The happiest days of his life came in 1989, when the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Freddie Ravensdale had risen quite far in rank by then, his career was soaring, and as the bricks toppled, he believed the sword that had hung over his head for so long was gone. The Stasi was dismantled, the Soviets collapsed and even the mighty KGB disappeared as the Cold War ended. Decades passed.
Then two weeks ago, his private cell phone rang and General Sir Frederick Ravensdale, the deputy supreme allied commander of NATO in Europe, answered it.
“Do you remember Lorette?” asked a smooth female voice he had never heard before.
The Russian MiG-29 fighter jet, an aerodynamic dream, whisked all alone through the darkening sky above Lapland, teasing the Finnish air defense radars that tracked it. The pilot, Captain Ildus Polnykov, knew they were watching him zip across the vast emptiness of the northwestern border. With Operation Hermitage still in progress, everybody was watching everybody.
One of his two assignments tonight was to force the Finns to scramble some F-18 Hornets up on an intercept course so the response could be timed. Once they arrived, Polnykov would peel away and fly back to Murmansk, where technicians would analyze the data collected by his electronics package. That they would come was never in doubt. He would make it happen with his second task, that of sparking a real confrontation.
He was about thirty miles across the international border into Finland and had come in so fast that no interceptors had yet shown up on his own radar. Normally, that was what these test flights were all about, he thought. To probe. See how far he could push it. See if he could pick a fight. This mission was going to be a lot different. He let the powerful MiG-29, known to NATO as the “Fulcrum,” slide down several thousand feet in altitude and bled off some speed to become an even bigger target.
At times like this, Polnykov felt a strange sense of peace, alone in a place of beautiful fantasy. The sky was purpling as the last ridge of the late-setting sun went down before him, while below were untracked snowy miles and great primeval forests. The only sounds were his own breathing into his oxygen mask and the periodic low voice of a controller far back in Russia. He would love to mix it up with a Hornet tonight, to dance in the heavens in playful menace, but that was not the main job. True air-to-air combat was something he had never experienced, and that absence was a hollow place inside of him. He checked his full load of armaments. Pure power lay right at his fingertips
Suddenly Captain Polnykov was snapped back into reality. The sensors were screaming warnings that he was being painted by radar, and the pinging was loud and strong, showing the threat was nearby. They had just turned it on, and it caught him by surprise.
Finland had put some new mobile antiaircraft missile batteries into the field, and the vehicles were secluded in the thick forests and hard to pinpoint because they changed position every day. In the past few weeks, the batteries appeared to be snuggling closer to the Russian border. Captain Polnykov and other pilots had been ordered to find and destroy one and show the Finns the cost of such folly.
Ah. He had done it. A missile radar truck was on line. Good. Make the run. He slid down to an even lower altitude, went to full throttle and the Klimov turbofan engines kicked into afterburner. The pilot was pushed back in his seat by that mighty thrust. Destroying the site would surely be enough provocation to draw a few F-18s up to play. He was so low that trees bent beneath the disturbed air of his passing over them.
The captain clicked on his ground-lock radar and let it sweep the evening. The radar instantly pointed out the radiating target below and identified it as an Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System. He listened to its frantic beep-beep-beep and considered what the perplexed Finnish Defense Force soldiers below were thinking as the Russian fighter-bomber roared toward them, eating up the miles only a few hundred feet off the deck and with a full rack of bombs. They would never fire first, and after he set his weapons free, they would not have adequate reaction time to shoot back because he was coming in too low and fast. This was a good find, and Polnykov rode in knowing that even without any Hornets to fight, he could return to Murmansk after this run and be cheered and rewarded. He began his final portion of the attack run.
Just as he sent three air-to-surface missiles sliding from the wing racks to ride down the radiating beam toward the Finns, he saw a brilliant flash against the bleak landscape below, and then the smoking trail of a missile erupting up out of the forest. Even as the avionics warnings shouted in his ears, he knew it was too late. The Finns had actually fired back! Two AMRAAM antiaircraft missiles had thundered out of the Finns’ launcher at point-blank range.
The Finnish missiles and the Russian plane collided with an incredible closing speed and the eighty-eight-pound high-explosive warheads blasted the MiG apart. Falling and spinning and the burning fragments gouging deep furrows where the pieces hit the frozen ground.
It crashed not far from the mobile launcher site, which itself was torn to shreds and left as a flaming pyre when the trio of Hermes missiles fired by Captain Polnykov smashed into it.
18
“We have a situation, sir.”
President of the United States Christopher Thompson was finishing off a small tuna salad lunch at his cluttered desk in the Oval Office when National Security Adviser Dean Thomas entered. Thompson looked up from a thick book of budget numbers. “What is it, Dean?”
“An intruding Russian fighter jet has attacked and destroyed a Finnish missile battery deep on Finland’s side of the international border. The plane was shot down during the attack.”
The president pressed his thumb hard against the pen in his hand, almost to the breaking point, then shoved aside the briefing book. The numbers from Congress would wait a while. “Dammit! I have warned Pushkin again and again that those overflights risked a confrontation. Do we have any details?”
Dean Thomas dropped a single piece of paper on the desk. It was only two paragraphs. “Not many,” said the NSA adviser. “It happened about an hour ago, right at sundown on their local time. A MiG-29, one of the better Russian aircraft, appeared out of nowhere on what appeared to be an attack run and an officer of the Finnish Defense Forces pushed the button in response and missiles flew in both directions.”
“What about hard evidence?”
“Yes, sir. Survivors of the missile battery found the plane wreckage and it’s clearly Russian. Radar records back them up. No question there.”
“Has there been any response from Moscow? Military or otherwise?” President Thompson was out of his chair and leading his national security adviser out the door, heading for the Situation Room underground.
“Nothing yet, Mister President.”
“Okay. Let’s get the staff together and see if we can get ahead of this thing to keep it from escalating. I want the vice president in on this, and get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs over here from the Pentagon. A video link with our new guy, the supreme allied commander in Europe?”
“General David Lincoln. He has been in the job for less than month. I doubt if he knows anything that he hasn’t passed to the Pentagon at this point.”