by Tom Clancy
“They’re attacking!”
“What?” The flight leader checked his mirror again. “Negative, negative—hold formation!”
The Tomcats screeched fifty feet overhead, the sonic booms they trailed sounding just like explosions. Shavrov acted entirely on his combat-trained instincts. He jerked back on his stick and triggered his four missiles at the departing American fighters.
“Three, what did you do?” the Russian flight leader demanded.
“They were attacking us, didn’t you hear?” Shavrov protested.
The Tomcats
“Oh shit! Spade Flight, you have four Atolls after you,” the voice of the Hawkeye’s controller said.
“Two, break right,” Jackson ordered. “Chris, activate countermeasures.” Jackson threw his fighter into a violent evasive turn to the left. Sanchez broke the other way.
In the seat behind Jackson’s, the radar intercept officer flipped switches to activate the aircraft’s defense systems. As the Tomcat twisted in midair, a series of flares and balloons was ejected from the tail section, each an infrared or radar lure for the pursuing missiles. All four were targeted on Jackson’s fighter.
“Spade 2 is clear, Spade 2 is clear. Spade 1, you still have four birds in pursuit,” the voice from the Hawkeye said.
“Roger.” Jackson was surprised at how calmly he took it. The Tomcat was doing over eight hundred miles per hour and accelerating. He wondered how much range the Atoll had. His rearward-looking-radar warning light flicked on.
“Two, get after them!” Jackson ordered.
“Roger, lead.” Sanchez swept into a climbing turn, fell off into a hammerhead, and dove at the retreating Soviet fighters.
When Jackson turned, two of the missiles lost lock and kept going straight into open air. A third, decoyed into hitting a flare, exploded harmlessly. The fourth kept its infrared seeker head on Spade 1’s glowing tail pipes and bored right in. The missile struck the Spade 1 at the base of its starboard rudder fin.
The impact tossed the fighter completely out of control. Most of the explosive force was spent as the missile blasted through the boron surface into open air. The fin was blown completely off, along with the right-side stabilizer. The left fin was badly holed by fragments, which smashed through the back of the fighter’s canopy, hitting Christiansen’s helmet. The right engine’s fire warning lights came on at once.
Jackson heard the oomph over his intercom. He killed every engine switch on the right side and activated the in-frame fire extinguisher. Next he chopped power to his port engine, still on afterburner. By this time the Tomcat was in an inverted spin. The variable-geometry wings angled out to low-speed configuration. This gave Jackson aileron control, and he worked quickly to get back to normal attitude. His altitude was four thousand feet. There wasn’t much time.
“Okay, baby,” he coaxed. A quick burst of power gave him back aerodynamic control, and the former test pilot snapped his fighter over—too hard. It went through two complete rolls before he could catch it in level flight. “Gotcha! You with me, Chris?”
Nothing. There was no way he could look around, and there were still four hostile fighters behind him.
“Spade 2, this is lead.”
“Roger, lead.” Sanchez had the four Fighters bore-sighted. They had just fired at his commander.
Hummer 1
On Hummer 1, the controller was thinking fast. The Forgers were holding formation, and there was a lot of Russian chatter on the radio circuit.
“Spade 2, this is Hummer 1, break off, I say again, break off, do not, repeat do not fire. Acknowledge. Spade 2, Spade 1 is at your nine o’clock, two thousand feet below you.” The officer swore and looked at one of the enlisted men he worked with.
“That was too fast, sir, just too fuckin’ fast. We got tapes of the Russkies. I can’t understand it, but it sounds like Kiev is right pissed.”
“They’re not the only ones,” the controller said, wondering if he had done the right thing calling Spade 2 off. It sure as hell didn’t feel that way.
The Tomcats
Sanchez’ head jerked in surprise. “Roger, breaking off.” His thumb came off the switch. “Goddammit!” He pulled his stick back, throwing the Tomcat into a savage loop. “Where are you, lead?”
Sanchez brought his fighter under Jackson’s and did a slow circle to survey the visible damage.
“Fire’s out, Skipper. Right side rudder and stabilizer are gone. Left side fin—shit, I can see through it, but it looks like it oughta hold together. Wait a minute. Chris is slumped over, Skipper. Can you talk to him?”
“Negative, I’ve tried. Let’s go back home.”
Nothing would have pleased Sanchez more than to blast the Forgers right out of the sky, and with his four missiles he could have done this easily. But like most pilots, he was highly disciplined.
“Roger, lead.”
“Spade 1, this is Hummer 1, advise your condition, over.”
“Hummer 1, we’ll make it unless something else falls off. Tell them to have docs standing by. Chris is hurt. I don’t know how bad.”
It took an hour to get to the Kennedy. Jackson’s fighter flew badly, would not hold course in any specific attitude. He had to adjust trim constantly. Sanchez reported some movement in the aft cockpit. Maybe it was just the intercom shot out, Jackson thought hopefully.
Sanchez was ordered to land first so that the deck would be cleared for Commander Jackson. On the final approach the Tomcat started to handle badly. The pilot struggled with his fighter, planting it hard on the deck and catching the number one wire. The right-side landing gear collapsed at once, and the thirty-million-dollar fighter slid sideways into the barrier that had been erected. A hundred men with fire-fighting gear raced toward it from all directions.
The canopy went up on emergency hydraulic power. After unbuckling himself Jackson fought his way around and tried to grab for his backseater. They had been friends for many years.
Chris was alive. It looked like a quart of blood had poured down the front of his flight suit, and when the first corpsman took the helmet off, he saw that it was still pumping out. The second corpsman pushed Jackson out of the way and attached a cervical collar to the wounded airman. Christiansen was lifted gently and lowered onto a stretcher whose bearers ran towards the island. Jackson hesitated a moment before following it.
Norfolk Naval Medical Center
Captain Randall Tait of the Navy Medical Corps walked down the corridor to meet with the Russians. He looked younger than his forty-five years because his full head of black hair showed not the first sign of gray. Tait was a Mormon, educated at Brigham Young University and Stanford Medical School, who had joined the navy because he had wanted to see more of the world than one could from an office at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. He had accomplished that much, and until today had also avoided anything resembling diplomatic duty. As the new chief of the Department of Medicine at Bethesda Naval Medical Center he knew that couldn’t last. He had flown down to Norfolk only a few hours earlier to handle the case. The Russians had driven down, and taken their time doing it.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m Dr. Tait.” They shook hands all around, and the lieutenant who had brought them up walked back to the elevator.
“Dr. Ivanov,” the shortest one said. “I am physician to the embassy.”
“Captain Smirnov.” Tait knew him to be assistant naval attaché, a career intelligence officer. The doctor had been briefed on the helicopter trip down by a Pentagon intelligence officer who was now drinking coffee in the hospital commissary.
“Vasily Petchkin, Doctor. I am second secretary to the embassy.” This one was a senior KGB officer, a “legal” spy with a diplomatic cover. “May we see our man?”
“Certainly. Will you follow me please?” Tait led them back down the corridor. He’d been on the go for twenty hours. This was part of the territory as chief of service at Bethesda. He got all the hard calls. One of the first things a doctor le
arns is how not to sleep.
The whole floor was set up for intensive care, Norfolk Naval Medical Center having been built with war casualties in mind. Intensive Care Unit Number Three was a room twenty-five feet square. The only windows were on the corridor wall, and the curtains had been drawn back. There were four beds, only one occupied. The young man in it was almost totally concealed. The only thing not hidden by the oxygen mask covering his face was an unruly clump of wheat-colored hair. The rest of his body was fully draped. An IV stand was next to the bed, its two bottles of fluid merging in a single line that led under the covers. A nurse dressed like Tait in surgical greens was standing at the foot of the bed, her green eyes locked on the electrocardiograph readout over the patient’s head, dropping momentarily to make a notation on his chart. On the far side of the bed was a machine whose function was not immediately obvious. The patient was unconscious.
“His condition?” Ivanov asked.
“Critical,” Tait replied. “It’s a miracle he got here alive at all. He was in the water for at least twelve hours, probably more like twenty. Even accounting for the fact that he was wearing a rubber exposure suit, given the ambient air and water temperatures there’s just no way he ought to have been alive. On admission his core temperature was 23.8°C.” Tait shook his head. “I’ve read about worse hypothermia cases in the literature, but this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“Prognosis?” Ivanov looked into the room.
Tait shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe as good as fifty-fifty, maybe not. He’s still extremely shocky. He’s a fundamentally healthy person. You can’t see it from here, but he’s in superb physical shape, like a track and field man. He has a particularly strong heart; that’s probably what kept him alive long enough to get here. We have the hypothermia pretty much under control now. The problem is, with hypothermia so many things go wrong at once. We have to fight a number of separate but connected battles against different systemic enemies to keep them from overwhelming his natural defenses. If anything’s going to kill him, it’ll be the shock. We’re treating that with electrolytes, the normal routine, but he’s going to be on the edge for several days at least I—”
Tait looked up. Another man was pacing down the hall. Younger than Tait, and taller, he had a white lab coat over his greens. He carried a metal chart.
“Gentlemen, this is Doctor—Lieutenant—Jameson. He’s the physician of record on the case. He admitted your man. What do you have, Jamie?”
“The sputum sample showed pneumonia. Bad news. Worse, his blood chemistry isn’t getting any better, and his white count is dropping.”
“Great.” Tait leaned against the window frame and swore to himself.
“Here’s the printout from the blood analyzer.” Jameson handed the chart over.
“May I see this, please?” Ivanov came around.
“Sure.” Tait flipped the metal cloud chart open and held it so that everyone could see it. Ivanov had never worked with a computerized blood analyzer, and it took several seconds for him to orient himself.
“This is not good.”
“Not at all,” Tait agreed.
“We’re going to have to jump on that pneumonia, hard,” Jameson said. “This kid’s got too many things going wrong. If the pneumonia really takes hold…” He shook his head.
“Keflin?” Tait asked.
“Yeah.” Jameson pulled a vial from his pocket. “As much as he’ll handle. I’m guessing that he had a mild case before he got dumped in the water, and I hear that some penicillin-resistant strains have been cropping up in Russia. You use mostly penicillin over there, right?” Jameson looked down at Ivanov.
“Correct. What is this keflin?”
“It’s a big gun, a synthetic antibiotic, and it works well on resistant strains.”
“Right now, Jamie,” Tait ordered.
Jameson walked around the corner to enter the room. He injected the antibiotic into a 100cc piggyback IV bottle and hung it on a stand.
“He’s so young,” Ivanov noted. “He treated our man initially?”
“His name’s Albert Jameson. We call him Jamie. He’s twenty-nine, graduated Harvard third in his class, and he’s been with us ever since. He’s board-certified in internal medicine and virology. He’s as good as they come.” Tait suddenly realized how uncomfortable he was dealing with the Russians. His education and years of naval service taught him that these men were the enemy. That didn’t matter. Years before he had sworn an oath to treat patients without regard to outside considerations. Would they believe or did they think he’d let their man die because he was a Russian? “Gentlemen, I want you to understand this: we’re giving your man the very best care we can. We’re not holding anything back. If there’s a way to give him back to you alive, we’ll find it. But I can’t make any promises.”
The Soviets could see that. While waiting for instructions from Moscow, Petchkin had checked up on Tait and found him to be, though a religious fanatic, an efficient and honorable physician, one of the best in government service.
“Has he said anything?” Petchkin asked, casually.
“Not since I’ve been here. Jamie said that right after they started warming him up he was semiconscious and babbled for a few minutes. We taped it, of course, and had a Russian-speaking officer listen to it. Something about a girl with brown eyes, didn’t make any sense. Probably his sweetheart—he’s a good-looking kid, he probably has a girl at home. It was totally incoherent, though. A patient in his condition has no idea what’s going on.”
“Can we listen to the tape?” Petchkin said.
“Certainly. I’ll have it sent up.”
Jameson came around the corner. “Done. A gram of keflin every six hours. Hope it works.”
“How about his hands and feet?” Smirnov asked. The captain knew something about frostbite.
“We’re not even bothering about that,” Jameson answered. “We have cotton around the digits to prevent maceration. If he survives the next few days, we’ll get blebs and maybe have some tissue loss, but that’s the least of our problems. You guys know what his name is?” Petchkin’s head snapped around. “He wasn’t wearing any dogtags when he arrived. His clothes didn’t have the ship’s name. No wallet, no identification, not even any coins in the pockets. It doesn’t matter very much for his initial treatment, but I’d feel better if you could pull his medical records. It would be good to know if he has any allergies or underlying medical conditions. We don’t want him to go into shock from an allergic reaction to drug treatment.”
“What was he wearing?” Smirnov asked.
“A rubber exposure suit,” Jameson answered. “The guys who found him left it on him, thank God. I cut it off him when he arrived. Under that, shirt, pants, handerchief. Don’t you guys wear dogtags?”
“Yes,” Smirnov responded. “How did you find him?”
“From what I hear, it was pure luck. A helicopter off a frigate was patrolling and spotted him in the water. They didn’t have any rescue gear aboard, so they marked the spot with a dye marker and went back to their ship. A bosun volunteered to go in after him. They loaded him and a raft cannister into the chopper and flew him back, with the frigate hustling down south. The bosun kicked out the raft, jumped in after it—and landed on it. Bad luck. He broke both his legs, but he did get your sailor into the raft. The tin can picked them up an hour later and they were both flown directly here.”
“How is your man?”
“He’ll be all right. The left leg wasn’t too bad, but the right tibia was badly splintered,” Jameson went on. “He’ll recover in a few months. Won’t be doing much dancing for a while, though.”
The Russians thought the Americans had deliberately removed their man’s identification. Jameson and Tait suspected that the man had disposed of his tags, possibly hoping to defect. There was a red mark on the neck that indicated forcible removal.
“If it is permitted,” Smirnov said, “I would like to see your man, to thank him.�
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“Permission granted, Captain,” Tait nodded. “That would be kind of you.”
“He must be a brave man.”
“A sailor doing his job. Your people would do the same thing.” Tait wondered if this were true. “We have our differences, gentlemen, but the sea doesn’t care about that. The sea—well, she tries to kill us all regardless what flag we fly.”
Petchkin was back looking through the window, trying to make out the patient’s face.
“Could we see his clothing and personal effects?” he asked.
“Sure, but it won’t tell you much. He’s a cook. That’s all we know,” Jameson said.
“A cook?” Petchkin turned around.
“The officer who listened in on the tape—obviously he was an intelligence officer, right? He looked at the number on his shirt and said it made him a cook.” The three-digit number indicated that the patient had been a member of the port watch, and that his battle station was damage control. Jameson wondered why the Russians numbered all their enlisted men. To be sure they didn’t trespass? Petchkin’s head, he noticed, was almost touching the glass pane.
“Dr. Ivanov, do you wish to attend the case?” Tait asked.
“Is this permitted?”
“It is.”
“When will he be released?” Petchkin inquired. “When may we speak with him?”
“Released?” Jameson snapped. “Sir, the only way he’ll be out of here in less than a month will be in a box. So far as consciousness is concerned, that’s anyone’s guess. That’s one very sick kid you have in there.”
“But we must speak to him!” the KGB agent protested.
Tait had to look up at the man. “Mr. Petchkin, I understand your desire to communicate with your man—but he is my patient now. We will do nothing, repeat nothing, that might interfere with his treatment and recovery. I got orders to fly down here to handle this. They tell me those orders came from the White House. Fine. Doctors Jameson and Ivanov will assist me, but that patient is now my responsibility, and my job is to see to it that he walks out of this hospital alive and well. Everything else is secondary to that objective. You will be extended every courtesy. But I make the rules here.” Tait paused. Diplomacy was not something he was good at. “Tell you what, you want to sit in there yourselves in relays, that’s fine with me. But you have to follow the rules. That means you scrub, change into sterile clothing, and follow the instructions of the duty nurse. Fair enough?”