Chapter Twenty-Three

May 7

It was no myth that the Admiral Isakov was the world’s most powerful warship. In fact, it might have been the most powerful warship ever.

Not only did it carry fleets of fighters and attack copters on board, it was also outfitted with long-range offensive weapons more typically seen on battleships. Four massive batteries, two fore and two aft of the carrier’s immense, ten-story superstructure, each packing three gigantic eighteen-inch guns. Cruise missile launchers dominated both sides of the ship’s wide deck, along with a line of antiship missiles, weapons that could be quickly adapted to carry nuclear warheads.

For its own protection, dozens of SAM launchers, rotary cannons, and CADS Gatling-type weapons could be found in place all over the exterior, threatening anyone who dared come in close.

But the Isakov’s supremacy lay in its air group. The ship carried three dozen Su-34 JLR Mach 2 fighters, extremely advanced and extremely dangerous airplanes. In air-to-air mode, a Su-34 JLR could destroy enemy airplanes up to a hundred miles away. It could also shred anything in near visual distance with its pair of massive nose-mounted cannons.

But the Su-34 JLR was also a bomber—a real bomber, not just some fighter plane with bombs attached. It carried a crew of two and a cockpit big enough to have a galley, a toilet, and a bunk bed. Its fuel capacity, bumped up to huge numbers in the JLR model, gave the plane the capability to fly fifteen hundred miles, drop its bombs, and fly back again—a three-thousand-mile combat radius, incredible for a midsize warplane. A Su-34 JLR taking off from New York City could fly to Kansas, drop ten thousand pounds of conventional bombs, and return with fuel to spare. But … if this bomber went with a buddy plane, they could fly the same mission all the way to the West Coast and back, again with leftover fuel. And their weapons systems could just as easily drop poison-gas containers or biological weapons or even nukes.

The carrier was also home to three-dozen Mi-24N helicopters plus just as many cargo lifters, guaranteeing the Russian helicopter shortage in New York City was about to end. The huge Mi-24s featured enough firepower to bust up anything from tanks to entire city blocks, all while carrying up to ten fully armed combat troops. They were so big, the Isakov’s gigantic main flight-deck elevator, used to bring aircraft up and down from the ship’s hangar decks, was built to service its Mi-24s as well as other oversize Russian copters.

Most of the Isakov’s sea operations were run by computers—lots of them on the second deck. There were even some primitive robots—moving arms mostly—that chipped in on things like loading shells or remotely operating the main deck elevator. The carrier carried a crew of just four hundred, instead of the more typical four thousand. This left space for more weapons, fuel, and airplanes.

But the most unusual thing about the Isakov was who it belonged to.

The Russian Navy had been kept in the dark while the carrier was being built. This was not their boat. Constructed in the deepest secrecy per the wishes of the most shadowy group of characters inside the Kremlin, the Isakov belonged to the NKVD, the only secret police force in history to have its own aircraft carrier.

Its crew had been handpicked by the highest echelons of the NKVD and was much better trained than ordinary Russian sailors. All members had been indoctrinated to believe being insanely loyal to the Kremlin was the path to glory and that theirs was the greatest collection of ocean voyagers on the planet. The massive ship did little to dispel that notion.

This was also true for the carrier’s fighter pilots. They were members of the NKVD’s Special Naval Air Squadrons. The much-feared secret police had an air force, too. Their tactics were so merciless the NKVD pilots even frightened their counterparts in the Russian air corps.

The Isakov had seen action along Europe’s Mediterranean and North Sea coasts. Sometimes, its planes would even carry out surprise attacks on civilians living deep within Russian-controlled territory, just to remind them who was boss.

Now the NKVD was steering its great ship toward America. With New York firmly in the hands of the Russian military, more or less, the massive secret police organization would indeed have a jumping-off point from which to terrorize the continent. This was why the carrier was packed with tons of biological, conventional, and nuclear weapons. It was the arsenal for just such a campaign.

But that was not all.

At the very bottom of the ship, there was a large container, twelve feet by twelve feet, locked inside a bright yellow, lead-lined storage compartment, which was on wheels. Someone had nicknamed it the Magilla. Located in an area of the ship that only the vessel’s top officers could access, the item was never directly mentioned in any communiqués regarding the Isakov’s new deployment orders. In fact, no one but the highest echelons of the NKVD knew it even existed.

Its newly updated destination was the World Trade Center’s Tower Two.

The Isakov did not have a captain. It was run by a committee of seven NKVD political officers, all of equal rank but with varying experience in naval warfare. No matter, because in true Soviet fashion, one of the committee members was actually more powerful than the rest. This person had attained this position because he had a direct line to the very top of the secret police organization. His name was Yuri Zmeya Mikhailovich. He was Commissar Zmeya’s younger brother.

Just as handsome as Vladimir, and four years his junior, Senior Vessel Chairman Zmeya—or Commander Z (or just plain Z)—also bore a resemblance to the superspy Viktor Robotov, especially around the eyes. But however the DNA had been distributed, Yuri was as adept and as ruthless at his job as big brother Vladimir was at his. They’d both risen in the ranks very quickly and were plainly cut from the same cloth. And both were on the same mission: to make the NKVD the most feared police organization on the planet.

To this end, Z ran an extremely tight ship, rarely leaving the bridge. His pocket-size crew performed mostly as overseers of the Isakov’s vast computer systems—80 percent were IT guys. Still, they swabbed the decks, endlessly painted the ship, worked long duty shifts, and were fed the minimum.

Like his brother, Yuri Zmeya preferred to dress in black. On board the Isakov, he wore a nondescript black naval uniform, a massive naval cap, and large dark sunglasses, which he reportedly didn’t take off even when he slept, which wasn’t very often.

The convoy had left Murmansk ten days ago and had sailed in foul weather the entire trip—rain, high winds, very turbulent seas. This day promised more of the same. Torrential rain and the booming Atlantic had forced Z to clear the flight deck after just one abbreviated buddy patrol by a two-pack of its Su-34 JLR fighters.

By 0800 hours, the storm had grown even worse, forcing Z to reduce speed to eighteen knots.

The rain grew more intense, and the surface gale coming over the bow grew to fifty knots, blowing suds of salt and brine all the way down to the stern.

At 0830 hours, Z called off all air launches and ordered that once a transit air group from Murmansk landed later in the day, all air ops would be shut down entirely until the weather improved. While this canceled his surprise flyover of New York City by the carrier’s entire complement of Su-34s, not launching aircraft saved wear and tear on the knightly Su-34 JLRs. Plus, with the flight deck empty, the surging waves would wash away the last of the oil and grease that had accumulated over the long voyage. Yuri wanted his ship to look as good as possible when it arrived off Battery Park around noon the following day.

After all, big brother Vlad would be waiting at the dock.

By 1430 hours, when the second-call meal was delivered to the bridge from the officers’ mess, everyone but Z declined, all of their faces having turned some shade of green due to the heavy seas.

Z found this amusing. Going through major gales at sea was just another part of the job, he thought now, looking out on the nasty hurricane-like conditions. After all, he was commander of the greatest ship in the world, maybe in all of history, and he—

Suddenly, something crashed onto the carrier’s storm-tossed deck. It made a horrendous noise coming in, a sort of screeching that went right to the bone. It was black, had propellers and wings, and was belching tremendous streams of fire and smoke. It skidded right past the superstructure, creating a giant spray of sparks and traveling so fast it was certain to drop off the side of the ship. But at the very last moment, its landing gear collapsed, twisting its wings and demolishing its two engines. All this wreckage served to slow it down. It stopped just inches from toppling over the bow.

Z was simply stunned, as was everyone on the bridge. They all jumped to their feet and were crowded up against the control bridge windows, trying to make sense of what had just happened ten stories down. One NKVD committee member voiced the only likely explanation: Had some random plane in distress just crash-landed on their ship?

But before anyone could reply, a second plane came out of the storm, and it, too, slammed onto the deck. It looked exactly like the first, black and stubby. It quickly caught fire as well. Z froze in place. This was too much like something from a dream, something that just should not be happening. This second plane also went screeching past the superstructure at high speed, snapping all three of the ship’s arresting cables before crashing into the first plane. The collision resulted in so much jagged metal and steel, it served to keep both planes adhered to the viciously rolling flight deck.

Even before it stopped moving, armed men were jumping out of the second plane via its open cargo bay. Joining up with dark figures exiting the first smoking wreck, they tried mightily to push the two planes over the side, obviously to make room for a third plane, which hit the deck an instant later. Slamming into the far aft gun deck and cleanly severing its starboard wing, it scattered the armed invaders, spiraled into the first two planes, and finally knocked both wrecks into the sea.

Armed troops began pouring out of this third plane, too. Joining their comrades from the first two mangled aircraft, they took up positions among the automated weaponry in place along the forward starboard gunwale. Then, on someone’s command, the invaders started firing their weapons directly up at the control tower. Suddenly, a giant fan of bright red tracer rounds lit up the blowing morning rain. Sustained and merciless, the barrage was intended to kill the ship’s commanders and anyone else on the bridge.

But by this point, everyone inside the bridge had literally hit the deck as a storm of broken glass and machine gun rounds rained down on them—everyone except Commander Z. He remained absolutely still at the windows, awash in denial. That’s how he saw the fourth plane bang in, skid down the flight deck, collide with the island, and then screech to a long, painful halt up at the bow, covering the entire flight deck with a flood of sparks. Even more soldiers began jumping out of it.

Only then did Z’s security detail arrive and force him down to the deck.

“Sir—we are being attacked,” the lead security officer shouted. “We are going to remove you to the secure point behind the bridge.”

This knocked Z out of his trance.

He resisted the security team’s efforts to carry him away. “Who would possibly be attacking us? No one knows we’re out here.”

The lead security man looked at his colleagues and then grudgingly nodded. They let Z up slowly, still protecting him from all sides with handheld body-length bulletproof shields. Most of the bridge’s windows had been shattered by gunfire by this point, though the amount of incoming ordnance had not decreased.

Lifting Z only enough so he could see out one of these broken windows, the security man directed his attention to the wreckage of the fourth crashed plane. The flames around it were bright enough to cut through the smoke and spray and let Z see something had been painted on its fuselage right behind the wing.

It was a flag.

Stars and stripes. Red, white, and blue. …

Z began sputtering. “Americans? No way—they’ve been reduced to cavemen. There’s no way they’ve gotten aboard my ship. No one knew we were coming. …”

The security team finally lifted Z off the deck and started moving him aft. While leaving the giant control room in this awkward deportment, Z ordered his fellow committee members to remain on the bridge and monitor the battle. They nervously acknowledged his command with a round of halfhearted salutes.

The security detail got Z into his large, fully equipped, steel-reinforced safe room located just behind the bridge. They locked themselves in with him. The mandated withdrawal had little impact on him, though. He immediately turned on the ship’s intercom and began barking orders. His first was to call the crew to battle stations.

But this brought a moment of confusion. The Isakov might have been the greatest warship in the world, but it was crewed by only four hundred men, most of whom were technicians. Battle stations to them meant manning the screens at their Vector-06Cs and Mera-7209 computers and looking for some target out over the horizon. They were just barely sailors, never mind soldiers, and they’d never drilled for a physical attack on the ship because no one had ever dreamed something like this would happen.

Still, there were plenty of combat weapons on the carrier, thousands of AK-47s along with tons of ammunition. Some bigger, even more destructive combat weapons, like RPG launchers, were on board as well.

Z screamed for his NKVD security forces, real soldiers, about eighty men in all, to join with the three dozen Su-34 pilots and immediately confront the attackers on deck. Then he ordered the regular crewmembers to arm themselves with AK-47s and do the same thing inside the ship. Finally, he told his antiaircraft crews to activate their bow-mounted CAD Gatling-type weapons, turn their outward-facing barrels to point inward, and blast the aerial intruders off the deck.

But then, some of the CAD guns along the outer edge of the ship began blowing up on their own. Five in a row along the starboard gunwales were suddenly gone in five puffs of smoke, the debris quickly blown away by the high winds. By this time, more than half of the mystery soldiers had gained entry inside the ship anyway, most by swarming through a hatch at the bottom of the giant under-attack superstructure. Now, running past the mysteriously burning weapons, another dozen of the invaders made it through the hatch and joined their comrades in the first-deck passageway. Another half dozen were right on their heels.

By then, the automated CAD guns on the port side had spun around to point inward. These weapons could fire a hundred depleted uranium rounds a second and there were five of them. Aimed by TV cameras controlled from belowdecks, and unbeknownst to them, their aiming sights were turned on those gunmen still using the wreckage of the last two aircraft as cover while they continued to pummel the carrier’s bridge with tracer fire.

The five Gatling-like barrels actually started rotating, a two-second exercise to get them properly lined up with their firing chambers. In one more second, they would have started firing, and those on the receiving end of the horrific barrage would be reduced to a bloody mist.

But at that last instant, the five weapons also blew up, one right after another. A moment after that, the carrier’s main radio mast was severed in a mighty blast, killing all communications aboard the ship and spraying the deck with a rain of shrapnel. A moment after that, the ship’s huge K4FN satellite dish antenna was blown to bits.

That’s when a jet airplane suddenly appeared out of the storm, only to disappear an instant later.

Z was watching it all as a live TV broadcast being displayed on the phalanx of black-and-white monitors that dominated one wall of his safe room. He was the first to spot the jet. It had come right down the starboard side, not fifteen feet off the deck, strafing the area where the five antiaircraft guns had just blown up. Though it was being battered mightily by the winds and rain, its aim had been perfect. One, two seconds out in the open at the most, and then it disappeared back into the tempest, leaving Z to wonder, What kind of plane was that?

Though the TV reception was not good, it was enough for Z to see the jet’s bright exhaust inside the low rain clouds. A moment later, huge streams of tracer fire came out of those same clouds, now hitting targets all over the carrier’s superstructure. Antennas. Radar dishes. More antiaircraft gear. More deck guns. Z’s safe room shuddered with the impacts; the whole ship was shaking. Every shot fired by the plane seemed to hit its target, leaving just smoky flashes behind.

Another sharp turn inside the storm, and suddenly the jet was coming directly at the control bridge. The multiple cannons in its nose were clearly evident. When they started firing, the flare they caused was so bright, it blacked out some of Z’s TV screens. But on others, he saw the fusillade demolish what was left of the bridge’s windows, killing everyone left inside. Some of these shells hit the exterior of Z’s safe room itself, rocking it violently.

But before the airplane flashed over the ferociously burning bridge and back into the storm, it was caught by a TV camera mounted in the low radar mast, down one level, aft of the main bridge.

Z was able to freeze the frame and finally get a good look at the aerial attacker. His blood suddenly turned cold. Unlike his brother, Z had been spared having to look at a ghostly flying toy and wonder what the hell it was. Once he saw this plane up close, he recognized it immediately—and he knew who was flying it.

The legendary F-16XL.

Hawk Hunter.

The Wingman.

“I despise that guy,” Z growled angrily to his security men. “And everyone thought he was dead.”

The stark realization quickly sank in. Not only had Z heard all the tales about Hawk Hunter, he believed them. He hit his shortwave radio’s all-send button and broadcast an emergency message to the rest of Convoy 56, something he wouldn’t have dreamed he’d be doing just a few minutes ago.

It was just two lines:

ISAKOV UNDER ATTACK BY AMERICANS, POSSIBLY H HUNTER.

RENDER ALL ASSISTANCE POSSIBLE.