D. Porter.
All four ships had already added their Standard missile firepower to the battle and were knocking down incoming Russian cruise missiles as fast as they appeared on the screen.
As he kept listening to the bursts of radio communication between the men and women in the fighters, however, Tombstone knew that the real brunt of the fighting was being borne not by the CICs of the surface ships involved, but by the aviators. As minute dragged after minute, the Tomcats and Hornets from both CBGs continued to claw at the neo-Soviet aircraft formations pressing in across Jefferson's eastern combat perimeter. One wave had largely been wiped out of the sky by the long-range AIM-54Cs; there'd been a brief pause, but now a second wave had appeared, and the Hawkeye radar pickets indicated that still more aircraft were beginning to appear in the skies above the Kola Peninsula air bases.
Sooner or later, the repeated Russian assaults, crashing like storm-driven waves across the CBF's slender defenses, would break through.
When that happened, the water would come crashing through the breach, and there would be nothing left with which to stop it.
'Low Down!' Bouncer cried in his ear. 'Watch it! We got two dropping in from our five o'clock!'
Lieutenant James Stanley Lowe, call sign 'Low Down,' was a new arrival aboard the Jefferson. A member of the carrier's other Tomcat squadron, the VF-97 War Eagles, he'd come aboard during Jefferson's refit at Norfolk some two months before, having flown before that with a reserve squadron at Oceana.
He'd brought his RIO with him, Lieutenant j.g. Beth Harper. After she'd thrown an abusive drunk out the door of a squadron watering hole in Norfolk, everyone had called her Bouncer.
They worked well together, and he'd enjoyed the notoriety of being one of the first in his reserve group to team with a female NFO.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he spotted the slim, nose-on silhouettes of the MiGs following the Tomcat into a long right turn. Damn… a pair of MiG-29 Fulcrums, flying welded-wing. They were still perhaps a mile off. He pulled the stick farther to the right, tightening his turn.
'Keep… watching… 'em…' he called back, battling the increasing G-forces of the turn.
This was bad. Fulcrums were hot… as fast and as able as the F-15 Eagle they'd been designed to combat, and in some ways better. Worse, Lowe and Harper had launched with a warload of six Phoenix missiles. They'd expended them all at long-range targets and been on their way back to the Jeff to rearm when these jokers had slipped through the perimeter and jumped them.
Trading altitude for speed, Low Down straightened out of the turn to starboard; the two MiGs, still flying in tight side-by-side formation, punched across his flight path a good mile to the rear. With twin stabilizers and large underslung intakes, they looked a lot like U.S. Air Force Eagles.
'They're turning,' Bouncer told him. 'They're coming right and following us down!'
He'd lost sight of them behind the aircraft. 'Are they still turning?'
'Yeah! Still coming! Turning our way!'
Lowe went into a reverse turn to the left that made the Tomcat shudder in protest. He'd practiced this stunt a lot, had even pulled it once on a couple of F-15s during Navy-Air Force 'Red Flag' maneuvers. Standing on his port-side wing, he watched sea and sky wheel past his canopy until the two tiny, distant shapes swung past his left shoulder and dropped behind his HUD.
One of the MiGs had turned smartly and was coming down Lowe's path virtually in his footsteps, too close and too far to the right for Lowe to engage. The other had had trouble with the hard left turn and drifted away from his wingman. As he pulled out of his turn, he was a mile beyond his companion and almost directly in the center of Lowe's HUD.
This would be the time for a heat-seeker shot, but he didn't have any.
'Going to guns!' he called, and he flipped the selector. His HUD showed the drifting circle of his aiming reticle, as well as the rectangle marking the target. Just beneath the vertical airspeed indicator on the left side of his HUD was a discrete reading: ARM 675, showing his gun ready, with a full load of 675 rounds of 20mm ammo. Pulling up slightly, he dragged the reticle across the rectangle, squeezing the trigger when the one encompassed the other.
The F-14 mounted the M61A1 Vulcan, a six-barreled, high-speed cannon recessed into the left side of the fuselage, just below the cockpit. That gun screamed now, hurling 20mm shells toward the MiG as it angled toward him almost nose-on.
The other MiG flashed past him on the left. He ignored it and kept holding down the trigger. Firing six thousand rounds per minute, the Vulcan would eat 675 rounds in less than seven seconds. He held the trigger down for two full seconds, watching the flicker of yellow tracers as they whipped off his Tomcat's nose, then slowed in accordance with the laws of perspective, floating, nearly stopping as they converged on the MiG. He imagined he saw debris breaking off the target but couldn't be sure.
Yes! The MiG was trailing smoke. There was a puff of smoke, and something separated from the aircraft, now less than half a mile away. The Russian pilot had just ejected.
Bringing his stick back to the right and kicking his rudder over, Low Down rolled to starboard, cutting away from the oncoming aircraft. Burning now, it held its long, straight descent toward the sea.
'Splash one Fulcrum!' he called over the tactical channel.
'Low Down!' Bouncer warned. 'The other MiG's reversed. He's coming in on our five again!'
Twisting in his seat, he picked up the enemy aircraft over his right shoulder. Damn, this guy was good! His wingman must have been a rookie to let himself get pulled out of formation like that, but this man was matching Lowe turn for turn, and then some, getting full value out of the Fulcrum's superior turning and maneuverability.
While he was looking at the MiG, he saw a yellow spark ignite beneath its wing. Missile! With no radar warning, it would be an IR homer, probably one of the Russians' AA-8 Aphids.
'Missile launch!' Bouncer called. 'Incoming!'
'Flares!' he snapped. He rolled hard to the right, turning into the attacker, hoping to break inside the missile's turn radius. He could already tell, though, that he was too late.
Next choice. He throttled back, way back, pulling the Tomcat's engines nearly to idle. More hot-burning magnesium flares scattered into the sky behind his aircraft. With the engine throttled back, the IR homer might choose the flares instead of his exhaust.
A second missile was in the air now, and the first was hurtling toward his six with appalling speed. He let the F-14's nose fall way off. The ocean spun across the front of his canopy, filling his view forward in a spinning blur of ultramarine…
The first missile slammed into his starboard engine and exploded, sending white-hot fragments ripping through avionics, combustion chambers, turbine blades, and fuel tanks. In that same instant, Low Down knew that the aircraft was doomed. He could feel the plane tearing itself to pieces around him.
'Punch out, Bouncer!' he yelled. 'Eject! Eject!'
He grabbed his own red-and-white-striped ejection ring and pulled, hard.
The canopy exploded away from the falling aircraft, and a second later, an angry giant slammed his boot into the base of Lowe's spine, flinging him clear of the Tomcat in a shrieking cacophony of wind and rocket motor.
For a few seconds, Low Down was suspended in blissful silence. He saw his Tomcat ? what was left of it, anyway ? disintegrating into flaming, tumbling fragments as it dropped toward the sea.
And then his chute opened, jerking him upright with a jolt that nearly knocked the breath from his lungs. Reflexively grabbing the chute's risers, he dangled there, surveying his surroundings.
Low Down was alone in a wide, open sky. He couldn't see the MiG that had killed him, though the snarled white contrails of other aircraft and missiles in the distance gave the skyscape a strange, surreal look. Twisting in his harness, he tried to spot Bouncer. Had she gotten clear?
He couldn't see her chute anywhere. Minutes later, he plunged into the frigid waters of the Barents Sea.
