Northern Fury- H-Hour

by Bart Gauvin

  The Sidewinder shot off its rail under Jan’s right wing. In the same instant, Sven’s Falcon, off Olsen’s right wing, exploded as a missile plowed into the top middle of the F-16B. Instinctively Jan yanked his stick to the right and punched flares. A white flash out of the corner of his eye and the violent buffet from an explosion told him that his abrupt maneuver had saved him from a second enemy weapon. Jan desperately scanned the sky above and to his front for the enemy aircraft that had just shot down his second wingman of the day.

  Mitroshenko banked his Su-27 to keep the maneuvering F-16 in his sights. After lancing into the flank of the NATO fighters, he had managed to use one of his heat-seeking R-73 missiles to shoot down another Norwegian fighter before his controller aboard the A-50 vectored him and his wingman northeast to protect a flight of fighter-bombers sent to strike the one remaining NATO ground radar. They went to afterburner, avoiding several aerial duels along the way. They arrived too late to save the two escorting MiG-23s, but when the enemy fighters turned to follow the bombers, he saw his chance.

  The Soviets launched their missiles from above and ahead of the Norwegians, and Mitroshenko had watched his wingman’s R-73 detonate into the back of one of the pursuing Falcons, sending it spinning immediately downward. To his dismay his own missile flew harmlessly into a flare dropped by the lead F-16. Worse, one of the Norwegians had managed to fire a missile, which streaked through clouds of defensive flares until it exploded into the tail of an Su-24. For a moment the bomber continued onward, but then yellow flames shot out from behind as its engines failed and it rolled over to the left. Both crew ejected just before their aircraft tipped onto its back and plunged into the snow-covered trees.

  Mitroshenko followed the F-16 as it executed a tight, climbing turn. The nimble, single-engine Falcon was turning so fast that he struggled to lock a second R-73 onto it. Mitroshenko’s wingman broke in the opposite direction intending to intercept the Norwegian as he reversed his course, but this was a mistake. The major grunted through his high-G turn, only to see the white smoke trail of a Sidewinder leave the other jet and streak into his wingman’s left air intake a half mile away. The Sukoi exploded as shrapnel tore through its left engine and fuel tanks.

  Still banking behind the Norwegian, Mitroshenko swore violently as he finally heard the tone in his ears telling him that his R-73 had locked on. Quickly, he squeezed the trigger, and the missile shot outward.

  Olsen was amazed he’d been able to lock a Sidewinder onto the Flanker so quickly. Fleeing from the Su-27 on his tail, he’d been almost certain that the second jet looping around would be his doom. Instead, he’d added another of the dangerous Sukhois to his growing list of kills, though there was no time to tally them as he craned his neck to keep tabs on his pursuer. His Falcon continued to bleed off speed through a tight climbing. Then he saw the missile streak out from under the wing of the Flanker and barely had time to punch his flare dispenser before the AA-11’s warhead exploded, riddling the left side of his jet with shrapnel.

  The force of the explosion knocked Jan’s F-16 over onto its back, sending it hurtling down to the clouds and snow below.

  Mitroshenko clenched his fist in triumph as he saw his missile exploded just off the Falcon’s left horizontal stabilizer. The Norge immediately winged over onto its back and dove, trailing smoke. He lost sight of his prey as the stricken jet plunged into one of the scattered clouds below.

  He was about to follow the F-16 down to make sure of his kill, but a screaming tone in his headphones told him that he was being targeted by one of those blasted American AMRAAMs. Mitroshenko threw his jet into evasive maneuvers as he turned back west towards the threat.

  Ahead through the broken clouds, the three surviving fighter-bombers released their ordnance. The Su-24s overflew the large, white globe housing the Backstop radar, leaving in their wake a series of massive explosions that sent translucent shock waves outward through the surrounding forest. One of the bombs crashed through the white plexiglass of the protective globe and exploded inside, ripping the structure apart. The data feed from Backstop to the NATO AWACS ceased abruptly, leaving the controllers aboard the NATO radar planes all but blind as to what was going on in the skies between Banak and the Finnish border.

  The remnants of the NATO sweep over Finnmark were extracting themselves with difficulty from the furball. Aided by American F-15s and Norwegian MLU Falcons, the surviving F-16 pilots fled westward on afterburner, chased by flocks of MiGs and Sukhois snapping at their heels. Once they’d expended all of their long-range missiles, the AMRAAM-carriers also turned and fled. To the rear, the MiG-31s, unable to safely target the Americans due to the proximity of their comrades, held their fire.

  Aircraft on both sides were low on fuel after minutes of high-speed maneuvering on afterburner, and many were low on missiles. When a fresh flight of two American F-15s out of Bodø activated their radars, joined by a pair of Dutch F-16s from the newly-arriving 322 “Polly Parrots” fighter squadron, the Soviet controllers aboard the A-50 ordered the pursuers to break off the chase. The Soviets turned back, content to have won air superiority in the skies over Northern Norway from the Soviet border to the Lyngen position, two hundred miles to the west.

  As the massive battle involving more than eighty aircraft subsided, each side tallied the results, and both came to the same conclusions. The Soviets had suffered the greater number of losses in the confused engagement, including a pair of Su-27s, four MiG-29s, and seven of the older MiG-23s, in addition to one Su-24 fighter-bomber. On the NATO side, the butcher’s bill stood at eight F-16s and a pair of the vaunted American F-15s. But despite the nominally favorable kill ratio, the battle had been a disaster for NATO. To have any hope of weathering the Soviets’ crushing numerical superiority, NATO needed to maintain a kill ratio of at least three Soviet aircraft for every NATO jet lost. In this engagement, the exchange rate had been less than half that, fourteen aircraft to ten. Worse, the Norwegian and American squadrons on this front would not again in the foreseeable future be able to put thirty jets into the air at once. The Soviets had brilliantly seized the initiative in the skies over Northern Norway. Both sides knew it, and now the Soviets began to exploit their success.

  From the Soviet border to the east, flights of fighter-bombers, which had been circling over their Kola bases, turned west, fanning out towards targets west of Banak that had, up to now, been too dangerous to strike.

  Jan Olsen struggled to keep his damaged F-16 level and above the treetops as he flew northwest towards the coast. He had tumbled through the broken clouds in an uncontrolled, twisting dive as he fought to regain control of the aircraft. For an instant he’d reached up to yank the handles of his ejection seat, but then thought better of it. Instead, he used everything he had ever learned about flying to pull his Falcon out of its spin a mere two hundred meters from the ground.

  Looking around, Jan was surprised to see that none of his adversaries had followed him down. He decided that his best chance of getting home with his crippled bird was to avoid any engagement and head to the coast. He could see that his oil pressure was dropping quickly. A look to the left revealed a dozen large gashes in his wing. In fact, one of the flaps was barely hanging on by its smashed hinges. He doubted that his barely airworthy airplane could perform even the gentlest maneuvers if he was faced with the necessity of fighting his way out. So Jan stayed low, his wounded bird fighting him the whole way. He just hoped his engine would hold out long enough for him to reach a safe landing field. Preferably one where I can get into another jet, he thought bleakly.

  CHAPTER 82

  1645 CET, Sunday 13 February 1994

  1545 Zulu

  Banak Airbase, Lakselv, Troms, Norway

  RITTMESTER ERIK JOHANSEN pulled his knit cap down over his ears as he walked out of the makeshift command post and into the biting Arctic evening. The tall and lanky Løytnant Sigurd Berg, his number two, followed.
Neither man was aware of the epic aerial battles raging to their south over the past half hour, but they both noted troubling signs that things were not going well above their heads. The most obvious indicator was the four-engine turboprop that was orbiting above the airfield, just beyond the range of the Norwegian defenders’ anti-air weapons.

  At first the plane had lifted Johansen’s spirits, as it looked for all the world like one of the P-3 sub-hunting aircraft flown by the Royal Norwegian Air Force, with its four engines mounted atop rather than slung beneath the wings. The soldiers manning the optical sights on the surviving RBS-70 posts and Bofors guns soon reported that the aircraft was actually a Soviet Il-18, or perhaps an Il-22 command variant. If the pilot of this slow-moving bird felt so safe as to loiter over Banak, it did not bode well for NATO’s control of the air.

  A half hour after the first bombing raid, another troubling sign: a lone jet, another Su-17 Fitter, roared across the airfield at extremely low altitude from the west. By the time the anti-air troops responded, the Soviet fighter-bomber was gone, leaving only the echoes of its engine to reverberate off the surrounding valley walls. Erik was certain that the lone Fitter was on a reconnaissance mission to judge the effectiveness of the earlier attack. If he was right, this meant that the Soviets really cared about this piece of real estate. More will come, he thought grimly.

  Johansen saw several dragons from his headquarters section completing an “icecrete” fighting position in the wood line overlooking the access road leading to the Coast Guard hangars. Since the ground here in the Far North was frozen for much of the year, and thus unsuitable for digging foxholes, soldiers learned to improvise fortifications from the one thing which they possessed in abundance: frozen water. To create an icecrete fortification, they simply combined water with some reinforcing substance like sawdust, wood chips, or gravel, and then froze the mixture. The resulting composite material was much stronger than ice and, if thick enough, could serve nicely as protection from small arms fire and shrapnel. Sergeant Pedersen, the pioneer leader, had secured several bags of sawdust when he’d gone into Lakselv to check on the fire started by one of the downed Soviet bombers. Since returning he’d been busily supervising the construction of the small ice bunker.

  Johansen nodded approvingly, then turned to Berg and said, “We can expect another attack at any time. I’m taking one of the snowmobiles around the airfield to check on the missile and gun teams.”

  Berg alert and ready, said, “Yes sir.”

  “Have we heard anything from Battalion?” Johansen asked. Contact with Major Laub or anyone else from the rest of 2nd Mechanized Battalion had been all but nonexistent since the fighting had started nearly four hours ago.

  “Not since the last report that they were starting out from Skjӧld,” answered the executive officer. “Jamming has been the worst on the HF net, but I’ll keep monitoring and let you know as soon as I hear something.”

  Johansen nodded again. His command was positioned as well as it could be given their limited resources. He looked up to the sky again, It won’t matter if the rest of the battalion doesn’t get here to reinforce us.

  Erik mounted one of the Coast Guards’ snowmobiles. The engine roared to life and he opened the throttle, driving northward through the low, snow-laden trees that lined the west side of the runway. After a hundred meters he passed through a stretch of forest where the incendiaries dropped by the Su-17s had melted the snow and blackened the ground and the trees. Two hundred meters more and he arrived at the first Bofors gun position.

  Despite the recent Russian attack and decimation of the gun crew on the opposite side of the runway, Johansen found these men in decent spirits. The wounded from the crew had been rushed to the hospital in Lakselv, while the dead were under sheets, the bodies growing cold outside the bombed-out civilian terminal. It was gratifying to see the men’s eagerness to bring their gun into action against another Soviet aircraft. “You watch, sir,” the gun sergeant promised as Johansen remounted his snowmobile, “next time we’re going to put a burst straight through the cockpit of one of those bastards!”

  Johansen nodded back and drove on. Another hundred meters, and he came upon one of the RBS-70 posts. The two soldiers there were shivering and stomping their feet. Their launcher sat atop its tripod-mounted pedestal, the “post,” while a missile reload lay on a tarp at their feet. Johansen asked the two men how they were doing.

  “Cold, sir,” one of the men answered, “and we only have two missiles left.”

  “I’ll make sure your relief is out here soon,” Johansen told them. “But we won’t have any more missiles until the rest of the battalion arrives.”

  The soldiers nodded and mumbled, “Yes sir,” through frozen lips.

  The rittmester was just remounting his snowmobile when he saw the two men cock their heads to one side and stand still. Then he heard it as well. Above the constant droning of the four-engine aircraft circling overhead came the deeper rumble of jet engines, reverberating against the walls of the fjӧrd valley.

  From their perch aboard the command Il-22 three thousand meters up, the two colonels strained their eyes to watch the strike go in. Sokolov explained to his friend that the first strike by a squadron of Su-17s had been intended to close the Banak airfield to NATO use without actually damaging the runway and key facilities. It had been a costly attack, with three of the fighter-bombers going down to the Norwegian defenses. That was why another attack was now necessary to suppress those defenses before the arrival of the helicopters bearing the pathfinders for Sokolov’s assault battalion.

  Through his headset, Romanov heard the radio call, “Control Two, this is Kondor Lead, First pair are on their final approach to the target. Beginning attack run now.”

  Ilya saw a pair of low-flying MiG-27 fighter-bombers crest the ridge west of Banak and dive for the airfield, their swing wings swept back for added speed.

  Johansen decided to remain with the missile troopers. He didn’t want to expose himself by tearing about on a snowmobile while attack jets roared overhead looking for targets. Instead, he buckled on his helmet and was now kneeling next to the two soldiers, one of whom was seated behind the launcher, his eyes pressed to the targeting unit with the green cylinder of the missile tube over his right shoulder.

  From the air defense radio Erik heard the terse warning, “Air action west! Two contacts coming in low and fast!”

  A few seconds later the loud pom-pom-pom of the Bofors gun across the runway from them began again, sending forty-millimeter shells over Johansen’s head towards the approaching MiGs.

  From above, the two fighter-bombers looked like green and brown arrowheads flashing across the airfield’s runway. Romanov saw flashes in the tree line as an anti-aircraft gun opened up against the raiders. Then a missile shot up from the northeast corner of the runway, streaking towards the left-hand MiG. Bright white flares appeared out the back of the aircraft, but the missile flew true and exploded, riddling the jet’s tail with shrapnel. The jet shuddered but continued on, the pilot and his wingman releasing their fragmentation bombs into the already-gutted passenger terminal on the east side of the airstrip.

  Over the radio Romanov heard a dispassionate voice call, “Kondor One-One-Three, this is Lead. I confirm a gun position three hundred meters from the northern end of the runway on the east side, and a missile launch point at the south end of the runway. Engage. Respond.”

  “Da, Lead,” came the response. “Engaging now.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Romanov saw another pair of MiG-27s approaching from the southwest. These, unlike the pair that had just streaked across the airfield, were flying not much below the altitude of the loitering Il-22, and their swing-wings were extended for maximum control at low speed.

  “This is One-One-Three,” Ilya heard in his headset, “Grom away!”

  At the same instant he saw a streak of fire and a stubby, whi
te-painted missile shot out from under the fighter-bomber’s wing. Seconds later the other MiG launched its missile. Grom, the Russian word for “thunder,” was also the Soviet designation for the Kh-23M air-to-ground missile. These were laser-guided weapons that rode a beam, emitted by a laser designator in the nose of the launching aircraft. Two of these precision weapons were now diving towards Banak.

  Johansen pumped his fist and shouted “Yes!” as he saw the missile from the team across the runway explode onto the tail of the jet, just before the bombs tore into the smoldering shell of the passenger terminal. The two raiders, he thought, had done nothing more than pound the rubble left by the previous strike, and one of their aircraft had taken a hit doing so. He would happily take that exchange.

  Then Johansen’s feeling of triumph evaporated as the Bofors gun across the runway from them disappeared in an earsplitting explosion of fire, tree limbs, and gray smoke. Seconds later, the second Kh-23M slammed into the spot where the RBS-70 team had engaged the low-level raider. The one-hundred-kilogram warhead exploded as it burrowed into the snow, killing both men and obliterating the launcher they were busily reloading. Johansen looked on helplessly at the destruction of a third of his command’s remaining anti-air strength.

  As the reverberations from the missile strikes died away, Johansen heard the rumble of jet engines pass overhead. Looking up, he could see the silhouettes of two Soviet fighter-bombers banking over the airfield at about two thousand meters altitude. Suddenly, the rittmester realized what was happening. The first two MiGs were bait! he now understood. Bait to get us to reveal the locations of our anti-air weapons!

  Johansen turned to warn the missile crew next to him, and to his horror saw the soldier training the launcher’s sighting unit on the pair of jets far above.