minutes, she had her face out of her radar screen and was looking at
him. The eyes visible between her visor and her oxygen mask were very
blue, and sparkled with something that might be amusement.
Or possibly it was just pride at a job well and professionally done.
“No!” he said, laughing. Willis felt as though a tremendous weight had
been lifted from his shoulders. There was something almost magical in
the shared camaraderie of combat that wiped away doubt, replacing it
with trust.
“No, God damn it! I didn’t!”
He brought the Intruder around, heading north toward the coast.
CHAPTER 23
Tuesday, 17 March
Early morning hours
The Kola Peninsula
During the night the U.S. Air Force entered the fray–F-117 Stealth
Fighters and F-111 Aardvarks, deploying out of Lakenheath and Upper
Heyford, England, crossed the mountains above Bodo, then skimmed the
forests and lake country of northern Sweden and Finland, striking the
Kola military bases from the west and south instead of from the north.
“Smart” weapons, first seen publicly in the Gulf War of 1991, followed
invisible beams of laser light unerringly into bunker-complex ventilator
shafts, aircraft hangar doors, and command-center windows, as American
forces kept up a relentless pressure against Russian C3 assets–command,
Control, and Communications.
Contributing their firepower to the assault through that long night were
over two hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the wide-scattered
fleet of Los Angeles-class attack subs in the Barents Sea. Skimming sea
and earth at subsonic speeds, the TLAMs followed the terrain features
loaded into their onboard computers. Their principal targets were
communication relays and operations centers, SAM sites, and aircraft in
their revetments.
Carrier strikes continued as well, but at a lower tempo as both deck
personnel and aircrews were given a respite in preparation for missions
in support of the Marine amphib operations. One carrier attack squadron
off the Eisenhower, VA-66, the Waldos, participated in a long-range,
nighttime strike far to the east. The Waldos’ A-6 Intruders were loaded
with four Harpoon missiles apiece and sent to hunt down the Groznyy, the
Russian cruiser that had sunk the Scranton the day before.
Guided by Hawkeye radar pickets and by Forward-Looking Infra-Red
tracking, or FLIR, they found the Groznyy in the mouth of the White Sea
and left her burning and with her decks awash. The Waldos and another
attack squadron off the Ike, the Tigers of VA-65, also hit other naval
targets found at sea between Polyamyy and Grimikha, sinking dozens of
vessels from Osa II guided-missile boats to a destroyer, the
Nastoychivyy. The idea was to convince what was left of the Russians’
Northern Fleet to stay at home, in port and safely under the protection
of shore-based antiaircraft and SAM batteries.
Meanwhile, throughout the night in the skies above the Kola Peninsula,
spy satellites and high-flying Aurora reconnaissance aircraft continued
to pinpoint key targets and update the Pentagon’s overall intelligence
picture.
Microwave communications between command centers and outlying facilities
were tapped by various electronic intelligence assets. Even from orbit,
ELINT satellites could listen in on encrypted conversations between unit
commanders and their units; as streams of intercepted communications
were relayed back to its secret complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, the
National Security Agency, largest and arguably the most secret of
America’s intelligence organizations, swiftly broke the codes on their
batteries of Cray supercomputers. Even without decoding, the patterns
of radio communications provided NSA, CIA, and Pentagon analysts with a
clear picture of the Russians’ Kola Peninsula military command structure
… and final proof, in the form of orders from Krasilnikov himself,
that the defenses were being orchestrated from the Kremlin. The idea
that the attacks on the American carrier groups had been carried out by
renegade local commanders was clearly a complete fiction.
That night, however, the UN’s determination to enforce Resolutions 982
and 984 began taking on a new urgency.
0130 hours EST (Zulu -5)
Oval office, The White House
Washington, D.C.
The President sat in his high-backed chair, watching without expression
the contorted face of Marshal Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov on one of
the large television monitors in one wall of the Oval Office. Elsewhere
in the room, Gordon West, his chief of staff, and Herbert Waring, the