HILL 152, ICELAND
“What’s that?” Edwards saw it first for a change. The wide silver wings of a Badger bomber skirted in and out of the lower cloud layer. Then something else. It was smaller, and it disappeared back into the clouds.
“Was that a fighter?”
“I didn’t see anything, sir.” Garcia had been looking in the wrong direction. The sound passed overhead, the distinctive whine of turbojets on a low throttle setting.
The lieutenant was becoming a master at getting his radio in operation. “Doghouse, this is Beagle, and things are rotten. Do you copy?”
“Roger, Beagle. What do you have for us?”
“We have aircraft flying overhead, westbound, probably for Keflavik. Stand by.”
“I can hear ‘em, but I don’t see nothin’.” Garcia handed the glasses over.
“I saw one twin-engine aircraft, probably a bomber, and one other aircraft, a lot smaller, like a fighter. We have aircraft sounds overhead, but we got solid clouds at about two thousand feet. No more visual sightings.”
“You say heading toward Keflavik?”
“That’s affirm. The bomber appeared to be westbound and descending.”
“Any chance you can walk back to Keflavik to see what’s happening there?”
Edwards didn’t speak for a second. Couldn’t the bastard read a map? That meant walking thirty miles over bare ground.
“Negative. Say again, negative, no chance. Over.”
“Understood, Beagle. Sorry about that. I had orders to ask. Get back to us when you have a better count. You’re doing good, guys. Hang in there. Out.”
“They asked if we wanted to walk over to Keflavik,” Edwards announced as he took off his headset. “I said no.”
“Real good, sir,” Smith observed. At least Air Force officers weren’t total idiots.
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
The first MiG-29 Fulcrum landed at Keflavik a minute later. It taxied behind a base jeep and stopped close to the tower. The major in command of the base was there to meet it.
“Welcome to Keflavik!”
“Excellent. Find me a lavatory,” the colonel replied.
The major motioned him to his own jeep—the Americans had left seventy jeeps behind, plus over three hundred private automobiles—and drove toward the tower. The American radios had been destroyed, but the plumbing was made of sterner stuff.
“How many?”
“Six,” the colonel answered. “A Goddamned Norwegian F-16 jumped us off Hammerfest and got one before we knew he was there. Another aborted with engine trouble, and a third had to land at Akureyri. Do we have men there?”
“Not yet. We have only one helicopter. More should be coming in today.” They pulled to the door. “Inside, second door on the right.”
“Thank you, Comrade Major!” The colonel was back in three minutes. “The unglamorous side of flying fighter aircraft. Somehow we never warn our cadets about this.”
“Here, coffee. The previous occupants were most kind to us.” The major unscrewed an American thermos. The colonel took the cup, savoring the flavor as though it were fine brandy while he watched his fighters land. “We have your missiles all ready for you, and we can refuel every aircraft from our trucks. How soon can you fly again?”
“I’d prefer that my men get at least two hours to rest and eat. And I want those aircraft dispersed after they’re fueled. Have you been hit yet?”
“Only two reconnaissance aircraft, and we killed one. If we’re lucky—”
“Luck is for fools. The Americans will hit us today. I would.”
USS NIMITZ
“We have a new intel source on Iceland, code name Beagle,” Toland reported. They were in the carrier’s Combat Information Center now. “He counted over eighty transport flights into Reykjavik last night, at least six fighters with them. That’s enough airlift capacity for a whole airborne division and then some. Doghouse in Scotland says that they have an unconfirmed report of Soviet fighters landing now.”
“Have to be a long-range one. Foxhound, maybe a Fulcrum,” CAG said. “If they have them to spare. Well, we weren’t planning to visit the place just yet. We might have a problem with them trying raid-escort, though.”
“Any word on E-3 support from the U.K.?” Baker asked Svenson.
“Looks like none.”
“Toland, when do you expect our friends to arrive?”
“The RORSAT passes overhead in twenty minutes. They’ll probably want that data before they take off. They could take off at any time after that, Admiral. If the Backfires tank up partway down and proceed at max power, two hours. That’s worst case. More likely four to five hours.”
“CAG?”
The air group commander looked tense. “Each carrier has a Hummer radar bird up, a pair of F-14 Tomcats with each. Two more Tomcats on the catapults, ready to go at five minutes’ notice, another Hummer and a tanker. The rest of the fighters are at plus-fifteen on the roof, loaded and fueled. The flight crews are briefed. One Prowler over the formation, the rest ready to go at fifteen. The A-7s have buddy stores rigged. We’re ready. Foch has her Crusaders at plus-fifteen. Good birds, but short legs. When the time comes we’ll use them for overhead coverage.”
KIROVSK, R.S.F.S.R.
The Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite, called a RORSAT, passed over the formation at 0310. Its radar transmitter noted the formation and its cameras tracked in on their wakes. Five minutes later, the data was in Moscow. Fifteen minutes after that, flight crews were given their final brief at four military air bases grouped around the city of Kirovsk on the Kola Peninsula. The crews were quiet, no less tense than their American targets. Both sides mulled over the same thoughts. This was the exercise both sides had practiced for over fifteen years. Millions of hours of planning, studies and simulations were about to be put to the test.
The Badgers lifted off first, pushed by their twin Mikulin engines. Each takeoff was an effort. The bombers were so heavily loaded that the tower controllers reached out with their minds to wish every aircraft into the still morning air. Once off the ground they headed north, forming up into loose regimental formations just north of Murmansk before heading west and skirting past the North Cape, before their slow left turns took them toward the North Atlantic.
Twenty miles off the North Russian coast, USS Narwhal hovered beneath the surface of a slate-gray sea. The quietest submarine in the U.S. fleet, she was a specialized intelligence-gathering platform that spent more time on the Soviet coast than did some ships in the Russian Navy. Her three thin ESM antennae were raised, as was a million-dollar search periscope. Technicians aboard listened in on low-power radio conversations between aircraft as they formed up. Three uniformed intelligence specialists and a civilian from the National Security Agency evaluated the strength of the raid and decided that it was large enough to risk a warning broadcast. An additional mast was raised and aimed at a communications satellite twenty-four thousand miles away. The burst transmission lasted less than a fifteenth of a second.
USS NIMITZ
The message was automatically relayed to four separate communications stations, and within thirty seconds was at SACLANT headquarters. Five minutes after that, Toland had the yellow message form in his hand. He walked immediately to Admiral Baker, and handed the message over: 0418z REALTIME SENDS WARNING AIR RAID TAKE OFF 0400 HEADING WEST FROM KOLA ESTIMATE FIVE REGIMENT PLUS.
Baker checked his watch. “Fast work. CAG?”
The air group commander looked at the form and walked to a phone. “Shoot off the plus-fives, recall the patrol aircraft when they get to station, and set up two more Tomcats and a Hummer on plus-five. I want the returning aircraft turned around immediately. Reserve one catapult for tankers.” He came back. “With your permission, sir, I propose to put another pair of F-14s and another Hummer up in an hour, and put all the fighters on plus-five. At 0600, the rest of the fighters go up, with tankers in support. We’ll meet them with everything we have about t
wo hundred miles out and kick their ass.”
“Very well. Comments?”
Svenson looked pensively at the master plot. Circles were already being drawn for the farthest possible advance of the Soviet bombers.
“The Brits get the same warning?”
“Yes, sir,” Toland answered. “Norwegians, too. With luck, one or the other might make contact with the raid and nibble at it some, maybe put a trailer with them.”
“Nice idea, but don’t count on it. If I was running the attack, I’d come way west and turn south right over Iceland.” Svenson looked back at the plot. “You think Realtime would have broadcast a warning for Bear-Ds?”
“My information, sir, is that they are allowed to broadcast only for three regiments or more. Ten or twenty Bears wouldn’t be enough. They might not even notice.”
“So right now we probably have a herd of Bears out there, not emitting anything, just flying around listening for our radar signals.”
Toland nodded agreement. The battle group was a circle of ships with a radius of thirty miles, the carriers and troop ships in the center surrounded by nine missile-armed escorts and six more specialized antisubmarine ships. None of the ships had a radar transmitter working. Instead, they got all their electronic information from the two circling E-2C air-surveillance aircraft, known colloquially as Hummers, whose radars swept a circle over four hundred miles across.
The drama being played out was more complex than the most intricate game. More than a dozen variable factors could interact, with their permutations running into the thousands. Radar detection range depended on altitude and consequent distance to the horizon that neither eyes nor radar can see past. An aircraft could avoid, or at least delay, detection by skimming the waves. But this carried severe penalties in fuel consumption and range.
They had to locate the battle group without being detected by it first. The Russians knew where the carrier group was, but it would move in the four hours required for the bombers to get there. Their missiles needed precise information if they were to home in on the raid’s primary target, the two American and one French carrier, or the mission was a wasted effort.
Putting the group’s fighters on station to intercept the incoming raid depended on expert prognostication of its direction and speed. Their job: to locate and engage the bombers before they could find the carriers.
For both sides, the fundamental choice was whether or not to radiate, to use their radar transmitters. Either choice carried benefits and dangers, and there was no “best” solution to the problem. Nearly every American ship carried powerful air-search radars that could locate the raid two hundred or more miles away. But those radar signals could be detected at an even greater range, generating a return signal, that would potentially allow the Soviets to circle the formation, pinpoint it, then converge in from all points of the compass.
The game was hide and seek, played over a million square miles of ocean. The losers died.
NORTH ATLANTIC
The Soviet Bear-D reconnaissance bombers were passing south of Iceland. There were ten of them, covering a front of a thousand miles. The monstrous propeller-driven aircraft were packed full of electronics gear and crewed by men with years of training and experience in locating the American carrier groups. At the nose, tail, and wingtips, sensitive antennae were already reaching out, searching for the signals from American radar transmitters. They would close on those signals, chart them with great care, but remain forever outside the estimated detection radius. Their greatest fear was that the Americans would use no radar at all, or that they would switch their sets on and off at random intervals and locations, which posed the danger of the Bears’ blundering directly into armed ships and aircraft. The Bear had twenty hours of endurance, but the penalty for it was virtually no combat capability. It was too slow to run from an interceptor, and had no ability to fight one. “We have located the enemy battle force,” the crews’ bitter joke ran: “Dosvidania, Rodina!” But they were a proud group of professionals. The attack bombers depended on them—as did their country.
Eight hundred miles north of Iceland, the Badgers altered their course to one-eight-zero, due south at five hundred knots. They had avoided the still-dangerous Norwegians, and it was not thought that the British would reach this far out. These air crews kept a nervous watch out their windows nevertheless, their own electronic sensors fully operative and under constant scrutiny. An attack by tactical fighters against Iceland was expected at any time, and the bomber crews knew that any NATO fighter pilot worthy of his name would instantly jettison his bombload for a chance at air-to-air combat with so helpless a target as a twenty-year-old Badger. They had reached the end of their useful lives. Cracks were developing in the wings. The turbine blades in their jet engines were worn, reducing performance and fuel efficiency.
Two hundred miles behind them, the Backfire bombers were finishing their refueling operations. The Tu-22Ms had been accompanied by tankers, and, after topping off their tanks, they headed south, slightly west of the Badgers’ course track. With an AS-6 Kingfish missile hanging under each wing, the Backfires, too, were potentially vulnerable, but the Backfire had the ability to run at high Mach numbers and stood a fair chance at survival, even in the face of determined fighter opposition. Their crews were the elite of Soviet Naval Aviation, well-paid and pampered by Soviet society, their commanders had reminded them at the regimental briefings. Now it was time to deliver.
All three groups of aircraft came south at optimum cruise speed, their flight crews monitoring fuel consumption, engine heat, and many other gauges for the long over-water flight.
USS NIMITZ
Toland stepped outside for a breath of air. It was a fine morning, the cotton-ball clouds overhead turning briefly pink from the sunrise. Saratoga and Foch were visible on the horizon, perhaps eight miles away, their size impressive even at this distance. Closer in, Ticonderoga was cutting through the five-foot seas, white-painted missiles visible on her twin launchers. A few blinker lights traded signals. Otherwise the ships in view were gray shapes without noise, waiting. Nimitz’s deck was covered with aircraft. F-14 Tomcat interceptors sat everywhere. Two were hooked up on the midships catapults, only a hundred feet from him, their two-man flight crews dozing. The fighters carried Phoenix long-range missiles. The attack bombers carried buddy-store tanks instead of weapons. They’d be used to refuel the fighters in flight, enabling them to remain aloft an extra two hours. Deck crewmen in multicolored shirts scurried about, checking and rechecking the aircraft. The carrier began turning to port, coming around into the westerly wind in preparation for launching aircraft. He checked his watch. 0558. Time to get back to CIC. The carrier would go to general quarters in two minutes. The intelligence watch officer took one more breath of fresh sea air and wondered if it would be his last.
NORTH ATLANTIC
“Contact!” the technician said over the Bear’s interphone. “Signals indicate an American airborne radar transmitter, carrier type.”
“Give me a bearing!” the pilot commanded.
“Patience, Comrade Major.” The technician made an adjustment on his board. His radio-interferometers timed the signals as they arrived at antennae arrayed all over the aircraft. “Southeast. Bearing to signal is one-three-one. Signal strength one. He is quite distant. Bearing is not changing as yet. I recommend we maintain a constant course for the present.”
The pilot and copilot exchanged a look, but no words. Somewhere off to their left was an American E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. A flight crew of two—a radar intercept officer and two radar operators. It could manage the air battle for over a hundred enemy aircraft, could vector a missile-armed interceptor in at them within seconds of detection. The pilot wondered just how accurate his information was on the Hawkeye’s radar. What if they had already detected his Bear? He knew the answer to that. His first warning would come when he detected the fire-control radar of an American F-14 Tomcat heading right at him. The Bear held course one
-eight-zero while the plotting officer tracked the change in bearing to the radar signal. In ten minutes they might just have an accurate fix. If they lived that long. They would not break radio silence until they had a fix.
“I have it,” the plotting officer reported. “Estimate distance to contact is six hundred fifty kilometers, position forty-seven degrees, nine minutes north, thirty-four degrees, fifty minutes west.”
“Get it out,” the pilot ordered. A directional HF antenna in the aircraft’s tail fin turned within its housing and radioed the information to the raid commander, whose Bear command aircraft was a hundred miles behind the snoopers.
The raid commander compared this datum with that from the reconnaissance satellite. Now he had two pieces of information. The Americans’ position three hours ago was sixty miles south of the estimated plot for the Hawkeye. The Americans probably had two of them up, northeast and northwest of the formation. That was normal fleet doctrine. So, the carrier group was right about . . . here. The Badgers were heading right for it. They would encounter the American radar coverage in . . . two hours. Good, he said to himself. Everything is going according to plan.
USS NIMITZ
Toland watched the aircraft plot in silence. The radar picture from the Hawkeyes was being transmitted to the carrier by digital radio link, enabling the battle group commander to follow everything. The same data went to the group air defense boss on Ticonderoga and every other ship fitted with the Naval Tactical Data System. That included the French ships, which had long since been equipped to operate closely with the U.S. Navy. So far there was nothing to be seen except the tracks of American military and commercial aircraft ferrying men and supplies across the ocean, and dependents back to the States. These were beginning to swing south. Warned that an air battle was possible, the pilots of DC-10s and C-5As were prudently keeping out of the way, even if it meant having to land and refuel on the way to their destinations.