"Acknowledged. Out." The pilot switched off. "So, Volodya, our friends are still there. Lonely place."
"If there are women about, and you are kulturny, you need never be lonely." Another voice came over the intercom.
"Will somebody shut that horny bastard up!'' the navigator suggested.
"Studying to be a political officer?" the copilot inquired. "How long to home?"
"Two hours twenty-five minutes."
The Backfire continued northeast at six hundred knots as it passed over the desolate center of the island.
"Tallyho!" the pilot said quietly. "One o'clock and low." The Tomcat's onboard television system showed the distinctive shape of the Russian bomber. Say what you want about the Russians, Winters thought, they do build 'em pretty.
He turned the aircraft, which took his nose-mounted camera off the target, but his back-seat officer put his binoculars on the Backfire and soon spotted two more flying in a loose formation. As expected, their course was northeast, and they were cruising at about thirty thousand feet. Winters looked for a big cloud to hide in and found one. Visibility dropped to a few yards. There could be another Backfire out there, Winters thought, and maybe he likes flying in clouds, too. That could really ruin this mission.
He ran out of cloud a moment later, banked his fighter hard, and ducked back inside, his mind computing time and distance. The Backfires should all be past now. He pulled back on his stick and popped out of the cloud top.
"There they be," the back-seater said first. "Heads up! I see more of,em at three o'clock."
The pilot vanished back into the cloud for another ten minutes. Finally: "Nothing to the south of us. They should all be past by now, don't you think?"
"Yeah, let's go looking."
One terrifying minute later, Winters was wondering if he hadn't let them get too far ahead, as his TV system swept across the sky and found nothing. Patience, he told himself, and increased his speed to six hundred ninety knots. Five minutes later, a dot appeared on his screen. It grew to three dots. He estimated he was forty miles behind the Backfires, and with the sun at his back, there was no way they could spot him. His backseater made a check of the radar warning receiver and the air behind them for additional aircraft, a procedure repeated three times a minute. If an American fighter could be out here, why not a Russian?
The pilot watched the numbers click off on his inertial navigation system, kept an eye on fuel, and watched forward for any change in the Russian bomber formation. It was both exciting and boring. He knew the significance of what he was doing, but the actual doing was no more thrilling than driving a 747 from New York to L.A. For over an hour they flew, covering the seven hundred miles between Iceland and the Norwegian coast.
"Here's where it gets cute," the back-seater said. "Air-search radar ahead, looks like Andoya. Still over a hundred miles away, they'll probably have us in two or three minutes."
"That's nice." Where there was air-search radar, there would be fighters. "Got their position worked out?"
"Yep."
"Start transmitting." Winters turned the aircraft and headed back out to sea.
Two hundred miles away, a circling British Nimrod receipted the signal and retransmitted to a communications satellite.
Admiral Beattie was trying to remain calm, but it didn't come easily to a man whose nerves had been stretched and abused by crisis after crisis since the war began. Doolittle was his baby. For the past two hours, he'd waited for word from the Tomcat. Two had returned without sighting the Russians. One had not. Was it tracking them as planned or had it merely fallen into the sea?
The printer in the corner of the communications room began to make the screening sound that the Admiral had learned to hate: EYEBALLS REPORTS HARES AT 69/20N, 15/45E AT 1543z COURSE 021 SPEED 580 KTS ALT 30.
Beattie tore the page off and handed it to his air-operations officer. "That puts them on the ground in thirty-seven minutes. Assuming it's the last group, and a fifteen-minute spread, the first bombers will be landing in twenty-two minutes."
"Fifteen minutes from now, then?"
"Yes, Admiral."
"Get the order out!"
In thirty seconds half a dozen separate satellite channels began transmitting the same message.
The three American submarines had lain on the bottom of the Barents Sea near the Russian coastline-so near, it was only one hundred seventy-four feet of water-for what seemed like half a lifetime, before finally receiving the signal to move south. McCafferty smiled with relief. The three British submarines, including HMS Torbay, had already done their job. They had sneaked up on a Russian frigate and four patrol boats patrolling the Russian/Norwegian coastline and attacked with torpedoes. The Russians could only assume a major effort was under way to penetrate their patrol barrier, and had sent their antisub patrol force west to meet it.
