On the best of nights, the flight deck of a carrier was a horribly dangerous place to be. On nights like this, it was worse. All of nature’s elements — the wind and the sea, the rain and the thunder — combined with man’s howling catapults and screaming jet engines to form a Niagara of noise, lights, vibration, and confusion.
Three hundred men worked in the darkness to launch and recover the carrier’s aircraft. Many of them were nearing exhaustion. Yet the night was young. It was only 22:15 local and the America was only halfway through it’s second night launch. Aircraft were already waiting to be recovered. Hornets and Tomcats circled overhead, occasionally tapping into refuelers for gas as they waited for clearance to land. As soon as the second round of aircraft had been catapulted out over the water, the waiting aircraft would line up to make their approach to the carrier’s deck.
An F-18 Hornet taxied up to the catapult and was quickly surrounded by sailors wearing different colored vests. One man communicated with the pilot through an elaborate dance of gestures and flashing hand signals, while two other sailors connected the fighter’s nose wheel to the catapult bar. The pilot signaled his gross weight to the catapult controller, who set the catapult’s steam engines at an appropriate setting that would blow the thirty-six-thousand-pound fighter across the deck. The pilot completed his final checks, ran his two engines up to full afterburner and pushed himself back in his seat. The catapult hissed, pulling her steel cables taut against the carrier deck. The cat director bent his knees and slowly lowered his hands to the grated deck. When his fingers touched the water-soaked metal, the catapult fired. Two seconds later, the fighter was airborne. It immediately turned away from the carrier as it climbed up through the rain.
By the time the pilot had passed through three thousand feet, he already had tuned up his radar and was sweeping the sky up ahead. He quickly took his appointed place in the armada of U.S. and NATO aircraft that were searching for the stolen bomber over the dark skies of the Med.
The B-1 continued through the night. She was more than halfway across the Med on her way to the Aegean Sea, the ancient vineyards of Sicily having passed just off to her left. She sped along two hundred feet above the dark ocean waves. Richard Ammon peered out through the darkness, squinting his eyes to protect his night vision from the flashing lightning that constantly filled the sky. The pointed nose of his bomber had picked up a faint and eerie green glow. The entire cockpit constantly crackled with sparkling flashes of faint blue light. Tiny fluorescent spider webs of electricity crawled up his windscreen, like a thousand outstretched fingers. Saint Elmo’s Fire. It was beautiful and fascinating to watch, but very dangerous, for it indicated the presence of massive amounts of electricity. Of course, the possibility of a lightning strike was only one of the risks that a pilot took when he chose to fly directly through such powerful storms.
The turbulence alone was enough to rip the wings off of most aircraft. But the Bone bobbed along, slicing through the wind sheer and downdrafts with considerable ease. Two small winglets underneath her nose flickered in the wind, acting to stabilize the aircraft as it flew through the stormy night. The massive engines never even coughed, though with every passing minute they sucked in tons of rain-soaked air. Her radar continued to peer through weather, beaming through the turbulent wind and the rain to guide the aircraft over the white-capped waves.
This was perfect, Ammon thought. He couldn’t have asked for anything better. The storm would almost assuredly hide the B-1 from any American fighter’s radar. And even if they were to find him, it would take a very brave pilot to try and chase him through such a storm.
Ammon knew that he would be safe until he passed to the east of the storms. By then he would be over the Black Sea, and only a few minutes ride from the Ukrainian border. There the chase would end, for even if the Americans were able to find him, it would no longer matter, for the small fighters didn’t have the range to pursue him past the Aegean Sea.
Richard Ammon scanned his instruments once again as the aircraft bounced along. Everything was functioning perfectly. The terrain-following system was flying the aircraft. There was really nothing for him to do.
He reached down and picked up his chart. He studied the black pencil line that depicted their desired flight path. It was a hook-shaped line that passed south of Sicily before turning northeast toward Greece and the Aegean Sea. Morozov had planned their intended flight path to avoid passing over any NATO airspace.
Ammon continued to study the map. He traced his finger along the line, following its crooked path until it passed just north of the island of Crete. There he let his finger linger. He glanced up into the darkness. The island nation was not far ahead.
Returning his eyes to the cockpit, Ammon stared at his weapons display and considered once again the horrible weapons that were stored inside the belly of his aircraft. For the thousandth time, he swallowed and shook his head in awe. He couldn’t help himself. The magnitude of destructive power was enough to baffle the mind.
In his mind, he counted the weapons. Ten M-95 high-velocity bunker-killing missiles. The specialty weapon. Designed to kill military and civilian leadership as they cowered in their subterranean bunkers. Eight B-69 nuclear gravity bombs. General purpose destruction. Twenty-four megatons of fiery blast and smoking debris. Guaranteed to radiate for a hundred years, producing massive stretches of hot soil, glowing milk, mutant fish, and enough thyroid and bone cancers to fill every hospital bed within the whole of northern Russia.
Then there was the last weapon stuffed inside his bomb bay. The guided cruise missile. “The Sunbeam,” Colonel Fullbright had called it. It was a weapon Ammon knew very little about. He didn’t understand how it worked. He didn’t know how it was guided. He didn’t know its capabilities, lethality, payload, or speed.
All he knew was its range. About three hundred miles. Because that was how close he had to get to his target before he could spit the missile out of the belly of the Bone and send it on its low-altitude flight toward Moscow.
Which meant he had to fly at least eighty miles on the other side of the Russian border. Eighty miles north of their lines of defense.
Ammon drew in a weary breath, then turned his attention back to his chart. He followed the pencil line across the Black Sea to where it crossed the Ukrainian border. He followed it north, past the city of Kiev toward the Russian front.
There he expected to encounter the first of the Russian fighters. The whole of Russia’s Southern Command — SU-27s and 29s, MiG 35s and 31s. They were all there, jammed along the Ukrainian border. Each of the fighters would carry a full combat load. About half of the aircraft would be dedicated to defensive-counter air, set up in a wide swath as a combat air patrol, watching and waiting for an attack such as this, prepared at a moment’s notice to track any incoming Bandits and blow them out of the sky.
Ammon stared forward into the inky-black distance. They were out there. Waiting. He looked at his watch. It wouldn’t be long. At the speed he was flying, he would soon be within range of the fighter’s early-warning radar.