Just aft of where Tombstone and Tomboy were sitting ― a fifty-yard-line seat if ever there was one, he thought ― two lines of deck personnel were busily erecting the crash barricade, a horizontal ladder of wire and fabric strips designed to stop an aircraft that, for whatever reason, could not make a normal arrested landing. Tomcat 209 had one engine out, and if his tailhook failed to engage an arrestor wire, he wouldn't have the power necessary to complete a touch-and-go and would bolter off the forward end of the flight deck again. For that reason, Slider and Blue Grass would be making a barrier landing.
Nearby, men in red jerseys with black stripes stood ready to go, fire extinguishers in hand, some of them crouched atop deck tractors rigged out as fire-fighting vehicles. Men in white with red crosses were hospital corpsmen, standing by with first-aid kits and wire-frame Stokes stretchers. The ungainly struts and braces of the four-wheeled aircraft-handling crane known as "Tilly" loomed above them in the lee of Jefferson's island. One man standing on the crane was completely anonymous, clad head to toe in brightly reflecting flameproof silver. He had one job only. If Shotgun One-three crashed and burned, he would be the one to brave fire and exploding fuel in an attempt to pull Slider and Blue Grass from the wreckage.
Looking aft again, Tombstone saw the Tomcat, dropping toward Jefferson's roundoff. Across the deck from him, the LSO and his crew were at their station in front of Jefferson's meatball, guiding the crippled aircraft down its long glide-path toward the steel deck. Closer… closer… nose high, flaps down, gear down… With its wings extended, the F-14 was a "floater," generating tremendous lift, and now it appeared to be suspended, hanging almost motionless in the sky astern of the carrier. Tombstone found himself willing the aircraft safely onto the deck…
… and suddenly it was dropping with alarming speed, plummeting after its own shadow across the roundoff, slamming down with a shriek of rubber on steel, sweeping ahead with a deafening roar into the barricade. Smoke boiled from the starboard engine… and then the nose wheel gave way, and the nose smacked onto the deck with a shattering rasp and showering sparks, plunging through the barricade. The fluttering straps of the barrier seemed to gather Slider's Tomcat in, before collapsing across the aircraft's wings and tail.
The crash crew was already rolling, surrounding the plane in seconds, the yellow-painted Tilly lumbering forward with its crane extended, the sailor in the flameproof suit clinging to one of its struts.
Tombstone found he was holding his breath. In seconds, someone had the Tomcat's canopy up, and they were helping Slider out of the cockpit. It took a few moments more to get Blue Grass out. From some two hundred feet away, Tombstone could see the sickening slime of blood covering the RIO as the crash crew pulled him free and strapped him into a Stokes stretcher.
"My God," he heard Tomboy say. "His legs are gone!"
Whatever had hit Tomcat 209 had slammed up through the belly and severed Blue Grass's legs between hips and knees. The man was dead; he must have bled to death moments after he was hit. "You still want to go?" he asked Tomboy over the ICS.
"Yes." There was none of the usual imp's humor in her voice. "But let's move it, okay?"
Around them, the carrier's deck operations continued their never-ending dance-on-the-deck. Launch ops had slowed their tempo quite a bit to accommodate aircraft coming in for recovery, and the Air Boss was alternating launches from the bow cats with traps astern. After the frantic activity of earlier that morning, and with brief, adrenaline-charged intervals such as Slider's barrier trap, the work load seemed almost light, the men going about their tasks with a casual jauntiness that belied their exhaustion.
The initial checkout complete, with Tomboy reporting all circuit breakers set and systems go, he switched on the engines. As the power built, he felt the aircraft shuddering, as though yearning to free itself from the confines of steel deck and sheltering hangar, to fling itself at the sky.
"Tomcat Two-zero-zero, Air Boss."
Uh-oh. If it was coming, here it was. "Two-double-oh. copy."
"CAG. I got someone here wants to talk to you."
"Put him on."
"CAG? This is Admiral Tarrant."
"Yes, sir." Tombstone had been gambling that Tarrant would take no notice of his unauthorized launch… or better, that he wouldn't find out until after Tombstone was away from the Jeff. Tombstone would not refuse a direct order to stand down, but he desperately hoped that that order would not be given.
"Stoney, Air Ops reports real heavy action over the Inlet above Polyamyy.
Watch your ass in there, do you hear?"
"Yes, sir!"
"That's one expensive item of machinery you've got there. Bring it back in one piece."
"Aye, aye, sir!" Tombstone found himself grinning idiotically.
A plane director was backing away ahead of the Tomcat, motioning Tombstone on. Carefully, he let up the brakes and followed, threading the thirty-ton aircraft past Slider's and Blue Grass's fallen, nose-down F-14 and toward the bow catapults.
Captain First Rank Anatoli Chelyag leaned out over the edge of the cockpit, located high atop the Typhoon's sail. Naval Infantry troops lined the pier to which Leninskiy Nesokrushimyy Pravda had been moored, the younger ones among them looking scared as the sounds of gunfire continued to echo distantly through the cavern.
Line-handlers ashore had already cast off the enormous wire ropes securing the Typhoon to the bollards. Chelyag was watching now as the distance between pier and the sloping flanks of the behemoth he commanded gradually widened.
"We're clear to port now," he said, speaking into a telephone handset.
"Ahead slow."
"Ahead slow, Captain" came the reply from the officer at the helm in Pravda's control center.
The huge submarine picked up momentum, gliding through the filthy water with a sullen chug-chug-chug of her enormous screws. Chelyag remembered again Karelin's voice as he'd ordered the Pravda out of the cavern and into the hellfire outside. Reach the Barents Sea? They would be lucky if they cleared Polyamyy Inlet and made it to the main channel. Admiral Marchenko had been sending down hourly reports. That last one had spoken of Marines on the hillside directly above Pravda's hiding place.
But there was no refusing Karelin's orders. Chelyag would do as he'd been commanded, clear Tretyevo Peschera, then fire missile number one, already targeted on Chelyabinsk. After that… well, their survival depended entirely on the Frontal Aviation units now closing on Polyamyy from the south.
He brought the telephone to his mouth again. "Commander Mizin. Pass the word ashore to open the cavern doors."
"Yes, Comrade Captain." There was a pause. "Captain? We have a message from Admiral Marchenko."
"Read it to me."
"He says… 'Good luck, Pravda. Go with God.""
Chelyag could almost see the sneer, the curl to Mizin's lip, as he recited the message. His First Officer was a good atheist, a man who'd hoped with an almost religious passion that the return of no-nonsense hard-liners to power in Moscow would mean an end to the religious mania that had exploded throughout the nation during the days of Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Evidently, he'd been disappointed.
"Tell Admiral Marchenko, 'Thank you. Message received and very much appreciated.""
And what, he wondered, did Mizin think of that?
"We're coming up on the coast," Tomboy said over the ICS. "Feet dry."
"More or less," Tombstone replied. "We're not over land yet."