Afterburn

CHAPTER 24

By 0830 hours, the U.S. Marines were firmly ashore, moving onto and across the beach by a variety of means. Dozens of LVTP-7 amtracks, each carrying twenty men, churned through light surf at nine knots toward the beach. As their tracks hit sand, they lurched up out of the water like prehistoric beasts rising from the sea, grinding inland in a meticulously planned double envelopment that secured both the undefended beachhead and the refinery complex at Arsincevo. A public beach south of Kerch was designated Red Beach. Moments after dawn, LCACS ― Landing Craft Air Cushion ― howled across the surf in billowing curtains of spray, then drifted across the beach shelf over self-generated hurricanes of windblown sand. As each hovercraft settled down onto collapsing rubber skirts, bow and stern ramps dropped to disgorge twenty-four troops or as many as four vehicles. The first amtracks growled ashore at 0750 hours, just twenty minutes after sunrise.

Overhead, Marine helos clattered through the air, racing inland to touch down and disgorge Marine strike teams at key points around the tank farm and the naval base. Marine Harrier jets and Cobra gunships joined with the F/A-18 Hornets off the Jefferson to hit the Kerch airfield and various military facilities all over the eastern end of the peninsula. Others were precision-blasted by cruise missiles launched from the carrier group’s attack subs, a storm of robotic killers droning in on stub wings to seek out SAM sites, radar complexes, command posts, communications centers, and even individual vehicles with deadly precisionist accuracy. Larger or more dispersed targets were hit repeatedly by A-6 Intruders of VA-84 and VA-89, flying mission after low-level mission off the Jefferson.

These attacks, particularly the air attacks, were not intended to destroy all opposition. Indeed, the strike planners had recognized early on that there were simply too many targets to hope for a clean sweep. Rather, they had been designed to throw the defenders into disorganized confusion for a critical several hours, isolating them from outside communications, and misleading them as to the exact scope and target of the Marine incursion.

Since the 1970s, U.S. Marine doctrine had stressed the MAGTF concept, or Marine Air-Ground Task Force, as a means of providing combined arms ― sea, air, and land ― at all levels of Marine unit deployment. The largest MAGTF unit was the Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, which consisted of an entire Marine division, an aircraft wing, and ancillary support units, with a total of over fifty thousand Navy and Marine Corps personnel deployed from a task force consisting of about fifty amphibious ships. The recent operation in the Kola Peninsula had been carried out by II MEF.

Next in size and complexity was the Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which deployed fifteen thousand Marines and six hundred seventy naval personnel ― not counting the ships’ crews ― from twenty-one to twenty-six amphibious ships. It consisted of a Regimental Landing Team, a reinforced aircraft group, and support units.

Smallest of the deployable MAGTF units in the Marine Corps was the MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, composed of a Battalion Landing Team, a reinforced helicopter squadron, and an MEU Service Support Group. Total strength, not counting the Navy crews of its four to six amphibious operations ships, totaled 2,150 Marines and 116 Navy personnel. Colonel Winston Howell commanded MEU-25’s ground forces.

Twenty-five-hundred-odd men was not much of an invasion force, but they had the advantages of speed and surprise, backed by the tremendous sheer firepower of CVBG-14. MEU-25 had shifted position during the night, keeping pace with the fast-moving carrier group. The LPH Guadalcanal, the LHA Saipan ― only recently detached from service with II MEF ― and the LPD Shreveport made up the core of the naval half of the MEU, together with several other amphibious vessels, a scattering of supply ships, two Perry-class frigates, and the guided-missile destroyer Isaiah Robinson. Another advantage was the wing of twenty CH-53A Super Stallions. Normally, an MEU included only four of the smaller CH-53E Sea Stallions, relying for most of their air-mobile needs on twelve of the older CH-46 Sea Knights. The helicopter carrier Guadalcanal had been recently attached to MEU-25, however, specifically to carry out the Marines’ mission in Georgia, and the Super Stallions aboard were a welcome addition to an operation that in most other areas was already feeling the pinch of limited supplies and assets.

The air attacks on various Russian installations had been continuing since well before 0500 hours. The first heliborne troops were disembarking at a dozen different locations half an hour before sunrise. By the time the amtracks were coming ashore, the most stubborn defenses had already been overrun or neutralized. Resistance was fierce in spots, but only briefly. When a pillbox or heavy weapons site pinned down an advancing Marine party, Cobra gunships or Harrier jump jets would appear within minutes, blasting the site with Hellfire missiles, Zuni rockets, and high-speed 30mm rotary cannon fire.

In most areas, the Russian defenders had fled the fire and death raining from the predawn skies. Marines entered the outskirts of the Kerch naval base on foot at just past 0830 hours to find it deserted, with half a dozen guided-missile corvettes and patrol boats, a couple of armed tugs, and a Riga-class frigate, all of them aflame or already settled into the dark, shallow waters of the port, as oil-black smoke stained the blue morning sky.

Throughout the landing area, prisoners were rounded up and interrogated.

Morale among the defenders, it turned out, was low, though a few elite naval infantry troops were defiant and possessed undeniably high spirits.

Navy and Marine Corps public affairs officers had already characterized the landings, however, as “meeting little opposition” and “suffering only very minor casualties,” all in all a “remarkably clean and uncomplicated, surgically precise strike.”

Tombstone lay flattened in a pool of near-liquid mud, face-down, hands clasped over his head, as the ground beneath him bucked and rocked. Thunder passed, caressing him; he looked up and saw smoke boiling into the sky.

“Goddamn it, Matt!” Pamela screamed from her patch of mud a few feet away. “Tell them we’re on their side!”

“Rule number one of combat, miss,” Chief Geiger growled from close by.

“Friendly fire isn’t.”

Slowly, Tombstone rose to his knees, staring after the departing aircraft in time to see sunlight flash from the wings of the two A-6 Intruders that had just spilled an avalanche of high explosives ― a “force package” in the sterile lexicon of official reports ― across the top of the ridge.

There was nothing, nothing more demoralizing in warfare than being attacked by your own side.

Rising unsteadily from the mud, he jogged toward the smoke. Boychenko was there, pointing and giving orders as Russian soldiers trotted toward the crest of the ridge. Several vehicles had been hit on the road and were burning furiously, including, he noticed, the ACN van. Oh, God, no…

But there were no bodies, no screaming wounded. He spotted PO/2 Kardesh standing near the general. “Natalie!” he called. “Anybody hit in that attack?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so, sir! But the general asked me whose side those Intruders were on. He says some of the men are a little shaken by that attack!”

“I can believe that.” Fortunately for the rebel column and its American auxiliaries, the Intruders had dumped their load on the vehicles, which had been standing empty along the Kerch Road, on the west side of the ridge.

“Tell him he’s got to get the panels out!” Tombstone told her.

“I did! He said this ridge is too exposed, that we have to try moving closer to the refinery. Otherwise, we’re going to get flanked up here.”

“God save us from military geniuses.”

Natalie blinked at him. “Pardon, sir?”

He hadn’t realized he’d muttered the thought aloud. “Never mind. Come on. Translate for me.”

Tombstone could hear the sound of the ground battle developing up ahead, on the east side of the ridge, a sharp rattling and cracking of automatic weapons. As they reached General Boychenko, he was conferring with several of his officers. He looked up from a map as Tombstone and Natalie approached. “Ah, Captain Magruder,” he said, raking Tombstone with his eyes. “You… are one of us now, da?” He added something in Russian, and his officers chuckled.

Tombstone looked down at his full dress uniform ruefully, now so coated with mud that he was very nearly as well camouflaged as the Spetsnaz troops in their camo fatigues. Both of his shoulder boards with their four broad gold stripes were gone, and he’d pocketed his medals during the drive from Yalta. His uniform was no longer blue, but a smeared mix of black and clay-brown. It felt as though his face were probably colored the same way.

“General,” Tombstone said. “if you don’t get those marker panels out, we’re going to be one big, happy bull’s-eye on top of this hill.” During his planning session with Coyote, they’d agreed that cloth ground panels ― parachute material or canvas or whatever else could be scavenged for the purpose ― would be laid out in the shape of large Vs, visible from the air, identifying Boychenko’s column. If there’d been time, he would have insisted that Vs be painted on the vehicles as well, but they’d been on the move, on the run, really, all night.

And now it was too late. He was just glad no ACN people had been in that van when the Intruders had struck.

Natalie translated, then gave Tombstone Boychenko’s reply. “He wants to know if we aren’t in communication with our ships.”

“Tell him yes, we are, but things are pretty confused out there right now. With so many planes in the sky, it’s hard to coordinate. All of these ridges up here look pretty much the same from the air.”

Boychenko nodded. “We are… how you say? Stuck.” He pointed to the map, then told Natalie something in Russian.

“He says that an armored force coming out of Kerch has spread out along the east side of this ridge.” She pointed to the map. “Here… and here. Between us and the port. He says they’re naval infantry.”

“Morskaya Pekhota,” Boychenko added for emphasis, making a face. “Like American Marines. Good soldiers.”

“He says the lead elements of his column have been skirmishing with them for several minutes now. That’s what the gunfire is, over the top of the ridge. He says there’s no way to go through, and he doesn’t think we can go around. He wants to know if helicopters can come here to pick us up.”

Tombstone looked up. Contrails were twisting wildly through the sky high overhead. One contrail ended in a fleecy white puff, from which a black streak emerged, arrowing downward toward the sea.

“Not until we have air superiority,” he replied. “And probably not until we do something about that naval infantry. The helos can’t touch down if they’re under heavy fire from the ground.”

Boychenko looked grim as Natalie passed on Tombstone’s assessment. A moment later, she told him the general’s reply. “He says… he says he hopes we can use rifles as well as aircraft, because we’re in the infantry now. He cannot promise us a way through to the beach.”

On the other side of the ridge, to the east, the crackle of small arms fire was increasing.

In the skies over Kerch and Arsincevo, the real battle was beginning to take shape. As Tomcats and Hornets flew constant patrols, shielding the Marine landings, the ships offshore, and the attack and support aircraft that were backing up the landings, two major groups of Russian aircraft approached, one from the north, coming in low across the Sea of Azov, the other from the west, bursting across the Crimean Mountains and streaking straight for the fleet gathered in the shallow gulf between the Crimea and the Caucasus.

The Americans struck the first blow in the aerial engagement, loosing their AIM-54C Phoenix missiles while the enemy was still eighty miles away. The survivors pressed on, however, their numbers only somewhat thinned.

At 0840 hours, the Russian aircraft, now numbering about forty, mostly Mig-27 Floggers and Mig-29 Fulcrums, hit the wall of American fighters ― a total of sixteen Tomcats and fourteen Hornets flying in four squadrons. Marines on the ground looked up in something like awe as white contrails crawled and scratched across the sky, etching out twists and turns and occasional deadly plunges toward the earth on smoke trails turned black.

The twisted mass of contrails thickened, swiftly tangling into what aviators referred to as a furball.

In the skies above the Kerch Peninsula, aircraft and men were dying.

So far, the information supplied by the Russians through Captain Magruder had proven accurate. South of the naval base facilities at Kerch, and just offshore from the tank farm and refinery complex at Arsincevo, an enormous offshore fueling dock was connected to the shore by a bridge and a massive bundle of petroleum loading lines. The dock approaches had been carefully checked by the frigate Leslie, making certain that the shipping channels were clear and deep enough for the supercarrier’s ponderous draft. Two hours earlier, a shore party of fuel handlers from the Air Wing’s V-4 Division ― ”grapes” in Navy parlance, because they wore purple jerseys during flight deck operations ― together with a security detail of Marines off the Jefferson, had boarded the offshore dock and begun readying it for fueling operations.

Commander Tom Hadley stood on the starboard side of the Jefferson’s bridge, looking down at the fueling dock… and out across the water beyond to the shoreline a mile away. This was the key moment in Operation Ranger, the whole point of the raid, and the time when the huge carrier was at her most vulnerable. He’d brought her into the narrow waters between the Taman and Kerch Peninsulas, facing south with her starboard side toward the landing beaches to the west. The shore party was hooking up the fueling lines now, swaying the ends up to Jefferson’s starboard fuel ports and locking them home. A Seabee crew ashore had already identified the storage tanks containing high-octane aviation gasoline, while Lieutenant Commander Volkwein, senior officer of V-4, had pronounced the avgas “sweet” and up to Jefferson’s demanding standards.

Now all they had to do was pump nearly three million gallons ― about nine thousand tons ― of the highly flammable stuff on board.

All flight deck operations had been suspended, of course, and the smoking lamp was out throughout the ship. More worrisome, Hadley had ordered the automatic fire control computers for Jefferson’s three CIWS defense systems switched to standby mode. If something triggered the Close-in Weapons System’s radar-linked computer while it was on active, it would acquire the target and open fire by itself within two seconds, loosing a stream of depleted uranium shells at a buzz-sawing fifty rounds per second… and possibly ignite the gasoline fumes spilling from the carrier’s starboard side.

That meant, however, that for the critical thirty minutes or so necessary for the transfer of fuel from shore to carrier, the Jefferson would be relying solely on its fighter cover for defense from enemy aircraft.

Of course, the carrier always relied on her aircraft as her first and primary line of defense; CIWS, pronounced “sea-whiz” in Navy-speak, was strictly a last-ditch defense against missiles or aircraft that had “leaked” through the outer defensive perimeters and approached to within fifteen hundred yards of the carrier. But this close inshore, this close to the battle, with a defensive perimeter as tight and as restricted as this one, they were taking a terrible chance.

Hadley paced the bridge, anxiously watching the sky.

Dixie couldn’t see the enemy plane yet, but he could follow the symbol marking it on his HUD, shifting from left to right as the other pilot tried to position himself for a launch.

Tomcat 216 was momentarily alone; Tomboy and Hacker in 207 had dropped back a few miles, deploying in a “loose goose” formation that gave the defense maximum flexibility. The attackers, as nearly as Dixie could tell, weren’t even employing wingman tactics. Possibly, the volley of Phoenix missiles had so broken up the approaching formations that only scattered, individual aircraft were left.

“Damn!” Cat said from the backseat. “This bastard’s taking us head-to-head! Range five miles!”

“Going for Sidewinder,” Dixie said, flipping a selector switch. He still had two Phoenix missiles left from his original four, but he wanted to save those for a difficult shot or longer-ranged targets. The AIM-9L was an all-aspect heatseeker, meaning he didn’t have to be looking up the target’s tailpipes in order to get a solid lock. Still, head shots were risky, and in more ways than one. Since the target gave off far less heat from its forward aspects than from its tail, it was always easier to elude an incoming heatseeker by dropping flares.

“Range three miles!” Cat warned. They were closing rapidly.

He heard the warble in his headset, indicating a heatseeker lock. “I’ve got him!” Dixie yelled. “Fox two!”

Major Yevgenni Sergeivich Ivanov had been holding his Mig-27M steady, angling toward the oncoming American aircraft until he saw the flash of its launch, just three miles ahead. There was no buzzing tone warning of a radar lock, so the incoming missile had to be a heatseeker. He held steady for another three beats, then pulled back sharply on the stick, going into a steep, twisting climb as he triggered a string of flares. At twelve thousand feet, he flipped the Mig over onto its back, dropping out of a perfect Immelmann that put him well above the American, and slightly to the right. From here, looking down on the enemy, he let his port-side AA-8 Aphid missile “see” the F-14’s heat plume and triggered the launch.

As soon as the Aphid slid off the launch rail, Ivanov rolled hard to the left, trading altitude for speed as he plummeted toward the sea far below.

While the American was dealing with the heatseeker, perhaps he could slip through down on the deck.

“We missed,” Cat said. “He suckered us with a flare.”

“I’m going after him,” Dixie said. His heart was pounding, his breath coming in short, hard gasps behind his oxygen mask.

“Watch it, Dix!” Cat warned. “He’s launched!”

“I see it!” Dixie adjusted his course slightly, angling straight toward the oncoming missile, holding steady for an agonizing three seconds… then cutting back on his throttle while simultaneously popping flares.

Another few seconds passed, and then the missile streaked past, a hundred feet off; there was a loud thump from astern as the AA-8’s proximity fuse detonated the warhead, but no indication of damage. Dixie rolled hard to port, pulling the F-14’s nose around, centrifugal force mashing him down into his seat as he whipped around through sixty degrees of the compass. He’d lost sight of the other plane.

Now where the hell?..

“Tomboy, this is Dixie! Where are you?”

“About five miles behind you, at base plus five.” That put her at eight thousand feet, slightly above 216.

“We just missed a Flogger coming through the line. Did you see him?”

“Negative on that, but we’ll keep an eye out.”

“Rog.” He thought the Flogger must have dived; that’s what he would have done in that situation ― give the opposition something to think about, then head for the deck, where the ground clutter might hide him from enemy search radar. “I think he’s on the deck. What’s your warload, now?”

“We’re down to one AIM-9,” Tomboy replied. “We’re empty on the 54s.”

“Shit. Okay. If you spot him, coordinate with Cat. We have two Phoenixes left, and maybe we can take him if you can spot him.”

“I COPY.”

Dixie pulled into a turn, giving Cat a chance to probe the entire area with the F-14’s AWG-9, as well as to query the Hawkeyes that were orbiting further south, outside of the main battle area. The AWG-9 had the impressive capability known as “look down-shoot down,” meaning it could pick a target out from the background clutter even when it was mingled with returns from the sea or ground. But Cat would need time to narrow her beam and carry out a search.

The problem, he reflected, in fighting a major engagement in such a tightly confined area was that you didn’t have much of a second chance against leakers. Once they slipped past you, they were into your inner defensive zone in minutes or seconds, and then it could well be too late.

They had to find that Flogger, and fast!

Major Ivanov had pulled out of his dive a scant five hundred feet above the sea, then dropped even lower, skimming above the fuel tank farm of Arsincevo at an altitude of less than fifty meters. He swung left, avoiding the fractionating towers of the refinery. Directly ahead, the sea was crawling with ships, boats, and the odd-looking tracked vehicles the American Marines used as landing craft.

There were targets there… tempting targets, but Ivanov was after bigger game. He’d already noted the position of the biggest game of all, a big, fat aircraft carrier slipping in close to the fueling dock off Kerch.

He was carrying two AS-7 air-to-surface missiles under his Mig’s wings, the kind of big, ugly ship-killers that NATO called “Kerry.” If he could slip that pair of ship-killing one-hundred-kilogram warheads into a carrier while it was taking on fuel…

And he was now well inside the Americans’ fighter envelope. It was certainly worth a try.

“Got him!” Cat called. “He slipped past us after he popped that Aphid.”

“Where is he?”

“Down on the deck, like you said. Bearing zero-five-five. Shit!”

“What?”

“He’s locking onto the Jeff!”

“Guide me onto him, Cat. We’ve got to take him down!”

“Right. Tomboy, this is Cat. You copy?”

“Cat, Tomboy.” Her voice sounded strained, as though she were enduring a high-G turn. “Copy.”

“Tomboy, we’ve spotted our leaker.” Cat gave her the coordinates of the Flogger that had broken past. “It looks like he’s trying for a radar lock on the Jefferson!”

“Okay, Hacker and I’ve got him. You’re a little closer, though, and I need a minute to lock him with my Sidewinder.”

“Just cover us, Tomboy,” Dixie said, “in case we miss this one. We’re not getting another chance!”

Range three miles ― practically point-blank ― and if that carrier was taking on fuel, as Ivanov thought it must be, the detonation of two antiship warheads ought to send up a fireball powerful enough to shake the dachas at Yalta.

He heard the tone of radar lock, and his thumb came down on the firing switch. There was a hard bump as the first four-hundred-kilogram Kerry dropped free, its solid fuel motor igniting. Instantly, Ivanov locked with the second missile. Fire!

Two ship-killers accelerated to Mach 1 in seconds, streaking across the sea toward the helpless supercarrier.