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  The advantage the gidro-samofyot— “skimmer craft”—had, running with or without foil, was that not only did their high mobility mitigate against being bit, but because of their small size, they could weave through the wave clutter that blocked American radar. And their very presence as they attacked the Americans would cause the slower U.S. warships to expend much of their fuel and oblige the U.S. carrier to use up vital fuel in launching sorties to deal with the small, fast attack boats. Thus they would siphon off the U.S. battle group’s main aerial cover, including those planes that would otherwise have been designated “strikers” as a prelude to Freeman’s amphibious landings. One missile from any of these swarms of small, fast boats would be devastating against any of the modern-hulled American ships.

  In all Baku had designated 212 boats to the offshore Kuril defense; and 40 to patrol in the vital Kuril Strait. The latter was crucial for the Siberians’ egress out of the Sea of Japan into the Pacific. The remaining forty-eight fast attack boats were assigned to guard the other main egress passage, La Perouse Strait, between Japan and Sakhalin Island in the event that the Japanese defense force turned offensive under U.S. arm-twisting.

  But in the heavyweight division, Baku’s major ships were not those like the Kiev carrier, Murmansk, or the two nuclear-powered Kirov class cruisers which, unlike the small hydrofoils, would show up on the Americans’ radar, but his twenty-nine nuclear submarines — thirteen from Vladivostok, sixteen from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula — all converging south, most of them already lying in wait, “on station.” Three of these were the Zoltaya Nyba, or “golden fish,” because of their class — revolutionary Alfa IIs.

  The extraordinarily expensive liquid-metal heat exchange system of their reactor plants, superior to using the pressurized water system, allowed the 267-foot-long, 2900-ton Hunter/Killers, with a beam less than thirty-three feet and a titanium hull, to be the best HUKs in the world. At 45 knots submerged they were not only the fastest nuclear submarines in the world but the deepest-diving. The Alfa II ‘s crush depth was four thousand feet, its armament six twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedoes fired from forward tubes and SS-N-15s which, although classified as surface-to-surface missiles, were in effect twenty-one-inch diameter, four-thousand-pound torpedo-launch rocket/depth charges with a nuclear warhead having a range of twenty nautical miles. The depth charge, attached to the solid propellant rocket, and released just above target, was capable of killing an enemy sub to a depth of up to three thousand feet as opposed to the conventional depth charge warhead, which could damage an enemy sub only within a hundred feet of detonation.

  Faced with the oncoming American task force and the Americans’ four-thousand-pound SUBROC sub-killing missile, capable of a longer reach than the Alfa — thirty-three miles rather than twenty-four — the Alfa’s safety resided in its ability to be exceptionally silent, thanks to Toshiba Electronics having sold the KGB superior U.S. prop-tooling technology years before.

  The Alfa’s dilemma, however, faced by U.S. subs also, was that the sub’s greatest advantage, its silence, was immediately forfeited upon firing any of its torpedoes or missiles. Once an Alfa, or any of the other Russian subs, fired, the American task force, with superior sonar both aboard its surface ships and aboard its submarines, would know precisely where they were.

  Ranged against the Siberian sub packs were the American Sea Wolf lis, including Robert Brentwood’s USS Reagan, but as yet the two task forces, while within the 1,600-mile range of the Americans’ Tomahawk cruise missiles, were still beyond the navy’s “outer zone”—more than 420 miles from one another. This zone was the last in which satellite reconnaissance could be relied on, and no task force wanted to strike and betray their exact position. This was especially so while Burke was taking advantage of satellite surveillance, in particular to program his Tomahawk missiles, which needed precise target vector feed-in so long as the task force was over the horizon. And once any missile was fired it, too, showed up on the enemy’s radar and could be “back-tracked” on that radar to pinpoint the position of the ship that had fired the missile, thereby putting its entire battle group at risk.

  To head off the two Siberian cruisers coming down from the north, Admiral Burke, in the calming blue light of his TFCC— Tactical Flag Command Center — watched carefully the disposition of his forces coming in from the central battle group commanders to the battle watch station, or T-table. This monitored the large-screen situation display and automatic status board, and through it the old battle wagons Missouri and Wisconsin were ordered to steam due west to intercept the two Siberian cruisers as their first priority and only after — if the battleships survived — to resume course back north to shell the Kommandorskys, under whatever air cover could be provided out of Shemya Air Force Base at the tip of the Aleutians. Despite all the high tech, Burke knew that with everyone on radio silence this phase of the sea battle would essentially be the same as the battle for Midway: who would launch first?

  “Watch for the Tattletale!” he told his air commander. “Once he spots us, he’ll relay it to Petropavlovsk control, and all our aircraft must launch—’lock-on’—in unison. Then, gentlemen, we’ll quickly have incoming missiles — Soviet style, all at once. Kamikaze. And remember, from different directions.”

  Burke also knew that if his own combat patrol scouts, on radio silence but using passive radar, found the oncoming Siberians, the latter would launch their aircraft immediately and, in the aerial melee that would follow, there’d be no way friendly fire from the American task force would fail to take out some of his own men.

  “Tattletale yet?” Burke asked, looking up at the plastic/ crayon situation board, an old-fashioned backup should all computer power be lost during an attack. The Tattletale would be the lead Soviet ship, the scout, which, with air cover and on radio silence, would be well out in front of the main task force, probing. Once he’d made contact with the Americans he would abruptly turn about, heading at full speed back toward his own fleet. The ship chosen as the Tattletale was so designed that it could fire the overwhelming number of its missiles from stern launchers. This was not only to engage the enemy with maximum firepower while hightailing it but an insurance against being confused by the oncoming waves of Siberian planes for an advance American ship. Stern salvos at the Americans were the best insurance.

  * * *

  “Sir!” Out of the rain-riven darkness it was the voice of an operator manning one of the battle group’s E-2 Hawkeye advance warning planes, picking up a pulsating amber dot on its AN/APS 150-mile-range radar sweep.

  The five crewmen aboard the E-2 Hawkeye were the first to hear radio silence broken in a squall so fierce the copilot could hear the rain that was pelting the plane’s radar rotodome that extended above the fuselage, the contact between the slowly rotating dish and the rain producing halos of steam whipped away into the slipstream. It was near the end of the Hawkeye’s four-hour patrol when the RIO picked up the Tattletale on the infrared scan and almost immediately heard, “Master arm on! Centering the T… centering the T. Bogeys eight miles… eight miles. Centering the dot.” It was an F-14 Tomcat pilot talking to his RIO, the RIO’s voice rising above the fish fry of static, yelling excitedly, “Get the tone! Get the tone!”

  “Got it…I’ve got it… ” The Sparrow air-to-air missile was ready, its coffee-grinder growl loud in the pilot’s ear. “Centering the dot — Fox One…” The E-2 Hawkeye radio operator heard a rush and a few seconds later the RIO’s excited voice again. “Splash!”

  The bogey was down.

  “Good kill! Outstanding!”

  They had just shot down another Tomcat, returning from combat patrol in the outer zone. It shouldn’t have happened— there were “investigation friend or foe” procedures — but with so many aircraft flying and men on the razor’s edge, determined not to let the enemy penetrate their defenses, Murphy’s Law stalked the night.

  The two downed flyers were to be the first casualties of the impendi
ng battle of the Kuril Islands. Worse, though the radar operator aboard the E-2 Hawkeye picked up a chute signal descending, there was nothing they could do this far out.

  * * *

  Aboard the Tattletale, a Kashin class, 3,750-ton destroyer with four single rear-firing Styx launchers, no adjustment in heading was made. Whether or not the Americans had spotted any or all of their “owl screech,” “peel group,” and “basstilt” radars didn’t alter anything. The destroyer’s job was not to run at the first sign of combat but to stay on a steady course until the Americans were sighted. So important was her function that Baku had ordered her helicopter unarmed, jettisoning machine guns and belt feeds so as to accommodate a “Big Bulge” surface-search-and-targeting radar which, with its 255-mile range, was now locating the exact position of the U.S. task group.

  * * *

  The USS Acheson’s flag data display system, or FDDS, in the carrier’s tactical flag command center, began to “fuzz,” the Siberians clearly dropping chaff.

  “Your estimate of what’s behind the clutter, Mr. Lean?” Burke asked of his chief electronics warfare officer without taking his eyes for a moment from the blue-white situation display.

  “I’d estimate forgers, en masse.”

  “Fighter cover?”

  “Fulcrums. Top of the line — C’s.”

  “I concur. Man battle stations.”

  “Man battle stations!” repeated the officer of the deck, and now the rough-throated Klaxon could be heard throughout the giant ship, Prifly launching every aircraft it had, the flight deck a rough ballet of red and whitish blue exhausts, drifting steam from the four catapults, and huge shadows of ordnance men who, having pulled the safety pins from the hard-point bomb racks, were holding the pins and ribbons aloft so the pilot could see all the bombs were armed, ready to go.

  With radio linkups secured among assault forces, amphibious ships, those who would be the beach masters, choppers, naval gunfire support, and the forward air control officer, Douglas Freeman and Dick Norton waited aboard the USS Winston Davis.

  “How far are we from the Kurils, Dick?”

  “Fifteen, twenty hours, sir, depending on the weather.”

  “Worst part — the waiting,” said the general, his outline now dimly recognizable by Norton as they stood in the chilly, buffeting wind of the LHD’s flight deck. Norton’s face, had Freeman been able to see, was tinged a light green as the Davis thumped repeatedly against equally stubborn swells. “Give me the old terra firma any day,” said Norton. It was getting cold on deck, even in their thermal battle fatigues, but to go back into the closed, rolling ship — to be assailed by a noxious combination of cooking odors and recycled air — was more than Norton could contemplate. He jogged feebly to get bis blood warmer, but the motion, allied with the peculiar yaw and pitch of the big “flat mother,” as the marines called the assault ship, only made him more nauseated.

  “Well, Dick, Siberia’ll be all the terra firma you’ll want.” The general paused for a moment or two, listening to the heavy slushing of the ship’s wake, and nearby, though he could only see the phosphorescent tails of their wakes, the occasional sound of the other ships plowing through a heavy swell, throwing an incandescent spray of phytoplankton high above the bow that swept back in the darkness and disappeared. “Been sleeping well?” he asked Norton.

  “Not too much, sir. You?”

  “Yes, but I’m haunted, Dick, by dreams of Siberia. Maps of Siberia — all different scales. Recon photos as well. All keep crowding in on me. I feel—” His voice took on the tone of a father who, though reasonably sure he had done all he could to secure his children’s safety, was yet dissatisfied, even fearful— as much as Freeman could be — that he had unwittingly ignored some aspect in the planning. Left something out. “I feel as if there’s something missing…”

  “Siberians, I hope,” said Norton.

  Though he couldn’t see the general, Norton knew that Freeman either hadn’t heard him or was simply brushing his aide’s attempt at levity aside, too preoccupied by all the concerns that assail a commander in the hours before a landing. Amphibious assaults — well, they were right up there with pilots on night carrier landings when it came to the number of things that could go wrong. He was chagrined to remember how his own designation of Ratmanov Island as “Rat,” in an effort to raise morale, had also been responsible for a logistics officer in San Diego having sent several Hercules-hauled palettes of ammunition to the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain instead of Alaska.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about the dreams, General,” said Norton.”Rubbish heap for nonsense, my dad used to say.”

  “Did he?” asked the general.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, Norton, your father was wrong. You ignore the subconscious at your peril. Remember Patton. He had Third Army poised for the final thrust into Eastern Europe, and he knew the Krauts were on their knees. Intelligence didn’t — but Patton knew. You remember why?”

  All Norton could think of was being stupid enough to have had a cup of coffee before coming on deck, wondering about his chances of keeping it down.

  “The carts!” said Freeman. “Dream was full of goddamned carts.”

  Norton could sense the tension in Freeman’s tone then heard the general’s field holster bumping the rail. “Nazis were out of gas, Dick. They were using carts to take away their wounded. The dream told him, Dick. It was in the dream.”

  Norton heard Freeman’s radio crackle. The general was wanted on the bridge.

  As Freeman headed through the darkness toward the bridge he heard a roaring so powerful he could feel its vibration. Then he saw fiery tail of a missile, quickly followed by another, spewing up from one of the Ticonderogas’ fifty-six cell-box launchers, in seven rows of eight directly forward of the guided-missile cruiser’s bridge. Both he and Norton were surprised by just how close the other ships in the carrier’s screen were. They watched the bright yellow V of the gas-propelled blast-offs fading into a side-venting column of white flame that soon turned to a dry-ice-like fog that covered the cruiser’s deck. Now another missile erupted from the deck, forming the third arc of the triple launch, the arcs shooting heavenward, the heat momentarily creating the illusion of a summer wind. The naval battle that would last for six hours was already joined as Freeman reached the bridge of the Winston Davis.

  Momentarily blinded by the dim red light of the ship’s bridge, he was unable for an instant to pick up the radar relay trace of the Ticonderoga’s three eighty-mile Mk 41 missiles whose one-thousand-pound warheads were now streaking across the night sky like fiery comets toward the Siberian task force over fifty miles away. Six minutes later as the yellow arrowhead on the Ticonderoga’s Aegis screen and its target advanced toward one another on the middle vector of the triangular cone, the calm, unemotional voice of the Ticonderoga’s EWO announced, “Aegis evaluates kill.”

  In response the Ottichnyy, a Sovremennyy class guided-missile destroyer, fired two solid-fuel SS-N-22, Mach 2.5 antiship missiles, killing range sixty-five miles. Launched from the Otlichnyy’s starboard quad, the missiles were more than twice as fast as the American Standard Missile salvos but were nevertheless taken out, intercepted by two five-hundred-pound-warhead Harpoons in an orange slash that could be seen by the attacking Ticonderoga’s starboard lookout and by the only radar still operational on the sinking Siberian ship — the Top Steer/Top Plate combination radar mesh atop the forward mast.

  One American missile hit the destroyer between the bridge and well decks, and the Siberians’ thirty-millimeter Gatling guns completely disappeared, a smoking crater in their place. The other U.S. Standard struck the Otlichnyy’s port side midships just aft of the front dome radars, immediately knocking out most circuits and creating a fire that pinpointed the Siberian fleet’s position for the American pilots about to engage a mass of Yak-38 Forger V/STOL fighter bombers. Each of the Forger A’s were carrying 3,000 pounds of ordnance on four underwing hard points,
including air-to-air Aphid missiles and 2,600-pound Kerry air-to-surface-7 missiles, as well as the much lighter, 550-pound, ten-mile-range AS-14.

  But there was never any doubt of the outcome in the air, for even with over sixty Forgers plotted by the Acheson swarming toward the American task force, the F-14 pilots alone knew they would “eat them alive.” The Tomcats, at Mach 2.34, were twice as fast, their service ceiling fifty thousand feet, a good ten thousand higher than what the Forgers could pull. And as if this wasn’t enough, whereas the Forgers had a 150-mile-lo-lo-lo radius with maximum weapon load, the Tomcats’ 1500-mile range gave the American fighters that much extra time in the air, a crucial element in the titanic battle between the carriers. But the Siberians, Admiral Burke knew, were not so naive as to believe for a second that they would all permeate the American defenses. It was the Leninist strategy again: if only ten Forgers got through, they would play havoc with the American task force — their targets not the American warships but the amphibious transports. All the American naval firepower in the world could not make a landing without live marines.