“PK EST 1 HOUR — RUN,” he typed into his computer console.
“23,” the computer answered at once.
Quentin grunted. Twenty-four hours earlier the PK, probability of a kill, had been forty — forty probable kills in the first hour after getting a shooting authorization. Now it was barely half that, and this number had to be taken with a large grain of salt, since it assumed that everything would work, a happy state of affairs found only in fiction. Soon, he judged, the number would be under ten. This did not include kills from friendly submarines that were trailing the Russians under strict orders not to reveal their positions. His sometime allies in the Sturgeons, Permits, and Los Angeleses were playing their own ASW game by their own set of rules. A different breed. He tried to think of them as friends, but it never quite worked. In his twenty years of naval service submarines had always been the enemy. In war they would be useful enemies, but in a war it was widely recognized that there was no such thing as a friendly submarine.
A B-52
The bomber crew knew exactly where the Russians were. Navy Orions and air force Sentries had been shadowing them for days now, and the day before, he’d been told, the Soviets had sent an armed fighter from the Kiev to the nearest Sentry. Possibly an attack mission, probably not, it had in any case been a provocation.
Four hours earlier the squadron of fourteen had flown out of Plattsburg, New York, at 0330, leaving behind black trails of exhaust smoke hidden in the predawn gloom. Each aircraft carried a full load of fuel and twelve missiles whose total weight was far less than the -52’s design bombload. This made for good, long range.
Which was exactly what they needed. Knowing where the Russians were was only half the battle. Hitting them was the other. The mission profile was simple in concept, rather more difficult in execution. As had been learned in missions over Hanoi — in which the B-52 had participated and sustained SAM (surface-to-air missile) damage — the best method of attacking a heavily defended target was to converge from all points of the compass at once, “like the enveloping arms of an angry bear,” the squadron commander had put it at the briefing, indulging his poetic nature. This gave half the squadron relatively direct courses to their target; the other half had to curve around, careful to keep well beyond effective radar coverage; all had to turn exactly on cue.
The B-52s had turned ten minutes earlier, on command from the Sentry quarterbacking the mission. The pilot had added a twist. His course to the Soviet formation took his bomber right down a commercial air route. On making his turn, he had switched his IFF transponder from its normal setting to international. He was fifty miles behind a commercial 747, thirty miles ahead of another, and on Soviet radar all three Boeing products would look exactly alike — harmless.
It was still dark down on the surface. There was no indication that the Russians were alerted yet. Their fighters were only supposed to be VFR (visual flight rules) capable, and the pilot imagined that taking off and landing on a carrier in the dark was pretty risky business, doubly so in bad weather.
“Skipper,” the electronic warfare officer called on the intercom, “we’re getting L- and S-band emissions. They’re right where they’re supposed to be.”
“Roger. Enough for a return off us?”
“That’s affirm, but they probably think we’re flying Pan Am. No fire control stuff yet, just routine air search.”
“Range to target?”
“One-three-zero miles.”
It was almost time. The mission profile was such that all would hit the 125-mile circle at the same moment.
“Everything ready?”
“That’s a roge.”
The pilot relaxed for another minute, waiting for the signal from the entry.
“FLASHLIGHT, FLASHLIGHT, FLASHLIGHT.” The signal came over the digital radio channel.
“That’s it! Let ‘em know we’re here,” the aircraft commander ordered.
“Right.” The electronic warfare officer flipped the clear plastic cover off his set of toggle switches and dials controlling the aircraft’s jamming systems. First he powered up his systems. This took a few seconds. The -52’s electronics were all old seventies-vintage equipment, else the squadron would not be part of the junior varsity. Good learning tools, though, and the lieutenant was hoping to move up to the new B-lBs now beginning to come off the Rockwell assembly line in California. For the past ten minutes the ESM pods on the bomber’s nose and wingtips had been recording the Soviet radar signals, classifying their exact frequencies, pulse repetition rates, power, and the individual signature characteristics of the transmitters. The lieutenant was brand new to this game. He was a recent graduate of electronic warfare school, first in his class. He considered what he should do first, then selected a jamming mode, not his best, from a range of memorized options.
The Nikolayev
One hundred twenty-five miles away on the Kara-class cruiser Nikolayev, a radar michman was examining some blips that seemed to be in a circle around his formation. In an instant his screen was covered with twenty ghostly splotches tracing crazily in various directions. He shouted the alarm, echoed a second later by a brother operator. The officer of the watch hurried over to check the screen.
By the time he got there the jamming mode had changed and six lines like the spokes of a wheel were rotating slowly around a central axis.
“Plot the strobes,” the officer ordered.
Now there were blotches, lines, and sparkles.
“More than one aircraft, Comrade.” The michman tried flipping through his frequency settings.
“Attack warning!” another michman shouted. His ESM receiver had just reported the signals of aircraft search-radar sets of the type used to acquire targets for air-to-surface missiles.
The B-52
“We got hard targets,” the weapons officer on the -52 reported. “I got a lock on the first three birds.”
“Roger that,” the pilot acknowledged. “Hold for ten more seconds.”
“Ten seconds,” the officer replied. “Cutting switches… now.”
“Okay, kill the jamming.”
“ECM systems off.”
The Nikolayev
“Missile acquisition radars have ceased,” the combat information center officer reported to the cruiser’s captain, just now arrived from the bridge. Around them the Nikolayev’s crew was racing to battle stations. “Jamming has also ceased.”
“What is out there?” the captain asked. Out of a clear sky his beautiful clipper-bowed cruiser had been threatened — and now all was well?
“At least eight enemy aircraft in a circle around us.”
The captain examined the now normal S-band air search screen. There were numerous blips, mainly civilian aircraft. The half circle of others had to be hostile, though.
“Could they have fired missiles?”
“No, Comrade Captain, we would have detected it. They jammed our search radars for thirty seconds and illuminated us with their own search systems for twenty. Then everything stopped.”
“So, they provoke us and now pretend nothing has happened?” the captain growled. “When will they be within SAM range?”
“This one and these two will be within range in four minutes if they do not change course.”
“Illuminate them with our missile control systems. Teach the bastards a lesson.”
The officer gave the necessary instructions, wondering who was being taught what. Two thousand feet above one of the B-52’s was an EC-135 whose computerized electronic sensors were recording all signals from the Soviet cruiser and taking them apart, the better to know how to jam them. It was the first good look at the new SA-N-8 missile system.
Two F-14 Tomcats
The double-zero code number on its fuselage marked the Tomcat as the squadron commander’s personal bird; the black ace of spades on the twin-rudder tail indicated his squadron, Fighting 41, “The Black Aces.” The pilot was Commander Robby Jackson, and his radio call sign was Spade 1.
Jackson was leading a two-plane section under the direction of one of the Kennedy’s E-2C Hawkeyes, the navy’s more diminutive version of the air force’s AWACS and close brother to the COD, a twin-prop aircraft whose radome makes it look like an airplane being terrorized by a UFO. The weather was bad — depressingly normal for the North Atlantic in December — but was supposed to improve as they headed west. Jackson and his wingman, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bud Sanchez, were flying through nearly solid clouds, and they had eased their formation out somewhat. In the limited visibility both remembered that each Tomcat had a crew of two and a price of over thirty million dollars.
They were doing what the Tomcat does best. An all-weather interceptor, the F-14 has transoceanic range, Mach 2 speed, and a radar computer fire control system that can lock onto and attack six separate targets with long-range Phoenix air-to-air missiles. Each fighter was now carrying two of those along with a pair each of AIM-9M Sidewinder heat-seekers. Their prey was a flight of YAK-36 Forgers, the bastard V/STOL fighters that operated from the carrier Kiev. After harassing the Sentry the previous day, Ivan had decided to close with the Kennedy force, no doubt guided in with data from a reconnaissance satellite. The Soviet aircraft had come up short, their range being fifty miles less than they needed to sight the Kennedy. Washington decided that Ivan was getting a little too obnoxious on this side of the ocean. Admiral Painter had been given permission to return the favor, in a friendly sort of way.