Countdown

CHAPTER 10

"Let's go with a Phoenix launch first," Coyote told Cat. "We've for damned sure got targets enough to choose from."

"Definitely what they call a 'target-rich environment,' Boss," Cat replied. "We're tracking on four."

In all the arsenals of all the world's powers, even in the arsenals of other U.S. military services, there was nothing like the AIM-54C Phoenix. A 985-pound missile with a range of over 120 miles and a speed of better than Mach 5, the weapon could be fired only by the F-14 Tomcat with its advanced AWG-9 radar guidance system, and was therefore available only to the U.S.

Navy. The Tomcat's radar, set to track-while-scan, could lock onto six separate targets while simultaneously guiding six missiles at once.

Coyote was carrying only four AIM-54s, so Cat had selected four targets, tagging them on her radar screen in the back seat.

"Let 'er rip, Cat," he told her.

"That's fox three," she replied, using the aviator's code for a Phoenix launch.

Cat hit the launch button and the Tomcat lurched higher as it was freed of nearly a half-ton weight slung beneath its belly. Igniting beneath the F-14, the missile speared forward into a crystal-blue sky, a cotton-white contrail streaming astern.

"And firing two," Cat said. "Fox three!"

"Gold Eagle One, Eagle Two." That was Mustang Davis, Coyote's wingman.

"We've got track-and-lock. Fox three!"

One of Mustang's white Phoenix darts dropped clear, ignited, and swooshed into the distance.

"Hey, Coyote!" Mustang called. "What about those cruise missiles?"

"We'd have to backtrack to get a lock," he told him. "We'll leave them for the follow-up crew. Or Jeff's CIWS."

"Okay, copy. Here's another fox three."

The sky was rapidly becoming filled with the twisting white streamers of missile contrails arcing toward the southeast.

The basic tactics of modern aircraft carrier warfare had been laid down in World War II, when Admiral Chester Nimitz took on a far larger Japanese force with three aircraft carriers, their air groups providing both offensive strike capability and defensive CAP over the fleet, plus eight cruisers and seventeen destroyers dedicated to providing close-in antiaircraft defense for the carriers. His tactics ― and the luck that blesses or curses every plan of battle ― won the Battle of Midway, and the concept of hard-hitting, well-protected carrier groups quickly became the guiding combat doctrine for the U.S. Navy's Pacific War.

During the next fifty years, the aircraft became larger, faster, and farther-ranging; the weapons became smarter, more destructive, and capable of superb accuracy across ranges unthinkable in 1942. The Nimitz doctrine, however, remained essentially the same.

The modern aircraft carrier battle group, variously called CBG or CVBG, was built around the supercarrier. Some, like Jefferson or Eisenhower, were nuclear-powered. Others, like the Kennedy and the America, had originally been designed for nuclear power but, thanks to Congressional budget cuts, were driven instead by conventional, fuel-oil-fired boilers. Depending on their class, their flight decks stretched from 990 to 1,040 feet long, just six feet less than the height of New York City's Chrysler Building. Their full-load displacement ranged anywhere from 80,000 to 96,000 tons ― compared to the 19,900 tons of the U.S.S. Enterprise at Midway.

The rest of the battle group was devoted to protecting the carrier and consisted of one or two guided-missile cruisers, a mixed force of four to seven frigates and destroyers, and one or two Los Angeles-class attack submarines. As it approached its patrol area off North Cape, Jefferson's battle group included the Aegis cruiser Shiloh; three guided-missile destroyers, John A. Winslow, William B. Truesdale, and Alan Kirk; four Perry-class guided-missile frigates, Dickinson, Esek Hopkins, Stephen Decatur, and Leslie; and the attack subs Morgantown and Galveston.

It was a powerful force. CBG-14, already understrength by the time it reached Romsdalfjord nine months before, had been badly hurt during the Battles of the Fjords, and the decision had been made to reinforce it big-time. The Truesdale, Kirk, Dickinson, Leslie, and Morgantown all were new additions to the battle group.

In modern warfare, a carrier battle group is deployed across an incredibly vast stretch of open ocean. If CBG-14 could have been magically transported to the eastern seaboard of the United States, with the Jefferson herself planted on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C., her escort ships would have been ranging as far afield as central Pennsylvania, southern Virginia, and West Virginia; her defensive air units would have been patrolling the skies over Maine and South Carolina, Kentucky and Michigan; and her attack subs and S-3 Vikings would have been searching out enemy submarines somewhere in Ohio. Her attack planes, meanwhile, could have struck targets as far off as Chicago.

As the first wave of Russian bombers entered Jefferson's outer defensive ring, Tomcat-launched Phoenix missiles drew the first blood. Russian longand medium-range bombers ― Bears, Badgers, and Backfires ― began exploding in flames as far off as the Russia-Norway border.

As Tomcat after Tomcat locked on and fired, the losses within the approaching Russian horde mounted. In the first five minutes of the battle, eighteen Tomcats launched ninety-six AIM-54Cs. The Phoenix had a reliability rating of about ninety percent, meaning that in ideal conditions, nine out of ten would hit what they were aimed at.

In warfare, conditions are never ideal. Badger-J electronic-warfare aircraft were accompanying the bomber formations, and they were able to kill or blind a number of AIM-54s before they reached their targets.

Seventy-eight struck, however, all but annihilating the first wave of bombers.

All four Phoenix missiles were gone, but Coyote still had two Sidewinders and two AMRAAMs slung beneath the wings of his Tomcat. Pushing his throttle forward, feeling the click of each detent as he went all the way to zone-five afterburner, Coyote hurtled toward the southeast. His F-14's computer automatically slid the aircraft's wings back, adjusting drag and lift for maximum speed. A moment later they slipped past the sound barrier with scarcely a shudder in the big Tomcat's airframe.

"That's… a… kill!" Cat called from the back seat, her words and breaths coming in short bursts as she labored against the transverse-Gs pressing her back against her seat. "Splash… four!"

"Send it," Coyote told her, cutting back the F-14's power and dropping below Mach 1 again. Ahead, the ragged gray coastline of Norway was stretched along the sea at the horizon. Numerous threads of white crisscrossed the blue sky, Phoenix contrails from a dozen F-14s. "Mustang, where the hell are you?"

"Coyote, Mustang. I'm on your five at six miles. Going for Phoenix launch!"

"Okay. Dump your load, then close up. I'm naked up here."

"Roger that, Two-oh-one. Here we go. Lock and… fox three!"

Coyote switched to ICS. "Cat! Gimme a vector! Gimme something to shoot at!"

"Shit, Coyote, take your pick. Ah… come right five. Looks like a large target at angels ten, range four-two miles."

He picked out the target on his own display. "Got it. We'll take it with AMRAA.M."

The AIM-120A, also called the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile or AMRAAM for short, had been a long, long time in coming. With Phoenix to hit targets up to a hundred miles away, with the Sidewinder heat-seeker to take on close targets out to ten miles or so, a medium-range missile was needed to fill the gap between the two extremes. Since the 1950s, the Navy's medium-range missile had been the AIM-7 Sparrow.

For the men who'd had to rely on them, the AIM-7 had never been entirely satisfactory. They were SARH-guided ― semiactive radar-homing ― which meant they homed on radar energy reflected off the target by the firing aircraft.

That meant that the aviator who locked on to an enemy target and fired a Sparrow at it had to keep his aircraft flying straight and level, continuing to paint the target while his missile completed its flight ― as much as sixty-two miles in later versions of the AIM-7.

And while he was doing that, he was vulnerable, unable to maneuver without breaking the radar lock and wasting his shot.

Coyote switched his heads-up display to medium-range-missile mode, selecting an AIM-120. On his HUD, a small rectangle drifted across his field of view, the target designator. To the left, beneath the vertical line of his airspeed indicator, ARM M2 appeared, showing he had two missiles ready, while to the right, just inside the altitude scale, a vertical line gave the target's closing speed and range. The target was twenty-five nautical miles away now, closing at 512 knots.

Dragging his stick over, he merged the designator box with the target pipper; the letters ACQ let him know that the target had been acquired by the missile's radar. There was a beat as computers calculated firing conditions, angles, and probabilities… and then the rectangle blinked to a circle embracing the letter m.

A tone shrilled in his ear. "Radar lock!" Cat called from the RIO's seat.

"Fox one!" Coyote answered, and he squeezed the firing trigger.

AMRAAM represented a whole new type of air-to-air missile, carrying its own radar-guidance system as well as extremely sensitive infrared sensors for terminal homing. Cost overruns and unexpected technical difficulties had delayed the missile's production for the better part of a decade, and with the first production models going to the Air Force, the new missile had been slow to reach Navy combat units.

With a roar, the AIM-120 detached itself from the Tomcat, boosting on a trail of flame to Mach 4 in seconds. On Coyote's HUD, beneath the altitude scale, the characters IN RNG and 28 glowed in silent affirmation. The AMRAAM would reach the target in another twenty-eight seconds.

With the missile away, Coyote immediately brought his stick hard to the right, dropping into a starboard turn away from the target that would have been impossible with the old AIM-7.

"I've got a target," CAT told him. "Bearing one-eight-five at three-one nautical miles."

Coyote pulled back on his stick, easing out of the turn. "Got him!" he said. "Set the next one for AMRAA.M."

At first, as the long-range Phoenix missiles streaked in from the U.S.

fighter screen, the Russian fighters escorting the bombers couldn't even hit back. The best air-to-air missile they possessed was the semi-active radar-homing AA-9 "Amos," carried as a stand-off interceptor by the MiG-31 and having a range of about eighty miles. Production of the AA-9 had been plagued by problems even worse than those endured by the AMRAAM, however, and they were not as reliable as the AIM-54 Phoenix they'd been designed to emulate ― especially in a hostile ECM environment.

Nor were there as many of them. Most of the air-to-air missiles protecting the Russian bomber force were big AA-6 "Acrids," carried by MiG-25 Foxbats and having a lock-on range of about sixty-two miles, and the modern AA-10 "Alamo," with a thirty-mile range.

As the two air armadas closed with one another, more and more of the Russian weapons began coming into play. But if the Russians were beginning to concentrate their forces, so too were the Americans. While the basic unit of naval warfare was the carrier battle group, a common strategy involved combining two or more CBGs into a carrier battle force, or CBF. During the Gulf War of 1991, four separate carrier groups had united in the Persian Gulf, forming a single battle force of unprecedented firepower.

Now, off the northernmost tip of Norway, two carrier battle groups were in the process of joining forces. Though the surface elements of CBG-7 and CBG-14 had not yet merged, the moment orbiting Hawkeyes had spotted the approaching Russian air armada, the Eisenhower had thrown her defensive cordon of Tomcats and Hornets into the sky along Jefferson's threat axis, combining and bolstering the defenses for both carrier groups. Tomcats from the Eisenhower loosed their AIM-54Cs at targets still deep in the Kola Peninsula; Hornets vectored in to provide air protection for Jefferson Tomcats that had already expended their missiles.

Despite the reinforcements, however, the battle was still so scattered that it was in reality a large number of separate, isolated clashes between tiny groups or even individuals, all fighting for their lives.

"Tone! Fox one!"

Their second AMRAAM slid from its launch rail, tracking a Russian bomber that had already passed Tomcat 201's position and was now almost thirty miles ahead, between Coyote and the fleet.

There were more aircraft in the sky now. All of Jefferson's Tomcats were in the air, and more and more of the Hornets from her two F/A-18 squadrons were arriving in the battle zone.

In addition, new Tomcats were vectoring in from the northwest, F-14s launched earlier from the U.S.S. Eisenhower.

Coyote was glad to see the extra talent arrive, but there was scant time for celebration. Seconds after his second AMRAAM struck home, Cat cut in over the ICS.

"Coyote," she said, sounding worried. "I've got a threat tone here."

He glanced down at his own console and saw the glowing light on his threat-warning receiver. A radar-guided missile had just locked onto his aircraft, was tracking them now from astern. "I see it. Do you have it on your TID?"

"Wait one…" She was checking her Tactical Information Display, the round screen centered on her NFO's console. "Yeah! Got it. Bearing zero-nine-five, range four-two and closing… shit, Mach three point five.

Coyote, I think we've just picked up an Amos."

"Stay on it. We'll let it get closer."

"It's close enough for me right now."

"Yeah, but if we break, it'll break with us. Stay frosty."

"I'm so frosty I'm freezing to death."

"Mustang! You there?"

"Right here, Coyote. Loose as a goose on your four." Navy aviators tended to fly in widely spaced, flexible tactical formations, referred to as "loose goose," rather than the tight wing-and-wing approach used by most of their opponents.

"Rog. Let's go ballistic before that thing kicks us in the ass." At this range, the incoming missile might be tracking either of them. There'd be no way to tell until it got a lot closer.

"Affirmative."

"Going to zone five." He rammed his throttle forward.

"Right with you."

At their current altitude of just over twenty-thousand feet, the Tomcats could manage about Mach 2.3. The missile following them, now forty miles away, was traveling at Mach 3.5, which meant that even at their top speed it would continue to overhaul them with a closing rate of almost eight hundred miles per hour.

With luck, the air-to-air missile would run out of fuel before it reached them.

If it didn't, it would catch up to them in another three minutes.

The CICOs in the American line's E-2Cs reported thirty Amos air-to-air missiles incoming during the first few minutes of the exchange. EA-6B Prowlers, flying in their electronic-warfare/electronic-countermeasures role off both the Jefferson and the Eisenhower, targeted the missiles with intense bursts of radar energy designed to burn out their delicate SARH receivers.

Other AA-9s were decoyed by chaff or knocked out by RIOs using their Tomcats' own ECM assets.

In all, only eleven American aircraft were hit, and of those, four were only damaged by the detonation of the AA-9's radar proximity fuze and were able to make it back to their respective carriers.

Against such odds as they were facing now, however, the Americans could not afford to lose a single plane.

"It's coming fast, Coyote! Range five miles-"

"Mustang! When I give the word, break right. I'll go left."

"… four miles…"

"Roger that, Coyote!"

"… three miles…"

"Now! Break!"

Coyote pulled the stick hard to the left and forward, going into a dive to pick up extra, crucial speed. Stealing a look back over his shoulder, he could see the onrushing missile now, a pinpoint trailing an endless thread of white scrawling across the eastern sky. As Mustang slipped off to the right, the missile tracked left.

It was after him and Cat.

He'd dropped out of afterburners to avoid guzzling up his remaining fuel, but he kicked them in once more, fighting for every possible extra measure of speed. The G-forces piled on top of his head and chest and gut, squeezing the air from his lungs, clawing at his eyeballs in their sockets.

"One… uh! mile still uh!… with us!" Cat was having to force each word out, punctuating them with savage grunts to literally force the air out of a diaphragm nearly paralyzed by almost nine Gs.

"Chaff!" Coyote yelled. Rapid-bloom chaff exploded from the Tomcat's tail, myriad slivers of aluminum-coated mylar cut to precise lengths blossoming in an expanding cloud astern. The missile, now a few hundred yards away, automatically tracked for the middle of its radar target as it traveled left to right, aiming at the so-called "centroid of reflected radiation."

When the radar image suddenly smeared into a far larger, longer target, the AA-9's aim shifted to the right…

… and then Coyote snap-rolled the F-14 into a hard, reverse turn, climbing now and breaking out of its turn. The missile flashed into the still-scattering cloud of chaff, its simple-minded proximity fuze decided that it had reached the target, and it detonated with a thunderous roar. Bits of metal pinged and clattered off the Tomcat's hull, but no warning lights winked on in response.

"Coyote, this is Mustang! Are you okay?"

"Copacetic, Mustang. Still here!" Coyote stared up through his canopy at that deep, impossibly blue sky, crisscrossed with the lacy weavings of aircraft and missile contrails. It struck him suddenly that he'd been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the past ten minutes, killing or damaging a probable total of six enemy planes and damned near getting killed himself.

And in all that time, he'd never been close enough to even once see a Russian aircraft.

"Mustang, Coyote," he called. "We're down to two AIM-9s and coming up on bingo fuel. I'd say it's time to RTB."

"RTB" meant "return to base." Time to head back to the Jeff and rearm.

"That's a major roger, Skipper. Lead the way."

Coyote switched his HUD back to NAV MODE and picked up Shiloh's directional beacon. With Jefferson off the air for the moment, he'd have to home on the Shiloh, then when he got in close enough, find the Jeff by Mark-One eyeball.

He was now less than 120 miles from the center of the battle group. He cut back on his throttle to take them down closer to the water and eased onto the new heading.

They should be in shouting distance of the Jefferson in another twelve minutes.

Russian naval tactics, like their tactics for land warfare, depended on saturating the enemy's defenses, piling on so much raw power in such huge numbers that sooner or later those defenses began to leak. Their bombers, the survivors of the Tomcats' Phoenix assault plus those that managed to get close enough to launch before being shot down, had managed to release a total of ninety-three ship-killers, most of them AS-5 "Keit" and AS-6 "Kingfish" antiship missiles. Over thirty feet long, weighing over five tons apiece, and traveling at better than Mach 3, these missiles hurtled across the Barents Sea at wave-skimming height. Some were programmed to go all the way in at low altitude; others were set to pop up during the last few miles of their approach, attacking the carrier group from almost straight overhead. The mix of approaches was designed, like the dive-bomber/torpedo-plane tactics of World War II, to confuse, divide, and overtax the target's defenses.

Coyote peered past his fighter's HUD, trying to pick out details against the sun-sparkle off the ultramarine sea. He was at five thousand feet now, but the bandit was below him, skimming at damn-near wave-top height on a direct course for the center of the battle group. His low altitude had provided excellent cover, masking him in the back-scatter from the surface of the sea. He was definitely a "leaker," a Russian bomber that had managed to slip unobserved deep inside the CBG's defenses.

"Range two miles," Cat told him.

"Rog. I'm setting him up."

They were close enough now that Coyote could recognize the back-swept wings, the twin turbojets set close along the fuselage. It was a Tu-16 Badger, almost certainly the Badger-G missile-strike variant. Flying off each wing was a smaller aircraft, indistinguishable at this distance but almost certainly a fighter escort. Coyote edged his stick to port and pushed it forward, nudging the F-14 into a better firing position. The Badger grew rapidly behind the pale computer-graphic symbols and data lines on his HUD.

Its attendants, already breaking from their larger consort and swinging around to face him, were a pair of Sukhoi-21 interceptors, Flagon-Fs painted in a tactical green-and-brown camouflage scheme.

But Coyote glimpsed something else in that blurred instant of approach.

Beneath each wing of the Badger-G was the slim fuselage and pointed nose of an AS-6 "Kingfish" antiship missile. As he watched, locking his target designator onto the hot IR glow of the bomber's twin engines, first one, then the other of those sleek and deadly darts dropped from their hardpoints, igniting tails of orange flame and unraveling contrails of white smoke.

"Launch! Launch!" Coyote yelled into his radio. "Hotspur, Gold Eagle One, I have confirmed launch of two Alfa-Sierra six…"

Two more cruise missiles were now streaking at Mach 3 toward the center of the fleet.

And they were now less than one hundred miles out.