CHAPTER 12
'We've just lost Low Down and Bouncer,' the CIC officer said. 'They've routed an SH-3 for search and rescue.'
'It'll have to be quick,' Tombstone replied. 'That water's damned cold.'
He felt numb. He'd heard Lowe's exultant cry of 'Splash one Fulcrum' over the tactical channel and hoped the kid might be able to shake the second MiG. Obviously, the Fulcrum had stuck with him.
This, Tombstone thought, was what had been bothering him a few days before, now made diamond hard. Lowe's RIO, Beth Harper, was the first of Jefferson's female aviators to get shot down in combat. Had she survived?
Could she survive, given that even in her survival suit and with her life raft she would live only minutes in the cold Arctic water?
And yet, Tombstone surprised himself with the agility with which his mind shifted to other things, more pressing things. The rest of the fighters from Jefferson and the Eisenhower continued in their one-sided struggle against superior numbers… and the Russian missiles were starting to leak through the middle defensive zone. There was an exclamation from several sailors at one of the consoles. Blakely, one of the Ike battle group's frigates, had just taken a missile amidships, a big one. Reports were coming in that the FFG was already heeling far over to port, furiously ablaze.
'I think the Russkis are trying to flank us,' Frazier said. 'We're having more leakers coming around from the northeast. God damn!'
The CICO's exclamation was in response to another report. A radar-homing missile had just struck the Gettysburg, the Eisenhower group's Aegis cruiser.
It would be minutes yet before a clear picture of the damage could be transmitted, longer still before it could be assessed.
'CAG?' A sailor handed a telephone to Tombstone. 'CATCC.'
Tombstone took the call from the carrier's air traffic control. Many of Jefferson's Tomcats were heading back now for rearming. He acknowledged the information and suggested that permission be secured from the Shiloh for air ops to go back on the air again.
Handing the receiver back to the sailor, he turned to Frazier.
'We're going to have to start taking aircraft aboard pretty quick,' he said. 'Wind's still from the northeast, so we won't need a course change, but we'll need to break radio silence for approach control.'
'We'll be able to start recoverin' if those Russian Kingfishes don't burn our ass first.' The CIC officer paused, listening to something over his headset. 'Damn,' he said. 'Dickinson's playin' hero!'
At one end of the darkened CIC was a row of consoles manned by enlisted men, watched over by a chief petty officer. The consoles controlled Jefferson's CIWS.
'Chief Carangelo!' Frazier called. 'Dickinson's about to pass close aboard to starboard. Make sure the starboard CIWS is on standby.'
'Starboard CIWS on standby, aye, aye, sir.'
'Better wait a sec on the recovery ops, CAG,' he added. 'We got trouble comin'in from starboard, big time, and we're gonna be kinda busy.'
Any attacker that made it through the carrier group's three tactical zones had one final barrier to hurdle: the carrier's Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapons System, computer directed Gatling guns firing depleted-uranium shells at the incredible rate of three thousand rounds per minute. With a maximum effective range of only 1,500 yards, CIWS, called 'sea-whiz' by the men it protected, was definitely a last-ditch defense against any attackers that managed to penetrate to what counted for knife-fighting range in modern warfare.
The count of incoming missiles was still dwindling fast, but at the ten-mile mark, the beginning of Jefferson's inner defense zone, twenty-three remained in the air, still boring in on their target with deadly, single-minded purpose. With Jefferson's own radar shut off, the cruise missile threat would be scattered across a wide area, and many must be tracking the Shiloh. All such missiles, however, could be programmed to reach a given area through inertial guidance alone, and then begin searching with their own on-board radars for the largest target they could find.
A few of them were bound to spot the Jefferson.
Meanwhile, one of Jefferson's escorts, the guided-missile frigate Dickinson, had been providing close fire support from a position nearly half a mile astern of the carrier and to starboard. Now, however, as the enemy cruise missiles closed from starboard, Dickinson's skipper had ordered his ship to full speed ahead, racing up alongside the Jefferson in an attempt to block the incoming missiles.
Fire Control Technician Third Class Frank Pellet was scared to death.
It wasn't the battle. The drift of colored lights, the remote buzz of voices from the speakers, the chirp and warble of various consoles of data-linked electronics did not feel like what he had imagined combat to be.
He knew there were cruise missiles out there, inbound, but that information seemed curiously second-hand, remote, even unimportant.
No, Pellet was scared because of what had happened last night.
The fact that FCT3 Pellet was homosexual had nothing to do with his skills as a sailor. He'd been in the Navy for almost three years now, had learned his job well, and had consistently pulled in marks of 3.6, 3.8, and even 4.0 on his quarterly fitness reports.
He was under a hell of a lot of stress, though. The official ban against gays in the military had been lifted a good many years ago, but Pellet and tens of thousands of others like him continued to keep their sexual preferences hidden, or tried to, especially aboard ship. The Jeff wasn't bad as Navy ships went ? not like the Belleau Wood or a few others he'd heard about ? but in any assembly of thousands of people there were always a few who detested gays no matter what the brass or the Navy Department or the White House itself had to say.
He'd done his best to keep his secret. He'd approached none of his shipmates, never made a pass, kept his eyes to himself in the showers, and generally tried to maintain a low profile.
Of course, that meant he also hadn't made many friends. When the Jefferson had been laid up in Norfolk, he'd quartered aboard but gone ashore three nights out of four. Usually, he hadn't gone with his shipmates, though, because they'd often ended their drinking binges with a visit to one or another of Norfolk's whorehouses, and he found the very idea of doing that with some girl, well, disgusting. One memorable night, he'd been practically shanghaied into going with some of the other weapons techs and gunner's mates.
Unable to get out of it, he'd ended up paying the woman to let him sit with her in the room and just… talk. He'd told her everything and she'd been understanding and really nice about it. Afterward, she'd even endorsed his sexual prowess in front of the guys, telling them what a stud he was and how he'd done her until she could hardly walk.
That incident should have made things safer for him, but despite what she'd said, the story that he was gay had been spreading through the carrier like wildfire. Some straight, he was pretty sure, must have followed him one night when he'd donned his civies, taken liberty, and headed into town and the Pink Slipper. That was a notorious gay bar, and his secret would sure as hell be out if he'd been seen going in there. Or maybe that whore had told the truth to one of his shipmates.
Last night, though, his secret had been blown for good, and now he was just waiting for the ax to fall.
Damn it all! He'd been so careful not to give himself away by making a pass at someone or being too friendly, but he'd not thought that being careful meant he had to stay celibate! Jefferson's small gay community had a pretty closely knit organization aboard, what was still sometimes called a 'daisy chain' by the straights. Its members met
