Next Brentwood called through to the chief of the boat in charge of battling the fire. “What are we looking at back there, Chief?”
A young voice came on, rising above the hollow roar of the fire. “Sir, this is electrician’s mate Richards. The chief’s—” Brentwood waited — either the circuit had gone or the seaman had also been overcome by the toxic fumes — a defective mask seal, the mask knocked askew by falling lagging — anything could happen.
Brentwood pulled a man out of the line of sailors waiting to go up to the sail and guided him toward the ladder. “Give me your mask, sailor.”
Brentwood informed Zeldman he was going aft so that should anything happen to him, Zeldman would take over. “Give me five minutes, Pete,” Brentwood instructed.
“Five minutes. Aye, sir. Mind how you go.”
Brentwood strapped on the mask, his throat already raw from the smoke, his voice nasal inside the mask as he entered the smoke-choked passageway. “On your left, make way. On your left…” As he walked through “Sherwood Forest,” the smoke was swirling thickly about the huge missiles like the set of some fantastic opera.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
By the time the bulk of Mount Moffett, the initial aiming point fifty miles away, started Dipping green in Sergei Marchenko’s head-up display, the Flogger D automatically started to climb in preparation for bomb release. Knowing he was going to be in full view of Adak’s radar as he gained altitude, Marchenko released his
The chaff, aluminized glass fiber strips cut to lengths corresponding to those of Adak’s radar band, immediately started sowing havoc with Adak’s radar, the screens a frantic dance of “fly shit.” As the fourteen Soviet fighters passed between Mount Moffett, massive but invisible on their right, and the two-thousand-foot Mount Adagdak to their left, Marchenko saw the snow-framed mirror of Andrew Lagoon racing toward him, and beyond it, the soft glow of the “marker” fire indicating the command and control center of the naval base.
Below, off to his left, he could see long arcs of red and white tracer disappearing eastward over the black void of Kulak Bay. Though Marchenko only glimpsed the trawler intermittently in flare light reflected off the snowy peaks surrounding the icy blue crescent of the bay, he was more aware than any of the other pilots of how much they owed the crew of the trawler for having set the bonfire marker and now firing Grail missiles at virtually point- blank range into the Kulak Bay defenses.
Despite his high state of tension, Marchenko was content to let the Flogger D have its head, trusting entirely to its contour-matching radar, its computer automatically selecting wavelengths to be different from those being jammed. It was at once exhilarating and frightening.
He saw the target growing on his infrared screen and took over the controls, Adak base directly ahead, its cluster of long huts, all the same in appearance, looking in the snow surprisingly like a camp he’d seen in the Gulag. Between the huts there were shimmering figures — people running for cover.
The computer had already selected the Flogger’s “exit” trajectory, the shortest vector away from the point of bomb release, as the large sub base, its pens outlined now on the infrared TV screen above the main instrument panel, came in on the “zoom” frame immediately below the larger screen. He felt the shock wave bumps of antiaircraft fire but ignored them, releasing only when he heard the bip.
Bombs released, turning hard right, he heard the chatter of American voices on the radio, spotted an American Tomcat in his HUD, and went air-to-air. The American passed out of sight above the sudden light of the exploding inferno beneath them that had been Adak Naval Station. Marchenko turned left, rolled hard right, trying to center another Tomcat. A wing edge slipped into his HUD. He fired a missile, but the American had gone down and now was probably going around, trying to get into the Flogger’s cone, to take him out from behind. He saw another Tomcat on his radar coming for him, then breaking off, down, for a stern conversion. He went to afterburner and climbed high.
Shirer’s Tomcat was on warning yellow — weapons hold status — fourteen miles from Adak, having been halfway to Shemya before they heard Adak’s call for assistance. “Master arm on,” he told his RIO in the backseat. “Centering the T. Bogeys ten miles. Centering the dot.”
“Bingo!” It was his wingman on the halfway fuel mark, breaking off to head back to the carrier.
There was a rush of static, then the RIO’s voice came through, “You got the tone?” to confirm whether the Tomcat’s Sparrow missile was ready.
“Got it,” answered Shirer. “Centering the dot… Fox 1.” Shirer felt the twelve-foot Sparrow release.
“Bogey at three o’clock,” called the RIO. “Bogey…” Shirer hit the afterburner. The RIO felt the sudden G, like steel against his chest.
Shirer saw another Bogey climbing fast, crossing his HUD’s green lines. He centered. “Fox 2.” This time a Sidewinder took off from the Tomcat, heading for the Flogger’s exhaust.
“Angels 2,” said the RIO, telling Shirer they were at two thousand feet. Shirer hit the afterburner again; the steep wall of fire that was Adak base slipped downhill from him into the darkness. He was in cloud. He glimpsed the flames again — they were making tiny shadows on the fading patch of snow as he entered more cloud. The Flogger D had exploded, its orange ball curling to black.
“Outstanding!” the RIO yelled. “That’ll—”
There was a ragged crimson streak in front of them — a Flogger D’s six-barreled rotary cannon spitting out twenty-three-millimeter tracer, a Tomcat exploding to Shirer’s left. The Flogger D passed into Shirer’s HUD for only a millisecond, but Shirer’s reaction was automatic, the Tomcat slid, its rotary cannon in the port side erupting in a long, blue-white flash, the reflection dancing madly in the cockpit. A sound like tearing canvas. Then the Tomcat went crazy, Shirer doing everything he could but realizing he was quickly slipping into an inverted spin.
“Eject!” he shouted to the RIO through his mike as he tried every trick he knew, released the break chute — nothing worked as the plane continued yawing, pitching, and rolling simultaneously, its engine flamed out, the blood roaring from feet to head. “Eject!” he yelled again.
Elbows in, head tucked, he pulled the release, felt the kick of the rocket assist, then blacked out.
An F-16 and Flogger collided over Andrew Lagoon as the four F-16s that Adak had scrambled tried to beat off the surprise low-level Soviet attack. Two of the remaining three F-16s in the flight were destroyed on the Davis runway. The other one was destroyed by one of the Tomcats’ Sidewinder missiles after having been mistaken for a Sukhoi Fitter C, which, like the F-16, was also a single-engined fighter.
The engagement, involving all planes, had lasted 4.73 minutes, the Adak base by Kulak Bay gutted, rendered ineffective. In the light of the fires from the oil and food stores, those among the two thousand civilian and military personnel still alive saw the shoreline around the C-shaped bay littered with the bodies of hundreds of dead fish and gannets, some of the birds coated with the sheen of high-octane from the ruptured storage tanks, but most of the wildlife killed by the concussion of several off-target bombs exploding in the bay.
The commanding officer of Adak was trying to contact Shemya, four hundred miles to the west, and Dutch Harbor about five hundred miles to the east, but could reach neither. Meanwhile the duty officer was informing him that the SOSUS, the underwater hydrophone sound surveillance system, was out. Whether the underwater arrays themselves about the island had been damaged by depth bombs or whether it was the connection between shore and the arrays that was the problem, there was nothing but “garbage” coming in. Adak was on its own.
“Then our first priority is to get those fires out,” replied the CO. “Unless we do, we’ll all die of exposure in this weather. Contact our Wave contingent and see what they can rig up if the hospital huts are gone, and make sure every available pump hose is—”
“Sir?”
There was a crackling noise in the distance, above the noise of the nearby fires. “What’s that?” demanded the CO.
“Probably the Aleut shacks that are—”
“By God,” said the CO, “that sounds like small-arms fire to me.”
It was the first sign they had that Soviet paratroops were descending on Adak.
