The drama being played out was more complex than the most intricate game. More than a dozen variable factors could interact, with their permutations running into the thousands. Radar detection range depended on altitude and consequent distance to the horizon that neither eyes nor radar can see past. An aircraft could avoid, or at least delay, detection by skimming the waves. But this carried severe penalties in fuel consumption and range.
They had to locate the battle group without being detected by it first. The Russians knew where the carrier group was, but it would move in the four hours required for the bombers to get there. Their missiles needed precise information if they were to home in on the raid’s primary target, the two American and one French carrier, or the mission was a wasted effort.
Putting the group’s fighters on station to intercept the incoming raid depended on expert prognostication of its direction and speed. Their job: to locate and engage the bombers before they could find the carriers.
For both sides, the fundamental choice was whether or not to radiate, to use their radar transmitters. Either choice carried benefits and dangers, and there was no “best” solution to the problem. Nearly every American ship carried powerful air-search radars that could locate the raid two hundred or more miles away. But those radar signals could be detected at an even greater range, generating a return signal, that would potentially allow the Soviets to circle the formation, pinpoint it, then converge in from all points of the compass.
The game was hide and seek, played over a million square miles of ocean. The losers died.
NORTH ATLANTIC
The Soviet Bear-D reconnaissance bombers were passing south of Iceland. There were ten of them, covering a front of a thousand miles. The monstrous propeller-driven aircraft were packed full of electronics gear and crewed by men with years of training and experience in locating the American carrier groups. At the nose, tail, and wingtips, sensitive antennae were already reaching out, searching for the signals from American radar transmitters. They would close on those signals, chart them with great care, but remain forever outside the estimated detection radius. Their greatest fear was that the Americans would use no radar at all, or that they would switch their sets on and off at random intervals and locations, which posed the danger of the Bears’ blundering directly into armed ships and aircraft. The Bear had twenty hours of endurance, but the penalty for it was virtually no combat capability. It was too slow to run from an interceptor, and had no ability to fight one. “We have located the enemy battle force,” the crews’ bitter joke ran: “Dosvidania, Rodinia!” But they were a proud group of professionals. The attack bombers depended on them-as did their country.
Eight hundred miles north of Iceland, the Badgers altered their course to one-eight-zero, due south at five hundred knots. They had avoided the still-dangerous Norwegians, and it was not thought that the British would reach this far out. These air crews kept a nervous watch out their windows nevertheless, their own electronic sensors fully operative and under constant scrutiny. An attack by tactical fighters against Iceland was expected at any time, and the bomber crews knew that any NATO fighter pilot worthy of his name would instantly jettison his bombload for a chance at air-to-air combat with so helpless a target as a twenty-year-old Badger. They had reached the end of their useful lives. Cracks were developing in the wings. The turbine blades in their jet engines were worn, reducing performance and fuel efficiency.
Two hundred miles behind them, the Backfire bombers were finishing their refueling operations. The Tu-22Ms had been accompanied by tankers, and, after topping off their tanks, they headed south, slightly west of the Badgers’ course track. With an AS-6 Kingfish missile hanging under each wing, the Backfires, too, were potentially vulnerable, but the Backfire had the ability to run at high Mach numbers and stood a fair chance at survival, even in the face of determined fighter opposition. Their crews were the elite of Soviet Naval Aviation, well-paid and pampered by Soviet society, their commanders had reminded them at the regimental briefings. Now it was time to deliver.
All three groups of aircraft came south at optimum cruise speed, their flight crews monitoring fuel consumption, engine heat, and many other gauges for the long over-water flight.
USS NIMITZ
Toland stepped outside for a breath of air. It was a fine morning, the cottonball clouds overhead turning briefly pink from the sunrise. Saratoga and Foch were visible on the horizon, perhaps eight miles away, their size impressive even at this distance. Closer in, Ticonderoga was cutting through the five-foot seas, white-painted missiles visible on her twin launchers. A few blinker lights traded signals. Otherwise the ships in view were gray shapes without noise, waiting. Nimitz’s deck was covered with aircraft. F-14 Tomcat interceptors sat everywhere. Two were hooked up on the midships catapults, only a hundred feet from him, their two-man flight crews dozing. The fighters carried Phoenix long-range missiles. The attack bombers carried buddy-store tanks instead of weapons. They’d be used to refuel the fighters in flight, enabling them to remain aloft an extra two hours. Deck crewmen in multicolored shirts scurried about, checking and rechecking the aircraft. The carrier began turning to port, coming around into the westerly wind in preparation for launching aircraft. He checked his watch. 0558. Time to get back to CIC. The carrier would go to general quarters in two minutes. The intelligence watch officer took one more breath of fresh sea air and wondered if it would be his last.
NORTH ATLANTIC
“Contact!” the technician said over the Bear’s interphone. “Signals indicate an American airborne radar transmitter, carrier type.”
“Give me a bearing!” the pilot commanded.
“Patience, Comrade Major.” The technician made an adjustment on his board. His radio-interferometers timed the signals as they arrived at antennae arrayed all over the aircraft. “Southeast. Bearing to signal is one-three-one. Signal strength one. He is quite distant. Bearing is not changing as yet. I recommend we maintain a constant course for the present.”
The pilot and copilot exchanged a look, but no words. Somewhere off to their left was an American E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft. A flight crew of two-a radar intercept officer and two radar operators. It could manage the air battle for over a hundred enemy aircraft, could vector a missile-armed interceptor in at them within seconds of detection. The pilot wondered just how accurate his information was on the Hawkeye’s radar. What if they had already detected his Bear? He knew the answer to that. His first warning would come when he detected the fire-control radar of an American F-14 Tomcat heading right at him. The Bear held course one-eight-zero while the plotting officer tracked the change in bearing to the radar signal. In ten minutes they might just have an accurate fix. If they lived that long. They would not break radio silence until they had a fix.
“I have it,” the plotting officer reported. “Estimate distance to contact is six hundred fifty kilometers, position forty-seven degrees, nine minutes north, thirty-four degrees, fifty minutes west.”
“Get it out,” the pilot ordered. A directional HF antenna in the aircraft’s tail fin turned within its housing and radioed the information to the raid commander, whose Bear command aircraft was a hundred miles behind the snoopers.
The raid commander compared this datum with that from the reconnaissance satellite. Now he had two pieces of information. The Americans’ position three hours ago was sixty miles south of the estimated plot for the Hawkeye. The Americans probably had two of them up, northeast and northwest of the formation. That was normal fleet doctrine. So, the carrier group was right about . . . here. The Badgers were heading right for it. They would encounter the American radar coverage in . . . two hours. Good, he said to himself. Everything is going according to plan.
USS NIMITZ
Toland watched the aircraft plot in silence. The radar picture from the Hawkeyes was being transmitted to the carrier by digital radio link, enabling the battle group commander to follow everything. The same data went to the group air defense boss on Ticonderoga and every other ship fitted with the Naval Tactical Data System. That included the French ships, which had long since been equipped to operate closely with the U.S. Navy. So far there was nothing to be seen except the tracks of American military and commercial aircraft ferrying men and supplies across the ocean, and dependents back to the States. These were beginning to swing south. Warned that an air battle was possible, the pilots of DC-10s and C-5As were prudently keeping out of the way, even if it meant having to land and refuel on the way to their destinations.
The group’s forty-eight Tomcat interceptors were now mostly on station, spread in a line three hundred miles across. Each pair of Tomcats had a tanker aircraft in attendance. The attack birds, Corsairs and Intruders, carried oversized fuel tanks with refueling drogues attached, and one by one the Tomcats were already beginning to top off their fuel tanks from them. Soon the Corsairs began returning to their carriers for refills. They could keep this up for hours. The aircraft remaining on the carriers were spotted on the decks for immediate takeoff. If a raid came in, they would be shot off the catapults at once to eliminate the fire hazard inherent in any type of aircraft.