All of the captured airfields across north-central Norway were located
north of the Arctic Circle where, on this midsummer’s night, the sun never set
but dipped sullenly beneath the leaden overcast and drifted from west to east
along the northern horizon, not quite setting even at midnight. It was
daylight, then, but still the middle of the night at Bodo, Narvik, Andseiv,
and Tromso, when radar dishes and operation vans suddenly shattered under the
detonation of 145 pounds of high explosive. Backup radars and SAM systems
switched on and, minutes later, vanished in the fireballs of a second wave of
incoming HARM warheads.
Two hundred miles out at sea, the attack sub U.S.S. Galveston added her
volley to the barrage. The Los Angeles-class submarine had been stalking the
newly pinpointed Soyuz, but she paused now to loose a salvo of deadly Tomahawk
Land-Attack Missiles.
TLAM was launched underwater from a 21-inch torpedo tube, blasted into
the sky by a solid-fuel booster, and sent cruising toward its target by an
air-breathing turbofan that gave it a range of up to 450 nautical miles.
TLAM/C cruise missiles carried conventional warheads–either one thousand
pounds of high explosive or sub-munitions dispensers with combined-effects
bomblets. Eighteen feet long, with a diameter of less than twenty-one inches,
Tomahawks were very hard to spot–especially when Soviet radars across
northern Norway were either being jammed or coming under HARM attack. They’d
been used for the first time in combat during the Gulf War of 1991, when
cruise missiles from two American attack subs and the decks of several surface
ships had joined in with the aerial pounding of Baghdad.
What happened at Bodo, a commercial seaport on the Saitfjord just north
of the Arctic Circle, was typical. There, two squadrons of a Soviet Frontal
Aviation unit had recently deployed to the former NATO air base outside of
town. Most of the aircraft were sheltered in hardened revetments, but two
Su-25 close-support aircraft were already on the runway readying for takeoff,
while four more waited their turn on the taxiway below the tower. Su-25s,
designated “Frogfoot” by NATO, were similar in mission to the American A-10
“Warthog,” ugly, straight-winged aircraft with twin engines tucked in close
alongside a chunky fuselage. Each carried over four tons of air-to-ground
rockets, GP and cluster munitions, and laser-guided bombs.
The alert sounded seconds after the radar dish spinning above a trailer
parked beyond the hangars exploded in a fiery detonation that sent chunks of
metal pattering across the runway. At a signal from the tower, the first
Frogfoot began accelerating down the runway, building to takeoff speed.
At Mach .7, the first TLAM hurtled in from the sea, traversing the runway
from southwest to northeast. Panels in the side of the cruise missile blew
out, scattering bomblets across the tarmac in a rain of death. Shrapnel
scythed through walls, glass, and the thin metal fuselages of aircraft caught
in the open.
The first Frogfoot had just lifted clear of the tarmac when the firestorm
began, a savage whirlwind of firecracker blasts that snapped hydraulic lines
and ruptured fuel tanks. The pilot battled the controls for a fraction of a
second as death descended around his hurtling aircraft, and then the fuel
ignited and the Su-25 exploded into a disintegrating cross of fire and
wreckage cart-wheeling down the runway. In the tower, Soviet controllers and
the base commanding officer died as glass shattered and nail-sized bits of
metal shredded flesh and bone. The second Frogfoot, just moving to the end of
the runway, crumpled as bomblets exploded around it, then erupted into flame.
The blasts stalked across the tarmac like some striding, death-dealing god of
war.
Secondary explosions rent the air long seconds after the last bomblets
fell, sending black smoke boiling above the fueled and armed aircraft parked
by the tower, from a storage hangar, and from a large fuel tank nearby.
Munitions slung beneath the wings of burning aircraft detonated, adding to the
destruction. The Bodo tower was rocked by multiple blasts. Rockets ignited
within the destruction of a burning Frogfoot and hissed across the pocked and
cratered tarmac. Nearby, a truck containing half a ton of belted 30-mm rounds
for Soviet Gatling cannons vanished in a fireball that continued to hiss and