He thought of Army and Dixie, shot down while trying to save the Jefferson from a cruise missile. Despite a search by SAR helos, they’d not been found in the choppy seas just a few miles from the carrier.
They’d not fought for any particular cause or label … though both were patriots in every sense of the word. Like all of the others, Tombstone thought, Army and Dixie had believed in what they were doing but had carried on not for the sake of the mission … but because they couldn’t let down their friends, the other members of their squadrons, their shipmates.
Possibly, Tombstone reflected, that was what every soldier of every war fought for more than home or country: the men fighting with him at his side. They fought not to take the next hill or even to win the war, but because friends and comrades would suffer or die if they did not.
And after that … yeah, there was the mission. Always the mission.
“Viper Leader, Viper Two.”
“Go ahead, Batman.”
“Ho, Stoney. Looks like we’re getting ready to rock and roll. We got bogies, bearing zero-niner-five.”
“We see them,” Tombstone replied, checking his VDI. The bandits were forming up, rising from airfields despite the damage done by the Hornet strikes. Well, that was expected. No strike was one hundred percent effective … especially when the opponent was as powerful and as well-dispersed as this one. “Okay, boys and girls. Stand by to break right on my signal. Weapons are free. Good luck!”
“Listen, guys,” Batman added. “Drinks are on me when we get back to the bird farm!”
“If the bird farm’s still there,” Coyote said. “I’m not sure I like the idea of CAG’s ‘newbies’!”
“Only game in town, Coyote,” Tombstone replied. “They’ll hold the fort for as long as they can fly. Meanwhile, I think the locals are going to be way too interested in us to worry about aircraft carriers.”
“Roger that.”
Tombstone checked left and right once more. VF-95 consisted now of just six aircraft, a fraction of its usual strength: Tombstone and Batman, Coyote and Shooter, Nightmare and Ramrod. All were friends, all comrades in the sharp and bitter air engagements of the past nine months. The chances were good that not all of them would make it back to the carrier when this flight was over.
For perhaps the first time, Tombstone saw the odds and accepted them. He remembered his decision to leave the Navy, made during a string of accidents and near-misses … what? Was it only three days ago? He felt as though he’d lived a lifetime since then. He was no longer certain about that decision. Let me get through this fight, he thought.
Then I’ll decide. But right now, I’m needed here.
“Viper Leader to Vipers,” he called. “On my command … break!”
The six Tomcats of VF-95 banked right in perfect unison, angling toward the Indian fighters rising to meet them.
Captain Kurasov saw the lumbering aircraft’s approach and felt like crying with pent-up relief.
The bomber known to NATO as the Tu-16 Badger had been a mainstay of Soviet aviation for over three decades. Large, powered by a pair of massive turbojets slung close to the roots of swept-back wings, the Badger had a combat radius of nearly 2,000 miles. Nine major variants served a variety of roles with both the Russian strategic aviation forces and the Russian navy: anti-shipping, ELINT, ECM, conventional medium bomber, reconnaissance, and tanker.
This particular variant, a Badger-A fitted out for the tanker role, had taken off from the air base at Dushanbe among the mountains north of the Afghanistan border three hours earlier. Cruising southwest at its service ceiling of forty thousand feet, it had avoided Pakistan air space by violating Iran’s hostile but poorly watched Baluchistan frontier until it was over the Gulf of Oman, before turning southeast on the final leg of its 2,000 mile journey.
The decision to send the Badger had been made with uncharacteristic haste by the officers of the small Russian naval aviation staff stationed at Dushanbe. Maintained by the Department of SNA to support Russian naval forces operating in the Indian Ocean, the facility had dispatched the tanker within minutes of learning that Kreml’s flight deck was burning, and that no fewer than twelve of the new navalized Mig-29 fighters were aloft at the time.
By loitering over the area and conserving fuel, the Mig-29s had hoped to stay airborne until the tanker reached them. They had the endurance … barely. They’d used lots of fuel during their launch, and they’d not begun flying conservatively until after the cruise missile hit Kreml at 0859. After more than three and a half hours aloft, the Mig squadron was running on fumes.
Captain Kurasov looked at the fuel gauge on his console. Things were desperate. His squadron was down to ten now. Uritski and Denisov had run dry minutes ago. The first to launch, they’d been the first to run out of fuel with no place to land, ejecting into the sea close by the American carrier. Both men had been rescued by one of Jefferson’s helicopters.
That would be the fate of the rest of the Migs soon, if they could not get refueled in time. Kreml’s flight deck was still a ruin of twisted metal and debris, though the fires were out now, at last report.
Attempting to land on the American carrier was out of the question.
There were too many technical variables, too many differences in the technology. The aircraft did not have the Americans’ ILS equipment for instrument landings and didn’t know how to use American signaling and course-correction techniques—”calling the ball,” as they referred to it.
As a good atheist, Kurasov could not call the appearance of the tanker a godsend. But he was damned glad to see it approach. “Red Soldier, this is Tower,” he said, using the call sign and frequency given him by the new Soviet air control officer on board the Marshal Timoshenko.
“Tower, Red Soldier. We heard you boys were thirsty. Perhaps you would like a small drink, comrades?”
Kurasov grinned. The old communist honorific “comrade” had fallen into disfavor of late among the people of the Commonwealth. Somehow, it had managed to take on an entirely new meaning among those who served in Russia’s armed forces. Comrade. Brother.
“Indeed we would, Red Soldier. Ten baby birds with mouths open wide!”
One by one, the Migs approached the Russian tanker in order of their fuel needs. Each would take only five hundred liters, enough to remain airborne long enough for all of them to slake their thirst in turn. Then they would go through the list again, drinking their fill.
“Tower Leader, this is Tower Three,” the pilot of one of the other Migs said.
“Go ahead, Tower Three.”
“Tower Leader, we have a message from the American radar plane.”
“Read it.” Tower Three, a young pilot named Lavrov, was the only one of the ten pilots still in the air who spoke passable English. He’d been designated as the go-between with American traffic control.
“They say, “Estimated ten to twelve Indian aircraft approaching from one-six-zero degrees, range eight-five kilometers. Believed to be Sea Harriers from INS Viraat. Intercept and destroy.’”
“”Intercept and destroy,” eh?” He chuckled. “I never thought I would be flying air cover for an American aircraft carrier!”
“Da, Comrade Captain. But their defeat is ours as well.”
That, at least, had been the reasoning used by Fitzgerald, the American carrier Captain. Fitzgerald had been unable to promise the Migs a place to land if they ran out of fuel … but he had, rather eloquently, convinced the Russian aviators that to lose the Jefferson would doom their own ship. If the Indians broke through, they would find the scarred and battered Kreml a tempting target indeed.