Countdown c 6, p.33
Countdown c-6, page 33
part #6 of Carrier Series
The soldier appeared to be alone. His back was to Tombstone, his total attention on the woman at his feet. Stoney raised the pistol but kept on running, trying to center the sights on a target that bobbed with each step he took.
From fifty feet away, Tombstone fired… a clean miss. The soldier turned, gaping at this apparition charging him with a pistol, then reached for his AKM, fumbling with its strap.
Tombstone fired again. Damn! It looked easy on the TV cop shows, but a pistol was a ridiculously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired while running. The Russian raised the AK's muzzle…
Again, Tombstone squeezed the trigger… miss!
Then there was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered forward, still clutching the AKM. Tomboy, still on her back, had her revolver out. She'd shot up into the Russian's back from a range of four feet. The man tried to raise the AK again…
Tombstone stopped, braced his.45 in both hands, and squeezed the trigger three more times in rapid succession. One of the rounds at least hit the Russian in the chest, pitching him backwards, sending the rifle spinning from his hands.
He dropped to his knees at Tomboy's side. "Tomboy! You okay?"
"Hi… Stoney." Her face twisted with pain. "Bad landing."
Glancing back, he saw her left leg twisted back under her body at an impossible angle. It looked like she'd snapped both her tibia and her fibula just below her knee. There was blood on her leg too, and a gleam of white bone visible through a tear in her flight suit ― a compound fracture, and a nasty one.
Quickly, Tombstone scanned their surroundings. The Russian soldier was dead, and there was no one else in sight. He could just make out the peaked roofs of a small village or settlement some distance to the east. They were sheltered to the north by a low rise, little more than a snow-covered mound on the tundra. Nothing else was visible in any direction but mountains, ground, and sky.
He touched the transmit key on the Search and Rescue radio strapped to his flight suit. "This is Tomcat Two-double-oh, Tomcat Two-double-oh, broadcasting Mayday, Mayday." He stopped, listening intently, but heard only the hiss of static, and once a garbled burst of something that might have been a partial transmission leaking across from a neighboring frequency.
Nothing. His transmitter might have been damaged in the landing, or else no one was listening on the frequency at the moment. He set the SAR radio to broadcast an emergency beacon, then turned to Tomboy.
"Let me take a look at that leg," he told her. First, he pulled a morphine syrette from his first-aid kit, pulled open the tear in her flight suit, squeezed a handful of skin and muscle, and jammed the needle home.
"That ought to make you feel real good," he told her.
"A real… high."
With a grease pencil included in the first-aid kit, he marked the letter "M" on her forehead, and the time. The small ritual was comforting, an acknowledgment that they were going to get out of this.
"You don't really think we're gonna get rescued, do you?" she asked. Her eyes were glassy, the words slurred. He thought she must already be in shock.
"'Course we are," he told her. "Brace yourself now. This might hurt, morphine or no morphine."
It did hurt; she fought back a yelp as he straightened her leg.
Tombstone looked around for a splint, but there wasn't a thing to be found but the soldier's AKM. He'd hoped to use the weapon ― an AKM with a thirty-round magazine was better than a pistol any day ― but he also needed a splint, and even with an assault rifle, he wouldn't be able to hold the enemy off for long once they showed up in force. He used his knife to cut generous lengths of nylon cord from the parachute, as well as strips from the canopy that he could use as bandages and padding. He removed the AKM's banana magazine, did his best to straighten out Tomboy's leg, then began tying the rifle above and below the break, keeping her leg rigid from thigh to ankle. He tried just once to set the bone, but he stopped when she screamed. Unable to see what he was doing, and unwilling to damage her leg more than it already was, he settled at last for simply immobilizing it, wrapping it in swaths of parachute nylon.
After a while, Tomboy opened her eyes as he worked. "Hey, CAG." Her voice sounded dreamy now, and she smiled. "Is it true what some of the girls are saying?"
"What's that?"
"That some sailor snuck into our shower and took photographs of us in there."
"Where the hell did that come from?"
"All the girls are talking about it."
How did news spread so swiftly through a ship's company? Tombstone had hoped the women would never find out about that episode. Obviously, though, he'd not counted on the incredible speed and power of the shipboard dissemination of rumor.
"It's true."
"Any in there of me? Heard there was."
"Yes. One."
"I must've… looked awful without my makeup."
"Oh, from what I could see, you looked pretty good."
"I'll bet. Ha! So much for all those women's issues sensitivity sessions. You're not supposed to notice things like that."
"So much for privacy aboard ship. Even one as big as the Jeff." He straightened up. "How's that feel?"
"It hurts like hell. CAG?"
"Yeah?"
"We're not going to get out of this, are we?"
"Sure we are. We've got our beacon out. They'll hear us."
"Yeah, but they can hear it too. You'd better take off without me."
"Nope."
"The Marine lines can't be more than five or six miles north of here.
Damn it, Captain, why should both of us get caught? Why should you get caught?"
"Why don't you shut up? You women talk too much, you know that?"
"You bastard! Get out of here now, while you can."
"And how effective a CAG would I be after that, knowing I'd run off and left one of my men, half stoned on morphine and lying out here in the mud?
What are you trying to do, Tomboy, ruin my career?"
She laughed, an involuntary snicker. Then the pain in her leg hit her and she gasped. Biting her lip, she shook her head. "Tombstone, if you don't-"
"Hush!" Tombstone raised his pistol. He could hear the rumble of an engine, nearby and growing closer. The source was masked by that low mound of earth and snow to the north.
Slowly, Tombstone rose to his feet. "Something's coming."
Troops spilled over the crest of the rise, spreading out to either side.
It took Tombstone a shocked half-second to recognize the uniforms, to put up his pistol.
"I'm Sergeant Bradley," the lead Marine said. "You Navy guys pick the God-damnedest places for LZs!"
"What?"
"You got yourself a shit-load of Russians heading this way, sir, but we beat 'em out by about two minutes. Come on. We've got a hummer on the other side of the ridge. We'll take your pal here."
Gathered up by the Marine recon patrol, Tombstone and Tomboy were escorted back to a cluster of camouflaged vehicles waiting a few yards beyond the ridge. Overhead, a trio of Tomcats boomed low across the tundra, the sunlight flashing from their wings.
The reality of his and Tomboy's rescue didn't hit home until that moment.
1443 hours
Kandalaksha Command Center
Kola Peninsula
Admiral Karelin never did find out that Pravda's missile had not made it clear of the launch tube. He'd heard the sub's weapons officer shout the word "fire," but then he'd waited, and waited, listening for some confirmation of launch, and heard nothing but static.
But the missile had to have gotten clear, had to have arrowed into the sky over Polyamyy on its way to Chelyabinsk. The sub base had been under attack, he knew that, and it was possible that the Pravda had been hit within seconds of the launch, but nothing could stop an ICBM once it was clear of its tube, nothing!
But there was no further word from Polyamyy, and no confirmation from Moscow that the missile had descended on Chelyabinsk. Perhaps, after all, something had gone wrong.
Damn the American carrier forces! Somehow, they'd managed to take out the pride of the Russian Northern Fleet, spoiling for a second time an attempt to end once and for all the civil war destroying his country.
Always, it seemed, it was the U.S. Navy, the Americans and their far-ranging carrier aircraft.
Ironically, it was not the U.S. Navy at all, but an F-117 Stealth aircraft that punched home the final seal of Karelin's destiny.
The Kandalaksha base had been identified the day before by its microwave transmissions. During the night, several cruise-missile attacks and bombing strikes had been made against Karelin's bunker, a low, concrete blockhouse squatting on the plain north of Kandalaksha's military air base. Now, a Stealth Fighter was holding a targeting laser steady on the target, a three-foot-wide ventilation grill on the bunker's roof. The bomb, released moments earlier, was gliding toward the spot of reflected laser light, its control surfaces twitching this way and that to keep its glide path on target.
Smoothly, as though placed there by hand, the one-thousand-pound bomb slipped through the ventilator, bursting through aluminum slats and fittings as though they were cardboard, penetrating yards of concrete and steel before detonating at last in a savage blast.
Admiral Karelin never felt the explosion that killed him.
EPILOGUE
Wednesday, 18 March
1530 hours
Flight deck
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
The SH-3 helicopter settled gently to Jefferson's deck. Tombstone unsnapped his harness and, clutching at his cranial with one hand, jumped through the open door to the deck. Ducking to avoid the still-spinning rotor blades, he trotted across the flight deck toward the carrier's island.
Admiral Tarrant, Captain Brandt, Coyote, and several aides stood there, waiting for him.
The fighting ashore was winding down, though God alone knew how much longer it would continue. The last word he'd heard was that the Marines now held a twenty-five-mile perimeter from Polyamyy to Port Vladimir, but that they would be pulled out soon. The Marines who'd picked him and Tomboy up off the tundra had regaled him with stories of the fighting, including a hand-to-hand gunfight inside one of the huge, underground Russian sub pens.
For the Most part, it seemed, the Russian defenses were collapsing.
Dozens of their ICBM subs had already been seized, dozens more crippled or destroyed by the constant bombing raids. Everywhere, Russian troops were surrendering. The civil war had had a terribly demoralizing effect on them, and the situation had been complicated by continuing problems with logistics and poor communications. Morale throughout the Red Army was virtually nil, and some POWs brought with them tales of food shortages, of corruption or cowardice among the officers, even of mutiny and defection among the enlisted men. The crew of the Jefferson might have been facing morale problems, but nothing as serious as that.
He'd learned something else while he'd been with the Marines ashore.
Late during the previous afternoon, a Marine patrol had entered the town of Sayda Guba after a sharp, short firefight with some rather raggedly undisciplined MVD troops. There, they'd found a wire cage with Lieutenant Hanson locked inside. Gang-raped and badly beaten, she was still alive. The Marines had flown her out to the LPH Iwo Jima, which had an excellent and well-equipped three-hundred-bed sick bay. Tomboy had been heloed out to the Iwo as well, as had a badly wounded female RIO from VA-89 called Sunshine.
At last report, all three women were going to be fine… although some wounds might take longer to heal than others. Chris Hanson, he'd been told, might never recover fully, though Tombstone wasn't willing to take odds on that. Naval aviators were tough ― they had to be ― and if anyone could find the strength and resiliency and sheer willpower to bounce back from an experience like that, Tombstone thought Lobo could do it.
But… had the Great Experiment been worth it? He wondered. Women in combat. They'd proven they could take stress as well as men, or better in some cases. And in the acid test of combat, they'd shown that they were just as capable as any man they flew with. God knew they'd earned the right to fight for their country. Tombstone had never disputed that.
Balancing all of that, though, were the undeniable problems sexual integration had raised. The morale problems alone had put his entire air wing at risk, and possibly the entire battle group. If he'd learned nothing else from this episode, it was that the U.S. military was not the place for social experimentation by politicians or by liberal activist groups like DACOWITS or NOW. The Navy, for all the scandals uncovered during the past decade, for all the problems it had endured, was still America's first line of defense, the projection of America's military might that kept the ambitions of nuclear-armed madmen like Krasilnikov at arm's length.
Any nation that tampered with the efficiency and combat readiness of its military services in this day and age did so at its peril.
Tombstone reached the silently waiting commanding officer of Carrier Battle Group 14 and the men waiting with him. He saluted, then addressed Brandt. "Permission to come aboard, sir."
"Granted," Brandt said. "Damn you, Stoney, I ought to give you permission to visit the brig."
"I get him first," Tarrant said. "Tombstone. What did I tell you about bringing back your airplane?"
"I guess I misplaced it. Sir."
Tarrant shook his head, then laughed. "I ought to make you walk back and get it. Well, welcome aboard anyhow. And welcome back!"
"Good to be back, Admiral."
"How'd you like playing with the grunts?" Coyote asked.
"Oh, not bad. Marines are almost human, once you get to know them."
"I see you also lost your RIO," Tarrant added. The twinkle in his eye told Tombstone the admiral knew that Tomboy was safe aboard the Iwo. "What happened, Stoney, you decide you have enough of women in your air wing and leave her in the Kola?"
"Terrible thing, sir," Coyote said, grinning. "But you know what they say. Women and salt water just don't mix."
"I don't know about women or salt water," Tombstone said. "But Tomboy, Lobo, and Brewer and the rest are aviators!" He grinned widely. "They can fly with me anytime!"
The End
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Document ID: e2f1a9ad-7834-4d17-b61d-2db4069c9600
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Document creation date: 15.8.2012
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Keith Douglass
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Keith Douglass, Countdown c-6
