Northern Fury- H-Hour

by Bart Gauvin

  Over Alta? Olsen thought. That’s seventy kilometers west of Banak! Have we been pushed back so far in just, he looked down at the console clock and reality struck him, five minutes, had it taken only five minutes? His mind worked to reconstruct what had just transpired. Three Falcons for five. Six? Flankers, he tallied. As he flew his subconscious took over his thoughts, he registered that this was not a sustainable loss ratio for his small air force. Fifty percent losses for both sides engaged so far. Then he registered the fact that he was now receiving direction from callsign Backstop, rather than Magic, and he heard the ground controllers warning him that formations of MiG-23s and MiG-29s were boring westward to replace the dangerous Su-27s, the Soviets apparently now substituting quantity for quality. Then his mind remembered his promise to Johansen, back on the ground at Banak. We’ll keep them off your back. He was beginning to doubt his ability to do so.

  CHAPTER 50

  1503 MSK, Sunday 13 February 1994

  1203 Zulu

  Over the Barents Sea

  A HUNDRED AND FIFTY miles to the east of the aerial melee over Norway, off the north coast of the Kola Peninsula, the pilot of a lone MiG-31 interceptor pulled back on his control stick, lifting the big, twin-tailed jet’s nose upward towards the deep blue of the polar sky. He pushed his throttles forward to their stops to lite the afterburners of his huge turbofan engines, which gobbled up the thin atmosphere through large, boxy air intakes on either side of the cockpit. The fighter, call sign Icarus, accelerated upwards, pushing the pilot and his weapons officer into their seats. Already at ten-thousand meters altitude when the maneuver began, the MiG-31, called the “Foxhound” by NATO, passed the twelve-thousand-meter mark, then fifteen-thousand.

  The Foxhound was a development of the older MiG-25 “Foxbat.” With its powerful Zaslon radar and long-range R-33 missiles, the MiG-31 was designed and built to protect the USSR’s long northern coast from incursions by nuclear-capable American bombers. It was not a dogfighter, being too clumsy to turn with more nimble aircraft like the Norwegian F-16s, but its top speed of nearly Mach 3 at high altitude, powerful radar, and long-range air-to-air missiles compensated nicely for this deficiency.

  The crew of this particular Foxhound, however, were hunting neither Norwegian fighters nor American bombers. The armament slung under the center of their aircraft’s fuselage consisted of a single, heavily modified and experimental R-37 missile. The prey for this missile: USA-34.

  The satellite, just now rising over the dark, polar horizon, had been launched into low earth orbit by the Space Shuttle Atlantis six years earlier. As part of the United States’ National Reconnaissance Office “Lacrosse” program of surveillance satellites, USA-34 carried a synthetic aperture radar that beamed energy down to earth’s surface to detect large, moving objects like ships on the ocean surface. The satellite had passed over northern Alaska several minutes earlier at an altitude of four-hundred and forty kilometers. Its fourteen-thousand mile-per-hour velocity would carry USA-34 across the North Pole, bringing it over the Barents Sea within the next few minutes, where its wide-ranging radar would be able to see the dozens of Soviet ships, large and small, that had sortied from their Kola bases, seeing through the layer of broken clouds that blanketed the area. From there it would continue south, passing over Leningrad, Belarus, Ukraine, the Crimea, the Black Sea, and eventually the Eastern Mediterranean, all of which were places that the Soviet high command did not want the American satellite’s sensors to see on this very busy day, or on any other hereafter.

  As the MiG-31 climbed through eighteen-thousand meters, its crew received direction from technicians at the early warning Dnestr-M radar located in the snowy forests just west of the Soviet mining town of Olenogorsk, south of Murmansk. The radar tracked USA-34 as it hurtled along its predictable journey. While the MiG-31’s speed was one of the aircraft’s most impressive features, neither it nor any weapon it could carry could hope to come anywhere close to matching the satellite’s velocity. If Icarus was to successfully complete its mission, they would need to be precisely positioned in time and space to hurl their anti-satellite missile, or ASAT, towards its rendezvous with USA-34.

  The Soviet pilot saw his altimeter pass through twenty-thousand meters. They were now over the central Barents Sea, directly in the path of the target. He was having to work carefully now to keep his laboring engines from flaming out in the thin atmosphere. A few seconds more and they would be beyond the height at which their air-breathing jet interceptor could function.

  Then the deadpan command came from the controller at the Olenogorsk site: “Icarus, this is Space Control. Launch in three…two…one…”

  The ASAT missile separated silently from belly of the MiG-31. Both objects continued their upward trajectory for a few moments more, the distance between them growing as the pilot began to nudge his aircraft over on its back to begin the long, gliding descent back to their base outside Murmansk. Then the weapons’ rocket booster fired, propelling the missile upwards into the deep blue stratosphere atop a column of white, billowing smoke.

  USA-34’s surface-surveillance radar was just beginning to come within range to detect the groups of Soviet warships in the central Barents when the Soviet missile, guided in its terminal phase by its own onboard homing radar, slammed into its fragile structure. The enormous combined velocities of the two objects made for an impressive release of energy as they both attempted to occupy the same exact space, at the same exact time.

  A brief pulse of light in the polar sky announced the demise of USA-34, and with it NATO’s ability to see from space for the next several hours. The only other Lacrosse radar satellite currently in orbit, USA-69, would not pass over this part of the globe for another five hours. Before that happened, it too was scheduled for a meeting with an ASAT-armed MiG-31, this time flying from a base in the Soviet Far East. Until the United States could launch replacement satellites into orbit, NATO would have to find their Soviet adversaries the hard way.

  CHAPTER 51

  1507 MSK, Sunday 13 February 1994

  1207 Zulu

  TAKR Baku, Barents Sea

  CONTRA-ADMIRAL IVANENKO SLAMMED his fist triumphantly onto the chart table with something approaching glee. His order to begin the engagement early had paid off. The northern American submarine had evaded two air-dropped torpedoes but had finally succumbed to a third and was now a wreck on the bottom of the western Barents. The submarine to the south, near the coast, had been somewhat more complicated. In fact, one of the Soviet patrol aircraft prosecuting the southern contact had very nearly dropped a torpedo on a Project 877 submarine, called a Kilo by the NATO naming convention, instead of on the American. The crew of the Be-12 patrol plane had only called off their attack at the last minute when one of their passive buoys had detected the contact launching four torpedoes of definitively Russian manufacture.

  The near-disaster of the would-be friendly fire incident had given way to a triumph, however. The Be-12’s buoys had tracked the Project 877’s torpedoes all through the short run to the American submarine, which had barely enough time to accelerate, much less evade the fish. Ivanenko had not known the friendly submarine was there. It was not supposed to be there. But, in the opening minutes of a massive global war that was as much a surprise to many of the Soviet combatants as it was to their NATO enemies, such mix-ups were inevitable.

  Contra-Admiral Ivanenko exulted in these opening triumphs for Russia. The American submarines had arrogantly trawled his country’s coast for decades. Now two of them were dead. Ivanenko did not know how many NATO submarines were actually in these waters, but after this double victory he could not imagine any evading the incredibly intensive operation he had planned, organized, and eventually led, to clear the exits from the Kola bases ahead of the rest of the fleet. That fleet was now beginning to sortie from its bases along the length of the Inlet. Initial task complete, he told himself, checking the NAT
O submarine pickets off his mental tally of enemy forces. On to the real task at hand.

  “Communications officer!” Ivanenko called.

  “Da, Contra-Admiral,” the staff officer responded from his position across the flag bridge.

  “Take down a message for the task force,” Ivanenko ordered. He clasped his hands behind his back and paced while he made the pronouncement, loudly and proudly: “Well done! We have cleared the imperialist aggressors from our shores. Now we will proceed west at our best speed. We’re taking the fight into the enemy’s own waters. The might of our fleet is behind us. You are the vanguard of forces that will free our country from the encirclement of the Americans and their European puppets. We go forward to Soviet victory!”

  As the staff officer jotted down the message, Ivanenko’s mind looked ahead to his next objectives along the Norwegian coast. He already took for granted that, with the death of the two American submarines, his rear areas were for now clear of enemy threats.

  0808 EST, Sunday 13 February 1994

  1208 Zulu

  US 2nd Fleet Headquarters, Building W-8, Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, USA

  US 2nd Fleet’s staff had been at work since the previous night’s DEFCON Four warning. Increasingly tense reports out of the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea were giving clear evidence of Soviet mobilization. Troubling reports continued to arrive from Europe, where the massive, coiled Soviet ground force that had been occupying Czechoslovakia for the past three years was also stirring. There were reports that Russian tanks, moving west from Belorussia, had reached Warsaw in the early hours of this morning. Vice Admiral Falkner hoped that the mobilization was just another dramatic instance of saber-rattling to cover the Soviets’ interference in Poland. For brief moments Falkner had thought that the powerful Soviet force in Czechoslovakia would stay there, or that it would simply move north into Poland to support the thrust from the Soviet Union. But deep down, he’d known better. At this moment his worst fears were being confirmed.

  “Sir!” one of the communications officers in the cramped operations room called, too loudly.

  Falkner stood from his desk overlooking the staff area and walked over, his N3, Rear Admiral Johnson, at his heels. “What is it?” Falkner asked.

  The junior officer licked his lips, then reported, “Sir, COMSUBLANT reports they just had two rescue beacons activate…both from boats on X-Ray Station.”

  It’s started then, thought Falkner.

  “Which boats?” Johnson asked.

  The young man checked his notes. “Boise and,” another check, “New York City, sir.”

  Two of the X-Ray boats gone, Falkner tallied quickly. That leaves just…Baltimore, Trafalgar, and Connecticut to watch the Kola bases.

  “Get a message out to the fleet, every ship, every station, on every channel,” Falkner said quickly. “We’re at war.”

  CHAPTER 52

  1509 MSK, Sunday 13 February 1994

  1209 Zulu

  USS Connecticut (SSN 22), mouth of the Kola Inlet, Barents Sea

  COMMANDER ROGERS WAS sweating. The Conneticut, a big submarine by most standards, transited from the western to the eastern side of the shallow channel that marked the mouth of the Kola Inlet. We should be out in deep water where we can take advantage of our speed, not here, jammed up against the coast, he fretted. Connecticut was in the middle of a very sensitive maneuver, repositioning to put distance between themselves and the Soviet patrol frigate they had detected when they’d come shallow to receive the DEFCON Four message.

  Rogers considered his boat’s situation as he sat in his command chair, sipping another cup of coffee. Connecticut was creeping towards the center of the channel at three knots, barely enough to maintain steerage through the dark, frigid water. So far, their passage had been uneventful. The sounds of the patrol frigate were gently fading away behind the American submarine’s slowly turning screw. They’d heard nothing from Norfolk since the DEFCON Four alert that had so thrown off his boat’s routine. He’d begun to relax slightly when the situation began to become more eventful again.

  “Con, sonar,” called the chief sonarman, “I’m starting to pick up a lot of noise coming from the inlet. Too intermixed to give any firm count or ID at this time. Multiple contacts, definitely.”

  “Got it sonar, keep us updated,” said Rogers. Great, he thought bitterly, we’re in the middle of the channel with nowhere to hide. Just our luck.

  Minutes passed. Then the sonar room called again, “Con, we’re picking up at least two destroyers I’m calling Sovremennys, designate these as Skunks Eight and Nine,” a pause, “and there’s another I can’t put my finger on right now. Calling this one Skunk Ten. Others coming out behind them. They’re doing turns for twenty-five knots and accelerating, they’re really moving sir! They’re going to close the distance on us pretty quick.”

  Rogers knew he had to act fast; They’ll be on top of us in minutes. He couldn’t increase his own speed for fear of being detected, but if he stayed here, they were almost certain to detect him anyway. What to do? An unorthodox plan began to formulate. I’ve seen crazier shit done up here, he thought with a grim smile.

  “XO, what’s the bottom material of the channel here? Right below us?”

  “Uh…” his second-in-command had been unprepared for this question, but he recovered quickly, beginning to divine his skipper’s intentions. He bent down and studied the chart table for a moment before saying, “Looks like fine silt from the yearly melt runoff sir. Should be nice and soft.”

  Rogers nodded, giving his number two a half smile. The man’s quick, he thought. He’ll be ready for his own boat after this patrol.

  Turning to the chief of the boat, the captain said, “COB, we’re going to put her down on the floor, shut everything down, go nice and quiet, and let them just pass right over us.”

  The wiry, crusty old COB turned from his position behind the helmsman and raised an eyebrow, “Sir?”

  Rogers nodded again. He didn’t mind being questioned, certainly not by his senior chief. The man had more time up on X-Ray Station than many of the junior officers aboard had in the service, and, truth be told, what the skipper was planning bore significant risk. Yes, the Seawolfs were exceedingly quiet, but they were also powered by a nuclear reactor, which required constant cooling, which meant constant pump noises even when the boat was sitting perfectly still. If it made noise, it could be detected, especially at this proximity.

  “Make it so, COB,” Rogers confirmed.

  The chief nodded, turned back, and gave the necessary instructions. Then he turned again and quietly said to the XO, “Sir, we’d better warn the crew.”

  The XO nodded, reaching for the 1MC, “All hands, secure any loose gear, brace for impact.”

  “All stop,” ordered Rogers.

  “All stop, aye,” came the response.

  The large, highly advanced propeller of the Conneticut slowed; its curved, scythe-like blades coming to a stop amid the gently swirling sediment of the channel floor, the large attack submarine settling softly and anti-climactically into the prehistoric ooze of the channel floor. Rogers felt the deck take on a list as his command came to rest on a slight slope. Now we wait, he thought.

  “Sonar, Con.” the skipper called, “status on those contacts?”

  “We’ve got at least seven vessels coming out at high speed, sir. Those two Sovremennys, I’m calling Skunk Ten an Udaloy, and, uh, Captain, can you come in here?”

  Rogers was up, out of his seat, and across the few feet to the sonar room in seconds. “What is it?” he asked.

  The chief petty officer in charge of the sonar section was tracing his finger along a distinctive set of lines on the “waterfall display,” the computer screen showing the graphical representation of what the boat’s acoustic sensors were hearing.

  “Sir,” the chief said
, “take a look at this.” He was indicating with the pointer and pinky fingers of his left hand at two lines “falling” down the screen from top to bottom. The green glow of the display was casting an eerie light onto the operators’ faces.

  “What is it, Chief?” the captain asked, not appreciating being made to wait for what looked to be vital information.

  “Sir,” the man said, “this is big. This contact here,” he indicated the left-hand line, “Skunk Eleven, this one’s a Kirov.” Rogers stood up straight and let out a low whistle at the revelation. One of the Soviet navy’s huge battlecruisers putting to sea was big news.

  “Sir, that’s not the half of it,” the chief was saying. “Skunk Twelve, this one here,” he indicated the right-hand line on the display, “that’s the Kuznetsov. I’d bet a month’s pay on it.”

  Rogers felt his blood run cold. The TAKR Kuznetsov was the Soviet Union’s first, and only, so far as Rogers knew, big deck aircraft carrier, capable of carrying over three dozen fighters along with a large complement of helicopters. Moreover, it was the flagship of the entire Red Banner Northern Fleet. If one of the Northern Fleet’s two Kirovs putting to sea by itself was big news, seeing both of the capital ships departing together at the center of a strong escort was almost unheard of. Something big was happening, and Rogers didn’t like any of the explanations he was coming up with.

  Lieutenant Santamaria was at the door of the cramped sonar room.

  “What is it, Sparks?” asked the skipper.

  “ELF message, sir. Fleet wants us to come to communication depth,” the junior officer said quickly.

  “Now?” blurted the skipper, still feeling the sting of annoyance at the lack of information the shore weenies had sent in the morning’s transmission. The timing for this couldn’t have been worse, with a ridiculously powerful Soviet task force about to pass directly overhead. The captain worked to get his anger under control, he had to weigh the odds. Chewing out Santamaria for doing his job won’t help anyone.