Dixie’s RIO for this flight was Lieutenant Commander Kevin Moss, handle “Mickey,” a young, sandy-haired guy who nevertheless passed for what the squadron thought of as “an old hand,” since he’d been flying with the Vipers for almost a year now. For the past several days, ever since the helicopter incident when Cat had told him flatly that she wouldn’t fly with him again, Dixie had been paired off with a succession of Rios from the duty pool. He was beginning to suspect that they drew lots every day, with the loser assigned to backseating with him. The only qualification seemed to be that the man assigned as his RIO had to be more experienced than he was. It was humiliating… and unfair, and Dixie had had just about enough.
At least CAG had allowed him to keep flying. If he’d been ordered to stay on the deck, he’d be approaching critical mass just about now.
“BARCAP Two, this is Dog House” sounded over his headset. “We’ve got bogeys about two hundred fifty miles southwest of your position, and we need a positive ID. Deputy CAG wants you to go check them out.”
“Roger, Dog House,” Mickey replied. “We’re on the way.”
Dixie felt the tiniest bite of worry. A positive ID?
With the Tomcat cruising comfortably at Mach 1.5, they would be close enough to the intruders to get a visual in about twelve minutes, and this time Dixie was going to make damned sure of his target recognition.
At least this time the target wasn’t likely to be U.S. Army helicopters.
Ivanov pulled back slightly on the stick, bringing his Mig’s altitude up to just under two hundred meters. He could see the Turkish coast ahead; they were well into Turkish airspace now, and he could imagine the faces of the Turk air force officers turning purple as they screamed for identification. Casually, he glanced left, then right, searching the skies. He could see vapor trails on both sides, but those were almost certainly other aircraft of the attack group. They’d be scrambling interceptors by now at half a dozen nearby air bases, but it was already too late.
“Black Leader, this is Flashlight.” Radio silence had been broken now.
If the Turks didn’t know they were here before, they certainly did now. “The target is illuminated.”
Ivanov flipped a line of switches, checking his laser targeting pickup.
A light winked on and a tone sounded in his helmet; his number-one AS14 missile had registered the hot, optically invisible pinpoint of laser light gleaming on the target, now less than thirty kilometers ahead, and was tracking it.
Not much longer…
His Mig27 was carrying a warload of two AS14 air-to-surface missiles, the laser-guided monsters known in the NATO lexicon as “Kedge.” His port-side missile had a solid lock on the target now, though it was still just beyond the weapon’s twenty-kilometer range, Somewhere further out and higher up, “Flashlight,” another Mig27 with a laser designator pod, was illuminating the target for the entire attack squadron.
The blurred impression of water flashing beneath Ivanov’s keel flashed suddenly from blue to browns, grays, and greens. He was over the beach now, thundering above peasants’ stone huts and tangled complexes of larger- scale architecture. Black Flight’s sonic booms must be rattling windows in their wake. For several seconds, he hurtled above the brown-streaked earth, and then he was over water once more, this time flashing low above the dark waters of the northern mouth of the Bosporus Straits. A pair of ships appeared ahead, a long, gray, knife- prowed destroyer and a far larger and clumsier-looking tanker, painted black with a white superstructure. Ivanov glimpsed the American flag fluttering from its truck.
Then he was past both vessels. He glanced down at both his radar display and his threat warning indicators, half expecting the Turkish destroyer to pop a SAM up his tailpipe, but there was no reaction from the surface.
Perhaps they’d managed to catch Turks and Americans alike by surprise.
A warning light winked on. He was within range now of the primary target. Since Turkish interceptors would be in the area at any moment, the mission parameters called for launch at maximum range. He double-checked his target lock, then brought his thumb down on the firing button. “Black One, missile away!” he called.
His Mig lurched skyward as the Kedge missile, weighing some six hundred kilograms, dropped from his left- side inlet duct pylons. Its solid-fuel motor ignited with a yellow-white flash, and though the engine was supposed to be smokeless, condensation in the air boiled into a sharp, white contrail arrowing out ahead of the hurtling Mig.
“Black Three,” Mikhail Mizin, his wingman, called. “Missile away!” A second contrail chased the first, swooping low toward the surface of the strait before leveling off just a handful of meters above the water.
“Black Two! Missile launch.”
“Black Four. Aborting run. I have malfunction. “
Damn… that was bad luck, but not unforeseen. Russian military technology tended to be blunt, tough, and simple; when it had to be complex, as in the case of Migs or AS14 missiles, there was always a stubbornly unpredictable but high chance of equipment failure of some sort. That was why attacks like this one were planned with multiple redundancy in mind. Each aircraft in Black Flight would loose one of its two missiles, then loiter until the damage could be assessed. If necessary, the second missile would be used on the primary target; if the initial attack proved successful, they would be free to seek targets of opportunity for their second shots, before turning back for the north and home.
He checked his indicators, noting that the missile was running hot and smooth. Flight time to the target would be just over one minute.
CHAPTER 18
The newest and northernmost of the three bridges spanning the Bosporus was crowded this morning, with cars, trucks, bicycles and scooters, ox-carts, and even people on foot. The big show ? the passage of the American aircraft carrier the week before ? had drawn a much larger mob, but there was always heavy traffic both ways over the span, crossing in a few moments from one continent to another.
The bridge was of the same general design as others among the world’s largest spans ? the Golden Gate, the Verrazano Narrows, and, longest of all, the Humber Bridge in northern England. It consisted of a gently arcing deck suspended from two massive cables. Each of those main cables was just less than a meter thick and composed of hundreds of tightly woven wire ropes; the cables, in turn, were draped from two towers rising from either side of the strait’s main shipping channel. The towers were paired, hollow-core, reinforced concrete pillars straddling the suspended deck; the span between the two towers across the channel was just over a thousand meters.
The first Kedge missile arrowed south across the waters of the Bosporus, scant feet above the dark and oily waters. Striking the base of the westernmost of the two huge concrete towers, the warhead triggered, one hundred kilograms of high explosives detonating in a savage blast, raising a vast cascade of white spray and hurling chunks of concrete far out into the water.
Three seconds later, a second missile struck the tower. Those towers, designed to exacting engineering specifications to support tremendous weight or withstand hurricane-force winds, were simply not designed to absorb that brutal and sudden a punishment. With both northern legs of the suspension system damaged, the span between them sagged. The hangers, the vertical wire ropes supporting the deck, began snapping, first one by one, then in rippling, crashing volleys. The deck itself; individual sections like shallow boxes and paved over with a one- and-a-half-inch layer of mastic asphalt; the design provided flexibility, as it had to on an engineering project of such scope, but it also allowed the two explosions to generate shock waves that rippled out from the towers, with the deck itself convulsing in a titanic game of crack-the-whip.
Vehicles and people alike were scattered like toys as the asphalt flexed, tossing them into the air and smashing them down again. A third missile detonated against the eastern tower, somewhat higher up the leg than
