“Three, what did you do?” the Russian flight leader demanded.
“They were attacking us, didn’t you hear?” Shavrov protested.
“Oh shit! Spade Flight, you have four Atolls after you,” the voice of the Hawkeye’s controller said.
“Two, break right,” Jackson ordered. “Chris, activate countermeasures.” Jackson threw his fighter into a violent evasive turn to the left. Sanchez broke the other way.
In the seat behind Jackson’s, the radar intercept officer flipped switches to activate the aircraft’s defense systems. As the Tomcat twisted in midair, a series of flares and balloons was ejected from the tail section, each an infrared or radar lure for the pursuing missiles. All four were targeted on Jackson’s fighter.
“Spade 2 is clear, Spade 2 is clear. Spade 1, you still have four birds in pursuit,” the voice from the Hawkeye said.
“Roger.” Jackson was surprised at how calmly he took it. The Tomcat was doing over eight hundred miles per hour and accelerating. He wondered how much range the Atoll had. His rearward-looking-radar warning light flicked on.
“Two, get after them!” Jackson ordered.
“Roger, lead.” Sanchez swept into a climbing turn, fell off into a hammerhead, and dove at the retreating Soviet fighters.
When Jackson turned, two of the missiles lost lock and kept going straight into open air. A third, decoyed into hitting a flare, exploded harmlessly. The fourth kept its infrared seeker head on Spade 1’s glowing tail pipes and bored right in. The missile struck the Spade 1 at the base of its starboard rudder fin.
The impact tossed the fighter completely out of control. Most of the explosive force was spent as the missile blasted through the boron surface into open air. The fin was blown completely off, along with the right-side stabilizer. The left fin was badly holed by fragments, which smashed through the back of the fighter’s canopy, hitting Christiansen’s helmet. The right engine’s fire warning lights came on at once.
Jackson heard the oomph over his intercom. He killed every engine switch on the right side and activated the in-frame fire extinguisher. Next he chopped power to his port engine, still on afterburner. By this time the Tomcat was in an inverted spin. The variable-geometry wings angled out to low-speed configuration. This gave Jackson aileron control, and he worked quickly to get back to normal attitude. His altitude was four thousand feet. There wasn’t much time.
“Okay, baby,” he coaxed. A quick burst of power gave him back aerodynamic control, and the former test pilot snapped his fighter over — too hard. It went through two complete rolls before he could catch it in level flight. “Gotcha! You with me, Chris?”
Nothing. There was no way he could look around, and there were still four hostile fighters behind him.
“Spade 2, this is lead.”
“Roger, lead.” Sanchez had the four Fighters bore-sighted. They had just fired at his commander.
On Hummer 1, the controller was thinking fast. The Forgers were holding formation, and there was a lot of Russian chatter on the radio circuit.
“Spade 2, this is Hummer 1, break off, I say again, break off, do not, repeat do not fire. Acknowledge. Spade 2, Spade 1 is at your nine o’clock, two thousand feet below you.” The officer swore and looked at one of the enlisted men he worked with.
“That was too fast, sir, just too fuckin’ fast. We got tapes of the Russkies. I can’t understand it, but it sounds like Kiev is right pissed.”
“They’re not the only ones,” the controller said, wondering if he had done the right thing calling Spade 2 off. It sure as hell didn’t feel that way.
Sanchez’ head jerked in surprise. “Roger, breaking off.” His thumb came off the switch. “Goddammit!” He pulled his stick back, throwing the Tomcat into a savage loop. “Where are you, lead?”
Sanchez brought his fighter under Jackson’s and did a slow circle to survey the visible damage.
“Fire’s out, Skipper. Right side rudder and stabilizer are gone. Left side fin — shit, I can see through it, but it looks like it oughta hold together. Wait a minute. Chris is slumped over, Skipper. Can you talk to him?”
“Negative, I’ve tried. Let’s go back home.”
Nothing would have pleased Sanchez more than to blast the Forgers right out of the sky, and with his four missiles he could have done this easily. But like most pilots, he was highly disciplined.
“Roger, lead.”
“Spade 1, this is Hummer 1, advise your condition, over.”
“Hummer 1, we’ll make it unless something else falls off. Tell them to have docs standing by. Chris is hurt. I don’t know how bad.”
It took an hour to get to the Kennedy. Jackson’s fighter flew badly, would not hold course in any specific attitude. He had to adjust trim constantly. Sanchez reported some movement in the aft cockpit. Maybe it was just the intercom shot out, Jackson thought hopefully.
Sanchez was ordered to land first so that the deck would be cleared for Commander Jackson. On the final approach the Tomcat started to handle badly. The pilot struggled with his fighter, planting it hard on the deck and catching the number one wire. The right-side landing gear collapsed at once, and the thirty-million-dollar fighter slid sideways into the barrier that had been erected. A hundred men with fire-fighting gear raced toward it from all directions.
The canopy went up on emergency hydraulic power. After unbuckling himself Jackson fought his way around and tried to grab for his backseater. They had been friends for many years.
Chris was alive. It looked like a quart of blood had poured down the front of his flight suit, and when the first corpsman took the helmet off, he saw that it was still pumping out. The second corpsman pushed Jackson out of the way and attached a cervical collar to the wounded airman. Christiansen was lifted gently and lowered onto a stretcher whose bearers ran towards the island. Jackson hesitated a moment before following it.
Captain Randall Tait of the Navy Medical Corps walked down the corridor to meet with the Russians. He looked younger than his forty-five years because his full head of black hair showed not the first sign of gray. Tait was a Mormon, educated at Brigham Young University and Stanford Medical School, who had joined the navy because he had wanted to see more of the world than one could from an office at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. He had accomplished that much, and until today had also avoided anything resembling diplomatic duty. As the new chief of the Department of Medicine at Bethesda Naval Medical Center he knew that couldn’t last. He had flown down to Norfolk only a few hours earlier to handle the case. The Russians had driven down, and taken their time doing it.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m Dr. Tait.” They shook hands all around, and the lieutenant who had brought them up walked back to the elevator.
“Dr. Ivanov,” the shortest one said. “I am physician to the embassy.”
“Captain Smirnov.” Tait knew him to be assistant naval attaché, a career intelligence officer. The doctor had been briefed on the helicopter trip down by a Pentagon intelligence officer who was now drinking coffee in the hospital commissary.
“Vasily Petchkin, Doctor. I am second secretary to the embassy.” This one was a senior KGB officer, a “legal” spy with a diplomatic cover. “May we see our man?”
“Certainly. Will you follow me please?” Tait led them back down the corridor. He’d been on the go for twenty hours. This was part of the territory as chief of service at Bethesda. He got all the hard calls. One of the first things a doctor learns is how not to sleep.