“Dammit, I wish there was something we could do to help,” Bird Dog muttered.
“Not a thing except keep the bad guys off them,” Gator said. He shook his head. “That shiphell of a captain on her.”
“Lead, Two.” The quiet voice over the tactical coordination circuit was from Skeeter. “Is there anything we can do?” he asked, unconsciously echoing Bird Dog’s comment just moments earlier.
“Not a thing, Two. You heard the report. How’s your fuel state?”
“Seven thousand poundsenough for now.”
“Roger. Don’t waste it, Skeeter. The tanker’s still out here, but those Hornets suck down gas like it’s going out of style. Loiter speed, most conservative airspeedyou know the drill, straight out of the books.”
“Just like you did a little while ago?” Skeeter asked innocently.
Bird Dog sucked in a hard breath at the young pilot’s audacity.
Evidently, his wingman was not going to quickly forget about his dash on afterburner. He started to answer, then gave it up as a lost cause as Gator howled in the backseat with laughter. “Whose side are you on anyway?”
Gator ripped off his oxygen mask, choking and spluttering. “Dammit, it’s about time I saw thatthat young’un’s gonna give you a taste of your own medicine, Bird Dog. Oh, shit, I can’t believe he said that-“
Gator’s voice broke off as a new peal of laughter ripped through him.
“Yeah, wellit’s about teamwork, isn’t it?” Bird Dog muttered.
The squeal of the RHAWS ESM warning gear cut through Gator’s jocularity. The RIO swore and reached for the silent switch. “F-14’s inbound, Bird Dogand they ain’t ours. Based on their direction, I make them from Turkey.”
“Concur,” Bird Dog said crisply. He flipped over to the tactical circuit. “You getting it, Skeeter?”
“Got it.”
“High-lowI’ll take high.”
Bird Dog goosed the jet up, settling in the classic high-low combat spread that was the favorite fighting position of the United States Navy. Separated by altitude, with the higher aircraft slightly aft of the lower one, this combination gave the two-fighter team superb visibility. Additionally, it allowed the high station to back up the low as the low engaged the incoming target.
They fought the way they trained, in twos. Bird Dog just hoped Skeeter remembered that.
“Got himbogey inbound. Fifty miles, bearing zero-nine-zero.”
“Tomcat 201. Weapons free, weapons free.” The carrier TAO’s voice was calm and assured. “Good hunting, gentlemen.”
“How many of them are there, Gator?” Bird Dog said, maintaining station on Skeeter. “A number.”
“I make it to be thirty-twogive or take a couple,” Gator said.
“Jesus, they’re launching a full-scale strike at us.”
“We need to get at least two of them real fast then. With twenty of us, and no ready source of fuel, we don’t have time to knife-fight it. Not for long anyway.”
“Skeeter, Phoenixlet’s get’em broken up a little bit. Who knows, we might even get lucky and hit something.”
“Fox Three, Fox Three,” Skeeter said immediately.
Bird Dog smiled. Evidently the younger pilot already had had his finger poised over the weapons-selector switch and had already acquired a tone lock on the lead target.
Over the tactical, he heard the other Tomcats and Hornets identifying their targets, selecting their Phoenix, and unleashing a barrage of the long-range missiles on the incoming targets. At the very least, it would force Turkey on the defensive, give the American fighters a little maneuvering room as the raid streaked in toward the trapped carrier below.
“Twenty miles and closing,” Gator reported. “They’re coming after us first, Bird Dognot the carrier.”
“Good thing too,” Bird Dog said, “those assholes aremissile inbound.”
Bird Dog rocked the Tomcat into a hard driving turn. The missile had just appeared on his heads-up display and was only four miles away. He swore quietly. “What the hell was that, Gator? How the hell did it get so close so fast?”
“I don’t knowkeep an eye out for another visual,” the RIO reported, his voice muffled.
Bird Dog twisted and weaved in the sky, shaking the missile easily.
It streaked on past him, tried to home in on a Tomcat behind him, and was just as easily evaded.
Finally, its fuel spent, it ceased forward motion and plunged into the ocean below.
“Got one,” a voice over tactical crowed. “Ain’t never saying another bad thing about a Phoenix.”
For a few moments, the circuit was cluttered with jubilant cries as five Phoenix missiles found their targets.
“Get this ship underway.” The captain’s voice was cool and confident. “We’ve got the damage under control, and whether or not we’re underway won’t make any difference to the corpsman.”
The situation around him was becoming increasingly desperate. The twenty fighters that had been loitering just north of them were fully engaged with the incoming Turkish fighters. They were holding their own for now, but under the constant pressure of attack, there would be no opportunity for them to refuel, and sooner or later they’d run out of missiles. The battle was already edging forward into the edge of Shiloh’s air-engagement envelope, but there was no way she could take a shot, not without risking taking out a friendly fighter instead. Not with the furball that they were in.
“Indicate zero-two-one revolutions for three knots,” the OOD said.
The captain watched as the helmsman carefully rang up the ordered rounds on the engine-order telegraph.
The cruiser inched forward slowly, preceded by her escort of motor whaleboats. She was still listing to starboard, and the five-degrees tilt on the deck felt much more significant than it actually was.
For the next ten minutes, she proceeded by fits and starts, creeping forward at three knots, going into a full-astern bell at the slightest indication of trouble from her waterborne lookouts. They edged closer and closer to the edge of the Black Sea.
The second mine caught Shiloh just under the bow. The ship slammed up, her bow tossed out of the water by the violence of the explosion. The crew, braced unconsciously for another hit on the beam, was thrown back against the aft bulkhead. Again the screams, the wails of the dead and dying, as the explosion catapulted already injured sailors into cold steel surfaces.
The bow crashed back down on the water, the forward weather deck completely submerged. The sea coursed up over it, lapping hungrily at the forward bridge windows before subsiding. The fore-and-aft pendulum motion dampened out more quickly than the side-to-side roll had. Within a couple of moments, the ship was bow-down and still listing to starboard.
“Damage report.” The captain’s voice was a harsh croak, but still understandable. The reports started pouring in.
He made his assessment quickly, still somewhat dazed by the hard blow he’d taken against the chart table. The forward part of the ship below the waterline was a complete casualty. The explosion had ripped off the sonar dome, buckled steel plates, and twisted stanchions. The sea was pouring in, had completely inundated the forward boatswains’ locker, as well as the first twenty frames of the ship. The damage control team had already established watertight boundaries, but there was no hope of pumping out the flooding.
Most worrisome was the indication that some of the watertight doors forward had been buckled by the stress to which the steel frame of the ship was exposed. Damage Control teams reported leaking around some of the hatches, controllable for now, but likely to get worse. The captain ordered secondary boundaries set and casualties evacuated, and ordered the ship forward.