defenses. With one exception, the rest of the American battle group had taken
station at the mouth of the fjord to maintain the ASW watch. The
exception–the attack submarine Galveston–was patrolling farther north,
searching for the acoustic trail of Soyuz and her escorts.
Tombstone’s eyes felt gritty and he needed a shave. He’d packed an
electric razor in his toiletry kit, but the power had gone off in the hotel
sometime during the wee hours and had not been restored by the time of his
appointment with Lindstrom’s people. When he walked into Jefferson’s Flag
Plot, however, he was somewhat relieved to see that, except for the ever
immaculate Admiral Tarrant, the dozen or so officers already gathered there
looked as rumpled as he felt.
“Welcome back, CAG,” Tarrant said, looking up from a large, photomosaic
spread out on the plot table. “You’re just in time for the party.”
“Thank you, Admiral. What’s going down?” Tombstone had felt the tension
in the room the moment he’d walked in. He dropped his hat and flight jacket
on a chair, gratefully accepted a cup of coffee from an enlisted aide, and
walked over to the table.
A mosaic of dozens of smaller, high-resolution photographs, the map
showed most of the Norway coast, from North Cape to just south of Bergen. The
crispness, the clarity of detail were astonishing. Looking closely, Tombstone
could see the shadowed moird of wave patterns on the sea, the precisely
ordered patchwork of fields and forests, the layered strangeness of glaciers
in mountain valleys.
Obviously taken from space by an American satellite, the photographs
showed no trace of clouds or of darkness. Numbers printed on one corner of
the map indicated that the sweep had been made only hours ago.
“High-resolution radar imagery,” Tarrant explained. “From a new spy sat.
They flashed the pieces through from NSA early this morning, and OZ put it
together.”
The NSA–the National Security Agency–was responsible for much of the
United States’ electronic intelligence, especially that gained through
satellite reconnaissance. Spy satellites, carrying radars more sensitive than
the equipment that had mapped the surface of Venus from the Magellan
spacecraft, could create photomosaics of incredible detail, with a theoretical
resolution of detail of a few feet.
This map was not that fine–it would have had to have been larger than
Jefferson’s flight deck to record individual buildings and vehicles–but it
did strip the clouds from the Norwegian Sea, robbing the Soyuz of any place to
hide. His eyes went at once to a clump of symbols marked with grease pencil
onto the mosaic three hundred miles west of the sheltering island chain of the
Vestfjord. The symbols were adapted from NATO computer display symbols, each
symbol indicating different targets–surface vessels, aircraft, or submarines.
One symbol stood out from the others, a red, cross-hatched diamond.
The CDS for a Soviet aircraft carrier. Close by were other diamonds,
each with a central dot. Those would be the escorts, two Krivaks, one Kirov
battle cruiser, and a protecting ring of frigates and destroyers for ASW and
anti-air defense. An arrow and cryptic figures indicating bearing and speed
showed that the group was heading east, roughly in the direction of the
Vestfjord.
“You found them” was all Tombstone could say. He felt the thrill of
excitement, like that of a hunter who’d glimpsed his quarry. In modern
combat, whether at sea or in the air, the advantage always went to the side
that spotted the other side first.
“Damn right.” Commander James K. Brody, Jefferson’s Operations Officer,
rubbed his mustache thoughtfully. “Now we gotta figure how to nail ’em down.”
“Ideas, CAG?” Captain Brandt asked.
Tombstone glanced at the mosaic’s scale and estimated the range to the
Soviet carrier battle group at something like four hundred miles. A-6
Intruders had a combat range with full warload of over a thousand miles; their
Tomcat escorts had an operational radius of over seven hundred miles, and both
aircraft could extend their ranges with in-flight refueling. “No problem
hitting them,” he said. “Surprise would be the real problem. It could get
pretty bloody.”
“That’s what we were just discussing when you came in,” the admiral said.
“We can expect a lot of triple-A from those escorts, not to mention their