Afterburn

CHAPTER 25

“He’s launched!” Cat yelled. “One… no, two cruise missiles, in the air!”

“He’s fired on the Jefferson,” Tomboy echoed over the tactical channel.

“Cat! Take them!”

Dixie yanked his thumb off the firing button that would have released one of his two remaining Phoenix missiles. In the backseat, Cat wiped the lock they’d just achieved on the Russian Flogger and was shifting instead to the two tiny, fast-moving blips streaking out in front of the Mig.

The AIM-54C ― together with the Tomcat’s AWG-9 radar-fire control system ― had been designed with two specific missions in mind. One was the standoff intercept, allowing the Tomcat to target and kill enemy aircraft approaching from a range of 120 nautical miles. The other, however, was dictated by the ever-changing requirements of modern naval warfare. Cruise missiles ― large, relatively slow, but extremely deadly ship-killers like the AS-7 Kerry ― had emerged during the past decades as the single deadliest threat to surface ships. The Phoenix and the look down-shoot down AWG-9 had been designed with the express capability of tracking and destroying large missiles in flight.

But with the high speeds and short response times that characterized modern warfare, success or failure often hinged on one man’s reactions, on his experience, on his training, and on his ability to separate a great deal of confusing, even conflicting information, analyze it, and do the right thing instantly.

Dixie didn’t have to think it through; he couldn’t. Traveling at the speed of sound, the AS-7s would travel the three miles to the Jefferson in just over thirteen seconds. He was five miles from the Flogger ― a flight time of a hair under five seconds for a Phoenix ― but in five seconds, the Kerrys would have traveled almost half the distance to the carrier. Dixie had less time than that to decide that the Kerry missiles had to be his target and not the Flogger, to abort his launch on the Mig, and to let Cat lock onto the missiles and fire both AIM-54s.

“Take the missiles!” he yelled at Cat, an instant after Tomboy’s order.

But she was ahead of him, already punching the new target into the computer. “Fox three!” she yelled, and a Phoenix shrilled off the Tomcat’s launch rail. “Fox three!” she yelled again, and their last missile streaked after its companion.

Dixie found he was holding his breath. He could see neither the Kerry missiles nor the Mig that had launched them, but he could see the Jefferson less than ten miles ahead, huge and gray and vulnerable.

And somewhere between him and the carrier, four missiles were flying a deadly, high-speed race.

“Missiles incoming!” the voice of someone in CIC yelled over the intercom. “From the southwest!”

Hadley spun just in time to see a white flash above the water halfway between the beach and the fueling dock; he heard the crash of the explosion a moment later. A second missile, dragging a vapor trail through the air, arrowed across the water toward Jefferson’s exposed starboard side. At the last instant, the missile seemed to skip, rising high; the maneuver, often programmed into antiship missiles, was designed to bring it down on the relatively unarmored topside of the target, rather than into steel-plated sides.

The maneuver took the Kerry out of a direct flight path into the carrier’s fueling port, where grapes were still frantically pumping avgas aboard, but would bring it down squarely in the center of Jefferson’s four-acre flight deck, where one Hawkeye, three Hornets, and four A-6s were being refueled and rearmed after the day’s early morning operations. A detonation among those aircraft would cause a major fire on the flight deck, a fire that would spread instantly to the avgas fumes to starboard.

The Kerry had just reached the apex of its climb, coast, and dive when the second Phoenix missile streaked in from behind. The explosion felt as though it had struck the bridge, a savage bang that shattered windows and knocked several of the bridge watch-standers to their knees.

Hadley stood there for a long, desperate second or two, waiting for the far larger roar of exploding aviation fuel to follow. The roar did not come, and after a moment he allowed himself to breathe again.

God in heaven, but that, that had been close.

Tomboy hauled her F-14 into another hard turn, trying to follow the fleeing Mig as it twisted hard toward the north. She was three miles behind it now, and it was little more than a speck… though Hacker had a solid lock on the aircraft with their AWG-9.

Unfortunately, she had only the one Sidewinder left, and the target was jinking so sharply across the folded landscape that she was having trouble getting a lock.

Tone! “Fox two!”

Her last missile streaked toward the target.

Turning in his seat, Ivanov saw the missile arrowing toward him.

Cursing, he dragged his aircraft hard to the left and punched in the afterburners ― normally not a good idea when being pursued by a heatseeker, but he needed altitude, fast, and the only way to get it was ― as the Americans said ― to “go ballistic.”

As he climbed almost vertically, he cut his burners and released a string of flares, letting his Mig fall over onto its back with the nose pointed almost directly at the approaching Tomcat. The Sidewinder, deprived of its easy, hot targets, nosed over as it simple-mindedly pursued a flare, missing Ivanov’s aircraft by a generous margin.

He grinned into his mask. This American, whoever he was, was good.

Schooled in the warrior’s mentality, Ivanov welcomed this head-to-head exchange, the chance to test himself against another expert aviator. He was glad he wasn’t facing one of the rumored female pilots employed by the American battle group.

That would have been too easy, no challenge at all.

“He’s coming at us, head-to-head!” Hacker warned.

“I think he wants to play chicken,” Tomboy replied. “Hold on!”

She pulled the stick back, climbing fast; the enemy plane went into a climb at almost the same moment, and the two hurtled skyward, twisting as they passed, rolling into the deadly aerial maneuver known as a rolling vertical scissors. For an agonizing second, Mig and Tomcat flew back-to-back, practically canopy-to-canopy, and Tomboy could pull her head back and look “up” into the Russian’s cockpit, only a few deadly yards away.

Ivanov looked “up” and found himself scant yards from the American Tomcat; he could see the pilot and his radar intercept officer, their helmeted, visored heads tipped back to return his stare. He was so close he could actually read the lettering picked out on the F-14’s fuselage, just beneath the canopy: CDR JOYCE FLYNN “TOMBOY.” Behind was LT BRUCE KOSINSKI “HACKER.”

He frowned, puzzled. He could read English lettering fairly well. He knew the name “Bruce,” but “Joyce”? What kind of a man’s name was “Joyce”?

It sounded almost like a woman’s name…

For several deadly seconds, Mig and Tomcat rolled around one another as they continued their climb, still canopy-to-canopy. Tomboy cut her power and let her aircraft slew sideways, coming within a hair of stalling and going into a pancake dive.

That second or two was all she needed, though, as the Mig continued its climb, rolling onto its back and twisting clear of its aerial embrace with the Tomcat.

She’d anticipated his break; ninety percent of being a good tactical combat flyer was being able to guess what the other guy was going to do and matching or countering the move almost before he made it. Her port engine stuttered, dangerously close to a stall, but she nursed the throttle, felt the engine resume its accustomed thunder, and watched the Flogger drop across her gun sight.

Tomboy had already shifted to guns, since her M-61A1 was the only weapon she had left. Reacting instantly, and at a range of less than fifty yards, she squeezed the firing button on her control stick; the six-barreled cannon howled, sending a tight-spaced volley of 20mm rounds into the Flogger’s left wing, sawing through from front to back in a splintering, slashing burst. The skin of the wing pocked, then shredded; fuel from the wing tank gushed into the air, then ignited in the hail of white-hot shells. A fireball erupted scant yards from the nose of Tomboy’s F-14 as the Flogger disintegrated. Jagged fragments hurtled past her head; shrapnel pinged and rattled from her aircraft’s skin ― and then she was hurtling through the fireball with a hard jolt and smashing through into open sky.

“Whee-ooh!” Tomboy exulted, her voice shrill. “Got him!” Then, sobering as she eased into a gentle turn, she said, “Did you see a chute?”

“Negative,” Hacker told her. “I didn’t see anything but fire.”

“Too bad,” Tomboy replied. “He was good.”

By now, Tombstone knew that he simply was not cut out for life as an infantryman. In the sky, strapped into the cockpit of an F-14, he had an impressive array of sophisticated electronics and high-powered weaponry at his command, available literally at the touch of a button. His machine spoke to him, in the warble of warning tones and flashing threat indicators, in the yellow-green glow of radar blips scattered across his VDI, in the feel of the aircraft as he pulled it into a turn or nursed it out of a plunging, hell-bent-for-leather dive through thirty thousand feet.

Here, in the mud and cold and blood of man-to-man combat, there was nothing to speak to him but his own pounding heart and his own ragged fear. Combat, for the aviator, still possessed something of the romantic, medieval flavor of single combat between knights. Here, though, there was no glory, no romance of single combat. There was only stink, pain, fear, and death.

Tombstone and several other naval personnel were huddled inside the partly wrecked stone building just below the crest of the ridge overlooking Arsincevo, not far from the spot where Tombstone had first seen the storage facility. A dead Russian lay face-up in the mud a few feet away. He was naval infantry, wearing a one-piece light-camo jumpsuit, his black beret lying by his side. His eyes, wide open and very, very blue, stared sightlessly at the sky.

Stoney had appropriated the man’s AKM assault rifle and a canvas pouch with five spare magazines, fully loaded, but his mind was full of images of the Russian he and Tomboy had killed in Kola. There’d been nothing romantic about that encounter, either, and he was not eager to get into a firefight.

Pamela and several members of her ACN crew were sitting on the ground nearby. No one had been hurt, and all were accounted for, but they seemed a bit lost now that they didn’t have their van of high-tech electronics.

He walked over and slumped down at Pamela’s side. “Sorry you came?”

“Are you looking for some kind of victory?” she asked him. “All right.

I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry I ever heard of this godforsaken place. Satisfied?”

“I wasn’t looking for satisfaction,” he told her.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. I know I wish you’d flown out on that helo.” He hesitated, wondering if he should say it. “I still love you, you know.”

She didn’t answer, and Tombstone knew that their relationship was truly over.

Gunfire continued to bark and crackle from the east side of the ridge, Boychenko’s Spetsnaz holding off yet another charge by the naval infantry. One charge, a few minutes ago, had come close to sweeping over the defenders’ position; that one Russian marine had actually made it all the way to the American position, shouting the naval infantry’s battle cry “polundra” ― very roughly translated as “Look out below!” ― before a U.S. Marine had shot him.

It was the only time all morning that any of the Americans had actually gotten into the battle. Tombstone had ordered everyone in the group, including the Marines and the SEALS, to stay out of the fighting if they possibly could. Their small numbers could add nothing to the larger battle raging up and down the ridge around them; their participation would only guarantee that some of them would be killed.

And at the moment, Tombstone could see nothing in this desolate and war-torn country worth dying for.

He was giving a lot of thought to alternatives, just now. The SEAL, Doc, Was in a corner on the other side of the wrecked house, still trying to raise someone on the satellite communications gear, but so far he’d only been able to pick up coded transmissions. He’d hoped to reach Jefferson directly, but either the signal was being jammed, or human error had put the carrier on a different channel from the one he was trying to reach. Those channels that they were able to listen in on either weren’t picking up their transmissions, or else those transmissions were being ignored in the general confusion of the moment.

Nothing, he reminded himself, goes as planned in war.

The problem was, there were several tanks coming up the east side of the ridge, four of the odd-looking PT-76 amphibious tanks designed to swim rivers. Those tanks, along with a number of armored personnel carriers, were still positioned squarely between Boychenko’s Spetsnaz and the American beachhead. The Spets forces had not expected heavy fighting; the idea had been for them to serve as a blocking force on that ridgeline and to provide perimeter defense as the Americans pulled out, not fight a major ground action with elite forces. Boychenko seemed less than eager to press the attack.

But if he didn’t, Tombstone and Pamela and Natalie and the rest were likely to be guests in this country for quite a long time to come.

“Hey, Captain!” Doc called suddenly.

“You get ‘em?”

“Still can’t raise Ops, but I think we’re tapped into the aircraft tactical channel. I can hear the pilots talking to one another.”

“You can!” Tombstone sprang to his feet. “That’s great. Let’s hear!”

Doc led him to the wall where the satcom device had been set up, its small antenna pointed carefully at a particular patch of sky in the south. He took the headset Doc handed to him and pressed it against his ear.

“Tomboy! Tomboy!” was the first thing he heard. “You okay?”

“I’M okay, Dix,” was her reply. “Just a little singed on the outside!”

Quickly he pressed the transmit key. “Tomboy! Tomboy! This is Tombstone! Do you copy?”

There was a moment’s pause. Then, “Tombstone?” He could hear the surprise in her voice. “Is that you?”

“I see you strapped on your Tomcat, like I told you to,” he said, using the incident at the palace to positively identify himself.

“Damn it, Tombstone! Where are you? What are you doing on this channel?”

“I’m on the back side of a ridge west of Arsincevo. We’re having a little trouble getting through to the beach. Think you can help us?”

“I’ll see what I can do. Give me your tacsit.”

He began describing their situation.

Tomboy was out of missiles, but she still had the Tomcat’s left-mounted M-61A1 20mm rapid-fire gun, and almost five hundred rounds remaining of her original 657. She dropped through the sky, leaving the furball of the mass aerial battle above and behind, flashing in an instant low above the row upon row of fuel tanks, and the twisted, black columns of smoke marking dozens of raging fires.

That ridge… that would be where the Boychenko Russians ― and Tombstone ― were holding off the approaching naval infantry detachment.

“Okay, Tombstone,” she said. “I see the ridge. Talk to me.”

“We’ve got three, maybe four PT-76 tanks,” he told her. “They’re on the east side of the ridge, moving toward the top in a line-abreast formation, about two hundred meters from the crest. I can see them pretty well from here. Doesn’t look like there’s too much ground cover, so you ought to have a clear shot.”

“I think…” She stared ahead through her HUD, straining to see.

“Watch it, Tomboy,” Hacker called from the rear seat. “I’ve got a Gun Dish paint!”

“Ah, Tombstone, this is Tomboy,” she called. “Your band of gypsies happen to have a Zoo in the parade?”

“That’s a negative, Tomboy. No Zoos.”

“Okay. We’ve got one in the area. If you see it, give me a yell, will you?”

“Will do.”

There they were. She could see the tanks now, four of them stretched out in a line almost directly ahead. She only had an instant to react, and she had to aim and fire by instinct. Her thumb closed on the trigger, and she felt the vibration as her six-barreled Gatling gun screamed white death at four thousand rounds per minute.

A white cloud appeared on the naked slope of the ridge just short of the first amphibious tank. Holding the aircraft steady, she walked that cloud along the slope, sending it smashing into the first tank, then adjusting slightly to the left to hit the second.

At better than four hundred miles per hour, she roared overhead so fast that the terrain was a gray-brown blur, though she had a brief instant’s impression of men in camouflage uniforms on the ground, some running, some falling, some simply standing and staring up at her with mouths agape. One tank, at least, was burning, and she thought she’d hit another one, but now she was out of sky and out of time. She pulled back on the stick, climbing hard.

Tombstone and Pamela were peering over the shattered wall of the building when the Tomcat rose from behind the crest of the ridge, a huge, gray bird riding fire and thunder. An explosion fireballed on the ground beyond the crest.

“You know, Matt,” Pamela said as the F-14 clawed for sky, turning back over the Arsincevo Valley with sun flashing from its wings, “I’m beginning to think she’s more your type. I think you must have a lot in common with her.”

Tombstone looked at Pamela, defensive… and then he saw her tired smile. He grinned, a bit ruefully. “Maybe you’re right. I do like her style!” He still couldn’t deny the feelings he had for Pamela, but he was able to accept the simple, cold fact that their relationship really did have no future. He understood, he thought, what Pamela must have been going through and why she wanted to end their relationship.

And maybe, after all, that would be best.

Tomboy was bringing her F-14 in for another strafing run.

He stood up behind the wall, exposing himself to fire from below so that he could see. Dust and smoke erupted from a third PT-76; from further down the valley, a squat, ugly-looking tracked vehicle with a low, open turret slewed quad-mounted 23mm cannons and opened fire. “Tomboy!” he yelled. “ZSU on the road-“

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” he heard her calling. White smoke was streaming aft from her Tomcat as she hurtled past the east face of the ridge, angling toward the sea eight miles away.

“Tomboy!”

“I’m… okay,” he heard her say. “We’re okay, but I don’t think we’re going to make it back to the Jeff.”

“Get some altitude!”

“Already on it.”

He could see the F-14 coming up now. It was hard to see, but he thought one of the engines was out. The smoke streaming off the aircraft’s tail was thicker now.

“Okay,” Tomboy said. “We’ve got an engine fire. We’re definitely not going to make it to the Jefferson. She’s still taking on fuel, and they’re not going to let us come anywhere near her with a dinged Tomcat. I think we can make it out over the sea, though, and eject.”

“Good luck, Tomboy,” he said. “Hey… this time try not to break your leg when you punch out, okay?”

He heard her laugh… but he also heard the worry behind it. “Don’t worry, Stoney. You take care of yourself. See you back aboard the carrier!”

“See you aboard.”

He watched her Tomcat, dwindling to a speck in the distance, still climbing, still burning.