Countdown

CHAPTER 1

"Damn but the weather's dirty tonight." Captain Matthew "Tombstone" Magruder stood in Jefferson's Primary Flight Control, "Pri-Fly" to the initiated, and worked at not sloshing hot coffee down the Air Boss's back. He could feel the pitch to the supercarrier's deck as she plowed through heavy seas invisible in the darkness 120 feet below. "For once I'm actually glad I'm not up there."

"What, am I hearin' this right, CAG?" Commander William Barnes grinned up at him from a coffee mug of his own. "AIR BOSS" was stenciled across the man's sweatshirt and the back of his chair, while his coffee mug proclaimed, "I'm the BOSS." He was the man responsible for controlling all air traffic in the carrier's immediate vicinity from this glassed-in eyrie, including all launch and recovery operations. "Man, this has got to be some kind of first.

Usually all I hear is you bitchin' about what you wouldn't give to be able to log more hours."

"Hours, yes. But not in that. Case Three if ever I saw it." Case Three was a bad-weather carrier approach, with a ceiling of two hundred feet and visibility of a half mile or less. In blue-water operations like this, with no friendly airfields within range, those limits could quickly drop to zero-zero, no ceiling, no visibility.

"Hell, the Met boys say it's going to get even worse," the Boss said. He jerked a thumb toward Pri-Fly's aft windows. "We're tryin' to get these people down before it turns to snow."

It was raining now, a cold, thin half-water/half-sleet that lashed across Pri-Fly's slanted windows. It was also pitch black save for the rain-smeared gleam of flight-deck acquisition lights and the glow from the big Fresnel lens apparatus aft and to port, where the Landing Signals officer and his crew were already talking the next aviator down. The scene was repeated in black and white on the big PLAT monitor suspended from Pri-Fly's overhead. Glancing up at the screen, Tombstone could see several members of the deck crew, bulky in their cold weather gear, trotting out of the camera's range.

"Two-oh-seven," the LSO's voice crackled from an overhead speaker. "Call the ball."

There was a moment of static, then a new voice sounded from the speaker.

"Clara." That one code word meant simply that the approaching aviator could not yet see the ball… or the storm-masked Jefferson.

In normal peacetime operations, the flight deck was shut down when Case Three conditions dropped below a half-mile visibility ― fifteen seconds' flight time for an approaching aircraft.

"Home Plate, Two-oh-seven," the voice added a moment later. "Wait one.

Okay, got you! Two-oh-seven, Tomcat ball. Three point three."

The terse information confirmed for the men adjusting the tension of the five parallel arrestor wires stretching across the after part of the flight deck that it was an F-14D Tomcat coming in for a trap, that the aircraft had 3,300 pounds of fuel left aboard, and that the pilot could now see the yellow beacon, the "meatball," of the carrier's landing approach guide indicator.

Having made countless traps himself, including Case Three landings on nights as dark, wet, and raw as this one, Tombstone could see the approach setup clearly in his mind's eye. So long as the aviator kept the ball centered between the horizontal lines of green lights to either side, the aircraft was holding the proper angle of approach for a good trap.

The Tomcat was also being guided in by Jefferson's Instrument Landing System, "riding the needles" in on the correct glide slope. By coupling the ILS with the Automatic Carrier Landing System, or ACLS, the approach could actually be turned over to a computer, which could land the aircraft with no human hand at the controls.

As Tombstone knew from long personal experience, Navy fliers had distinctly mixed feelings about the ACLS, and the hairier the approach, the less they liked it. Hell, no pilot liked to fly with someone else at the controls, and when that someone else was a goddamned computer…

Had 207 sounded just a little too tight? Hell, an approach on a night like this would unsettle anyone, and Lobo, Lieutenant Hanson, was still relatively new at this. "Roger ball," the LSO's voice said, calm and reassuring. "You're looking good. Come left, just a hair… little more…

that's good. Centerline good. Deck going down, power down."

Tombstone was staring into the night astern of the carrier, but try as he might he still couldn't see any sign of the approaching Tomcat… and then the big aircraft exploded out of the gloom off Jefferson's stern, wings swept far forward and flaps down for maximum lift, acquisition lights at belly and tail and wingtips flashing frantically but damned near masked by the rain as the F-14 swept across the roundoff at the end of the flight deck, wheels kissing steel as the tailhook struck a skittering salvo of yellow sparks, then neatly snagged the three-wire and dragged the hurtling mass of machinery to an almost instant halt even as its two big F110-GE-400 engines howled to full throttle.

The moment the tailhook had successfully engaged the arrestor wire and it was clear the Pilot wouldn't have to pull a "bolter" off the deck and come around for another try, the aircraft's engines spooled down again. The whole sequence, from Tombstone's first glimpse of the Tomcat materializing out of the dark to the moment it backed slightly on the carrier's roof, spitting out the wire, had taken only seconds, and he let out a small whoosh of pent-up air. Two-oh-seven was safely down, a perfect trap. Engines whining, the F-14 began nosing around to starboard, slowly following a yellow-jerseyed deck handler who backed away from the aircraft step by step, a pair of light wands waving up and down as he directed it toward an out-of-the-way spot on the flight line.

"Two-one-eight," the Air Boss was saying into the heavy microphone on the console in front of him. "Charlie now."

That was the command to the next aircraft circling west of the Jefferson to break from its holding pattern, or "Marshall Stack," and begin its approach to the carrier.

"Two-one-eight, copy," another voice said from the speaker, hard-edged and professional. "We're heading in."

"Ah, listen, Two-one-eight. Visibility on the deck's down to half a mile or less. Wind at one-nine knots from zero-four-zero, but we're getting occasional gusts at two-five."

"Wonderful, Home Plate. Just shit-fire wonderful. Sounds brisk and refreshing."

"Ah, Two-one-eight, we've got the beer chilled and waiting for you. Just bring back our airplane." Barnes released the switch on the mike and thumbed through a clipboard on his console. "Who's got the front seat on Two-one-eight tonight anyway?"

"Conway," Tombstone said. He didn't need to check the roster. "Call sign Brewer."

The Air Boss leaned back in his chair and glanced up briefly at him.

"CAG, you look as shook as a rookie making his first trap. What the hell are you doing hanging around here bothering working men for anyway? Don't you have some papers to shuffle or something?"

Barnes said the words with a crooked grin that robbed them of their sting, but Tombstone felt the stab nonetheless. God, to be skipper of VF-95, Viper Squadron, again.

Those were Viper Tomcat-Ds recovering on the Jefferson under the Air Boss's watchful eye now. Tombstone was now the Co of CVW-20, commanding officer of Jefferson's entire air wing of some ninety aircraft, but he still couldn't help holding a special place in his feelings for the Vipers of VF-95.

"Hey, c'mon, Bill," he said. "I just came here to do some slumming, you know that. If You Prefer, you can let it out that I'm here to boost morale and encourage the troops-"

"I think you're scared those nuggets of Yours out there are going to get lost."

They laughed at that, but Tombstone was more than a little nervous and had to resist the impulse to pace the narrow stretch of Pri-Fly's free deck space. An aircraft carrier's roof, her flight deck, was already the deadliest workplace on Earth, and the harsh blend of darkness, wind, and sleet transformed it into a death trap. Back in the Vietnam War, medical researchers had wired naval aviators to record pulse and respiration and other telltale physical signs, then monitored them as they carried out their missions. Nothing, not the headlong rush of a catapult shot, not SAMs streaking toward their aircraft in the skies over Hanoi, not air-to-air combat, not even the jolting instant of stark terror during an ejection, could cause the same heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed terror every aviator felt making a final approach toward a carrier at night.

And wind and rain just made it worse, of course. Still, carrier operations went on, whatever the weather, whatever the time of day or night.

Especially now… with this undeclared war with the Russians, or whatever the hell they were calling themselves these days. Tombstone glanced across the compartment to the Pri-Fly tally board, where an Assistant Air Boss was keeping tabs on Jefferson's far-flung net of aircraft.

Storm or no storm, at this moment six S-3A Viking ASW aircraft were probing across an arc far in advance of the carrier battle group, searching for seaborne traces of Russian submarines that might be trying to use the rain and wind as cover for a stealthy approach and kill. Somewhere in the darkness a mile or so off to port, an SH-3 Sea King helicopter mounted lonely vigil, ready to attempt a rescue of an aviator who, God forbid, got into trouble during recovery and had to punch out in this soup. High up and to starboard was one of Jefferson's four E-2C Hawkeyes, providing the entire, far-flung battle group with early-warning radar that could penetrate the sleet and dark across hundreds of miles and, at need, serve as airborne combat command centers. CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, was being provided by four F/A-18 Hornets of VFA-161, the Javelins. They'd screamed off Jefferson's deck into the rain thirty minutes ago, taking up their patrol stations so that the Tomcats of Viper Squadron could return to the carrier.

As it was, except for the increased number of Viking sub-hunters aloft, it was a fairly light deployment. Jefferson and the entourage of warships comprising Carrier Battle Group 14 were currently cruising east-northeast through the Norwegian Sea two hundred miles south of Iceland. Carrier Battle Group 7, the U.S.S. Eisenhower and her consorts, was already somewhere well to the northeast, five hundred miles ahead, moving to cover the Barents Sea approaches out of Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula just in case the Red Banner Fleet elected to sally forth for a rematch after its defeat at Jefferson's hands off Norway the previous year. CBG-3, meanwhile, with the U.S.S.

Kennedy, was in the North Sea off the Skagerrak, overseeing the final collapse of neo-Soviet troops in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Kennedy and the warships with her were the cork in the Baltic's bottle, keeping any surviving Russian ships at St. Petersburg safely docked and out of action.

No, Jefferson shouldn't have to worry about Russian attacks tonight. But they did have to worry about the weather. Tombstone felt the deck rise beneath his feet, felt the slightly sickening twist of the carrier corkscrewing through the worsening waves.

"Two-one-eight," the LSO said over the speaker. "Call the ball."

"Home Plate, Two-one-eight, Clara, repeat, Clara. I'd call the damned ball if I could see it. It's getting damned thick up here."

"Is Two-one-eight the last one up?" Tombstone asked.

"Yup." Suddenly, Barnes's voice was tight and sounded as dry as Tombstone's. There was no light banter in the compartment now.

"Two-one-eight," the voice crackled over the speaker. "Tomcat ball. One point eight."

Eighteen hundred pounds of fuel left? They were damned near running on fumes.

"Roger ball. Deck coming up, power on." Tombstone found himself holding his breath…

… and then the Tomcat boomed out of the darkness, red and green navigation lights winking, arrestor hook groping for a wire, but high… high as the LSO's voice shouted, "Wave off! Wave off!" and the meatball flared red. The Tomcat hit the steel hard, sparks exploding into the night well beyond the number-five wire, too far up the deck for the tailhook to snag hold, but the aviator's hand had already rammed the throttles full forward, sending twin spears of yellow flame thundering against the night in a desperate bid to regain suddenly precious airspeed.

"Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!" someone was yelling over the intercom system, as Tomcat 218 screamed past Jefferson's island, rushing down the angled flight deck and back into the night.

Stoney was still holding his breath as he watched the twin flares of light marking the engines, like glowing eyes, stagger beyond the deck, dipping toward an invisible sea, then come up, rising… rising… struggling aloft against wind and gravity and drag.

Then the Tomcat was gone, swallowed once again by the night.

"Okay, Brewer," Barnes was saying into his microphone. "Once again around. Just like a walk in the park."

"Ah, roger that, Home Plate," the voice replied. "Just remember that the parks are getting damned dangerous. 'Specially at night."

"So, Captain," Barnes said conversationally after a moment. "What're the chances that the Russkis are gonna fold?"

It was clearly a ploy to ease the atmosphere of growing tension that filled Pri-Fly like some noxious cloud. The Russian War had been the steady, number-one topic of conversation aboard every ship in CBG-14 ever since they'd left Norfolk the week before.

"Zero to none," Tombstone shot back. His heart was pounding hard enough that Barnes could surely hear it. "The Reds don't dare show the cracks in the foundation of their coup. It looks like Leonov is going to keep hammering away until something gives. The only out the neo-Soviets have is to turn this into a general war. A world war."

"My, CAG, but you're just full of cheerful thoughts tonight," Barnes said. "Think it'll go nuke?"

"It could. I don't think anyone wants it to, not even Krasilnikov. And yet…" He shrugged. "This is the first time we've had an honest-to-God civil war in a country where both sides have nuclear weapons. And, well, fratricidal wars are always the bloodiest, the most down-and-dirty vicious wars of all."

"Hey!" Barnes said. "Remember when we all thought the world would be a safer place with the Soviet Union gone?"

"What do you want," Stoney replied, grinning. "A return to the good old days of the Cold War?"

The neo-Soviet empire had appeared to collapse in the wake of the brief, hard-fought naval campaign off Norway nine months earlier. Tombstone could close his eyes and still remember the roar and thunder of battle, the pillars of smoke climbing heavenward marking the funeral pyres of ships, the hurtling aerial combat machines jousting in tournaments of death at Mach 2 and beyond.

Tombstone himself had been in a Hornet flashing low across the deck of the Soviet supercarrier Kreml ― just as the Baltic Fleet's flagship had exploded in flames. His heart still raced each time he thought about it.

The Thomas Jefferson had been hurt badly off the Lofoten Islands in the final chapter of the Battles of the Fjords. She'd limped back under her own steam, first to Scapa Flow, then to Norfolk, but her flight deck had been so badly ripped up that nothing could land on it but helicopters. By the time the old girl had reached her home port, there'd been talk of scrapping her.

Events across the Atlantic had dictated otherwise. UN troops had briefly occupied Moscow and St. Petersburg, as Red Army units in Scandinavia began surrendering en masse. There'd been talk of a joint allied military government to oversee the recovery of Russian democracy. Ilya Anatolevich Leonov and his Popular Russian Democratic Party had made their appearance, rising from obscurity to control of the new Russian government almost overnight. The UN forces had withdrawn, and a breathless world had continued to watch the growth of the world's newest and most astonishing democracy, live from Moscow on CNN. Which was why the news of the military coup in mid February had been so devastating. Overnight, it seemed, the old iron Curtain had slammed down yet again. The only news emerging from the crippled Russian giant consisted of dark, nightmare tales of purges and people's courts, of mobilizations, KGB arrests, and assassinations, of a hard-liner Red Army marshal named Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov who, to judge by the stories spread by the trickle of refugees out of Russia, held close spiritual kinship with the restive shade of Stalin.

The war begun by the Soviets in Scandinavia, it was clear now, was resuming. News that Leonov and some of his supporters had fled Moscow and found refuge in the southern Urals was the first word of civil war. As former S.S.R.s chose sides, as Krasilnikov's Red Army and Leonov's Blue Army clashed in a bloody meeting engagement at the Vornezh River, it became clear that events in the former Soviet Union might well be capable of holding the entire world hostage.

Both Reds and Blues possessed nuclear weapons. How long would it be before one side or the other used them?

The repairs to the Thomas Jefferson had received top priority in a nation already struggling to improve its military posture. In record time, Jeff's flight deck had been restored, and her normal complement of ninety-plus aircraft in ten squadrons had been returned to her.

Now, the Jefferson was returning to the same waters where she'd been savaged nine months earlier. She was the same ship, but many of her people were new… and that included the majority of the air wing's aviators.

Casualties among Jefferson's fliers during the Battle of the Fjords had been atrocious, and the Navy Department had been pulling out all the stops to get qualified personnel in to replace those losses.

"Two-one-eight, you're lookin'just fine," the LSO's voice said. "Call the ball."

Static crackled over the speaker, and Tombstone pictured Conway in the Tomcat's cockpit, straining for a glimpse of Jefferson's meatball through that ink-black soup.

"Two-one-eight, call the ball. Acknowledge."

"Okay, gentlemen, got it," Conway's voice replied. "Two-one-eight, Tomcat ball. One… ah, make it zero point niner."

There wouldn't be fuel enough for another touch-and-go.

"Two-one-eight, roger ball. You're right on the money. Deck coming up.

Power on."

Tombstone leaned forward, knuckles white against the handle of his forgotten cup of coffee.

"Power on, Two-one-eight! Up! Up!"

God, Conway was low, hurtling toward Jefferson's ramp at 140 knots…

The Tomcat materialized out of the night like a gray ghost, nose high, landing gear and arrestor hook seeming to reach ahead of the plummeting aircraft in a desperate search for the deck. The F-14 cleared the flight deck's roundoff by a handful of feet, slamming the steel just beyond with a jolt that wrenched its nose down sharply. Throttle up… but then the tailhook engaged the number-two wire and yanked the aircraft to a halt. The engine throttled down.

"Thank you, God," Tombstone said. "Thank you, dear God." A pair of powerful 7x50 binoculars swung by their strap from a hook beside the Air Boss's station. Tombstone picked them up and raised them to his eyes. Tomcat 218 was now approaching the spot left for it, guided by the yellow shirt and his glowing wands. The rain appeared to have lessened in the past few minutes, but it was rapidly being replaced by the first swirling flakes of snow. The Tomcat's wheels left tracks in a thin slush already gathering on the black-painted steel of the flight deck.

Two-one-eight's deck crew crowded around, ramming chocks home beneath the wheels and beginning the complex tie-down process to secure the aircraft against blasts of wind, natural or manmade, across the flight deck. The crew chief turned a key and unfolded a ladder from the fuselage. The canopy popped open, then raised itself back.

Tombstone focused the binoculars on Lieutenant Commander Conway and the aircraft's Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Damiano. Still seated in their aircraft, bathed in the harsh glare from a light on the carrier's island above their heads, they seemed unshaken, running through their shutdown procedures with the professionals' routine and unflappable calm.

Not for the first time, Tombstone marveled at the changes that were overtaking Jefferson's air wing… that were sweeping throughout the entire American military. He'd thought that the high casualties off Norway, the graphic horrors of modern naval warfare, would have had the exact opposite effect on recruitment and training policies and American popular opinion than that he'd been witness to these past few months. Sometimes it was still a bit hard to believe.

Through the binoculars, he watched Conway and Damiano remove their helmets and hand them to their crew chief, then begin unfastening the harnesses. Tricia Conway's blond hair was cut short to accommodate her helmet; Rose's hair was jet black and a bit longer. Their flight suits could not completely disguise the decidedly female curves of their figures.

Lieutenant Chris Hanson, having just clambered out of her Tomcat parked a few yards away, reached the foot of the ladder and was shouting something at Conway, giving her a happy thumbs-up.

This, Tombstone decided, was definitely a whole new Navy from the one he'd joined over a decade before. Twenty-eight new flight officers, pilots and RIOs, had reported aboard the Jefferson at Norfolk two weeks ago. Of those twenty-eight, twelve were women.

The great, long-awaited social experiment, American women in combat, was beginning aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson.