When they were finished, they would unload. Then they would do it all over again. It was a backbreaking job, but critical. When the strike order came down with specific weapon loads, Boyce wanted his jets armed and ready.
He hadn’t yet designated a strike leader. He had already ruled himself out, much as he wanted to be in the front. Something about this one was giving him a bad feeling. If things went sour, the place for an Air Wing Commander was not in the cockpit but here aboard ship.
Who, then? To be fair, the nod should go to Rico Flores, who commanded the VFA-34 Bluetails. He was the senior squadron skipper and a competent strike leader. Or Burner Crump, who ran the Tomcat squadron. Crump had the most combat experience and was a steady leader.
Something in Boyce’s gut was troubling him. When you had nutcase enemies like these Islamic terrorists, who had nothing to lose and believed that dying was a ticket to paradise, you never knew what to expect.
There wasn’t a textbook solution for everything that could go wrong on a deep air strike. They had to keep learning that same damned lesson every time — Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq again, Afghanistan.
Now Yemen.
This operation could turn ugly. He needed a strike leader who could make decisions on the spot. Somebody who could change the game plan if necessary.
Brick Maxwell.
Boyce could already hear the outraged bitching from the other strike leaders. It would be the same old stuff about seniority and that carpetbagging ex-astronaut and what the hell does he know about tactical air combat?
Too bad. They’d get over it.
Maxwell was the right guy. Every eye in the Pentagon would be on the Reagan and its air wing these next few days. Maxwell knew when to shoot and when to hold his fire. In the No-Fly-Zone over Iraq, he had passed up a sure MiG shot when it wasn’t necessary to kill him. Then he had not hesitated to kill an adversary when the bastard needed killing. Maxwell was a guy who didn’t agonize over decisions.
Boyce looked at his unlit cigar. The conference room, like almost every other space on the ship, was a no-smoking area. The goddamn tree-hugging pure air freaks had ruined it for everyone.
He pulled out his ancient Zippo and applied the flame to the cigar. He got a nice ember going, then wafted a cloud of gray smoke across the room. Yeah, he would take flak about his choice of strike leader. Sometimes you just had to break a few rules.
CHAPTER FOUR
KILO
Lt. Cmdr. Pietr Ilychin entered the control room. “It’s here, Captain. The updated point of intended movement.”
Capt. Yevgeny Manilov took the message from Ilychin and turned back to his keyboard. He inserted the coordinates of the new position into the Andoga navigational computer.
When he was finished, he tilted back and studied the display for a moment. “Almost no change, three kilometers perhaps. The wind must be shifting. They will change course to launch aircraft.” Manilov handed the message back to Ilychin. He glanced at his watch. “Ahead five knots, maintain ninety meters. Set course for the updated position.”
“Aye, Captain.”
This last message from Yemen, via satellite, had arrived just in time. It was almost sunrise. In daylight he could no longer risk raising the periscope-mounted antenna even for the few minutes it took to download messages.
Yevgeny Manilov was the commander of the Ilia Mourmetz, a Project 636 Kilo-class diesel/electric submarine with a displacement of 2,400 tons. During the pre-dawn hours he had sailed the Mourmetz on the darkened surface into the Gulf of Aden. Now that they were within fifty kilometers of prying eyes along the shoreline, they would submerge and enter the littoral waters off the Yemeni coast.
The old Kilo-class boats and their Amur — class derivatives were the stealthiest undersea vessels yet constructed in Russia. Even better than the brutish nuclear-powered Oscar subs, conventional boats like the Mourmetz could hide in shallow water, lurk beneath thermal layers — and emit virtually no acoustical signal. With the addition of the anechoic tile coating on the outer hull, the Mourmetz in a passive mode could elude almost all magnetic anomaly and sonar detection equipment.
Sitting at his table in the control room, Manilov considered his situation. Nineteen years it had taken him to get here. Nineteen humiliating, ruble-begging, egg-sucking years. Like every other uniformed member of the Russian Navy, he had endured months without pay, eaten food unfit for cattle, suffered the indignity of seeing their once-magnificent submarine fleet moldering like derelicts in the naval yards.
Manilov had remained in the Navy mainly because he had no other options. Being the underpaid captain of a derelict submarine was preferable to hammering nails or selling shoes or shoveling shit in the streets of Moscow. The nation’s economy was treading water. Mother Russia was at the mercy of gangsters, its own inept leadership, and, worst of all, her former enemy.
The thought of the United States and its overweening arrogance was enough to fill Manilov with rage. For years he had played Cold War games, tracking the profiles of American warships. He had yearned for the order to send a torpedo crashing into one of those gray hulls. In his mind’s eye he could see the crimson fireball, the gushing oil smoke, the specter of a bow tilting upward and sliding like a steel sarcophagus beneath the waves. It would have been wonderful.
The order never came. Instead, the Soviet Union had burst apart like a sledgehammered pumpkin.
Then the final indignity. Everything was for sale — space vehicles, medical research, military technology… submarines.
The Ilia Mourmetz, Manilov was informed one day, had been sold. It would be Manilov’s duty to deliver his vessel to the Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas. It would also be, he knew without doubt, his last voyage as a submarine commander. Russia’s Navy was transforming into a maritime auction house.
Four weeks elapsed while the Mourmetz underwent modifications at the Vladivostok naval base. The old boat’s navigational gear was retrofitted with the newer, state-of-the-art laser gyro inertial guidance units. The sonar and fire control systems were replaced with an MGK-400EM digital sonar and the MVU-110 combat information computer. An oxygen/hydrogen generator plant was installed that allowed the sub to operate for weeks beneath the surface without snorkeling to recharge batteries or replenish air supplies.
This only exacerbated Manilov’s mounting anger. The Iranians were getting equipment that was vastly superior to anything Manilov had used aboard the old Mourmetz. All it took was money! They all had it — Americans, Iranians, Chinese, Japanese — everyone except the Russians.
The deathlike bleakness of the Russian winter had not yet released its grip on Vladivostok. While he waited for the Mourmetz’s renovations to be completed, Manilov spent his idle hours in a quayside bar frequented by naval officers and shipyard bureaucrats. Only with sufficient alcohol in his blood could he put aside the dismal thoughts of his final voyage.
One evening in the bar, Manilov found himself in conversation with a dark-skinned man in an ill-fitting suit. Manilov guessed from the accent that he came from one of the newly independent republics — Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan, perhaps — somewhere in the southern Caucasus.
After several vodkas the man surprised Manilov with his knowledge of the Mourmetz and its upcoming voyage. Then he surprised him even further by presenting him with a business proposition. For an amount of money that exceeded anything Manilov could imagine, would he consider taking the Mourmetz not to its new owner, but to a different destination?