Flame Out

CHAPTER 4

Rear Admiral Douglas F. Tarrant looked up from his computer terminal at the discreet tap on his door. “Come,” he said, saving the letter to his wife before shutting off the machine. He glanced at the clock over his desk and raised a surprised eyebrow. There were few people aboard who would knock on that door at this time of night, even if they knew Tarrant was accustomed to working late and snatching short catnaps.

Jefferson’s CO, Captain Jeremy Brandt, looked apologetic as he entered. Short, stocky, with close-cut blond hair beginning to go gray, Brandt had a bulldog face and a temperament, so Tarrant had learned, to match. They’d never served together before, but Tarrant had heard nothing but good reports on the captain, and had confirmed them in a month’s direct contact. It was Brandt’s first cruise commanding a carrier, but he’d put in tours as CO aboard the Tripoli and the Kalamazoo, with a particularly good record as CAG aboard the Kennedy back in ‘93. The carefully planned career cycle of Navy carrier skippers ensured that the best men made it to the top, but even in that distinguished company Brandt stood out.

“Sorry to disturb you, Admiral,” he said. “But Commander Sykes down in CR just processed a Priority Urgent message from CINCLANT.” He held up a bundle of teletype printouts.

Tarrant frowned. The bulky ream of paper sent up from the ship’s Communications Department had to be detailed situation reports and orders for the battle group from Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet, and the precedence code of “Priority Urgent” meant that it was important enough to require attention within three hours of transmission. That could mean only one thing.

“We’re going in,” he said aloud. “We must be going in.”

Brandt nodded slowly. “That’s my guess, sir. Looks like the folks up at NCA finally got off their collective butt and decided to make a move after all.”

He took the papers from the captain. “Anything else?”

“Mercury Flight’s on the deck, Admiral. Two Tomcats, two Intruders. Not a full replacement, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Good.” Tarrant smiled. “I’ll bet CAG’s happy at least.”

“Yes, sir,” Brandt said noncommittally. Everyone on board knew Stramaglia’s reputation for never being satisfied. “We also had confirmation from the Hawkeye that the Bear we were tracking changed course after our Tomcats intercepted.”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t tell me,” Tarrant said. There was a certain amount of rivalry between Brandt as Captain of the ship and Stramaglia as CO of the Air Wing. In theory they were equals under Tarrant’s command, and it might have been considered a breach of protocol for Brandt to report developments that were entirely within the CAG’s purview. But Tarrant was more concerned at the moment with information rather than propriety. If the message from CINCLANT was what he thought it was, he was going to need every scrap of data he could lay his hands on in the next few hours.

“All right, Captain,” he went on, adopting a more serious tone. “Pass the word for my staff to meet me in Flag Plot in half an hour. And I want a meeting of the battle group’s senior officers on board Jefferson tomorrow morning at 0900. Captains and Execs … CAG and his staff too.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Brandt responded formally. “I doubt Colby or Wolfe can get here for the meeting, though.”

They were the skippers of CBG-14’s two 688-class attack subs, Galveston and Bangor. They were ranging far ahead of the surface ships, and it would be awkward to transport officers off the submarines to attend a briefing.

A face-to-face meeting with his ship commanders wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it was something Tarrant always tried to arrange when there were important orders to be passed along. It gave him a better measure of the men who had to carry them out. He could see their reactions, hear their opinions. Despite all the myths of modern high-tech warfare it was still the men who counted most.

“Don’t worry about them,” he told Brandt. He’d just have to depend on their skills sight unseen. From what he remembered of them from the short meetings he’d had with the two sub commanders at the beginning of the deployment, he had nothing to worry about from either man. “We’ll send them a transcript afterwards. But see to getting the others aboard.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the captain repeated, glancing again at the printout with an unreadable expression before turning to leave.

After Brandt was gone Tarrant picked up the printout and began to scan the pages. It was as he had feared. The situation in Norway was no longer to be considered a local problem.

As was so often the case, the crisis had caught everyone, including America’s intelligence community, off guard. At the core of the matter lay a long-standing grievance between Norway and the Soviet Union, going back to post-World War II days. The argument over the exact location of territorial water boundaries in the Barents Sea had become a major issue almost overnight. Soviet military maneuvers on the Norwegian border had heightened the tensions without really changing the equation. That was just a routine adjunct to diplomacy as far as the Russians were concerned. The world community had looked on, unable and often unwilling to get involved as the war of words continued. Denunciations of both sides in the United Nations, mediation by the Secretary General — nothing had worked.

But the Soviet President had made his mark on the world stage as a diplomat whose charm and personal style could make things happen where the career negotiators were deadlocked. His well-publicized trip to Oslo on a mission of personal negotiation had been stage-managed with the modern Russian flair for grabbing Western audiences and selling them on the new Soviet Union’s dedication to peace and goodwill.

At the time Tarrant had been convinced that the whole dispute with Norway had been engineered just so the President of the Soviet Union could produce another of his famed diplomatic miracles … and incidentally counteract the bad press Russia had been getting over the crackdowns on food rioters in Kiev and Smolensk. The Soviets had learned a lot about stage-managing public relations stunts from Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Then, on the fourth day of June, the unthinkable happened. In front of tens of millions of television viewers worldwide, a bomb planted in Norway’s parliament building had exploded just as the Soviet President had come forward to deliver a speech announcing the settlement of the dispute.

The act had left the world stunned. Not only had the charismatic, reform-minded Soviet President perished in that blast, but along with him numerous high-ranking Norwegian government officials and members of the Storting had died as well. Within a matter of hours there were riots in Oslo and Bergen, and an air of desperation and near-anarchy seemed to dominate Norway.

The Soviet reaction had been both swift and deadly. Declaring the bomb plot and the subsequent disorders in a neighbor country posed a direct threat to the stability of their own nation, Russian leaders announced their intention to restore order before the situation deteriorated further. Russian troops and planes were on their way into Norwegian territory within a day of that fateful assassination.

Tarrant considered himself a student of history, and he couldn’t help but draw the parallels between the events the world had just witnessed and another assassination plot years ago in a Balkan city called Sarajevo. But where it had taken over a month for open warfare to break out after the death of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, this time fighting erupted in a matter of hours.

What other differences would there be … and what similarities? Would Norway be another Afghanistan, or the flashpoint for the Third World War?

Tonight the crisis had just escalated one notch higher, and the world had moved one step closer to all-out war between the superpowers.

It was ironic, he thought as he finished the long communiqud and put it aside, the way the crisis had come out of nowhere. Twenty years, even ten years ago, a Soviet attack into Norway would have been unthinkable. Norway was a firm NATO ally, and though foreign troops were not permitted on Norwegian soil in peacetime, the apparatus for getting them there in a hurry was well tested. But the very air of peace and cooperation that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall had also undermined the whole fabric of the West’s defense plans. NATO was almost a dead letter now, in shambles after fighting had erupted between Greece and Turkey and after Germany’s decision to pull out of the alliance and stand alone. The Labor government in Britain had cut back involvement in European affairs as they had cut the British defense budget, and the United States, with liberal Democrats controlling both the Congress and the Executive Branch for the first time in decades, had been just as eager to retreat into a new isolationism. The tireless pursuit of the “peace dividend” had led to closings of most of the major military bases in Europe and massive cuts in personnel and hardware.

America had hesitated when the first tanks rolled across the border. President Connally had been reluctant to make a unilateral commitment of forces, preferring to seek United Nations support for a solution, be it diplomatic or military, to the aggression in Scandinavia. Now, a week into the fighting, he had finally issued the orders to act.

Tarrant tapped the printout absently with the fingers of one hand. The gesture Connally had ordered could easily turn out to be too little, too late. Norway had not been able to put up the stiff resistance everyone had expected the nation to provide in the event of an invasion. Though both sides had been mobilized before the Soviet President’s visit to Oslo, the Norwegians had received orders to begin a general stand-down in the wake of the breakthroughs at the conference table. The crippling blow to their government had created massive confusion which the Russians, who had remained on full alert throughout, were quick to exploit. Their advance into Norway had used the kind of Air-Land battle techniques demonstrated before by the U.S. in Operation Desert Storm, encircling, cutting off pockets of resistance, using airborne and airmobile capabilities to the fullest. Amphibious operations along the vulnerable coastline had been another key factor in the rapid Russian advance.

It looked now like Norway might fall before American intervention could do anything to save the country … and CBG-14 was sailing into the middle of that inferno.

He glanced at the clock again. It was almost time for him to put in his appearance at Flag Plot and set his staff in motion to translate Washington’s orders into action. But first, he told himself as he reached for the switch on his computer terminal, he would finish the letter to his wife so it would be ready for the next COD flight.

Admiral Douglas F. Tarrant was all too aware that it might be the last letter he ever sent her.

Commander Willis E. Grant held on to his cap with one hand and hurried across the deck toward the huddled row of airplanes parked on the flight deck. In the eerie glow of work-lights they presented a nightmare appearance, with wings twisted and folded in bizarre shapes to allow them to take up the least possible space. Intruders with wings folded upward at mid-span to meet above the center of the fuselage, S-3 Viking sub-hunters with tails twisted to one side and slender wings laid flat against the top of the aircraft, the weird shape of a Hawkeye with wings tucked close in alongside its body and the huge rotating radar dome on top casting strange shadows, all of them looked like prehistoric beasts lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike. Around them the steady work of a carrier at sea went on. Grant dodged a pair of green-shirted maintenance men and narrowly avoided being run down by one of the “mules” that were used to tow planes from place to place on the deck and were driven by a blue-shirted crewman. Then he saw the newly arrived Tomcat, already tucked neatly into a row of other aircraft, with the familiar tall, spare figure of Tombstone Magruder visible near the front of the plane.

Magruder had his helmet under one arm and was bending over to examine the jet’s front landing gear assembly. Grant had seen the hard landing he’d made, and knew what that could do to the wheels. It was typical of Magruder to be concerned for his plane after he was down, a familiar echo of many shared flights.

They went back a long way, Magruder and Grant, all the way back to flight school. Over the years the two of them had been rivals in almost everything, and a lasting friendship had grown up between them along the way. Grant had won their competition for the heart of Julie Wilson, but Tombstone had been best man at their Navy wedding. Then Magruder had won the coveted assignment to Top Gun, narrowly beating out Grant in the squadron competitions for the honor. Tombstone had been a step ahead of Grant when it came to promotions, making lieutenant commander and squadron leader of VF-95 after his graduation from Top Gun. It hadn’t changed their friendship, though. Far from begrudging Magruder his advancement, Grant had been delighted for his friend. He had secretly wondered, though, if he himself hadn’t been the lucky one of the pair. What he had with Julie was something he wouldn’t have given up for all the stripes in the Navy, and by the same token there had always been a restless, questing part of Matt Magruder that was never entirely at ease no matter how much he achieved.

They’d been reunited in the Vipers for Jefferson’s Pacific deployment, and it was that cruise that had changed them both forever. While Tombstone was scoring ACM kills over North Korea and starting on the hero’s path, Grant had been shot down in the first engagement of the confrontation. Captured by the enemy he’d been thrown into a prison camp alongside the crew of the American spy ship that had triggered the crisis. The Marine rescue mission to Wonsan had freed him along with the others, but afterward Grant had come close to turning in his wings. He had come too close to death to ever take anything, especially his happiness with Julie, lightly again.

The one thing that had pulled him through that time of crisis had been Magruder’s unyielding faith in him. In the fraternity of naval aviators there was little sympathy for the men who cracked under the strain, who showed even a hint of human weakness. But Tombstone Magruder hadn’t turned his back on Grant, and in the end, recovered from his ordeal, Grant had returned to VF-95 in time to fight side by side with Tombstone again in the skies over the Indian Ocean.

It was a debt he would never be able to fully repay. Grant loved flying, and looking back now he knew that he would never have forgiven himself if he’d gone through with that first impulse to quit.

A plane captain clad in a brown shirt had joined Magruder, and was nodding sagely at something Tombstone was pointing out to him. The Tomcat’s RIO, looking painfully young and unsure of himself, lingered for a few moments looking uncertainly at Tombstone before he finally started for the carrier’s island.

Then Tombstone was finished with his inspection and starting off in the younger officer’s wake, heading toward Grant but apparently not aware of him. Grant stepped in front of him, drew up to attention, and tore off a snappy salute. “Deputy CAG, Sir!” he said. “VF-95 welcomes you aboard, Sir!”

The look on Magruder’s face was a joy to behold. Bewilderment, then surprise, then sheer joy spread across his features in quick succession. “Coyote!” he said, using Grant’s well-worn call sign. “God damn, Coyote, what a perfect welcoming committee! I didn’t even know you were still on the Jeff!”

“There’s still a few of us here, Matt,” Grant told him, grinning. Despite the best of intentions they’d lost touch over the past two years. Magruder wasn’t much of a correspondent at the best of times, and Coyote could imagine how easy it had been for him to put off writing letters in the face of day after day of piled-up paperwork. Though he’d tried to keep up his end, eventually Grant had started letting the contact slide as well. That had been about the time Julie Marie had been born. “Batman and Malibu would’ve been here too, but they had a Bear hunt tonight. We were afraid we’d lost you to the old five-sided squirrel cage forever!”

Magruder’s smile faded. “Biggest mistake I ever made, letting myself get talked into that. I could’ve had damn near any assignment I asked for after that cruise, but I ended up pushing papers and smiling for the publicity photos.” There was a bitterness there that Coyote didn’t like. Tombstone had always been a little bit moody, but this was different, grimmer. Like he’d lost a part of himself and wasn’t sure he’d ever get it back again. Tombstone shrugged, then said, “How’s the baby?”

“Almost three now … what they call the ‘Terrible Twos.’” Coyote made a face. “Julie claims she’ll get over it. I hope the house survives!”

“She must love you bugging out for sea duty again so quick,” Magruder commented, chuckling.

“You know Julie. No complaints there.” Grant glanced at his friend. “How’s Pamela doing?”

“Okay, I guess,” Tombstone replied, looking away. “We … uh, called it quits a few months back. I haven’t seen her in a while, except on the tube.”

“I’m sorry,” Coyote said, feeling the words were inadequate. “I thought you’d worked out all the … problems there.”

“I did too. Guess I was wrong.” He had that grim look again. Tombstone’s romance with Pamela Drake had been the kind of relationship Hollywood screenwriters loved. The red-hot Navy fighter jockey and the beautiful television reporter had seemed perfect together, and Grant had really thought his friend had found something to hold on to at last, something as strong as what Coyote had with Julie. There had been some strains, of course. Pamela had been faced With the problem every service wife or girlfriend had to deal with, the danger of Tombstone’s career, and the fact that her Marine brother had died overseas hadn’t helped. She’d pleaded with Magruder to give up the Navy, but Tombstone had finally made her see how important his job was to him. “I really thought she understood how much the Navy meant to me, but I guess I was wrong. Even though she gave up on trying to make me a pilot for United or whoever, she kept telling me I should use my reputation to get myself a better job … you know, go into politics or on the talk show circuit or something. Can you see me spending all my time making the rounds with Jay or Phil?”

“I’m sorry,” Coyote repeated uselessly. “I thought you two had something pretty good going.”

“Yeah, me too,” Magruder told him. He looked away, then turned back to Coyote with a grin. “Well, if the Batman’s on board, maybe he’ll teach me how to hold on to women.”

They both laughed. Batman Wayne had been as much renowned aboard the Jefferson for his conquests in port as for his skill in the sky, but he wasn’t good at lasting relationships. Not if “lasting” meant a period of more than a week. But the laughter was strained, and Coyote felt there was a wall between them.

He wanted to change the subject, but after so long he wasn’t sure if there were any safe topics left. “How about your uncle?” he said hesitantly. “How’s he been doing?”

“Good, good,” Magruder said quickly, latching on to the new topic. There had been a time when his relationship to Admiral Thomas Magruder would have been a sore spot as well, but that was one thing that being a hero had helped him come to terms with. The admiral had commanded CBG-14 for a time, and his nephew had taken a lot of flak from people who thought he owed his advancement more to connections than ability. Tombstone had certainly disproved that. “He just got a posting to the Pentagon, in the Joint Operations Staff. A bit of a letdown from Presidential adviser, but after Connally came in it was a pretty good career move. He was moving in about the time I was coming up for reassignment.”

“Well, there’s one Magruder I’ll be glad to have in the Pentagon. The Old Man will show them a thing or two, huh?” They had reached the carrier’s island. Ducking through a hatch, they started down one of the seemingly endless corridors en route to the ready room, where Magruder could get out of his flight suit before reporting to Maintenance Control for the usual round of post-flight paperwork. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. I took care of your uniforms and your quarters assignment as soon as I heard you were coming aboard. Everything’s set.”

Magruder looked relieved. “Great. They stuffed us into those planes so fast they didn’t even give us time to pack. You’re a real buddy, Willie.”

Coyote glanced at him. The words were sincere enough, but Grant couldn’t help thinking how much they’d grown apart these last two years. It was like he was meeting Matt Magruder for the first time, and there were barriers there that old friendship just couldn’t get around.