The helicopter landed at the edge of a forest. Just within the treeline, Alekseyev saw, antiaircraft guns tracked them all the way to the ground. He and Sergetov jumped out, ducking under the still-turning main rotor as they ran into the trees. There they found a cluster of command vehicles.
“Welcome, Comrade General,” said a dirty-faced Red Army colonel.
“Where is the divisional commander?”
“I’m in command. The General was killed day before yesterday by enemy artillery fire. We have to move the CP twice a day. They are becoming very skilled at locating us.”
“Your situation?” Alekseyev asked curtly.
“The men are tired, but they can still fight. We are not getting sufficient air support, and the NATO fighters give us no rest at night. We have about half our nominal combat strength, except in artillery. That’s down to a third. The Americans have just changed tactics on us. Now, instead of attacking the leading tank formations, they are sending their aircraft after our guns first. We were badly hurt last night. Just as we were launching a regimental attack, four of their ground-attack fighters nearly wiped out a battalion of mobile guns. The attack failed.”
“What about concealment!” Alekseyev demanded.
“Ask the devil’s mother why it doesn’t work,” the colonel shot back. “Their radar aircraft can evidently track vehicles on the ground-we’ve tried jamming, we’ve tried lures. Sometimes it works, but sometimes not. The division command post has been attacked twice. My regiments are commanded by majors, my battalions by captains. NATO tactics are to go for the unit commanders, and the bastards are good at it. Every time we approach a village, my tanks have to fight through a swarm of missiles. We’ve tried rockets and artillery to suppress them, but you can’t take the time to blast every building in sight-we’d never get anywhere.”
“What do you need?”
“Air support and lots of it. Get me the support to smash through what’s opposing me, and I’ll give you your damned breakout!” Ten kilometers behind the front, a tank division was waiting for this very unit to rupture the front-but how could it exploit a breakthrough that was never made?
“Your supply situation?”
“Could be better, but we’re getting enough forward to supply what we have left-not enough to support an intact division.”
“What are you doing now?”
“We launch a two-regiment attack just over an hour from now. Another village, named Bieben. We estimate enemy strength as two understrength battalions of infantry, supported by tanks and artillery. The village commands a crossroads we need. Same one we tried to get last night. This assault should work. Do you wish to observe?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’d better get you forward. Forget the helicopter unless you want to die. Besides” -the colonel smiled- “I can use it to support the attack. I’ll give you an infantry carrier to get you forward. It will be dangerous up there, Comrade General,” the colonel warned.
“Fine. You can protect us. When do we leave?”
USS PHARRIS
The calm sea meant that Pharris was back on port-and-starboard steaming. Half the crew was always on duty as the frigate held her station north of the convoy. The towed sonar was streamed aft, and the helicopter sat ready on the flight deck, its crew dozing in the hangar. Morris slept also, snoring away in his leather bridge chair, to the amusement of his crewmen. So, officers did it, too. The crew accommodations often sounded like a convention of chainsaws.
“Captain, message from CINCLANTFLT.”
Morris looked up at the yeoman and signed for the message form. An eastbound convoy one hundred fifty miles north of them was under attack. He walked back to the chart table to check distances. The submarines there were not a threat to him. That was that. He had his own concerns, and his world had shrunk to include them only. Another forty hours to Norfolk, where they would refuel, replace expended ordnance, and sail again within twenty-four hours.
“What the hell’s that?” a sailor said loudly. He pointed to a low-lying trail of white smoke.
“That’s a missile,” answered the officer of the deck. “General quarters! Captain, that was a cruise missile southbound a mile ahead of us.”
Morris snapped upright in his seat and blinked his eyes clear. “Signal the convoy. Energize the radar. Fire the chaff.” Morris ran to the ladder to CIC. The ship’s alarm was sounding its strident note before he got there. Aft, two Super-RBOC chaff rockets leaped into the sky and exploded, surrounding the frigate with a cloud of aluminum foil.
“I count five inbounds,” a radar operator was saying. One’s heading towards us. Bearing zero-zero-eight, range seven miles, speed five hundred knots.”
“Bridge, come right full rudder to zero-zero-eight,” the tactical action officer ordered. “Stand by to fire off more chaff. Air action forward, weapons free.”
The five-inch gun swiveled slightly and loosed several rounds, none of which came near the incoming missile.
“Range two miles and closing,” reported the radar man.
“Fire four more Super-Rocs.”
Morris heard the rockets launch. The radar showed their chaff as an opaque cloud that enveloped the ship.
“CIC,” called a lookout. “I see it. Star bound bow, inbound-it’s gonna miss, I got a bearing change. There-there it goes, passing aft. Missed us by a couple hundred yards.”
The missile was confused by the chaff. Had its brain had the capacity to think, it would have been surprised that it struck nothing. Instead, on coming back to a clear sky, the radar seeker merely looked for another target. It found one, fifteen miles ahead, and altered course toward it.
“Sonar,” Morris ordered, “check bearing zero-zero-eight. There’s a missile-armed sub out there.”
“Looking now, sir. Nothing shows on that bearing.”
“A five-hundred-knot sea-skimmer. That’s a Charlie-class sub, maybe thirty miles out,” Morris said. “Get the helo out there. I’m going topside.”
The captain reached the bridge just in time to see the explosion on the horizon. That was no freighter. The fireball could only mean a warship had had her magazines exploded by a missile, perhaps the one that had just missed them. Why hadn’t they been able to stop it? Three more explosions followed. Slowly the noise traveled across the sea toward them, reaching Pharris as the deep sound of an enormous bass drum. The frigate’s Sea Sprite helicopter was just lifting off, racing north in the hope of catching the Soviet sub near the surface. Morris ordered his ship to slow to five knots in the hope that the lower speed would allow his sonar to perform just a little better. Still nothing. He returned to CIC.
The helicopter’s crew dropped a dozen sonobuoys. Two showed something, but the contact faded, and was not reestablished. Soon an Orion showed up and carried on the search, but the submarine had escaped cleanly, her missiles having killed a destroyer and two merchantmen. Just like that, Morris thought. No warning at all.
STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND
“Raid warning again,” the Group Captain said.
“Realtime?” Toland asked.
“No, an asset we have in Norway. Contrails overhead southwest. He counts twenty or so, aircraft type unknown. We have a Nimrod patrolling north of Iceland now. If they’re Backfires, and if they rendezvous with a tanker group, we might just get something. See if your idea works, Bob.”
Four Tomcat interceptors were sitting ready on the flight line. Two were armed with missiles. The other pair carried buddy-stores, fuel tanks designed to transfer fuel to other aircraft. The distance they expected for a successful intercept meant a round trip of two thousand miles, which meant that only two aircraft could reach far enough, and they were stretching to the limit.
The Nimrod circled two hundred miles east of Jan Mayen Land. The Norwegian island had been subjected to several air attacks, destroying the radar there, though so far the Russians had not launched a ground attack as expected. The British patrol aircraft bristled with antennae but carried no armament of her own. If the Russians sent escorting fighters out with the bomber/tanker force, she could only evade. One team listened in on the bands used by the Russians to communicate between aircraft, another on radar frequencies.
It was a long, tense wait. Two hours after the raid warning, a garbled transmission was heard, interpreted as a warning to a Backfire pilot approaching a tanker. The bearing was plotted, and the Nimrod turned east hoping for a cross bearing on the next such signal. None was detected. Without a firm fix, the fighters had only the slimmest hope of an intercept. They were kept on the ground. Next time, they decided, there’d be a pair of snoopers up.
USS CHICAGO
The QZB bell-ringer call arrived just after lunch. McCafferty brought his submarine to antenna depth and received orders to proceed to Faslane, the Royal Navy submarine base in Scotland. Since losing contact with the Russian surface force, they had not tracked a single positive contact. It was crazy. All the pre-war assessments told McCafferty to expect a “target-rich environment.” So far he was rich only in frustration. The executive officer took them back down to a deep cruising depth while McCafferty began to write up his patrol report.