that counted, but whether they could survive long enough.
“Hunter One-one, this is Bifrost, do you copy? Over.”
“Bifrost, Hunter One-one,” he replied, his voice calm. Bifrost, the
rainbow bridge that connected earth and heaven in Norse mythology, was the
call sign for the Hawkeyes controlling the mission. Things were being kept
simple, with a minimum of radio jamming at this point, just in case the
Soviets were listening in. “We read you.”
“Hunter, you are go for attack run. Target bearing your position
zero-zero-five, range eight-one.”
“Roger, Bifrost. Commencing attack run now.” Reaching out with a gloved
hand, he eased the throttles forward, and the two big GE TF34 engines slung
beneath his wings increased their keening thunder. In seconds, the Viking had
accelerated to 450 knots, the other three sub-hunters increasing thrust to
maintain the pace.
Blue water blurred beneath the Viking’s wings as the miles ticked away.
0610 hours Zulu (0710 hours Zone)
Intruder 502
Over the Norwegian Sea
Six miles above the Vikings and several miles to the southwest,
Lieutenant Commander Barney J. Dodd felt particularly vulnerable at the
moment. Looking from side to side in his Intruder’s cockpit, he could see
other American aircraft scattered across the sky, A-6Es from his own Death
Dealers squadron mingled with F-14D Tomcats of the VF-95 Vipers. The sea was
an achingly lovely expanse of azure beneath intermittent scatterings of puffy
white clouds.
What made Sluf uneasy was the alpha strike’s attack profile. The Death
Dealers were flying north, on a direct heading toward the heart of the Soviet
battle group, and they were going in at an altitude of 35,000 feet.
Intruders were frequently called upon to make high-level attacks, usually
with precision, standoff weapons like the Mark 84 Paveway laser-guided bombs
that had been so effective in the Gulf War of ’91. When the enemy knew you
were coming, though, a more usual strategy was to get down on the deck, flying
so low that enemy radar could not separate you from the ground clutter. Going
in at angels thirty was a sure way to invite attack.
Sluf looked out the starboard side of his canopy, peering down through
streaming clouds, searching for a quartet of tiny shapes far below. He
couldn’t see them. From his vantage point almost six miles above them, they
would be all but invisible. But somewhere down there, four S-3 Vikings from
the King Fishers were mimicking the moves of an A-6 squadron deploying for an
attack run one hundred feet off the deck.
Decoys, Sluf thought. Dead meat. But damned important dead meat since
their weaponless run against the Russian battle group would give the Intruders
their chance to get in close to the target.
The Intruders had been deployed with the F-14 TACCAP, hurtling north as
part of the interceptor formation. He could hear the radio chatter between
Bifrost and Hunter, but the Intruders’ orders were to maintain radio silence
until they deployed for their attack. Unarmed save for their Harpoons, unable
to engage in a dogfight even to defend themselves, they would be
indistinguishable from the Tomcats by Russian radar. With luck, the Soviets
might ignore the fighters altogether, concentrating their battle-dwindled
assets instead against the Vikings.
At least that was the idea according to CAG, who earlier that morning had
compared the strategy to a plot device in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Sluf
had never read The Purloined Letter, but the theory seemed plausible enough.
For the Intruders to get close enough to lock onto the right target, they
would have to be hidden in plain view.
He glanced around again. Plain view, right. Despite heavy jamming by
both sides, they must be in plain view of every radar from Bergen to North
Cape.
If it came to a dogfight, the Tomcats would protect the Intruders. An
Intruder half-glimpsed in the heat of air-to-air combat would almost certainly
be mistaken for its close cousin, the EA-6B Prowler. Two Prowlers were flying
with the Tomcat formation, providing ECM cover for the whole group. It
wouldn’t save the Intruders from enemy missiles in a dogfight, but the family
resemblance of Intruders and Prowlers might keep the bad guys confused for the