Red Storm Rising (1986) (48 page)

“Very well. Captain, just check out the hilltops around Keflavik and Rejkyavik. How long on the second one?” Andreyev asked.

“Two hours.”

“Excellent. Good work, Comrade Captain.”

A minute later the heavy attack chopper lifted into the air.

 

“Down and freeze!” Garcia screamed. It didn’t come close to them, but seeing it was enough.

“What kind is it?”

“Hind. It’s an attack bird, like the Cobra. Bad news, Lieutenant. It carries eight troops and a whole shitload of rockets and guns. An’ don’t even think about shooting at it. Sucker’s armored like a damned tank.”

The Mi-24 circled the hill they’d just been on, then disappeared, heading south to loop over another hill.

“Didn’t see us, I guess,” Edwards said.

“Let’s keep it that way. Keep the radio stowed awhile, Lieutenant. We can call this one in after we move out a ways, okay?”

Edwards nodded agreement. He remembered a brief on Soviet helicopters in the Air Force Academy. “We are not afraid of the Russians,” an Afghan had been quoted, “but we are afraid of their helicopters.”

Colonel Ellington awoke at six that evening. He shaved and walked outside, the sun still high in the evening sky. He wondered what mission they’d have tonight. He was not a bitter man, but to have nearly a quarter of his crews—men with whom he had worked for two straight years—lost in a week was a difficult thing to accept. It had been too long since his experience in Vietnam. He’d forgotten how terrible losses could be. His men could not stand down a day to mourn their dead and ease the pain, much as they needed to. They were being carefully rested. Standing orders gave them eight hours of sleep a day—like night-hunters, they slept only by day.

They were making a difference, however. He was sure of that. Every night the black and green Frisbees lifted off for some special target or other, and the Russians still had not figured a counter. The strike cameras mounted in each aircraft were bringing back pictures that the wing intelligence officers could scarcely believe. But at such a cost.

Well. The colonel reminded himself that one sortie a day was a lighter load than the other air crews were bearing, and that the close-support crews were taking losses equal to his own. Tonight held another mission. He ordered his brain to occupy itself with that task alone.

The briefings took an hour. Ten aircraft would fly tonight: two planes each at five targets. As commander he drew the toughest. Surveillance indicated that Ivan had a previously unsuspected forward fuel dump at a position west of Wittenburg that was supporting the drive on Hamburg, and the Germans wanted it taken out. His wingman would go in with Durandals, and he’d follow with Rockeyes. There would be no supporting aircraft on this one, and the colonel didn’t want jammer aircraft to go in with him. Two of his lost birds had had such support, and the jamming had merely alerted the defenses.

He examined the topographical maps closely. The land was flat. Not much in the way of mountains and hills to hide behind, but then he could skim at treetop level, and that was almost as good. He’d approach from the east, behind the target. There was a twenty-knot west wind, and if he came in from leeward, the defenders would be unable to hear his approach until bomb release . . . probably. They’d egress the area by heading southwest. Total mission time seventy-five minutes. He computed his necessary fuel load, careful as always to allow for the drag of his bombs. To the bare-bones fuel requirements he added five minutes on afterburner in case of air-to-air combat and ten minutes to orbit Bitburg for landing. Satisfied, he went off for breakfast. With each bite of toast his mind ran through the mission like a movie, visualizing every event, every obstacle, every SAM site to be avoided. He randomly inserted the unexpected. A flight of low-level fighters at the target, what effect would this have on the mission? What would the target look like on this approach? If he had to make a second bombing pass, from what direction? Major Eisly ate with his commander in silence, recognizing the blank look on his face and running through his own mental checklist.

 

They headed straight into East Germany for fifty miles before turning north at Rathenow. Two Soviet Mainstay aircraft were up, a good distance back from the border and surrounded by agile Flanker interceptors. Staying well outside the effective range of their radar, the two aircraft flew low and in tight formation. When they screeched over main roads, it was always in a direction away from a course to their target. They avoided cities, towns, and known enemy depots where there might be SAMs.

The inertial navigation systems kept track of their progress on a map display on the pilot’s instrument panel. The distance to the target shrank rapidly as the aircraft curved west.

They flashed over Wittenberg at five hundred knots. The infrared cameras showed fueling vehicles on the roads heading right for the target area . . . there! At least twenty tank trucks were visible in the trees, fueling from underground tanks.

“Target in sight. Execute according to plan.”

“Roge,” acknowledged Shade-Two. “I have them visual.”

The Duke broke left, clearing the way for his wingman to make the first run. Shade-Two’s aircraft was the the only one left with the proper ejector racks for the bulky hard-target munitions.

“Gawd!” The Duke’s display showed an SA-11 launcher right in his flight path, its missiles aimed northwest. One of his aircraft had learned the hard way that the SA-11 had an infrared homing capacity that no one had suspected. The colonel reefed his aircraft into a hard right turn away from the launcher, wondering where the rest of the missile battery’s vehicles were.

Shade-Two skimmed over the target. The pilot toggled off his four bombs and kept heading west. Gunfire rippled across the sky in his wake. Too late.

The French-made Durandal weapons fell off the ejector racks and scattered. Once free, they pointed down, and rockets fired to accelerate the munitions straight at the ground. They were designed to break up concrete runways and were ideal for underground fuel tanks. The bombs did not explode on impact. Instead, the hard-steel weapons lanced into the ground, penetrating several feet before detonating. Three found underground fuel tanks. The Durandals exploded upward, breaking open a path for burning fuel to leap into the air.

It was the next thing to a nuclear detonation. Three white columns of flame rocketed into the air, spreading like fountains and dropping fuel for hundreds of yards. Every vehicle in the compound was engulfed in flame, and only those men near the perimeter escaped with their lives. Rubber fuel bladders brought to the site exploded a few seconds later, and a river of burning diesel and gasoline spread through the trees. In a matter of seconds, twenty acres of woods were transformed into a fireball that raced skyward, punctuated by secondary explosions. Ellington’s fighter rocked violently as the shock wave passed.

“Damn,” he said quietly. The plan called for him to use his cluster munitions to ignite what the Durandals had burst open.

“Don’t think the Rockeyes are necessary, Duke,” Eisly observed.

Ellington tried to blink away the dots as he turned away, keeping as low as he could. He found himself flying right down a road.

 

The Soviet Commander-in-Chief of the Western Theater was already angry, and what he saw to the east didn’t help. He’d just conferred with the commander of the Third Shock Army at Zarrentin to learn that the attack had again bogged down within sight of Hamburg. Furious that his most powerful tank force had failed to achieve its objective, he’d relieved its commander on the spot and was returning to his own command post. Now he saw what could only be one of his three major fuel depots rising into the clear sky. The General cursed and stood, pushing aside the roof panel on his armored command vehicle. As he blinked his dazzled eyes, a black mass seemed to appear at the lower edge of the fireball.

 

What’s that? Ellington wondered. His TV display showed four armored vehicles in a tight column—one of them a SAM launcher! He flicked his bomb-release controls to Armed and dropped his four Rockeye canisters, then turned south. His tail-mounted strike cameras recorded what followed.

The Rockeyes split open, distributing their bomblets at a shallow angle across the road. They exploded on impact.

CINC-West died a soldier’s death. His last act was to seize a machine gun and fire at the aircraft. Four bomblets fell within a few meters of his vehicle. Their fragments sliced through the light armor, killing everyone inside even before its fuel tank exploded, adding another fireball to a sky that had still not returned to darkness.

The submarine came slowly to the surface, spiraling up to allow her sonar to check the entire area as she rose to antenna depth. His luck had been bad so far, McCafferty considered, which was not a situation that encouraged risk taking. As the submarine leveled off beneath the waves, the ESM mast went up first, sniffing for hostile electronic signals, then the search periscope. The captain made a quick sweep around the sky, then the surface, his executive officer closely watching the television readout to back up the skipper’s observations. Everything looked clear. There was a moderate sea running, with five-foot swells, and the clear blue sky was decorated with fair-weather cumulus clouds. On the whole, a beautiful day. Except for the war.

“Okay, transmit,” McCafferty ordered. His eyes never left the periscope, which he turned continuously, angling the lens up and down to look for trouble. A petty officer raised the UHF antenna, and the “okay to transmit” light blinked on in the radio room aft of the attack center.

They had been summoned to the surface by an extremely low-frequency radio message with their call sign, QZB. The senior radioman powered up his transmitter, keyed out QZB on the UHF satellite broadcast band, and waited for a reply. There was none. He gave his neighbor a look and repeated the procedure. Again the satellite missed the signal. The petty officer took a deep breath and transmitted QZB yet a third time. Two seconds later the hot printer in the after corner of the room began to print up a coded reply. The communications officer keyed a command into the cipher machine, and the clear text came up on another printer.

McCafferty read the dispatch without comment, then handed it to the navigator. “How long to get there at fifteen knots?”

“About eleven hours.” The navigator took a pair of dividers and walked them across the chart. “Unless they’re flying, we’ll be there long before they are.”

“Joe?” The captain looked at his executive officer.

“I like it. Right on the hundred-fathom curve, and water conditions are a little squirrelly there, what with the Gulf Stream coming in so close and fresh water coming out of the fjords. They won’t want to be too close inshore because of the Norwegian diesel boats, and they won’t stray too far out because of the NATO nucs. If I had to bet, I’d say they’ll come right to us.”

“Okay, take her down to nine hundred feet and head east. Secure from general quarters. Let’s get everybody fed and rested.”

Ten minutes later,
Chicago
was on a heading of zero-eight-one, steaming at fifteen knots. Deep, but in relatively warm water from the ocean current that begins in the Gulf of Mexico and runs all the way to the Barents Sea, she enjoyed sonar conditions that made detection by a surface ship nearly impossible. The water pressure prevented cavitation noises. Her engines could drive the submarine at this speed with only a fraction of her total rated power, obviating the need for the reactor pumps. The reactor’s cooling water circulated on natural convection currents, which eliminated the major source of radiated noise.
Chicago
was completely in her element, a noiseless shadow moving through black water.

The crew’s mood changed slightly, McCafferty noticed. Now they had a mission. A dangerous mission, but one they had trained for. Orders were carried out with calm precision. In the wardroom his tactical officers reviewed tracking and attack procedures long since memorized, and a pair of exercises were run on a computer. Charts were examined to predict likely places for especially bad water conditions in which they might hide. In the torpedo room two decks below the attack center, sailors ran electronic tests on green-painted Mk-48 “fish” and the Harpoon missiles in their white canisters. One weapon showed an electronic fault, and a pair of torpedomen immediately stripped off an inspection plate to replace a component. Similar checks were made of the Tomahawk missiles in their vertical launch tubes nested in the bow. Finally the weapons-control team ran a computer simulation through the Mk-117 attack director to ensure that it was fully operational. Within two hours they were sure that every system aboard was operating within expected limits. The crewmen exchanged hopeful smiles. After all, they reasoned, it wasn’t their fault that no Russian had been dumb enough to come their way, was it? Just a few days before, hadn’t they practically landed on the beach—in Russia!—without being detected? The Old Man was a real pro, wasn’t he?