“What?” Marjorie asked, though her attention was distracted by a CBN broadcaster. Somehow they’d got one of their cameras twenty-four miles across the strait from Alaska to Little Diomede Island and had it set up on the sloping but still steep western side of the small American outpost near the Eskimo village of Inalik. The CBN’s camera was filling the TV screen with the ice-covered basalt that was the bottom half of Big Diomede or, as CBN was calling it, “Ratmanov Island.”
Freeman shot a glance at the TV, and Marjorie had seldom seen such a look of outright contempt on his face as he watched the CBN announcer in a fur-lined Eskimo parka telling Americans how the U.S. Air Force were already assembling fighters and fighter bombers on the Alaskan Peninsula for what was “certain to be” an aerial bombardment of the 11.2-square-mile Ratmanov Island. The island was so heavily defended, the reporter continued, “that many military experts believe it to be the most heavily defended piece of real estate in the world whose troops, unlike the ill-supplied Republican Guard of the Iraqi war, are known to have months of supplies and ammunition deep within the granite fortress. Along with state-of-the-art air defenses that are bound to inflict heavy casualties upon the Americans if they try to take out the SAM sites on Ratmanov and which they must take out if they have any hope of…”
“It’s not Ratmanov Island,” shouted Freeman at the CBN announcer. “It’s Rat Island, and we’re going to exterminate the bastards! By the bushel!”
“Douglas!”
He flashed a winning smile. “Sorry, Marjorie.”
“Aren’t you going to tell the then?”
He looked at her, puzzled, as he unconsciously felt for what he called his “backup,” his vest-holstered Hi-Vel.22 automatic beneath his tunic. “Tell you what?”
“You said there was one other thing about Siberia that made it so different. Oh, dear — you aren’t going to tell the you expect it to be a long war, are you?”
“Yes,” answered Freeman, slipping in a rubber-banded clutch of three-by-five index cards—”Arctic Ops”—into his pocket. “Siberia,” he told her, “is twenty times the size of Iraq.” Actually it was more than twenty-three times as big, but he knew civilians preferred round numbers. Suddenly Marjorie realized he’d been dressing with more ceremony than usual for duty at Fort Ord. “You’re not going?” she charged.
“Ordered by the president, Marjorie,” he said. “No choice.” It was only the second lie he’d told since leaving Europe, the first during a news conference in Paris on his way home, in which he had apologized, under direct orders from General Grey, for having called his Russian counterparts a pack of “vodka-sucking sons of bitches.” It was quite wrong of him, he said later, to have said anything against vodka—”Hell, I have it on good authority that you can run tanks on it.”
“If I didn’t know better, Douglas,” said Marjorie, “I’d think you enjoyed it.”
On the way to Fort Ord he heard on the radio that CBN was reporting that U.S. air strikes against Ratmanov from Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage and from the bases further west on Cape Prince of Wales were imminent.
“That’s right, you bastar—” He stopped short, old-fashioned about using rough language in front of women. “Wonder is,” he told the blond chauffeur, “they don’t tell the Siberians how many planes are involved.”
“They’re probably working on it, General.”
CHAPTER SIX
With most of the U.S. ‘s seventy-six F-117A Stealth fighters still in Europe, only five were immediately available to Alaskan command, the F-117A’s primary role being radar avoidance attack, not defense. Led in by a Wild Weasel F-4G Phantom jamming Big Diomede’s radars with white noise, the five Stealth fighters, despite their relatively low maneuverability-something not known by the public at large — thundered only four hundred feet above the white blur that was the eastern half of the Bering Strait.
Coming in at seven hundred miles per hour, executing both “high” and “over-the-shoulder” toss bomb release runs, they sent Paveway 2,300-pound laser-guided ordnance, along with twelve-foot-long, modular-glide bombs, sliding down the “icecream,” or laser, cone toward the eastern cliff face that sprouted retractable Flat-Face, Squat-Eye, Spoon-Rest, and Low-Blow radar arrays that serviced batteries of four barreled eighteen-inch-diameter surface-to-air missiles. Seconds after the four nose canards behind each laser seeker-detector nose assembly whistled through the dry Arctic air, their explosions lit up the face of “Ratmanov,” or Big Diomede, in crimson-curdled orange balls of fire. The thunder rolled between the two islands on the clear night, jagged sea ice reflecting the light so that Big Diomede was lit up like some huge, black-veined massif that had only suddenly burst through the frozen sea. It was an illusion created by enormous slivers of ice sliding from the island’s cliff face from the heat and the concussion of the bombs crashing into the sea ice below.
The following Aardvark, or F-111F fighter bombers, came in on the deck at 570 miles per hour to deliver their “slide” beams for more laser-guided bombs, pilots expecting to run into heavy antiaircraft fire on the approach, weapons officers centering the cross hairs on the infrared screens. Closing on the target, lasers were activated to “lock on” and, seconds before the “slide” bomb launch, the electronic warfare officers tensed, expecting heavy AA fire. But there was none. On the second approach by the F-111 fighter bombers, flying low to deliver more bombs, the aircraft presumably radar safe in the “frying pan” static set up by the F-4G Phantom Wild Weasels, Big Diomede suddenly erupted, spewing streams of red and green tracer crisscrossing the sky in deadly tattoo, the white noise now settling down so that the F-111 pilots knew that either the Wild Weasels had stopped their jamming or the Russians had outjammed the jammers.
Whatever the cause, over forty batteries of ZSU Quad twenty-three-millimeter cannon and Soviet SA-10 missiles filled the air above the strait, each gun firing over ten thousand rounds a second. The twenty-three-millimeter fire created a curtain of red-hot metal in the narrow corridor that the Wild Weasels had believed secure for a safe run in. Yet, despite the heavy AA fire, only one of the F-111 fighter bombers and one Wild Weasel were taken out, the F-111 going down, spitting flame then erupting on the ice into a thousand fiery pieces, the Weasel crashing because the intakes of its twin eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust jet engines were fouled as the plane struck a mass of terrified, glaucous-winged gulls. By now the F-111 fighter bombers had delivered their loads against the cliff face in an effort to penetrate the enclaves of the AA fire, but many of the heat-seeking missiles from the F-111s had been dummied by what photo reconnaissance later discovered were wired hot spots to sucker the heat-seeking American missiles, the Siberians’ ZSU twenty-three-millimeter and SA-10 missiles coming from relatively cooler apertures from within the sixteen-hundred-foot-high cliff face of the eleven-square-mile island.
In most danger were the five Stealth fighters. Poorly maneuverable, compared to the F-111s and Wild Weasels, and slow, at seven hundred miles per hour, the Stealth’s only superiority to the others lay in radar evasion. They sought the safety of flying practically on the deck, only two to three hundred feet above the jagged ice that was racing like an endless white runway beneath them. One, just off the northern end of Little Diomede less than two and a half miles from target, had ironically begun to climb for an over-the-shoulder toss when a wind shear created among the ice floes’ jagged peaks sucked it down for a fraction of a second. At seven hundred miles an hour the Stealth could not rise in time, and the Siberian Quads’ fire raked it from the ventral scanner below the pilot past the canopy actuator to the left-hand tail fin. It was as if a swallow’s tail had been suddenly clipped; the plane’s implosion on the ice and the detonation of the Paveway two-thousand-pounder blew a black hole in the ice, the giant eruption of flame from it illuminating the strait between the islands like some enormous charred skating rink. For an instant it was bright as day, the Siberian gunners pouring an enfilade of ZSU twenty-three millimeter fire toward it. It took a full burst, and the second Stealth was gone.