The remaining bombers were now over the target and screaming for help from their escorting fighters. Eight successfully dropped their bomb loads before turning clear of the area. The Soviet fighters had claimed five by now, and the surviving crews were desperate to escape the unexpected hazard. The Russians were now out of missiles, and attempting to engage with their cannon. That was dangerous. The B-52s retained their tail guns, and one Fulcrum was damaged by machine-gun fire from his target and had to break off.
The final element of confusion was the return of the American Phantoms. They carried only three Sparrow missiles each, and when they lit off their missile-intercept radars, the Soviet fighters all received warning tones from their defense systems. The Fulcrums scattered before the twelve incoming missiles and dove for the ground. Four dropped down right on top of Edwards' group, swooping low over a crashed B-52 east of Hafnarfjordur. When they came back up, the sky was clear again. The Phantoms were short on fuel. They could not press their attack and turned away without a single kill. The surviving bombers were now safely hidden in the cloud of jamming. The Soviets re-formed and moved back to Keflavik.
Their first impression was a bad one. Fully two hundred bombs had fallen within the airport perimeter, and nine of them had found runway targets. But runway eleven was unscarred. As they watched, the single Fulcrum left on the ground roared off into the sky, its pilot frantic with rage, demanding a vector to a target. He was ordered to patrol as the rest of the squadron landed to refuel.
The first battle had mixed results. The Americans lost half their bomber force in return for damaging three of Keflavik's five runways. The Soviets had most of a SAM battery smashed to little gain, but Keflavik was still usable. Already the ground personnel were running to the runway-repair equipment left behind by the Americans. At the end of each runway was a pile of gravel, and a half-dozen bunkers contained steel mats. Heavy equipment would bulldoze the debris back into the holes, even it out, then cover it over with gravel and steel. Keflavik was damaged, but its runways would be fully operational again before midnight.
"I think this one's for-real, Captain," the ASW officer said quietly. The line of colored blocks on the passive sonar display had lasted for seven minutes. Bearing was changing slowly aft, as though the contact were heading for the convoy, but not Pharris.
The frigate was steaming at twelve knots, and her Prairie/Masker systems were operating. Sonar conditions were better today. A hard thermocline layer at two hundred feet severely impeded the utility of a surface sonar. Pharris was able to deploy her towed-array sonar below it, however, and the lower water temperature there made for an excellent sound channel. Better still, the layer worked in both directions. A submarine's sonar had as much trouble penetrating the thermocline as a surface sonar. Pharris would be virtually undetectable to a submarine below the layer.
"How's the plot look?" the tactical action officer asked.
"Firming up," ASW answered. "Still the distance question. Given the water conditions and our known sonar performance, our sonar figure of merit gives us a contact distance of anything from five to fourteen miles on direct path, or into the first convergence zone. That predicts out from nineteen to twenty-three miles..." A convergence zone is a trick of physics. Sound traveling in water radiates in all directions. Noise that traveled down was gradually turned by water temperature and pressure into a series of curves, rising to the surface, then bending again downward. While the frigate could hear noise out from herself for a distance of about fourteen nautical miles, the convergence zone was in the shape of an annulus-the area between two concentric circles-a donut-shaped piece of water that began nineteen miles and ended twenty-three miles away. The distance to the submarine was unknown, but was probably less than twenty-three miles. That was already too close. The submarine could attack them or the convoy they guarded with torpedoes, or with surface-to-surface missiles, a technology pioneered by the Soviets.
"Recommendation, gentlemen?" Morris asked. The TAO spoke first.
"Let's put the helicopter up for the near solution, and get an Orion working the far one."
"Sounds good," ASW agreed.
