Afterburn

CHAPTER 19

The bandits had dropped out of nowhere, it seemed, coming in between Dixie and the now-distant Jefferson, their approach masked by jamming and the confusion of the moment.

“Break left, Dixie!” Badger yelled in his earphones. “Break left!! Fox two!”

The cry Fox two warned that Badger had just released a heatseeking Sidewinder missile; his order to break left meant either that he was trying to set up a shot, with Dixie pulling the bad guy into position when he swung left, or that any other maneuver might expose Dixie’s hot exhaust to the Sidewinder… and break its lock on the bandit with some rather serious consequences for Dixie.

Hauling back and to the left on his stick, he pushed the rudder over and dragged the Tomcat around in a hard turn to port. Sea and sky tilted on end, and both he and Mickey began grunting heavily, fighting against the rapid buildup of G-forces in their lower bodies. As his F-14 came around through nearly 180 degrees, he caught a glimpse of his pursuer, a black, winged speck a mile and a half behind him, reaching hard to match his turn.

“I see the missile!” Mickey yelled. “I see it! Coming in at seven o’clock! Pop flares!”

“I’m on it.” Dixie hit the flare release, spilling a line of white-hot flares to confuse the incoming heatseeker. A moment later, the missile streaked past, flashing beneath the Tomcat’s belly and off to the right.

“Suckered him!” Dixie yelled.

“Who are these guys?” Mickey wondered, twisting in his seat to get a better look at the other aircraft.

“Don’t know,” Dixie said. He kept the stick hard over, maintaining a steady eight Gs of acceleration in the turn. “Where the hell is Badger?”

“There. Nine o’clock, coming in on the bandit’s six.”

“Thank God. “Badger missed. That bandit’s popping flares, too.”

“Let’s see if we can help.” Leveling off at ten thousand feet, Dixie sent the Tomcat arrowing back toward the other aircraft.

The bandit was coming toward them, nose on. They only had a second in which to register each detail as it flashed past, but Dixie recognized the bandit as soon as he could make out its twin stabilizer configuration and the widely separated engine nacelles. Back in fighter school, he’d studied silhouettes, films, and photos of all possible aggressor aircraft, and he knew that one well.

Mig-29, “Fulcrum” in the NATO code list of hostile aircraft. A deadly aircraft, capable of Mach 2.23 at high altitude, of climbing fifty thousand feet in one minute, of out-turning, out-climbing, and outmaneuvering nearly every combat aircraft in the Western arsenal.

Moments later, Badger’s gray Tomcat approached, still trailing the bandit, wings folded back like those of a stooping eagle. Mickey had five more bandits on radar within twelve miles, closing fast, and plenty more within a thirty-mile radius. “Hey, Dixie!” he said. “We’ve got bandits all over the sky! I’m not sure I like these odds!”

“You wanna go to Phoenix, man?”

“Damn, I don’t know.” They had weapons free, but the big Phoenix missiles were long-range, standoff weapons, designed to knock down attackers threatening the battle group. The strategic situation was still murky; just who was attacking whom here?

“Hey, Mickey! You get a good look at that red bird we passed?”

“Sure did, Dixie. Mig two-seven, no bout a-doubt it.”

“Pass the word to ‘em back at the farm, will you? I don’t think they’ll believe me.”

“I think they’ll believe this one, Dixie. Only question is, was it a Russki or a Uke?”

“I couldn’t see a rounder or a star, could you?”

“Negative. He was going too fast.”

Damn. It was frustrating to be in combat with someone… and to not even know who it was you were fighting! The assumption back aboard Jefferson ― both in the briefings and in the bull sessions in the squadron ready room ― had been that the likely aggressors today, if indeed anybody came out to play, would be Ukrainians bent on jumping the gun on the Russians before Boychenko turned the Crimea over to the UN.

The aggressor aircraft appeared to be forming up in a loose-knit cloud to the west now, moving in a more or less northerly direction. As Dixie studied the pattern on his Vertical Display Indicator, he had the impression that he was looking at essentially a defensive formation, that the attacks he and Badger had endured had been launched by hostile barrier forces to keep them from breaking through to the main body.

“BARCAP Two! BARCAP Two! This is Dog House!”

“Yeah! Go ahead, Dog House!”

“We’re reading at least ten bogeys in your vicinity! Break off! Break off and RTB. Repeat, break off and RTB!”

“First sensible advice I’ve heard all day,” Dixie said over the tactical channel. “It’s gettin’ too damned crowded out here!”

“Roger that!” Badger’s voice came back.

A warbling tone sounded in his headset. Threat warning!

“Hey, Dixie!” Mickey called from the backseat. “They’ve got us painted!”

“I hear it.” That particular warning chirp ― and a red light winking on the threat display on his instrument panel indicated that a hostile aircraft had just established a radar lock on their Tomcat.

“Okay, Dixie,” Badger called. “The bandits’ve got missiles inbound at three-zero-two… looks like AA-9s. You got ‘em on your scope?”

“We have them,” Mickey replied. “Range… two-five miles.”

“Yeah, I think they just popped those things to scare us,” Red Burns said from Badger’s backseat.

“They’re doing a hell of a job,” Mickey said. “Let’s didi out of here, man!”

“I’m with you, brother.” Dixie brought the stick over again, swinging the Tomcat into a northeasterly course… back toward the Jefferson.

AA-9 Amos was the NATO designation for the Russian equivalent to the Navy’s AIM-54 Phoenix, a large missile with a range of at least eighty miles and active radar homing.

“What’s the range on the missiles, Mickey?”

“Nine miles.” The RIO sounded tight, and totally focused on his rear-seat console display. “Let’s go to burner.”

“Zone five, now!”

The Tomcat’s twin afterburners kicked Dixie hard in the back. The aircraft’s computer swung the wings all the way back as they passed Mach 1.5. Moments later they slipped past Mach 2; the Tomcat’s maximum speed at high altitude ― say, at forty thousand feet ― was Mach 2.34. At their current altitude of twelve thousand feet, the air was denser and sound traveled faster; Mach 2 was about the best that they could manage.

The AA-9 had a speed of about Mach 3.5, so there was no outrunning the thing in the short run. The long run was something else again, however. At Mach 3.5, the missile would cover nine miles in something like twelve seconds, but its speed relative to the Tomcat was only Mach 1.5 ― eleven hundred miles per hour, give or take a bit, at this altitude. At a closing speed of eleven hundred miles per hour, the missile would eat up that nine miles in about thirty seconds… a small eternity when it came to combat in the air.

“You got an idea about who they’re hunting?” Dixie asked. Likeliest, of course, was that one missile had been tossed at Tomcat 218, and another at 210.

“One’s definitely got our name on it,” Mickey said. “I think the other one’s tracking Badger.”

“Fun for everyone,” Badger said. “Fun the whole family can enjoy!”

“Yeah, well, it’s time to start partying,” Mickey said. “Dixie! On my call, break right hard! I’ll release the chaff!”

“Roger that.” He tightened his grip on the stick, trying to ignore the unsettling prickling sensation at the back of his neck. There was a terrible temptation to turn in his seat and try to see the incoming missile, but Mickey had a much clearer and surer picture of what was going on showing on his rear-seat display.

Range was down to one mile. Three seconds…

“Popping chaff!” Mickey yelled. “Break right.”

Chaff could be released both from the front seat and the back. Mickey was dumping clouds of aluminized mylar slivers to leave Dixie free to concentrate on the turn. Reacting at an almost instinctive level to Mickey’s call, Dixie hauled the stick right and kicked in the rudder, diving with the turn in order to pick up a critical bit of extra speed.

The G-forces piled on, crushing Dixie down against the hard back and bottom of his seat. For just a moment, his vision narrowed slightly, the only warning he was likely to get of the blackout he would suffer if he didn’t ease up a little. He held the turn as long as he could, willing the missile to miss them. By turning into the missile, he was using its greater speed to defeat it, since it could not turn at Mach 3.5 as sharply as he could turn at Mach 2. The chaff gave it a choice of radar-bright targets, enough to confuse its microchip brain and maybe give Dixie and Mickey an extra second or so to break out of the cone of its radar vision.

The explosion jolted Dixie as hard as kicking in the afterburners had, a solid thump from aft and left, accompanied by a piercing note, like the ricochet on a TV Western. For a moment, the controls went soft and he was afraid that they’d gone dead… but then he felt them biting the air again. He scanned his threat warning panel. No fires… no flameouts… no electrical failures. Christ, what had just happened?

“Mickey! You got any damage readouts?”

There was no answer from the backseat.

“Mickey! Yo! What’s happening back there?”

He checked the small rearview mirror, then twisted in his seat, trying to see aft, but the layout of the F-14 cockpit was such that it was almost impossible for the front-seat man to see his RIO, with his own ejection seat back and the RIO’s instrument panel between them. If Mickey was slumped down or forward…

“Mickey!”

Still no answer. He turned again in his seat, this time trying to check both wings and his stabilizers. Yeah… they’d taken some shrapnel, all right. The trailing edge of his left wing was showing some pretty bad damage; the inboard high lift flap was shredded, and there was damage both to the spoilers and the maneuver flaps as well. Three thin, smoky white streams from beneath the center of his wing were almost certainly avgas leaking from his port wing tank. He was conscious now of a shrill whistle, the sound that all combat aviators recognize at once as air escaping from their pressurized cockpit.

“Dixie, this is Badger! Do you copy?”

“Yeah.” He blinked behind his helmet visor. Things had happened so quickly that he was a little surprised to find that statement true. “Yeah, Badger, I’m here. I think we got a little shot up. And Mickey’s not answering.”

“Hang on. We’ll be there, in a sec.”

“What about the other missile?”

“It’s gone.” Dixie could hear the relief in Badger’s voice. “We outran the sucker.”

AA-9s packed enough solid fuel to give them a flight time of about two minutes. If the target aircraft could stay ahead of it until its fuel was exhausted, the missile would fall into the sea.

“What’s the gouge? Where’re the bad guys?”

“I think we’re clear. Batman and Libbie’ll be here in a few minutes.

I’ve got you in sight now. Coming up on your five.”

“The damage is on my port side,” Dixie told him. “I think I’m losing fuel from the left wing.”

“On your six and low. Coming around to port. Yeah, buddy. Looks like you took a near one. No blast damage, but your belly and left wing got peppered by shrapnel. So did your left stabilizer. Looks to me like it missed you, but the proximity fuse triggered the thing right under your wing.”

Looking left, he could see Tomcat 210 coming up from behind, just off his wingtip.

“Can you see Mickey?”

“We see him,” Red replied. “Head’s slumped forward a bit. Can’t tell from here how bad he’s hit.”

“Is his oxygen mask on?” Dixie was worried about the pressure loss in the cockpit.

“It’s on,” Red told him.

“How’s she handling, Dix?” Badger added.

“Okay, I think.” Cautiously, he played with his stick, testing the feedback. “I get a bit of flutter when I try giving it some left maneuver flap.”

“Okay,” Badger said. “Let’s not try anything fancy. We’ll escort you back, nice and easy. You can punch out when you’re close to the Jeff.”

“Not if Mickey’s still out of it,” Dixie said, determination giving his voice a hard edge.

“Right. Shit, I wasn’t thinking. Okay, Dix. Let’s come to zero-five-five, and maintain four hundred knots.”

“Copy, Badge. Zero-five-five at four-zero-zero.”

“Let’s take ‘er home.”

Tombstone was alighting from the CH-53 helicopter when he heard the thunder of approaching aircraft. At first, he thought it might be BARCAP Three, which Coyote had told him was coming, but then he realized that the sound seemed to be coming from the Crimean Mountains from north of Yalta.

The sound might be an echo. Sound did strange things between sea and Mountainside. But too many strange things were happening this afternoon for him to be willing to take chances. He waved at the helicopter’s crew, gesturing for them to get out of their aircraft and take cover. After a moment’s hesitation, they scrambled out, and together the men started running toward the White Palace.

The jets appeared with almost magical abruptness, howling in from the mountains, passing above the White Palace complex at an altitude of less than two hundred feet. The planes were so low that Tombstone could look up and see individual pilots, could see the sun-glint of canopies and dark visors, could see the numerals painted on their noses and the prominent red stars on stabilizers and wings.

Mig-29 Fulcrums. Some of the best fighter planes in Russia’s inventory.

Dropping down a shallow embankment that might offer some cover if the Migs started dropping nasty stuff, Tombstone stared after the jets. They were breaking formation now, far out over the sea. He glanced at his watch. BARCAP Three wouldn’t be in their patrol position yet. He didn’t think the Migs were headed for the carrier. Where…

Yes. Two of them were swinging around in a full one-eighty, streaking back toward the White Palace. They came in low, wingtips almost touching; he saw the flicker of their rotary cannon, tucked away at the root of their port-side wings, before he heard the shrill whine of high-speed gunfire above the thunder of their strafing run.

An explosion sounded an instant later, a dull boom echoing from the improvised landing pad on the east side of the palace. The incoming jets lifted slightly, white vapor blossoming off their wings in the moist air as they increased their angles of attack… and then they were howling overhead, rising swiftly as they climbed the face of the mountains inland. A missile streaked into the sky after them, trailing smoke ― a Grail or other shoulder-launched antiair missile released by one of the soldiers on the ground ― but it had been fired too late… or possibly without a firm heat source lock, and it twisted away after a few seconds of flight.

Rising from his hiding place, Tombstone jogged back toward the helicopter. As he’d feared, the Sea Stallion had been the target of that strafing run. It rested at a sharp angle now, with flames and black smoke licking from its port-side fuel tank sponson. If there’d been any doubt at all that those Migs were hostiles, it was gone now.

There was still a lot of confusion on the palace grounds, with civilians and reporters milling about with aimless and seemingly random blunderings, and Russian soldiers standing in almost comic attitudes of readiness, obviously with no idea what was happening or what they were supposed to do. First the attack on Boychenko, and now this. The entire area was a scene of utter confusion.

Pushing through the crowds, Tombstone made his way toward the back of the White Palace. He could see Boychenko standing there at the top of the broad stone steps, surrounded by aides and guards, hands at his sides, looking up with an almost boyish expression of slack-jawed wonder as six Migs roared overhead. Tombstone walked closer and several of the guards swung their weapons to aim at him.

Boychenko gestured sharply and snapped something in Russian. The guns were lowered.

“General!” Tombstone called. “Were those planes yours?”

The general looked at him and blinked. “Nyet… no,” he said. “Not mine. Is navy.”

“You didn’t order that overflight by those Migs?”

“No. Did not… order.” His face creased with puzzlement. “They attack!”

“General, hostile aircraft have just attacked one of the bridges over the Bosporus and blown it up. Did you order that attack?”

Boychenko blinked helplessly at him a moment, and Tombstone wondered how much English the man could really understand. Then the general shook his head, a jerky side-to-side motion. Probably, Tombstone thought, he understood English better than he could speak it. “Did not order that! No!”

Boychenko gestured swiftly to Natalie Kardesh and spoke rapidly to her in Russian. She turned to Tombstone. “The general wants me to ask you… did you just say that his aircraft attacked the bridges over the Bosporus?”

“Tell him yes. We don’t know yet if the aircraft were Russian or Ukrainian.” He jerked a thumb skyward. “That overflight, though, was by aircraft with red stars. Russians. The general says they were navy?”

“Mig-29s with fleet,” Boychenko said, nodding. He didn’t look happy.

“Admiral Dmitriev’s command.”

“Ask him,” he told Natalie, “if it’s possible that the Russian navy could have been behind that attempt on his life? Or Dmitriev?”

“Is possible,” Boychenko said slowly, following the conversation.

One of Boychenko’s aides, a major named Fedorev, nodded agreement. “I’m afraid that with Admiral Dmitriev, almost anything is possible. He is… ambitious.”

Tombstone was beginning to fit the larger parts of the puzzle together, but he was still missing a lot of the pieces. This had the earmarks of an attempted coup. If this Admiral Dmitriev was trying to take over the Crimean Military District, it might make sense to combine an assassination attempt with an attack.

But why the Bosporus bridge? That made no sense at all… unless they wanted the Jefferson and her consorts trapped in the Black Sea, and somehow that made even less sense than the attack itself.

He cocked his head. “Tell me. Is this Admiral Dmitriev… is his full name Nikolai Sergeivich?”

Fedorev nodded. “Yes, Captain. How did you know?”

“I flew with a Nikolai Sergeivich once. In joint operations in the Indian Ocean. I was wondering if it was the same man.” The Nikolai Dmitriev he’d known had been a hard, resourceful, and skillful tactician. If he were now the enemy… Tombstone didn’t like that thought at all.

“The helicopter’s totaled,” Tombstone said. “We’re not getting back to the carrier that way.”

Fedorev wrinkled his brow. “”Totaled?’”

“Wrecked. Finished. We have several hundred UN and American military personnel here, plus a bunch of civilian reporters from several countries. What are we going to do about them?”

Natalie consulted briefly with Boychenko, then nodded at Tombstone.

“The general says that when they know just what Dmitriev is up to, we will be informed. Until then, at least, and obviously, we are all the general’s guests. We can stay here at the palace, or return to Yalta.”

“Somehow,” he said, “I don’t think that’s going to be good enough. If it was Dmitriev who tried to knock the general off here, he must know by now that he didn’t succeed.”

That, in fact, was the best explanation Tombstone could think of for the attack on the helicopter. Abdulhalik had said the would-be assassins were Tatars; had they killed Boychenko, the murder could have been blamed on Tatar nationalists. There would have been watchers, however, who would have reported by now that Boychenko was still alive. The air strike had probably been set as a backup plan, a way of keeping the general from escaping Yalta for the relative security of the Thomas Jefferson.

But that meant that hostiles were probably already on their way to finish the job the Tatars had botched.

“Tell the general,” Tombstone said, “that we don’t have much time. I’m going to round up the Americans and UN people. Tell him to get his army personnel assembled. I figure we have an hour, maybe less, before all hell breaks loose.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir,” the aide, Fedorev, said, as Natalie spoke to the general. His use of the honorific was immediate and natural, unthinking. “Is there anything special you need?”

“Access to a radio,” Tombstone replied. “I’d better talk this over with the Jefferson.”

He was beginning to formulate an idea, but he couldn’t develop it further until he knew what was happening at sea.

One thing he did know: The Jefferson battle group and the men and women aboard were in a war zone once again, and God help anyone who tried to get in their way!