“I’ll take her, Commander,” Harrison announced from the pilot’s seat. He put his hands on the yoke. “I have control, sir,” he added formally, but with a sidelong grin at Magruder.
His reply was just as formal. “I relinquish control, sir,” he said, feeling relieved. For a moment he’d been afraid the ASW men would require him to handle the Viking all the way through. Right now he preferred the job of observer.
“Punching in new coordinates now,” Meade said. “Jezebel five is at bearing one-two-four, range twenty-five.”
“One-two-four, range twenty-five,” Harrison echoed. He looked at Magruder. “Always best to know the target even if the computer is supposed to steer you,” he said.
Tombstone nodded. “So is this an attack run?”
Over the ICS, Meade laughed. “Hell, no. Jezebel five is one of the omni-directional sonobuoys we’ve been laying. An SSQ-41. They use passive sonar sensors to pick up underwater noise.” He chuckled again. “Nope, the fun is just getting started, Commander. We know about where the bad guys might be, but now we’ve gotta find the bastards.”
“And of course while we’re closing in they’re still moving,” Harrison added. “That means the area we have to cover as we hunt gets larger as time passes. We’ve got a nice long time to go before we start shooting at anything.”
Magruder settled back into his seat, trying not to betray his disappointment. It looked like it would be a long, boring morning.
“Vampires! Vampires! Missiles inbound!”
Major Peter Kelso could feel the tension thick within the command center. “What’s the status on the runways?”
“Four Eagles to go, sir,” someone said. “Then the Orions.”
“Damn,” he muttered to himself. “Not fast enough. Damn!” Each passing second brought a wave of missiles closer and closer to the air base. Outside, klaxons continued to blare warning, but everyone he could see on the field below was staying at his post, trying to get those last few airplanes off the ground.
“Christ Almighty, will you look at that!” someone yelled. “Captain Blackwell just nailed two of the vampires with Sparrows!” That raised a cheer in the room, though everyone, from Kelso down to the greenest enlisted man, knew that taking out only two missiles from that swarm was about as effective as trying to bail out a sinking battleship with a spoon. “He’s closing in … what the hell?” The controller paused. “Blackwell got another one … I think he rammed it.”
The room grew quiet for a moment before someone else broke the stillness. “They’re tipping over.”
Far above Keflavik the missiles were reaching their maximum altitude and starting their descent toward their targets. “Kill the radars,” Kelso ordered. “Now!”
It was a long shot, but it might confuse the missiles enough to keep a few of Keflavik’s radar installations intact. If they were radar-homers …
The first missile hit at that moment, striking near the far end of runway two with a flash of light and an upwelling cloud of smoke and debris. The sound didn’t come for several more seconds. By then more missiles were hitting, and the popping, rumbling, tearing sounds of successive blasts merged into a single cacophony of sound.
Kelso felt rather than saw the blast that struck to the south of the building. It was a close hit, and sound and pressure rolled through Air Ops like a giant hand sweeping aside all it encountered. The force of the explosion knocked him off his feet.
An unknown amount of time later — seconds? minutes? Kelso realized he was lying facedown on the hard floor.
There were shards of glass everywhere like a shimmering blanket. A radio was squawking a request from one of the Eagles, but no one answered. The rumble of missile hits went on.
Kelso struggled to rise, but his body wouldn’t obey his will. Something warm and sticky soaked the front of his uniform.
Slowly it dawned on him that it was blood, but by then it was too late for Major Peter Kelso.
The catapult officer dropped to one knee and a tremendous force pressed Stramaglia back into his seat as the F-14 roared off the deck. As the Tomcat clawed its way skyward he hit the radio switch. “Good shot! Good shot! Tomcat Two-zero-zero, Good shot!”
“Squadron’s formed up at Point Bravo, sir,” his RIO said. Lieutenant Dennis Russell was Viper Squadron’s apprentice Landing Signals Officer, but he’d been pressed into service in his old calling as an RIO to fly with Stramaglia. His running name, true to his new job, was “Paddles.”
“Lancelot Two-zero-zero, this is Camelot,” a voice said over the radio. He recognized Owens, the Junior Deputy CAG who had relieved him in CIC. “Be advised, Keflavik has been attacked by Soviet Badgers carrying Alpha Sierra Six radar-homing missiles. Red Raid One still heading course two-eight-zero.”
“Copy, Camelot,” he replied curtly.
Keflavik …
The course of the Russian Backfires, designated Red Raid One on Jefferson’s plotting boards, suggested that they were also heading for Iceland. That would make sense if they were designed to be the second half of a one-two punch, with the Badgers delivering antiradar missiles designed to neutralize the defenses and the Backfires coming in to clean up what was left. Backfires could carry either missiles or bomb racks, and were capable of delivering enough ordnance, including specialized loads like the five-hundred-pound BETAB retarded antirunway bomb, the Russian equivalent to NATO’s Durandal, to wipe out the main American base in Iceland beyond all possibility of quick repair. That could have devastating effects. Iceland was the only possible staging point for reinforcements while England remained on the fence, and the P-3C sub-hunting patrols out of Keflavik were vital in sealing off those parts of the GIUK gap out of range of the carrier-based S-3s.
It had taken balls for the Russian commander to order the Backfires to swing so far south before striking out for Iceland, Stramaglia told himself with a grim smile. They’d kept the American forces off balance by threatening multiple targets — Bergen, the battle group, and Keflavik all at once — but they had also exposed those Backfires to a quick stroke that could blunt their attack … if the Tomcats could get there in time.
“Camelot, Lancelot Leader,” he transmitted. “I want both Hornet squadrons prepped for air-to-air ASAP. Get ‘em up and feed ‘em in as quick as you can, boys. We’re going to bite those Russkies right on the ass!”
“Roger, Leader,” Owens replied. Stramaglia could hear the excitement in his young voice and felt his resolve waver. After everything he had said to Magruder he had still elected to join the interceptors in the air. Had it been the right decision? Or had he just let the years of frustration and bitterness get to him at last?
No. They needed a firm hand up here, and Commander Grant still hadn’t shown Stramaglia that he knew how to apply that firm hand.
And he was Stinger Stramaglia, who had never been defeated at Top Gun, finally doing for real what he’d practiced for over the course of nearly a decade.
“All right, Paddles,” he said to the RIO. “Talk to me, son. Where’s the party?”
The Tomcat streaked northward through the cold gray sky.
“So what happens now?” Magruder asked as a thud from the rear of the plane announced the deployment of another sonobuoy.
From his position in the right rear seat, Meade answered in a distracted tone. “Now we hunt. We just dropped a DICASS, an SSQ-62. Instead of the Jezebel’s passive sonar the DICASS will send out active pings on command. We’ve got to lay several of the suckers so we can triangulate range and bearing data and locate our underwater friend.” He paused. “The Skipper has the next set of coordinates locked into the flight computer now, and Curtis is busy working on the acoustic data from the Jezebel.”