21 - Nordic Hammer

"I know that was a fighter, and there had to be more than one," Edwards said. It was raining again, probably for the last time. The clouds to the southwest were breaking up, and there was a hint of clear sky on the horizon. Edwards just sat there in his helmet and poncho, staring into the distance.

"I suppose you're right, sir," Smith replied. The sergeant was nervous. They'd been on this hilltop for almost twenty-four hours, a long time to be stationary in hostile country. The best time to move out would have been during the rain showers, when visibility was cut to a few hundred yards. Soon the sky might be clear again, and it wouldn't get dark again for quite a while. As it was, they sat on their hilltop in camouflage ponchos that kept them partly dry and wholly miserable.

There was a heavy shower north of them that prevented their seeing Reykjavik, and they could barely make out Hafnarfjordur to the west, which worried the sergeant, who wanted to know what Ivan was up to. What if they detected Edwards's satellite radio and began to triangulate on it? What if there were patrols out?

"Lieutenant?"

"Yeah, Sarge?"

"We got those phone lines on one side of us, and those power lines on the other-"

"You want to blow some up?" Edwards smiled.

"No, sir, but Ivan is going to start patrolling them soon, and this ain't a very good place for us to make contact."

"We're supposed to observe and report, Sarge," Edwards said without conviction.

"Yes, sir."

Edwards checked his watch. It was 1955Z. Doghouse might want to talk with them, though they hadn't called in to him yet. Edwards broke the radio out of the pack again, assembled the pistol-grip antenna, and donned his headset. At 1959 he switched on and tracked in on the satellite carrier wave.

"Doghouse calling Beagle. Doghouse calling Beagle. Do you copy? Over."

"Well, how about that." He toggled the Transmit switch. "Roger we're here, Doghouse."

"Anything new to report?"

"Negative, unless you want to know about the rain. Visibility is down. We can't see very much."

The communications watch officer at Doghouse looked at a weather map. So it really was raining there. He hadn't been able to convince his boss that Beagle could be trusted. Edwards had answered the questions that the counterintelligence guys had come up with. They'd even had a voice-stress analyzer handy to check the tapes of his answers. The needle had pegged on the last answer about his girlfriend. That hadn't been faked. Copies of the relevant parts of his personnel package had been faxed to them. Upper fifth of his class at Colorado Springs. Good in math and engineering studies, did extremely well in his post-graduation studies in meteorology. His eyesight had worsened slightly during his tenure at Colorado Springs, becoming just bad enough to keep him from flying. Regarded as quiet and shy, but evidently well liked by his classmates. Not a warrior type, the psychological profile said. How long would the kid last?

KEFLAVIK, ICELAND

One MiG-29 was flying. The others were in the hardened shelters the Americans had only just finished at the end of runway eleven. The fighter's mission was twofold. It was a standing combat air patrol aircraft should an incoming raid be detected, but more importantly, it was being tracked carefully by the ground radar controllers: their radar needed to be calibrated. Iceland's irregular terrain made for troublesome radar performance, and as with the surface-to-air missiles, the instruments themselves had been badly jostled by the trip aboard the Fucik The fighter flew circles around the airport while the radar operators determined that what their instruments told them was correct.

The fighters were fully fueled and armed, their pilots resting on cots near them. At the moment, the bowsers were fueling the Badger bomber that had given the fighters navigational and electronic support. Soon it would be leaving to bring in nine more. The Air Force detachment was rapidly finishing their job of clearing the airfield. All but one of the runways was swept clear of fragments now. The remains of the American aircraft had been bulldozed off the pavement. The fuel pipeline would be repaired in an hour, the engineers said.

"Quite a busy day," the major said to the fighter commander.

"It's not over yet. I'll feel better when we get the rest of the regiment in," the colonel observed quietly. "They should have hit us already."

"How do you expect them to attack?"

The colonel shrugged. "Hard to say. If they're really serious about closing this field, they'll use a nuclear warhead."

"Are you always so optimistic, Comrade Colonel?"

The raid was an hour away. The eighteen B-52H bombers had left Louisiana ten hours before and landed to refuel at Sondrestrom Air Force Base on Greenland's west coast. Fifty miles ahead of them were a single Raven EF-111 jamming aircraft and four F-4 Phantoms configured for defense-suppression.

The radar was about halfway calibrated, though what had been done was the easy part. The fighter that had just landed had flown racetrack ovals from due north around the western horizon to due south of Keflavik. The area to the west of the air base, though not exactly flat, was nearly so, with low rocky hills. Next came the hard part, plotting radar coverage of the eastern arc over Iceland's mountainous center, a solid collection of hills that worked up to the island's tall central peak. Another Fulcrum rolled off the runway to begin this task, its pilot wondering how long it might take to map all the nulls-areas blanked to radar coverage by the steep valleys-areas that an attacking aircraft could use to mask its approach to Keflavik.

The radar officers were plotting probable troublesome spots on their topographical maps when an operator shouted a warning. Their clear radar screens had just turned to hash from powerful electronic jammers. That could mean only one thing.

The klaxons sounded in the fighter shelters at the end of runway eleven. Fighter pilots who had been dozing or playing dominos jumped to their feet and raced to their aircraft.

The tower officer lifted the field phone to give more exact warning to the fighters, then called up the missile battery commander: "Incoming air raid!"

Men leaped into action all across the air base. The fighter ground crews hit the built-in self-starters, turning the jet engines even as the pilots climbed into the cockpits. The SAM battery turned on its search and fire-control systems while the launch vehicles slewed their missiles into firing position.

Just under the radar horizon, eighteen B-52 bombers had just lit off their ECM jamming systems. They were deployed in six groups of three each. The first skimmed over the top of Mt. Snaefells, sixty miles north of Keflavik, and the rest came from all around the west side of the compass, converging on the target behind a wall of electronic noise provided by their own systems and the supporting EF-111 Raven jammer.

The Russian fighter just lifting off climbed to altitude, the pilot keeping his radar off as he scanned the sky visually, waiting for intercept information from the ground-based radar. His comrades were even now taxiing into the open, racing straight down the runway and into the sky. The aircraft that had just landed taxied to a fuel bowser, its pilot gesturing and cursing at the ground crewmen who were struggling to fuel his fighter. In their haste, they spilled ten gallons of fuel over the wing. Amazingly, it did not ignite, and a dozen men ran in with CO, extinguishers to prevent an explosion as the fighter drank in a full load of fuel.