He’d studied maps of the Yalta coastal area thoroughly and knew that the White Palace where Captain Magruder and a number of other Americans and UN personnel were trapped was just up the coast to the east… just about there, in fact. The light show was dazzlingly beautiful… and deadly. Some of those slowly drifting globes of light ― they looked like softly glowing tennis balls ― seemed to be chasing one another in gently arcing lines across the sky only a few feet away, close enough for Dixie to reach out and catch one.
Their distance and their slowness were illusory. They were close, within a mile or so, but traveling fast enough to punch clean through his wing if they struck it. Proximity fuses could trigger them to explode within a set range of several meters, peppering his relatively fragile and vulnerable aircraft with white-hot shrapnel.
An explosion rocked his Tomcat… and another. Once he heard a sharp ping of metal on metal, but after a heart-stopping moment of scanning his damage indicators, he decided that it had missed anything vital. The Tomcat was rocking now with the gentle throb of aerial explosions. Streams of tracer rounds, green and yellow, floated and arced across the sky.
“So what do you think, Cat?” he asked his RIO. “Are we at war yet?”
She laughed. “I don’t know what Washington has to say about it,” she said, “but I was at war with those bastards the moment they shot our people.”
“You don’t think it was a terrorist attack, like they’re saying?”
Everybody in the battle group, it seemed, had been watching the ACN broadcasts, live, since the ships were all set up to receive satellite news feeds. It was a little eerie, Dixie thought, that he’d been seeing news programs broadcast from this spot on the Crimean coast just a few hours ago. He’d been watching the TV monitor set up in the Vipers’ ready room, and the explosion of cheers and applause when Tombstone appeared briefly in one of the shots had been thunderous.
Washington might be undecided as to how to handle the Crimean mess, but every man and woman aboard the ships of CVBG-14 and MEU-25 was ready to go in now and kick ass until their people were returned safe.
The flak was growing thicker toward the mountains… but had vanished along the coast west of Yalta. That in itself was a warning.
“Yeah, that’s where they’re coming from, Dix,” Cat told him. “I’ve got four, no… make that five bogeys coming in at two-eight-five, range fifty-two miles. I’m getting radar tone.” There was a pause. Then, “Missiles! We have missiles incoming!”
“Tell me when!”
Seconds dragged past. “Hold it… hold it… okay! Zone five and break left!”
Dixie threw the F-14 into a hard turn to port, slamming the throttle forward to the final detent. As acceleration crammed him down against his seat, he looked up… and saw two bright stars curving through the night sky, coming straight at his head.
“Dropping chaff!” Cat said… and the missiles streaked past, passing beneath the aircraft and out over the sea.
Dixie kept the afterburner on as he straightened out on a new heading, flying directly toward the oncoming wave of hostiles.
“Poor Man, Poor Man,” Dixie called over the radio, using Jefferson’s code name for this op. “This is Air Hammer One-three! We are taking fire!”
“Poor Man” had been adopted from the name of John Paul Jones’s most famous command, the Bonhomme Richard. “Air Hammer, this is Poor Man,” replied the voice of Jefferson’s Ops watch officer. “We copy Hammer One-three taking fire. Can you confirm? Over.”
“Poor Man, Hammer One-four,” Badger’s voice said. “We confirm.”
“Poor Man, Hammer One-one,” Batman added. “Missile launch confirmed.
The bastards are shooting at us, too!”
“Air Hammer, this is Top Hat,” a new voice said… Admiral Brandt, speaking from Jefferson’s CIC. “We confirm hostile action at twenty-one-forty hours. Weapons free. I say again, weapons free!”
“Music to my ears,” Dixie said. “I’m tired of being shot at.”
“Radar lock,” Cat said. He heard it, the shrill, chirping warble in his ear. “Let’s see if we can discourage them, Dix.”
“I’m with you.”
“Shall I do the honors?”
“By all means.”
“Okay. Bring us left a bit. There. That’s it. Hold it steady.” He could hear the flick-flick-flick of console switches as she armed the Tomcat’s AIM-54C missiles. “I have target lock, smack on the leader. I have tone… Fox three!”
The Tomcat bucked skyward for a moment, even though Dixie had been ready for it, as the 447-kilogram missile dropped clear. Its exhaust flared a dazzling, blinding white as the missile slid off the F-14’s wing and Dixie found himself staring briefly right up its tailpipe.
“Shit,” he said, blinking. His night sight was gone, shattered by that flare of light.
Cat guessed what had happened. “Next time-” she said.
“Don’t look,” the two of them chorused together, completing her statement. He blinked hard several times. He could still read his instruments well enough, and that was all that mattered.
“Target two… lock,” Cat said. “Fox three!”
This time, Dixie closed his eyes as the Phoenix missile blasted away from the F-14 and streaked into darkness.
They were carrying a total of six Phoenix air-to-air missiles, a full load; their AWG-9 radar was capable of tracking six targets and the missiles assigned to them simultaneously.
It was, Dixie thought, a strange kind of warfare. He couldn’t see the targets, wouldn’t have been able to see them even in broad daylight at a range of over fifty miles. Cat chose the first two targets; the aircraft’s fire control computer chose the next four, in decreasing order of threat to the aircraft. The elapsed time between her first Fox three and her last was just thirty-eight seconds.
Her first missile, flying at better than Mach 5, covered the forty-eight miles to the first target in a little over forty seconds. He saw the detonation when it went off, a tiny flash in the night far to the west. Her second missile hit, the third missed ― evaded by some spectacular aerial maneuvers by the target ― and then in rapid-fire succession, the fourth, fifth, and sixth AIM-54s all struck home.
Within the space of a minute and a half, Dixie and Cat had just launched six million dollars’ worth of technology, destroying five aircraft worth some twenty-five times the total cost of the AIM-54Cs.
There was no way of knowing at this range whether or not those aircraft’s pilots had managed to eject or not.
“Poor Man, this is Air Hammer One-three,” Dixie called. It was strange, but he didn’t feel the elation he’d expected. The engagement had been so distant, so… clinical. “We’re five for six and dry.”
“One-three, hold one.”
“COPY.”
It wasn’t until sometime later that something else occurred to him:
They’d just scored five kills, technically qualifying him as an ace. He didn’t feel like an ace; Cat had fired two of the missiles, and four had been launched by the aircraft’s computer. Over the tactical channel, he could hear bursts of radio chatter from other aviators as they launched on the unseen enemy.
“Fox three! Fox three!”
“That’s one! I saw it hit!”
“God, look at those flames. I’ve got a Mig here, going down inflames!”
“That’s Fox three for Hammer Two-two.”
They sounded so distant, so isolated. It seemed a cold and lonely way to fight a war, and he was glad Cat was with him.
“One-three, this is Poor Man. We copy you dry. Hold your position. The helos are going in.”
“Roger that. Hammer One-three, maintaining position.”