second later, he was rewarded by the flash of the letters ACQ as the Tomcat
acquired its target, and by the tone in his headset of a radar lock.
“Fox one,” he called, announcing a radar-homer launch, and his finger
closed on the firing trigger. The SARH air-to-air killer shooshed from
beneath his right wing, arrowing toward the approaching target.
The two enemy aircraft held steady for a moment, then split, one to the
north, one to the south. Crandall eased the stick to the left, holding on the
southern bandit, keeping it centered in the invisible cone of radiation
projected by the F-14’s AWG-9 radar.
Seconds later, there was a flash in the distance, and a blip faded from
his screen.
“Splash one MiG!” he called over the radio.
He caught the glint of sunlight on a canopy, high above him and to the
rear. The two MiGs to his rear had closed the range and were dropping toward
him now like hawks on a rabbit. Damn … where was Coyote?
1426 hours Zulu (1526 hours Zone)
Tomcat 201
Near Grotil, Norway
“Miss!” Coyote called, as the lead Phoenix blip merged with one target
… then separated, seeming to pass right through the contact. “Shit! We
missed!”
“Ditto on the second bird,” John-Boy added. “I think they foxed them.”
“At a million dollars a pop, you’d think they’d build missiles that could
hit something!” Coyote’s gloved fist came down on his knee.
“This ECM shit is bad, really bad,” John-Boy said. “I’m having trouble
seeing through this garbage.”
The radar clutter was like a snowstorm on Coyote’s display. As far as he
could make out, Bravo group was still on course, but someone out there was
jamming hard. It was increasingly difficult to see through the fuzz of ECM
and make out the targets.
“Two-one-eight, this is Two-oh-one. Scorpion, Where are you?”
“Boxed in, Coyote!” his wingman’s voice replied. “One down, three to go.
They’re all over me!”
“Can you get clear? We’re oh for four, and I want a closer look at these
bandits.”
“Working … on … it.” Crandall’s voice was distorted, forced from his
lungs in a series of grunts as he battled the effects of a high-G turn.
Coyote felt an instant of anguished indecision. He was going to have to
work his way in close to those bandits, close enough to make a try for them
with Sidewinders, and that was going to take more time than Scorpion had.
Damn, he couldn’t leave his wingman. The mysterious bandits of group
Bravo would keep. Angrily, Coyote put his stick over, dropping into a
screaming turn. Ahead, he could see the twisting wisps of vapor trails, the
furball of a dogfight. “Hang on, Scorp!” he called. “Two-oh-one is
engaging!”
1426 hours Zulu (1526 hours Zone)
The Romsdal Valley, Norway
Standing in the turret of his M-109, Loytnant Harald Snorisson craned his
head back, staring into the intense blue sky halfway between the southern
horizon and the zenith. Aircraft contrails writhed and tangled there, jets
clashing in air-to-air combat miles above the glistening ice of the
Jostedalsbre.
He felt a pulse-pounding excitement. He was twenty-three years old, a
very junior officer in Norway’s small regular army. His fierce eagerness to
come to grips with the enemy that had invaded his country threatened to
overwhelm all else.
Normally, he would have been stationed with the rest of his unit, the
Second Regiment of the First Mechanized Brigade, but accident and war had
dropped him here, alone, on a road running northwest along the steep and rocky
banks of the Romsdal. Standing doctrine called for his unit to be airlifted
to the far north in the event of a Soviet invasion of Norway, but the Russian
attack, coming as it had with almost complete surprise, had overwhelmed
Brigade North in a bitter, running fight through Finnmark. Norwegian command
and control had been shattered, first by Soviet air strikes on command centers
and army headquarters up and down the length of the country, then by the
savage amphibious and air landings at Oslo, far to the south.
General Nils Lindstrom was still in the midst of trying to salvage the
situation from his emergency headquarters near Bergen, but the army’s interior