Guided by the Yellow Shirt, the Tomcat rolled smoothly across the flight deck, nosing up behind the vertical wall of a jet-blast deflector raised from the deck. Forward of the JBD, another Tomcat had just screamed off the bow and into the sky, and steam was swirling past the deck like low-flying clouds.
The JBD dropped into its recess in the deck, and Coyote guided the Tomcat forward, aligning it with precision along the rail-straight slash of the starboard bow catapult.
From her vantage point high up off the steel deck, Cat had a glorious view of the sea and sky around her. It was minutes before dawn, which came at 0640 hours at this latitude and this time of year. The sky was completely clear save for a rim of purple clouds along the horizon. Aft and to port the sky was still a deep, midnight blue; ahead and to starboard, toward the east, it had already lightened to a dazzling blend of cerulean and gold, and the tops of the clouds were catching the first orange touch of the hidden sun. A dazzlingly bright star ? actually the planet Venus ? gleamed like a beacon low in the southeast. In every direction, the sea was a deep, deep blue-green shadowed to near-invisibility by the last remnants of night.
With a thunderous, shuddering roar, the engines of Tomcat 206 on the catapult to her left rose to a shrieking crescendo, the aircraft trembling against that twin-mouthed fury. The launch officer performed his ballet of movement, swinging his arm up to point off the carrier's bow, then dropping to touch the deck. At the signal, the catapult officer in his enclosed cockpit on the deck off to one side pressed his button. Tomcat 206, Lieutenant Bruce 'Mustang' Davis at the stick, whooshed down the catapult and off the bow, its engines glowing like twin orange eyes in the twilight. Steam fumed from the catapult track as deck crewmen dashed from their standby positions, preparing to receive the next Tomcat in line.
Other crewmen, meanwhile, were making the final preparations on 201.
Red-shirted ordies yanked the safing wires from the F-14's armament stores: four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, two AIM-9M Sidewinders, and two of the new AMRAAM radar-guided missiles that were only now slowly coming into service as a replacement for the old, less-than-satisfactory Sparrow. One of them held a handful of wires up so that Coyote and Cat could verify that all of the weapons were now ready to fire. A Purple Shirt, a 'Grape' in the lexicon of carrier deck crews, held up a signboard with the numerals 65000. That was the weight in pounds of the Tomcat, its stores, and its fuel. A cross-check with Coyote was necessary to verify the figure, so that the launch crews could set their catapult to fire with the proper strength. Green-shirted hook-and-cat men crawled beneath the aircraft, attaching the catapult shuttle and making certain all was ready for launch.
'Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Amen' sounded over her headset, a murmured litany. Coyote was running through the old naval aviator's ritual, 'wiping' the Tomcat's rudder and ailerons by moving his stick forward and back, left and right, then moving the rudder pedals with his feet.
'Harness set?' Coyote asked her.
'Ready to go,' she said. Could he hear her heart hammering through the ICS? Her mouth was dry, her palms inside her flight gloves were wet. She heard the Air Boss speaking to Coyote over the radio, giving him clearance. A light shining from the island and visible over her right shoulder showed green. They were ready for launch. Leaning her helmet as far back into her headrest as it would go, she braced herself, fighting the tension building in her gut. Suddenly, it was as though perspective had changed for her. The length of track from the Tomcat to the bow, just visible past the console and the back of Coyote's seat in front of her, seemed now impossibly short, a few feet at most. The deck officer was making revving motions with his wands, and she felt the F-14's engines coming to full power, a volcanic blast of power shrieking scant feet behind the small of her back. The Tomcat trembled now at the head of the catapult, like a great, gray eagle poised for flight.
How Many times had she been hurled from the bow of an aircraft carrier?
She'd long ago lost count… but the excitement and the fear and the adrenaline rush were always the same for her.
Coyote saluted the deck officer, indicating he was ready. The deck officer swung his arm up in that graceful point, dropped, touched the deck…
WHAM!
The Tomcat accelerated from zero to 170 mph in two seconds, thundering off Jefferson's bow in a dizzying rush of raw power. Had something gone wrong, had the catapult failed to provide the necessary thrust, they would have plunged off the carrier's bow toward the sea… with a scant second or two to grab their ejection rings and blast themselves clear.
'Wheeooo!' Coyote shrilled from the forward seat. 'Good shot!'
And then they were climbing, her seat tipping back as the nose came up… up… up… and the Tomcat rocketed into the dawn. Golden light exploded over the eastern horizon as they passed five thousand feet, a mile up and still climbing. The sky above was pure glory.
And this was why Kathy Garrity had become a naval flight officer, despite the protests of her parents, despite the grueling training and study she'd put herself through for the past four years.
'oh, God, this is beautiful!' she cried over the ICS, unable and unwilling to suppress the joy.
'Amen to that,' Coyote replied. 'Let's tuck 'em in and see what this crate'll really do.'
The Tomcat's wings, extended straight out to achieve maximum lift for takeoff, were folding back now, turning the Tomcat into a sleek spearhead designed for speed.
Accelerating now, they kept climbing into blue-gold glory.
The E-7C Hawkeye had roared off Jefferson's number-two catapult hours earlier, taking up station in advance of the carrier group as it made its way northeast along the Norwegian coast. One of four E-2Cs in VAW-130, the Catseyes, the Hawkeye was a carrier-based AEW, or early warning aircraft, thought by many to be the most capable radar-warning and aircraft-control plane in service anywhere in the world. In an age of high-performance jets, it was driven by two Allison turboprops, which gave the plane fuel efficiency enough to manage a two- hundred-mile patrol radius with six hours of loiter time on station. By far its most distinctive feature was the saucer-shaped radome, twenty-four feet in diameter, circling at a leisurely six revolutions per minute on its mounting above the aircraft's fuselage. The saucer provided lift enough to offset its own weight, and housed the powerful APS-125 radar that allowed the E-2C to track targets out to a range of 240 nautical miles.
On board was a crew of five: two pilots, a combat information center officer, an air controller, and a radar operator. Though it was now past sunrise, the aft part of the aircraft was shielded from outside light, and the only illumination came from the green-glowing screens that were the Hawkeye's entire reason for being. On the radar operator's main console, the sweep line painted smears of liquid light, stage-lighting the man as he noted the appearance of unidentified blips just entering the E-2C's range.
The CIC officer and the air controller stood behind him, peering over his shoulders at the screen. 'My Lord in heaven,' the air controller said. 'They must be standing on each other's shoulders.'
'Let's flash it,' the CIC officer said. He picked up a microphone, keyed it, and began speaking in rapid, urgent tones.
'Home Plate, Home Plate,' he said, using Jefferson's call sign. 'This is Echo-Tango Seven-six-one. We have multiple contacts, repeat, numerous multiple contacts, from one-zero-zero to one-five-zero, range two-four-zero nautical miles.'
The radar operator was Radarman First Class Richard Lee. Twenty-four years old, he'd been in the Navy for seven years and he had never, in all his life, seen such an array of aircraft except, possibly, for simulations of a mass Russian attack.
The Hawkeye was flying well in advance of the Jefferson and had now reached its patrol station twenty miles off Norway's North Cape. From that vantage point, and at the aircraft's ceiling of just over thirty thousand feet, he could see well into Russia's Kola Peninsula, painted on his display in crisp lines of light. Nothing was happening around Polyamyy or Murmansk, but the sky must be thick with aircraft over the airfields at Titovka, Pechenga, Zapolyamyy, Nikel.
This couldn't be happening…
'Sir,' he said, pointing. 'They're crossing the line.'
It was true. Aircraft from Nikel and Pechenga, already practically on Russia's narrow border with Norway, were moving across the demarcation line between the countries. More aircraft were arriving too, from further to the south and cast, from Kola airfields not yet within range of the E-2C's radar.
