Tomboy guided her F-14, nose number 207, into position astride the slot for catapult two, following the arm and hand motions of a Green Shirt on the deck in front of her. The cat shuttle was run back, and she heard the thumps and clanks as the deck crew attached it to her nose-wheel. It was still dark, with sunrise another ten minutes away, but the entire sky was alight with a deep blue radiance that clearly illuminated the activities on the deck.
She felt again the familiar thrill of anticipatory excitement, waiting for the cat shot.
“Ready to roll back here, Tomboy,” her RIO, Lieutenant Bruce “Hacker”
Kosinski said from the backseat.
“Okay, Hack. You keep your eyes peeled back there. We’re going to be knee-deep in Russian interceptors as soon as we hit the coast.”
“Roger that.”
She thought again of Tombstone ashore. His order still rankled, and since returning aboard late last night, she’d had to watch herself to keep from sounding short or sharp with Hacker or her other fellow NFOS. She glanced down at the map clipped to a board attached to the right thigh of her flight suit. A carrier’s chief strength, outside of the obvious punch and counterpunch represented by her aircraft, was her speed. Jefferson had covered 150 miles during the night and was now less than forty miles south of Kerch, well into the broad, open bite that stretched along the southeastern coast of the Crimea and down the western coast of Caucasian Russia.
“Hey, Tomboy.”
“Yeah?”
“You think this thing’s gonna work?”
“Of course it will,” she replied. Her earlier bad humor, she realized, was rapidly dissipating. She couldn’t help grinning behind her face mask as she added, “We’re about to go take a bite out of Crimea.”
Hacker groaned appreciatively. Thunder boomed from the right as Tomcat 201 ? Batman and Malibu ? roared off Cat One and into the early morning sky. White-shirted checkers paused, crouched low, as Batman’s F-14 howled off the bow, then continued their inspection of Tomboy’s aircraft. A Green Shirt standing to starboard of her cockpit held up a board reading 65000. She nodded and signaled OK, the tally matching her figure for the Tomcat’s full-loaded weight. An ordie held up a bundle of red-tagged arming wires and she counted them off. A standard intercept warload: four Phoenix, two AMRAAM, and two Sidewinder missiles ? correct. She gave the Red Shirt a thumbs-up and he dashed away, getting clear.
The deck officer signaled for her to wipe her controls and she did so ? flaps, ailerons, spoilers, rudder ? as White Shirts checked each movement, then signaled OK. Another signal, and she eased the throttle forward, feeling the raw thunder of the F110-GE 400 engines building as she took them all the way up to full military power. The checkers watched carefully, then signaled thumbs-up.
All clear, ready for launch.
Another Tomcat was being rolled onto Cat One and hooked up as steam swirled off the slot from Batman’s launch. The nose number was 216 ? Dixie and Cat. Tomboy caught Cat’s eye in the other aircraft’s backseat and waved; Cat tossed back a jaunty salute.
The pace of launches was rapid this morning ? one every forty-five seconds to a minute. The deck crew scurried about, sometimes appearing to be some sort of huge, brightly colored colonial or amebic creature moving with urgent purpose rather than a scattered group of tired, hard-worked men and women.
“Green light,” Hacker called.
“Good. Let’s grab us some sky!”
“Fine. But no more Crimea puns. Please!”
“Deal.”
The launch officer took a last look up and down the deck and around the Tomcat. He looked up at Tomboy and saluted.
She returned the salute. The launch officer dropped to his knee, pointing down the deck as the Green and Yellow Shirts nearby crouched low. He touched his thumb to the deck.
Acceleration ? a momentary surge of pressure and noise as she sank back hard against her ejection seat ? and then the dark gray of the carrier’s deck was gone and she was soaring out over the open sea. She pulled back on the stick, climbing, climbing. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw the Jefferson’s bow dwindling with distance. The rescue station helicopter was a tiny toy well off the carrier’s port side, its rotors sparkling in the sun. To the north, Shiloh and Decatur held station. Beyond that was the forbidding-looking coast of the eastern Crimea.
Tomboy held her climb, taking the aircraft past eight thousand feet in seconds, rising swift and clean out of the Earth’s shadow. Sunlight exploded around her, warm, golden, and glorious.
She hated like hell to admit it, but Tombstone was right. This was where she belonged.
Tombstone stood on the low hill, peering through binoculars at the tank farm below. It was typical of such facilities the world over, endless rows of squat, cylindrical tanks painted a drab olive color, together with the tangle of piping, fractionating towers, compressor buildings, flare towers, and furnaces that marked a petroleum refinery.
Arsincevo was a small town, a village, really, on the southern outskirts of the sprawl of Kerch. The naval port was directly on the north, almost adjacent to the tank farm, while a major airfield was visible to the northwest. By the dazzling light of the new-risen sun, Tombstone could see Kerch itself to the northeast, a drab-looking city separated by the sparkling blue waters of the Kerch Strait from the gray strip of land marking the western tip of the Taman Peninsula. Where much of the southeastern coastline of the Crimea had been devoted to resorts, health spas, and recreational beaches, the eastern end of Crimea, the Kerch Peninsula, was nearly entirely given over to the Russian military.
In particular, there was a Black Sea Fleet port at Kerch itself, together with a major refinery and military petroleum storage facility at Arsincevo. A major pipeline from the rich oil fields of the Caucasus came through the town of Chuska on the Taman Peninsula, then crossed the strait underwater, emerging south of the Kerch naval base and running through the Arsincevo refinery complex. The storage facilities here held millions of gallons of diesel fuel for the Black Sea Fleet ships deployed at the base.
And some of those tanks, according to General Boychenko, held several million gallons of aviation fuel, a formulation identical to the JP-5 used by U.S. Navy aircraft.
CBG-14 might have been left to its own devices by Washington, but they were about to demonstrate that those devices could still be very effective indeed.
“Hey, Captain Magruder?”
It was Doc Ellsworth. During the drive up the coast from Yalta, Tombstone had been able to draw the young man out a bit more. He’d been right in his guess that Doc was a SEAL, a member of the elite Navy commando unit descended from the famous UDT frogmen of World War II. He was serving now as part of a Marine Force Recon unit; SEALS and Marine Recon often teamed up in four-man units for special ops.
“Whatcha got, Doc?”
“Trouble. Coming out of the Kerch naval base and headed this way.”
Tombstone nodded. “Okay. On my way.”
He was tired, though the pump of adrenaline had been keeping him going since yesterday. It had been a long, long night.
The coming day promised to be longer still.
Naval Command Polkovnik Yuri Nikolaivich Yevtushenko was riding with his head and shoulders above the circular commander’s hatch in the turret of his BTR-60 as the armored personnel carrier crested the ridge north of Arsincevo. It was a glorious morning, the sun sparkling off the sea, though a low line of dark clouds to the north
