pop like fireworks at a Chinese parade.
From first blast to last, scant seconds had passed. The destruction was
not absolute; within minutes, Soviet ground crews and troops were at work,
clearing wreckage and bits of metal from the tarmac, extinguishing fires,
patching craters in the runway with sheets of wire mesh, and readying another
pair of Su-25s for a mission against the Norwegian perimeter. At most, Bodo’s
airfield had been put out of commission for two hours.
Still, for two hours Bodo was out of action, and during that time, the
first wave of Hornets from the Jefferson struck.
Four F/A-18 Hornets of VFA-161, “the Javelins,” approached Bodo from the
southwest, skimming low over the waters of the Saitfjorden. Their primary
mission was SAM suppression, and they carried HARM missiles that homed on the
frequencies used by Soviet SAM batteries and rode the beams in from twelve
miles out at sea.
Minutes behind the Hornets came four Intruders of VF-84, the “Blue
Rangers,” wave-hopping up the fjord at an altitude of barely fifty feet. They
split into two groups of two for a two-pronged approach timed to sweep over
Bodo from different directions, spaced three minutes apart. One Intruder in
each pair carried four GBU-10E Mark 84 Paveway II laser-guided bombs.
As Hornets from Javelin Squadron circling over the fjord directed
invisible beams of laser light against the revetments and shielded bunkers
housing Soviet aircraft, the Paveway IIs, each weighing two thousand pounds,
glided unerringly toward the electronically painted bull’s-eyes and exploded
with shattering, devastating effect. Even a partial penetration of armored
doors or sandbagged hangar walls filled the hangar enclosures with hurtling
bits of metal. Secondary explosions brought down walls as stored munitions
detonated.
The remaining Intruders each carried thirty Mark 83 bombs in
fore-and-aft-paired multiple ejector racks. As vast, black pillars of smoke
from burning revetments blotted out the midnight sun, they made their pass,
taking out fuel storage tanks, barracks, and hangars, and putting several
five-yard-wide craters squarely in the middle of the Bodo runway.
Four more Blue Rangers threaded their way through the mountains on the
Swedish side of the border, emerging over Narvik, 160 miles further to the
northeast, nearly thirty minutes after the strike at Bodo. The scenario there
was much the same, save that one A-6 was lightly damaged by shrapnel from a
hastily launched SAM. At Bodo, all four Intruders escaped unscratched.
From across occupied Norway and Sweden, swarms of Soviet fighters rose to
exact revenge for the sneak raids. Circling Tomcats from both the Vipers of
VF-95 and the War Eagles of VF-97 watched the enemy fighters assemble, as
recorded by the prying, long-range eyes of two orbiting Navy Hawkeyes. One by
one, as radar contacts were fed by Hawkeye operators to the RIOs of each
Tomcat, lock-ons were achieved and massive, AIM-54 Phoenix missiles streaked
northeast on roaring pillars of flame, striking MiG after MiG from as much as
112 miles away. Twenty-four kills were recorded, confirmed by the watching
Hawkeyes, and the Soviet counterattack was broken before it had a chance to
properly form.
Returning from their strikes, the Intruders and the Hornets rendezvoused
far at sea, then wave-hopped back to Romsdalfjord to avoid being tracked by
enemy radar. One after another, their weapons racks empty, they trapped
aboard the Jefferson as the carrier’s crew went wild, swarming around each
aircraft as it taxied to a halt, all but dragging the pilot from the cockpit,
and carrying him in triumph across the flight deck to the island.
Meanwhile, the second strike was assembled as quickly as the attack
aircraft could be refueled and rearmed. Tombstone worried as the second wave
began shrieking off the Jefferson’s bow on clouds of billowing steam. The
first strike had been an unqualified success, but there’d been no response at
all from the Soyuz.
As the long, nightless twilight dragged on, Jefferson’s attacks
continued.
CHAPTER 12
Sunday, 22 June
0745 hours Zulu (0645 hours zone)
Tomcat 200
Over Trondheimfjord, Norway
Wider than the Romsdalfjord one hundred miles to the southwest,
Trondheimfjord was a slash of silver-blue water between rocky cliffs,
half-glimpsed through intermittent clouds. Trondheim, third largest of
Norway’s cities, was a picturesque mingling of buildings old and new, divided