“Fighter weather,” agreed Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jeffers, commander of the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the “Black Knights,” most of whose F-15 Eagle interceptors were sitting in the open a bare hundred yards away. The pilots were in those fighters, waiting. They’d been waiting for ninety minutes now. Two hours before, they’d been warned of a large number of Soviet aircraft taking off from their tactical air bases on the Kola Peninsula, destination unknown.
Keflavik was always a busy place, but for the last week it had been a madhouse. The airport was a combination Navy and Air Force base and a busy international airport at which many airliners stopped to refuel.
The past week had seen this traffic supplemented by grim tactical fighters transiting from the United States and Canada to Europe, cargo aircraft transporting overloads of critical equipment, and airliners returning to America crowded with pale tourists and dependents of the military men who were now on the battle line. The same had happened to Keflavik. Three thousand wives and children had been evacuated. The base facility was cleared for action. If the Soviets kicked off the war that seemed to be springing from the ground like a new volcano, Keflavik was as ready as it could be.
“With your permission, Colonel, I want to check a few things at the tower. This forecast is pretty solid, for the next twelve hours anyway.”
“Jet stream?” Colonel Jeffers looked up from the yard-square chart of isobars and wind-trees.
“Same place it’s been all week, sir, no sign at all of a change.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
Edwards put on his cap and walked out the door. He wore a thin blue officer’s jacket over his Marine-style fatigues, pleased that the Air Force was still pretty casual about dress codes. His jeep held the rest of his “battle gear,” a .38 revolver and pistol belt, and the field jacket that went with the camouflage gear everybody had been issued three days before. They’d thought of everything, Edwards reflected as he started up the jeep for the quarter-mile drive to the tower. Even the flak jacket.
Keflavik had to get hit, Edwards reminded himself. Everybody knew it, prepared for it, and then tried not to think about it. This most isolated of all NATO outposts on the western coast of Iceland was the barred gate to the North Atlantic. If Ivan wanted to fight a naval war, Iceland had to be neutralized. From Keflavik’s four runways flew eighteen Eagle interceptors, nine sub-hunting P-3C Orions, and deadliest of all, three E-3A AWACS birds, the eyes of the fighters. Two were operating now; one was circling twenty miles northeast of Cape Fontur, the other directly over Ritstain, 150 miles north of Keflavik. This was most unusual. With only three AWACS birds available, keeping one constantly in the air was difficult enough. The commander of the Iceland defense forces was taking all of this very seriously. Edwards shrugged. If there really were Backfires bearing down on them, there was nothing else for him to do. He was the brand-new squadron meteorological officer, and he’d just given his weather report.
Edwards parked his jeep in an officer’s slot next to the tower and decided to take his .38 with him. The lot was not fenced, and there was no telling if someone might want to “borrow” his handgun. The base was crawling with a company of Marines and another of Air Force police, all looking very nasty with their M-16 rifles and web belts festooned with grenades. He hoped they’d be careful with those. Late the next day, a whole Marine Amphibious Unit was due to arrive to beef up base security, something that should have been done a week earlier but had been delayed, partly because of the Icelandic sensitivity regarding large numbers of armed foreigners, but mainly due to the unreal speed with which this crisis had developed. He trotted up the outside stairs and found the tower’s control room crowded with eight people rather than the usual five.
“Hi, Jerry,” he said to the boss, Navy lieutenant Jerry Simon. The Icelandic civilian controllers who usually worked here were nowhere to be seen. Well, Edwards thought, there’s no civilian traffic for them to control.
“Morning, Mike,” was the response. The ongoing joke at Keflavik. It was 0315 hours local time. Morning. The sun was already up, glaring in at them from the northeast through roll-down shades inside of the tilted glass windows.
“Let’s have an attitude check!” Edwards said as he walked over to his meteorological instruments.
“I hate this fucking place!” the tower crew answered at once.
“Let’s have a positive attitude check.”
“I positively hate this fucking place!”
“Let’s have a negative attitude check.”
“I don’t like this fucking place!”
“Let’s have a short attitude check.”
“Fuckit!” Everyone had a good laugh. They needed it.
“Nice to see that we’re all maintaining our equilibrium,” Edwards observed. The short, scrawny officer had become instantly popular on his arrival two months earlier. A native of Eastpoint, Maine, and a graduate of the Air Force Academy, his glasses prevented him from flying. His diminutive size—five—six and a hundred twenty pounds—was not designed to command respect, but his infectious grin, ready supply of jokes, and recognized expertise at making sense of the confused North Atlantic weather patterns had combined to make him an acceptable companion for anyone at Keflavik. Everyone thought he would make one hell of a TV weatherman one day.
“MAC Flight Five-Two-Zero, roger. Roll her out, Big Guy, we need the room,” said a tired controller. A few hundred yards away, a C-5A Galaxy cargo plane began to accelerate down runway one-eight. Edwards took a pair of binoculars to watch. It was hard to get used to the fact that something so monstrous could actually fly.
“Any word from anywhere?” Simon asked Edwards.
“Nope, nothing since the Norwegian report. Lots of activity at Kola. You know, I picked a hell of a time to come here to work,” Mike replied. He went back to checking the calibration of his digital barometer.
It had started six weeks before. The Soviet Naval and Long-Range Aviation groups based at a half-dozen airfields around Severomorsk had exercised almost continuously, flying attack-profile missions that could have been directed at nearly anyone or anything. Then two weeks before, the activity had been cut way back. That was the ominous part: first they drilled all their flight crews to perfection and then they went to a stand-down maintenance period to make sure that every bird and every instrument was also fully operational . . . What were they doing now? An attack against Bodø in Norway? Or Iceland maybe? Another exercise? There was no telling.
Edwards lifted a clipboard to sign off for having checked his tower instruments that day. He could have left it to his enlisted technicians, but they were backstopping the aircraft techs with the fighter squadron, and he could handle it for them. Besides, it gave him an excuse to visit the tower and—
“Mr. Simon,” the senior enlisted controller said rapidly. “I just copied a Flash from Sentry One: Warning Red. Many bandits inbound, sir. Approaching from due north to northeast—Sentry Two is checking in . . . they got ’em, too. Jesus. Sounds like forty to fifty bandits, sir.” Edwards noted that the inbounds were being called Bandits instead of the usual Zombies.
“Anything friendly coming in?”
“Sir, we got a MAC C-141 twenty minutes out, eight more behind it at five-minute intervals, all inbound from Dover.”
“Tell them to turn back, and get an acknowledgment! Keflavik is closed to all inbounds until further notice.” Simon turned to his telecommunications man. “Tell Air-Ops to radio SACLANT that we’re under attack, and to get the word out. I—”
Klaxons erupted all around them. Below, in the early-morning shadows, ground crewmen pulled red-flagged safety pins off the waiting interceptors. Edwards saw a pilot drain a Styrofoam cup and begin to strap himself in tight. The starter carts next to each fighter belched black smoke as they generated power to turn the engines.
“Tower, this is Hunter Leader. We’re scrambling. Clear those runways, boy!”
Simon took the microphone. “Roger, Hunter L
eader, the runways are yours. Scatter Plan Alpha. Go for it! Out.”
Below, canopies were coming down, chocks were pulled away from wheels, and each crew chief gave his pilot a smart salute. The shriek of jet engines changed to a roar as the aircraft started to roll awkwardly off the flight line.
“Where’s your battle station, Mike?” Simon asked.
“The met building.” Edwards nodded and headed for the door. “ ’Luck, guys.”
Aboard Sentry Two, the radar operators watched a broad semicircle of blips converging on them. Each blip had “BGR” painted next to it, plus data on course, altitude, and speed. Each blip was a Tu-16 Badger bomber of Soviet Naval Aviation. There were twenty-four of them, inbound for Keflavik at a speed of six hundred knots. They had approached at low altitude to stay below the E-3A’s radar horizon, and, once detected, were now climbing rapidly, two hundred miles away. This mission profile enabled the radar operators to classify them instantly as hostile. There were four Eagles on Combat Air Patrol, two of them with operating AWACS, but it was close to changeover point and the fighters were too low on fuel to race after the Badgers on afterburner. They were directed to head for the incoming Russian bombers at six hundred knots, and could not yet detect the Badgers on their own missile-targeting radars.
Sentry One off Cape Fontur reported something worse. Her blips were supersonic Tu-22M Backfires, coming in slowly enough to indicate that they were heavily loaded with external ordnance. The Eagles here also moved off to intercept. A hundred miles behind them, the two F-15s kept on point defense over Reykjavik had just been topped off from an orbiting tanker and were charging northeast at a thousand knots while the remainder of the squadron was even now leaving the ground. The radar picture from both AWACS aircraft was being transmitted by digital link to Keflavik’s fighter-ops center so that ground personnel could monitor the action. Now that the fighters were rotating off the ground, the crews for every other aircraft at the air station worked frantically to ready their birds for flight.
They had practiced this task eight times in the past month. Some flight crews had been sleeping with their aircraft. Others were summoned from their quarters, no more than four hundred yards away. Those aircraft just back from patrol had their fuel tanks topped off, and were pre-flighted by the ground crews. Marine and Air Force guards not already at their posts rushed to them. It was just as well that the attack had come at this hour. There was only a handful of civilians about, and civilian air traffic was at its lowest. On the other hand, the men at Keflavik had been on double duty for a week now, and they were tired. Things which might have been done in five minutes now took seven or eight.
Edwards was back in his meteorological office, wearing his field jacket, flak jacket, and “fritz” style helmet. His emergency duty station—he could not think of his office as a “battle” station—was his assigned post. As if someone might need an especially deadly weather chart with which to attack an incoming bomber! The service had to have a plan for everything, Edwards knew. There had to be a plan. It didn’t have to make sense. He went downstairs to Air-Ops.
“I got breakaway on Bandit Eight, one—two birds launched. The machine says they’re AS-4s,” a Sentry controller reported. The senior officer got on the radio for Keflavik.
MV JULIUS FUCIK
Twenty miles southwest of Keflavik, the “Doctor Lykes” was also a beehive of activity. As each Soviet bomber squadron launched its air-to-ground missiles, its commander transmitted a predetermined codeword that the Fucik copied. Her time had come.
“Rudder left,” Captain Kherov ordered. “Bring his bow into the wind.”
A full regiment of airborne infantry, many of them seasick from two weeks aboard the huge barge-carrier, was at work testing and loading weapons. The Fucik’s augmented crew was stripping the falsework from the aftermost four “barges,” revealing each in fact to be a Lebed-type assault hovercraft. The six-man crew of each removed the covers over the air intakes that led to the engines they had tended with loving care for a month. Satisfied, they waved to the craft commanders, who lit off the three engines in each of the aftermost pair.
The ship’s first officer stood at his elevator control station aft. On a hand signal, an eighty-five-man infantry company plus a reinforced mortar team were loaded into each craft. Power was increased, the hovercraft lifted up on their air cushions and were winched aft. In another four minutes, the vehicles were resting on the barge-loading elevator that formed the stem of the Seabee vessel.
“Lower away,” the first officer ordered. The winch operators lowered the elevator to the surface. The sea was choppy, and four-foot waves lapped at the Fucik’s bifurcated stem. When the elevator was level with the sea, first one, then the other Lebed commander increased power and moved off. At once, the elevator returned to the topmost deck while the first pair of hovercraft circled their mothership. In five more minutes, the four assault craft moved off in box formation toward the Keflavik Peninsula.
The Fucik continued her turn, returning to a northerly course to make the next hovercraft trip a shorter one. Her weather deck was ringed with armed troops carrying surface-to-air missiles and machine guns. Andreyev remained on the bridge, knowing this was where he belonged, but wishing he were leading his assault troops.
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
“Kef-Ops, the bandits are all turning right back after launching their ASMs. So far it’s been two birds per aircraft. We got fifty—make that fifty-six inbound missiles, and more are being launched. Nobody behind them, though. I repeat, nothing behind the bomber force. At least we don’t have any paratroopers headed in. Hunker down, guys, we now have sixty inbound missiles,” Edwards heard as he came through the door.
“At least they won’t be nukes,” said a captain.
“They’re shooting a hundred missiles at us—they don’t fuckin’ need nukes!” replied another.
Edwards watched the radar picture over the shoulder of one of the officers. It was eerily like an arcade game. Big, slow-moving blips denoted the aircraft. Smaller, quicker blips were the Mach-2 missiles.
“Gotcha!” hooted the enlisted radar operator. The leading Eagle had gotten within missile range of the Badgers and exploded one with a Sparrow missile—ten seconds after it had launched its own missiles. A second Sparrow missed its separate target, but a third appeared locked on it. The first fighter’s wingman was just launching at yet another Russian. The Soviets had thought this one out, Edwards saw. They were attacking from all around the northern littoral, with lots of space between the bombers so that no single fighter could engage more than one or two. It was almost like—
“Anybody check the geometry of this?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” The captain looked around. “How come you aren’t where you belong?”
Edwards ignored the irrelevancy. “What’s the chance they’re trying to draw our fighters out, like?”
“Expensive bait.” The captain dismissed the idea. “You’re saying they might have launched their ASMs from farther out. Maybe they don’t fly as far as we thought. Point is, those missiles are ten minutes out now, the first of them, with about a five- or seven-minute delay to the last. And not a Goddamned thing we can do about it.”
“Yeah.” Edwards nodded. The Air-Ops/Met building was a two-story frame structure that vibrated every time the wind hit fifty knots. The lieutenant took out a stick of gum and started chewing on it. In ten minutes a hundred missiles, each carrying about a ton of high explosives—or a nuclear warhead—would start falling. The men outside would get the worst of it; the enlisted men and the flight crews trying to get the airplanes ready to race off. His assigned job was merely to keep out of the way. It made him a little ashamed. The fear he could now taste along with the peppermint made him more ashamed.
The Eagles were now all airborne, racing north. The last of the Backfires had just launched their missiles and were turning back northeast at full power as the Eagles raced at twelve hundred knots to catch up. Three o
f the interceptors launched missiles, and they succeeded in killing a pair of Backfires and damaging a third. The “Zulu” fighters which had scrambled off the deck could not catch the Backfires, the commanding controller on Sentry One noted, cursing himself for not having sent them after the older, less valuable Badgers, some of which they might have caught. Instead, he ordered them to slow down, and had his controllers vector them toward the supersonic missiles.
Penguin 8, the first of the P-3C Orion antisubmarine warfare aircraft, was rolling now, down runway two-two. It had been on patrol only five hours before, and its flight crew was still trying to shake off the sleep as they rotated the propjet aircraft off the concrete.
“Tipping over now,” the radar operator said. The first Russian missile was almost overhead, beginning its terminal dive. The Eagles had hit two of the incoming missiles, but courses and altitudes had been against them, and most of their Sparrows had missed, unable to catch the Mach-2 missiles. The F-15s orbited over central Iceland, well away from their base, as each pilot wondered if he’d have an airfield to return to.
Edwards cringed as the first landed—or didn’t land. The air-to-surface missile had a radar-proximity fuse. It detonated twenty meters off the ground, and the effects were horrific. It exploded directly over International Highway, two hundred yards from Air-Ops, its fragments ripping into a number of buildings, the worst hit being the base fire station. Edwards fell to the floor as fragments lashed through the wooden wall. The door was torn off its hinges by the blast and the air filled with dust. A moment later, at the Esso facility a hundred yards away, a fuel truck exploded, sending a fireball towering into the sky, and dropping burning jet fuel for blocks around. Electrical power was immediately lost. Radars, radios, and room lights went out at once, and battery-powered emergency lights didn’t come on as they were supposed to. For a terrified moment, Edwards wondered if the first missile really might have been a nuke. The blast had rippled through his chest, and he felt sudden nausea as his body tried to adjust to the sensations that assaulted it. He looked around and saw a man knocked unconscious by a falling light fixture. He didn’t know if he was supposed to buckle his helmet strap or not, and somehow this question seemed enormously important at the moment, though he didn’t remember why.