Damage Control. Gordon Kent

almost certainly the second F-18, headed south.

       “Get him the fuck out of our airspace!” the same voice in Air Ops shouted.

      Rafe glanced around, and something moved in his peripheral vision, and then the world exploded.

      AG 703

      Soleck was two miles to the north of the stack of the carrier and just turning inbound to establish his refueling track, more attention on his armrest data screen than on his instruments, when movement in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flick into an instrument scan and out over sea—

      “Holy mother of God,” Soleck said.

      There was a fireball rising from the deck of the carrier like a Hollywood special effect, orange and white and spreading from the bow to the stern, the violent red pulses punctuated by streaks of white rising from the flames. The fireball itself rose so high that the island, the command node of the carrier, vanished in an orange bloom.

      His plane shook, and then a fist of air nearly struck them from the sky.

       4

      Mahe Naval Base, India

      The commodore’s pistol was a Czech CZ75 with a full fifteen-round clip but no extra ammo. Alan figured it would be about as good as a peashooter against the automatic weaponry he could hear, but it helped him fight a feeling of loss of control.

      The Marines were herding them like school kids down a back stairway, two of them leading and one covering the rear. “I feel like I’m back at Adirondack High,” Benvenuto muttered. “Fucking fire drill.”

      Crossing the third-floor foyer, the Marines had met two others; there had been a tense moment when both groups had got ready to shoot, and then they had identified themselves, and the two newcomers had said something to the sergeant and veered off down another corridor toward the office of the Commander, West Fleet—God knew what they’d find there. The building was chaos, three bodies and a wounded man scattered along the central corridor like sacks dropped off a truck, a trail of blood down the tile where the first wounded Marine had been dragged. Twice, they had seen other people at a distance; both times, everybody had flinched, crouched, and then the others had run away and they had moved on in their hurrying file. Indian file, he had thought grimly. But different Indians. They passed office after office with closed doors. Inside, he suspected, unarmed people were trying to wait out whatever was going on. Or were dead.

      USS Thomas Jefferson

      Fire. All around him, fire, and something on his legs.

      Rafe flailed his arms, seeking to get them free. A tumble of images, separated by flashes of darkness.

      “Sir! Stop fighting me! Sir!”

      Rafe pushed against something and the vertebrae of his back impacted against a sharp corner, sending more pain through his body in a jolt. He curled up, and the weight settled all over him. Weight and pain. He lay still. More tumbles. No sense of time.

      “That leg might be broken. Move him carefully.”

      “Sir, we got to get him clear of the bridge. The whole fucker could go!”

      “Roger that. Down to the O-3 level.”

      “Anyone else alive up here?”

      “Captain Rogers is dead. Helmsman is over there, I tried to wrap him, everyone forward of this bulkhead died when the fucker hit us. Admiral was coming back for coffee, that’s why he’s—”

      Rafe moved his head under the fire blanket and tried to speak. “—hit us?” he tried to say, but it only came out as a croak. He hurt. But time was moving now.

      He felt them putting him in a clamshell. His back and legs hurt so much he couldn’t really think, felt himself going into shock, tried to breathe. The fire blanket fell back from his face.

      “—what hit us?” he tried, but again, it was like a hiss of air.

      Madje’s face appeared in his arc of vision. It was red and there wasn’t any hair on it.

      “Sir? Can you hear me?”

      “Whahitus?” Rafe got out.

      Madje leaned closer. “That Indian plane hit the deck just forward, sir. The fires are pretty bad. We’re moving you to the O-3 level, and we’re fighting the fires.”

       “Whuzinc’mand?”

      Madje shook his head. “Captain Rogers died a few feet from you. CAG Lushner may be alive but the flight deck is—no one can go out there.”

      Rafe scrabbled at Madje like a corpse rising from the grave. His hands were burned claws and the angry red flesh on his sides showed under the ruins of his flight suit, but he rose almost to a sitting position.

       “You—find senior now! Take command!”

      Madje nodded, almost saluted, but Rafehausen had fallen back into the stretcher. The admiral coughed in pain as a portion of his left index finger, complete with the nail, remained stuck to the clamshell where he had gripped it to sit up.

      AG 703

      From the moment Soleck saw the Indian fighter plow into the after deck of the Jefferson, his mind focused on what would have to be the prime interest of every airplane aloft. Fuel.

      Soleck’s AG 703, flying as a mission tanker, had twenty thousand pounds of JP-5 to give when the carrier ceased to be a haven. AG 706, the last plane to launch before the catastrophe, had as much again. Scattered across two hundred miles of ocean were eleven other planes, mostly F-18 Hornets, famous for their short legs and suddenly bereft of their home base. Some of them had been on Combat Air Patrol since the last launch event more than an hour before, and their fuel tanks were as close to dry as their flight parameters and safety allowed. Down to the south, Donitz had already gone to burner and made at least one turn against exercise opposition from another flight of Indian Air Force Jaguars before the accident; he had less fuel than any of the others. Up to the north, two F-14 Tomcats from VF-171 were on picket with the northernmost fleet elements, and somewhere up there was supposed to be Stevens’s S-3 with a buddy store holding more gas. The rest of the planes were close at hand, waiting in the stack for the launch of the rest of a sea-strike package that would never come.

      “Where we gon’ to land?” Guppy said. He was shaken, his voice a monotone, his face as gray as his flight helmet.

      Soleck had the plane under control and the altitude even. Now he was trying to watch the whole sky for other planes. The tower had been off the air from the moment of the accident. He could see that the initial explosion and the resulting fire had stripped every antenna from the carrier, and that meant that the planes in the stack were on their own. Soleck feared that other pilots might leave their assigned altitudes and start flailing around, increasing the risk of collision.

      “Gup, we could fly to China with this much gas. Shut up and get me Alpha Whiskey on radio two. And try and raise the skipper in 701.”

      Soleck could hear a babble of pilot exchanges on Alpha Whiskey, with every plane in the stack clamoring for fuel and information. Alpha Whiskey, the radio frequency reserved for air-warfare command and usually controlled from the Ticonderoga-class cruiser Fort Klock, was being clobbered. “Start writing that shit down, Gup. Get their fuel states. Hey, Guppy! Stay with me, man.”

      Soleck had completed his turn at the north end of their track, and they were now nose-on to the burning carrier, just a mile out. The plume of smoke rose more than a thousand feet, and the tower leaned out over the starboard