Tombstone himself had been in a Hornet flashing low across the deck of the Soviet supercarrier Kreml ― just as the Baltic Fleet's flagship had exploded in flames. His heart still raced each time he thought about it.
The Thomas Jefferson had been hurt badly off the Lofoten Islands in the final chapter of the Battles of the Fjords. She'd limped back under her own steam, first to Scapa Flow, then to Norfolk, but her flight deck had been so badly ripped up that nothing could land on it but helicopters. By the time the old girl had reached her home port, there'd been talk of scrapping her.
Events across the Atlantic had dictated otherwise. UN troops had briefly occupied Moscow and St. Petersburg, as Red Army units in Scandinavia began surrendering en masse. There'd been talk of a joint allied military government to oversee the recovery of Russian democracy. Ilya Anatolevich Leonov and his Popular Russian Democratic Party had made their appearance, rising from obscurity to control of the new Russian government almost overnight. The UN forces had withdrawn, and a breathless world had continued to watch the growth of the world's newest and most astonishing democracy, live from Moscow on CNN. Which was why the news of the military coup in mid February had been so devastating. Overnight, it seemed, the old iron Curtain had slammed down yet again. The only news emerging from the crippled Russian giant consisted of dark, nightmare tales of purges and people's courts, of mobilizations, KGB arrests, and assassinations, of a hard-liner Red Army marshal named Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov who, to judge by the stories spread by the trickle of refugees out of Russia, held close spiritual kinship with the restive shade of Stalin.
The war begun by the Soviets in Scandinavia, it was clear now, was resuming. News that Leonov and some of his supporters had fled Moscow and found refuge in the southern Urals was the first word of civil war. As former S.S.R.s chose sides, as Krasilnikov's Red Army and Leonov's Blue Army clashed in a bloody meeting engagement at the Vornezh River, it became clear that events in the former Soviet Union might well be capable of holding the entire world hostage.
Both Reds and Blues possessed nuclear weapons. How long would it be before one side or the other used them?
The repairs to the Thomas Jefferson had received top priority in a nation already struggling to improve its military posture. In record time, Jeff's flight deck had been restored, and her normal complement of ninety-plus aircraft in ten squadrons had been returned to her.
Now, the Jefferson was returning to the same waters where she'd been savaged nine months earlier. She was the same ship, but many of her people were new… and that included the majority of the air wing's aviators.
Casualties among Jefferson's fliers during the Battle of the Fjords had been atrocious, and the Navy Department had been pulling out all the stops to get qualified personnel in to replace those losses.
"Two-one-eight, you're lookin'just fine," the LSO's voice said. "Call the ball."
Static crackled over the speaker, and Tombstone pictured Conway in the Tomcat's cockpit, straining for a glimpse of Jefferson's meatball through that ink-black soup.
"Two-one-eight, call the ball. Acknowledge."
"Okay, gentlemen, got it," Conway's voice replied. "Two-one-eight, Tomcat ball. One… ah, make it zero point niner."
There wouldn't be fuel enough for another touch-and-go.
"Two-one-eight, roger ball. You're right on the money. Deck coming up.
Power on."
Tombstone leaned forward, knuckles white against the handle of his forgotten cup of coffee.
"Power on, Two-one-eight! Up! Up!"
God, Conway was low, hurtling toward Jefferson's ramp at 140 knots…
The Tomcat materialized out of the night like a gray ghost, nose high, landing gear and arrestor hook seeming to reach ahead of the plummeting aircraft in a desperate search for the deck. The F-14 cleared the flight deck's roundoff by a handful of feet, slamming the steel just beyond with a jolt that wrenched its nose down sharply. Throttle up… but then the tailhook engaged the number-two wire and yanked the aircraft to a halt. The engine throttled down.
"Thank you, God," Tombstone said. "Thank you, dear God." A pair of powerful 7x50 binoculars swung by their strap from a hook beside the Air Boss's station. Tombstone picked them up and raised them to his eyes. Tomcat 218 was now approaching the spot left for it, guided by the yellow shirt and his glowing wands. The rain appeared to have lessened in the past few minutes, but it was rapidly being replaced by the first swirling flakes of snow. The Tomcat's wheels left tracks in a thin slush already gathering on the black-painted steel of the flight deck.
Two-one-eight's deck crew crowded around, ramming chocks home beneath the wheels and beginning the complex tie-down process to secure the aircraft against blasts of wind, natural or manmade, across the flight deck. The crew chief turned a key and unfolded a ladder from the fuselage. The canopy popped open, then raised itself back.
Tombstone focused the binoculars on Lieutenant Commander Conway and the aircraft's Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Damiano. Still seated in their aircraft, bathed in the harsh glare from a light on the carrier's island above their heads, they seemed unshaken, running through their shutdown procedures with the professionals' routine and unflappable calm.
Not for the first time, Tombstone marveled at the changes that were overtaking Jefferson's air wing… that were sweeping throughout the entire American military. He'd thought that the high casualties off Norway, the graphic horrors of modern naval warfare, would have had the exact opposite effect on recruitment and training policies and American popular opinion than that he'd been witness to these past few months. Sometimes it was still a bit hard to believe.
Through the binoculars, he watched Conway and Damiano remove their helmets and hand them to their crew chief, then begin unfastening the harnesses. Tricia Conway's blond hair was cut short to accommodate her helmet; Rose's hair was jet black and a bit longer. Their flight suits could not completely disguise the decidedly female curves of their figures.
Lieutenant Chris Hanson, having just clambered out of her Tomcat parked a few yards away, reached the foot of the ladder and was shouting something at Conway, giving her a happy thumbs-up.
This, Tombstone decided, was definitely a whole new Navy from the one he'd joined over a decade before. Twenty-eight new flight officers, pilots and RIOs, had reported aboard the Jefferson at Norfolk two weeks ago. Of those twenty-eight, twelve were women.
The great, long-awaited social experiment, American women in combat, was beginning aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson.
CHAPTER 2
Navy fliers never referred to themselves as pilots. The Air Force had pilots, men who landed on fifteen-hundred-foot runways, stationary runways, men who didn't have to contend with pitching decks or equipment failure in the recovery gear. The Navy had aviators, and naval aviators wore that word as a badge of supreme accomplishment, pride, and honor.
Could a woman be an aviator? That was the question. Tombstone Magruder still wasn't entirely sure of his own feelings regarding women aboard combat ships or flying combat missions. To be honest, he had no doubts whatsoever about their technical ability. Tricia Conway and the other women who'd come aboard in Norfolk two weeks earlier were hot pilots, as good as any rookie Tomcat drivers Tombstone had seen. With seasoning, with experience in the form of a few hundred more hours flying off the Jefferson day and night, in all weathers and in all types of seas, they'd be as good as any man in CVW-20.