Countdown c-6 Page 2

  And wind and rain just made it worse, of course. Still, carrier operations went on, whatever the weather, whatever the time of day or night.

  Especially now… with this undeclared war with the Russians, or whatever the hell they were calling themselves these days. Tombstone glanced across the compartment to the Pri-Fly tally board, where an Assistant Air Boss was keeping tabs on Jefferson's far-flung net of aircraft.

  Storm or no storm, at this moment six S-3A Viking ASW aircraft were probing across an arc far in advance of the carrier battle group, searching for seaborne traces of Russian submarines that might be trying to use the rain and wind as cover for a stealthy approach and kill. Somewhere in the darkness a mile or so off to port, an SH-3 Sea King helicopter mounted lonely vigil, ready to attempt a rescue of an aviator who, God forbid, got into trouble during recovery and had to punch out in this soup. High up and to starboard was one of Jefferson's four E-2C Hawkeyes, providing the entire, far-flung battle group with early-warning radar that could penetrate the sleet and dark across hundreds of miles and, at need, serve as airborne combat command centers. CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, was being provided by four F/A-18 Hornets of VFA-161, the Javelins. They'd screamed off Jefferson's deck into the rain thirty minutes ago, taking up their patrol stations so that the Tomcats of Viper Squadron could return to the carrier.

  As it was, except for the increased number of Viking sub-hunters aloft, it was a fairly light deployment. Jefferson and the entourage of warships comprising Carrier Battle Group 14 were currently cruising east-northeast through the Norwegian Sea two hundred miles south of Iceland. Carrier Battle Group 7, the U.S.S. Eisenhower and her consorts, was already somewhere well to the northeast, five hundred miles ahead, moving to cover the Barents Sea approaches out of Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula just in case the Red Banner Fleet elected to sally forth for a rematch after its defeat at Jefferson's hands off Norway the previous year. CBG-3, meanwhile, with the U.S.S.

  Kennedy, was in the North Sea off the Skagerrak, overseeing the final collapse of neo-Soviet troops in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Kennedy and the warships with her were the cork in the Baltic's bottle, keeping any surviving Russian ships at St. Petersburg safely docked and out of action.

  No, Jefferson shouldn't have to worry about Russian attacks tonight. But they did have to worry about the weather. Tombstone felt the deck rise beneath his feet, felt the slightly sickening twist of the carrier corkscrewing through the worsening waves.

  "Two-one-eight," the LSO said over the speaker. "Call the ball."

  "Home Plate, Two-one-eight, Clara, repeat, Clara. I'd call the damned ball if I could see it. It's getting damned thick up here."

  "Is Two-one-eight the last one up?" Tombstone asked.

  "Yup." Suddenly, Barnes's voice was tight and sounded as dry as Tombstone's. There was no light banter in the compartment now.

  "Two-one-eight," the voice crackled over the speaker. "Tomcat ball. One point eight."

  Eighteen hundred pounds of fuel left? They were damned near running on fumes.

  "Roger ball. Deck coming up, power on." Tombstone found himself holding his breath…

  … and then the Tomcat boomed out of the darkness, red and green navigation lights winking, arrestor hook groping for a wire, but high… high as the LSO's voice shouted, "Wave off! Wave off!" and the meatball flared red. The Tomcat hit the steel hard, sparks exploding into the night well beyond the number-five wire, too far up the deck for the tailhook to snag hold, but the aviator's hand had already rammed the throttles full forward, sending twin spears of yellow flame thundering against the night in a desperate bid to regain suddenly precious airspeed.

  "Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!" someone was yelling over the intercom system, as Tomcat 218 screamed past Jefferson's island, rushing down the angled flight deck and back into the night.

  Stoney was still holding his breath as he watched the twin flares of light marking the engines, like glowing eyes, stagger beyond the deck, dipping toward an invisible sea, then come up, rising… rising… struggling aloft against wind and gravity and drag.

  Then the Tomcat was gone, swallowed once again by the night.

  "Okay, Brewer," Barnes was saying into his microphone. "Once again around. Just like a walk in the park."

  "Ah, roger that, Home Plate," the voice replied. "Just remember that the parks are getting damned dangerous. 'Specially at night."

  "So, Captain," Barnes said conversationally after a moment. "What're the chances that the Russkis are gonna fold?"

  It was clearly a ploy to ease the atmosphere of growing tension that filled Pri-Fly like some noxious cloud. The Russian War had been the steady, number-one topic of conversation aboard every ship in CBG-14 ever since they'd left Norfolk the week before.

  "Zero to none," Tombstone shot back. His heart was pounding hard enough that Barnes could surely hear it. "The Reds don't dare show the cracks in the foundation of their coup. It looks like Leonov is going to keep hammering away until something gives. The only out the neo-Soviets have is to turn this into a general war. A world war."

  "My, CAG, but you're just full of cheerful thoughts tonight," Barnes said. "Think it'll go nuke?"

  "It could. I don't think anyone wants it to, not even Krasilnikov. And yet…" He shrugged. "This is the first time we've had an honest-to-God civil war in a country where both sides have nuclear weapons. And, well, fratricidal wars are always the bloodiest, the most down-and-dirty vicious wars of all."

  "Hey!" Barnes said. "Remember when we all thought the world would be a safer place with the Soviet Union gone?"

  "What do you want," Stoney replied, grinning. "A return to the good old days of the Cold War?"

  The neo-Soviet empire had appeared to collapse in the wake of the brief, hard-fought naval campaign off Norway nine months earlier. Tombstone could close his eyes and still remember the roar and thunder of battle, the pillars of smoke climbing heavenward marking the funeral pyres of ships, the hurtling aerial combat machines jousting in tournaments of death at Mach 2 and beyond.

  Tombstone himself had been in a Hornet flashing low across the deck of the Soviet supercarrier Kreml ― just as the Baltic Fleet's flagship had exploded in flames. His heart still raced each time he thought about it.

  The Thomas Jefferson had been hurt badly off the Lofoten Islands in the final chapter of the Battles of the Fjords. She'd limped back under her own steam, first to Scapa Flow, then to Norfolk, but her flight deck had been so badly ripped up that nothing could land on it but helicopters. By the time the old girl had reached her home port, there'd been talk of scrapping her.

  Events across the Atlantic had dictated otherwise. UN troops had briefly occupied Moscow and St. Petersburg, as Red Army units in Scandinavia began surrendering en masse. There'd been talk of a joint allied military government to oversee the recovery of Russian democracy. Ilya Anatolevich Leonov and his Popular Russian Democratic Party had made their appearance, rising from obscurity to control of the new Russian government almost overnight. The UN forces had withdrawn, and a breathless world had continued to watch the growth of the world's newest and most astonishing democracy, live from Moscow on CNN. Which was why the news of the military coup in mid February had been so devastating. Overnight, it seemed, the old iron Curtain had slammed down yet again. The only news emerging from the crippled Russian giant consisted of dark, nightmare tales of purges and people's courts, of mobilizations, KGB arrests, and assassinations, of a hard-liner Red Army marshal named Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov who, to judge by the stories spread by the trickle of refugees out of Russia, held close spiritual kinship with the restive shade of Stalin.

  The war begun by the Soviets in Scandinavia, it was clear now, was resuming. News that Leonov and some of his supporters had fled Moscow and found refuge in the southern Urals was the first word of civil war. As former S.S.R.s chose sides, as Krasilnikov's Red Army and Leonov's Blue Army clashed in a bloody meeting engagement at the Vornezh River, it became clear that events
in the former Soviet Union might well be capable of holding the entire world hostage.

  Both Reds and Blues possessed nuclear weapons. How long would it be before one side or the other used them?

  The repairs to the Thomas Jefferson had received top priority in a nation already struggling to improve its military posture. In record time, Jeff's flight deck had been restored, and her normal complement of ninety-plus aircraft in ten squadrons had been returned to her.

  Now, the Jefferson was returning to the same waters where she'd been savaged nine months earlier. She was the same ship, but many of her people were new… and that included the majority of the air wing's aviators.

  Casualties among Jefferson's fliers during the Battle of the Fjords had been atrocious, and the Navy Department had been pulling out all the stops to get qualified personnel in to replace those losses.

  "Two-one-eight, you're lookin'just fine," the LSO's voice said. "Call the ball."

  Static crackled over the speaker, and Tombstone pictured Conway in the Tomcat's cockpit, straining for a glimpse of Jefferson's meatball through that ink-black soup.

  "Two-one-eight, call the ball. Acknowledge."

  "Okay, gentlemen, got it," Conway's voice replied. "Two-one-eight, Tomcat ball. One… ah, make it zero point niner."

  There wouldn't be fuel enough for another touch-and-go.

  "Two-one-eight, roger ball. You're right on the money. Deck coming up.

  Power on."

  Tombstone leaned forward, knuckles white against the handle of his forgotten cup of coffee.

  "Power on, Two-one-eight! Up! Up!"

  God, Conway was low, hurtling toward Jefferson's ramp at 140 knots…

  The Tomcat materialized out of the night like a gray ghost, nose high, landing gear and arrestor hook seeming to reach ahead of the plummeting aircraft in a desperate search for the deck. The F-14 cleared the flight deck's roundoff by a handful of feet, slamming the steel just beyond with a jolt that wrenched its nose down sharply. Throttle up… but then the tailhook engaged the number-two wire and yanked the aircraft to a halt. The engine throttled down.

  "Thank you, God," Tombstone said. "Thank you, dear God." A pair of powerful 7x50 binoculars swung by their strap from a hook beside the Air Boss's station. Tombstone picked them up and raised them to his eyes. Tomcat 218 was now approaching the spot left for it, guided by the yellow shirt and his glowing wands. The rain appeared to have lessened in the past few minutes, but it was rapidly being replaced by the first swirling flakes of snow. The Tomcat's wheels left tracks in a thin slush already gathering on the black-painted steel of the flight deck.

  Two-one-eight's deck crew crowded around, ramming chocks home beneath the wheels and beginning the complex tie-down process to secure the aircraft against blasts of wind, natural or manmade, across the flight deck. The crew chief turned a key and unfolded a ladder from the fuselage. The canopy popped open, then raised itself back.

  Tombstone focused the binoculars on Lieutenant Commander Conway and the aircraft's Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Damiano. Still seated in their aircraft, bathed in the harsh glare from a light on the carrier's island above their heads, they seemed unshaken, running through their shutdown procedures with the professionals' routine and unflappable calm.

  Not for the first time, Tombstone marveled at the changes that were overtaking Jefferson's air wing… that were sweeping throughout the entire American military. He'd thought that the high casualties off Norway, the graphic horrors of modern naval warfare, would have had the exact opposite effect on recruitment and training policies and American popular opinion than that he'd been witness to these past few months. Sometimes it was still a bit hard to believe.

  Through the binoculars, he watched Conway and Damiano remove their helmets and hand them to their crew chief, then begin unfastening the harnesses. Tricia Conway's blond hair was cut short to accommodate her helmet; Rose's hair was jet black and a bit longer. Their flight suits could not completely disguise the decidedly female curves of their figures.

  Lieutenant Chris Hanson, having just clambered out of her Tomcat parked a few yards away, reached the foot of the ladder and was shouting something at Conway, giving her a happy thumbs-up.

  This, Tombstone decided, was definitely a whole new Navy from the one he'd joined over a decade before. Twenty-eight new flight officers, pilots and RIOs, had reported aboard the Jefferson at Norfolk two weeks ago. Of those twenty-eight, twelve were women.

  The great, long-awaited social experiment, American women in combat, was beginning aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tuesday, 10 March

  2210 hours (Zulu -1)

  0-3 deck

  U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

  Navy fliers never referred to themselves as pilots. The Air Force had pilots, men who landed on fifteen-hundred-foot runways, stationary runways, men who didn't have to contend with pitching decks or equipment failure in the recovery gear. The Navy had aviators, and naval aviators wore that word as a badge of supreme accomplishment, pride, and honor.

  Could a woman be an aviator? That was the question. Tombstone Magruder still wasn't entirely sure of his own feelings regarding women aboard combat ships or flying combat missions. To be honest, he had no doubts whatsoever about their technical ability. Tricia Conway and the other women who'd come aboard in Norfolk two weeks earlier were hot pilots, as good as any rookie Tomcat drivers Tombstone had seen. With seasoning, with experience in the form of a few hundred more hours flying off the Jefferson day and night, in all weathers and in all types of seas, they'd be as good as any man in CVW-20.

  In time, he supposed, they'd be real aviators and accepted as such by the hitherto all-male fraternity of naval fliers.

  His real problem with women serving aboard ship was on a different level entirely.

  Tombstone's destination was the Dirty Shirt Mess, so called because officers could show up there for a bite to eat at almost any time without having to change from working clothes to clean uniform, as was expected in Jefferson's more formal officers' wardroom. He'd missed the regular mess call because he'd been tracking the evening's CAP in worsening weather, first from CATCC, Jefferson's air traffic control center, and then from up in Pri-Fly.

  Now that Conway and her girls were safely down, he realized that he was hungry and wanted something to eat.

  Conway and her girls. Every sensitivity session on women in the military that Tombstone had sat through during the past several years had emphasized that you don't call an adult, professional woman a "girl." It was demeaning, sexist, insensitive.

  Yeah, right. Like it was demeaning for Tombstone to talk about his "boys." Conway herself referred to her people as her "girls," though some of the female Naval Flight Officers bristled when a man called them that. The semantic distinction seemed less important to the enlisted personnel on both sides of the line, but the whole issue had the air wing's male complement so on edge they sometimes seemed positively tongue-tied. Morale was being affected, and since Tombstone, as CAG, was responsible for the fighting trim and efficiency of CVW20, that made it his problem.

  The line to pay for his meal at the Dirty Shirt wardroom was a short one.

  An enlisted man sitting at the door punched his meal ticket, and Tombstone went straight in. Fluorescent lighting gleamed from metal surfaces and white tables. A handful of NFOs, all male, sat in small groups amid the clatter of silverware and the low-voiced murmur of conversation. Tombstone picked up a tray and started through the chow line. Fried chicken was on the menu this evening, left over from the regular mess hours and kept hot for people coming in off duty.

  Tombstone didn't resent the women. No, if he resented anyone, it was the politicians and bureaucrats back in Washington who continued to use the entire U.S. military as a test bed for their experiments in social reform.

  The first experiment with women aboard ship had taken place as far back as 1972, when Admiral Zumwalt, then Chief of Naval Operatio
ns, had issued one of his famous "Z-grams." Among other innovations, Z-gram 116 had called for 424 men and fifty-three carefully screened Navy women volunteers to report aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary for a four-hundred-day test at sea.

  Officially, the test was an enormous success. Unofficial leaks to the press, however, as well as the Navy's own classified reports, told a different story. Despite regulations, there'd been romantic relationships between members of the crew, and several pregnancies. PDAs, Navyese for "Public Displays of Affection," had been common, and there'd been a number of fights.

  "The situation was becoming serious," read a memorandum from Sanctuary's commanding officer to the CNO, "and was definitely detrimental to the good order and discipline of the ship's company."

  Perhaps the most obvious proof that the experiment had been less than totally successful could be found in the fact that the Sanctuary returned to port after only forty-two days at sea. She spent most of her next several years tied to a dock, before being unobtrusively decommissioned in 1975.

  In 1978, after Watergate's Judge John S. Sirica ruled in Federal District Court that banning women at sea violated their 14th Amendment rights, the Navy tried integrating the sexes aboard ship again, assigning a mixed crew to the repair ship Vulcan. Even before she left port, several pregnant personnel had to be put ashore, and the media began referring to the U.S.S. Vulcan as "the Love Boat."

  Eventually, Sirica's decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1981, a ruling that feminists decried as tragic and the ACLU called "a devastating loss for women's rights."

  But the matter had not ended there. Women continued to be stationed on some auxiliary, noncombat vessels. In the early nineties, the destroyer tender Samuel Gompers had become the next Navy ship to be known as the Love Boat when three sailors, two men and a woman, videotaped themselves having sex. One of the men was caught passing the tape around to his buddies, precipitating court-martial proceedings and yet another Navy sex scandal.