“They died for our cause,” Sir Neil said. “So did those chopper crews. We’ve got to make sure they didn’t go down fighting for nothing!”
“One more thing,” the chopper pilot said. “They have crews further down the waterway, clearing it from the battle yesterday. Big ships right behind them. It looks like what they can’t tow out of the way, they are blasting. With their deck guns.”
“They’re making their move,” Hunter said. “We’ve got to go after them, right now!”
Hunter bore down on the cruiser, four Shrike missiles strapped to his wings. He was somehow flying through a wall of fiery lead as it seemed every gun on the ship was firing at him. He didn’t care. He knew he wouldn’t be shot down. Not yet.
His body was rippling with intensity. His eyes were burning with hate. The valiant demise of the Freedom Navy had lit a fuse inside of him. Suddenly his questions were all answered. Fighting for freedom knew no bounds or borders. There were no degrees of liberty or desire in dying for it. He was here, fighting Lucifer, but he had no doubts that if the demon weren’t stopped here, America again would be on his target list — and many more would die in the process. Now the Commodore and his comrades were gone, fighting for freedom on a bunch of armed yachts in the middle of the Suez Canal. They had showed them the way. Hit! Hit hard! Do everything possible to stop tyranny in its tracks.
Or die trying …
He launched the Shrike and pulled up, feeling a half dozen AA shells pepper his starboard wing. No matter. The missile homed in on the cruiser’s radar-control room and exploded. Two secondary explosions soon followed. Judging by their intensity, Hunter knew he had put the cruiser out of action.
He had sent twenty of the Saratoga’s airplanes out to attack the large contingent of ships moving up the Canal toward Ismailia. Ten of them were with him; the other ten were attacking targets further down the Canal. When Hunter’s force had arrived over their target area, they had seen that Lucifer had sent no less than four battleships, eight cruisers, a dozen frigates, and many more destroyers and corvettes. Behind this task force were dozens of troopships of all kinds and shapes.
At once Hunter had realized what Lucifer was doing. He was concentrating on destroying the Saratoga and its flotilla. It was a typical emotional decision by Lucifer, totally devoid of any military value. It was the same kind of thinking that the madman had displayed back in The Circle War.
So, in a way, Sir Neil’s dream of a delaying action was coming true. The time and effort that Lucifer had apparently decided to expend on the small carrier force would delay his breakout into the eastern Med, possibly long enough for The Modern Knights to arrive in the area. The bad news was that now the Saratoga flotilla would bear the brunt of an attack by a fleet many times its size and carrying close to 900,000 soldiers.
Hunter was back down at wave-top level in seconds. Ahead of him was a guided-missile frigate. Its gunners too had him in their sights, but he pressed on. One hundred and fifty feet out he launched his second Shrike. He followed its path as it rose and struck the ship’s mast, exploding with a great blam! and raining flaming death down on the compartments below.
Hunter pulled up, did a tight turn, and came in on the ship again, his Vulcan cannon Six Pack going full blast. The ship was rocked with the withering, concentrated fire, hundreds of puffs of fiery smoke indicating hits all over the vessel. He turned once again, saw he had started at least a half-dozen fires on the frigate, then turned his attention to the troopship next in the line.
He knew by the radio chatter on his intercom that many of Lucifer’s troopships further down the canal were landing their troops on the eastern side of the Canal rather than be caught out in the open by Saratoga’s attack planes. This troopship in front of him was a converted tramp steamer. He could see the terrified troops were firing their rifles at him as he screeched towards them, his cannons blazing. Once again he felt some of the enemy fire find its mark, bullets pinging off his canopy and nose. But, still, Hunter ignored the enemy fire.
His cannon shells found the ship’s boiler room and destroyed it, causing the rear end of the ship to blow up and break apart. The ship went down quickly, horribly, carrying at least 2000 of Lucifer’s soldiers to their deaths.
All around him, the Saratoga’s airplanes were attacking the ships. The waterway was a mass of confusion, ships exploding, missiles being fired, AA guns going off.
Suddenly one, then two of the Tornados got hit. The battleships were loaded with antiaircraft missiles and it appeared to Hunter that the gunners were launching their rockets in waves, hoping to hit something.
He felt a pang in his heart as his saw the two precious Tornados go down in flames. Two Jaguars bravely attacked the guilty battlewagon, and they too found themselves in the midst of a rocket barrage. One went up from a direct hit, the other caught a missile on its wing and then kept right on going, slamming into the big ship.
Four airplanes in one minute. Christ, Hunter thought. All this way to lose a sixth of his air force in sixty seconds.
But the battle went on. He turned and lined up a cruiser. He pushed his launch button and a Shrike streaked out from under his wing. The missile impacted just behind the ship’s bridge, destroying it immediately. Its captain and steering crew dead, the ship caught fire and was soon burning out of control.
He was out of missiles and running low on cannon ammo. So were some of the other aircraft. He hated to leave the battle area. The two remaining Jags had the longest loitering time, so Hunter knew they would be able to stay on station a while longer. He and the remaining attackers — two Viggens and two Tornados — would return to the Saratoga.
He put the F-16 into a screaming loop and rocketed away from the fight, the four other planes right on his tail.
As they followed the Canal back to the ship, he saw the effects of the recent battles were giving the waterway a nightmarish quality. Everywhere there seemed to be burning ships, floating debris, dead bodies. The area where the Freedom Navy made its last stand was particularly gruesome — wreckage was scattered along the Canal banks for miles.
But now, although he was still forty miles away from the carrier, his instincts told him something was wrong. Dead wrong. He switched his radio to the carrier’s frequency and immediately heard a confusion of chatter he knew meant only one thing: the carrier was under attack.
“It’s those goddamn Hinds,” he swore.
He radioed the other pilots and made them aware of the situation. They took a quick inventory of their weapons’ status. All five airplanes had some cannon ammo left and Hunter had two Sidewinders. Trouble was, both Tornados and one Viggen were dangerously low on fuel. Hunter’s tanks were also low; the AA hits he’d taken on his wing had started a moderate fuel leak.
He knew immediately that they would have to perform what had to be the most difficult maneuver in warfare: landing on a carrier that was under attack.
Soon they could see the carrier off in the distance and sure enough a fight was going full tilt. The Soviet Hind helicopters — more than three dozen of them — were buzzing around the carrier like bees. A wall of defensive fire was being thrown up at them by the Spanish Rocketeers, the French Gatling team, and the AA crews on the Norwegian frigates. Hunter knew that, somehow, they would have to dodge all that fire and lead and set their airplanes down.
The five jets roared into the middle of the battle, surprising the attacking Hinds. A melee broke out, with the Hinds dropping down to a lower attack level, and the jets following them. Hunter dispatched two of the choppers instantly courtesy of his two remaining Sidewinders. One of the Viggens blasted another Hind with a cannon burst. The scattering choppers made easier targets for the Rocketeers and the Phalanx crews. Several more enemy choppers were downed.