Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,122

before and landed to refuel at Sondrestrom Air Force Base on Greenland's west coast. Fifty miles ahead of them were a single Raven EF-111 jamming aircraft and four F-4 Phantoms configured for defense-suppression.

The radar was about halfway calibrated, though what had been done was the easy part. The fighter that had just landed had flown racetrack ovals from due north around the western horizon to due south of Keflavik. The area to the west of the air base, though not exactly flat, was nearly so, with low rocky hills. Next came the hard part, plotting radar coverage of the eastern arc over Iceland's mountainous center, a solid collection of hills that worked up to the island's tall central peak. Another Fulcrum rolled off the runway to begin this task, its pilot wondering how long it might take to map all the nulls--areas blanked to radar coverage by the steep valleys--areas that an attacking aircraft could use to mask its approach to Keflavik.

The radar officers were plotting probable troublesome spots on their topographical maps when an operator shouted a warning. Their clear radar screens had just turned to hash from powerful electronic jammers. That could mean only one thing.

The klaxons sounded in the fighter shelters at the end of runway eleven. Fighter pilots who had been dozing or playing dominos jumped to their feet and raced to their aircraft.

The tower officer lifted the field phone to give more exact warning to the fighters, then called up the missile battery commander: "Incoming air raid!"

Men leaped into action all across the air base. The fighter ground crews hit the built-in self-starters, turning the jet engines even as the pilots climbed into the cockpits. The SAM battery turned on its search and fire-control systems while the launch vehicles slewed their missiles into firing position.

Just under the radar horizon, eighteen B-52 bombers had just lit off their ECM jamming systems. They were deployed in six groups of three each. The first skimmed over the top of Mt. Snaefells, sixty miles north of Keflavik, and the rest came from all around the west side of the compass, converging on the target behind a wall of electronic noise provided by their own systems and the supporting EF-111 Raven jammer.

The Russian fighter just lifting off climbed to altitude, the pilot keeping his radar off as he scanned the sky visually, waiting for intercept information from the ground-based radar. His comrades were even now taxiing into the open, racing straight down the runway and into the sky. The aircraft that had just landed taxied to a fuel bowser, its pilot gesturing and cursing at the ground crewmen who were struggling to fuel his fighter. In their haste, they spilled ten gallons of fuel over the wing. Amazingly, it did not ignite, and a dozen men ran in with CO2 extinguishers to prevent an explosion as the fighter drank in a full load of fuel.

HILL 152, ICELAND

Edwards's head jerked up at the noise, the distinctive roar of jet fighters. He saw a dark trail of smoke approaching in from the east, and the silhouettes passed within a mile. The shapes were heavy with ordnance, the up-angled wingtips making identification easy.

"F-4s!" he hooted. "They're our guys!"

They were Phantom jets of the New York Air National Guard, configured as Wild Weasel SAM-killers. While Russian attention was on the converging bomber raid, they skimmed over hilltops and down valleys, using the crenellated landscape to mask their low-level approach. The back-seat crewman in each aircraft counted the missile radars, selecting the most dangerous targets. When they got to within ten miles of Keflavik, they popped up high and fired a salvo of Standard-ARM antiradar missiles.

The Russians were caught by surprise. Laboring to direct missile fire at the bombers, they didn't expect a two-part raid. The incoming missiles were not detected. Three of the ARMs found targets, killing two search radars and a missile-launch vehicle. One launch commander turned his vehicle around and trained manually on the new threat. The Phantoms jammed his fire-control radar, leaving behind a series of chaff clouds as they came in at thirty-foot height. As each pilot raced to the target area assigned to him, he conducted a hasty visual search. One saw an undamaged SAM launcher and streaked toward it, dropping Rockeye cluster-bomb canisters that fell short but spread over a hundred bomblets all over the area. The SA-11 launcher exploded in his wake; its crew never knew what had happened. A thousand yards beyond it was a mobile