The first two days went well. The escort force sailed first, blasting with their sonars at the shallow coastal water for possible submarines and finding none. The merchant ships followed, forming slowly into eight columns of ten each. The twenty-knot convoy was in a hurry to deliver its goods. Covered by a massive umbrella of land-based aircraft, it pressed on through the first forty-eight hours with only minor zigzagging as it sailed past the coast of New England and Eastern Canada, Sable Island, and the Grand Banks. The easy part was behind them now. As they left coastal waters for the Atlantic Ocean proper, they entered the unknown territory.
"About filing my dispatches... " Calloway said to Morris.
"Twice a day you can use my satellite transmitter as long as it doesn't interfere with official traffic. You understand that your reports will be run through Norfolk for sensitive information?"
"Quite so. Captain, you may believe me when I say that as long as I'm here with you, I will reveal nothing that would endanger your ship! I had quite enough excitement this year in Moscow."
"What?" Morris turned and lowered his binoculars. Calloway explained what his spring had been like.
"Patrick Flynn, my opposite number from Associated Press, is aboard Battleaxe. Doubtless drinking beer," he concluded.
"So you were there when all this boiled up. Do you know why all this started?"
Calloway shook his head. "If I did, Captain, I'd have filed the story long ago."
A messenger appeared on the bridge wing with a clipboard. Morris took it, read through three messages, and signed for them.
"Something dramatic?" Calloway asked hopefully.
"Fleet weather-update and something about that Russian reconnaissance satellite. It comes overhead in another three hours. The Air Force is going to try and shoot it down before it gets to us, though. Nothing major. You're comfortable, I presume. Any problems?"
"None, Captain. Nothing like a nice sea voyage."
"True enough." Morris stuck his head into the pilothouse. "General Quarters, Air Action."
Morris led the reporter into the Combat Information Center, explaining that the drill he was about to see was to make sure his men could do everything properly even in the dark.
"One of those dispatches give you a warning?"
"No, but in six hours we'll be outside of land-based fighter cover. That means Ivan is going to come looking for us." And it's going to get awfully lonely out here by ourselves, Morris thought. He gave his men an hour's worth of drill. The CIC crew ran a pair of computer simulations. On the second one an enemy missile got through their defenses.
The F-15 fighter rolled to a halt just outside the shelter building. The crew chief set the ladder next to the aircraft, and Major Nakamura climbed down, already looking aft at her scorched airplane. She walked over to examine the damage.
"Don't look bad, Major," the sergeant assured her. A fragment from the exploding rocket motor had drilled a hole the size of a beer can right through her left wing, missing a fuel tank by three inches. "I can fix that in a couple of hours."
"You all right?" the Lockheed engineer asked.
"It blew, fifty feet away, and it just blew the hell up. You were wrong, by the way. When they blow, it's pretty spectacular. Pieces all over the damned place. I was lucky I only caught one of them." It had scared hell out of the pilot, but she'd then had an hour to recover. Now she was just mad.
"Sorry, Major. Wish I could say more than that."
"Just have to try again," Buns said, looking up at the sky through the hole. "When's the next window?"
"Eleven hours, sixteen minutes."
"That's it, then." She walked into the building, then upstairs to the pilots' lounge. There was carpeting on the walls of the building for noise absorption. It also prevented serious injury to the pilots' fists.
Unhampered, the Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite continued its orbit, and on its next pass over the North Atlantic found itself looking down on a collection of nearly a hundred ships in even columns. This must be the convoy their intelligence reports had told them about, the Russian analysts decided-and, they noted with satisfaction, it was out in the open, right where they could get at it.
Ninety minutes later, two regiments of missile-armed Backfire bombers, preceded by Bear-D search aircraft, lifted off the four airfields around Kirovsk, topped off their fuel tanks, and headed for the radar gap over Iceland.
"So this is the surprise you have in store for them?" Calloway asked. He tapped some symbols on the main tactical-display scope.
Morris nodded thoughtfully. "So far we've sent most of the convoys across under EMCON-that's emission control-with their radars blacked out to make them hard to find. This time we're doing something a little different. This is the display from the SPS-49 radar-"
