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.
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.
