The Fucik continued her turn, returning to a northerly course to make the next hovercraft trip a shorter one. Her weather deck was ringed with armed troops carrying surface-to-air missiles and machine guns. Andreyev remained on the bridge, knowing this was where he belonged, but wishing he were leading his assault troops.
"Kef-Ops, the bandits are all turning right back after launching their ASMs. So far it's been two birds per aircraft. We got fifty-make that fifty-six inbound missiles, and more are being launched. Nobody behind them, though. I repeat, nothing behind the bomber force. At least we don't have any paratroopers headed in. Hunker down, guys, we now have sixty inbound missiles," Edwards heard as he came through the door.
"At least they won't be nukes," said a captain.
"They're shooting a hundred missiles at us-they don't fuckin' need nukes!" replied another.
Edwards watched the radar picture over the shoulder of one of the officers. It was eerily like an arcade game. Big, slow-moving blips denoted the aircraft. Smaller, quicker blips were the Mach-2 missiles.
"Gotcha!" hooted the enlisted radar operator. The leading Eagle had gotten within missile range of the Badgers and exploded one with a Sparrow missile-ten seconds after it had launched its own missiles. A second Sparrow missed its separate target, but a third appeared locked on it. The first fighter's wingman was just launching at yet another Russian. The Soviets had thought this one out, Edwards saw. They were attacking from all around the northern littoral, with lots of space between the bombers so that no single fighter could engage more than one or two. It was almost like-
"Anybody check the geometry of this?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" The captain looked around. "How come you aren't where you belong?"
Edwards ignored the irrelevancy. "What's the chance they're trying to draw our fighters out, like?"
"Expensive bait." The captain dismissed the idea. "You're saying they might have launched their ASMs from farther out. Maybe they don't fly as far as we thought. Point is, those missiles are ten minutes out now, the first of them, with about a five- or seven-minute delay to the last. And not a Goddamned thing we can do about it."
"Yeah." Edwards nodded. The Air-Ops/Met building was a two-story frame structure that vibrated every time the wind hit fifty knots. The lieutenant took out a stick of gum and started chewing on it. In ten minutes a hundred missiles, each carrying about a ton of high explosives-or a nuclear warhead-would start falling. The men outside would get the worst of it; the enlisted men and the flight crews trying to get the airplanes ready to race off. His assigned job was merely to keep out of the way. It made him a little ashamed. The fear he could now taste along with the peppermint made him more ashamed.
The Eagles were now all airborne, racing north. The last of the Backfires had just launched their missiles and were turning back northeast at full power as the Eagles raced at twelve hundred knots to catch up. Three of the interceptors launched missiles, and they succeeded in killing a pair of Backfires and damaging a third. The "Zulu" fighters which had scrambled off the deck could not catch the Backfires, the commanding controller on Sentry One noted, cursing himself for not having sent them after the older, less valuable Badgers, some of which they might have caught. Instead, he ordered them to slow down, and had his controllers vector them towards the supersonic missiles.
Penguin 8, the first of the P-3C Orion antisubmarine warfare aircraft, was rolling now, down runway two-two. It had been on patrol only five hours before, and its flight crew was still trying to shake off the sleep as they rotated the propjet aircraft off the concrete.
"Tipping over now," the radar operator said. The first Russian missile was almost overhead, beginning its terminal dive. The Eagles had hit two of the incoming missiles, but courses and altitudes had been against them, and most of their Sparrows had missed, unable to catch the Mach-2 missiles. The F-15s orbited over central Iceland, well away from their base, as each pilot wondered if he'd have an airfield to return to.
