“Stoy! Stoy! Nee streelyaee! Not shoot!”
“Okay, Tyrone, cut the lock,” Batman instructed on their tactical channel. Then, switching to 258.0, he replied to the Soviet, “Russian aircraft, this is Hound Leader. I am the aircraft just off your port wing. Do you copy, over?”
“Hound leader, is Hight Varon. Radar lock is flagrant provocation. I protest this act of aggression. Over.”
“Protest all you want,” Batman shot back. “You are requested to come to course three-zero-zero and turn off that search radar. In the interests of international good will, you know.”
“Nyet! Is not for Americans to order flight plans of Soviet aircraft! Or do you declare exclusion zone?”
Jefferson hadn’t taken that step yet. In wartime or a particularly tense crisis an exclusion zone defined an area in which any unauthorized plane would be fired on automatically. That was a much larger escalation of the current tension than anyone had been willing to order so far.
“Negative, Flight Varon. But in view of the current situation, don’t you think it would be a good idea to avoid … unfortunate incidents?”
“Bah! Is blatant interference!”
Batman switched channels again. “Give him another little tweak, Tyrone,” he said. “Just to remind him what he’s risking.”
“Roger, Leader.” The younger pilot still sounded tense, but in control. “Got him.”
“Flight Varon, this is Hound Leader,” Batman drawled, back on the common frequency. “Request you comply with our suggestion. My partner has an itchy trigger finger.”
There was a long, tense pause. Technically there was nothing Batman could do to stop the Bear unless he was willing to risk a full-blown incident. He was banking on the Russians being as nervous as the Americans.
It was a deadly game of chicken … and millions of lives could hang on the outcome.
The rumble of the Bear’s engines rose in pitch a little as the aircraft accelerated and started to climb away from the encounter. “Big Bulge is off,” Malibu announced.
He watched the Bear turn, not northwest as he’d suggested, but east instead. As it continued to swing slowly around onto a northeasterly heading, Batman rubbed the bridge of his nose. They were on the right heading for a return to Russia. Had the reconnaissance flight been on a routine mission, or had it been especially directed against the battle group?
The answer to that question might tell a lot about Soviet intentions in the unfolding crisis.
CHAPTER 4
Rear Admiral Douglas F. Tarrant looked up from his computer terminal at the discreet tap on his door. “Come,” he said, saving the letter to his wife before shutting off the machine. He glanced at the clock over his desk and raised a surprised eyebrow. There were few people aboard who would knock on that door at this time of night, even if they knew Tarrant was accustomed to working late and snatching short catnaps.
Jefferson’s CO, Captain Jeremy Brandt, looked apologetic as he entered. Short, stocky, with close-cut blond hair beginning to go gray, Brandt had a bulldog face and a temperament, so Tarrant had learned, to match. They’d never served together before, but Tarrant had heard nothing but good reports on the captain, and had confirmed them in a month’s direct contact. It was Brandt’s first cruise commanding a carrier, but he’d put in tours as CO aboard the Tripoli and the Kalamazoo, with a particularly good record as CAG aboard the Kennedy back in ‘93. The carefully planned career cycle of Navy carrier skippers ensured that the best men made it to the top, but even in that distinguished company Brandt stood out.
“Sorry to disturb you, Admiral,” he said. “But Commander Sykes down in CR just processed a Priority Urgent message from CINCLANT.” He held up a bundle of teletype printouts.
Tarrant frowned. The bulky ream of paper sent up from the ship’s Communications Department had to be detailed situation reports and orders for the battle group from Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet, and the precedence code of “Priority Urgent” meant that it was important enough to require attention within three hours of transmission. That could mean only one thing.
“We’re going in,” he said aloud. “We must be going in.”
Brandt nodded slowly. “That’s my guess, sir. Looks like the folks up at NCA finally got off their collective butt and decided to make a move after all.”
He took the papers from the captain. “Anything else?”
“Mercury Flight’s on the deck, Admiral. Two Tomcats, two Intruders. Not a full replacement, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Good.” Tarrant smiled. “I’ll bet CAG’s happy at least.”
“Yes, sir,” Brandt said noncommittally. Everyone on board knew Stramaglia’s reputation for never being satisfied. “We also had confirmation from the Hawkeye that the Bear we were tracking changed course after our Tomcats intercepted.”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t tell me,” Tarrant said. There was a certain amount of rivalry between Brandt as Captain of the ship and Stramaglia as CO of the Air Wing. In theory they were equals under Tarrant’s command, and it might have been considered a breach of protocol for Brandt to report developments that were entirely within the CAG’s purview. But Tarrant was more concerned at the moment with information rather than propriety. If the message from CINCLANT was what he thought it was, he was going to need every scrap of data he could lay his hands on in the next few hours.
“All right, Captain,” he went on, adopting a more serious tone. “Pass the word for my staff to meet me in Flag Plot in half an hour. And I want a meeting of the battle group’s senior officers on board Jefferson tomorrow morning at 0900. Captains and Execs … CAG and his staff too.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Brandt responded formally. “I doubt Colby or Wolfe can get here for the meeting, though.”
They were the skippers of CBG-14’s two 688-class attack subs, Galveston and Bangor. They were ranging far ahead of the surface ships, and it would be awkward to transport officers off the submarines to attend a briefing.
A face-to-face meeting with his ship commanders wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it was something Tarrant always tried to arrange when there were important orders to be passed along. It gave him a better measure of the men who had to carry them out. He could see their reactions, hear their opinions. Despite all the myths of modern high-tech warfare it was still the men who counted most.
“Don’t worry about them,” he told Brandt. He’d just have to depend on their skills sight unseen. From what he remembered of them from the short meetings he’d had with the two sub commanders at the beginning of the deployment, he had nothing to worry about from either man. “We’ll send them a transcript afterwards. But see to getting the others aboard.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the captain repeated, glancing again at the printout with an unreadable expression before turning to leave.
After Brandt was gone Tarrant picked up the printout and began to scan the pages. It was as he had feared. The situation in Norway was no longer to be considered a local problem.
As was so often the case, the crisis had caught everyone, including America’s intelligence community, off guard. At the core of the matter lay a long-standing grievance between Norway and the Soviet Union, going back to post-World War II days. The argument over the exact location of territorial water boundaries in the Barents Sea had become a major issue almost overnight. Soviet military maneuvers on the Norwegian border had heightened the tensions without really changing the equation. That was just a routine adjunct to diplomacy as far as the Russians were concerned. The world community had looked on, unable and often unwilling to get involved as the war of words continued. Denunciations of both sides in the United Nations, mediation by the Secretary General — nothing had worked.