Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,121

to the southwest were breaking up, and there was a hint of clear sky on the horizon. Edwards just sat there in his helmet and poncho, staring into the distance.

"I suppose you're right, sir," Smith replied. The sergeant was nervous. They'd been on this hilltop for almost twenty-four hours, a long time to be stationary in hostile country. The best time to move out would have been during the rain showers, when visibility was cut to a few hundred yards. Soon the sky might be clear again, and it wouldn't get dark again for quite a while. As it was, they sat on their hilltop in camouflage ponchos that kept them partly dry and wholly miserable.

There was a heavy shower north of them that prevented their seeing Reykjavik, and they could barely make out Hafnarfjordur to the west, which worried the sergeant, who wanted to know what Ivan was up to. What if they detected Edwards's satellite radio and began to triangulate on it? What if there were patrols out?

"Lieutenant?"

"Yeah, Sarge?"

"We got those phone lines on one side of us, and those power lines on the other--"

"You want to blow some up?" Edwards smiled.

"No, sir, but Ivan is going to start patrolling them soon, and this ain't a very good place for us to make contact."

"We're supposed to observe and report, Sarge," Edwards said without conviction.

"Yes, sir."

Edwards checked his watch. It was 1955Z. Doghouse might want to talk with them, though they hadn't called in to him yet. Edwards broke the radio out of the pack again, assembled the pistol-grip antenna, and donned his headset. At 1959 he switched on and tracked in on the satellite carrier wave.

"Doghouse calling Beagle. Doghouse calling Beagle. Do you copy? Over."

"Well, how about that." He toggled the Transmit switch. "Roger, we're here, Doghouse."

"Anything new to report?"

"Negative, unless you want to know about the rain. Visibility is down. We can't see very much."

The communications watch officer at Doghouse looked at a weather map. So it really was raining there. He hadn't been able to convince his boss that Beagle could be trusted. Edwards had answered the questions that the counterintelligence guys had come up with. They'd even had a voice-stress analyzer handy to check the tapes of his answers. The needle had pegged on the last answer about his girlfriend. That hadn't been faked. Copies of the relevant parts of his personnel package had been faxed to them. Upper fifth of his class at Colorado Springs. Good in math and engineering studies, did extremely well in his postgraduation studies in meteorology. His eyesight had worsened slightly during his tenure at Colorado Springs, becoming just bad enough to keep him from flying. Regarded as quiet and shy, but evidently well liked by his classmates. Not a warrior type, the psychological profile said. How long would the kid last?

KEFLAVIK, ICELAND

One MiG-29 was flying. The others were in the hardened shelters the Americans had only just finished at the end of runway eleven. The fighter's mission was twofold. It was a standing combat air patrol aircraft should an incoming raid be detected, but more importantly, it was being tracked carefully by the ground radar controllers: their radar needed to be calibrated. Iceland's irregular terrain made for troublesome radar performance, and as with the surface-to-air missiles, the instruments themselves had been badly jostled by the trip aboard the Fucik. The fighter flew circles around the airport while the radar operators determined that what their instruments told them was correct.

The fighters were fully fueled and armed, their pilots resting on cots near them. At the moment, the bowsers were fueling the Badger bomber that had given the fighters navigational and electronic support. Soon it would be leaving to bring in nine more. The Air Force detachment was rapidly finishing their job of clearing the airfield. All but one of the runways was swept clear of fragments now. The remains of the American aircraft had been bulldozed off the pavement. The fuel pipeline would be repaired in an hour, the engineers said.

"Quite a busy day," the major said to the fighter commander.

"It's not over yet. I'll feel better when we get the rest of the regiment in," the colonel observed quietly. "They should have hit us already."

"How do you expect them to attack?"

The colonel shrugged. "Hard to say. If they're really serious about closing this field, they'll use a nuclear warhead."

"Are you always so optimistic, Comrade Colonel?"

The raid was an hour away. The eighteen B-52H bombers had left Louisiana ten hours