"South. It may have gone to a military airfield outside Orel. An airfield still under PRDP control."
"This," Krasilnikov said softly, "changes everything."
Doctorov favored him with a death's-head smile. "it means, my dear Comrade Marshal Krasilnikov, that our beleaguered nation's troubles are but beginning. If Leonov is alive, the democrats in the army and the nationalists in the republics will rally to him. It means what we have feared all along."
"Da," Krasilnikov said, and his eyes were fixed on the swirl of snowflakes dancing through the shattered window of the office. "It means another civil war. A blood-bath."
"Come, Comrade. The capital, at least, is ours. As are the northern military sectors and the bulk of the Red Army. We must compose our message for the rest of the world."
"Yes. Before they descend on us like wolves."
Thunder keened from the gray skies as a trio of MiG-31s roared low over the city. Krasilnikov cast another quick glance about the ruined office, then hurried after Doctorov. There was so very much yet to be done.
CHAPTER 1
"Damn but the weather's dirty tonight." Captain Matthew "Tombstone" Magruder stood in Jefferson's Primary Flight Control, "Pri-Fly" to the initiated, and worked at not sloshing hot coffee down the Air Boss's back. He could feel the pitch to the supercarrier's deck as she plowed through heavy seas invisible in the darkness 120 feet below. "For once I'm actually glad I'm not up there."
"What, am I hearin' this right, CAG?" Commander William Barnes grinned up at him from a coffee mug of his own. "AIR BOSS" was stenciled across the man's sweatshirt and the back of his chair, while his coffee mug proclaimed, "I'm the BOSS." He was the man responsible for controlling all air traffic in the carrier's immediate vicinity from this glassed-in eyrie, including all launch and recovery operations. "Man, this has got to be some kind of first.
Usually all I hear is you bitchin' about what you wouldn't give to be able to log more hours."
"Hours, yes. But not in that. Case Three if ever I saw it." Case Three was a bad-weather carrier approach, with a ceiling of two hundred feet and visibility of a half mile or less. In blue-water operations like this, with no friendly airfields within range, those limits could quickly drop to zero-zero, no ceiling, no visibility.
"Hell, the Met boys say it's going to get even worse," the Boss said. He jerked a thumb toward Pri-Fly's aft windows. "We're tryin' to get these people down before it turns to snow."
It was raining now, a cold, thin half-water/half-sleet that lashed across Pri-Fly's slanted windows. It was also pitch black save for the rain-smeared gleam of flight-deck acquisition lights and the glow from the big Fresnel lens apparatus aft and to port, where the Landing Signals officer and his crew were already talking the next aviator down. The scene was repeated in black and white on the big PLAT monitor suspended from Pri-Fly's overhead. Glancing up at the screen, Tombstone could see several members of the deck crew, bulky in their cold weather gear, trotting out of the camera's range.
"Two-oh-seven," the LSO's voice crackled from an overhead speaker. "Call the ball."
There was a moment of static, then a new voice sounded from the speaker.
"Clara." That one code word meant simply that the approaching aviator could not yet see the ball… or the storm-masked Jefferson.
In normal peacetime operations, the flight deck was shut down when Case Three conditions dropped below a half-mile visibility ― fifteen seconds' flight time for an approaching aircraft.
"Home Plate, Two-oh-seven," the voice added a moment later. "Wait one.
Okay, got you! Two-oh-seven, Tomcat ball. Three point three."
The terse information confirmed for the men adjusting the tension of the five parallel arrestor wires stretching across the after part of the flight deck that it was an F-14D Tomcat coming in for a trap, that the aircraft had 3,300 pounds of fuel left aboard, and that the pilot could now see the yellow beacon, the "meatball," of the carrier's landing approach guide indicator.
Having made countless traps himself, including Case Three landings on nights as dark, wet, and raw as this one, Tombstone could see the approach setup clearly in his mind's eye. So long as the aviator kept the ball centered between the horizontal lines of green lights to either side, the aircraft was holding the proper angle of approach for a good trap.
The Tomcat was also being guided in by Jefferson's Instrument Landing System, "riding the needles" in on the correct glide slope. By coupling the ILS with the Automatic Carrier Landing System, or ACLS, the approach could actually be turned over to a computer, which could land the aircraft with no human hand at the controls.
As Tombstone knew from long personal experience, Navy fliers had distinctly mixed feelings about the ACLS, and the hairier the approach, the less they liked it. Hell, no pilot liked to fly with someone else at the controls, and when that someone else was a goddamned computer…
Had 207 sounded just a little too tight? Hell, an approach on a night like this would unsettle anyone, and Lobo, Lieutenant Hanson, was still relatively new at this. "Roger ball," the LSO's voice said, calm and reassuring. "You're looking good. Come left, just a hair… little more…
that's good. Centerline good. Deck going down, power down."
Tombstone was staring into the night astern of the carrier, but try as he might he still couldn't see any sign of the approaching Tomcat… and then the big aircraft exploded out of the gloom off Jefferson's stern, wings swept far forward and flaps down for maximum lift, acquisition lights at belly and tail and wingtips flashing frantically but damned near masked by the rain as the F-14 swept across the roundoff at the end of the flight deck, wheels kissing steel as the tailhook struck a skittering salvo of yellow sparks, then neatly snagged the three-wire and dragged the hurtling mass of machinery to an almost instant halt even as its two big F110-GE-400 engines howled to full throttle.
The moment the tailhook had successfully engaged the arrestor wire and it was clear the Pilot wouldn't have to pull a "bolter" off the deck and come around for another try, the aircraft's engines spooled down again. The whole sequence, from Tombstone's first glimpse of the Tomcat materializing out of the dark to the moment it backed slightly on the carrier's roof, spitting out the wire, had taken only seconds, and he let out a small whoosh of pent-up air. Two-oh-seven was safely down, a perfect trap. Engines whining, the F-14 began nosing around to starboard, slowly following a yellow-jerseyed deck handler who backed away from the aircraft step by step, a pair of light wands waving up and down as he directed it toward an out-of-the-way spot on the flight line.
"Two-one-eight," the Air Boss was saying into the heavy microphone on the console in front of him. "Charlie now."
That was the command to the next aircraft circling west of the Jefferson to break from its holding pattern, or "Marshall Stack," and begin its approach to the carrier.
"Two-one-eight, copy," another voice said from the speaker, hard-edged and professional. "We're heading in."
"Ah, listen, Two-one-eight. Visibility on the deck's down to half a mile or less. Wind at one-nine knots from zero-four-zero, but we're getting occasional gusts at two-five."
"Wonderful, Home Plate. Just shit-fire wonderful. Sounds brisk and refreshing."
"Ah, Two-one-eight, we've got the beer chilled and waiting for you. Just bring back our airplane." Barnes released the switch on the mike and thumbed through a clipboard on his console. "Who's got the front seat on Two-one-eight tonight anyway?"