Rapidly the four aircraft and the cruise missiles chewed up the remaining distance back toward Ranger and her escorts. Two older, smaller F-18Cs vectored in, also low on avgas and munitions. The wingman watched his own fuel gauges drop alarmingly. They were running out of time, and so was Ranger. He hit Mach 1.
Easing in toward one cruise missile, he tried to slap it with his vortex turbulence. He watched it stagger but then get back on course. He eased in again, nudged it with his wingtip. It flipped over and crashed. He saw his leader do the same to another missile. But rapidly they were coming up to speed, planes and vampires both, and soon the missiles would outrun the Super Hornets irretrievably.
One of the other aircraft also tried to flip a missile, miscalculated, and both went into the sea. No chute, just a giant drawn-out splash. At a thousand knots airspeed you died instantly. The reservist watched the fourth pilot in their element aim his aircraft at another missile, ramming it on purpose. Jet fuel and missile fuel went up in a sharp double explosion, silent through the wingman's canopy and earphones, unheard above his rumbling engines. No big high-explosive blast this time — that one had been atomic. Bits of metal and flesh rained on the ocean and were quickly left behind. Inside his uncomfortable protective suit the wingman fought his stick, driving hard through the thick air right above the water. The sea swell rolled by in a blur. Behind him, he knew, his twin jets and his shock front would be making cockscombs on the ocean, but now he couldn't spare a moment to look back. He eyed his flight leader just in time to see him hit the surface, bounce once, and disintegrate. A split second's inattention, a wavelet slightly higher than the rest — it didn't take much.
Another, slower fighter, a late arrival, fired two AIM-120 AMRAAMs. Both missed, corkscrewing erratically, leaving useless trails of smoke — they must have suffered battle damage in some earlier dogfight. Flying on just vapors now, probably, that pilot pulled up and ejected. Good chute! The wingman called it in.
Another fighter rammed a missile, another harsh eruption, and the wingman was alone. He tried for one himself, using every ounce of thrust, his engine temps far in the red, happy to make the sacrifice for his 5,000 shipmates, surprised how easy it was to die. But his target was too fast. He watched the surviving missiles draw relentlessly ahead, arrayed in an arc in front of him. They left his Super Hornet to buffet in their jet wakes, spattering his windscreen with kicked-up spume.
With no other option the pilot gained altitude and throttled back and radioed in another warning. Ahead, hull down over the horizon, an Aegis guided missile cruiser opened fire. He guessed these were RUM-139B Updated ASROCs, in very short supply, antisubmarine rockets that dropped nuclear-tipped Mark 54 torpedoes, aimed to bracket the sub that launched the vampires.
Common sense told the wingman to turn north or south and flee, but loyalty kept him on course eastward. Running very low on fuel, running away from the ASROCs' impending nuclear detonations, heading almost certainly toward one more, he went for altitude again. Now he could see the whole battle group ahead, Ranger in the center, escorts spread around her in a circle foreshortened by perspective. They were well dispersed against atomic warheads, but at the cost of weakened interlocking antiaircraft fire. White spray began to shroud the vessels as high-pressure nozzles started the washdown that was a basic defense against the upcoming heat and fallout. The ships seemed so tiny against the surface of the water, their wakes curving in coordinated Vs as the formation altered course. To buy a little time? To show the smallest profile? Blue-gray fumes poured from Ranger's stack as her engineers squeezed every last knot from her aged oilfired boilers. Steam billowed from her flight deck as F-14s catapulted into the air against the crosswind, and her combat air patrol did what they could.
One missile went for an Arleigh Burke destroyer, attracted by the rippling thermal signature of her gas turbine exhausts. There was a brilliant flash. Conventional high explosive but she went dead in the water immediately, shrouded in flames and dirty smoke.
The wingman tried to spot the Shipwrecks, aptly named he told himself, but from his lofty, slower vantage point the supersonic projectiles were invisible to the human eye. They'd be mostly unseen to crewmen on the ships as well, he knew, though not to their pulse-Doppler and phased-array air-search radars. He watched the fluffy booster trails from RIM-7P Sea Sparrows, which made Mach 3.5 themselves, but whose range was only eight nautical miles. Some scored hits with their fragmentation warheads, and he prayed none picked up his fighter; he put his Identification-Friendor-Foe in squawk mode just in case.
Roiling black puffs belched from guns on every vessel now, throwing up a wall of steel, hoping for last-minute intercepts. Clouds of SRBOC chaff burst between the ships, and HIRAM decoy magnesium flares drifted on the wind — they showed up, too, amidst the chaos on the pilot's sea mode radar and on his forward-looking infrared. He pictured the ships' close-in-weapons systems slewing into action, firing 20mm nickel-cobalt-tungsten slugs at 3,000 rounds per minute. Some connected, and other missiles exploded or plunged into the sea.
But Ranger couldn't hide. Her thousand-foot-long bulk, her fifty-year-old most unstealthy lines, would draw the target seekers hungrily. The wingman altered course to northward, self-preservation taking hold at last. There was another blinding flash. Once more he looked back.
Off Ranger's starboard side a supernova flared. Her island superstructure blew apart, antennas first and then her stack and other chunks of twisted steel. The flag bridge and the main bridge vaporized, as the aviator tried not to think of the men and women who'd been inside. Ranger's remaining warplanes took off sideways, dissolving in midair, followed by her four big aircraft elevators, tumbling like leaves in an autumn breeze. The carrier's entire flight deck crew, traditional multicolored vests worn over rubberized jump suits and breather hoods, shriveled like ants under a magnifying glass and blew away in tiny puffs of soot. The carcass that was Ranger burned furiously from stem to stern.
The wingman felt the shock wave lift his fighter-bomber bodily, flung forward and yet almost in a stall. His moving map display, his head-up display, his helmet-mounted cueing system all went dead. Both artificial horizons failed, and he looked up to see the ocean, not the sky. He fought for control as more cautions and warnings lighted on his panels. From upside down he saw the Aegis cruiser take a tidal wave bows-on, pitching like a roller coaster, yawing frighteningly, white water thrown up higher than her masts, green water burying her weather decks.
Suddenly the wingman's port turbojet flamed out, from the negative static pressure pulse of the nuclear detonation. Fighting the torsion of unbalanced angular momentum on a single turbine, the twisting from uneven thrust, he went through the relighting sequence on pure instinct. Blessedly it worked. He leveled off.
The wingman blinked repeatedly, the dazzling spots before his eyes now mixed with angry tears. He glanced at the DI-60P/D dosimeter clipped to his flight harness, wondering if he'd gotten lethal rads, whole-body penetrating gamma rays and neutrons. You needed a computer to read the thing, but he'd find out soon enough if symptoms showed — nausea would be first. Off his left shoulder the horizon flickered lavender, violet, pink, then new suns rose in mockery of Sol. In the cockpit his upfront digital touchscreen died.