different frequency. “We are on their screens and have detected SAM launch.
Do you read Head Lights activation, over?”
“Fisher One-one, Smokescreen, that is affirmative,” a voice replied in
their headsets. “Special delivery is on the way.”
“Shut down or die, assholes,” Hunter growled. With Smokescreen on the
job, they had a good chance of coming out of this alive. He still didn’t want
to think of this as a suicide mission.
0611 hours Zulu (0711 hours Zone)
Smokescreen 111
Over the Norwegian Sea
They were known as wild weasels, a term derived from the Vietnam era that
applied to aircraft designed to identify, locate, and suppress enemy
air-defense systems by locking onto their guidance radar. In the U.S. Air
Force, the venerable F-4E and G Phantoms often filled this role, but in modern
carrier air operations it was the EA-6B Prowler that sought out enemy radar
emissions with their sophisticated electronics suites and homed on them with
the powerful HARM antiradiation missiles.
The AGM-88As weighed almost eight hundred pounds apiece and traveled at
better than Mach 2. The first HARM dropped away from the belly of the lead
Prowler, homing on the Soviet Head Lights radar thirty miles ahead. It was a
difficult target, for Head Lights rapidly shifted between a number of random
frequencies, partly to burn through enemy interference, partly as a
countermeasure to antiradar missiles.
For several seconds, it was a vicious “war of the beams,” as the men of
VAQ-143 called it, electronics matching electronics at speeds that defied
human comprehension. The Soviet radar shifted frequencies, the AGM-88 hunted,
matched, and locked, the cycle repeating again and again, all in a space of
microseconds as the HARM shrieked north at better than Mach 2. Soviet
operators aboard Soyuz and Marshal Timoshenko detected the missile launch and
were faced with a choice–continue to illuminate the target for the SAMs
already on the way, or shut down to save their radars.
The decision was easy. Radar systems were far more expensive–and less
easily replaceable–than surface-to-air missiles. For a time, control of the
missiles shifted back and forth between Soyuz and the Timoshenko, with first
one ship illuminating the approaching target, and then the other. In minutes,
though, the incoming HARM was close enough that both ships had to shut down
their emissions. Their Head Lights winked off and the two Goblet SSMs went
ballistic.
0613 hours Zulu (0713 hours Zone)
Viking 700
Over the Norwegian Sea
Hunter glimpsed it seconds before it hit. Twenty feet long and only
about a foot thick, the SAM looked like a flying telephone pole trailing white
smoke. It struck the sea two hundred yards ahead and to starboard, sending up
a massive explosion of white spray and buffeting the air around the thundering
Viking.
“Missile down!” he called. “Clean miss!” He never did see what happened
to the second missile.
Milky contrails streaming from tails and wingtips in the wet air just
above the sea, the Vikings pressed on with their mock attack.
0615 hours Zulu (0715 hours Zone)
Soviet Task Group Soyuz
The Norwegian Sea
Soyuz and Marshal Timoshenko continued on course. The Admiral Yumashev,
far enough north of the carrier that it had been unable to participate in the
opening high-tech round of the battle, came about and began retracing its
course, maneuvering to a better position from which it could help defend the
Soyuz.
The Soviet carrier, meanwhile, was launching aircraft to reinforce the
CAP it already had aloft, a dozen MiG and Sukhoi interceptors deploying toward
the south.
It was also recovering aircraft, a delicate and dangerous operation in
the urgency of the attack. MiGs and Sukhois were still returning from the
raid against the American carrier in Romsdalfjord, and other aircraft were
parked on the deck as ordnance technicians rearmed them and tanks were filled
with jet fuel. The Americans were attacking at precisely the worst possible
time, for Soyuz was a floating bomb, with ammunition stacked on her decks and
explosive fumes gathering in her hangar spaces.
But Marshal Timoshenko was an able shield, fast, well-armed, literally
bristling with surface-to-air missiles of several types. The big, Kresta-II
cruiser continued to spar with the American ECM aircraft, switching on her