve got one on my tail!” Dixie was calling from the bulkhead speaker.

“Break left, Dixie!” Badger replied. “Break left! Fox two!”

It sounded like Dixie and Badger had just flown smack into a full-fledged dogfight.