Super-RBOC chaff rockets leaped into the sky and exploded, surrounding the frigate with a cloud of aluminum foil.
'I count five inbounds,' a radar operator was saying. One's heading towards us. Bearing zero-zero-eight, range seven miles, speed five hundred knots.'
'Bridge, come right full rudder to zero-zero-eight,' the tactical action officer ordered. 'Stand by to fire off more chaff. Air action forward, weapons free.'
The five-inch gun swiveled slightly and loosed several rounds, none of which came near the incoming missile.
'Range two miles and closing,' reported the radar man.
'Fire four more Super-Rocs.'
Morris heard the rockets launch. The radar showed their chaff as an opaque cloud that enveloped the ship.
'CIC,' called a lookout. 'I see it. Star bound bow, inbound-it's gonna miss, I got a bearing change. There-there it goes, passing aft. Missed us by a couple hundred yards.'
The missile was confused by the chaff. Had its brain had the capacity to think, it would have been surprised that it struck nothing. Instead, on coming back to a clear sky, the radar seeker merely looked for another target. It found one, fifteen miles ahead, and altered course toward it.
'Sonar,' Morris ordered, 'check bearing zero-zero-eight. There's a missile-armed sub out there.'
'Looking now, sir. Nothing shows on that bearing.'
'A five-hundred-knot sea-skimmer. That's a Charlie-class sub, maybe thirty miles out,' Morris said. 'Get the helo out there. I'm going topside.'
The captain reached the bridge just in time to see the explosion on the horizon. That was no freighter. The fireball could only mean a warship had had her magazines exploded by a missile, perhaps the one that had just missed them. Why hadn't they been able to stop it? Three more explosions followed. Slowly the noise traveled across the sea toward them, reaching Pharris as the deep sound of an enormous bass drum. The frigate's Sea Sprite helicopter was just lifting off, racing north in the hope of catching the Soviet sub near the surface. Morris ordered his ship to slow to five knots in the hope that the lower speed would allow his sonar to perform just a little better. Still nothing. He returned to CIC.
The helicopter's crew dropped a dozen sonobuoys. Two showed something, but the contact faded, and was not reestablished. Soon an Orion showed up and carried on the search, but the submarine had escaped cleanly, her missiles having killed a destroyer and two merchantmen. Just like that, Morris thought. No warning at all.
'Raid warning again,' the Group Captain said.
'Realtime?' Toland asked.
'No, an asset we have in Norway. Contrails overhead southwest. He counts twenty or so, aircraft type unknown. We have a Nimrod patrolling north of Iceland now. If they're Backfires, and if they rendezvous with a tanker group, we might just get something. See if your idea works, Bob.'
Four Tomcat interceptors were sitting ready on the flight line. Two were armed with missiles. The other pair carried buddy-stores, fuel tanks designed to transfer fuel to other aircraft. The distance they expected for a successful intercept meant a round trip of two thousand miles, which meant that only two aircraft could reach far enough, and they were stretching to the limit.
The Nimrod circled two hundred miles east of Jan Mayen Land. The Norwegian island had been subjected to several air attacks, destroying the radar there, though so far the Russians had not launched a ground attack as expected. The British patrol aircraft bristled with antennae but carried no armament of her own. If the Russians sent escorting fighters out with the bomber/tanker force, she could only evade. One team listened in on the bands used by the Russians to communicate between aircraft, another on radar frequencies.
It was a long, tense wait. Two hours after the raid warning, a garbled transmission was heard, interpreted as a warning to a Backfire pilot approaching a tanker. The bearing was plotted, and the Nimrod turned east hoping for a cross bearing on the next such signal. None was detected. Without a firm fix, the fighters had only the slimmest hope of an intercept. They were kept on the ground. Next time, they decided, there'd be a pair of snoopers up.
The QZB bell-ringer call arrived just after lunch. McCafferty brought his submarine to antenna depth and received orders to proceed to Faslane, the Royal Navy submarine base in Scotland. Since losing contact with the Russian surface force, they had not tracked a single positive contact. It was crazy. All the pre-war assessments told McCafferty to expect a 'target-rich environment.' So far he was rich only in frustration. The executive officer took them back down to a deep cruising depth while McCafferty began to write up his patrol report.
'You're pretty exposed here,' the captain observed, crouching just behind the turret.
'True enough,' Sergeant Mackall agreed. His M-1 Abrams tank was dug into the reverse slope of a hill, its gun barely clear of the ground behind a row of shrubs. Mackall looked down a shallow valley to a treeline fifteen hundred meters away. The Russians were in there, surveying the ridges with powerful field glasses, and he hoped that they could not make out the squat, ominous profile of the main battle tank. He was in one of three prepared firing positions, a sloped hole in the ground dug by the engineers' bulldozers, helped over the last few days by local German farmers who had taken to the task with a will. The bad news was that the next line of such positions required traversing five hundred meters of open fields. They'd been planted with something a bare six weeks before. Those crops would never amount to much, the sergeant knew.
'Ivan must love this weather,' Mackall observed. There was an overcast at about thirteen hundred feet. Whatever air support he could expect would have a bare five seconds to acquire and engage their targets before having to break clear of the battlefield. 'What can you give us, sir?'
'I can call four A-10s, maybe some German birds,' the Air Force captain replied. He surveyed the terrain himself from a slightly different perspective. What was the best way to get the ground-attack fighters in and out? The first Russian attack on this position had been repulsed, but he could see the remains of two NATO aircraft that had died in the effort. 'There should be three choppers, too.'
That surprised Mackall-and worried him. Just what sort of attack were they expecting here?
'Okay.' The captain stood and turned back to his armored command vehicle. 'When you hear 'Zulu, Zulu, Zulu,' that means the air is less than five minutes out. If you see any SAM vehicles or antiair guns, for Christ's sake take them out. The Warthogs have been hit real hard, Sarge.'
'You got it, Cap'n. You better get your ass outa here, it's gonna be showtime soon.' One thing Mackall had learned was just how important a good forward air-control officer was, and this one had dug the sergeant's troop out of a really bad scrape three days before. He watched the officer sprint fifty yards to the waiting vehicle, its engine already turning. The rear door hadn't yet closed when the driver pulled out fast, zigzagging down the slope and across the plowed field toward the command post.
B Troop, 1st Squadron, 1lth Armored Cavalry Regiment had once been fourteen tanks. Five of the originals were gone, and there had been only two replacements. Of the rest, all had been damaged to one degree or another. His platoon leader had been killed on the second day of the war, leaving Mackall in command of the three- tank platoon, covering nearly a kilometer of front. Dug in between his tanks was a company of German infantry-men of the Landwehr, the local equivalent of the National Guard, farmers and shop owners for the most part, men fighting to defend not just their country, but their own homes. They, too, had taken serious losses. The 'company' was no more than two platoons of effectives. Surely the Russians know just how thin we're spread, Mackall thought. Everyone was dug in-deep. The power of Russian artillery had come as a shock despite all the pre-war warnings they'd had.
'The Americans must love this.' The colonel gestured at the low clouds. 'Their damned airplanes come swooping in too low for our radar, and this way we have practically no chance to see them before they fire.'
'How badly have they hurt you?'
'See for yourself.' The colonel gestured at the battlefield. Fifteen tanks lay in view-the burned-out remains. 'That American low-level fighter did this-the Thunderbolt. Our men call it the Devil's Cross.'
'But you killed two aircraft yesterday,' Sergetov objected.
'Yes, and only one of four gun vehicles survived the effort. The same vehicle got both-Senior Sergeant Lupenko. I recommended him for the Red Banner. It will be posthumous-the second aircraft crashed right on his
