Two of the surviving Migs attempted to attack the outlying picket ships with cannon, but were splashed by SM1-MR missiles, and the remainder ran for home. They knew what was coming and wanted a lot of distance between them and the ships.
The Backfires were carrying four AS-17 sea skimmers each and on the command of the senior regimental commander, they launched them all together. Eighty missiles accelerated towards the ships 30 miles away, seventy-four carried 380lb conventional warheads, and six carried 500kt nuclear warheads, the bomb that had devastated Hiroshima was only 20kt in yield.
Four aircraft from the shipping strike were down on the deck of the John F Kennedy when the air defence missiles started to fly from the picket ships. Five minutes later the Aegis cruisers USS Vincennes and USS Chancellorville, just a few miles to landward of the John F Kennedy began firing; they emptied their magazines in just four minutes.
Admiral Dalton deliberately ignored the plots and screens; it was all beyond his control now. He was stood with his hands behind his back, watching the TV screen as a Tomcat approached on finals when the bow and stern Phalanx guns began to fire. The picture disappeared, two thousandths of a second before the great warship herself did, along with eleven other warships and their entire ships companies.
No satellites were overhead during the attack on the American carrier group, they had already passed over the horizon by the time the Russian strike had arrived. The machines witnessed a temporary dawn over the horizon; it was far more brilliant than usual as three temporary suns were born within a second of each other.
In the war room shelter at space command, audible alarms sounded as the photonic flashes were measured for intensity and came up atomic in source.
When the next satellite passed over the Kamchatka Peninsula, the typhoon had disappeared as though it had never existed. The water vapour that powered it had been boiled off and the sky was a cloudless blue.
In California, British Columbia, Hawaii and besieged Japan, geological survey equipment to measure the planets seismic activity registered the detonations.
There was no sign of the American and British warships, the only vessels that remained were the surviving fleet replenishment ships far to the south. They had parted company with the warships when they had emptied their holds of munitions, and were now headed to the Hawaiian Islands to replenish. Satellite transmissions from the warships had ceased at exactly the same moment the orbiting sensors detected the nuclear detonations.
The enemy ships remained, although there were four less than before and others showed the damage resulting from near misses by Harpoons and direct hits from the much smaller anti-radiation missiles. Even worse was the scene in the bay, where the carriers and two destroyers were making ready to get underway once more.
The Premier of the People’s Republic of China, and the Premier of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, verbally slapped one another on the back in a rare videoconference between the two.
It did not matter to either man that the USSR presented a clutch of medals to some new Heroes of the Soviet Union, and declared the battle a Russian victory, or that the late Chinese Admiral Li was proclaimed the architect of China’s mastery of arms over America.
By late afternoon Lt Chubby Checkernovski was becoming very concerned for his pilot. Their Tomcat had been facing southwest when the false dawn had turned to daylight, with an intensity that had them slapping down the thick green visors on their flight helmets. It was as if they were flying directly at the sun, even though the light was behind them, so harshly brilliant that both had been left blinking to clear the after-images from their eyes, once it faded.
They were 67 miles from the outer screen of ships when the blast wave struck them, by which time it was but a murmur of its original force. Nikki fought to level their wings in the most violent turbulence either could remember, and when calm returned, they had gained over six thousand feet in altitude.
Both aviators had been too stunned to speak at first, Chubby had tried to raise first the John F Kennedy on the secure, directional beam before he had switched to Guard and listened to the static. Finally he dialled up each squadrons distress beacon frequency, listening for survivors in the water. All were silent.
With only fifteen minutes fuel remaining they had debated making landfall before punching out, to escape and evade, but neither really thought much of that one. It would take them two years and then some, to walk to Germany as they evaded capture and starvation, every step of the way.
The very faint likelihood that a ship would pick them up, and its crew could be persuaded to head for the states, held better odds. Say, 300,000 to 1 in fact!
They punched out at 5,000’ at barely above a stall, but even in those favourable conditions Nikki had been unconscious when she hit the water. Chubby had managed to paddle his one-man life raft over to her but it had taken a half dozen attempts, and all his reserves of energy, to drag her into her own life raft. He had only achieved it by tying a line from his own raft to his wrist and diving, or rather flopping into the water. He couldn’t believe what a dead weight an unconscious person could be, even one as petite as Nikki. The damn life raft of hers kept shooting away whenever he tried to get her head and shoulders over its side. Eventually he had gotten into her raft, placed his feet against the inflated side of a narrow end, reached forward, grabbed her under the arms and leant back, straightening his body as he did so. The action drove the end of the raft down below the surface and in the end he was lying beneath the pilot in a completely swamped life raft. He had struggled out from beneath her and back into the frigid water, before mooring the two rafts side by side and bailing both out, after which he lay exhausted for a full hour. He had seen the deep rent in the back of her flight helmet soon after he had first reached her, and as he lay in his raft he debated whether or not to remove the helmet, to see what damage was visible. Eventually he elected to leave it on; it may have been providing some tiny measure of insulation against the cold. If she had a skull injury it would require the skills of a surgeon to treat, and Chubby could just about manage a sticky plaster on a cut thumb.
It was now after three in the afternoon and Nikki had a pulse but that was about the only sign of life she showed. He was shivering with the cold and thirstier than he could ever remember when he heard a voice. It was difficult to look around without tumbling out of the raft and he didn’t exactly have a panoramic view, as the swells improved his range of vision, the troughs reduced it.
Eventually he saw another life raft as the waves briefly synchronised to raise them all at the same time. The strange raft was of a different design to that of the Americans; it was larger, circular and enclosed, providing more protection from the elements. Chubby had thought to take out his tiny survival compass, to get a bearing on whoever had shouted, always providing it wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him in the first place. The other raft was about a hundred meters to the north but he was unable to paddle towards it, with both rafts tied together he only succeeded in turning in a circle.
After an hour the other raft was closer though, its larger area allowed the wind to act on it, pushing it along and he recognised the Scots Sea Harrier pilot. Sandy Cummings had his head down as he leant out of an opening, industriously using a length of driftwood as a paddle to steer them together.
The first hint of dusk had arrived and it seemed the Scotsman’s raft would overtake theirs, passing a good fifteen feet to the west, but the Scotsman dived in, towing the raft behind him. Before long the Royal Navy pilot was in trouble, the wind was pushing his raft south whilst he was now swimming almost due north, his strength failing fast. Tying his own raft’s painter around his waist, Chubby flopped over the side and swam toward the pilot. They reached one another but it seemed they both must drown; the cold seas leeched the strength from muscles, and the will to fight on from their spirits. It took a last supreme effort to gain the side of the larger life raft, where Chubby had to combine his strength with the pilots to heave him aboard.