"Are you always so optimistic, Comrade Colonel?"
The raid was an hour away. The eighteen B-52H bombers had left Louisiana ten hours before and landed to refuel at Sondrestrom Air Force Base on Greenland's west coast. Fifty miles ahead of them were a single Raven EF-111 jamming aircraft and four F-4 Phantoms configured for defense-suppression.
The radar was about halfway calibrated, though what had been done was the easy part. The fighter that had just landed had flown racetrack ovals from due north around the western horizon to due south of Keflavik. The area to the west of the air base, though not exactly flat, was nearly so, with low rocky hills. Next came the hard part, plotting radar coverage of the eastern arc over Iceland's mountainous center, a solid collection of hills that worked up to the island's tall central peak. Another Fulcrum rolled off the runway to begin this task, its pilot wondering how long it might take to map all the nulls-areas blanked to radar coverage by the steep valleys-areas that an attacking aircraft could use to mask its approach to Keflavik.
The radar officers were plotting probable troublesome spots on their topographical maps when an operator shouted a warning. Their clear radar screens had just turned to hash from powerful electronic jammers. That could mean only one thing.
The klaxons sounded in the fighter shelters at the end of runway eleven. Fighter pilots who had been dozing or playing dominos jumped to their feet and raced to their aircraft.
The tower officer lifted the field phone to give more exact warning to the fighters, then called up the missile battery commander: "Incoming air raid!"
Men leaped into action all across the air base. The fighter ground crews hit the built-in self-starters, turning the jet engines even as the pilots climbed into the cockpits. The SAM battery turned on its search and fire-control systems while the launch vehicles slewed their missiles into firing position.
Just under the radar horizon, eighteen B-52 bombers had just lit off their ECM jamming systems. They were deployed in six groups of three each. The first skimmed over the top of Mt. Snaefells, sixty miles north of Keflavik, and the rest came from all around the west side of the compass, converging on the target behind a wall of electronic noise provided by their own systems and the supporting EF-111 Raven jammer.
The Russian fighter just lifting off climbed to altitude, the pilot keeping his radar off as he scanned the sky visually, waiting for intercept information from the ground-based radar. His comrades were even now taxiing into the open, racing straight down the runway and into the sky. The aircraft that had just landed taxied to a fuel bowser, its pilot gesturing and cursing at the ground crewmen who were struggling to fuel his fighter. In their haste, they spilled ten gallons of fuel over the wing. Amazingly, it did not ignite, and a dozen men ran in with CO, extinguishers to prevent an explosion as the fighter drank in a full load of fuel.
HILL 152, ICELAND
Edwards's head jerked up at the noise, the distinctive roar of jet fighters. He saw a dark trail of smoke approaching in from the east, and the silhouettes passed within a mile. The shapes were heavy with ordnance, the up-angled wingtips making identification easy.
"F-4s!" he hooted. "They're our guys!"
They were Phantom jets of the New York Air National Guard, configured as Wild Weasel SAM-killers. While Russian attention was on the converging bomber raid, they skimmed over hilltops and down valleys, using the crenelated landscape to mask their low-level approach. The back-seat crewman in each aircraft counted the missile radars, selecting the most dangerous targets. When they got to within ten miles of Keflavik, they popped up high and fired a salvo of Standard-ARM antiradar missiles.
The Russians were caught by surprise. Laboring to direct missile fire at the bombers, they didn't expect a two-part raid. The incoming missiles were not detected. Three of the ARMs found targets, killing two search radars and a missile-launch vehicle. One launch commander turned his vehicle around and trained manually on the new threat. The Phantoms jammed his fire-control radar, leaving behind a series of chaff clouds as they came in at thirty-foot height. As each pilot raced to the target area assigned to him, he conducted a hasty visual search. One saw an undamaged SAM launcher and streaked toward it, dropping Rockeye clusterbomb canisters that fell short but spread over a hundred bomblets all over the area. The SA-11 launcher exploded in his wake; its crew never knew what had happened. A thousand yards beyond it was a mobile antiaircraft gun vehicle. The Phantom engaged it with his own cannon, badly damaging it as he swept across the rest of the peninsula and escaped back over the sea, a cloud of chaff and flares in his wake. It was a letter-perfect Weasel mission. All four aircraft were gone before the Soviet missile crews were able to react. The two SAMs that were launched exploded harmlessly in chaff clouds. The battery had lost two-thirds of its launcher vehicles and all of its search radars. Three of the mobile guns were also destroyed or damaged. The bombers were now a mere twenty miles out, their powerful ECM jamming systems drowning the Soviet radar with electronic noise.
They could not defeat the radar on the mobile guns, however. The new system had a radar for which they were not equipped, but it didn't matter. The guns had been designed to deal with small fighters, and when their radars tried to lock on the huge bombers, they found a target so large that their radar signals traced from one part to another. The computers could not decide what the target range was, and kept recycling automatically, rendering the electronics package useless. The gun crews cursed as one man and switched over to manual fire-control, using their eyes to sight in on the massive incoming targets.
The bombers popped up to nine hundred feet now, hoping to avoid the worst of the gunfire and escape without loss. They had not been warned of a possible fighter presence. Their mission was to wreck Keflavik before fighters could get there.
Now surprise was on the Soviet side. The Fulcrums dived out of the sun at the bombers. Their own fire-control radars were nearly useless as they approached, but half their missiles were infrared-guided, and the American bombers gave off enough heat to attract the attention of a blind man in a fur coat.
The southbound flight of three never saw them coming in. Two took missile hits and exploded in midair. The third radioed for fighter cover, jinking his aircraft hard-too hard. His second dive bottomed out too late, and the aircraft disintegrated on the ground north of Keflavik in a fireball visible to Edwards thirty miles away.
The Russian fighters were experiencing an airman's dream. All eight aircraft had individual targets, and they split to hunt them singly before Keflavik absorbed too many bomb hits. The bomber crews pressed in on their targets. It was too late to run away, and all they could do was scream for the fighters to come back and support them.
The ground-based gunners joined in. Firing over open sights, a young sergeant hit a bomber just dropping its load. The bomb bay took a dozen rounds, and the aircraft vanished in a deafening explosion that shook the sky and damaged yet another B-52. One missile-launch crew successfully switched their missile-control systems to the backup infrared mode and fired a single rocket at a bomber. It hit just after the bombs were released. The bomber's wing erupted in flame and the aircraft swooped east trailing a black river of smoke.
They watched it approach their hill, a wounded monster whose right wing trailed burning fuel. The pilot was trying to maintain altitude so that his crew could eject, but all four of his right engines were gone and the burning wing collapsed. The bomber staggered in the air and dropped, rolling into the west face of Hill 152. None of the crew escaped. Edwards didn't have to give an order. In five seconds, his men had packed their gear and were running northeast.