HOHENROARTHE, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
Ellington circled his target at a thousand feet, several miles away. It was a double bridge, a pair of concrete arches, each about five hundred yards across, and with two traffic lanes, that crossed the River Elbe in the middle of a gentle S-curve. Pretty bridges. Ellington guessed that they dated back to the thirties, since this main road from Berlin to Braunschweig had been one of the first autobahns. Ole Adolf himself might have driven across these bridges, Ellington reflected. So much the better.
At the moment, a low-light television in his targeting systems showed them to be covered with Russian T-80 tanks, all heading west. Ellington evaluated the picture on his television screen. This could only be the second echelon of the army deployed to attack NATO. There was an SA-6 battery atop Hill 76 south of the bridges on the east bank, sited there to defend them. It had to be fully alert now. His earphones chirped constantly with noise from his threat receiver as the search radars from a score of air-defense batteries swept continuously over his aircraft. If only one of them got a good return . . . Pucker factor, Ellington reflected grimly.
“How’s the Pave Tack?”
“Nominal,” Eisly responded curtly. Pilot and back-seater were both under enormous stress.
“Illuminate,” Ellington ordered. In the back seat, Eisly activated the Pave Tack target-illumination laser.
The elaborate Pave Tack gear was built into the Frisbee’s drooping nosecone. Its lowermost part was a rotating turret containing a carbondioxide laser and television camera. The major used his joystick controls to center the TV picture on the bridge, then unmasked the infrared laser. An invisible dot appeared in the center of the north span’s bridge deck. A computer system would keep it there until told to do otherwise, and a videotape recorder would make a visual record of the raid’s success or failure.
“The target is lit,” Eisly said. “Still no fire-control radars on us.”
“Nemo, this is Shade 4. The target is lit.”
“Roge.”
Fifteen seconds later the first Aardvark screamed south a bare thirty feet over the water, popped up, and loosed a single GBU-15 Paveway laser-guided bomb before it turned hard to the east over Hohenroarthe. An optical-computer system in the bomb’s nose noted the deflected infrared beam, centered it, and adjusted the fins accordingly.
South of the bridge, the SAM battery commander was trying to decide what the noise was. His search radar did not show the Frisbee. He had been told not to expect the presence of “friendly” aircraft-the safe travel lane was fifteen miles to the north, over the Frontal Aviation base at Mahlminkel. Maybe that’s where the noise was coming from, he thought. No special alarm has been sent out-
The northern horizon went bright yellow. Though he did not know it, four Luftwaffe Tornados had just made a single pass over Mahlminkel, leaving hundreds of explosive cluster munitions in their wake. A half-dozen Soviet Sukhoi attack fighters went up in flames, sending a fireball of jet fuel that rose up into the rain-filled sky.
The battery commander hesitated not at all-he shouted an order for his men to switch their fire-control radars from stand-by to active, and trace them around “their” bridges. A moment later, one detected an F-111 coming upriver.
“Oh, shit!” The Aardvark’s systems operator instantly loosed a Shrike anti-radar missile at the SAM battery, another for good measure at the search radar, a second Paveway at the bridge, then the F-111 turned violently left.
A missile-launch officer blanched as he realized what had just appeared from nowhere onto his scopes, and salvoed his three missiles in return. The incoming aircraft had to be hostile, and had just separated three smaller objects . . .
His first SAM struck and exploded on the high-tension power lines that spanned the river just south of the bridges. The entire valley was strobelighted as the power lines fell sparking into the river. The other two SAMs raced past the surreal explosion and locked onto the second F-111.
The first Paveway impacted precisely in the center of the northern span. It was a delayed-action bomb, and penetrated into the thick concrete before exploding a few yards from a battalion commander’s tank. The north span was strong-it had been in use for over fifty years-but the 945 pounds of high explosive ripped it apart. In an instant the graceful concrete arch was cut in two, a ragged twenty-foot gap appearing between the two unsecured flying buttresses. They were not designed to stand alone, particularly with armored vehicles rumbling over them. The bomb released by the second Aardvark struck closer to shore, and the eastern side of the span failed entirely, taking eight tanks into the Elbe with it.
The second F-111 did not live to see this, however. One of the racing SA-6 missiles struck it broadside and blew it to pieces three seconds after the aircraft-launched Shrikes obliterated the pair of Soviet radar vehicles. Neither side had time for grief. Another F-111 screamed upriver as the surviving SAM crews frantically searched for targets.
Thirty seconds later, the north span was totally destroyed, brick-sized chunks of ferroconcrete scattered on the river bottom from three smartbomb impacts.
Eisly switched his laser-designator to the south span. It was clogged with tanks, logjammed by a BMP-l personnel carrier blown whole from one bridge span to the other by the first bomb, torn asunder and blazing on the west end of the bridge. The fourth Aardvark lofted a pair of bombs which homed in remorselessly on the laser-spot now stuck on the turret of a stopped tank. The sky was alight with blazing diesel fuel and streaked with hand-launched SAMs that had been blind-fired by panicked riflemen.
Both Paveways exploded a scant ten feet apart, and the entire bridge span failed at once, dropping a company of armored vehicles into the Elbe.
One more thing to do, Ellington told himself, there! The Soviets had stockpiled bridging equipment on the secondary road paralleling the river. The engineers were probably nearby. The Frisbee screeched over the rows of trucks, each of which carried a section of ribbon bridge, and deployed a row of flares before skimming back west toward the Federal Republic of Germany, and safety. The three surviving Aardvarks came in one at a time, each dropping a pair of Rockeye canisters into the truck park, ripping the bridging equipment to bits, and, their pilots fervently hoped, killing some of the skilled bridging engineers as well. Then the Aardvarks turned west to follow the F-19 home.
By this time, a second team of F-15 Eagle fighters had darted into East Germany to clear four lanes for the returning NATO strike aircraft. They fired their radar-and infrared-guided missiles at the MiGs trying to vector toward the returning fighter-bombers-but the American fighters still had their aerial radars to direct them, and the Soviets did not. The results reflected it. The Soviet fighters had not had time to reorganize after the loss of the Mainstays, and their formations were savaged. Even worse, the SAM batteries that were supposed to support the MiGs were ordered to engage the invading aircraft, and the surface-to-air missiles began to pluck targets out of the sky entirely without discrimination as the NATO aircraft clung to the nap of the earth.
By the time the last aircraft recrossed the border into West Germany, Operation Dreamland had lasted a total of twenty-seven minutes. It had been a costly mission. Two of the priceless Frisbees and eleven strike aircraft had been lost. Yet it had been a success. Over two hundred Soviet all-weather fighters had been destroyed by the NATO fighters, and perhaps a hundred more by “friendly” SAMs. The most elite squadrons of the Soviet air-defense force had been brutalized, and because of it, for the time being NATO would own the night skies over Europe. Thirty-six major bridges had been targeted: thirty had been destroyed and all of the rest damaged. The initial Soviet ground attack scheduled to begin in two hours would not be supported by the second echelon, nor by specialty units of mobile SAMs, engineers, and other crucial late-arrivals fresh from special training in the Soviet homeland. Finally, the attacks against airfields would give NATO air parity, at least for the moment. The NATO air forces had fulfilled their most crucial mission: the much feared Soviet ground superiority was decisively reduced. The land battle for Western Europe would now be fought on nearly even terms.
USS PHARRIS
It was still the previous day on the American East Coast. USS PHARRIS led the way out of the Delaware at 2200 hours. Behind her was a convoy of thirty ships, with a dozen escorting vessels. In both cases it was all that could be assembled on the short notice. Dozens of American and foreign flag vessels were racing to American ports, many taking southerly routings to keep as far away as possible from the Soviet submarines reported surging south from the Norwegian Sea. The first few days would be tough, Morris knew.