"Two-double-oh, this is Shotgun One-one. Tombstone, what the hell are you doing out here?"
"Getting my ass into trouble, Coyote. Where the hell are you?"
"Retanking at angels base plus ten, Delta Three-five-five, Charlie One-eight-one." Tombstone glanced at his map. That put Shotgun about eighteen miles to the northwest. "We're on our way back to the Jeff after covering White Lightning."
"Any of you already tanked up?"
"That's a roger. Three of us are anyway."
"If you're still armed, we could use you at Polyamyy. Multiple bogies coming out of one-eight-zero."
"I see 'em. Okay, Tombstone. Cavalry's on the way."
"Good to hear that, Coyote." Tombstone locked onto a second target, then squeezed the trigger. "Fox one!"
"Hey, leave a few for the rest of us."
But as the MiGs exploded out of the southern sky, Tombstone knew that Coyote needn't have worried on that score.
In seconds, MiG-29 Fulcrums were everywhere, sleek aircraft with twin stabilizers, clutching deadly pods of weapons beneath their wings.
Then Tombstone and Tomboy were fighting for their lives.
CHAPTER 29
Lieutenant Ben Rivera balanced himself against the ragged top of the wall, staring down into the dock facility at the base of the hill. From his vantage point, at the top of a seventy-degree slope perhaps two hundred feet above the waters of Polyamyy Inlet, it looked as though a monster was sliding out of the rock beneath his feet.
Dark gray, most of its surface covered with a brickwork effect, or tiles like those on a space shuttle, it was Leviathan himself. Even before half of it had moved into the open water, Rivera knew that he must be standing directly above the entrance to one of the secret Russian submarine pens he'd been briefed on before the landing. There were supposed to be a number of caverns piercing the cliffs overlooking the tangled inlets near Polyamyy, each sheltering some of Russia's most powerful boomers, and by chance he'd been dropped right on top of one.
That monster sliding into the inlet was as long as forever! A Typhoon ballistic-missile sub, it had to be! Nothing else could be so huge. As Rivera watched, that long, long forward deck continued to slide out from beneath the rocks, its upper surface showing the sharply chiseled grooves of two rows of missile hatches down the forward deck.
And… most merciful God in heaven… one of those hatches was open!
Rivera nearly lost his hold on the wall as he found himself staring down into the gaping hatch, meeting the gaze of the round, white eye of an SS-N-20 ICBM peering back from its depths.
"Larson!" He scrambled back from the edge of the cliff, the spell of awe and surprise that had pinned him there broken at last. "Gunny!"
The Typhoon's sail slid into view, and then the afterdeck, shorter by far than the forward missile deck. The rudder had the span of an A-6, and that broad, flattened, eighty-two-foot beam that made it look as fat as an aircraft carrier. Hell, with an LOA of 557 feet, it was two thirds the length overall of the Nassau, well over half the length of the Jefferson or the Eisenhower.
Larson handed him the radio phone, and he clutched it to his head with a trembling hand.
"King Three! King Three!" he called. "This is White Knight Five!
Over!"
There was no immediate answer.
"King Three! This is White Knight. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, answer me!"
"Red Hammer, Red Hammer," the Intruder flight leader called. "This is Red Hammer One-one. Target change. We have a new target request from Marine Air Control."
"Red Hammer One-three, we copy," Willis said. Then, "God, what do they want now?"
"Probably another truck park," Sunshine replied. "Shit, you'd think they'd find something interesting for us to clobber once in a while."
But as Willis listened to the new instructions from One-one, he realized that this target was nothing if not interesting.
It was almost damned dangerous. He brought the aircraft slightly to the right, carefully studying the panorama of mountains and water unfolding ahead.
"Hit!" Tombstone yelled. "Splash that MiG!"
"Watch it, Tombstone!" Tomboy called from the back seat. "Two are coming around behind us!"
"I see 'em! Hold on!" He jinked right, then rolled to the left, sending the F-14 into a high, floating barrel roll that took him up and out of the two Fulcrums' aim. The sky was filled with aircraft, all of them Fulcrums, it seemed. Ahead, there was a flash and an angry puff of orange disgorging a burning meteor plunging toward the waters of the Kola Inlet. Their second AMRAAM had scored.
"That's two… oof!" his RIO said as Tombstone kicked in his afterburners in a hard, tight turn pulling out of the barrel roll. The two MiGs on their tail had just flashed past on the left, then split apart, one cutting to the left, the other toward the right, almost directly in front of the Tomcat. Tombstone started to follow, then abruptly pulled back and swung left again, letting the F-14 drop a thousand feet toward the water.
"Hey, CAG!" Tomboy called. "What… are you feeling generous? You had a great setup there. Why'd you let him go?"
"Take a look up ahead!"
Red Hammer, the A-6 flight, had split up their original tight formation, but each aircraft was maintaining speed and altitude, already into the beginning of their approach run. A Fulcrum coming in from the south had spotted them, wheeled about, and dropped onto the six of one of the Intruders.
And Tombstone was bearing down on the six of the Fulcrum.
"I'm going to Sidewinder," he called. "I've got a good shot here, right up his tail."
He let the Sidewinder glimpse the MiG's hot tail pipes, then squeezed the trigger. "Fox two!"
"We've got another one behind us, Stoney. No, make that two!"
"How long till the cavalry gets here?"
"They're coming. Another thirty seconds. Threat warning! They have a lock!"
Tombstone pulled up violently, dumping chaff into his slipstream as he climbed.
He needed to cover Red Hammer's tail while they made their attack, at least until Coyote and the others arrived. Right now, though, the chances of Tomcat 200 surviving those next thirty seconds were not very good at all.
The Intruder rocked violently, and Willis had to pull the nose up slightly to steady it.
"What the hell was that?" Sunshine asked, her face still buried in her scope.
"Fulcrum on our tail," Willis said, glancing back over his shoulder.
"Someone just took it out with a heat-seeker up the ass."
"Rog. Thirty seconds!"
Eight hundred feet.
"On manual." The target, according to the Marine air controller who'd fed the data to Red Hammer, was moving… and surrounded by numerous other targets. Willis wasn't going to trust the computer on this one. At his side, Sunshine was flipping rapidly back and forth between search radar and FLIR mode; if his own system crashed or if he became disoriented, she would be able to keep him on track.
Seven hundred feet…
The radar homer sliced past to the right, seduced by Tombstone's chaff and Tomboy's vigorous ECM jamming. Now tracer rounds slashed past their canopy, high and leading the Tomcat by a good hundred yards. Tombstone hit the F-14's air brakes and pulled the nose up sharply. Floating at the ragged edge of a stall, the Tomcat slewed to the right just as the Fulcrum, surprised by Tombstone's maneuver, flashed past, so close that Tombstone could read the regimental markings on the other plane's fuselage.