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.”