A human error … The Martel struck Vicksburg close to the angle between her deck and the forward deckhouse tower, smashing through the deck plating and light armor on her starboard quarter. The warhead was triggered by a proximity fuze, but some minor fault delayed that triggering for the tenth of a second it took for the missile to literally tunnel into the ship’s electronic entrails. Over three hundred pounds of high explosives detonated within a few yards of Vicksburg’s CIC.
Admiral Vaughn did not feel the blast. One moment he was standing in front of the primary battle board, watching, beginning to hope that possibly, just possibly the Indian aircraft were starting to turn away.
Then he was flying through air suddenly and unaccountably filled with whirling fragments of glass and plastic, bits of wire, pieces of bodies, whole sections of the overhead and bulkhead plating and insulation. He slammed into an instrument console, rolled across it, and dropped to the deck. The console gave way an instant later, smashing down on top of him.
Already unconscious, he was unaware of that final blow.
Batman watched the mushroom cloud of black smoke shot with flame rise above the stricken command cruiser. He banked left but kept his eyes on the ship as they passed her to starboard, still under way but slower now, wallowing in the heavy seas as flame broke from the smashed-in hole on her forward deckhouse.
“Batman?” Malibu’s voice was subdued, almost stricken, over the ICS.
“Batman, check your fuel.”
He glanced at the fuel gauge. They had about fourteen hundred pounds.
They’d burned a lot on a long patrol, most of it in fuel-burning ACM.
“Okay,” he said. He felt drained … defeated. “Raise the boat, Mal.
Tell ‘em we’re coming in. And …” He hesitated, watching the burning ship. Was Admiral Vaughn still alive? “Better tell them that Vicksburg’s been hit.”
Tombstone closed his finger over the red firing button on the stick.
“Fox one, fox one!” His last missile, an AIM-7M Sparrow, ignited in a blast of white smoke and flame and streaked away from the Tomcat. At forty-five thousand feet, the air was diamond-clear, the sky an endless deep and crystal blue. The Sparrow’s contrail stood out in sharp relief as it twisted to the north like a chalk line scrawled across a blackboard.
“He’s turning, Tombstone,” Hitman announced. Tombstone glanced down at his VDI. The target, a lumbering IL-38 reconnaissance aircraft thirty miles away, appeared to be banking away toward the north … and Kathiawar.
“They’re running,” Tombstone said, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. The wave of Indian aircraft had struck against the combined squadrons full-force — and broken.
He checked his fuel. It was low … down to thirty-five hundred pounds.
They’d burned a hell of a lot on Zone Five.
“Hey, Tombstone?” Hitman said. “I’m getting a-“
Tombstone heard it over his headset as well. Batman was calling the Jefferson, reporting the Vicksburg hit by a missile.
It was too early to tell how badly the Aegis cruiser was hit, but it didn’t sound good.
“He’s right,” Hitman said a moment later. “Looks like the Aegis net is down. Shit, Tombstone, the squadron’s naked now!”
With a stubborn determination, Tombstone held the Tomcat in level flight, continuing to paint the fleeing Illyushin with his Tomcat’s radar. At Mach 4, the Sparrow traveled the thirty miles to the target in less than fifty seconds. The blips marking missile and target merged on Tombstone’s VDI.
Hit!
He took a deep breath, watching the blips scattered across his VDI. It was clear that the Indian aircraft were in full retreat now. The Russian-American force had won.
But at what cost? Kreml was still burning at last report. And now Vicksburg, shattered by a missile that had knocked out the battle group’s Aegis network.
The Tomcat squadrons had suffered as well, the two replacements, Maverick and Trapper and their RIOS, shot down during the aerial melee.
And Army and Dixie.
It took several minutes more for the IL-38 to die, falling from almost fifty thousand feet. By the time the radar trace fragmented and vanished, Tombstone and Hitman were already heading south and descending.
On the horizon, they could just make out the black speck that was the Jefferson, almost lost against the unending sea.
Admiral Vaughn became aware first of the pain, a sharp-edged throbbing in his right arm that grated when he tried to move. The darkness was next, a stinking, pitch-black night that lay across his face, choking him with each breath.
He tried to call out but heard nothing, felt nothing but the pain in his arm and a searing rasp in his throat.
Hearing returned, gradually, beginning with a high-pitched ringing that slowly subsided, replaced by shouts and screams, by the crackle of an open flame and the hiss of a ruptured steam pipe, by the sobbing, agonized moaning of someone lying close by but out of his sight. The darkness was relieved now, he saw, by the orange tongues of flame dancing above a shattered radar console. Vicksburg’s CIC suite had been transformed into a black and twisted cavern, illuminated only by the acrid glare of burning wiring.
“Syoodah!” a raw voice beside him. “Skaryehyeh! Pamageeteh!”
Hands closed on his shoulders and Vaughn screamed, “My arm! It’s broken!”
“Sorry, Admiral.” English this time. Vaughn recognized Sharov’s voice.
“Lie still. Help is coming.”
“My legs,” he said. “Can’t … feel them.”
“Skaryehyeh, pahzahloostah!” Sharov yelled. “Hurry, please!”
The glare of flashlights danced and stabbed in the near-darkness. Vaughn heard other voices, speaking English, and the scrabble and clatter of men moving through the wreckage. The shoosh-shoosh of someone triggering a fire extinguisher cut above the babble.
“Admiral? Can you hear me?”
“Y-yeah. Cunningham?”
“No, Admiral. I’m Thurman. I’m a Corpsman.”
Vaughn opened his eyes. In the dancing, smoke-wreathed light, he could make out a short-sleeved white shirt moving above him. On the right sleeve was the crow and caduceus of a Hospital Corpsman First Class.
“We’re gonna get you out of there, Admiral.”
“Okay. Doc. I think I’ve had it. Can’t move.”
“You’ve got a console on your legs, sir. They’re getting it off you now.”
He still couldn’t feel anything below his waist. There was a sharp jab as the Corpsman jabbed the needle of a morphine syrette in his arm.
“Astarawina!” someone called. “Gatovoh … tykes j’ehr!”
Vaughn managed to raise his head. In the uncertain light, he could see two of the Commonwealth liaison officers, Sharov and Kreml’s Tactical Officer, Besedin, straining together to lift the shattered console from his legs. Besedin wore a bandana torn from someone’s white shirt, stained over his left eye with blood.
The console stirred, then lifted between the two straining men.
“Harohshee! Harohshee!” They gave a concerted heave, and the wreckage crashed to the deck several feet away. Vaughn glanced down at his legs, half afraid of what he would see. They were still there, though the right leg was turned at an awkward angle. But he could not feel them at all. Turning away, he saw the bodies, blood-stained and crumpled by the force of the blast. One looked like the Russian Pokrovsky.
The other was Bersticer, his chest crushed and bloody. Six men crowded around Vaughn, blocking the sight, the horror. “Careful now,” Thurman ordered. “Get that board under his back. Strap it tight … under his arms. His legs. Good. Okay, ready? Lift!”