Chapter Forty-Four

The Cobra Brothers were in the pilots’ ready room aboard the Isakov when the call finally came.

They’d been waiting for the red radiophone to ring for the past hour. Now Don had a short conversation with the carrier’s battered communications room. Not much of the equipment was working there, but it was enough for the techs to get an emergency call from Hawk Hunter.

“He gave coordinates for five surface vessels headed south and the message: ‘Assistance appreciated,’” the tech told Don.

Scrambling their new Kamov gunships, the Cobras were airborne forty-five seconds later.

They immediately headed southwest at top speed and began long-range radar sweeps of the area where Hunter reported encountering the five ships. It took a couple of wipes, but on the third, the five blips suddenly appeared.

They were not sailing in a necklace formation; instead they were line ahead, like a spear pointed at New York City.

Yet they were all bunched together for some reason. The lead destroyer was only about a quarter mile ahead of the last ship in the group, extremely close when sailing at night. Plus, the Kamovs’ defensive weapons suites said the destroyers’ antiaircraft radars were hot and interacting.

Something else was going on here.

The Cobras’ FLIR screens suddenly picked up a small blip zipping between the ships. Flashes of antiaircraft fire were following it in the dark. Don was the first to figure it out.

“Freaking Hawk,” he said into his helmet mic. “He’s nuts. …”

“He sniffed some of the hal-lou, brother,” Phil explained. “Sometimes it takes a while for the powder to wear off.”

By that time, the Cobra Brothers were close enough to see the action through their night-vision goggles. The light show was being caused by Hunter’s clown plane flying madly between the Russian ships, taunting them to fire at him. But more than that, he was actually buzzing the bridges of the ships, doing the stop and hover, firing his M-16 into their control rooms, and then zooming off again.

He’d forced the destroyers to bunch up so they could establish patterns of cooperative fire—and they had to slow down considerably to do this. Every second they could be delayed from reaching New York would be a huge help—Hunter’s thinking all along. Plus, they would make good targets for someone with some ammo.

Both Cobras streaked over the little drama and, interpreting all its elements, fired off three bursts from their cannons at about a thousand feet. Combined, they lit up the ocean for miles.

It was their signal to Hunter.

We got this.

The Wingman understood right away. They saw him do a complete flip and then an extreme wing wag.

And then he was off, heading back to the battle in New York City.

The next ten minutes were so surreal, the Cobra Brothers thought maybe they’d somehow gotten a whiff of the powder, too.

They’d spent the scramble time taping English translations over their Kamovs’ panel lights. They’d gotten about a third of them done when the call arrived. The rest were still in Russian.

The Kamov was not unlike the AH-1 Cobra. Since it had dual controls, they could each fly one alone, without needing a copilot to ready and aim the gun. Unlike a lot of Russian helicopters that drove like trucks, the Kamov was made of composite materials and had that interesting Ugly Sister aerodynamic look. As Hunter had said, they flew like Ferraris.

They also packed a wallop. Each was carrying four Stutsia antiship missiles, plus two 30-millimeter cannons in a movable nose turret. And because this was a naval version of the Kamov, each was carrying a single 9ZN homing torpedo.

But there was a problem. The Cobras might sink two of these ships—and the first one might be a complete surprise since the destroyers were probably painting the Kamovs and assuming they were friendly aircraft that had just chased the bug away—but copters were slower than attack jets, and even if they got the first two, by that time, the gunners on the other three would have them locked in, and that would be the end of it.

But still, it had to be done.

They came out of the nearly full moon and attacked the last ship in line. Squeezing their fire buttons at the same moment, the Cobras sent two antiship missiles each rocketing off their rails. Designed to home in on electronic signals, all four slammed into an area right below the destroyer’s bridge, most likely its combat room.

The combined explosion was tremendous. The ship broke in two, this time from the top down. It was soon dead in the water and sinking—at least the Cobra Brothers knew what the green fire button on the far left of their weapons panel meant.

But the trouble was, one missile would have been enough to easily sink the ship, two for sure. Four had been overkill and instantly depleted their supply of antiship missiles.

Now they had four ships and just one torpedo apiece, though, luckily, they’d translated its switch before liftoff. But the Russian ships were now tracking them with radar-controlled guns. And those guns were going hot.

Phil and Don Cobra had been working together for years. Each knew what to do. Phil swooped in on the next destroyer in line, firing his nose cannons but drawing fire from the rest of the ships. Meanwhile, Don snuck in from the opposite side and laid a 9NZ torpedo right on the stern of the ship third in line. The explosion created a strange blue flame, and the destroyer split in two. One half sank immediately, the other just kept on going, but with a lot of fire and smoke.

Before the surviving ships could react, Don played the part of moving target and Phil launched his torpedo. It clipped the bow of the second destroyer, blowing it off in one huge piece, definitely a mortal wound.

It had been lucky shooting. But two destroyers remained, and all the Cobras had left were their nose cannons, with only a couple dozen shells between them. Not good odds.

They knew that all of their efforts would add up to nothing if even one of the destroyers made it to New York, so they decided to disable, if not sink, both remaining ships. It would be an extremely perilous mission, though, as it meant coming right in on a ship’s weapons-packed broadside and trying to hit its rudder or props.

They wished each other good luck, both knowing this would probably be the end.

But just as they were beginning their attack, both destroyers suddenly blew up and sank.

A little smoke, a little fire, a huge explosion of water, and then they were gone.

Just like that.