In pitch darkness, flying low over the sea six hundred miles southeast of Mednyy Island, the smaller of the two windswept Komandorskiyes, or Commander Islands, Col. Sergei Marchenko’s attack wing of fourteen MiG-27 Flogger Ds, with three drop tanks apiece, were now turning due south toward Adak Island seventy miles away. With a jagged, rugged coastline and topography, the U.S. island, one of the Aleutians’ chain of forty-six volcanoes, looked large enough on the map, but in reality it was at no point more than twenty miles wide. Marchenko was glad they were on satellite navigation. At their attack speed, it wouldn’t take more than two minutes for the entire wing to pass over the island.
With almost half their fuel for the 1,553-mile round trip gone, they would have approximately five minutes over Adak Naval Station from the initial aiming point of the thirty-six-hundred-foot-high Mount Moffett. If all went well, they would drop over ninety-two thousand pounds of iron and laser-guided bombs on the remote American submarine base. A half hour later, Adak radar out, one thousand SPETS paratroopers, already in the air aboard seven Candid transports from both Mednyy and Beringa in the Komandorskiyes, would be chuted into the remains of Adak to take over the bomb-gutted submarine listening and provisioning base that threatened the entire Soviet east flank.
It would be strictly hit-and-run, with high losses expected. And though Sergei Marchenko’s wing would not run from a fight, the orders from STAVKA via Khabarovsk command were very specific. No aircraft were to be sacrificed in dogfights with either the advance U.S. carrier screen fighters or the relatively few American fighters on Adak. Dogfights usually meant going to afterburner, and fuel suddenly sucked up at twenty times the normal rate, leaving the Floggers with insufficient fuel to make the return journey.
To lend weight to STAVKA’s order, Sergei Marchenko, during engine start-up on Mednyy strip, had stressed that even if the enemy carrier Salt Lake City picked up the MiGs’ departure from the Komandorskiyes on satellite, the range to and from the American carrier meant that the danger of running low on fuel would be as much a problem for the Americans from the carrier battle group as it was for Marchenko’s wing. Though the American jets had greater ranges than their Soviet counterparts, the Americans had farther to come and could afford only a very short time over the Aleutians. This was particularly so given the fact that the Americans would most likely be drawn away from Adak by the feint of nine shorter-range but faster MiG Fishbeds now approaching Shemya four hundred miles west of Adak.
Hopefully all the enemy fighters between Adak and Shemya would be drawn in, the Americans logically assuming that as the prelude to any Soviet invasion of the Aleutians, the first Soviet target would be the massive early-warning radar arrays on Shemya, which was only 350 miles from the Kamchatka Peninsula ICBM sites.
Four hundred miles east of Adak, one of the huge phased radar arrays on Shemya, looking like some great wedge of black cheese in the night, was picking up six surface vessels. Either big Japanese trawlers or possible hostiles, they were bearing 293 at a distance of 150 miles. Coming in behind them at five hundred feet were nine blips traveling at Mach 1.05. Undoubtedly fighters. To cover a possible invasion force? wondered Shemya’s CO.
There were other unidentified aircraft Shemya had been tracking, but they had been much slower, possibly a long-range reconnaissance sub-hunting force. In any case, they had now passed into Adak’s radar envelope well to the east. The CO quickly turned his attention back to the faster blips and the six ships. If it was an invasion force, it was a small one. On the other hand, if the ships were chopper and VTOL — vertical takeoff and landing — fighter carriers, it would constitute a major fleet attack.
The commanding officer, or “Gatekeeper,” as he was known because of Shemya’s strategic importance, was taking no chances. He ordered eight F-4 Phantoms aloft to intercept the suspected hostiles, withholding his fourteen much faster swing-wing F-111Fs in the event of other attacks that might be coming in on the deck, successfully evading his radar to the north, south, and west of him.
The thing that puzzled CO Shemya most was that if the Soviets were going to try to take out Shemya’s early-warning capability, why hadn’t they used an attacking force of their long-range supersonic Blackjack swing-wing bombers? The duty officer, however, turned to the vast, triangular area of ocean covered by Shemya in the west, Adak four hundred miles to the east, and the Salt Lake City carrier force nine hundred miles south. He pointed out that it wasn’t enough merely to knock out the radar station on Shemya; you had to occupy it and make sure it stayed that way, otherwise the U.S. Navy would immediately send in their Seabees to repair the damage. This convinced the CO that his first hunch was right, that the six blips and accompanying fighters were an initial invasion force coming at him, to be followed by many more once, and if, the base was secured. He ordered “engine start” for the fourteen F-111Fs carrying the combinations of iron bombs and TV-guided Maverick air-to-surface missiles.
In fact, the commanding officer was half-right about the Soviets using Blackjack bombers. Six of them, from the Kurile Islands base south of Kamchatka Peninsula, each replete with over thirty-five thousand pounds of bombs, the most sophisticated electronics in the Soviet Air Force, and with a range of over eight thousand miles, were now approaching the Salt Lake City battle group far to the south of the Aleutians. Their crews were in high spirits after having so badly mauled the Japanese “defense fleet” the day before and knowing that over half the Salt Lake City’s fighter screen was well away from them, flying combat patrols to cover possible attacks on Shemya.