In Alaska, high above the Yankee River’s winding ribbon of gray ice that cut through the predawn darkness of the Seward Peninsula’s mountains, the four crewmen aboard the Rockwell B-1B, its four thirty-thousand-pound GE-F 102 turbofans on afterburner, could see the two white dots of the Diomedes jutting up westward through the white ice pack as the bomber rose to “stand off” position.
In a direct line eighty miles from Big Diomede, the B-1’s wings were now fully extended for greater stability as it fired off ten million dollars in the form of eight SRAM AGM-69Bs— short range attack missiles — each with a one hundred mile range. They streaked in eight white contrails from the bomber’s “revolver chamber” rotary launcher. The B-1’s EWO ignored the missiles the moment the launch was over, alert now only to the Eaton defensive avionics system; another crewman kept a close eye on the Singer-Kearfott inertial navigation system. The sound of the earsplitting explosions as the three-thousand-pound warheads hit Big Diomede’s eastern cliffs was heard almost instantaneously in Inalik village on Little Diomede, followed seconds later by the shock wave. The latter started loose ice and rock falling; it crashed a quarter mile north of the village in a dirty spill of unearthed boulders and rubble that spilled onto the ice-fringed shore. The multiple cracks on the thick ice floes sounded to the villagers like the splitting noise of stiff sealskins drying in the bitterly cold wind.
Meanwhile the commander of Little Diomede’s Patriots was primarily concerned about possible Soviet air strikes against his hydraulic-legged canisters, which for quick action against any incoming missiles bound for Alaska needed to be on the surface and ready to go. So far he could only conclude that the Soviet MiGs were not being used against Little Diomede because they were being saved to deter any possible American invasion force across the fifty-two-mile-wide strait, a force that Big Diomede’s radar would give the Siberians ample warning of.
Most depressing of all to the Patriot commander this minute was the information that he reluctantly had to convey to the general in charge of Alaskan Air Command. Although the eight SRAMs had all hit Big Diomede, sending boulder-size ice and rock fragments flying over a thousand feet into the air before they rained down on the ice floes — a few hitting Little Diomede — there was no apparent “in depth” damage done to the Siberians’ radar-guided ZSU-23s. For while the enemy cliff face, as seen through his infrared goggles, — was badly scarred — the SRAMs’ explosions had sheared off great sheets of ice that fell crashing down onto the frozen strait over sixteen hundred feet below — the impact of the SRAMs had done nothing to silence the deeply revetted missile batteries.
The enormous and foreboding cliffs of Big Diomede were impervious, it seemed, to any attack but that of an atomic bomb, a course of action that once initiated would set off a nuclear chain that would destroy both sides. For the young captain on Little Diomede in charge of the Patriot defense unit, Big Diomede had grown in menace over the preceding months. Its summit was often obscured by clouds so sharply, it was as if someone had drawn a line with a rule along its five-mile length. But this morning, as changing pressure ridges from the ice reflected the pale winter sun, and the previously downed American aircraft wreckage flickered harmlessly here and there at its base, the enemy island seemed more brooding and threatening than ever.