The air battle lineup was strikingly similar. The United States had a handful of AWACS aircraft airborne from Alaska, to be joined shortly by others rushing northward from the States. They would orbit over northern Canada and the broad approaches to Alaska, their two-hundred-mile-radius radar envelopes overlapping along a strung out battle line to pick out low-level leakers. The supporting cast were dozens of interceptors, F-15 Eagles and Canadian CF-18 Hornets, some airborne, others on alert, waiting for the emergency signal to sprint skyward, vectored by the air controllers fighting the battle aboard the AWACS. They would hunt down the lumbering Bear H bombers carrying their deadly cargo of AS-15 cruise missiles and the modern Blackjacks with a mix of cruises and gravity bombs. Few in number, the B-1 look-alikes posed the greatest threat for the outnumbered US defenders. They would be the top priority. Numerous peacetime computer simulations envisioned a lopsided US victory in the air game, but the Russians had been first out of the gate, and the Bear and Blackjack pilots would surely press their attacks.
As in most military hardware systems, the Russians mirrored US efforts down to incredible detail, never being one to reinvent the wheel when espionage paid such huge technological dividends. The Russian air-defense forces possessed the less-capable Mainstay AWACS, staged at numerous forward Arctic bases. They would string along the northern periphery of the Russian landmass, and, like their American counterparts, search the heavens and the seas for the US bombers intent on attacking Mother Russia. Despite inferior early detection and warning abilities, the Russians did possess an ace in the hole — the legions of modern interceptors such as the MiG-31 Foxhound, MiG-29 Fulcrum, and the Su-27 Flanker. These frontline aircraft, backed by huge quantities of surface-to-air missile batteries, blanketed the flat approaches to the Russian homeland. This potent forward defense would attempt to destroy the bulk of the American cruise-missile carriers before they could release their weapons and then thin the ranks of the newer penetrating bombers. At this juncture, stopping the cruise missiles was the highest priority of the Moscow planners. Once loose in Russian airspace, the diminutive, cigar-shaped flying rockets were next to impossible to track — let alone shoot down.
Much had been made about the crumbling condition of the Russian air-defense matrix. The early nineties had no doubt left holes caused by poor maintenance. But as a system, integrity had been maintained, and shortfalls were compensated by tremendous redundancy.
The US penetrating bombers would first hit the vanguard surface-to-air missiles and then fight their way inland. Waiting in the wings were hundreds of VPVO interceptors — the new mixed with the old — and still more SAMs. Even the older Floggers and Foxbats were a serious threat to an exhausted bomber crew or a crippled plane. And fickle geography played into Russian hands. The American B-1Bs and B-2As would funnel into two distinct corridors after crossing the Polar ice cap, some east of the Urals for heavy industrial targets, while the majority would slip west, bearing down on the Russian heartland.
Although the odds seemed heavily stacked against them, the penetrators were far from helpless. The B-1B was a beautiful aircraft, sleek, fast, and lethal. It handled like a fighter, right down to the inclusion of a stick instead of a wheel for flight control. The combination of the tried and true swept-wing design with responsive, hydraulically boosted flight controls made the pilot’s job a breeze. When the wings were fully forward, quick takeoffs or operations on short runways were a piece of cake. When fully swept to the rear, supersonic cruise at altitude, or high subsonic, low-level flight were the norm. The latter was the B-1B’s forte, and low meant very low — on the deck, scraping the tree tops. Training runs were done at four hundred feet, the superb terrain-following radar expertly guiding the aircraft over hill and dale.
The more demanding EWO missions called for dropping to a scant two hundred feet. With the long, graceful wings laid back, the B-1B would hurtle across the earth at 640 knots like a black dagger, the landscape becoming a dreamlike blur. At night, it was terrifying. But the radical flight profile was the key to survival. Even during the peak of the day, the B-1B would be extremely difficult to track through the radar clutter generated by irregular terrain and bad weather. Any hostile aircraft would have to have a perfect intercept solution to take out the B-1B.
The Russians’ weakness? An overreliance on fixed, ground-intercept control sites for their airborne interceptors, a prime target for the B-1B’s supersonic SRAM II missiles. These babies would be dispensed to blast gaping nuclear holes through the VPVO’s architecture. In the end, when all was said and done, the issue would be how extensive was the damage to the air defense infrastructure before the bombers arrived. The US SIOP, or nuclear war plan, called for ICBMs and SLBMs to soften up Russian defenses by breaching broad avenues of devastation for the bombers. But that was a full SIOP. Anything less would leave the defenders essentially intact.
“Fuel consumption?” Buck began firing questions to shake his crew back to life. He had to start building them to an emotional peak before they entered the fringes of the Mainstay’s radar picket line. That’s where Ivan would be his freshest, and they must be too. If they could punch through that firstline of defense, they had half a chance of completing their mission alive.
“Right on target. Looks good,” Joe answered smartly.
“What’s the CPA to the Pole based on this heading?”
“No more than two hundred miles.”
Buck glanced over his right shoulder, even though he spoke through the intercom.
“Defensive Electronics?”
Johnson sat up straight. “Built-in test reports all systems up.”
“Johnson, remember they’re going to screw with their search radar frequencies. Don’t expect to see anything familiar. They might even use the AWACs, figuring we would have them blanked in our ESM receiver.”
“I got you, Buck.”
“And they might have aircraft farther north than we expect.”
“I know.” Johnson’s tone expressed his displeasure at the tutorial.
“Ledermeyer, everything check out OK?”
“That’s affirmative, Buck.”
“How about remote arming?”
“Already taken care of. What’s wrong? Don’t think I’ll be around?”
Buck didn’t answer. His thoughts had quickly turned back to the mission. Every time he did, his breathing accelerated. Take it easy, he warned himself.
The clear evening sky began to give way to thickening clouds that encircled them like wisps of angel’s hair. Nothing too threatening, thought Buck. Momentarily satisfied, he settled back and mentally created a map of central Russia. Slowly the key features sprang into sharp focus. He and his crew would drop down to two hundred feet as soon as they left the polar icepack, or sooner if they detected faint emissions from the Mainstay. The benefit of sensitive electronic support measures, or ESM gear, was that you could detect an adversary at over one and one half times the distance that he could get you. That’s when the chess game started. Do you avoid detection at all costs? Or do you tease the Mainstay then slightly alter course and hopefully slip by misdirected interceptors. The Russian pilots would get one pass before having to break off and hunt for other prey. No one knew the best strategy, especially when placed in the van. Buck didn’t relish being the lead plane through the gauntlet looming only hours ahead.
After skimming four hundred miles over the Kara Sea, they would traverse the Obskaya Guba, an appendix-shaped, seawater gulf protruding deep into the Motherland. Buck would stick close to the shoreline, praying the distinctive contrast between land and water would play havoc with the Russians’ search-and-look-down/shoot-down radars. Making landfall, he would most likely veer sharply to starboard, making a sprint for the Urals, attempting to seek shelter by hugging the protective eastern slope. The next seven hundred miles would severely tax his skills as a pilot. Switching off the terrain-following guidance system to protect against autonomous jammers sprinkled throughout the mountains, he would manually wind in and out of deep canyons and narrow valleys, skimming the earth as low as one hundred feet. He had flown the perilous route so many times in the simulators, it was burned into his brain. The 3-D display at the training center was breathtaking in its clarity; the multiple shades of brown and gray were brought to life by dual light sources reflecting off the irregular granite surfaces. By the end of the hour, he was drenched in sweat. At first he had always bounced off a canyon wall within the first few minutes, but through patience and hours of practice, he had managed to score well enough to be certified for this class-one mission, the most difficult rating in STRATCOM. If for some reason he bought it, Joe was ordered to break off and hit secondary targets along a less-demanding path. The less experienced copilot wouldn’t stand a chance at the primary route.