Missile Gap

He'll just have to see for himself.

Chapter Fifteen: Rushmore

The Korolev is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He's a fighter jock at heart and he can't stand Navy bullshit. Still, it's a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn't have a cockpit, or even a flight deck — it has a bridge, like a ship, with the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the captain's chair. When it's thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the wave-tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew's vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like demented death-watch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine rooms as possible. It's a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator's friend, and skimming across this infinite gray expanse between planet-sized land-masses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by instinct, a sailor.

They're two days outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even though they're cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha — who is visibly wilting from his twelve hour shift at the con — and straps himself in. "Anything to report?" He asks.

"I don't like the look of the ocean ahead," says Misha. He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin's left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and salutes.

"Permission to report, sir?" Gagarin nods. "We're coming up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we're on course for home but we haven't charted this route and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Any time now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we're going to have to start keeping a weather eye out."

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but now it's a dangerous but routine task. "You have kept the towed array at altitude?" he asks.

"Yes sir," Misha responds. The towed array is basically a kite-born radar, tugged along behind the Korolev on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. "Nothing showing—"

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand and waves three fingers.

"—Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing…okay, let's see it."

"Maintain course," Gagarin announces. "Let's throttle back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we're running into." He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw's shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the Korolev generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns gray and murky and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a down-draft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for take-off runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn't flying as usual as far as Gagarin's concerned, and the one nightmare all Ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose-first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He's beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom out of the gray clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots shouts: "Icebergs!"

"Fucking hell." Gagarin sits bolt upright. "Start all boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the hell out of this!" He turns to Shaw, his face gray. "Bring the towed array aboard, now."

"Shit." Misha starts flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control central. "Icebergs?"