"There it is again," the sergeant told his lieutenant.
"What's that?"
"I saw a flash from that hilltop, sun reflected off something."
"A shiny rock," the lieutenant snorted, not taking the time to look. "Comrade Lieutenant!" The officer turned at the sharp tone to see a rock flying through the air at his face. He caught it, and was too surprised to be angry. "How shiny does that rock look?"
"An old can, then! We've found enough trash here from tourists and mountain climbers, haven't we?"
"Then why does it come and go and come back?"
The lieutenant got visibly angry at last. "Sergeant, I know you have a year's combat experience in Afghanistan. I know I am a new officer. But I am a Goddamned officer and you are a Goddamned sergeant!"
The wonders of our classless society, the sergeant thought, continuing to look at his officer. Few officers could bear his look.
"Very well, Sergeant. You tell them." The lieutenant pointed at the radio.
"Markhovskiy, before you come back, check out the hilltop to your right."
"But it's two hundred meters high!" the squad leader shot back.
"Correct. It shouldn't take long at all," the platoon sergeant said comfortingly.
Toland switched viewgraphs, in the projector. "Okay, these satellite shots are less than three hours old. Ivan has three mobile radars, here, here, and here. He moves them about daily-meaning that one's probably been moved already-and usually has two operating around the clock. At Keflavik we have five SA-11 launch vehicles, four birds per vehicle. This SAM is very bad news. You've all been briefed on its known capabilities, and you'd better figure on a few hundred hand-held SAMs, too. The photo shows six mobile antiaircraft guns. We don't see any fixed ones. They're there, gentlemen, they're just camouflaged. At least five, perhaps as many as ten MiG-29 fighter interceptors. This used to be a regiment until the guys from Nimitz cut them down to size. Remember that the ones who're left are the ones who survived two squadrons of Tomcats. That is the opposition at Keflavik."
Toland stepped aside while the wing operations officer went over the mission profile. It sounded impressive to Toland. He hoped it would be so for the Russians.
The curtain went up fifty minutes later. The first aircraft launched for the strike were the E-2C Hawkeyes. Accompanied by fighters, they flew to within eighty miles of the Icelandic coast and radiated their own radar coverage all over the formation. More Hawkeyes reached farther out to cover the formation from possible air-and submarine-launched missile attack.
Ground-based Soviet radar detected the Hawkeyes even before their powerful systems went active. They could see two of the slow propeller-driven aircraft hovering beyond SAM range, each accompanied by two other aircraft whose extended figure-eight-course tracks denoted them as Tomcat interceptors guarding the Hawkeyes. The alarm was sounded. Fighter pilots boarded their aircraft while missile and gun crews raced to their stations.
The fighter-force commander was a major with three kills to his credit-but who had learned the virtue of caution the hard way. He'd been shot down once already. The Americans had sprung one trap on his regiment and he had no wish to participate in a second. If this was an attack and not a feint to draw out what fighters remained on Iceland-how would he know? He reached his decision. On the major's command, the fighters lifted off, climbed to twenty thousand feet, and orbited over the peninsula, conserving their fuel and remaining over land, where they could be supported by friendly SAMs. They had exercised carefully the previous few days with these tactics, and were as confident as they could be that the missile crews could distinguish between friendly and unfriendly aircraft. When they got to altitude, their radar threat receivers told them of more American Hawkeyes to the east and west. The information was relayed home with a request for a strike by the Backfires. What they got back was a request to identify the American fleet's location and composition. The air-base commander didn't bother forwarding that. The Soviet fighter commander swore under his breath. The American radar aircraft were prime targets, and tantalizingly within reach. With a full regiment, he'd streak after them and risk losses from their fighter escorts, but he was sure that that was precisely what the Americans were hoping he'd do.
The Intruders went in first, skimming above the wavetops from the south at five hundred knots, Standard-ARM missiles hanging from their wings. More Tomcat fighters were behind them at high altitude. When the fighters, passed the radar aircraft, they illuminated the circling MiGs with their radars and began to fire off Phoenix missiles.
The MiGs couldn't ignore them. The Soviet fighters separated into two-plane elements and scattered, coached from their ground-based radar controllers.
