You did everything you could have done. It’s not your fault, he told the face in the mirror.
But you were the captain, it replied.
Morris had gotten through five homes when he’d had to stop. It was one thing to talk to wives and parents. They understood. Their sons and husbands were sailors, and had taken a sailor’s risk. But the four-year-old daughter of Gunner’s Mate Second Class Jeff Evans had not understood why her daddy would never come home again. A second-class petty officer didn’t make much, Morris knew. Evans must have worked like a madman on that little house to make it as neat as it was. A good man with his hands, he remembered, a good gunner’s mate. Every wall was newly painted. Much of the interior woodwork had been replaced. They’d been in the house only seven months, and Morris wondered how the petty officer had found the time to get all that work done. He had to have done it himself. No way he could have afforded contractors. Ginny’s room had been a testimony to her father’s love. Dolls from all over the world had stood on hand-made shelves. As soon as he’d seen Ginny’s room, Morris had had to leave. He’d felt himself on the verge of breaking down, and some absurd code of conduct wouldn’t allow him to do that in front of strangers. So he’d left and driven home, with the rest of the list tucked back in his wallet. Certainly the fatigue that had enveloped him would allow him a night’s sleep…
But now he stood in front of the mirror, looking at a man with hollow eyes who wished his wife were there.
Morris went out to the kitchen of his one-story house and went mindlessly through the process of making coffee. The morning paper was on the doorstep, and he found himself reading stories about the war that he knew to be inaccurate or out of date. Things were happening much too fast for reporters to keep up. There was an eyewitness account from an unnamed destroyer about a missile that had leaked through her missile defenses. An “analysis” piece explained how surface warships were obsolete in the face of determined missile attacks and asked where the fleet’s vaunted carriers were. That, he thought, was a pretty good question.
Morris finished his coffee and returned to the bathroom for a shower. If he had to be awake, he thought, he might as well be at work. He had one set of undress whites in the closet. He donned them a few minutes later and walked out to his car. It was already first light when he drove to the Norfolk Navy Base.
Forty minutes later he was in one of several operations rooms, where the positions of convoys and suspected submarine locations were plotted. On the far wall the threat board listed estimated Russian assets and the numbers and types of kills accumulated to date. Another wall showed losses. If the intel guys were right, he thought, the war at sea had the look of a draw-but for the Russians a draw was the same as a win.
“Good morning, Commander,” COMNAVSURFLANT said. Another man who had not slept very much. “You look a little better.”
Better than what? Morris wondered.
“We have some good news for a change.”
NORTH ATLANTIC
The B-52 crews were nervous despite the heavy fighter escort. Five thousand feet above them, a full squadron of F-14 Tomcats flew top cover, having just refueled from KC-135 tankers. The other squadron was tanking now for their part in the mission. The sun was just peeping above the horizon, and the ocean below them was still dark. It was 0300 local time, when human reaction times are at their worst.
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
The alarm klaxon jolted the sleeping Russian pilots off their cots. Their ground crews took fewer than ten seconds to begin preflight procedures as the airmen climbed the steel ladders into their cockpits and plugged in their helmet radios to learn what the emergency was.
“Heavy enemy jamming activity to the west,” the regimental commander announced. “Plan Three. Repeat: Plan Three.”
In the control trailer, radar operators had just seen their radar screens turn to a cluttered nightmare of white-noise jamming. An American raid was coming in, probably B-52s, probably in force. Soon the American aircraft would be so close that the ground-based radars could burn through the jamming. Until then, the fighters would try to engage as far out as they could to reduce the number of bombers before they could strike their target.
The Soviet pilots had been well drilled in their time on Iceland. Within two minutes the first pair of MiG-29s was rolling; in seven all were in the air. The Soviet plan left a third of the fighters over Keflavik while the others charged west toward the jamming, their own missile-targeting radars on, seeking targets. They were ten minutes out when the jamming stopped. A single MiG got a radar contact off a retreating jamming aircraft and radioed Keflavik, only to learn from his ground controllers that nothing was on the scopes out to a range of three hundred kilometers.
A minute later, the jamming began again, this time from the south and east. More cautiously this time, the MiGs flew south. On orders, they kept their radar systems shut down until they were a hundred miles offshore, but when they switched on they found nothing. Whoever was jamming was doing it from a great distance. The ground controllers reported that three jammers had been involved in the first incident and four in the second. Quite a lot of jammers, the regimental commander thought. They’re trying to run us around, trying to make us use up our fuel.
“Come east,” he ordered his fight leaders.
The B-52 crews were really nervous now. One of the escorting Prowlers had picked up the voice radio orders from the MiGs, and another had caught a flash of their air-intercept radars to the southwest. The fighters eased south also. They were now one hundred fifty miles from Keflavik, crossing the Icelandic coast. The mission commander evaluated the situation and ordered the bombers to turn slightly north.
The B-52s carried no bombs, just the powerful radar jammers designed to allow other bombers to reach targets within the Soviet Union. Below them, the second squadron of Tomcats was heading for the deck, the eastern slopes of the Vatna glacier. With them were four Navy Prowlers for additional protection against air-to-air missiles in case the MiGs got too close.
“Starting to get some airborne radars, bearing two-five-eight. Seems to be closing,” one Prowler reported. Another copied the same signal and they triangulated the range to fifty miles. Close enough. The mission commander was flying a Prowler.
“Amber Moon. Say again, Amber Moon.”
The B-52s turned back east and dove, opening their bomb bays to disgorge tons of aluminum chaff that no radar signal could penetrate. As soon as they saw that, the American fighters all dropped their external fuel tanks, and the Prowlers broke off from the bombers to orbit just west of the chaff. Now came the tricky part. The fighters of both sides were closing at a combined speed of over one thousand miles per hour.
“Queer check,” the mission commander radioed.
“Blackie check,” acknowledged the skipper of VF-41.
“Jolly check,” replied the commander of VF-84. Everyone was in position.
“Execute.” The four Prowlers flipped on their antimissile jamming gear.
The twelve Tomcats of the Jolly Rogers were strung on a line at thirty thousand feet. On command they activated their missile-guidance radars.
“American fighters!” shouted a number of Russian pilots. Their threat receivers instantly told the pilots that fighter-type radars were locked on their aircraft.
The Soviet fighter commander was not surprised. Surely the Americans would not risk their heavy bombers again without a proper escort. He’d ignore these and bore in for the B-52s, as his training dictated. The MiG radars were heavily jammed, their ranges cut in half and as yet unable to track any targets at all. He ordered his pilots to be alert for incoming missiles, confident that they could avoid those that they saw, and had all his aircraft increase power. Next, he ordered all but two of his reserve force to leave Keflavik and come east to support him.
The Americans needed only seconds to lock onto targets. Each Tomcat carried four Sparrows and four Sidewinders. The Sparrows went first. There were sixteen MiGs in the air. Most had at least two missiles targeted, but the Sparrows were radar-guided. Each American fighter had to remain pointed at its target until the missile hit. This ran the risk of closing within range of Soviet missiles, and the Tomcats were not equipped with protective jammers.
The Americans had taken position up-sun from the Russians. Just as their radars began to burn through the American jamming, the Sparrows arrived, the first directly from the sun, exploding its MiG in midair and warning everyone in its flight. The Soviet aircraft began radical jinks up and down, some pilots breaking into hard turns as they saw the seven-inch wide missiles racing in, but four more found their targets, and in moments there were three hard kills and one severely damaged aircraft that turned to limp for home.