CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

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

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *