“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.
“Leaves us the closest one,” McKenna said. “Tiger?”
“Arm ’em all, Snake Eyes, and let’s go huntin’.”
McKenna raised the flap, selected all pylons, and armed all missiles. The eight in the payload bay would remain in reserve because he didn’t want to slow down enough to open the bay doors.
“AD yours, Tiger.”
“Gracias.”
They were keeping Tac-1 open so that each of the MakoSharks knew what the others were doing. He heard Conover and Dimatta arming their weapons.
He couldn’t see them, but knew that Dimatta was six miles to his right and Conover was six miles to his left.
“Let’s do it, Deltas.”
Easing back on the throttles, McKenna tapped the hand controller forward and the nose tilted down. Minus twenty-five degrees. On the bottom right of the HUD, fifteen small green lights displayed the live missiles on the pylons. They had lost one during the blackout period and had jettisoned it over the Norwegian Sea.
“Delta Blue, Condor,” came in on Tac-2.
“Go.”
“Tern Flight is making its turn on the wells.”
The Fulcrums making the ground attack had to come from the north, rather than the east, in order to approach the platforms on the ice from the correct angle.
“Copy, Condor. What’s your status?”
“We have shot down six German aircraft. I have lost three. We are chasing the remaining four hostiles.”
McKenna noted the pronoun distinctions in Volontov’s statement. Volontov was part of his wing when it came to optimistic reports. His losses were personal. McKenna felt the same way, and his esteem for Volontov took another giant step upward.
“Good show, Condor. We’re jumping off, now.”
Thirty miles from the coordinates provided by Pearson, McKenna said, “Deltas, go active.”
The screen, which had been showing green fluffy clouds, jumped to the radar display in the fifty-mile range mode. The orange targeting flower appeared.
“Hot damn, jefe! There he is.”
The orange circle, guided by Munoz’s helmet, squirted to the upper right of the screen and found the tanker. Off to the right and left, McKenna saw the other targets.
LOCK-ON!
“Heat-seeker. Committed. And gone,” Munoz said.
The Wasp whisked away, and one of the green missile lights on the HUD blinked out.
The Wasp II’s speed was about 1,700 miles per hour, but it took longer to cover thirty miles.
Slightly over one minute.
The tanker, which was apparently outfitted with threat warning equipment, began to dive.
Too late.
There were two explosions, a blindingly white one as the Wasp went up one of the two port turbojet exhausts, then a bright yellow-orange detonation as hot splinters of the destroyed engine sliced into the gigantic fuel tanks and ignited the vapors of partially emptied tanks.
“Scratch one tanker,” McKenna said.
“And two,” from Conover.
Two heartbeats.
“Three… and now four,” Nitro Fizz Williams reported. “Let’s go get us some wells,” McKenna said.
He dove into the clouds.
Mac Zeigman had immediately jammed his throttle into afterburner, pulled into a loop, then rolled upright to reverse his course as soon as his WSO announced the active radars.
“They are diving quickly, Major. All of the tankers have been destroyed.”
“Give me a damned heading,” Zeigman demanded.
“I am working… they are at seven hundred knots, three-five-oh degrees, our bearing zero-one-eight.”
“Intercept?”
The HUD readout showed his speed up to Mach 1. The Tornado shivered. His three element members had reversed course, also, but their slower reactions left them almost a kilometer behind him.
“Intercept course is zero-zero-four.”
He banked the craft slightly to the left.
“Tigers Two, Three, Four, join on me. Quickly now! Arm all weapons.”
“Tiger Leader, Panther Nine.”
“Tiger Leader,” Zeigman acknowledged.
“We have eight hostiles on the look-down radar at one thousand meters altitude. They are spreading out and initiating attacks on the wells.”
“Stop them.”
“But there are two hostiles approaching from ten thousand meters, also. And our fuel state is eight-five-zero kilograms. We must refuel.”
“There is no more fuel, Panther Nine. You might as well attack. Now!”
Albert Weismann and Maximillian Oberlin were in the computer center at Peenemünde, watching over the shoulders of the experts brought down from Tempelhof as they verified the computer programs.
“Here it is!” a hauptmann shouted.
“What?” Weismann demanded.
“A simple loop instruction inserted into the guidance program. The rocket would have gone mad.”
“Can you correct it?”
“Easily, Herr Colonel.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard, and the cursor on the screen exchanged new letters for old in the incomprehensible line of instructions.
“There. It is done.”
“Excellent, Captain. Now, if you would please load it into the rocket computers.”
He and Oberlin exchanged smiles. Oberlin had been positively cheerful since returning from his helicopter flight. He had told Weismann, “The old man did not think he could walk on air. He cried. Unfortunately, I think he had a heart attack as soon as he went out the door. I had wanted him to think about it all the way down.”
“Yes. Very unfortunate,” Weismann had agreed. “One day quite soon, however, you and I will see many more walking on air.”
They were almost to the doorway of the computer center when an unteroffizier slid to a stop outside the glass door. He pushed it open.
“Colonel Weismann! There is an emergency call for you.”
Weismann walked over to a computer console, picked up the phone, and punched the blinking button.