"Okay, let's scratch," Lieutenant Atcheson decided. "Light up and see if there's something out there to bounce a signal off of."
"Lighting up," Lewiston said, and the Hawkeye went active. The peculiar bogeys were still far beyond detection range of even the Hawkeye's prodigiously efficient radar, but its pulses reached to the target, though they lacked the power to return. Three minutes and forty-two seconds later, a fifty kiloton nuclear warhead blew Atcheson, Lewiston, their fellow crewmen, and their aircraft into fiery oblivion.
"What the hell-?!" O'Donnel was startled out of his bitter silence by the sudden flash ahead of them.
"Somebody must've hit the tender with a scanner," Leonovna said, face tense as she fought the atmospheric shockwaves. "That was an ARAD."
"An antiradiation missile? Who the hell's got modern scanners down here?"
"Don't know," Colonel Leonovna said, and concentrated on her flying.
"Jesus Christ!" Commander Edward Staunton winced at the volume of his senior airborne Tomcat pilot's voice. "Home Plate, this is Hawk One! We have a nuclear explosion-I say again, a nuclear air burst-bearing two-seven-five relative from the task force, range two-eight-zero miles!"
"What did he say?" Staunton turned to see Commander Bret Hanfield, Roosevelt's executive officer, standing just inside PriFly.
"He said it was a nuke," Staunton replied, his voice completely calm while his mind tried to grapple with realization.
"CAG, we can't raise Spyglass." The air wing commander looked over his shoulder at the duty flight ops officer, but he wasn't really surprised. The range and bearing from Hawk One had already warned him, even if he had not consciously worked out all the implications yet.
"Sir, CIC is on the line," a petty officer said, extending a phone. "He's looking for the XO."
Hanfield held out his hand and pressed the phone to his ear. "XO," he said. "Talk to me." He listened for a moment, eyes narrowing, and Staunton noticed that his color was stronger than a moment before.
"Thank you," he said, then glanced at Staunton even as he punched buttons on the handset. "Message from Antietam," he said tersely, "group tacco just confirmed it."
Staunton looked at the ops officer. Antietam carried the group tactical warfare officer for a very simple reason; she was a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, an Aegis ship, with the most advanced shipborne radar and deadliest surface-to-air weapons fit in the world.
"Bridge, this is the XO," Hanfield continued into the phone. "Give me the OD." He waited a moment longer. "Harry? We've got a confirmed nuclear air burst three hundred miles ahead of us. Sound general quarters and set condition One-AAW. Then get the captain and tell him what's happening. I'm on my way now." He threw the phone back to the petty officer without a word and vanished from PriFly while the man was still looking at him. The alarm awoke a fraction of an instant later, and the calm, unhurried voice of the boatswain-of-the-watch came from the speakers.
"General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands man battle stations for antiair warfare. This is no drill."
A bolt of pure fury suffused the Troll commander as the primitive aircraft vaporized. He knew at once what had happened. His cowardly, ultracautious creators had built no offensive weapons into their tender-that was the purpose of its escort-but they had crammed in every defensive system their anxious minds could envision. His own sensors had detected the crude radiation emanating from the aircraft, though he hadn't recognized it as a detection system. Why should he? No one had used single-dimension radio-wave scanners in over two centuries! But the Shirmaksu never forgot a danger, and some ancient threat recording had triggered their onboard computers, wasting a nuclear-armed ARAD on an archaic, propeller-driven aircraft.
It wasn't the death of the aircraft the Troll resented, but the fact that his masters hadn't seen fit to spend a little more of their foresight on fitting their tender with offensive weapons. He could have used them, for the human devil behind him had devised a plan.
He understood instantly when the cralkhi's drive field peaked. The enemy was going to attempt to overfly him and his wingman, then sweep back from head-on, and, in atmosphere, it might just get away with it. The odds were astronomically against it, but it was possible. Human drive fields had less power, but they were more efficient, and, especially in atmospheric maneuvering, efficiency counted. The human could maintain a better power curve in its bow drive field, which meant it could pull a higher atmospheric velocity. His own fighters were down to under eleven thousand kilometers per hour in this thickening air, and the cralkhi's fighter could do far better than that.
Of course, the devil would have to get past two Trolls to do it, he thought grimly, and his targeting systems sprang to life once more.
"The Captain is on the bridge!" a voice snapped as Captain Everett Jansen strode onto his bridge. The skin around his eyes was puffy with sleep, but the eyes themselves were already clear. Hanfield turned to him instantly, but Jansen waved him back.
"A sec, Bret," he said, grabbing for a phone and punching up CIC. "Plot, this is the Captain. What's our status?" He listened for perhaps ten seconds, then grunted. "Thanks." He hung up the phone and turned in one smooth movement. "All right, XO, I have the conn."
"Aye, Sir." Commander Hanfield didn't even try to hide the relief in his voice.
"I've got two more bandits, Skip," O'Donnel reported. "Coming at us from 11,000 meters altitude. Range eight-four-two kilometers. Rate of closure's over fourteen thousand KPH."
"What?" Colonel Leonovna spared a fraction of her own attention for the new targets. "Forget them, Anwar. They're human aircraft." She turned back to her piloting, a tiny corner of her historian's brain continuing, "Must be military to pull that speed."
"Home Plate, this is Hawk One. Hawk Flight going to burner."
Commander Staunton watched two more F-14s thunder off the catapults and climb away as he absorbed the report from his two airborne fighters. The big, swing-wing aircraft were long overdue for replacement, and he didn't like to think about the flight hours and fatigue their airframes had accumulated, but the general slowdown in military funding over the last twenty years had played havoc with next-generation systems development and acquisition. And for all their age, the F-14 and its equally venerable Phoenix missiles remained the most capable long-range interceptor in the world. Which was the reason the Navy (whose airfields had an unfortunate tendency to sink when sufficiently damaged) continued to labor so heroically to keep them flying. The standby F-18s were already being towed to the cats, but he doubted they'd get the younger design aloft in time to make much difference. Whatever was coming towards them had still been pulling almost seven thousand miles per hour when it dropped below SPASUR's coverage.
"Hawk Two, Hawk One," he heard his senior pilot say. "Light off your radar."
"Rog, Hawk One."
Two hundred miles ahead of the carrier battle group, both F-14Ds switched on their AWG-9 radars, searching for whatever had killed Spyglass.
"Hostiles incoming! I have incoming hostiles!" Hawk One announced. "Jesus! The bastards are pulling close to twelve thousand knots!"
Staunton looked at his flight officer in disbelief.
"Skipper, the tender's launched another pair of ARADs!"
"Those poor bastards," Colonel Leonovna said softly.
"Fox One!" Hawk One snapped. "Fox One-four away!"
Four late-mark AIM-54 missiles dropped from the lead Tomcat's pallets, followed moments later by two more as Hawk Two's novice aircrew launched as well. The Mach-five Phoenix, the longest ranged air-to-air missile in the world, was totally outclassed by the incoming missiles. But Phoenix missiles were designed to knock down small cruise missiles in the most difficult targeting solution of alclass="underline" head-on at extreme range. The Kanga missiles were larger than the Tomcats which had fired, and for all their massive speed, they were utterly incapable of evasion. They mounted advanced ECM systems, but those systems were designed for outer space, and no ECM in the galaxy could have hidden the fantastic heat source their atmospheric passage generated.