USS CHICAGO
All the boats slowed on reaching the icepack. McCafferty inspected it through his periscope, a thin white line less than two miles away. There was nothing else visible. Few ships lingered so near the ice, and no aircraft were visible.
Sonar reported a gratifying amount of noise. The serrated fringe of the pack was composed of thousands of individual floes, slabs of ice a few feet thick, ranging in size from a few square feet to several acres. Every year they came loose with the spring thaw and drifted at random until the freeze began again. While loose in the brief arctic summer, they drifted at random, grinding against one another in a process that destroyed some of the smaller floes, which added to the never-ending groans and pops of the solid ice that went across the top of the pole all the way to the North Slope of Alaska.
"What's that?" McCafferty adjusted the scope slightly, turning the handle to the twelve-power setting. He'd glimpsed what might have been a periscope for the merest instant. It was gone now and-reappeared: the swordlike dorsal fin of a male killer whale. A puff of spray marked its breath, condensing to vapor in the polar air, then a few more whales appeared. What was it they called a family of orcas? A school-no, a pod. Up here hunting seals, probably. He wondered if the omen was good or bad. Orcinus orca was the scientific name: Bringer of Death.
"Sonar, do you have anything at one-three-nine?"
"Conn, we have eleven killer whales on that bearing. I make it three males, six females, and two adolescents. Pretty close in, I think. Bearing is changing slowly." The sonar chief responded as if insulted. There were standing orders not to report "biologicals" unless specifically ordered otherwise.
"Very well." McCafferty had to grin in spite of himself.
The other submarines of Operation Doolittle were strung out on a line more than ten miles across. One by one they went deep and headed under the pack. An hour later the freight train headed east, five miles inside the nominal edge of the pack. Twelve thousand feet below them was the floor of the Barents Abyssal Plain.
ICELAND
"Haven't seen a chopper all day," Sergeant Smith observed.
Conversation, Edwards noted, made a nice distraction from the fact that they were eating raw fish. He checked his watch. It was time to call in again. It had gotten so that he could assemble the radio antenna in his sleep.
"Doghouse, this is Beagle, and things could be a lot better, over."
"Beagle, we read you. Where are you now?"
"About forty-six kilometers from our objective," Edwards replied. He gave them map coordinates. There was one road yet to cross, and only one more row of hills, according to the map. "Nothing much to report except we have not seen any choppers today. In fact we haven't seen any aircraft at all." Edwards looked up. The sky was pretty clear, too. Usually they spotted fighters once or twice a day as they patrolled overhead.
"Roger that, Beagle. Be advised that the Navy sent some fighters over and beat them up pretty good around dawn."
"All right! We haven't seen any Russians since the chopper looked us over." In Scotland his controller shuddered at that. Edwards went on, "We're down to eating fish we catch, but the fishing's pretty good."
"How's your lady friend?"
Mike had to smile at that one. "She's not holding us back, if that's what you mean. Anything else?"
"Negative."
"Okay, we'll be back if we see anything. Out." Edwards flipped the power switch on the radio pack. "Our friends say the Navy chewed up some Russian fighters today."
"Bout time," Smith said. He was down to his last five cigarettes and stared at one now, deciding whether or not to reduce his supply to four. As Edwards watched, he opened his lighter to poison himself again.
"We go to Hvammsfjordur?" Vigdis asked. "Why?"
"Somebody wants to know what's there," Edwards said. He unfolded the tactical map. It showed the entrance to the bay to be crammed with rocks. It took him a moment to realize that while the land elevations were in meters, the depth curves on the map were in fathoms...
KEFLAVIK
"How many?"
The fighter regiment commander was lowered gently from the helicopter, his arm tied across his chest. Ejecting from his disintegrating aircraft, the colonel had dislocated his shoulder, and then his parachute had landed him on a mountainside, giving him a sprained ankle plus several facial cuts. It had taken eleven hours to find him. On the whole, the colonel considered himself lucky for a fool who had allowed his command to be ambushed by a superior force.
"Five aircraft are mission capable," he was told. "Of the damaged ones, we can repair two."
The colonel swore, angered in spite of the morphine that coursed through his veins. "My men?"
"We've found six, including you. Two are uninjured and can still fly. The rest are in the hospital."
Another helicopter landed close by. The paratroop general got out and came over.
"Good to see you alive."
"Thank you, Comrade General. You are continuing the search?"
"Yes. I have detailed two helicopters to the task. What happened?"
"The Americans staged a raid with heavy bombers. We never saw them, but we could tell from the jamming. They had fighters mixed in with them. The bombers fled when we approached." The Air Force colonel tried to put the best face on it, and the General did not press him. This was an exposed post, and such things were expected. The MiGs could hardly have ignored the American raid. There was no point in punishing this man.
The General had already radioed for more fighters, though he didn't expect any. The plan said they would not be necessary, but the plan had also said his division had to hold the island unsupported for only two weeks. By that time Germany was supposed to be fully defeated, and the land war in Europe mainly over. He received reports from the front that were mere embellishments of the news on Radio Moscow. The Red Army was driving on the Rhein-and they'd been driving on the Rhein since the first day of the damned war! The names of the cities under daily attack were strangely left out. His intelligence chief was risking his life by listening in on Western radio broadcasts-the KGB regarded it as a disloyal act-in order to get an idea of how the fighting was going. If Western reports were true-he didn't really believe them either-the campaign in Germany was a bloody mess. Until that was over, he was vulnerable.
Would NATO try to invade? His operations officer said it was impossible unless the Americans were able to destroy the long-range bombers flying out of Kirovsk first, and the whole point of seizing Iceland had been to prevent the American carriers from moving to a position from which they could do just that. On paper, then, the General expected only increased air attacks, and he had surface-to-air missiles to defend against those. But he hadn't become a divisional commander by merely shuffling papers.
NORTH ATLANTIC
"What the hell happened?" The captain looked up to see a tube stuck in his arm. The last thing he remembered was being on the bridge halfway through the afternoon watch. Now the porthole on the starboard side of his stateroom was covered. Darkened ship: it was night outside.
"You passed out, Captain," the chief hospital corpsman said. "Don't-"