“Already on it.”
He could see the F-14 coming up now. It was hard to see, but he thought one of the engines was out. The smoke streaming off the aircraft’s tail was thicker now.
“Okay,” Tomboy said. “We’ve got an engine fire. We’re definitely not going to make it to the Jefferson. She’s still taking on fuel, and they’re not going to let us come anywhere near her with a dinged Tomcat. I think we can make it out over the sea, though, and eject.”
“Good luck, Tomboy,” he said. “Hey… this time try not to break your leg when you punch out, okay?”
He heard her laugh… but he also heard the worry behind it. “Don’t worry, Stoney. You take care of yourself. See you back aboard the carrier!”
“See you aboard.”
He watched her Tomcat, dwindling to a speck in the distance, still climbing, still burning.
EPILOGUE
The broad, calm waters of the Bosporus spread out ahead of the Jefferson as the great carrier slowly cruised southwest into the straits. The same pilot who had guided them through weeks before, Ismet Ecevit, was again on the bridge, stoically at his place alongside Jefferson’s helm. If he felt any distress, any injury to his national pride after the events of the past weeks, he gave no sign at all.
Tombstone leaned forward in the chair, the raised, leather-backed chair that had the word CAPTAIN stenciled in bold letters across the back, and grinned.
They were leaving the Black Sea at last.
“Glad to get out of this pocket?” Admiral Brandt, standing at his side, said with a smile. “I seem to remember you weren’t too thrilled with coming in here, a couple of weeks ago.”
“Yes, sir,” Tombstone said. “It’s going to be real good to get home.”
They were going home. It still seemed hard to believe, but the orders had come through from Washington only a few hours after U.S. Army engineers and Navy Seabees had reported the Bosporus Strait clear to navigate.
The Battle of Kerch, as it was being called now, had ended in a clear victory for the American battle group and MEU-25.
Tomboy had taken a lot of good-natured ribbing once she and Hacker were back aboard the carrier. The F-14 Tomcat had been designed strictly as an air superiority fighter” not one pound for air-to-ground,” as the slogan had insisted during the aircraft’s design and testing. Still, she’d handled the big machine as an appallingly effective ground-attack aircraft, something quite outside its normal purview… and hers. Her impromptu strafing run was credited with breaking up the naval infantry attack on Boychenko’s position; the Krasilnikov forces had fled moments later, opening up the way for the evacuation helicopters off the Guadalcanal to move in. They’d touched down on the ridge above Arsincevo minutes after Tomboy’s strafing run; Tombstone had made it back to the Jefferson only ten minutes ahead of Tomboy and Hacker, who were plucked from the sea south of Kerch by one of the carrier’s SH-53 rescue choppers.
By then, the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson was underway again, cruising south at a brisk clip with her aviation gasoline tanks full once more. With another sixteen days’ worth of fuel for her aircraft, clearly any attempt to stop her would be foolhardy. Tombstone, pausing only to take a quick shower and put on a clean uniform to look the part, had assumed command from the ship’s Exec; Admiral Brandt had transferred his flag to the Shiloh, and so Tombstone had been left in command of the carrier, a command confirmed ? at least temporarily ? by Washington a few hours later.
The sea battle that had followed had been almost total anticlimax.
Dmitriev’s small and ill-prepared carrier force had been steaming around the southwestern tip of the Crimea, obviously hoping to trap the battle group at Kerch, but by the time the two squadrons came within range of one another, Dmitriev had only a handful of aircraft left, and his huge Pobedonosnyy Rodina was literally a sitting duck.
The battle was over in minutes and was resolved even before Coyote could order an air strike by A-7s and Hornets. The Los Angeles-class attack sub Orlando had been lurking unseen and unheard in the deep, dark waters south of Sevastopol and had picked up the approaching rumble of the Rodina’s screws almost as soon as she’d left port. Over one hundred miles away, four sub-launched TLAMS ? Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles ? had burst one after the other from Orlando’s vertical launch tubes, driving up through the water on rocket motors that hurled each twenty-foot-long cruise missile into the air at a fifty-degree angle. The solid motors burned out and fell away; the cruise missiles, gulping air now, steadied on course at altitudes of only a few feet, arrowing toward the distant Russian carrier at Mach 7.
The Pobedonosnyy Rodina never had a chance. Her escorts turned back even before the huge vessel capsized beneath a funeral pall of roiling black smoke.
One of the oil-covered survivors pulled from the Black Sea by one of Jefferson’s helicopters hours later had been one Vitse-Admiral Nikolai Sergeivich Dmitriev, encountering the Jefferson for the second time in his career. He’d requested asylum as soon as he was aboard.
Tombstone wondered what he and Boychenko had been talking about in the week since.
Turning in his seat, he could see a great crowd of Jefferson’s enlisted men and women stretched across her deck in a shoulder-to-shoulder line, walking slowly down the deck, their eyes on the Kevlar-coated steel at their feet. Occasionally, someone in the line would stoop, picking something up off the deck. The exercise was called a Foreign Object Damage walk-down, an FOD for short, and it was the most efficient way the Navy had come up with yet to clear the flight deck of every single dropped nut, lost tool, or anonymous chunk of metal that might be sucked into an aircraft’s jet intakes during flight ops.
Small things could do tremendous damage, all out of proportion to their size. It was literally true that a thirty-five-cent bolt sucked into the air intake of a Tomcat on the deck could ruin a thirty-five-million-dollar aircraft ? at least to the point where a set of turbine blades had to be pulled and replaced and the compressors checked for damage. A single million-dollar Phoenix could take down a thirty-million-dollar jet a hundred miles away.
A single carrier battle group could change the politics of a nation.
Strategically, the raid on Kerch had been a pinprick, inconsequential in any larger scheme of things, but it had demonstrated the resourcefulness and will that were by now defining characteristics of the United States Navy. It had also broken the air power of the Black Sea Fleet; at last report, Ukrainian landing craft had been coming ashore at Mikolaivka and Kacha, just north of Sevastopol, and were on their way to overrunning the entire peninsula. The UN had protested, insisting that the Crimea was under UN protection, but no one seemed to be paying any heed.
The loss of the Crimea might well be the final blow to Marshal Krasilnikov’s hard-line rule of what was left of Russia. No one could know with any certainty, however, what the future held for that unhappy country.
Tombstone, however, knew exactly what was in store for him. It was the end of the twentieth century, the beginning of a new era… a new world. For a long time, he’d wondered whether technology and events had already passed him by, whether or not it would be better if he accepted that he’d gone as far in his naval career as he could. Civilian life, sometimes, looked pretty good.
But he knew now that that was not for him. The special fraternity with the men ? and women ? who sailed and flew with him was something he would not easily be able to lay aside.
He looked around the bridge of the Thomas Jefferson, caught Brandt’s eye, and winked.
The Jefferson might still have three thousand miles of open ocean between her and her home port, but Tombstone Magruder knew that he was already home.
