with the incoming vampire, barely closer to it than any of the other anti-air shots had been.
But close enough. The plat camera aimed back at the stern of the carrier showed a black-and-white picture of an oily, billowing mass of smoke and fire.
With the missile destroyed, we now had to face taking out the platform that had launched it. The TAO reached out and turned up the volume on the USW CR. The S-3 TACCO's voice boomed out, giving us a running commentary on his own attack. 'Two fish away. Acoustic indications ? they're lit off, entering search pattern.' The torpedoes were programmed to commence a standard search pattern once they hit the salt water. 'Searching… Searching… Contact. Torpedo one entering attack profile.' The sonar dome inside the nose of the torpedo would have gone to the high-frequency, search-sector ping once it detected a target of interest. It was homing in on that now, guided partly by the acoustic sounds emanating from the submarine, as well as the reflection of its own sonar transmissions off the hull.
'Active countermeasures ? Home Plate, I have active countermeasures in the water. Submarine is evading ? he just knuckled and headed deep.'
I stared off at the horizon, which was bland and featureless. There was nothing that would indicate to the naked eye that a deadly battle was taking place beneath its surface. Only cold, slate gray water and a few clouds. The aircraft and helicopters themselves were indistinguishable.
'Second torpedo acquiring. Commencing approach run.'
'I've got him on the sonar dome,' the first helicopter pilot reported.
'Holding good contact. I think the bastard's going deep, trying to get below the thermocline and try to evade. Going active now.'
'Launch three. Launch four.' The Viking pilot was taking no chances, peppering the water with warheads.
'He got him. Home Plate, this is Hunter 701,' the pilot said, sheer glee plain in his voice. 'I have explosive noise, breaking up. Should be ? yes, there it is. Home Plate, oil slick and debris in the water.
Classify one Russian submarine as destroyed.'
'Admiral, flight deck supervisor. The submarine is clear of us, sir, and requests permission to submerge. She sends her thanks.'
Batman nodded. 'Tell her captain that he owes four guys on a Viking a steak dinner. They just rid that sub's neighborhood of a few pesky rodents.' The strident gonging of the General Quarters alarm cut off his last word.
There are some advantages to being an admiral. One of them that during General Quarters, even with the entire crew of the carrier scurrying to their battle stations, you can still get through. The stream of sailors hurtling through the passageways at breakneck speeds parted slightly as Batman approached, even though we were going counter to the ordered flow of traffic. I stayed close on his heels as we made for TFCC.
We pounded to the conference room and into the small compartment located at the back of it. A sailor thrust flash gear and a gas mask at me as I got to the compartment.
The large scale display told the entire picture. Two waves of MiGs, fourteen per wave, were just leaving the coastline of Russia. This wasn't any escort force. Coupled with the submarines lurking to our north, it meant only one thing. As the gonging of the General Quarters alarm stopped, I heard the first sounds of the Tomcats turning their engines overhead. The structural steel and tarmac that separated us from the most potent weapons ever built in this century could only diminish, not block out, the thunderous sounds of those powerful engines.
Then another sound chimed in, the lighter, almost insect-like scream of the Hornet engines turning. Powerful in their own way, the perfect adversary against the MiG, yet lacking the legs and sheer firepower of their larger brothers. Either Tomcats or Hornets alone had disadvantages, but together they were deadly.
Russians have their own ways of making war, and this attack was no exception. Even before we'd left home port, we had worked up how we would fight an air war if necessary. The decades of the Cold War had taught us how the Russians liked to fight. They come in waves ? heavy, massive waves of aircraft, throwing sheer tonnage of steel and weapons against a carrier battle group. They seek out the carrier, the vital soft heart of the fighting force. Without it, the battle group retains some capacity for self-defense, particularly when there's an Aegis cruiser along. But even though that battle group might be able to stave off missiles, it couldn't fulfill the primary mission of an aircraft carrier and battle group to wreak devastation and damage on the soil of another nation.
Our Aegis cruiser was turning now, taking up her assigned station at flank speed. Her skipper was on the circuit, reporting all stations ready for battle. His ship would already have set General Quarters, being so much smaller than the carrier. Three minutes, four tops. It wouldn't have taken much longer. For the aircraft carrier it took longer.
Nevertheless, even before General Quarters was fully set, Jefferson was already poised to wage war. I heard the notification come from the officer of the deck ? Pri-Fly had requested a green deck, and the OOD had granted it. Seconds later, the scream of engines overhead built to a higher level, then the noise that can be best described as a roller coaster, the catapult driven by steam yanking the aircraft forward and accelerating it in a space of seconds to the speed necessary to stay airborne. One cat shot. A few minutes later, another. The flight deck had hit its rhythm, and was shoving aircraft into the skies faster than I could keep count. But the MiGs were faster. Even as our last fighter left the deck, the first missiles were inbound. They traced their way across the screen, bloody red symbols deadly stark against the blue background.
The Aegis was on them. The second the first one crossed our missile engagement zone, the cruiser fired. I watched on the closed-circuit television, dividing my time between that and the tactical display, as missiles rippled off the deck of the Aegis. She was equipped with a vertical launch system, which made engaging that many targets at once theoretically possible. Theoretically ? no nation had yet put it to a test.
Until now.
Our own aircraft were vectoring around behind the Aegis, leaving the missile engagement zone via a safe corridor marked out for their use. The Aegis would shoot nothing within that area, and nothing outside of her missile engagement zone. The Tomcats and Hornets were to get out of the area quickly, circle back around, and engage the fighters outside the MEZ.
In the midst of the chatter from the Hornet pilots verifying the existence of the tanker, the Tomcat pilots divvying up the incoming MiGs, the lone S-3 Viking pilot we'd left to the north patrolling the last detection of the submarine chimed in. He had not much to say, just wanted to remind us that he was out there. Alone. Without any anti-air missiles.
Batman promptly recalled him, bringing him into the starboard marshal pattern to get him out of the Aegis's MEZ, and told him we'd get him back onboard when we could. The S-3 declined, saying he just needed some gas and would prefer to remain airborne in case another submarine entered the area.
The fighters were dominating the circuit now, shouting out those brief incomprehensible phrases that mean everything to the men in the air and nothing to the ones in the ship. The E-2 Hawkeye was frantically slipping in and out of the link, troubleshooting some avionics problem that kept her from being fully operational. It was her role to control the dispersion of the fighters, warn them of incoming threats, and generally maintain an overall tactical view of the air battle. It wasn't working, and until she could get her link fully operational, her data only garbled the incoming contacts from the aircraft themselves. The TAO wisely slipped her out of the data link until she could get her problems solved.
It was over faster than I'd have ever thought possible. Six MiGs down, no American losses. The surviving MiGs turned back toward Russia, lucky to escape with their skins.
Thirty minutes later, we'd gotten Jefferson headed back into the wind, with good wind across the deck. Tombstone and Skeeter slid into the starboard marshal, waiting for their turn to get onboard.
'I'll be wanting to talk to Tombstone,' Batman said quietly. 'This little business you and he had going on with the codes ? what do you think about that, Commander? A fair thing to do to me?'
I considered that for a moment. 'I don't think so, Admiral. But I don't know what was on Admiral Magruder's mind at the time he laid it out for me.'
Batman was silent for a moment, then he said, 'It better not happen again. You hear me? Now, let's get the hell out of here and go home.'
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and stalked off.
I had a feeling that one of the first people that Tombstone Magruder would encounter when he reentered the ship would be Admiral Wayne. And from the look on his face, the conversation was not going to be pleasant.
