“Condor One, you are cleared for Runway Ten right, takeoff in pairs. Wind is eleven knots, gusting to twenty, direction one-seven-zero. Temperature is two degrees.”
That was Centigrade, just above freezing. The water would be much colder. Volontov was wearing two sweaters and a pair of long underwear under his pressure suit, but they would not do much for him if he was forced down in the sea.
Releasing the brakes and turning on his wing lights and anticollision strobe, he pulled out of line for several meters, then turned right. His wingman followed, taking up a position off Volontov’s right wing.
The rest of the wing fell into line as the commander’s MiG passed the front row. A half kilometer later, he turned left onto the runway and braked to a stop. No other aircraft was scheduled, but he had checked the skies anyway.
Gurychenko, his wingman, took up a position to his right, and Volontov blinked his lights. Advancing his throttles, then releasing the brakes, Volontov allowed the MiG to roll. Gurychenko stayed right alongside.
He pushed the throttles outboard and shoved them into afterburner.
The MiG leaped like a ballet dancer. Halfway down the stage, she rose into the air, and he retraced the landing gear and flaps.
When he achieved 600 knots and 2,000 meters, Volontov shut down the afterburners. He continued to climb, waiting for the others to group around him.
There was very little talk on the radio. Everyone had his own thoughts to tend to, and the flight strategy had been ingrained after several briefings.
When the wing was complete, Volontov advanced his speed to Mach 1.5. They climbed quickly through low and scattered cloud cover and emerged into a starlit night. The clouds were like rolling plains below. Billowy steppes.
Three hundred kilometers out of Murmansk, Volontov spoke on the first tactical frequency. “This is Condor One. Code Neva. I say again, Code Neva.”
Condor Flight continued to climb, seeking the 15,000 meters they would maintain, while Vulture Flight leveled off at 6,000 meters and accelerated to Mach 1.7. When they were twenty kilometers ahead of the main group, they would return to Mach 1.5.
Tern Flight stayed at 6,000 meters. At the first sign of radar contact, they would dive to a hundred meters off the water and attempt to avoid the radar. After a few minutes passed, Volontov checked the positions by switching his radar to active.
Every one was in place.
He was proud of them.
His heading was shown as 000 degrees on the HUD, the reading taken from the gyroscopic compass. Magnetic compasses were less than reliable in the far north. The downward pull of magnetic north tended to depress the needles and make them jump from side to side.
Each of the flights met two tankers and topped off their fuel.
When the computer informed him that he had achieved 80 degrees north latitude, he checked his watch. 1112 hours, German time. They were two minutes ahead of schedule.
There would be ice shelf down there, but the clouds, which had been closing in, blocked a view of it.
On the second tactical frequency, Volontov said, “Delta Blue, Condor One.”
“Go Condor, you’ve got Blue.”
“Code Silver Lake.”
“Copy Silver Lake. Code Ural.”
“I receive Code Ural. Good luck, Delta Blue.”
“Same to you, fella.”
On the first tactical frequency, Volontov told his wing, “Code Volga.”
The entire flight turned to the west, Condor and Tern Flights waiting one and a half minutes, in order to stay directly behind Vulture flight.
Half an hour later, Rostoken reported the first radar probes.
*
Felix Eisenach was enjoying a late-night brandy with Hans Diederman in the engineer’s quarters on the fourth level when the duty officer called.
Diederman hung up the telephone and grabbed his jacket from the back of the sofa.
“There has been a radar contact, Herr General. Unidentified aircraft.”
Eisenach retrieved his own uniform jacket and slipped into it as he followed Diederman out of the small apartment and down the corridor to the operations room.
The dome did not have a military-type plotting screen, but one of the consoles was displaying the radar picture relayed by one of the Tornadoes over the ice platforms.
The console operator was a little excited. “I count … eh … count twenty aircraft, Lieutenant. Now, wait. Eight of them have disappeared into the clutter of ground return. They are flying very low.”
The duty officer looked up to Eisenach.
The general was extremely disappointed. He had been certain that attacks by aircraft were a thing of the past. Either the secret service’s leaking of the information about the fail-safe explosive devices had been ignored, or had not reached the proper ears. He should have used the newspapers, as the Americans had with the task force information.
“How many interceptors do we have up?” he asked.
The leutnant spoke to the operator. “Let us see our own radar.”
The screen flickered then displayed the area covered by the radar antenna on the dome. The Soviet — they had to be Soviet from that direction — aircraft were out of range.
With his finger, the operator checked off blips. “Twenty-four, Herr General.”
Twenty-four? That was all of the aircraft assigned to Weismann. Had the oberst known something that Eisenach had not known? The man had trouble communicating.
Nevertheless, Eisenach was happy to see all of the aircraft.
“Some of them are joining to meet the Soviets,” the leuntnant said. “See here? Ten of them.”
“That is good,” Eisenach said, relieved that Weismann had apparently instilled some discipline in his pilots.
The telephone rang, and the duty officer picked it up, listened, then handed the phone to Eisenach. “It is Admiral Schmidt.”
Eisenach took the handset. “Yes, Gerhard?”
“Did you know that twenty Soviet airplanes are coming at us, Felix?”
“Yes. I am watching on the screen.”
“And did you also know that the Soviet and British-American task forces have been turned northward and are making flank speed?”
“It could be expected,” Eisenach said. “As I mentioned to you.”
Inside, his stomach felt like jelly.
“I must have missed that mention,” Schmidt said. “I am going to sound General Quarters, and I am freeing my guns and missiles.”
“Of course,” Felix Eisenach said. “That is what you must do.”
Seventeen
The AEW&C plane was an Ilyushin II-76 using the call sign Sable. The air controller had a baritone, unflappable voice. He sounded so rock-solid that Volontov agreed with NATO. They called the airborne early warning and control aircraft version of the II-76 Mainstay.
“Condor, Vulture, this is Sable.”
“Proceed, Sable,” Pyotr Volontov said.
“You have ten targets on intercept course, velocity Mach 1.2. We interpret them as four Eurofighters at seven thousand meters and six Tornadoes at twelve thousand meters. They have you spotted, so you may as well go to active radar.”
Volontov activated the radar set. The sweep lit up so many blips that it took him several seconds to sort them out.
He depressed the transmit button, “Sable, Condor. The Eurofighters appear to be a probe.”
“Agreed, Condor.”
“Vulture Flight, scatter,” Volontov ordered. “Condor, Vulture, Tern, arm all.”
Volontov raised the protective cover and armed his guns and missiles. He selected two AA-11 missiles from the inboard left and right pylons.
On the radar screen, he saw Rostoken’s flight of six break up as preplanned. Three fighters spread out and began to climb toward the four Eurofighters. The other three hung back for a second, then went to afterburners and started to climb toward the Tornadoes.
The distance to initial contact was fifty kilometers. One of
the Eurofighter pilots was nervous. He released two missiles, probably Sky Flashes, far too early. The small blips dashed across the screen and died an early and ineffective death.
Tern and Condor Flights maintained their steady advance at Mach 1.5.
At forty kilometers, just inside the Sky Flash effective range, the Eurofighters fired eight missiles at the lead MiGs. Volontov thought that the Germans were too obviously trying to draw an attack by all of his craft.
The three lead MiGs returned fire with six missiles, then took evasive action, their blips disappearing in a cloud of chaff and flares.
The Eurofighters came on.
The Tornadoes at 12,000 meters held course and altitude. They were thirty kilometers behind the Eurofighters.
Volontov looked up through the windscreen. A second later, a white flash in the distance. Then another.
Sable reported. “Vulture Four is hit. One Eurofighter hit.”
Another transmission with lots of static. “ … Vulture Five … turbo … jets … woun … down … eject.”
“Sable to Mother Hen.” The air controller read off the coordinates of the downed MiG to the rescue craft.
He would bail out over the ice, but Volontov was doubtful of the man’s chances. Georgi Andrenko. Twenty-six years old, a joker in the barracks. Married for less than one year. Volontov’s resolve built up inside him, along with a boiling hatred.
“Vulture One to Two and Three. Dive now!”
On the screen, the three Vultures who had begun to climb toward the Tornadoes suddenly altered course and dove toward the Eurofighters.
The three remaining Eurofighters, their formation already disrupted by evasive tactics, began to dive as all of Vulture Flight converged on them.
That committed the Tornadoes. All six began a quick descent. Volontov watched until they passed through 8,000 meters.
“Condor. Tern Flight go to Mach two. Condors Three, Four, Five, and Six, Engage.”
Volontov dearly wanted to go with them. But he and Gurychenko would remain the cover for Tern Flight and go in for the cleanup. Tern Flight had to be protected.
He advanced his throttles and watched the HUD readout rise to Mach 2.
The screen began to fill with missile firings. All order disintegrated. Sable chanted instructions as the air controller tracked each airplane.
His earphones filled with a cacophony of Russian voices. “Vulture Seven, go left! … Got him! … Six, two missiles on you … hard, now, hard, now dive … ”
*
Mac Zeigman flew alongside the drogue and watched as his lighted fueling probe entered the cone.
“Here she comes, Tiger Leader,” the Pelican One fuel controller told him.
He trimmed his controls as the weight of the fuel was taken aboard the Tornado. He was not paying a lot of attention to the fueling process, a dangerous lack of concentration.
He was listening to the voices intoning the battle to the northeast. Longing to be there. Knowing he could do it better than anyone else.
“Major … ” his WSO said.
He looked at the fuel readout. “All right, Pelican. That does it.”
“Right, Tiger Leader. Next!”
Easing the throttle back, he pulled out of the drogue, then switched off the light and retracted the fuel probe.
He put the nose down and slid under the tanker, allowing the next plane to close in.
He checked his radar scan. Panther flight’s air battle was out of range. Four of Panther flight’s Tornadoes still circled north of him, over the center of the ice platforms.
Four of his own squadron’s aircraft were to the west, circling, waiting, while the two Eurofighters were below the clouds, near the center of the offshore platforms. He had three other Tornadoes with him southeast of the field. Svalbard Island was invisible below the cloud cover. The stars were clear against a black sky. Two hours to moon-rise.
He checked the chronometer. Soon, he would have to release the second and third elements of his own squadron for refueling, also.
He called the element in the north. “Panther Nine, Tiger Leader. What is your fuel state?”
“One-three-zero-zero kilograms, Tiger Leader.”
“Wait ten minutes, then join Pelican Three.”
“Affirmative, Tiger Leader.”
Zeigman eased in left rudder and left stick and went into a shallow left turn as his wingman slipped in alongside him.
His eyes roamed the dark valleys and mountains of the clouds.
To the south.
The MakoSharks would come from there.
And very soon.
They had done it before.
The Soviets would not draw him off, again. He put the dog fight out of his mind and focused on the south.
Tiger Drei and Tiger Vier, finished with their refueling, joined up off his left wing, in a four-finger formation.
The HUD gave him the speed and altitude. Five hundred knots and 10,000 meters, conserving fuel.
Seeing nothing.
He scanned the radar screen. They were moving south of the fields now. Schmidt’s three battle groups showed up clearly, on stations ten kilometers south of the first platforms. The four airborne fuel tankers were spaced to the west, also at 10,000 meters.
Would the naval ships draw the MakoSharks when they came? Or would the stealth aircraft elude them after the nearly fatal encounter of several days before?
Would the MakoSharks attempt to torpedo the cables below the wells, as Weismann assumed they would?
They should have an airborne control craft up. He could not decipher the action being reported on Panther flight’s radio frequency, but it sounded as if there were fewer voices.
He could not see the MakoSharks.
“Tigers Two, Three, Four, we will take a peek under the cloud cover.”
Zeigman eased the stick forward, and the Tornado glided downward. The thick blanket of clouds rose toward him, then wrapped wispy trails around him.
*
Pearson, Avery, Overton, Arguento, and Amber held onto tethers and handgrips and watched the main console screen. The view of the Persian Gulf through the port was being totally ignored.
The KH-11’s night-vision, real-time image was being computer-enhanced, but there was little to be seen. German planes circled above the clouds. Four of them had just disappeared as they went below the cloud cover.
To the northeast, the conflict with the Soviets had also disappeared as the aircraft descended below 15,000 feet.
The speakers were silent. The Delta flight was maintaining an unnecessary radio silence on Tac-1, as far as Pearson was concerned. She wanted to know what was going on. McKenna and Volontov were not communicating on Tac-2. Arguento had located the Soviet tactical channel on a radio, but the dialogues were disjointed, in Russian, and as Val Arguento said, “probably scrambled.” Arguento had also located the probable German air and naval frequencies, but they were also scrambled.
One of the secondary screens displayed the radar repeat from the AWACS airplane, Cottonseed. Numerous targets were shown on the scan, each identified with a code and an altitude. The codes clarified the blip as, for example, German and Panther — “G/Pntr.”
Overton touched the intercom button for the radar room. “Radar, Command.”
“Radar, sir.”
“Let’s go to the plot program.”
“Coming up, General.”
Arguento tapped the keyboard, cleared the screen, and set it up for the plot mode. A few seconds later, a stylized map of the area appeared, along with a few dozen white squares. The computer was accepting both radar and KH-11 data, merging them, and displaying the total input, without the barrier of cloud formations.
Arguento played with the keyboard, changing the wells to yellow, the Soviet planes to red, the German ships to blue, and the German planes to orange. The American and Soviet AWACS and search-and-rescue craft remained white. Finally, he overlaid the grid that the Delta flight was using on their maps
to mark coordinates.
There were no MakoSharks.
The dogfight in the northeast appeared frantic, the blips so close together that they merged and the ident tags left the screen. One flight of eight, at low altitude and inserted by the computer from the order of battle, rather than from visual or radar contact, had pulled away from the melee and were headed west.
“There were ten Germans and twenty Soviet planes in that bunch,” Overton said. “The eight must be the ground attack squadron, but I only count thirteen left.”
“Nine planes down,” Amber said.
Pearson wondered what this looked like on NORAD’s larger screen. Brackman and Thorpe were maintaining their silence, but they must be on the edge of their chairs.
She pulled herself close to the microphone. After a heated debate with McKenna and Overton, she had been designated the operations officer for this mission. McKenna had unexpectedly taken her side.
“Delta Blue, Alpha Two.”
“Go ahead.”
“Squawk me once, if you can.”
Delta Blue’s IFF signal appeared briefly on the screen.
“I read them sixty miles out,” Arguento said.
“Thanks, Blue. That helps,” from Cottonseed.
The MakoSharks were not yet using radar, so their interpretation of events came over the radio channel from Cottonseed or Alpha.
Pearson pressed the transmit button, “Delta Blue, the current situation is as follows: four Tornadoes at R-twelve, six-nine, seven thousand, heading one-nine-zero; two Eurofighters … ” She read off the rest of the coordinates, imagining Munoz, Abrams, and Williams feeding the data to their own computers.
“Delta Blue,” she said, “if they can’t refuel, it’ll be a shorter night.”
“Alpha Two,” Munoz asked, “what were those tanker coordinates again?”
*
McKenna hated wearing gloves when he was flying, but he pulled his on and pressed the wrist fittings into the groove of the environmental suit.
He scanned the HUD. They were holding 60,000 feet and Mach 1.2.
Dimatta came on the air. “I get the two on the west, Snake Eyes. The jerks are bunched up.”
“I’ve got the east-bounder,” Conover said.
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