Just then she caught sight of the lines of AN-130s below, where her second two bombs had impacted. Fires raged everywhere, with massive wings lying detached from fuselages.
At that moment, another AN-130 came in for a landing and crashed into debris lying in its path. The plane spun sideways, sliding wildly across the snow until it impacted with several others in a chain reaction that left Halverson wanting to cheer, but she felt too sick.
She was glad she hadn’t had time to eat. She had practiced ejections before, but this one . . . she thought for a moment she might pass out.
Her comm system had automatically switched over to the helmet’s transmitter, and while she knew her ejection had automatically been sent to every JSF command post in the world, she knew it was imperative that she confirm she was alive.
Yes, her flight suit would also transmit her bio readings, but a voice on the end of an encrypted transmission carried a whole lot more weight.
Protocol dictated that she get on the tactical channel to contact the nearest command post, but she said screw it and broadcast over the emergency channel reserved for strategic operations. Better to ring the louder bell.
“This is JSF Fighter Siren out of Igloo Base, Northwest Territories. I’ve ejected north of Behchoko.” She rattled off the last coordinates she’d read on her display. “I’m descending toward a heavily wooded area, GPS coordinates to follow once I’m on the ground, over.”
After about ten seconds, a voice came over the radio: “JSF Fighter Siren, this is Hammer, Tampa Five Bravo. Received your transmission. We’ll see if we can get some help up to you. Send GPS coordinates once you’re on the ground.”
“Roger that, Hammer. And here’s hoping our boys get to me before they do.”
“We’ll do everything we can. And you do the same. Standing by . . .”
All right, she’d survived the ejection.
Would she survive the landing?
The forest unfurled below for kilometer after kilometer, dense, snow-covered, a bone-breaking gauntlet.
She imagined herself plunging through the heavy canopy and getting impaled by a limb.
Wouldn’t that be her luck?
Some training mission. The fighters were gone, the base was gone, her colleagues were dead.
Jake, are you there?
Yeah, why didn’t you say anything?
Because it would’ve been too complicated.
You’re wrong.
I know. I’ve been lying to myself.
Just don’t panic. It’ll be all right. I’ll be with you every step of the way. You know what to do now. Get your mind off of it. Calm down.
Halverson took a deep breath.
The ground came up faster.
With a vengeance.
TWENTY
Commander Jonathan Andreas glanced down at his watch: 0513 hours.
You would need a hell of a lot more than a knife to cut the tension in the Florida’s control room.
A plasma torch might not even do it—because the moment had come, and Andreas and his crew were a pack of artic wolves, poised before their prey, still and silent in the dim red light.
The AGM-84 Harpoon antishipping missiles were loaded in tubes one, two, and three.
And presently, the Varyag, the converted aircraft carrier now serving as the Russian task force’s command and control ship, had the oiler Kalovsk tied up alongside, with lines fore and aft, separated by evenly spaced fenders between them to cushion any accidental impact between the ships. Now, with the first pale ribbons of dawn wandering along the horizon, refueling operations were well under way.
This was it.
Two ships. One missile.
Andreas held his breath a moment more, and then turned his key, granting the weapons control console permission to launch. The reaction of three thousand psi jettisoning more than fifteen hundred pounds out the torpedo tube rumbled through the control room.
The submarine variant of the AGM-84 Harpoon antishipping missile was housed in a blunt-nosed, torpedo-like capsule called an ENCAP, which had positive buoyancy and burst away from the Florida, while a lanyard caused fins to pop out as it glided to the surface without power.
Once the ENCAP breached the surface, Andreas watched as it blew off its tail and cap, then fired the Harpoon on its solid-fuel booster.
His pulse leapt as the glowing orb shot off.
The missile was directed by an INS (inertial navigation system), where it conducted an autonomous search for a specific preprogrammed target image. A number of different search patterns could be programmed into the Harpoon, which not only increased its probability of detecting the target but made it harder to trace the missile’s flight path back to its launcher.
Now the Harpoon dropped down to wave height as it homed in, skimming along the icy spray.
Andreas checked his watch once more, then glanced up at the image on the flat panel.
The Harpoon’s WDU-18/B—an innocuous description for a 488-pound, penetrating, blast-fragmentation warhead—pierced the Kalovsk’s port beam.
A heartbeat . . . then 297,000 gallons of aviation and ship fuel ignited.
The Kalovsk’s crew was vaporized before her aft superstructure fractured into five pieces and hurtled skyward. Her port side spewed molten, fragmented steel more than two miles out into Gray’s Bay.
Then, in less than thirty milliseconds, molten fragmented steel—formerly the Kalovsk’s starboard side—bridged the twenty-five-foot gap separating the oiler from the port side of the Varyag.
Andreas gasped as the Varyag’s partially filled fuel tanks immediately exploded, peeling back and curling 150 feet of her main deck like a sardine can.
The enormous holes at the Varyag’s waterline brought icy arctic water in direct contact with the 1,200-psi superheated steam in both boiler rooms. The resulting explosions shattered Varyag’s keel in three separate locations.
Andreas beat a fist into his palm, and the crew saw that as a sign to cut loose and cheer.
Her spine broken, Varyag took nine minutes to join Kalovsk at the bottom of Gray’s Bay. There were no survivors from either vessel.
Two down, two to go. The Ulyanovsk and the Ivan Rogov . . .
Half his company had been killed in the C-130 explosion, leaving Sergeant Nathan Vatz in a state of shock as he gathered his chute with the other operators who had managed to bail out before the missile had struck.
He’d shut down the oxygen, popped off his helmet, and was panting in the frigid morning air, occasionally glancing across the broad, snow-covered field toward several buildings, lumber mills maybe, and the dense forests toward the east and west.
With the chute gathered, he charged toward the embankment along a snow-covered road, probably dirt, where the rest of the operators were gathering and burying their chutes in the snow.
There, Vatz crouched down with twenty-six other men, noting immediately that every operator of ODA- 888 had made it, along with most of the operators from ODA-887, though one guy was lying on his back, looking pale as two medics attended to him.
“Everybody else, all right?” asked Detachment Commander Captain Mike Godfrey. He was Vatz’s CO, bearded and barely thirty, and wise enough to lean on Vatz for advice. “This mission is not over. Captain Rodriguez and I have decided we’re carrying on and have put in the request for another company to be sent up. Of course that’s going to take time. Meanwhile, we get to work.”
Captain Manny Rodriguez, big eyes and a Fu Manchu mustache, nodded and added, “Me and my boys from Zodiac Team will hit the Chevy dealership and secure some SUVs, while you guys from Berserker hit the sporting goods store and pick up the gear in our crates. Same game plan. We all dress up like hunters. But it’ll be Captain Godfrey, Warrant Officer Samson, and Sergeant Vatz who’ll meet with the mayor and the RCMPs here.”
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police would be one of the keys in securing and preparing the town for the Russian invasion, but Vatz had a sneaking suspicion that the
ir support wouldn’t be easily won. And with the area’s small population, Vatz figured if they found a dozen Mounties to help, that’d be a lot.
“All right, gentlemen. We rally on the police station no later than oh-six-thirty hours,” said Godfrey. “The Russians are already on the ground and on the move. No time to waste!”
“Okay, let’s move!” hollered Vatz.
And with that, all of them took off running across the field, shouldering their heavy packs.
Vatz couldn’t wait to see the look on the Mounties’ faces when he, Godfrey, and Samson walked into the station.
That would be an interesting conversation.
Major Stephanie Halverson crashed through the tree limbs with a horrible cracking noise. She was jolted left, then right, her helmet scraping against the trees, then suddenly she—
Stopped short.
Her entire body tugged hard against the straps, and her neck snapped back as she lost her breath.
It took a few seconds for her to get her bearings.
The snow lay about twenty feet below. She glanced up, saw that the chute had tangled in the limbs and she now dangled in midair.
After ditching the ejection seat, she’d done her best to steer herself into the widest gap between trees, and that had probably saved her life, but it had also left her hanging, literally, between the big pines.
Detaching the chute line and jumping meant risking a fracture.
She undid her helmet, let it drop to the snow, thud. No, she wasn’t jumping.
“Oh,” she said aloud, breathing in the cold, crisp air. In the distance came the muffled drone of props, and she wondered how long it would take before they sent out a squad of Spetsnaz troops for her. They couldn’t have missed her chute.
The thought sent her into motion, swinging from side to side, trying to get close to the nearest trunk, where she might grab on and attempt to secure herself.
After five or six swings, she built up enough momentum to strike the trunk, bark flying as she wrapped an arm around and came to a sudden halt, her grip already faltering.
She detached the chute, let the twenty-two-pound survival kit fall away to the ground, where it broke open, scattering its contents.
Nice, Major.
Then she threw herself forward, wrapped both arms around the tree, then both legs, as lines fell away.
Repressing the morbid desire to look down, she slowly loosed arms, just a bit, and began to slide—
Just as a shattered limb from above decided to drop, missing by only six inches.
The sudden shock caused her to loose her grip even more, and she slid much too fast down the tree, bark ripping her across the legs, which were beginning to warm behind the flight suit.
She wasn’t sure if she screamed or not as she suddenly hit the ground, lost her balance, and collapsed onto her rump, sending up clouds of snow.
For just a few seconds she sat there, gingerly testing her legs, making sure she hadn’t broken or sprained anything. Then the internal voice took over, the training: All right, all right, get the gear and get the hell out!
She had a couple of meals ready to eat (MREs), a couple liters of water, a .45 with two spare magazines, a survival guide for exciting reading in case she got bored fleeing from the Russians, a fixed-blade survival knife in nylon sheath, a radio beacon (which she checked to be sure was off ), a pair of high-powered binoculars with integrated digital camera, and a small emergency blanket.
She tried her helmet’s radio. Dead. Damn, it’d been smashed up in the trees on the way down. She also had her wrist-mounted GPS and a satellite phone in her breast pocket, which she now fished out, switched on.
No signal.
“Are you kidding me? The entire network’s down?”
Well, wasn’t that a bitch? She’d have to find the ejection seat, which had recently been equipped with a secondary transmitter.
But breaking radio silence would mean giving up her location, the same way the survival kit’s satellite beacon could.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
It wouldn’t hurt to at least track down the seat, and let them know in which direction she was headed, which was—
She spun around.
If the Russians were heading south, any direction but south might be good. Then again, the farther north, east, or west she traveled, the farther her rescuers would have to come—if they were planning to rescue her.
It would be all too easy to write off one pilot in an operation as massive as this would be. Did they even have the resources?
She vowed to stop feeling sorry for herself. She would find the ejection seat, send off the last transmission, then take it from there.
The sound of jet engines sent her gaze skyward, where the stars were beginning to fade, where she should be right now.
After slinging the survival kit over her shoulder, the two .45 magazines in her left hip pocket, the pistol in her gloved hand, she took one last look around to make sure she’d hadn’t left anything. Then, remembering she had been gliding northwest when she’d dumped the seat, she jogged off and headed southeast through the forest.
She got no more than a thousand yards from her landing site when she heard the sounds of multiple, somewhat high-pitched engines. The sounds left her puzzled. She crouched down, then dug through her kit, produced her binoculars.
In a clearing off to her left, a half dozen black snowmobiles had come to a halt. Climbing off them were heavily armed Spetsnaz troops.
Lowering the binoculars and placing them back into the kit, ever so gently, as though the tiniest sound might be heard by the enemy, Halverson glanced up, saw how the forest dipped down ahead, and figured there might be better cover there.
She rose, started off, wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t do a damned thing except focus on the next position.
One of the Spetsnaz cried out in Russian, loud enough for her to hear, and she understood the words: “I found the chute!”
And now they knew she was alive.
TWENTY-ONE
A weatherworn man in his early sixties whom the computer identified as Ivan Golova, commander of the helicopter assault ship Ulyanovsk, was standing on the main deck, midships, inspecting his vessel for debris damage.
Andreas’s men had just intercepted and decrypted communications between him and the skipper of the amphibious assault ship Ivan Rogov. Both men agreed that the destruction of the Varyag and Kalovsk was the worst refueling accident in the history of the Russian Navy.
And both men were unaware of the wolf at their door.
Andreas tensed as Golova looked up, a half second before the Harpoon struck his ship broadside.
The incredible amount of energy directed upward into the main deck instantly blasted the commander apart—
Just as the flooded engineering spaces exploded in a magnificent conflagration that, seconds later, split Ulyanovsk in half.
The helicopter assault ship’s stern section sank within a minute, but the bow section remained afloat, and crewmembers scrambled to get into lifeboats. The dozens in the water would die within minutes from hypothermia induced by the unforgiving arctic sea.
Those lucky men in the lifeboats, about twenty-five by Andreas’s count, paddled furiously for the Ivan Rogov as they watched the bow section finally join the Varyag and Kalovsk at the bottom of Gray’s Bay.
This time there was no cheering in Andreas’s control room. The odd thing was—and every man serving on his boat would attest to this—if there wasn’t a war going on, they and the Russians sailors would probably buy each other drinks. They were all proud Navy men and women. There was a kinship there that extended beyond politics and culture.
But, as always, when push came to shove, they would kill each other without hesitation, and often without remorse. So, yes, there was no cheering this time while the tortured faces appeared on the Florida’s screens.
For a few minutes more, everyone in the control room watched as the Ulyanovsk’s su
rvivors struggled to reach a ship that was already doomed.
Andreas, unwilling to subject himself and his crew to any more, gave the order to fire.
The Florida’s third Harpoon struck the Ivan Rogov’s forward fuel tank. The enormous blast instantaneously consumed the first hundred feet of the ship, including the Ulyanovsk’s overloaded lifeboats.
As long columns of fire and smoke billowed from the vessel, wave action and shifting tides swung her 180 degrees on her stern anchor, causing her to dislodge the flukes. Dragging a useless anchor and powerless to stop, Ivan Rogov’s broken hulk foundered against the rocky shore.
The handful of survivors who began making their way to the rails would face the hostile Northwest Territories. Andreas doubted that they’d last more than a week.
Throughout the Harpoon attack, he had stood with his right hip pressed against the plotting table and suddenly realized his right leg had gone to sleep. The realization carried him back to his boyhood and Melville’s Captain Ahab. He shuddered free the memory and got back to work.
The task force’s icebreakers had left, leaving the ammunition ship, which had already lifted an anchor and was on the run.
Andreas spoke softly. “Let her pass. I want to see her plimsoll line and draught markings. I’d also like to get her name before we kill her—for the log.”
The ammo ship’s angle on the bow was currently port thirty, making it impossible to see her stern and name. However, she had been zigzagging and was just about due for another course change.
Andreas got his wish when she turned right seventy degrees. He let her pass then slowly fell in behind to read her transom:
MOЛHИЯ
“Anybody. Translate that for me,” he said.
“It means lightning, sir,” replied the SpecOps communications technician.
“How apropos.” He glanced sidelong at the XO. “Her draught markings indicate she’s drawing forty-two feet. Set up the Mark 48 accordingly and let her open out to ten thousand yards—we don’t want her coming down on us when she blows. Load up tube one. You have the honors.”