Tombstone had made his decision. There was no turning back now.

  1724 hours

  Intruder 504

  Approaching the Kola Peninsula

  In tight formation with two other Intruders and a Prowler ECM aircraft, the A-6 boomed low across the water, low enough that salt spray pattered across its windscreen. It was as though they were flying through fog or a light rain, with the windshield wiper ineffectually batting away at the moisture almost as quickly as it collected.

  Willis ignored the water, keeping his eyes glued instead to the glowing screen of his Kaiser AVA-1 Visual Display Indicator as he concentrated on keeping his heading and his altitude precise. At an altitude of 100 feet and at a speed of 550 knots, there was no margin for error.

  He still felt uncomfortable with Sunshine at his side. Damn it, if she screwed the pooch on this one…

  Not that she'd screwed up so far. But there was always a first time, and this was when a mistake would get them both killed. Glancing up, he caught the blur of a gray shoreline coming up fast, half-glimpsed through the swish-swish of the wiper. His VDI showed the coast, painted in radar. An instant later, the land exploded around them, replacing the featureless blue-gray blur of the sea.

  At his side, Sunshine keyed her radio mike with her left foot.

  "Terminator 1.504, feet dry, feet dry." They were over land now. Over Russia.

  "That's Point Yellow-Delta, mark number two," she said. "Come left to zero-nine-three."

  He saw the radar profile of a promontory on his screen. "I got it.

  Zero-nine-three it is." He nudged the stick to the left. Each Intruder had its own precisely calculated, zigzag path to its target, a path through space and time designed to keep it clear of active enemy SAM and gun batteries, as well as letting it avoid occupying the same airspace at the same time as some other American aircraft.

  "Terminator 2.500" sounded over his headset. "We're feet dry, feet dry."

  That was the voice of Commander John "Thumper" Hargraves, the Death Dealers' squadron leader, coming in a few miles behind 504, and a bit to the east.

  "This is 3.505. Feet dry."

  "Jammer 4.703." That was the EA-6B Prowler accompanying the Terminator flight, providing electronic countermeasures for the three Intruders as they made their run. "Feet dry, feet dry."

  Antiaircraft fire appeared to his left, tracers rising from the ground, like gently drifting specks of orange light. They were past so quickly he didn't even have a chance to see where the fire was coming from.

  "We're coming up on mark three," Sunshine said over the ICS. Her helmeted head was still pressed up against the rubber shield of her radar scope. "Point Red-Sierra."

  "Okay, boys and girls," Terminator 500 told them over the tactical channel. "That's Red-Sierra, on the money. Time to break. Terminator Five-oh-four, you have the honors."

  Red-Sierra was the southern tip of a long island in the mouth of a ragged-edged inlet. There was a fishing village there, Port Vladimir. Willis and Sunshine's flight plan called for a sharp dogleg to the south now, as each aircraft maneuvered independently to come at their objective from a different direction, breaking up the enemy's defensive fire and keeping him guessing about where the next strike was coming from.

  Willis brought his stick to the left, veering clear of Port Vladimir and heading sharply south away from the coast. He started climbing too, rising to his attack altitude of six hundred feet.

  "Roger that," Sunshine said over the tactical channel. "We're climbing to attack altitude. See you boys over the target."

  "Yeah," Willis added. "You guys can eat our dust."

  "Launch! Launch!" sounded over his headset. "This is Terminator Five-oh-five! I've got a SAM launch at zero-eight-five!"

  "Copy, Five-oh-five," Thumper called. "I see it."

  Willis saw it too, a pillar, like a telephone pole painted white, balancing skyward on smoke and flame a mile to the east.

  "Looks like they're finally waking up down there," Willis told Sunshine.

  A threat warning lit up on his console. They were being tracked. "It's about damn time, huh? I was beginning to think they didn't care."

  "Three miles to the last turn," Sunshine said, ignoring his banter. Her voice was cold, all business. The Intruder jolted once, turbulence from a near-miss. "Weapons armed. Safe off. Pickle's hot."

  The miles flashed by. "Okay," Sunshine said. "Mark. Come right to one-seven-two."

  "Rog." The aircraft's wing seemed to skim the blurred earth as the Intruder swung to the right.

  "We're in the groove for our approach. Range twelve miles." More seconds dragged past. Willis's hands were wet beneath his gloves. "C'mon, c'mon. You see 'em yet?"

  "Negative. Ten miles."

  "Christ, we'll be on top of-"

  "Got it! Lots of static from jamming, but I've got a solid lock. Come right a bit. See it?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I've got it. Going to attack." His VDI changed to attack mode, the graphics now more complex, feeding him more data. He scanned it all: time to target, drift angle, steering point. Where was that missile headed? Damn, he'd lost it when they'd made that second course change, and it was behind them somewhere. Okay. The threat warning was off.

  The Prowler piggy-backing on the Intruder flight must have jammed the thing or seduced it out of the way.

  "Not all that much in the way of anti-air defenses," he said. Tracers continued to flash and flicker across the ground below them, and the puffy, deceptively peaceful-looking cotton balls of triple-A were scattered across the sky. "Not as bad as I thought it would be this close in, anyway."

  "Looks to me like their air defense is pretty much off the air," Sunshine replied. "Thank the Sharks for that."

  The Sharks, the EA-6Bs of VAQ-143, had delivered the first blow that afternoon. Their stand-off HARM and Tacit Rainbow missiles homed on enemy radars, even targeting radar sources that were switched on briefly, then turned off. Of course, the enemy was sure to have kept a lot of his radars off the air completely, as a combat reserve.

  The A-6 gave another hard jolt, slamming Willis against Sunshine's leg.

  "Hang on!" He keyed the tactical frequency. "Terminator Five-oh-oh, this is Five-oh-four. I've got my primary. Going in hot."

  "Terminator Five-oh-four, Terminator Five-double-oh. Copy that. We'll be right behind you. Good luck!"

  "Roger that, Five-oh-four," a different voice said. It sounded like Lucas, in Five-oh-five. "Don't get greedy now. Save some for us poor tag-alongs."

  "Copy." Willis pushed the stick over, picking up speed as the Intruder's nose dropped below the horizon line.

  "Picking up some heavy triple-A here," someone said. Willis didn't catch who it was. "Aw, shit! Shit! I'm hit!"

  "Abort your run, Five-oh-five! You're on fire."

  "I see it. Engine light. I'm losing my starboard engine. Shit! Fire in the aircraft! Fire-"

  The hiss of static chopped the transmission off in mid-sentence. Willis felt cold. Mike Daniels and his B/N, Frank Lucas, had been good friends.

  Somehow, he managed to keep his concentration locked on his VDI. The Intruder was sometimes described as possessing a heads-down display, for the aircraft could be flown by an aviator who never needed to look up through his canopy. When Willis did look up, it was into nightmare. Puffs of smoke were scattered thickly across the sky ahead, mingled with the rising, twisting white threads of SAM contrails. His missile-threat warning was flashing again, coupled with a plaintive, chirping warble in his headset.

  "Steady," Sunshine warned him. "Steady! You're drifting left!"

  On his VDI, his targeting pipper was climbing steadily up the screen toward the release point. Something hit them, a loud thump aft like someone kicking the fuselage.

  "I'm taking it in on manual," he said, flipping the selector. If the A-6 had been hit by gunfire, he didn't want to risk going in on auto-release, flying over the target, then finding out they'd failed to release.

  The release pipper crawled relentlessly toward the bottom of the display.

  When it winked out, Willis slammed his thumb down on the pickle switch. In the same instant, the brown and gray ground outside gave way to pavement, runways, dozens of tightly clustered buildings, parked vehicles, and aircraft resting in high-walled revetments. He thought he even glimpsed men down there, dashing wildly for cover.

  Then the Intruder lurched heavily upward in a series of thumping jolts.

  Its warload consisted of thirty five-hundred-pound retarded bombs, four groups of three clamped to A/A 37B-6 multiple eject racks beneath each wing, and two groups more mounted one in front of the other on his centerline, and they were dropping from the aircraft six at a time, in a pattern designed to scatter them across as much real estate as possible.

  Relieved of some fifteen thousand pounds of ordnance, the Intruder rocketed into the sky. Willis helped it along, going to full throttle and hauling back on the stick. The shock wave struck them from behind as they climbed.

  Willis twisted in his seat, trying to see aft past the Intruder's port wing. The center of the airfield was engulfed in boiling flame, and several buildings were erupting in pulsing, flaming blasts, contributing to the ongoing mass detonations as he watched. "Secondaries!" he yelled, excitement hammering at him. "We've got secondaries."

  "Roger that, Five-oh-four," Thumper called. "I think you dropped one into their missile stores! Look at that sucker blow!"

  "Goddamn!" Willis enthused. "We did it, Sunshine, we did it!"

  "Did you have any doubts about that, Willis?" For the first time in long minutes, she had her face out of her radar screen and was looking at him. The eyes visible between her visor and her oxygen mask were very blue, and sparkled with something that might be amusement.

  Or possibly it was just pride at a job well and professionally done.

  "No!" he said, laughing. Willis felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. There was something almost magical in the shared camaraderie of combat that wiped away doubt, replacing it with trust.

  "No, God damn it! I didn't!"

  He brought the Intruder around, heading north toward the coast.

  CHAPTER 23

  Tuesday, 17 March

  Early morning hours

  The Kola Peninsula

  During the night the U.S. Air Force entered the fray ― F-117 Stealth Fighters and F-111 Aardvarks, deploying out of Lakenheath and Upper Heyford, England, crossed the mountains above Bodo, then skimmed the forests and lake country of northern Sweden and Finland, striking the Kola military bases from the west and south instead of from the north. "Smart" weapons, first seen publicly in the Gulf War of 1991, followed invisible beams of laser light unerringly into bunker-complex ventilator shafts, aircraft hangar doors, and command-center windows, as American forces kept up a relentless pressure against Russian C3 assets ― command, Control, and Communications.

  Contributing their firepower to the assault through that long night were over two hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the wide-scattered fleet of Los Angeles-class attack subs in the Barents Sea. Skimming sea and earth at subsonic speeds, the TLAMs followed the terrain features loaded into their onboard computers. Their principal targets were communication relays and operations centers, SAM sites, and aircraft in their revetments.

  Carrier strikes continued as well, but at a lower tempo as both deck personnel and aircrews were given a respite in preparation for missions in support of the Marine amphib operations. One carrier attack squadron off the Eisenhower, VA-66, the Waldos, participated in a long-range, nighttime strike far to the east. The Waldos' A-6 Intruders were loaded with four Harpoon missiles apiece and sent to hunt down the Groznyy, the Russian cruiser that had sunk the Scranton the day before.

  Guided by Hawkeye radar pickets and by Forward-Looking Infra-Red tracking, or FLIR, they found the Groznyy in the mouth of the White Sea and left her burning and with her decks awash. The Waldos and another attack squadron off the Ike, the Tigers of VA-65, also hit other naval targets found at sea between Polyamyy and Grimikha, sinking dozens of vessels from Osa II guided-missile boats to a destroyer, the Nastoychivyy. The idea was to convince what was left of the Russians' Northern Fleet to stay at home, in port and safely under the protection of shore-based antiaircraft and SAM batteries.

  Meanwhile, throughout the night in the skies above the Kola Peninsula, spy satellites and high-flying Aurora reconnaissance aircraft continued to pinpoint key targets and update the Pentagon's overall intelligence picture.

  Microwave communications between command centers and outlying facilities were tapped by various electronic intelligence assets. Even from orbit, ELINT satellites could listen in on encrypted conversations between unit commanders and their units; as streams of intercepted communications were relayed back to its secret complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, the National Security Agency, largest and arguably the most secret of America's intelligence organizations, swiftly broke the codes on their batteries of Cray supercomputers. Even without decoding, the patterns of radio communications provided NSA, CIA, and Pentagon analysts with a clear picture of the Russians' Kola Peninsula military command structure… and final proof, in the form of orders from Krasilnikov himself, that the defenses were being orchestrated from the Kremlin. The idea that the attacks on the American carrier groups had been carried out by renegade local commanders was clearly a complete fiction.

  That night, however, the UN's determination to enforce Resolutions 982 and 984 began taking on a new urgency.

  0130 hours EST (Zulu -5)

  Oval office, The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  The President sat in his high-backed chair, watching without expression the contorted face of Marshal Valentin Grigorevich Krasilnikov on one of the large television monitors in one wall of the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the room, Gordon West, his chief of staff, and Herbert Waring, the National Security Advisor, along with a number of secretaries, aides, and staffers, stood in silence as they listened to a translator's voice providing a simultaneous translation for Krasilnikov's impassioned speech.

  "The United Nations has taken dangerous… ah… a dangerous course of action," the translator's voice was saying. Krasilnikov's own voice, the volume turned down but still audible, was shaking with an emotion the translator could not express. "For fifty years United Nations has provided forum for international debate, for keeping, uh, for peacekeeping activities through rule of law…"

  "The guy's not a bad speech-maker," the President said. "No wonder he went in for politics."

  Waring, standing closest to the Chief Executive, looked up from a transcript of Krasilnikov's speech. "I wonder if he might not have some valid points here, Mr. President. After all, if we continue to act as the UN's muscle in Russia, what's to stop the UN from pulling the same tactics against us some day?"

  "The alternative, Herb," the President said slowly, "is to let them start nuking each other, and anyone else who makes them mad. The UN can't afford to let that start happening. We can't afford to let it happen."

  "Uh, oh," Gordon West said. "He's starting in on us now."

  "The United States of America has embarked down dangerous road," the translator was saying. "One of military adventurism, of unrestrained and illegal meddling in internal affairs of sovereign, ah, of a sovereign world power. This, perhaps, was safe enough when confronting Third World countries like Iraq or the People's Republic of Korea, nations that could not seriously challenge American military might.

  "But now, the United States, operating behind facade of bandit thugs of United Nations, has challenged a great power, one capable of most, of the most severe and devastating retaliatory response."

  "my God, he's threatening us!" West said softly. "He's actually threatening to loose his nukes on us if we don't back off!"

  "I hear him, Gordy," the President said. Indeed, he'd heard this speech three times that night already, as well as going over the written transcript.

  The key here was knowing ― or at least taking a damned good guess at ― what Krasilnikov was really saying beneath his bombastic phrases of you-can't-do-this-to-us hurt and outrage.

  "The wanton destruction of one of Russia's most modern ballistic-missile submarines by units of the U.S. Navy operating illegally within the Barents Sea," Krasilnikov went on, "cannot swerve us from our purpose, which is the final unity and security of the Russian peoples, and the defense of our Motherland against all foreign invaders, even those cloaked in the rags of so-called United Nations mandates. The United States should bear in mind the fact that we have many ballistic-missile submarines, and that a suitable demonstration of our will could as easily be directed against the American aggressors as against the traitors in illegal rebellion against the present Russian government."

  "Mr. President," Waring said. "It may be that the thing to do at this point would be to pull back, take a deep breath, and think this whole thing through. We are looking at the possibility of thermonuclear war. I don't think we've been this close to a full-scale nuclear exchange since the Cuban Missile Crisis."

  The President shifted his gaze to others in the Oval Office. In one corner was a small coterie of military officers, among them the Pentagon liaison, Admiral Magruder.

  "What do you say, Admiral?" the President asked.

  "Actually, Mr. President, we've been eyeball to eyeball with the Russians several times since 1962. They had nuclear missiles ready to go during the Six-Day War, for instance-"

  "That's not what I was asking, Admiral. How shall we respond to Krasilnikov's, ah, accusations?"

  "Hardly my place to say, Mr. President, I'm a military man, not a leader of government."

  "Damn it, Admiral-"

  "Sir, I can point out that all of our intelligence to date Suggests that the only nuclear weapons he has access to are those in the Northern Fleet.

  The rest are either in rebel hands or contested, controlled by loyalist Strategic Rocket Forces but cut off behind the lines in rebel territory. If he were to order a nuclear strike against the United States, it would be a sharply limited one."