centerline, and they were dropping from the aircraft six at a time, in a pattern designed to scatter them across as much real estate as possible.
Relieved of some fifteen thousand pounds of ordnance, the Intruder rocketed into the sky. Willis helped it along, going to full throttle and hauling back on the stick. The shock wave struck them from behind as they climbed.
Willis twisted in his seat, trying to see aft past the Intruder's port wing. The center of the airfield was engulfed in boiling flame, and several buildings were erupting in pulsing, flaming blasts, contributing to the ongoing mass detonations as he watched. 'Secondaries!' he yelled, excitement hammering at him. 'We've got secondaries.'
'Roger that, Five-oh-four,' Thumper called. 'I think you dropped one into their missile stores! Look at that sucker blow!'
'Goddamn!' Willis enthused. 'We did it, Sunshine, we did it!'
'Did you have any doubts about that, Willis?' For the first time in long minutes, she had her face out of her radar screen and was looking at him. The eyes visible between her visor and her oxygen mask were very blue, and sparkled with something that might be amusement.
Or possibly it was just pride at a job well and professionally done.
'No!' he said, laughing. Willis felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. There was something almost magical in the shared camaraderie of combat that wiped away doubt, replacing it with trust.
'No, God damn it! I didn't!'
He brought the Intruder around, heading north toward the coast.
CHAPTER 23
During the night the U.S. Air Force entered the fray ? F-117 Stealth Fighters and F-111 Aardvarks, deploying out of Lakenheath and Upper Heyford, England, crossed the mountains above Bodo, then skimmed the forests and lake country of northern Sweden and Finland, striking the Kola military bases from the west and south instead of from the north. 'Smart' weapons, first seen publicly in the Gulf War of 1991, followed invisible beams of laser light unerringly into bunker-complex ventilator shafts, aircraft hangar doors, and command-center windows, as American forces kept up a relentless pressure against Russian C3 assets ? command, Control, and Communications.
Contributing their firepower to the assault through that long night were over two hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the wide-scattered fleet of Los Angeles-class attack subs in the Barents Sea. Skimming sea and earth at subsonic speeds, the TLAMs followed the terrain features loaded into their onboard computers. Their principal targets were communication relays and operations centers, SAM sites, and aircraft in their revetments.
Carrier strikes continued as well, but at a lower tempo as both deck personnel and aircrews were given a respite in preparation for missions in support of the Marine amphib operations. One carrier attack squadron off the Eisenhower, VA-66, the Waldos, participated in a long-range, nighttime strike far to the east. The Waldos' A-6 Intruders were loaded with four Harpoon missiles apiece and sent to hunt down the Groznyy, the Russian cruiser that had sunk the Scranton the day before.
Guided by Hawkeye radar pickets and by Forward-Looking Infra-Red tracking, or FLIR, they found the Groznyy in the mouth of the White Sea and left her burning and with her decks awash. The Waldos and another attack squadron off the Ike, the Tigers of VA-65, also hit other naval targets found at sea between Polyamyy and Grimikha, sinking dozens of vessels from Osa II guided-missile boats to a destroyer, the Nastoychivyy. The idea was to convince what was left of the Russians' Northern Fleet to stay at home, in port and safely under the protection of shore-based antiaircraft and SAM batteries.
Meanwhile, throughout the night in the skies above the Kola Peninsula, spy satellites and high-flying Aurora reconnaissance aircraft continued to pinpoint key targets and update the Pentagon's overall intelligence picture.
Microwave communications between command centers and outlying facilities were tapped by various electronic intelligence assets. Even from orbit, ELINT satellites could listen in on encrypted conversations between unit commanders and their units; as streams of intercepted communications were relayed back to its secret complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, the National Security Agency, largest and arguably the most secret of America's intelligence organizations, swiftly broke the codes on their batteries of Cray supercomputers. Even without decoding, the patterns of radio communications provided NSA, CIA, and Pentagon analysts with a clear picture of the Russians' Kola Peninsula military command structure… and final proof, in the form of orders from Krasilnikov himself, that the defenses were being orchestrated from the Kremlin. The idea that the attacks on the American carrier groups had been carried out by renegade local commanders was clearly a complete fiction.
That night, however, the UN's determination to enforce Resolutions 982 and 984 began taking on a new urgency.
The President sat in his high-backed chair, watching without expression the contorted face of Marshal Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov on one of the large television monitors in one wall of the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the room, Gordon West, his chief of staff, and Herbert Waring, the National Security Advisor, along with a number of secretaries, aides, and staffers, stood in silence as they listened to a translator's voice providing a simultaneous translation for Krasilnikov's impassioned speech.
'The United Nations has taken dangerous… ah… a dangerous course of action,' the translator's voice was saying. Krasilnikov's own voice, the volume turned down but still audible, was shaking with an emotion the translator could not express. 'For fifty years United Nations has provided forum for international debate, for keeping, uh, for peacekeeping activities through rule of law…'
'The guy's not a bad speech-maker,' the President said. 'No wonder he went in for politics.'
Waring, standing closest to the Chief Executive, looked up from a transcript of Krasilnikov's speech. 'I wonder if he might not have some valid points here, Mr. President. After all, if we continue to act as the UN's muscle in Russia, what's to stop the UN from pulling the same tactics against us some day?'
'The alternative, Herb,' the President said slowly, 'is to let them start nuking each other, and anyone else who makes them mad. The UN can't afford to let that start happening. We can't afford to let it happen.'
'Uh, oh,' Gordon West said. 'He's starting in on us now.'
'The United States of America has embarked down dangerous road,' the translator was saying. 'One of military adventurism, of unrestrained and illegal meddling in internal affairs of sovereign, ah, of a sovereign world power. This, perhaps, was safe enough when confronting Third World countries like Iraq or the People's Republic of Korea, nations that could not seriously challenge American military might.
'But now, the United States, operating behind facade of bandit thugs of United Nations, has challenged a great power, one capable of most, of the most severe and devastating retaliatory response.'
'my God, he's threatening us!' West said softly. 'He's actually threatening to loose his nukes on us if we don't back off!'
'I hear him, Gordy,' the President said. Indeed, he'd heard this speech three times that night already, as well as going over the written transcript.
The key here was knowing ? or at least taking a damned good guess at ? what Krasilnikov was really saying beneath his bombastic phrases of you-can't-do-this-to-us hurt and outrage.
'The wanton destruction of one of Russia's most modern ballistic-missile submarines by units of the U.S. Navy operating illegally within the Barents Sea,' Krasilnikov went on, 'cannot swerve us from our purpose, which is the final unity and security of the Russian peoples, and the defense of our Motherland against all foreign invaders, even
