Jefferson's CIC fell dead silent for one stunned instant. To Tombstone, it felt as though someone had thrown a switch, cutting every sound in the compartment. The chief at the CIWS console broke the spell an instant after he'd snapped the Phalanx selector back to standby.
'Pellet!' he barked. 'You're relieved! Get the hell out of there!'
'Chief, I-'
'Out, mister! You're confined to quarters until further notice! Newell!
Get in there! You have CIWS One!'
'Dickinson's falling off abeam,' Frazier snapped, staring at a television monitor that showed the burning frigate. 'Let's get on those missiles!'
The FFG's missile launcher and main gun had both stopped firing when the helicopter hangar exploded. As Dickinson dropped astern, Jefferson's starboard-side defenses opened up with renewed fury. Sea Sparrow missiles burst from their boxy eight-tube mounts in clouds of smoke and sprayed shards of plastic packing material. One after another, the Sea Sparrows arced low across the water, homing on incoming cruise missiles as they passed the ten-mile mark. Moments later, a bright blue flash lit the eastern horizon…
then another.
Several men in Jefferson's CIC cheered, but discipline returned almost at once. On the main screen display repeated from Shiloh, eleven missiles had crossed the ten-mile point. Even here, deep in Jefferson's CIC, the thud- whoosh of Sea Sparrows sprinting toward the horizon could be felt as a faint trembling in the deck, transmitted through the carrier's hull.
Watching the gathering force of the avalanche, Tombstone found he was holding his breath.
CHAPTER 13
Two AS-6 Kingfish missiles streaked low across the water toward Jefferson's forward quarter. The carrier's number-one CIWS, released by the man in CIC, tracked on the nearer Kingfish and opened fire, sending a brief burst, correcting the angle of fire, then firing again. Nine hundred yards off Jefferson's starboard quarter, the missile's one-ton warhead detonated with a savage bang that scattered glittering metallic fragments across three thousand square feet of sea, lashing the water to white frenzy.
The second missile flashed across the intervening space in an instant; the CIWS slewed to meet it, fired, and uranium penetrators slashed into its body. Liquid fuel burst into flame, and the missile, tumbling now and furiously ablaze, hurtled low across Jefferson's flight deck, scant yards above a row of A-6 Intruders parked with wings folded along the starboard side. Deck personnel engaged in launching a Hornet and a KA-6D tanker off the bow catapults dropped flat; for one agonized moment, it appeared that the burning wreckage was going to slam into the tanker loaded with over 2 1,000 pounds of jet fuel.
Then the burning Kingfish had passed, hurtling into the sea off Jefferson's port beam, striking the water with a thunderous detonation that sent a geysering white pillar hundreds of feet into the air, lashing the flight deck with spray.
Flight deck operations continued without letup. Minutes later, the fully laden tanker slammed off Jefferson's catapult, climbing aloft to rendezvous with those of the carrier's Tomcats that were returning now low on fuel.
Meanwhile, with the immediate threat from enemy missiles ended, the carrier's air traffic control center went back on the air.
'Dickinson's been hit,' Cat reported over the Tomcat's ICS. 'Sounds like she's got a fire on her helo deck.'
'Too damned many Russian leakers,' Coyote replied. Glancing out his canopy to his left, he saw a black smudge against the horizon and knew with cold certainty it marked a burning ship.
'Coyote, our fuel state's getting critical.'
'Affirmative, Cat. I see it. Give me the latest vector on our Texaco.'
'Come right three-five degrees. Another twenty miles.'
'Sounds good.'
Throughout the battle, Jefferson had kept at least one KA-6D tanker orbiting north and astern of the carrier, available for returning aircraft that might need some extra fuel for the inevitable loiter time in the Marshall Stack before recovering on the flight deck. Popularly called a 'Texaco' by naval fliers, the aircraft was a modified A-6 Intruder, fitted with five-hundred-gallon drop tanks and with some of its avionics pulled from the after fuselage to accommodate the refueling reel.
Minutes later, Coyote was slipping the F-14 in behind the tanker, holding back for a moment while a Hornet already hooked up to the refueling basket drank its fill. Then the Hornet detached from the KA-6D and dropped out of the way, and Coyote eased in closer. Flicking a switch on his console extended the Tomcat's refueling probe from a compartment just below and to the right of the cockpit. Ahead, his target dangled in midair, a metal-woven basket suspended on the end of a fifty-foot hose extruded from a protrusion beneath the tanker's tail.
'Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, Tango-Romeo One-two' sounded over his headset, a man's voice. 'What can we fix you up with today?'
'Tango-Romeo One-two, Eagle Two-oh-one,' Coyote replied. 'Set us up, barkeep. We're running on fumes.'
'Approach looking good, Two-oh-one. Come and take us, guys. Our legs are spread in a proper military fashion, and we're ready for some good ol' I&I.'
The almost blatantly phallic imagery of an aircraft's fuel probe attempting to penetrate and lock into the tanker's basket had inevitably given rise to numerous lines of standard dialogue traded between pilots and tanker crewmen, ranging from the mildly ribald to the sexually explicit. I&I was a graphic replacement for the military's R&R, standing for 'Intercourse and Intoxication.'
'Ah, roger that, Tango-Romeo,' Coyote said. 'Here we come.'
He felt mildly embarrassed. Until that moment, he'd actually forgotten that the officer in his back seat was a woman. The KA-6D operator's coarse banter had managed to remind him. He didn't know Cat that well yet, and he wondered what she thought of this.
Both aircraft, now separated by scant yards, were traveling at better than 370 knots. Creeping in now, with a closing rate of a foot per second, Coyote was attempting to slip the thread of his Tomcat's fuel probe into the eye of the tanker's basket. Since he needed to concentrate on his instrumentation, the looming presence of the tanker's tail just above and ahead of his cockpit, and his flying, he could not keep watching the relative positions of fuel probe and drogue basket only a few feet beyond the plastic of his canopy. That was his RIO's job, and Cat called second-to-second course adjustments to him over the ICS with clarity and precision.
'Come right one foot,' she said. 'That's good. You're four feet from contact, and a little low. Come up… more… more that's it. Hold that.
Forward now, easy… three feet two…' Coyote was battling the tanker's slipstream now, with no room for error. The drogue basket jittered ominously in the airflow just beyond the tip of the probe. He eased forward a bit more… 'Contact,' the tanker crewman called, and Coyote felt the thump of a solid connection, followed by a small jolt as locking catches snapped home.
'Ready to receive,' Coyote said.
'Ohh… that feels soooo good, Two-oh-one.'
'Tango-Romeo, be advised there's a lady aboard.'
'Ah, copy that, Two-oh-one. Capture confirmed. Whatcha want?'
'Make it a thousand pounds of high-test,' Coyote replied, trying to keep his voice light. 'Check the oil, clean the windshield, and put it on my Visa.'
