for a safe run in. Yet, despite the heavy AA fire, only one of the F-111 fighter bombers and one Wild Weasel were taken out, the F-111 going down, spitting flame then erupting on the ice into a thousand fiery pieces, the Weasel crashing because the intakes of its twin eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust jet engines were fouled as the plane struck a mass of terrified, glaucous-winged gulls. By now the F-111 fighter bombers had delivered their loads against the cliff face in an effort to penetrate the enclaves of the AA fire, but many of the heat-seeking missiles from the F-111s had been dummied by what photo reconnaissance later discovered were wired hot spots to sucker the heat-seeking American missiles, the Siberians’ ZSU twenty-three-millimeter and SA-10 missiles coming from relatively cooler apertures from within the sixteen-hundred-foot-high cliff face of the eleven-square-mile island.
In most danger were the five Stealth fighters. Poorly maneuverable, compared to the F-111s and Wild Weasels, and slow, at seven hundred miles per hour, the Stealth’s only superiority to the others lay in radar evasion. They sought the safety of flying practically on the deck, only two to three hundred feet above the jagged ice that was racing like an endless white runway beneath them. One, just off the northern end of Little Diomede less than two and a half miles from target, had ironically begun to climb for an over-the-shoulder toss when a wind shear created among the ice floes’ jagged peaks sucked it down for a fraction of a second. At seven hundred miles an hour the Stealth could not rise in time, and the Siberian Quads’ fire raked it from the ventral scanner below the pilot past the canopy actuator to the left-hand tail fin. It was as if a swallow’s tail had been suddenly clipped; the plane’s implosion on the ice and the detonation of the Paveway two-thousand-pounder blew a black hole in the ice, the giant eruption of flame from it illuminating the strait between the islands like some enormous charred skating rink. For an instant it was bright as day, the Siberian gunners pouring an enfilade of ZSU twenty-three millimeter fire toward it. It took a full burst, and the second Stealth was gone.
High above Big Diomede thousands more seabirds, screeching in panic, driven aloft by the shrapnel-filled night, cried even louder, some falling now, tumbling down toward the ice, either killed outright or stunned by the bombs’ explosions and AA fire. Two Siberian SA-10 missiles — radar-identified by a high-stationed, rotodomed Boeing E-3—streaked toward two of the three remaining Stealths as they banked hard right, turning north, swinging still further to an eastward heading.
There were two winks of light from Cape Prince of Wales’ Cape Mountain, and in less than five seconds two 20-foot-long, 2,200-pound U.S. Patriot land mobile surface-to-air missiles intercepted the two Soviet SA-10s, blowing them out of the sky. In the mobile command center of the Patriots in a bunker in Cape Prince of Wales the videos from the cameras of the first American wave were already being shown. The representatives from Raytheon Co. of Lexington and the Martin Marietta Corp. of Bethesda, Maryland, the prime and subcontractors for the 1.4- million-dollar-apiece Patriots, were well pleased, watching their companies being guaranteed future contracts for the 152-million-dollar Patriot’s mobile five unit system.
They were also joining in the congratulations to those pilots who had “toggled” the laser-guided bombs, via the white cross of the TV image, smack onto their selected targets, the silent, soft white bursts of light on the videos showing the smart bombs exploding. But there had been very few secondary bursts within the initial explosions, meaning no ammunition or missile dumps.
But if the contractors were pleased, the CO of Alaskan Command wasn’t. He had lost four multimillion dollar aircraft and six air crew, two each from the downed F-111 fighter bomber and the Phantom 4-G Wild Weasel, two from the Stealth fighters. And for what? If the high-frequency Russian radar hadn’t picked them up because of the earlier jamming by the Wild Weasels, then low frequency, which had been known to work on the Stealths before, must have. In any case, what was the result? he pointedly asked the hitherto exhilarated pilots. The infrared videos showed nothing more than the cliff face splattered with black, sootlike marks and splotches like white paint, clumps of old guano that had accumulated against the sixteen-hundred-foot-high granite cliff now covered in ice and snow. Yes, the bombs had landed where they were supposed to, but there was no evidence of any real damage. Where the hell were the knocked-out ZSU quads? Never mind the absence of any real damage to the SA-10 and radar array sites.
“Probably all recessed,” proffered one of the remaining F-111 weapons officers.
“Of course they’re goddamn recessed,” said the general. “They popped up long enough to get a fix on you, fired, and then they were gone, back in their holes like a bunch of prairie dogs.”
“We must have hit a few ventilator shafts, sir — that led in from the cliff. They have to breathe.”
“Hell, Captain, they could have ventilator shafts coming in from all over that island from the western side. Island’s only three miles wide. We were firing at hot spots that the videos now show were just that — hot spots. Thermal patches, each one probably run by a goddamn flashlight battery. I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it, but we’re wasting bombs, and we’ve just shot off five million bucks worth of ordnance in five seconds to shoot down missiles from sites we can’t even see.”
“Well, sir,” continued one of the two remaining Stealth captains, “we’re just going to have to get those satellite boys in Washington to get their magnifying glasses on. Has to be somewhere we can get ordnance into that sucker.”
“Trouble is, sir, it’s so cold, RHPs’ signatures disappear on you almost immediately.”
“I know, I know. I’ll put the word out to our chief weapons officer — see whether he can crank the infrared sensors up a notch or two.”
“I’m surprised we didn’t run into any MiGs,” said the captain in charge of the Stealths.
“Maybe they don’t have any in their eastern TVD.” He meant the Siberians’ eastern theater.
“Right,” said the Stealth captain cheekily, “and I ‘m Marilyn Monroe.”
“Then come to bed, Marilyn,” said one of the weapons officers. But no one felt like laughing. The exhilaration of the attack was wearing off with the realization that six of their buddies were no more. And in the two Stealths alone, Alaska Air Command had lost 250 million dollars of the taxpayers’ money.
One thing was for damn sure, the general told his aide after the debriefing — he wasn’t going to send any more pilots against that “hunk of rock” until he could loosen it up a bit by “other means.” By which he meant that, despite NORAD’s insistence that the attack on Ratmanov not siphon off any aircraft from the continent’s vital North American defense line, he would request that a B-1 bomber be released from its blastproof shelter six hundred feet above sea level to launch air-to-ground 86-B cruise missiles at the rock.
Firing the three-thousand-pound, two-thousand-mile-range missile outside the Siberians’ effective air-to- surface missile envelope from a distance of between forty and fifty miles would be like hitting the rock at point- blank range. If that didn’t shake a few things loose, granite fortress and all, he didn’t know what would. He could, of course, wait for more bombers to be released from Europe, but this was unlikely now that they had to contend with containing the Siberian west flank. And the air commander knew that if he couldn’t shake up Big Diomede— and quickly — knocking out its radar, AA, and no doubt its surface-to-ship missile batteries, he would have to yield the job to the navy. He was right.
The Tomcats aboard USS
In the backseat of the lead Tomcat, Frank Shirer’s RIO, his radar intercept officer, Walter B. Anderson, a twenty-four-year-old from Wisconsin, raised his thumb, signalling the red-jacketed ordnance men that he had seen all the red-ribboned safety pins extracted from the bomb racks. Now through the white blaze of steam-curtained light, shadows of yellow- and green-jacketed men darted about the bow and waist cats and blast deflectors — the twin, bluish white cones of the Tomcat’s Pratt and Whitney TF-30 engines going into the high scream of a forty- thousand-pound thrust. Shirer saw the yellow jacket drop, left knee on the deck, left hand tucked up behind his back, right arm fully extended. “Go!”
Shirer braced himself. There was an enormous hiss. Shirer felt himself slammed back into his seat, saw a blur
