by Bart Gauvin
That must be the 493rd from Lakenheath, thought Jan. Good pilots. Good jets. The 493rd Fighter Squadron, the “Grim Reapers,” was the American F-15C Eagle squadron based northeast of London.
“If we can hold on for a few more hours,” the lieutenant was saying, “I think the generals are hoping we can stop the Soviets around Banak.”
A few more hours? Jan thought. We’ve already lost almost a quarter of our strength. He thanked the younger officer and picked up the phone. Will there be anyone left by the time help arrives? he wondered.
“Jan,” Olsen heard his squadron commanding officer’s voice, “good to hear from you. Sorry about Bjorn. He was a good man and a good pilot.” It was a poor eulogy for a man that Olsen had spent more hours with than perhaps anyone besides his parents, but, This is war, Jan thought. This must be what war is like: loss.
“We’ve got a major op coming together,” the CO was saying. “I want you to stand down for the next couple of hours,” that was not what Jan wanted to hear, “I need you fresh to lead a flight of four jets in a massed sweep to see if we can stop this Soviet attack in its tracks.” That sounded better.
“We should have support from some Grim Reapers out of Lakenheath,” the CO explained. “They’ll start arriving within the hour. We’ll have bits from at least three other squadrons: The Lions,” he referred to the Norwegian 331 Squadron, “are working out of Evenes.” Olsen nodded. His own 332 Squadron, the Eagles, worked together with the Lions often. The CO continued: “334 Squadron is backstopping here over Bardufoss, and Tiger Squadron,” here he referred to the Royal Norwegian Air Force’s 338 Squadron, “is on their way north with four of the new MLU Falcons.”
That was excellent news, Jan knew. The MLU, or “Mid-Life Upgrade” F-16s were capable of carrying the amazing new AMRAAM missile, just like the American F-15 Eagle. Those weapons would give the NATO side a huge advantage once they arrived. His spirits were beginning to lift. Maybe we can beat them back.
His body registered that he could use some rest, get something to eat, then get back in the air to cut a swathe through the Soviet hordes and begin exacting some revenge for Bjorn and the others.
“The Dutch 322nd Fighter Squadron is flying up as well, but they won’t arrive until tonight,” the CO was saying. The “Poly Parrots,” Olsen smirked, remembering the Dutch Squadron’s mascot. I wonder if they’re bringing the bird?
“We’ve got a big fight, brewing, Jan,” the commander concluded. “We’re going to stop these Reds and start pushing them back so the army can secure the north. I need you to be ready, understood?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “I’ll be ready.”
“I know you will, Jan,” the man on the other end of the line said. Then, “One of the other ships you’ll lead is up there at Tromsø already. The other two should be there in half an hour, they’re just returning from beating back an attack on the Backstop site in Finnmark. I want you ready to launch at fifteen-thirty, so get some rest. You’re going to need it.” The line clicked off.
As he set the receiver down, Jan’s thoughts turned back to Erik in Banak. He and his unit were isolated, they needed support, and Jan had promised to deliver. As if the controllers at the Backstop radar site had read his mind, the HF radio in the small room crackled to life: “All callsigns, be advised, major enemy strike going into Banak. Does anyone have enough missiles to intervene?”
The airwaves remained silent in response to this query.
He listened as the Backstop controllers began to describe the situation in the skies to the north and to direct the fighters defending the airspace. This fight was considerably harder than in training, especially considering the effective Soviet jamming emanating from aircraft just over the frontier. There would be precious little help for Johansen’s cavalry squadron at Banak.
Hold on Erik! Jan urged silently, feeling the heat of frustrated rage return.
CHAPTER 72
1429 CET, Sunday 13 February 1994
1329 Zulu
Banak Airbase, Lakselv, Troms, Norway
THE SUN SHINING through the patchy clouds overhead offered no warmth to the soldiers moving about below. The icy wind blowing off the fjӧrd didn’t help either. Rittmester Erik Johansen and his signaler waited outside of his G-Wagen just south of the airfield, tucked into the tree line among the stunted evergreens, boughs heavy with snow, the driver remained sitting behind the wheel. The sparse little crossroads town of Lakselv, their whole reason for being here, was off to their right front. On their way to inspect the troop positions guarding the southern approaches to the town, the HF radio call came in through the jamming static, warning that a raid was inbound to their position.
Johansen, deciding that being the one moving vehicle in sight might not be the best idea, halted at the edge of town. Immediately he called on his radio back to the airfield, just a few hundred meters north, and ordered the last two F-16s off the ground. The pilots from Olsen’s flight had been waiting for the skies overhead to clear of Soviet aircraft long enough to make their vulnerable takeoff rolls; now they had no choice but to risk it.
As they waited, Johansen pulled out his map, flattened it on the hood of the truck, and visualized his reconnaissance squadron’s positions. Two sections from 2nd Troop were guarding the eastern approaches, focusing their defenses on the bridge across the Brennelvo, with the third section back at the airfield with Sergeant Pedersen’s pioneers and the two TOW missile-carrying M113s. The anti-air missile teams, now joined by the four Bofors gun crews, were scattered around the perimeter of the runway. Johansen’s ace in the hole, the artillerymen from the Porsanger battery, were even now spreading white camouflage netting over their six one-hundred-five-millimeter howitzers in the woods northwest of the airfield. Finally, Johansen’s 1st Troop was in positions on the southern edge of the town of Lakselv to protect against an attack from that direction.
Lakselv occupied a strategic position, sitting at the head of the hundred-and-twenty kilometer-long Porsangerfjӧrd, which cut deeper than any other into Norway’s rugged arctic coast. Banak and Lakselv, at the head of the fjӧrd, were nestled into the valley that extended south from the water, bounded to the west by the Stabbursdalen highlands, whose sheer cliff faces overshadowed the town, and to the east by the Halkvarre Mountains, rising in some places to almost a thousand meters of glacier-smoothed altitude. The rugged highlands forced any attacker into one of two avenues of approach, either along the coast from the east on Highway 98, or up the valley from the south along the E6. Lakselv sat where these roads converged.
If Johansen and his men could deny this spot to the Soviets long enough for the battalion to arrive, then the Soviet offensive would stall up here in the ice and snow of the far north. If not…I don’t want to think about “if not.” He would not feel secure until the reinforcements arrived tonight with its company of Leopard tanks, two companies of mechanized infantry, another artillery battery—this one with heavy hundred-fifty-five-millimeter M109 mobile howitzers—and all the other trappings of a modern armored force. Once in position at this choke point, the Soviets were going to find it very hard indeed to dislodge such a force. The issue is holding out until then.
The scream of jet engines from the south tore the rittmester’s attention away from the map. The arrow-straight E6 highway gave him a clear vista between the colorful buildings of Lakselv on the right and the stunted tundra vegetation, brown sticks poking out of soft mounds of white snow, to the left. His eyes took a moment to focus. The low rumble of high-altitude jet engines overhead had been constant for the past hour, along with the sharper crack of explosions and the occasional deep sonic boom. This sound was different, though. It didn’t come from above, Johansen thought. Instead it was reverberating off the rocky hills to the east and west.
Then he saw them. Two flitting objects to the south, barely at treetop level, turning north to come down the valley. His eyes pla
yed tricks with him as he lost the jets against the gray and white of the hillsides before reacquiring them as they leveled out. The roar of the two airplanes’ engines grew louder. It felt like the jets were flying directly at him, with the round circle of the fuselages framed by the thin lines of wings and stabilizers giving only a small cross-section to observe.
The rittmester clapped his signalman on the back. The man, who was also looking to the south from their shelter in the low trees, jumped a little.
“Get a call out on the squadron net: fast-movers approaching from the south, low altitude. Tell everyone to look alive!” Johansen ordered.
As the radioman made the call, two more dark objects banked into the valley behind the first pair, and Johansen thought he could see a third flight descending into valley from the southeast. The roar of the jet engines returned until it was a scream as the first two Soviet jets shot past, almost directly over Erik and his two soldiers, dark arrowheads against the white-blue sky. Johansen’s reconnaissance training paid off as he identified the Soviet aircraft in a moment. Cigar-shaped fuselage, front air intake with shock cone, variable geometry wings, Su-17 “Fitter” fighter-bombers, the rittmester knew, turning to follow the mottled green- and brown-painted jets as they flashed north towards the airfield.
The Soviet fighter-bombers were just nosing up to bomb-release altitude when Johansen heard the first staccato burst of machinegun fire from the direction of the airfield. He knew that the gunners would only have moments to aim at the old but blazingly fast and rugged Su-17s. The machinegun burst had no effect, and Erik watched as several objects detached from the Fitters and fell towards the airfield, then at the last moment seemed to split open, dozens of small bomblets scattered downward.
“Get down!” Erik yelled, pushing his signalman and driver towards the snow as the bomblets struck. The three men hit the ground as the first sub-munitions detonated, followed by dozens more in a firecracker string of blasts.
Looking up, Erik could see the taxiway and snowfields on the west side of the runway disappear beneath a blanket of sparking explosions and gray smoke. From his position Erik had a clear view straight up the runway, with the civilian passenger terminal and hangars on the right and the small collection of military buildings on the left. Both sticks of cluster bombs fell on the west side of the runway, between the tarmac and the small Coast Guard complex, but the military buildings themselves seemed to be intact amid the smoke and shrapnel. One of the Coast Guard helicopters was not so lucky, however. A yellow eruption of aviation fuel announced the machine’s demise.
As the reverberations of the explosions receded, Johansen became aware of other sounds. The deep pom-pom-pom of the Bofors guns as they opened from their hidden positions around the airfield. He could see the tracers of the forty-millimeter rounds arcing upwards, chasing the two aircraft as they dove for the treetops once again and banked away to the east. A tearing scream announced the launch of an RBS-70 missile from west of the runway. Erik watched the thin white smoke trail of the weapon. The laser-guided missile sped after one of the Soviet fighter-bombers. Johansen willed it on, but instead saw the missile fall into the fjӧrd as its rocket motor burned out.
The next pair roared overhead. This time the Norwegian defenders, anticipating the direction of the attack, responded with greater alacrity. Bofors rounds flashed between the Soviet jets as they climbed, and one shell passed through the left wing of the lead aircraft, leaving a softball-sized hole but failing to down the bird. The two Soviet fighter-bombers angled slightly to the right of the first two, and their high-explosive bombs straddled the hangar in which the civilian evacuees had assembled less than an hour before. One bomb crashed through the thin roof of the hangar, and a moment later the structure’s wide doors blew outward with the blast. The pom-pom-pom of the Skyguard radar-directed Bofors guns continued to hammer into Erik’s consciousness amid the larger explosions.
To his amazement, Johansen could see the two F-16s, unharmed, taxiing to the southern end of the runway, the end nearest to him. As the third pair of Su-17s roared overhead targeting the middle of the runway, the first F-16 began its takeoff roll northward, directly away from Erik’s location. The Soviet fighter-bombers roared over the airfield and released their ordnance just as the first Norwegian Falcon was rotating off the tarmac. Erik watched in horror as one of the cluster bombs burst open directly above the ascending F-16. Three submunitions struck the fighter and exploded in miniature flashes. A moment later a yellow jet of flame shot out from the Falcon’s fuselage. The jet’s nose dipped, and it dove into the fjӧrd, crashing through the sea ice along the shore and sending blue and white chunks flying. Incredibly, the second Falcon passed unharmed through the cones of smoke and shrapnel thrown up by the cluster bomblets. The pilot pulled back on his stick, at the same time punching his afterburners, and the nimble jet shot into the sky, banking west.
At this point the airfield’s defenders finally managed to gain some measure of revenge. Another RBS-70 missile tore skyward from the northwest end of the runway just as the Fitters were banking east. Johansen saw the missile fly straight into an Su-17s left wing root and explode, sending the jet spiraling into the water.
A fourth pair of Soviet raiders was nearing the airfield, and the Norwegian Bofors gunners were now finding the range. The lead jet’s nose disintegrated as it took a burst of forty-millimeter shells straight through its conical air intake. The Su-17 banked right and rolled over onto its back as its already-dead pilot slumped against his joystick. Johansen cringed as he watched the stricken jet disappear into the buildings of Lakselv. A red and black fireball rose from within the town to accompany the rumbling explosion. The pilot of the second of these two Su-17s forged on, however. This flight of raiders had been armed with rockets instead of gravity bombs, and now the pilot aimed his aircraft’s nose at the gun position that had downed his wingman.
Erik heard a tearing roar above him and looked up to see streaks of gray smoke shoot out from two pods underneath the wings of the surviving Fitter, now passing directly overhead. Seconds later he saw and heard a string of explosions straddle the location of one of his Bofors guns in the trees on the east side of the runway. The gun fell silent, though another sent tracers up to chase the lone bomber as it banked east heading for home.
The air raid seemed to go on forever. A fifth pair of Fitters screamed overhead, then a sixth. These carried incendiary bombs, which they dropped into the tree line on either side of the runway. A third Su-17 fell to the defenders, struck by several rounds from a surviving Bofors gun. The fighter-bomber continued on for several moments, then nosed down and crashed with a tremendous white splash into the dark open water, near where the 332 Squadron Falcon had gone in.
Then, suddenly, the valley was quiet. Or at least relatively so, Johansen realized as the sounds from the Soviet jets’ engines receded to the northeast. The roar of explosions and of military aircraft engines gave way to fire crackling from beneath dark pillars of smoke rising from the crash sites in Lakselv and east of the airfield, as well as from the eviscerated hangar. The scene around him was smudged with thick black smoke, sprays of dirt and concrete, and raging yellow fires contrasting dizzyingly with the whites and blues that had characterized their world just minutes before.
The raid apparently over, Erik climbed to his feet, grabbed the radio hand-mic from his signalman, and called his number two. Løytnant Berg was back at the airfield.
“Dragon Five, Dragon Five, this is Dragon Six, over.” Johansen waited, but there was no response. “Dragon Five, this is Six,” he repeated, “Respond, Five!”
Erik waited for several more moments, beginning to lose hope. Then his radio crackled with, “Six, this is Five, over.” Thank God, the rittmester sighed.
“Five, give me a situation report. What are your losses back there, over?” Johansen demanded.
Another moment of silence, then, “Six, we have some casualties he
re, still getting a handle on it. Looks like one of the Bofors got hit. The whole crew is dead. Incendiary bombs fell in the area where one of the RBS-70 posts was, but the sergeant major hasn’t gotten over there yet. One of the TOW carriers took some damage from a cluster bomb. Two of the crew are wounded. I’ll let you know when we have a better idea of what’s going on, over.”
Johansen nodded. Did he need to return to the airfield? No, he decided, Berg had things under control. He’d always been impressed with the competence of his lanky deputy. Now he was really beginning to shine. The XO would be very busy indeed in the coming hours.
“Roger that, Five,” Erik responded. “You handle things back there. I’m continuing on to 1st Troop’s position. Six, out.”
The rittmester climbed back into the G-Wagen. He’d heard nothing from Battalion for more than an hour. The silence was due, no doubt, to the increasingly effective Soviet jamming, but the lack of contact left him feeling alone. Were it not for his conviction that his countrymen wouldn’t willingly abandon them, Erik might have thought that Banak and his men were being written off as a lost cause. Such a large strike could have been intended to prevent the airfield’s use by the Norwegians but, Erik’s stomach sunk with realization: the Sovs had used only munitions that could not crater the runway. That left the airstrip open for use. By anyone. Erik didn’t like where this war was headed, and it wasn’t even ninety minutes old yet!
Erik pushed aside his feelings and began to look at his squadron’s situation as rationally as he could. His thoughts turned to the grandfather who had remained behind at the Lufthavn. That man is taking his “Poster on the Wall” duty to heart, thought Johansen. A plan began to form in his mind. It wasn’t a plan that he ever wanted to implement, but if worse came to worst and his squadron did turn into the trip wire it was starting to look like, he and his soldiers could still cause many problems to the Soviets.