'Roger that, sir.' COS headed off to make sure everyone was playing from the same game book.
'Sir? Is there anything I should know?' the TAO asked.
I knew why he was asking. I'd known about the sub; maybe there was something else I was keeping from them. The TAO had the balls to put me on the spot about it.
'No, nothing. Just call it a bad feeling, that's all,' I answered. I watched the screen as the fighters arced out from the carrier, followed in short order by their slower USW brethren, with the helos bringing up the rear. The fighters would be first on station over the sub.
'Admiral, all aircraft launched and four Hornets in Alert Five,' the TAO said. 'The air boss is ready to recover the fighters in the stack.'
Tombstone. There was no time now for what I needed to say to him, not with the sub in trouble and air on the way to the rescue. Maybe later.
Might be better that way anyway give us both a chance to cool off, avoid saying words that we could never take back.
'Very well,' I said. 'And Admiral Magruder should be first on deck, shouldn't he?'
The TAO pointed at the screen. 'He would have been.'
I started swearing as I saw what the double nuts bird was doing…
17
As I saw it, there wasn't much choice. I'd been monitoring the problems with the sub on tactical and saw the carrier start its turn into the wind. The word came out that we'd stay in the marshal pattern while the fresh fighters and USW birds were launched. But I could tell from the seas that it was going to take some time to get into favorable winds, and the ice creeping out from the shoreline and down from the north was going to be a problem in sustained operations.
So there we were, flying fat, dumb and happy with a hefty fuel reserve ? what else were we supposed to do?
'Skeeter,' I said over our private coordination circuit, you ready?'
Two clicks acknowledged my transmission. 'Let's go, then. Combat spread, you take high.' Another two clicks, and I saw Skeeter up above me peel out of marshal and head east. I was just a split second behind him.
Skeeter climbed and settled in at the correct altitude, taking his cues from me. I descended to seven thousand feet, with Skeeter maintaining the correct separation slightly behind me.
The submarine was tough to pick out at first. The sea up here was dark, oily black. Gator vectored me in on her LINK position. I finally found a streak of black in the whitecaps and blowing spray. 'Got her,' I announced.
'Me, too,' Skeeter said. 'Looks like her playmates are still submerged.'
'I'm going down to take a look, maybe reassure her that we're in the area. Stay at this altitude unless I tell you otherwise.' Two clicks again.
I descended in a tight spiral centered on the stricken sub. There were people in her sail, three of them that I could make out. No obvious signs of damage, no smoke. They stared up at me. I was at five hundred feet, low enough that they could make out my tail insignia. I wanted to make sure that they knew who we were.
The men in the sail were armed with shotguns. Even from this distance, they looked cold and miserable.
Then I saw why. Barely below the surface, only three hundred yards away, I could see an area of darker water. A feather trailed aft from a periscope poking up from the sea. As I watched, the Russian submarine's sleek sail broke the surface of the water, followed by the bow at a slight up angle and then the stern. An odd conical pod stuck up from the tail assembly.
The Victor, then. But where was the Akula? And just what did they have planned for our sub?
The Victor was edging in, her own sail now filling with people. Two of them were struggling with equipment. They propped it up on the edge of the sail, evidently into a slot built to accommodate it, then stepped back.
Machine guns. Probably fifty cal from the looks of them, or the Russians equivalent. Not much use against anything except a lightly armored craft.
Like a submarine.
Or a Tomcat.
The USW aircraft weren't going to be much use, not unless they had loaded a gun into the slot on the SH-60. I doubted that they had ? using the fifty cal required leaving the side door open, and the wind-chill factor in this climate would be deadly.
The Victor continued to close until she was barely one hundred feet away from the U.S. boat, a deadly close range for ungainly submarines surfaced in open sea. Then I saw the canisters dangling over the Russian sail. Self- inflating rafts, their mechanism activated by salt water.
The Victor's crew lowered one into the water. After a few seconds, it started expanding into a brilliant yellow rescue boat. It wasn't designed as an assault craft ? merely as a lifeboat ? and its rubberized hull couldn't withstand a blast from a shotgun. It would fill quickly and sink within a minute, consigning its crew to the frigid water.
Surely the U.S. sub skipper knew that. But he wouldn't ? he couldn't ? let the Victor's lifeboat approach.
Or would he?
He would. I saw the hesitation in his movements, the arm upraised to hold fire. Did he think that the Russians might simply want to talk to them? Could he possibly believe that after the cat-and-mouse game they'd played for the last week?
Or did he feel what I'd felt with Ilanovich, a kinship of fellow warriors that transcended national boundaries? Could he blast the lifeboat, knowing that that action would condemn men just like him to certain death? Would he hold on to any sliver of hope that there might be an innocent reason for their entirely insane deployment of the life rafts?
The life raft was pitching in the seas, sliding up the side of one swell sideways and coming down bow-first on the other side. Russian sailors were piling into it now, none of them obviously armed. There could have been sidearms, though, and I was certain that there were. Then they cast off from the Victor, and sailors manning paddles steadied the boat in the seas and headed for the U.S. sub.
'We've got company.' For a moment, I had the illusion that the sub skipper was talking, then I realized it was Skeeter. 'Four MiGs inbound, Tombstone. I think you better grab some altitude before they close on us.'
'On my way.' I slammed the throttles forward and nosed the Tomcat up into a steep climb. With MiGs inbound I wasn't going to be able to stay at sea level and baby-sit a sub skipper who was about to make a serious mistake.
Gator, Sheila, and the ship all started yelling at the same time.
Launch indications, this time for submarine-based antiship missiles.
Long-range ones, more than capable of reaching the carrier thrashing about in the icy water.
The Akula. Judging from the roiling water I saw ten miles to the north, she was the culprit.
'Tombstone.' Batman's voice was deadly. 'Get the hell out of there.
You're inside the missile engagement zone, clobbering the Aegis picture.
Get down to sea level, stay out of the way. There's not time for you to clear the area ? now move.'
'Tombstone, we can't just-' Skeeter started.
'You heard the admiral,' I snapped. 'Now head for the deck.' Unless we wanted to risk being the unintended recipient of a Standard missile, we needed to be well outside of her targeting area. 'Gator, find out where the safe- passage corridor is and get me in it.'
