Chapter Thirty-Eight

Neither JT nor Ben had ever flown a Russian fighter before.

They’d fought them, they’d shot them down, but they’d never gotten closer than the range of a Vulcan cannon.

But there are commonalities between airplanes. With all of them, you take off, you add power, you fly. It’s what you do once airborne that tells the tale.

At the moment, though, they were being used as test monkeys. They were scheduled to take off from the Admiral Isakov in two Su-34s just after 2100 hours. Thanks to the 7CAV guys, the carrier’s deck was clear and the stationary ship had just a 10 percent list to starboard.

The jets were armed and ready to go, but would the ship’s leaky, jimmy-rigged steam generators hold enough pressure to shoot them off the deck? If not, even a Su-34 couldn’t survive what would happen next.

The minutes ticked down; hasty, last-moment tests were done; and at precisely 2104 hours, JT went off the deck. Ben followed him two seconds later. Both Su-34s dipped precipitously after leaving the carrier’s bow, but recovered quickly. In seconds, they were climbing to five thousand feet, going nearly straight up.

Thirty seconds behind, another Su-34 took off, Captain Crunch at the stick. He flew a souped-up F-4 Phantom in his day job, a rugged but aged stallion. Never did he dream he’d be flying a Russian jet on a combat mission, never mind a Su-34.

They’d found a lot of really nasty ordnance aboard the Isakov, both conventional and otherwise. The three purloined fighters were now lugging some of the worst: RBK-250 cargo munitions, better known as cluster bombs. Once dropped, each bomb, a large container with hundreds of little bomblets inside it, would split open, and the diminutive bombs would explode a few feet off the ground, killing large numbers of personnel in a short amount of time. Each plane was carrying ten thousand pounds of them.

This would be a one-and-done air strike, though. The Isakov’s arresting cables were unfixable, so returning to the ship was out. There was a tiny airport on east Nantucket with a small runway, but a vast parking lot beyond it.

Before the mission, some 7CAV guys removed the fence separating the landing strip from the parking lot, hoping it was a way of stretching the runway so JT, Ben, and Captain Crunch could manage to land their Su-34s. It was the best they could do, because by the time the Su-34s even took off from Nantucket, most of the 7CAV planned to be otherwise engaged.

The three fighters formed up at five thousand feet over Nantucket Bay. Power plants checked and single-pilot configs entered and confirmed, they set their flight computers to mission-command and turned southwest.

New York City was just a twenty-minute flight from here.