by Ian Slater
He looked at her, puzzled, as he unconsciously felt for what he called his “backup,” his vest-holstered Hi-Vel.22 automatic beneath his tunic. “Tell you what?”
“You said there was one other thing about Siberia that made it so different. Oh, dear — you aren’t going to tell the you expect it to be a long war, are you?”
“Yes,” answered Freeman, slipping in a rubber-banded clutch of three-by-five index cards—”Arctic Ops”—into his pocket. “Siberia,” he told her, “is twenty times the size of Iraq.” Actually it was more than twenty-three times as big, but he knew civilians preferred round numbers. Suddenly Marjorie realized he’d been dressing with more ceremony than usual for duty at Fort Ord. “You’re not going?” she charged.
“Ordered by the president, Marjorie,” he said. “No choice.” It was only the second lie he’d told since leaving Europe, the first during a news conference in Paris on his way home, in which he had apologized, under direct orders from General Grey, for having called his Russian counterparts a pack of “vodka-sucking sons of bitches.” It was quite wrong of him, he said later, to have said anything against vodka—”Hell, I have it on good authority that you can run tanks on it.”
“If I didn’t know better, Douglas,” said Marjorie, “I’d think you enjoyed it.”
On the way to Fort Ord he heard on the radio that CBN was reporting that U.S. air strikes against Ratmanov from Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage and from the bases further west on Cape Prince of Wales were imminent.
“That’s right, you bastar—” He stopped short, old-fashioned about using rough language in front of women. “Wonder is,” he told the blond chauffeur, “they don’t tell the Siberians how many planes are involved.”
“They’re probably working on it, General.”
CHAPTER SIX
With most of the U.S. ‘s seventy-six F-117A Stealth fighters still in Europe, only five were immediately available to Alaskan command, the F-117A’s primary role being radar avoidance attack, not defense. Led in by a Wild Weasel F-4G Phantom jamming Big Diomede’s radars with white noise, the five Stealth fighters, despite their relatively low maneuverability-something not known by the public at large — thundered only four hundred feet above the white blur that was the eastern half of the Bering Strait.
Coming in at seven hundred miles per hour, executing both “high” and “over-the-shoulder” toss bomb release runs, they sent Paveway 2,300-pound laser-guided ordnance, along with twelve-foot-long, modular-glide bombs, sliding down the “icecream,” or laser, cone toward the eastern cliff face that sprouted retractable Flat-Face, Squat-Eye, Spoon-Rest, and Low-Blow radar arrays that serviced batteries of four barreled eighteen-inch-diameter surface-to-air missiles. Seconds after the four nose canards behind each laser seeker-detector nose assembly whistled through the dry Arctic air, their explosions lit up the face of “Ratmanov,” or Big Diomede, in crimson-curdled orange balls of fire. The thunder rolled between the two islands on the clear night, jagged sea ice reflecting the light so that Big Diomede was lit up like some huge, black-veined massif that had only suddenly burst through the frozen sea. It was an illusion created by enormous slivers of ice sliding from the island’s cliff face from the heat and the concussion of the bombs crashing into the sea ice below.
The following Aardvark, or F-111F fighter bombers, came in on the deck at 570 miles per hour to deliver their “slide” beams for more laser-guided bombs, pilots expecting to run into heavy antiaircraft fire on the approach, weapons officers centering the cross hairs on the infrared screens. Closing on the target, lasers were activated to “lock on” and, seconds before the “slide” bomb launch, the electronic warfare officers tensed, expecting heavy AA fire. But there was none. On the second approach by the F-111 fighter bombers, flying low to deliver more bombs, the aircraft presumably radar safe in the “frying pan” static set up by the F-4G Phantom Wild Weasels, Big Diomede suddenly erupted, spewing streams of red and green tracer crisscrossing the sky in deadly tattoo, the white noise now settling down so that the F-111 pilots knew that either the Wild Weasels had stopped their jamming or the Russians had outjammed the jammers.
Whatever the cause, over forty batteries of ZSU Quad twenty-three-millimeter cannon and Soviet SA-10 missiles filled the air above the strait, each gun firing over ten thousand rounds a second. The twenty-three-millimeter fire created a curtain of red-hot metal in the narrow corridor that the Wild Weasels had believed secure for a safe run in. Yet, despite the heavy AA fire, only one of the F-111 fighter bombers and one Wild Weasel were taken out, the F-111 going down, spitting flame then erupting on the ice into a thousand fiery pieces, the Weasel crashing because the intakes of its twin eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust jet engines were fouled as the plane struck a mass of terrified, glaucous-winged gulls. By now the F-111 fighter bombers had delivered their loads against the cliff face in an effort to penetrate the enclaves of the AA fire, but many of the heat-seeking missiles from the F-111s had been dummied by what photo reconnaissance later discovered were wired hot spots to sucker the heat-seeking American missiles, the Siberians’ ZSU twenty-three-millimeter and SA-10 missiles coming from relatively cooler apertures from within the sixteen-hundred-foot-high cliff face of the eleven-square-mile island.
In most danger were the five Stealth fighters. Poorly maneuverable, compared to the F-111s and Wild Weasels, and slow, at seven hundred miles per hour, the Stealth’s only superiority to the others lay in radar evasion. They sought the safety of flying practically on the deck, only two to three hundred feet above the jagged ice that was racing like an endless white runway beneath them. One, just off the northern end of Little Diomede less than two and a half miles from target, had ironically begun to climb for an over-the-shoulder toss when a wind shear created among the ice floes’ jagged peaks sucked it down for a fraction of a second. At seven hundred miles an hour the Stealth could not rise in time, and the Siberian Quads’ fire raked it from the ventral scanner below the pilot past the canopy actuator to the left-hand tail fin. It was as if a swallow’s tail had been suddenly clipped; the plane’s implosion on the ice and the detonation of the Paveway two-thousand-pounder blew a black hole in the ice, the giant eruption of flame from it illuminating the strait between the islands like some enormous charred skating rink. For an instant it was bright as day, the Siberian gunners pouring an enfilade of ZSU twenty-three millimeter fire toward it. It took a full burst, and the second Stealth was gone.
High above Big Diomede thousands more seabirds, screeching in panic, driven aloft by the shrapnel-filled night, cried even louder, some falling now, tumbling down toward the ice, either killed outright or stunned by the bombs’ explosions and AA fire. Two Siberian SA-10 missiles — radar-identified by a high-stationed, rotodomed Boeing E-3—streaked toward two of the three remaining Stealths as they banked hard right, turning north, swinging still further to an eastward heading.
There were two winks of light from Cape Prince of Wales’ Cape Mountain, and in less than five seconds two 20-foot-long, 2,200-pound U.S. Patriot land mobile surface-to-air missiles intercepted the two Soviet SA-10s, blowing them out of the sky. In the mobile command center of the Patriots in a bunker in Cape Prince of Wales the videos from the cameras of the first American wave were already being shown. The representatives from Raytheon Co. of Lexington and the Martin Marietta Corp. of Bethesda, Maryland, the prime and subcontractors for the 1.4-million-dollar-apiece Patriots, were well pleased, watching their companies being guaranteed future contracts for the 152-million-dollar Patriot’s mobile five unit system.
They were also joining in the congratulations to those pilots who had “toggled” the laser-guided bombs, via the white cross of the TV image, smack onto their selected targets, the silent, soft white bursts of light on the videos showing the smart bombs exploding. But there had been very few secondary bursts within the initial explosions, meaning no ammunition or missile dumps.
But if the contractors were pleased, the CO of Alaskan Command wasn’t. He had
lost four multimillion dollar aircraft and six air crew, two each from the downed F-111 fighter bomber and the Phantom 4-G Wild Weasel, two from the Stealth fighters. And for what? If the high-frequency Russian radar hadn’t picked them up because of the earlier jamming by the Wild Weasels, then low frequency, which had been known to work on the Stealths before, must have. In any case, what was the result? he pointedly asked the hitherto exhilarated pilots. The infrared videos showed nothing more than the cliff face splattered with black, sootlike marks and splotches like white paint, clumps of old guano that had accumulated against the sixteen-hundred-foot-high granite cliff now covered in ice and snow. Yes, the bombs had landed where they were supposed to, but there was no evidence of any real damage. Where the hell were the knocked-out ZSU quads? Never mind the absence of any real damage to the SA-10 and radar array sites.
“Probably all recessed,” proffered one of the remaining F-111 weapons officers.
“Of course they’re goddamn recessed,” said the general. “They popped up long enough to get a fix on you, fired, and then they were gone, back in their holes like a bunch of prairie dogs.”
“We must have hit a few ventilator shafts, sir — that led in from the cliff. They have to breathe.”
“Hell, Captain, they could have ventilator shafts coming in from all over that island from the western side. Island’s only three miles wide. We were firing at hot spots that the videos now show were just that — hot spots. Thermal patches, each one probably run by a goddamn flashlight battery. I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it, but we’re wasting bombs, and we’ve just shot off five million bucks worth of ordnance in five seconds to shoot down missiles from sites we can’t even see.”
“Well, sir,” continued one of the two remaining Stealth captains, “we’re just going to have to get those satellite boys in Washington to get their magnifying glasses on. Has to be somewhere we can get ordnance into that sucker.”
“Time, gentlemen,” said the general urgently. “Time! The Joint Chiefs want this one taken out in a big hurry. We don’t knock out Big Diomede, we can’t cross the strait. We don’t cross the strait, and the Siberians can move everything they’ve got to their eastern flank — fifty miles from us.” The general was studying one of the video stills. “We’ll have to go in with more infrared seekers — hope some of them can fix on RHPs.” He meant residual heat patches, which theoretically should have been identified by thermal patch imaging sights even after the periscopelike radar antennae popped back down in their holes.
“Trouble is, sir, it’s so cold, RHPs’ signatures disappear on you almost immediately.”
“I know, I know. I’ll put the word out to our chief weapons officer — see whether he can crank the infrared sensors up a notch or two.”
“I’m surprised we didn’t run into any MiGs,” said the captain in charge of the Stealths.
“Maybe they don’t have any in their eastern TVD.” He meant the Siberians’ eastern theater.
“Right,” said the Stealth captain cheekily, “and I ‘m Marilyn Monroe.”
“Then come to bed, Marilyn,” said one of the weapons officers. But no one felt like laughing. The exhilaration of the attack was wearing off with the realization that six of their buddies were no more. And in the two Stealths alone, Alaska Air Command had lost 250 million dollars of the taxpayers’ money.
One thing was for damn sure, the general told his aide after the debriefing — he wasn’t going to send any more pilots against that “hunk of rock” until he could loosen it up a bit by “other means.” By which he meant that, despite NORAD’s insistence that the attack on Ratmanov not siphon off any aircraft from the continent’s vital North American defense line, he would request that a B-1 bomber be released from its blastproof shelter six hundred feet above sea level to launch air-to-ground 86-B cruise missiles at the rock.
Firing the three-thousand-pound, two-thousand-mile-range missile outside the Siberians’ effective air-to-surface missile envelope from a distance of between forty and fifty miles would be like hitting the rock at point-blank range. If that didn’t shake a few things loose, granite fortress and all, he didn’t know what would. He could, of course, wait for more bombers to be released from Europe, but this was unlikely now that they had to contend with containing the Siberian west flank. And the air commander knew that if he couldn’t shake up Big Diomede— and quickly — knocking out its radar, AA, and no doubt its surface-to-ship missile batteries, he would have to yield the job to the navy. He was right.
The Tomcats aboard USS Salt Lake City with their 14,500 pounds of ordnance on four underfuselage points and two wing hard points were even now taking their turn as squat, bright yellow mules — tractors — positioned them ready for the four waist and bow catapults. The Alaskan air commander was too much of a professional to let petty interservice rivalry with the navy stand in the way of an operation’s success. Still…
In the backseat of the lead Tomcat, Frank Shirer’s RIO, his radar intercept officer, Walter B. Anderson, a twenty-four-year-old from Wisconsin, raised his thumb, signalling the red-jacketed ordnance men that he had seen all the red-ribboned safety pins extracted from the bomb racks. Now through the white blaze of steam-curtained light, shadows of yellow- and green-jacketed men darted about the bow and waist cats and blast deflectors — the twin, bluish white cones of the Tomcat’s Pratt and Whitney TF-30 engines going into the high scream of a forty-thousand-pound thrust. Shirer saw the yellow jacket drop, left knee on the deck, left hand tucked up behind his back, right arm fully extended. “Go!”
Shirer braced himself. There was an enormous hiss. Shirer felt himself slammed back into his seat, saw a blur of deck lights, felt a rush like a long feather pulling through his rectum, involuntarily ejaculated, and was hurled aloft at 180 miles per hour, the carrier deck a yellow postage stamp sliding away downhill into the darkness behind him.
Shirer was already feeling nostalgic for the Tomcat. After this he would be transferred to shore duty at Elmendorf, navy fighters being used to fill the NORAD gap. It would mean he’d have more opportunity to be with Lana, but he liked carriers — they kept moving. Now, however, all thoughts of Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, her beauty, her fear of her husband, Jay La Roche, a wife-beater and psychopath all rolled into one behind the respectable exterior, had to be put aside as Shirer, leader of the twelve Tomcats, headed toward Ratmanov Island, their offset aiming point the quarter-mile-high Fairway Rock twelve miles south of their target.
* * *
Shirer’s F-14, coming in over the ice pack, led the attack, diving into the slot of the Bering Strait where the blip of Ratmanov was already on his target scope, magnified by the second. Then the Arctic night came alive with streams of red and green tracer, not shot higgledy-piggledy, Shirer noted, as in the Baghdad raids he’d been on, but carefully vectored toward the ten-plane arrowhead formation. His RIO, Anderson, reported that he had a cluster of Siberian Spoon-Rest radar masts on the eastern cliff of Ratmanov in the cross hairs of the green infrared screen. He switched on the laser designator beam and in less than a second informed Shirer they had a “lock-on”; in another second two-thousand-pound dumb bombs fitted with Paveway conversion kits, turning them into smart weapons, were sliding down the beam. At the same time six batteries of quad-mounted ZSU-23s opened up along the cliff, sending swarms of sixty-five-round-per-second, thirty-millimeter fire at the American jets. Faster eighteen-foot-long SA-10 missiles followed, the Siberian radar having got a radar fix.
“We’ve been painted,” warned Anderson. The missiles, at over forty-two hundred miles an hour travelling faster than a rifle bullet, were streaking toward the American formation.
The F-14s began evasive measures, but Shirer’s Tomcat was hit as it rose sharply before a dark cleft in the cliff erupting with massed machine-gun fire, the Tomcat’s wings going into the swept position for more maneuver, its turbofans screaming on afterburner. Shirer felt a shudder. The tail actuators were severed.
; “Eject! Eject!” he yelled. Anderson pulled the eject handle. There was a bang, the explosive bolts disengaging.
Knowing his RIO was out, Shirer pulled his eject and the next moment was shot out in the rocket-assisted Martin-Baker ejector seat. The freezing Arctic wind howled about him as he reached the apogee of the thrust. He began to fall, heard the snap of the chute opening, and in flickering flare light spotted Anderson below, off to his left, as they descended toward the snow-covered southern end of the high, rocky island.
They had been illuminated by the flare light for only a second or two, but it was enough for the six-man troop of the elite Russian SPETS commandos, who, unseen by the Americans, came up out of their deep, rock-roofed tunnel complex and, invisible because of their white winter overlays against the snow, ran with the controlled pace of top athletes. Despite their heavy weapon load, they continued sprinting toward the island’s narrower, southern end.
Anderson, from the downed Tomcat, had barely finished wrapping up his chute when Shirer quickly released himself from the chute before it could drag him over the seventeen-hundred-foot-high edge of the cliff. The SPETS were almost upon them.
“Ne dvigat’sya!”— “Don’t move!” Neither the pilot nor his RIO knew a word of Siberian, but they understood the lead commando’s shouted command, and stood, hands raised.
The first two commandos knelt, covering them with their AK-74s. As per regulation, at least one of the elite SPETS troop, the tail-end Charlie, spoke English — and without a trace of an accent. “What airfield are you from?” he asked them both, his gaze settling on Shirer who, despite the fact that the Russian was only several feet away, couldn’t make out the commando’s face beneath the dark makeup and the hood of the white overlay.
“My name is Franklin G. Shirer. My rank is colonel in the U.S. Navy. My service number is—”
“Who’s the senior officer?” snapped the Russian commando, his infrared goggles giving him a grotesque, bug-eyed, alien appearance.
