Four American Phantoms were waiting in ambush for them. In a moment eight Sparrow missiles were diving toward the Fulcrums. Now it was time for the Soviets to run. The MiG-29s wheeled and ran back for Iceland on afterburner. One was felled by a missile, and another damaged. The battle had lasted all of five minutes.
“Doghouse, this is Beagle. The electrical station is gone! The Varks knocked it flat, guy. One hell of a fire at the southwest edge of the airport, and looks like the tower got chopped in half. Two hangars look shot up. I see two, maybe three burning aircraft, civilian types. The fighters got off half an hour ago. Damn, that tank farm is burning like a sonuvagun! Lots of people running around on the ground below us.” As Edwards watched, a dozen vehicles with headlights blazing ran back and forth over the roads below him. Two stopped a kilometer away and dismounted troops. “Doghouse, I think it’s time for us to leave this hill.”
“That’s a roger, Beagle. Head northeast towards Hill 482. We’ll expect to hear from you in ten hours. Get moving, boy! Out.”
“Time to leave, sir.” Smith tossed the lieutenant his pack and motioned for the privates to move. “Looks like we can score one for the good guys.”
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
The MiGs landed on the still undamaged runway one-eight, the base’s longest. They had barely stopped rolling when ground crews began the process of turning them around for further combat operations. The colonel was surprised to see the base commander still alive.
“How many did you get, Comrade Colonel?”
“Only one, and they got one of mine. Didn’t you get anything on radar?” the colonel demanded.
“Not a thing. They hit Reykjavik first. Two groups of aircraft, they came in from the north. The bastards must have flown between the rocks,” the major snarled. He pointed to the big mobile radar that sat in the open between two runways. “They missed it completely. Amazing.”
“We must move it. Someplace high, very high. We’ll never get an airborne radar, and unless we improve radar warning, this low-level business will eat us up. Find a good hilltop. How badly are our facilities damaged?”
“Many small holes in the runways from these bomblets. We’ll have them all patched in two hours. The loss of the tower will hinder our ability to operate large numbers of aircraft. When we lost electrical power, we lost the ability to move fuel through our pipeline, probably lost the local telephone service.” He shrugged. “We can make adjustments, but it’s a major inconvenience. Too much work, too few men. We must disperse the fighters, and we must make alternate arrangements for fueling. The next target will be the fuel dumps.”
“Did you expect this to be easy, Comrade?” The colonel looked over at the blazing pyres that only thirty minutes before had been a pair of Tu22M Backfires. The damaged Bear was just touching down. “Their timing was too good. They caught us when half my fighters were escorting a bomber force off the north coast. Luck, perhaps, but I do not believe in luck. I want ground troops to check for enemy infiltrators around all the airports. And I want better security arrangements. I-what the hell is that?”
A Rockeye bomblet lay on the concrete not twenty feet from them. The major took a plastic flag from his jeep and set it near the bomb.
“The Americans set some for delayed detonation. My men are already searching for them. Be at ease, Comrade, all your fighters have landed safely. Your dispersal areas are clear.”
The colonel drew back a few feet. “What do you do with them?”
“We’ve already practiced this. We’ll use a specially fitted bulldozer to push them off the concrete. Some will explode, some won’t. Those that do not go off of their own accord will be detonated by a marksman with a rifle.”
“The tower?”
“Three men were on duty. Good men.” The major shrugged again. “You must excuse me. I have work to do.”
The colonel took a last look at the bomblet before walking toward his fighters. He’d underestimated the major.
ICELAND
“There’s a light on our hill,” Garcia said. Everyone dropped to the ground. Edwards got next to the sergeant.
“Some bastard just lit a cigarette,” Smith observed sourly. He’d finished his last one several hours before and was going through withdrawal symptoms. “Now you see why we’re carrying our trash with us?”
“They’re looking for us?” Edwards asked.
“Figures. That attack was pretty cute. They’ll wonder if the airedales had any help. I’m surprised they didn’t do it sooner. Guess they were pretty busy with other stuff.”
“Think they can see us?” Edwards didn’t like that idea.
“From two miles? Pretty dark for that, and if they’re smoking, they’re being pretty casual. Relax, Lieutenant. It isn’t all that easy to find four guys. Lots of hills to check out on this rock. We want to be careful where we walk. Keep off the ridges, like. Even if they got low-light gear, we won’t be easy to see if we keep to the valleys. Let’s move it out, troops, and keep low.”
USS PHARRIS
One last merchant was burning. Her crew had abandoned ship two hours before, but still she burned on the western horizon. More deaths, Morris thought. Only about half of the crews had been saved, and there wasn’t time for a more careful search. The convoy had sailed without a designated rescue ship. The helicopters had pulled many out of the water, but most of them were still needed to hunt submarines. He held a dispatch saying that Orions out of Lajes had prosecuted and probably killed an Echo-class missile submarine in their path. Some good news, but intelligence reported indications of two more.
The loss of Iceland was a disaster whose dimensions were only now becoming apparent. The Soviet bombers had a clear lane to reach into the trade route. Their submarines were racing through the Denmark Strait even as the NATO navies were trying to position their submarines to reform the barrier they had lost-the barrier upon which the convoys depended. The Air Force and Navy would soon try to rearrange fighter coverage to harass the Backfires, but those measures were a stopgap. Until Iceland was fully neutralized, or better yet retaken, the Third Battle of the North Atlantic hung in an uneven balance.
At the Pacific fleet bases of San Diego and Pearl Harbor, darkened ships stood out to sea. Once in open ocean they all headed south toward Panama.
23 – Returns
USS PHARRIS
Things had settled down again. A very relative term: the Backfires were still coming down the gap over Iceland, but they’d hit another convoy this afternoon, killing eleven merchantmen in the process. All the eastbound convoys were angling south, trading a longer voyage to Europe for reduction of the air threat. As bad as losses were to this point-nearly sixty ships had already been sunk-a routing south at least meant the Soviet bombers could carry only one missile instead of two.
The strain was beginning to tell on everyone. Morris’s crew had been “port and starboard” for almost a week now, four hours on duty, four hours off. Sleep patterns had been broken up. People didn’t eat proper meals. Crucial maintenance requirements cut into what sleep allocations his men had. On top of that was the knowledge that a submarine or aircraft attack could come at any time. The work was still getting done, but Morris noted that his men were becoming terse and ill-tempered. People were beginning to trip over doorsills, a sure sign of fatigue. More serious mistakes would soon follow. The relationship between fatigue and errors was as certain as gravity. In another day or so he hoped a solid routine would establish itself, something for his men to adjust to. There were signs of this, and his chiefs were telling him not to worry. Morris worried.
“Bridge, Combat. Sonar contact, possible submarine, bearing zero-zero-nine.”
“Here we go again,” the conning officer said. For the twenty-fourth time on this voyage, Pharris’s crew raced to battle stations.
It took three hours this time. No Orions were available for them, and the escorts pooled their helicopters to track down the submarine, an directed by Morris and his CIC crew. This submarine driver really knew his business. At the first suspicion that he had been detected-perhaps his sonar had detected a helicopter overhead or heard the splash of a falling sonobuoy-he went deep and began a confusing series of sprints and drifts, porpoising over and under the layer, working hard to break contact-toward the convoy. This one wasn’t interested in running away. The submarine disappeared and reappeared on their tactical plot, always closing but never revealing his position clearly enough for a shot.
“Gone again,” the antisubmarine-warfare officer said pensively. A sonobuoy dropped ten minutes earlier had detected a weak signal, held it for two minutes, then lost it. “This guy’s beautiful.”