begun allowing Women to fly carrier aircraft. He snorted behind his oxygen mask. Women? The very idea was preposterous. During the long Soviet reign, women had been promised full equality with men, but that was an idea that had never really been reflected by the real world, one composed more of words than of substance. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet government, there’d been an ultraconservative backlash against the whole concept of women’s rights; female equality with men was an idea linked inextricably in the public mind with the Communists, and there was a tendency now to relegate women to the kitchen and a select few professions outside the home ? actresses and street sweepers and doctors and the like.
Ivanov grinned. Like most fighter pilots of his acquaintance, he thought of women as simple and delightful perquisites of his profession, the faster and hotter the better. As far as he was concerned, women belonged in bed, naked and with legs welcomingly spread, not in the cockpit of a jet aircraft.
He thought he would like to meet some of the American women aboard the Thomas Jefferson, however. If even half of the scandalous stories he’d heard were true…
Such a meeting seemed unlikely at best, just now. Once again, politics and the relentless tides of history were about to bring the American and Russian navies into conflict, and if he met an American fighter pilot at any time in the near future, it would be as an opponent, a minute, wildly twisting speck trapped in the targeting reticle of his Mig’s HUD.
Pathetic… the thought of women attempting to meet men on equal terms in combat. The idea was ludicrous in ground combat, since women were so much weaker than men; it was even more ludicrous in air combat, for the demonstrable fact that women simply didn’t have the brains for the highly technical aspects and details of flying high-performance jet aircraft. He’d heard that several American women had been shot down over the Kola; if Black Flight encountered any today, it would be an even more complete slaughter. In the Kola, the Americans had been flying against second-rate units and rear-echelon squadrons, the leftovers after the debacle in and around Norway. Black Flight, and the attendant formations code-named Bastion and Flashlight, were made up of combat aviators scoured from Loyalist units all over Russia and were comprised of the very best of the best.
“Black Leader, this is Bastion One-one-seven” sounded in his headset.
“Do you read me? Over.”
“Bastion One-one-seven, Black Leader reads. Go ahead.”
“We are being painted by American radar, almost certainly from their naval AWACS.”
“What about ECM?”
“We have been jamming steadily for fifteen minutes, sir. The Americans have been increasing the power of their scans and at this point are probably burning through our interference. They will not be able to judge our numbers, but they know we are here, and probably where we are going.”
“That does not matter. They will not be concerned with us unless they believe us to be threatening their battle group.”
“Just keep your ears sharp, Yevgenni,” the voice of Captain Oleg Nikiforov added over the tactical channel. “Once they figure out what we’re up to, they will be after us like a cat pouncing on mice.”
“The cats will find they’ve cornered a pack of wolves, Captain,” Ivanov replied, and he heard the others chuckle in response.
As a military pilot, he had a healthy respect for American naval aviators ? the men, anyway; he’d flown with them in the Indian Ocean and against them off Norway and could accept, with some few unspoken reservations, the fact that they were the best in the world. This time around, however, it was going to be different.
There would be no massed attacks against layered American carrier battle group defenses, for one thing. That type of antiquated strategy had been dictated by the old Soviet military command, back when they’d been faced with the problem of how to wage war in the air, on the land, and both on and under the sea against a technologically superior enemy, overcoming them with forces whose only advantage lay in their numbers. No, the first direct attack against the Americans would come only after their battle group had been seriously weakened.
And weakening their forces was precisely the objective of today’s low-level raid.
Ivanov thrilled to the sheer, joyous power of his machine. He was never more alive than when he was in the cockpit of the sleek attack aircraft, peering ahead across the broad, wedge-shaped nose known affectionately to the aircraft’s pilots as utkanos, the duck nose. The Mig27, known as “Flogger-D” in NATO’s code, was a venerable aircraft by now; it had entered service with Frontal Aviation in 1974, and for most of that time had been the mainstay of Soviet air-to-ground attack. Most pilots held a genuine affection for the machine; up until its appearance, odd Mig designation numbers had been reserved for fighters, while even numbers identified attack planes. Like the American F-111, however, an attack plane with the completely inappropriate F-for-fighter designation, the Mig27 carried a somewhat confusing identifier. Pilots who liked the way the plane handled, however, insisted that it was as fast and nimble as most fighters and therefore carried exactly the right ID. Indeed, besides his main armament of air-to-surface missiles, the Mig carried both two AA8 infrared-homing missiles for air-to-air dogfighting, as well as a powerful six-barrel rotary cannon for close-in work. At need, the Mig could play the fighter’s role, though Ivanov knew he would be at a disadvantage if he found himself tangling with American Tomcats or Hornets.
That was what the Mig29s in Bastion were for.
He checked the flight’s position on his terrain-mapping radar. Less than ninety kilometers to go. It was too late for the Americans to stop them now, even if they guessed what their true objective was.
There was still one remaining chance that the attack would be aborted, and it was time now to find out, one way or the other. Reaching down, he dialed his radio frequency selector to the channel assigned for Operations.
“Tower, Tower, this is Black One. How do you read me? Over.”
“Black One, Tower. We read you.”
“Dostoyevsky,” he said, the writer’s name serving as a code informing Operations that the attack group was on course, on time, and ready to proceed with the mission. The reply would be either “Tolstoy,” which would mean abort and return to base, or…
“Chekhov,” the voice said. “I say again, Chekhov.”
“Confirm Chekhov,” he replied. The mission was on! “Proceeding as ordered.”
Switching back to his tactical channel, he contacted the other five aircraft of Black Flight. “The word is Chekhov, men,” he said, and the relief he felt as he said it was almost palpable.
“Excellent!” Piotr called. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time!”
“Radio silence from now on,” he warned. “Vsevaw harashiva y pabeda!”
Good luck, and victory.
The flight of deadly Mig27s arrowed toward the still-invisible coast of Turkey.
“Dog House, Dog House, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?”
Lieutenant Arnold Brown checked again the sweep of green-white fuzz and blips on his main display screen. There was no doubt about it. Something big ? several somethings, in fact ? were moving out there, over one hundred miles to the southwest.
“Watch Dog, this is Dog House,” the voice of the Operations watch officer replied. “Go ahead.”
“I have a contact, designated Mike One-five, bearing two-zero-five, range one-zero-eight. There is heavy, repeat, heavy ECM, but I believe the contact to be multiple air targets down on the deck.”
“Copy that, Watch Dog. We’ve got your screen up here in front of us now.
How long you been tracking them?”
“Five, maybe six minutes, Dog House. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t picking up waves.”
“Met says the sea’s flat and calm today, Watch Dog, so whatever you have, it’s a hard target. Besides, I doubt that the Ukes are jamming to keep us from seeing waves off the Turkish coast.”
“Ah, roger that.”
Brown puzzled a moment at Ops’ assumption that the targets were Ukrainian. On their current heading, they could have come from either Odessa or Sevastopol; the reciprocal of their course drew a line lying almost directly between those two cities on the map. They could as easily be Russian aircraft as Ukrainian.
