"At least they won't be nukes," said a captain.
"They're shooting a hundred missiles at us-they don't fuckin' need nukes!" replied another.
Edwards watched the radar picture over the shoulder of one of the officers. It was eerily like an arcade game. Big, slow-moving blips denoted the aircraft. Smaller, quicker blips were the Mach-2 missiles.
"Gotcha!" hooted the enlisted radar operator. The leading Eagle had gotten within missile range of the Badgers and exploded one with a Sparrow missile-ten seconds after it had launched its own missiles. A second Sparrow missed its separate target, but a third appeared locked on it. The first fighter's wingman was just launching at yet another Russian. The Soviets had thought this one out, Edwards saw. They were attacking from all around the northern littoral, with lots of space between the bombers so that no single fighter could engage more than one or two. It was almost like-
"Anybody check the geometry of this?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" The captain looked around. "How come you aren't where you belong?"
Edwards ignored the irrelevancy. "What's the chance they're trying to draw our fighters out, like?"
"Expensive bait." The captain dismissed the idea. "You're saying they might have launched their ASMs from farther out. Maybe they don't fly as far as we thought. Point is, those missiles are ten minutes out now, the first of them, with about a five- or seven-minute delay to the last. And not a Goddamned thing we can do about it."
"Yeah." Edwards nodded. The Air-Ops/Met building was a two-story frame structure that vibrated every time the wind hit fifty knots. The lieutenant took out a stick of gum and started chewing on it. In ten minutes a hundred missiles, each carrying about a ton of high explosives-or a nuclear warhead-would start falling. The men outside would get the worst of it; the enlisted men and the flight crews trying to get the airplanes ready to race off. His assigned job was merely to keep out of the way. It made him a little ashamed. The fear he could now taste along with the peppermint made him more ashamed.
The Eagles were now all airborne, racing north. The last of the Backfires had just launched their missiles and were turning back northeast at full power as the Eagles raced at twelve hundred knots to catch up. Three of the interceptors launched missiles, and they succeeded in killing a pair of Backfires and damaging a third. The "Zulu" fighters which had scrambled off the deck could not catch the Backfires, the commanding controller on Sentry One noted, cursing himself for not having sent them after the older, less valuable Badgers, some of which they might have caught. Instead, he ordered them to slow down, and had his controllers vector them towards the supersonic missiles.
Penguin 8, the first of the P-3C Orion antisubmarine warfare aircraft, was rolling now, down runway two-two. It had been on patrol only five hours before, and its flight crew was still trying to shake off the sleep as they rotated the propjet aircraft off the concrete.
"Tipping over now," the radar operator said. The first Russian missile was almost overhead, beginning its terminal dive. The Eagles had hit two of the incoming missiles, but courses and altitudes had been against them, and most of their Sparrows had missed, unable to catch the Mach-2 missiles. The F-15s orbited over central Iceland, well away from their base, as each pilot wondered if he'd have an airfield to return to.
Edwards cringed as the first landed-or didn't land. The air-to-surface missile had a radar-proximity fuse. It detonated twenty meters off the ground, and the effects were horrific. It exploded directly over International Highway, two hundred yards from Air-Ops, its fragments ripping into a number of buildings, the worst hit being the base fire station. Edwards fell to the floor as fragments lashed through the wooden wall. The door was torn off its hinges by the blast and the air filled with dust. A moment later, at the Esso facility a hundred yards away, a fuel truck exploded, sending a fireball towering into the sky, and dropping burning jet fuel for blocks around. Electrical power was immediately lost. Radars, radios, and room lights went out at once, and battery-powered emergency lights didn't come on as they were supposed to. For a terrified moment, Edwards wondered if the first missile really might have been a nuke. The blast had rippled through his chest, and he felt sudden nausea as his body tried to adjust to the sensations that assaulted it. He looked around and saw a man knocked unconscious by a failing light fixture. He didn't know if he was supposed to buckle his helmet strap or not, and somehow this question seemed enormously important at the moment, though he didn't remember why.
Another missile landed farther away, and then for a minute or so the sounds blended into a series of immense thunderclaps. Edwards was choking from the dust. It felt as though his chest would burst, and impulsively he bolted for the door to get fresh air.
He was greeted by a solid wall of heat. The Esso facility was a roaring mass of flames which had already engulfed the nearby photo lab and base thrift shop. More smoke rose from the enlisted housing area to the east. A half-dozen aircraft still on the flightline would never leave it, their wings snapped like toys from the blast of a missile that had exploded directly over the runway crossroads. A smashed E-3A Sentry burst into flames before his eyes. He turned to see that the control tower had been damaged, too, all its windows gone. Edwards ran that way, not thinking to take his jeep.
Two minutes later, he entered the tower breathlessly to find the crew all dead, torn apart by flying glass, the tiled floor covered with blood. Radio receivers were still making noise over desk-mounted speakers, but he couldn't seem to find a working transmitter.
PENGUIN 8
"What the hell is that?" the Orion pilot said. He turned his aircraft violently to the left and increased power. They had been orbiting ten miles out from Keflavik, watching the smoke and flames rising from their home field, when four massive objects passed under them.
"It's a-," the copilot breathed. "Where-"
The four Lebeds were moving at over forty knots, bouncing roughly over the four- to five-foot waves. About eighty feet long and thirty-five wide, each had a pair of ducted propellers atop, immediately forward of a tall, aircraft-type rudder painted with the Soviet naval ensign, a red hammer and sickle over a blue stripe. They were already too close to shore for the Orion to use any of her weapons.
The pilot watched incredulously as he approached, and any doubts he had ended as a 30mm cannon fired at them. It missed wide, but the pilot jerked the Orion around to the west.
"Tacco, tell Keflavik ASW Ops they got company coming. Four armed hovercraft, type unknown, but Russian-and they gotta be carrying troops."
"Flight," the tactical coordinator reported back thirty seconds later. "Keflavik is off the air. ASW Ops Center is gone; the tower is gone, too. I'm trying to raise the Sentries. Maybe we can get a fighter or two."
"Okay, but keep trying Keflavik. Get our radar lit off. We'll see if we can find where they came from. Get our Harpoons lit off, too."
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
Edwards was surveying the damage through binoculars when he heard the message come in-and could not answer it. Now what do I do? He looked around and saw one useful thing, a Hammer Ace radio. He took the oversized backpack and ran down the steps. He had to find the Marine officers and warn them.
The hovercraft raced up Djupivogur Cove and came to land a minute later less than a mile from the airbase. The troopers gratefully noted the smoother ride as their craft spread out to line abreast, three hundred yards between them as they tore across the flat, rocky gorse toward the NATO air base.