Aboard Sentry Two, the radar operators watched a broad semicircle of blips converging on them. Each blip had "BGR" painted next to it, plus data on course, altitude, and speed. Each blip was a Tu-16 Badger bomber of Soviet Naval Aviation. There were twenty-four of them, inbound for Keflavik at a speed of six hundred knots. They had approached at low altitude to stay below the E-3A's radar horizon, and, once detected, were now climbing rapidly, two hundred miles away. This mission profile enabled the radar operators to classify them instantly as hostile. There were four Eagles on Combat Air Patrol, two of them with operating AWACS, but it was close to changeover point and the fighters were too low on fuel to race after the Badgers on afterburner. They were directed to head for the incoming Russian bombers at six hundred knots, and could not yet detect the Badgers on their own missile-targeting radars.

Sentry One off Cape Fontur reported something worse. Her blips were supersonic Tu-22M Backfires, coming in slowly enough to indicate that they were heavily loaded with external ordnance. The Eagles here also moved off to intercept. A hundred miles behind them, the two F-15s kept on point defense over Reykjavik had just been topped off from an orbiting tanker and were charging northeast at a thousand knots while the remainder of the squadron was even now leaving the ground. The radar picture from both AWACS aircraft was being transmitted by digital link to Keflavik's fighter-ops center so that ground personnel could monitor the action. Now that the fighters were rotating off the ground, the crews for every other aircraft at the air station worked frantically to ready their birds for flight.

They had practiced this task eight times in the past month. Some flight crews had been sleeping with their aircraft. Others were summoned from their quarters, no more than four hundred yards away. Those aircraft just back from patrol had their fuel tanks topped off, and were preflighted by the ground crews. Marine and Air Force guards not already at their posts rushed to them. It was just as well that the attack had come at this hour. There was only a handful of civilians about, and civilian air traffic was at its lowest. On the other hand, the men at Keflavik had been on double duty for a week now, and they were tired. Things which might have been done in five minutes now took seven or eight.

Edwards was back in his meteorological office, wearing his field jacket, flak jacket, and "fritz" style helmet. His emergency duty station-he could not think of his office as a "battle" station-was his assigned post. As if someone might need an especially deadly weather chart with which to attack an incoming bomber! The service had to have a plan for everything, Edwards knew. There had to be a plan. It didn't have to make sense. He went downstairs to Air-Ops.

"I got breakaway on Bandit Eight, one-two birds launched. The machine says they're AS-4s," a Sentry controller reported. The senior officer got on the radio for Keflavik.

MV JULIUS FUCIK

Twenty miles southwest of Keflavik, the "Doctor Lykes" was also a beehive of activity. As each Soviet bomber squadron launched its air-to-ground missiles, its commander transmitted a predetermined codeword that the Fucik copied. Her time had come.

"Rudder left," Captain Kherov ordered. "Bring his bow into the wind."

A full regiment of airborne infantry, many of them seasick from two weeks aboard the huge barge-carrier, was at work testing and loading weapons. The Fucik's augmented crew was stripping the falsework from the aftermost four "barges," revealing each in fact to be a Lebed-type assault hovercraft. The six-man crew of each removed the covers over the air intakes that led to the engines they had tended with loving care for a month. Satisfied, they waved to the craft commanders, who lit off the three engines in each of the aftermost pair.

The ship's first officer stood at his elevator control station aft. On a hand signal, an eighty-five-man infantry company plus a reinforced mortar team were loaded into each craft. Power was increased, the hovercraft lifted up on their air cushions and were winched aft. In another four minutes, the vehicles were resting on the barge-loading elevator that formed the stem of the Seabee vessel.

"Lower away," the first officer ordered. The winch operators lowered the elevator to the surface. The sea was choppy, and four-foot waves lapped at the Fucik's bifurcated stem. When the elevator was level with the sea, first one, then the other Lebed commander increased power and moved off. At once, the elevator returned to the topmost deck while the first pair of hovercraft circled their mothership. In five more minutes, the four assault craft moved off in box formation toward the Keflavik Peninsula.