Delta Blue

Seventeen

The AEW&C plane was an Ilyushin II-76 using the call sign Sable. The air controller had a baritone, unflappable voice. He sounded so rock-solid that Volontov agreed with NATO. They called the airborne early warning and control aircraft version of the II-76 Mainstay.

“Condor, Vulture, this is Sable.”

“Proceed, Sable,” Pyotr Volontov said.

“You have ten targets on intercept course, velocity Mach 1.2. We interpret them as four Eurofighters at seven thousand meters and six Tornadoes at twelve thousand meters. They have you spotted, so you may as well go to active radar.”

Volontov activated the radar set. The sweep lit up so many blips that it took him several seconds to sort them out.

He depressed the transmit button, “Sable, Condor. The Eurofighters appear to be a probe.”

“Agreed, Condor.”

“Vulture Flight, scatter,” Volontov ordered. “Condor, Vulture, Tern, arm all.”

Volontov raised the protective cover and armed his guns and missiles. He selected two AA-11 missiles from the inboard left and right pylons.

On the radar screen, he saw Rostoken’s flight of six break up as preplanned. Three fighters spread out and began to climb toward the four Eurofighters. The other three hung back for a second, then went to afterburners and started to climb toward the Tornadoes.

The distance to initial contact was fifty kilometers. One of the Eurofighter pilots was nervous. He released two missiles, probably Sky Flashes, far too early. The small blips dashed across the screen and died an early and ineffective death.

Tern and Condor Flights maintained their steady advance at Mach 1.5.

At forty kilometers, just inside the Sky Flash effective range, the Eurofighters fired eight missiles at the lead MiGs. Volontov thought that the Germans were too obviously trying to draw an attack by all of his craft.

The three lead MiGs returned fire with six missiles, then took evasive action, their blips disappearing in a cloud of chaff and flares.

The Eurofighters came on.

The Tornadoes at 12,000 meters held course and altitude. They were thirty kilometers behind the Eurofighters.

Volontov looked up through the windscreen. A second later, a white flash in the distance. Then another.

Sable reported. “Vulture Four is hit. One Eurofighter hit.”

Another transmission with lots of static. “… Vulture Five… turbo… jets… woun… down… eject.”

“Sable to Mother Hen.” The air controller read off the coordinates of the downed MiG to the rescue craft.

He would bail out over the ice, but Volontov was doubtful of the man’s chances. Georgi Andrenko. Twenty-six years old, a joker in the barracks. Married for less than one year. Volontov’s resolve built up inside him, along with a boiling hatred.

“Vulture One to Two and Three. Dive now!”

On the screen, the three Vultures who had begun to climb toward the Tornadoes suddenly altered course and dove toward the Eurofighters.

The three remaining Eurofighters, their formation already disrupted by evasive tactics, began to dive as all of Vulture Flight converged on them.

That committed the Tornadoes. All six began a quick descent. Volontov watched until they passed through 8,000 meters.

“Condor. Tern Flight go to Mach two. Condors Three, Four, Five, and Six, Engage.”

Volontov dearly wanted to go with them. But he and Gurychenko would remain the cover for Tern Flight and go in for the cleanup. Tern Flight had to be protected.

He advanced his throttles and watched the HUD readout rise to Mach 2.

The screen began to fill with missile firings. All order disintegrated. Sable chanted instructions as the air controller tracked each airplane.

His earphones filled with a cacophony of Russian voices. “Vulture Seven, go left!.. Got him!.. Six, two missiles on you… hard, now, hard, now dive… ”

Mac Zeigman flew alongside the drogue and watched as his lighted fueling probe entered the cone.

“Here she comes, Tiger Leader,” the Pelican One fuel controller told him.

He trimmed his controls as the weight of the fuel was taken aboard the Tornado. He was not paying a lot of attention to the fueling process, a dangerous lack of concentration.

He was listening to the voices intoning the battle to the northeast. Longing to be there. Knowing he could do it better than anyone else.

“Major… ” his WSO said.

He looked at the fuel readout. “All right, Pelican. That does it.”

“Right, Tiger Leader. Next!”

Easing the throttle back, he pulled out of the drogue, then switched off the light and retracted the fuel probe.

He put the nose down and slid under the tanker, allowing the next plane to close in.

He checked his radar scan. Panther flight’s air battle was out of range. Four of Panther flight’s Tornadoes still circled north of him, over the center of the ice platforms.

Four of his own squadron’s aircraft were to the west, circling, waiting, while the two Eurofighters were below the clouds, near the center of the offshore platforms. He had three other Tornadoes with him southeast of the field. Svalbard Island was invisible below the cloud cover. The stars were clear against a black sky. Two hours to moon-rise.

He checked the chronometer. Soon, he would have to release the second and third elements of his own squadron for refueling, also.

He called the element in the north. “Panther Nine, Tiger Leader. What is your fuel state?”

“One-three-zero-zero kilograms, Tiger Leader.”

“Wait ten minutes, then join Pelican Three.”

“Affirmative, Tiger Leader.”

Zeigman eased in left rudder and left stick and went into a shallow left turn as his wingman slipped in alongside him.

His eyes roamed the dark valleys and mountains of the clouds.

To the south.

The MakoSharks would come from there.

And very soon.

They had done it before.

The Soviets would not draw him off, again. He put the dog fight out of his mind and focused on the south.

Tiger Drei and Tiger Vier, finished with their refueling, joined up off his left wing, in a four-finger formation.

The HUD gave him the speed and altitude. Five hundred knots and 10,000 meters, conserving fuel.

Seeing nothing.

He scanned the radar screen. They were moving south of the fields now. Schmidt’s three battle groups showed up clearly, on stations ten kilometers south of the first platforms. The four airborne fuel tankers were spaced to the west, also at 10,000 meters.

Would the naval ships draw the MakoSharks when they came? Or would the stealth aircraft elude them after the nearly fatal encounter of several days before?

Would the MakoSharks attempt to torpedo the cables below the wells, as Weismann assumed they would?

They should have an airborne control craft up. He could not decipher the action being reported on Panther flight’s radio frequency, but it sounded as if there were fewer voices.

He could not see the MakoSharks.

“Tigers Two, Three, Four, we will take a peek under the cloud cover.”

Zeigman eased the stick forward, and the Tornado glided downward. The thick blanket of clouds rose toward him, then wrapped wispy trails around him.

Pearson, Avery, Overton, Arguento, and Amber held onto tethers and handgrips and watched the main console screen. The view of the Persian Gulf through the port was being totally ignored.

The KH-11’s night-vision, real-time image was being computer-enhanced, but there was little to be seen. German planes circled above the clouds. Four of them had just disappeared as they went below the cloud cover.

To the northeast, the conflict with the Soviets had also disappeared as the aircraft descended below 15,000 feet.

The speakers were silent. The Delta flight was maintaining an unnecessary radio silence on Tac-1, as far as Pearson was concerned. She wanted to know what was going on. McKenna and Volontov were not communicating on Tac-2. Arguento had located the Soviet tactical channel on a radio, but the dialogues were disjointed, in Russian, and as Val Arguento said, “probably scrambled.” Arguento had also located the probable German air and naval frequencies, but they were also scrambled.

One of the secondary screens displayed the radar repeat from the AWACS airplane, Cottonseed. Numerous targets were shown on the scan, each identified with a code and an altitude. The codes clarified the blip as, for example, German and Panther — “G/Pntr.”

Overton touched the intercom button for the radar room. “Radar, Command.”

“Radar, sir.”

“Let’s go to the plot program.”

“Coming up, General.”

Arguento tapped the keyboard, cleared the screen, and set it up for the plot mode. A few seconds later, a stylized map of the area appeared, along with a few dozen white squares. The computer was accepting both radar and KH-11 data, merging them, and displaying the total input, without the barrier of cloud formations.

Arguento played with the keyboard, changing the wells to yellow, the Soviet planes to red, the German ships to blue, and the German planes to orange. The American and Soviet AWACS and search-and-rescue craft remained white. Finally, he overlaid the grid that the Delta flight was using on their maps to mark coordinates.

There were no MakoSharks.

The dogfight in the northeast appeared frantic, the blips so close together that they merged and the ident tags left the screen. One flight of eight, at low altitude and inserted by the computer from the order of battle, rather than from visual or radar contact, had pulled away from the melee and were headed west.

“There were ten Germans and twenty Soviet planes in that bunch,” Overton said. “The eight must be the ground attack squadron, but I only count thirteen left.”

“Nine planes down,” Amber said.

Pearson wondered what this looked like on NORAD’s larger screen. Brackman and Thorpe were maintaining their silence, but they must be on the edge of their chairs.

She pulled herself close to the microphone. After a heated debate with McKenna and Overton, she had been designated the operations officer for this mission. McKenna had unexpectedly taken her side.

“Delta Blue, Alpha Two.”

“Go ahead.”

“Squawk me once, if you can.”

Delta Blue’s IFF signal appeared briefly on the screen.

“I read them sixty miles out,” Arguento said.

“Thanks, Blue. That helps,” from Cottonseed.

The MakoSharks were not yet using radar, so their interpretation of events came over the radio channel from Cottonseed or Alpha.

Pearson pressed the transmit button, “Delta Blue, the current situation is as follows: four Tornadoes at R-twelve, six-nine, seven thousand, heading one-nine-zero; two Eurofighters… ” She read off the rest of the coordinates, imagining Munoz, Abrams, and Williams feeding the data to their own computers.

“Delta Blue,” she said, “if they can’t refuel, it’ll be a shorter night.”

“Alpha Two,” Munoz asked, “what were those tanker coordinates again?”

McKenna hated wearing gloves when he was flying, but he pulled his on and pressed the wrist fittings into the groove of the environmental suit.

He scanned the HUD. They were holding 60,000 feet and Mach 1.2.

Dimatta came on the air. “I get the two on the west, Snake Eyes. The jerks are bunched up.”

“I’ve got the east-bounder,” Conover said.

“Leaves us the closest one,” McKenna said. “Tiger?”

“Arm ’em all, Snake Eyes, and let’s go huntin’.”

McKenna raised the flap, selected all pylons, and armed all missiles. The eight in the payload bay would remain in reserve because he didn’t want to slow down enough to open the bay doors.

“AD yours, Tiger.”

“Gracias.”

They were keeping Tac-1 open so that each of the MakoSharks knew what the others were doing. He heard Conover and Dimatta arming their weapons.

He couldn’t see them, but knew that Dimatta was six miles to his right and Conover was six miles to his left.

“Let’s do it, Deltas.”

Easing back on the throttles, McKenna tapped the hand controller forward and the nose tilted down. Minus twenty-five degrees. On the bottom right of the HUD, fifteen small green lights displayed the live missiles on the pylons. They had lost one during the blackout period and had jettisoned it over the Norwegian Sea.

“Delta Blue, Condor,” came in on Tac-2.

“Go.”

“Tern Flight is making its turn on the wells.”

The Fulcrums making the ground attack had to come from the north, rather than the east, in order to approach the platforms on the ice from the correct angle.

“Copy, Condor. What’s your status?”

“We have shot down six German aircraft. I have lost three. We are chasing the remaining four hostiles.”

McKenna noted the pronoun distinctions in Volontov’s statement. Volontov was part of his wing when it came to optimistic reports. His losses were personal. McKenna felt the same way, and his esteem for Volontov took another giant step upward.

“Good show, Condor. We’re jumping off, now.”

Thirty miles from the coordinates provided by Pearson, McKenna said, “Deltas, go active.”

The screen, which had been showing green fluffy clouds, jumped to the radar display in the fifty-mile range mode. The orange targeting flower appeared.

“Hot damn, jefe! There he is.”

The orange circle, guided by Munoz’s helmet, squirted to the upper right of the screen and found the tanker. Off to the right and left, McKenna saw the other targets.

LOCK-ON!

“Heat-seeker. Committed. And gone,” Munoz said.

The Wasp whisked away, and one of the green missile lights on the HUD blinked out.

The Wasp II’s speed was about 1,700 miles per hour, but it took longer to cover thirty miles.

Slightly over one minute.

The tanker, which was apparently outfitted with threat warning equipment, began to dive.

Too late.

There were two explosions, a blindingly white one as the Wasp went up one of the two port turbojet exhausts, then a bright yellow-orange detonation as hot splinters of the destroyed engine sliced into the gigantic fuel tanks and ignited the vapors of partially emptied tanks.

“Scratch one tanker,” McKenna said.

“And two,” from Conover.

Two heartbeats.

“Three… and now four,” Nitro Fizz Williams reported. “Let’s go get us some wells,” McKenna said.

He dove into the clouds.

Mac Zeigman had immediately jammed his throttle into afterburner, pulled into a loop, then rolled upright to reverse his course as soon as his WSO announced the active radars.

“They are diving quickly, Major. All of the tankers have been destroyed.”

“Give me a damned heading,” Zeigman demanded.

“I am working… they are at seven hundred knots, three-five-oh degrees, our bearing zero-one-eight.”

“Intercept?”

The HUD readout showed his speed up to Mach 1. The Tornado shivered. His three element members had reversed course, also, but their slower reactions left them almost a kilometer behind him.

“Intercept course is zero-zero-four.”

He banked the craft slightly to the left.

“Tigers Two, Three, Four, join on me. Quickly now! Arm all weapons.”

“Tiger Leader, Panther Nine.”

“Tiger Leader,” Zeigman acknowledged.

“We have eight hostiles on the look-down radar at one thousand meters altitude. They are spreading out and initiating attacks on the wells.”

“Stop them.”

“But there are two hostiles approaching from ten thousand meters, also. And our fuel state is eight-five-zero kilograms. We must refuel.”

“There is no more fuel, Panther Nine. You might as well attack. Now!”

Albert Weismann and Maximillian Oberlin were in the computer center at Peenemünde, watching over the shoulders of the experts brought down from Tempelhof as they verified the computer programs.

“Here it is!” a hauptmann shouted.

“What?” Weismann demanded.

“A simple loop instruction inserted into the guidance program. The rocket would have gone mad.”

“Can you correct it?”

“Easily, Herr Colonel.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard, and the cursor on the screen exchanged new letters for old in the incomprehensible line of instructions.

“There. It is done.”

“Excellent, Captain. Now, if you would please load it into the rocket computers.”

He and Oberlin exchanged smiles. Oberlin had been positively cheerful since returning from his helicopter flight. He had told Weismann, “The old man did not think he could walk on air. He cried. Unfortunately, I think he had a heart attack as soon as he went out the door. I had wanted him to think about it all the way down.”

“Yes. Very unfortunate,” Weismann had agreed. “One day quite soon, however, you and I will see many more walking on air.”

They were almost to the doorway of the computer center when an unteroffizier slid to a stop outside the glass door. He pushed it open.

“Colonel Weismann! There is an emergency call for you.”

Weismann walked over to a computer console, picked up the phone, and punched the blinking button.

“Weismann.”

It was the operations officer at New Amsterdam. “Herr Colonel, there is pandemonium at the wells!”

“Let us not have it here. What is happening?”

“We are being attacked!”

“We?”

“The wells, Herr Colonel. Twenty Soviet aircraft. The American stealth planes also. We have lost nine fighters and four tanker aircraft.”

Weismann shook his head. The tankers. Unarmed aircraft. The Americans and Soviets were diabolical.

“What is Schmidt doing?” he demanded.

“I do not know. The attackers are just now reaching the oil field.”

Zeigman’s defenses had not held up. Still, there were fifteen fighters left, apparently.

Though probably not enough.

“Keep me posted, Major.” He slapped the telephone down.

“It is bad, Albert?”

“Not good at all, Max,” he said, then turned to the noncommissioned officer. “Corporal, you go find that banker’s son. We are launching immediately.”

As soon as the Tornadoes dove on the Tern Flight MiGs, Volontov advanced his throttles to military power and put his nose down.

He reset the radar range to thirty kilometers, to make the blips more distinct.

Below, the ice gave off a dim luminescence. Ahead, the platforms had extinguished their red warning lights.

The well the Americans had labeled number seventeen was twenty kilometers away. The Tern Flight was nine kilometers away, pulling well apart from each other as they lined up on their assigned targets.

Two more kilometers and they could begin targeting with the lasers, locking a laser dot onto a dome in precisely the right spot, high and away from the wellhead. The computer would hold the dot in place, and the missiles would home on it. The objectives, as McKenna had related them, was to demonstrate that Soviet and American fighters did not fear attacking the wells, to disrupt the operations, and to create panic and a loss of morale among the platform personnel. It would make the landings by American, British, and Soviet troops go very smoothly.

The four Tornadoes seemed hesitant, unable to choose among so many targets.

“Condor Two, you will shoot down the westernmost airplanes.”

“Of course, Condor One.”

It was too easy. His radar could track up to eight aircraft at once.

Volontov used the miniature stick guiding the target flower on the screen to encircle the lead aircraft, clicked the button to lock on to it, then circled the second Tornado and locked on to that one also.

The beep in his headphones of the missile heads confirmed that the missiles had secured their targets, the Tornadoes’ active radars, and would not let go.

He depressed the commit button on the stick.

The computer thought about for a halfsecond, decided the time was right, and launched two AA-11 missiles.

They dove into the night, trailing hot white fire.

Munoz extended the range of the radar as they came out of the clouds.

“We’ve got four comin’ from the southwest, jefe. Another four convergin’ from the west. Hey, Do-Wop! You see ’em over there?”

“Got them, Tiger.”

Nitro Fizz Williams said, “There’s three more headed this way from the northeast, but I see MiGs hot on their tails. I don’t think they’re going to make it… nope. Boom! One down.”

McKenna scanned the screen, evaluating positions.

“We can beat the interception before the first pass, Deltas. Go over to rockets for two seconds on my mark. That’ll boost us out of the interception course, but we’ll have to use speed brakes before we reach the ships.”

“Roger that, Snake Eyes,” Dimatta said.

“Wilco, since I’m playing navy,” Conover acknowledged.

“Mark!”

Delta Blue accelerated from 700 knots to Mach 1.5 in six seconds.

McKenna shut down the rocket motors and checked the radar screen. The Germans had been left far behind.

“Cottonseed to Delta Blue.”

“Come on.”

“You’ve got the lead time. Info item: ASW choppers from the task forces are dropping ashcans on submarines. Watch out for those choppers on your way back.”

“Got it, Cottonseed.”

McKenna focused his attention on his battle group of ships, the one located on the south-center of the platforms. They were coming up rapidly.

Each of the MakoSharks was taking on one battle group before their attacks on the wells.

McKenna dumped his speed brakes, fighting to get down to 700 knots, to improve the accuracy.

“Range forty miles, Snake Eyes. I want the payload bay, save our wing-mounted stuff.”

As the speed came down, McKenna opened the payload bay doors, extended the first rack of missiles, and armed all four of them.

“There you go, Tiger.”

“Good. It’s all ASM.”

Twenty miles.

The three ships ahead of him were already firing flares. Either the Tornadoes behind him had raised the alarm or the ships were tracking the radar.

The orange circle darted about the screen under Munoz’s control, picking out each of the ships and locking missile heads onto the targets.

“I’m usin’ two Wasps off the outboard pylons also, amigo.”

The Wasps weren’t large enough to cause extreme damage to anything as big as a destroyer or cruiser unless the depleted uranium, armor-piercing warhead penetrated the steel plates at water level. McKenna was hoping to cause enough damage on deck, or maybe fires, to create some panic.

“Any time, Tiger.”

Munoz launched the six missiles just as the ship in the center, the cruiser, launched four SAMs at them.

“Shut her down, Tiger.”

The radar went passive, disappearing from the ship’s tracking system.

He put the nose down and headed for the water, leveling off at a thousand feet. He retracted the forward missile rack and lowered the aft rack, arming the missiles.

“We got two strikes, Snake Eyes,” Dimatta called. “Lookin’ good.”

Delta Green was a few miles closer to her targets.

“Goddamn!” Munoz said, watching the night-vision screen. “Love those Wasps. Right on track, right on target.”

Ten miles.

Flares erupting everywhere.

On the screen, the greenish-white trails of all six Wasps winked out almost simultaneously, followed by six green eruptions.

“Six hits!” Munoz said.

Glancing through the windscreen, McKenna saw the blossoms dying out as flames began to spread.

The four SAMs shot by, three thousand feet above them.

“Give them a couple more, Tiger.”

“Roger, codger”

Two more Wasps leaped from their rails on the aft bay rack and began to home on the cruiser.

The frequency of flare firing diminished.

Five miles.

The Hamburg was clearly defined in the light of her own flares. McKenna saw both missiles slam into the bridge and detonate.

Blue-yellow-green-red-orange flame everywhere.

The antiaircraft guns opened up, but the concentration of fire was erratic and almost purposeless.

McKenna nudged the hand controller and banked to the left, passing the ships in a three-mile arc. As he rolled upright, he looked to his left. All three ships had fires of some degree raging.

The firing from the ships died away.

“Come right three degrees,” Munoz ordered.

“Right three. How about you, Cancha?”

“We’re through the heavy stuff, Snake Eyes. Lining up on number six.”

“Josie says we got them licked,” Williams added.

“Con Man?”

“Fuckers got my right aileron.”

“You canceling?”

“Hell, no. We’re flying this mother.”

“You sure it’s all right?”

“Damned sure. Bastards! That’s twice now.”

The dome of well number nine was completely dark, the platform invisible against the darkness of the sea.

Munoz went over to infrared tracking on the screen, and the heat emitted by the dome appeared as a dim red ball on the screen.

They couldn’t get a distance on the infrared, but they had a direction.

“We want the right side on this one, Snake Eyes.”

“Got it, Tiger.”

McKenna hoped that Pearson’s drawings of the dome interiors were accurate. He wanted to blow a few big holes in the dome on the side away from the wellhead and let the weather in. Create chaos and discomfort among the platform personnel. Give the task forces time to move in with their Spetznaz and Rapid Deployment Force troops and secure the wells.

“One in the dome and one on the pad,” McKenna said.

“Roger.”

The dim red ball got larger and larger.

“Launching,” Munoz said.

The missiles sailed away, guided by Munoz’s helmet.

The platform defenses never opened up.

They never saw anything to fire at.

There were two detonations, and then Delta Blue passed over the platform.

In the rearview screen, McKenna saw bright lights, interior lights shining through a jagged-edged hole in the night.

“Number five’s next, then number one,” Munoz said. “Give me a heading.”

“Three-four-five.”

“Coming around”

“Hey, compadre?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d better do a quick check on those four Tornadoes behind us.”

“I’m watching them, Delta Blue,” Cottonseed said. “They’re circling around now, wondering where the hell you’ve gone. Ah! Now they have an idea. I suspect they see light on platform number nine. And six. And ten. And three. We’ve got five hits on the ice, so far. Some of those Fulcrums are turning for another pass.”

“How about the four hostiles chasing Delta Yellow?”

“Just now turning north. If I knew where Yellow was, I’d give him a distance.”

Conover said, “Check my IFF.”

“Okay, babe, got you. Hell, they’re twenty miles behind you, headed in the wrong direction. The MiGs over east splashed a couple more. Both Eurofighters.”

Platform number five was holed without return fire, but they ran into an active defense of well number one. The defensive batteries couldn’t see them, however, and AA fire and SAM launches were being directed blindly, hoping to hit something.

Munoz put three missiles into number one, one through the dome, and two into the SAM radar trailers.

“Next target eleven,” Munoz said.

“Con Man?” McKenna asked.

“Ten, twelve, fifteen down. Two and seven coming up.”

“Cancha?”

“Six, three, and four are ventilated.”

There were fires on several of the platforms. The seascape was becoming defined with bonfires low on the water.

“I’m out of SAMs, Snake Eyes. Got six air-to-airs, though.”

“Use them up,” McKenna said.

They put two of them into platform eleven, then McKenna went into a hard right turn and headed south again. Because of its location between nine and six, platform number thirteen had been skipped on the first pass.

It was time to correct the omission.

Three minutes later, Munoz said, “I need radar to pinpoint it, Snake Eyes.”

“Go radar.”

A moment after the radar image hit the screen, Munoz yelled, “Jesus Christ!”

McKenna’s eyes jerked down to the screen.

Tornado diving, closing fast.

Wha-wha-wha!

The threat receiver sounded overly loud to him.

Check the screen.

Six missiles fired.

“Son of a bitch is right on our ass,” Munoz said.

McKenna rolled right, then left, shoving the throttles in. He was too low for much maneuvering.

“Hard left, Snake Eyes.”

Whip the hand controller over.

“Rockets! Now, now, now!”

McKenna slapped the throttles.

But not before two Sky Flash missiles slammed into the starboard engine nacelle. The right wing erupted in a ball of flame.