communications had not been as effective as they’d been during NATO maneuvers
in the past. Snorisson’s brigade had been ordered to Bergen, then to
Trondheim, then finally thrown into a thin, ragged line across the center of
the country.
Since June 12, the brigade reportedly had fought a series of delaying
actions down the coast, all the way from Tromso to Rorvik, but in all that
time, not once had Snorisson seen combat. Somehow, in the storm of orders and
counterorders, his vehicle had missed a planned rendezvous, and now it was
just him, three enlisted men, and their M-109 Roland anti-air vehicle, alone
on a country road in the Romsdal Valley.
With a fine sense of irony, his sergeant had painted the name Skynd
Dem!–“Hurry Up!”–across both sides of the turret just beneath the launch
tubes. Snorisson wondered if it was the same in all armies–hurry up, hurry
up … then wait.
He ached to come to grips with the invaders. At first he’d been
terrified, especially as each report from the front had brought news of
another disaster. But he’d been born and raised in the small and somewhat
isolated fishing village of Leiranger, overlooking the vast sheltering of the
mighty Vestfjorden. His wife and young son were there still … or had been.
His fists closed, his nails biting his palms. Word had reached him only
five days before that Soviet naval infantry forces had pushed south from their
initial perimeter at Narvik, that Norwegian Heimevemet forces–the home
guard–had ambushed a Soviet column on the road near Narvik, that Soviet naval
infantry were rounding up hundreds of civilians throughout the area and
shooting them in brutal retaliation. Leiranger, he’d heard, had been put to
the torch, one of a dozen villages along the Vestfjorden destroyed as
punishment and warning.
Loytnant Snorisson wanted to strike back, and strike back hard. For five
days, he’d thought of little else, as the fighting ground ever closer from the
north.
And this might be his chance. At last.
He ducked his head through the circular hatch of the turret. The M-109
was an American vehicle, designed originally as a self-propelled howitzer, but
refitted as a mobile launcher for Roland 2 anti-air missiles. The Roland was
a joint French-German SAM, a radar-guided, short-ranged missile system that
could track targets sixteen kilometers away but needed to be considerably
closer–six kilometers or less–to kill them. Several times in the past
weeks, his unit had tracked hostile aircraft in the skies above Norway, but
this was the closest they’d been to the action yet.
“Gunnar!” he called. “Do you have a target?”
The grizzled stabsersjant–staff sergeant–blinked back at him from the
dim interior of the turret with tired, pale eyes. “Many targets, Loytnant.
Range ten kilometers, altitude sixteen thousand. All still well out of
range.”
Snorisson raised himself back into daylight. Someone was fighting up
there … Soviets and the remnants of the Norwegian air force, it had to be.
The Royal Norwegian Air Force had been conspicuous by its absence during the
past few days. In the first week of the invasion, plane after plane had been
shot from the sky or caught on the ground by the vicious, roving packs of
Soviet airborne wolves.
But now, some of his countrymen had emerged to make a stand in the skies
above the Jostedalsbre. And if any of the hated Russian invaders ventured
within range of his SAMs, Loytnant Snorisson would make his stand with them!
1426 hours Zulu (1526 hours Zone)
Tomcat 218
Near Grotil, Norway
The MiGs closed with appalling speed, maneuvering onto Crandall’s six,
the favored spot for making a kill–squarely on his tail. Over his shoulder,
he had a glimpse of both aircraft flying almost wingtip to wingtip as he
pulled into a hard right turn.
“They’re still with us, Scorp!” Juggler called. The RIO had recovered
consciousness seconds after losing it, but he still sounded groggy, his voice
strained. Crandall held the turn, calculating his chances.
His opponents were MiG-29s, “Fulcrums” in the old NATO nomenclature,
sleek and deadly-looking aircraft outwardly almost identical to the American
F/A-18 Hornet, with twin stabilizers rising just outboard of the two powerful
Tumanski R-33D turbofans, and the gaping maws of the squared-off air intake