Madje caught his eye and pointed at the JOTS, shaking his head. “Mahe master terminal is off the air,” he said.
Rafe felt a little chill in his gut.
The ship leaned harder to starboard. The whole deck was vibrating. Rafe saw Hank’s grin, realized that Hank had planned this maneuver and was on the ball. It was well executed, too, and he saw the helmsman beaming.
Good for them, he thought. Glad I let him. Somewhere in the back of his mind where he kept score, Hank Rogers got a little plus sign on a future fitrep.
Down a level, the air boss was putting the whole deck on hold as they heeled sharply. He’d had less than a minute’s warning about what the captain intended. The flight deck was still jammed, but the respite was giving the spotters time to get the second alert five up to cat two and the E-2 command plane up to cat three, despite the cant to the deck.
Almost there, he thought.
“Turn us to 180, Gup,” Soleck said, craning his neck. “Sounds to me like the Indians jumped the gun and we have a missile strike coming in.” He looked out over the sunlit sea and up to the clouds, trying to find the two Indian Jaguars mentioned on the AAW frequency. They were clearly in radar silence, as he didn’t have anything on the S-3’s primitive ESM. Now if they were in the water—
In the water fired a synapse somewhere in his brain. That weak signal up north was a rescue transponder. That’s why the freq looked familiar. Man in the water!
He was reaching for the radio when he saw the Jaguar, a high glinting in the sunlight, starting its steep descent to imitate a missile heading for its target — the carrier.
“Goblin’s not responding to the tower.”
“Fuck him.” Rafe couldn’t remember an exercise with such dicked-up comms. Was the guy really an asshole, or had someone put out the wrong freqs? Who knew?
“He’s less than a minute out and starting his pop.”
A pop-up was a typical terminal maneuver in most anti-ship missiles. The missile would climb sharply after it chose its target, then come down as nearly vertical into the deck of the target as possible. The Indian pilot was going for realism.
“He’s too fucking close,” from Air Ops.
The Jefferson was still turning, her aft anti-missile systems unmasked and “firing” for exercise purposes, but the rate of turn had slowed and Rafe felt the thunk of a plane launching, almost certainly the second F-18, headed south.
“Get him the fuck out of our airspace!” the same voice in Air Ops shouted.
Rafe glanced around, and something moved in his peripheral vision, and then the world exploded.
Soleck was two miles to the north of the stack of the carrier and just turning inbound to establish his refueling track, more attention on his armrest data screen than on his instruments, when movement in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flick into an instrument scan and out over sea—
“Holy mother of God,” Soleck said.
There was a fireball rising from the deck of the carrier like a Hollywood special effect, orange and white and spreading from the bow to the stern, the violent red pulses punctuated by streaks of white rising from the flames. The fireball itself rose so high that the island, the command node of the carrier, vanished in an orange bloom.
His plane shook, and then a fist of air nearly struck them from the sky.
4
The commodore’s pistol was a Czech CZ75 with a full fifteen-round clip but no extra ammo. Alan figured it would be about as good as a peashooter against the automatic weaponry he could hear, but it helped him fight a feeling of loss of control.
The Marines were herding them like school kids down a back stairway, two of them leading and one covering the rear. “I feel like I’m back at Adirondack High,” Benvenuto muttered. “Fucking fire drill.”
Crossing the third-floor foyer, the Marines had met two others; there had been a tense moment when both groups had got ready to shoot, and then they had identified themselves, and the two newcomers had said something to the sergeant and veered off down another corridor toward the office of the Commander, West Fleet — God knew what they’d find there. The building was chaos, three bodies and a wounded man scattered along the central corridor like sacks dropped off a truck, a trail of blood down the tile where the first wounded Marine had been dragged. Twice, they had seen other people at a distance; both times, everybody had flinched, crouched, and then the others had run away and they had moved on in their hurrying file. Indian file, he had thought grimly. But different Indians. They passed office after office with closed doors. Inside, he suspected, unarmed people were trying to wait out whatever was going on. Or were dead.
Fire. All around him, fire, and something on his legs.
Rafe flailed his arms, seeking to get them free. A tumble of images, separated by flashes of darkness.
“Sir! Stop fighting me! Sir!”
Rafe pushed against something and the vertebrae of his back impacted against a sharp corner, sending more pain through his body in a jolt. He curled up, and the weight settled all over him. Weight and pain. He lay still. More tumbles. No sense of time.
“That leg might be broken. Move him carefully.”
“Sir, we got to get him clear of the bridge. The whole fucker could go!”
“Roger that. Down to the O-3 level.”
“Anyone else alive up here?”
“Captain Rogers is dead. Helmsman is over there, I tried to wrap him, everyone forward of this bulkhead died when the fucker hit us. Admiral was coming back for coffee, that’s why he’s—”
Rafe moved his head under the fire blanket and tried to speak. “—hit us?” he tried to say, but it only came out as a croak. He hurt. But time was moving now.
He felt them putting him in a clamshell. His back and legs hurt so much he couldn’t really think, felt himself going into shock, tried to breathe. The fire blanket fell back from his face.
“—what hit us?” he tried, but again, it was like a hiss of air.
Madje’s face appeared in his arc of vision. It was red and there wasn’t any hair on it.
“Sir? Can you hear me?”
“Whahitus?” Rafe got out.
Madje leaned closer. “That Indian plane hit the deck just forward, sir. The fires are pretty bad. We’re moving you to the O-3 level, and we’re fighting the fires.”
“Whuzinc’mand?”
Madje shook his head. “Captain Rogers died a few feet from you. CAG Lushner may be alive but the flight deck is — no one can go out there.”
Rafe scrabbled at Madje like a corpse rising from the grave. His hands were burned claws and the angry red flesh on his sides showed under the ruins of his flight suit, but he rose almost to a sitting position.
“You — find senior now! Take command!”
Madje nodded, almost saluted, but Rafehausen had fallen back into the stretcher. The admiral coughed in pain as a portion of his left index finger, complete with the nail, remained stuck to the clamshell where he had gripped it to sit up.
From the moment Soleck saw the Indian fighter plow into the after deck of the Jefferson, his mind focused on what would have to be the prime interest of every airplane aloft. Fuel.