Cauldron

CHAPTER 26 Time on Target

Four delta-winged Mirage 2000s screamed north over the rolling, windswept Lambourn Downs, flying so low they nearly merged with the shadows rippling over long, green grass. Below them, strings of racehorses out for early morning schooling panicked, broke free from their stable lads, and scattered in a frenzied gallop — spraying across the barren landscape like pellets from a shotgun.

The pilot of the lead Mirage eased back on his stick, pulling his jet up as the ground ahead rose steadily toward a line of low chalk hills stretching east and west. One hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred.

Abruptly the landscape dropped away below them, falling into a wide, settled valley dotted with small villages and fields — the Vale of the White Horse.

As he dove for the valley floor, a series of low, bass beeps sounded again in the lead pilot’s headphones. The sounds signaled an airborne search radar hunting for them. Either the Americans or the British had an AWACS plane orbiting over southern England. He checked the radar signal strength. High. Too high. They’d been detected.

He shook his head. The AWACS was too late. The four French warplanes were just twenty kilometers and ninety seconds from their target. He rocked the Mirage from side to side as a signal to the others and accelerated.

CNN’s viewers were being treated to live pictures of a massive military operation in progress. Huge U.S. Air Force C-5As, looking more like sections of gigantic pipeline than anything flyable, lumbered over the concrete tarmac. In the distance, other transports, C-141s and C-17s with their ramps extended, loaded trucks, missile launchers, and pallet after pallet of supplies. More colorful civilian airliners were intermixed with the green-painted military planes, pressed into service to carry troops. Long files of infantrymen shuffled forward to board the passenger aircraft, bowed down under rucksacks, weapons, and gear weighing up to 120 pounds.

With its three-thousand-meter long main runway, the RAF base at Brize Norton was an important center for the airlift pouring men, equipment, and supplies into Poland.

The reporter’s khaki pants, shirt, and bulky flak jacket gave him a martial air that fitted his surroundings. He had to shout into his mike to make himself heard over howling jet engines and rumbling machinery. “The British 1st Armored is only one of — ”

A sudden, high-pitched wail stopped him in midsentence, rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

“What’s that noise?” Alarm flashed across the reporter’s face as he recognized the base air raid siren. Still looking into the camera, he stammered, “Is this some kind of drill?” He turned to his left and repeated the question.

The view shifted, showing an ashen-faced RAF lieutenant motioning frantically toward the ground. “Take cover! Take cover!”

Explosions drowned out the siren.

The camera image jarred, then tumbled to lie on its side, showing a cluster of buildings — aircraft hangars and living quarters. A mike picked up shocked voices in the background. “Are you all right?… Jesus, look at that! Where’s the camera?”

The image spun and shook, then steadied on a transformed scene. A pall of smoke hung over the flight line, fed by masses of flames below it. The fires dwarfed everything in sight — solid sheets of flame that towered over the trucks and men scrambling to control them.

Shaking again, the CNN cameraman panned left, then right, unable to capture the scope of this disaster in a single frame. The long, ordered lines of soldiers were gone, replaced by screaming clumps of wounded men and silent heaps of those who were dead. Secondary explosions threw mangled pieces of aircraft into the air as balls of orange-red flame mushroomed in the mass of wreckage.

The German submarine commanded by Captain Theodor Ritter lay bottomed on the Thames Estuary, practically hugging an old wreck left over from the last war. She was just forty kilometers east of London.

German submarines have never had names. This one was no exception. She was simply called U-32, the “U” standing for Unterseeboot, undersea boat. She was small, only one-fifth the size of a Los Angeles-class nuclear sub. Unlike America’s SSNs, Germany’s U-boats didn’t need a cruising range measured in tens of thousands of miles. They were built for coastal operations, close to their home ports.

As a Type 212 boat, U-32 was also brand-new, and new technology gave her an edge over the enemy. Instead of a large, expensive nuclear reactor, she carried an “air-independent” propulsion plant. When their electric batteries ran low, older conventional submarines had to snorkel — drawing air from the surface for their diesel engines. But snorkeling makes noise, and making noise during wartime is a sure and certain way for a submarine to get itself killed.

U-32 and the other boats in her class didn’t have to snorkel. Instead, a tank of liquid oxygen supplied an advanced engine, which replaced the diesel. That meant they could charge their batteries while submerged, and then proceed silently on electric motors. The combination of ultraquiet propulsion, a small, nonmagnetic hull shaped to help scatter sonar echoes, and a first-rate sonar and fire control system made U-32 and her sisters deadly opponents.

Slipping this far through the Combined Forces ASW patrols had been difficult, but the German sub wasn’t looking for a fight.

U-32’s submerged mobility, almost as good as a nuclear boat’s, had let her sidestep or backtrack if she found herself near a prowling adversary. Her skipper and crew knew there would be time to deal with isolated enemy destroyers or frigates on the way out.

Besides, the war was almost three weeks old now. Patterns had begun to emerge in the way the Americans and British patrolled — patterns that could be exploited.

So now U-32 lay motionless in the mud. With her motors and even her air recirculation pumps shut down, she would be almost impossible to hear on passive sonar. Even normal active sonars couldn’t find her this close to the bottom — the mud and sediments blurred sound waves bouncing off it.

But the Royal Navy was used to operating in shallow water. Many of its ships carried special high-frequency sonars that could provide almost picture-quality images of whatever lay on the bottom.

The German submarine was relying on three things to safeguard her from such sonars. First, her small size — barely one thousand tons surfaced — and minimal sonar cross section. Second, her anechoic coating and special hull design should help absorb and scatter enemy sonar pulses. Last, and most important of all, U-32 lay close beside the old wreck, almost hull-to-hull — hiding in the sonar and magnetic shadow cast by the larger vessel.

Ritter and his crew resigned themselves to a long stay on the bottom, breathing air that would grow fouler as the hours passed. Like a spider in its web, the U-32 lay in wait for her prey.

HMS Brecon led the outbound convoy heading for Gdansk. Built with a glass-reinforced plastic hull, and equipped with a pair of unmanned submersibles and a high-frequency sonar, the Hunt-class minehunter had proven her worth after the Falklands war by sweeping Argentine minefields laid off Port Stanley.

Now she plodded down the estuary at a sedate ten knots, sweeping back and forth. Behind her came two Type 22-class frigates, HMS Chatham and HMS London.

Three merchant ships followed the warships. A third frigate, HMS Argyll, a Type 23, brought up the rear.

Every warship was at action stations, expecting trouble. The three merchant ships, one bulk freighter and two container ships, held the better part of a British armored regiment, along with spare parts and ammunition.

U-32’s crew, lazing at their own duty stations, sat up as the first chirp of the enemy’s sonar beams came over the attack center speaker.

Ritter cocked his head toward the ceiling, listening as the British ships steaming overhead came closer.

The high-frequency chirping swelled, backed by the low, dull thrum of the minehunter’s engines. New sounds over the speaker signaled another British ship moving in behind the first.

Chatham’s active sonar made a deeper, duller noise than Brecon’s set.

More crewmen tensed as the sounds grew steadily louder. In theory, they were reasonably safe from detection. But theory seemed a poor substitute for certainty when the sonar pulses lashing the U-32 could be heard pinging through the hull itself.

Aboard Brecon, the senior petty officer manning the high-frequency sonar watched his screen carefully. He knew these waters well. The wreck, a coastal freighter sunk by Stukas in 1940, was a familiar landmark on his charts. He glanced at the digital clock above his display. They were right on time.

The wreck appeared, crawling down the screen as Brecon steamed toward it. He studied the bottom area around the sunken freighter closely. Nothing. Just the usual jumble of green-white shapes. Anything shaped like a submarine should have stood out clearly.

U-32’s sensitive sonar gear picked up machinery sounds emanating from the oncoming convoy and fed them to her fire control computers. By comparing the noises against prerecorded data sets, the computers were able to rapidly classify each ship. As always, information obtained during peacetime exercises was proving useful in war.

Ritter hovered over the computer display, watching the results of this automated search appear. Moving blips indicated seven ships sailing east in line, centered in the channel. His fingers drummed against the console. The three warships were tempting targets, but his instructions were clear. The merchantmen were his first priority.

“Prepare for an attack,” he ordered. “Two torpedoes at the lead merchant, three each at the other two.”

Every man in the boat held his breath as the ships drew nearer. The swishing roar of the enemy minehunter’s screws passed overhead and began to fade.

Ritter kept his eyes on the display, watching the six ships behind Brecon.

Bearing, still steady. Range, decreasing. He looked up at his diving officer. “Lift off.”

Valves opened, and a shot of compressed air entered U-32’s ballast tanks, changing her buoyancy from slightly negative to slightly positive. She lifted smoothly off the bottom. At the same time, her silent propellers spun up slowly, giving the submarine bare steerageway.

Once depth and speed were stabilized, the diving officer nodded silently to Ritter. They were in position.

The captain turned to the fire control officer. “Ready?”

“Solutions checked and valid.”

Ritter wrapped one hand around an overhead support and took a deep breath. Now. “Shoot!”

One after another, eight Seal 3 torpedoes, pushed out of their tubes by a pulse of water, came to life and sped toward their targets. Dual-core wires connected each torpedo to the U-32 and her fire control computer. These wires carried guidance commands from the sub to its weapons. They also allowed the sub to see everything its torpedoes saw.

With so many propellers thrashing the water, the British warships had failed to hear the German submarine as she vented her tanks and came off the bottom. But the high-pitched screw noises made by eight torpedoes screaming in at thirty-five knots were unmistakable.

In seconds, sonar plots aboard all three frigates showed their bearing and probable origin point. But it was too late.

The first torpedoes were already reaching their targets.

Van Dyck, a bulk freighter of twenty thousand tons deadweight, took one torpedo in the bow and another in the engine room. Although each Seal 3 carried a quarter ton of PBX, the vessel was only crippled, not destroyed. Within seconds she was practically dead in the water, listing to starboard. She would have to be towed back for repairs in Great Britain’s already overtaxed shipyards.

Three torpedoes slammed into Falmount Bay, a container ship of the same size. Without decoys, at slow speed, the large ship was an easy target. Three plumes of yellow-stained water and smoke fountained high into the air. Falmount Bay broke in half and sank.

Behind her, only two of three incoming Seals plowed into the container ship St. Louis.

The third missed and ran up the estuary until it ran out of fuel and drifted harmlessly into the mud. But she was smaller than the others and carried a flammable cargo. Internal explosions tore her apart in minutes — sending a huge plume of smoke high into the atmosphere.

Chatham and London raced for the old wreck, sonars blasting, pounding the estuary in a frenzied search. Argyll, in the rear, turned to assist the stricken Van Dyck. She also launched one of her two Westland Lynx helicopters to assist in the hunt.

Ritter didn’t waste time patting backs. Celebrating could come later — once he and his crew were safely back in port. “All ahead flank!”

U-32 was not silent now. Her only hope of escape lay in speed, and she had a lot of it in reserve — twenty-three knots submerged. She darted out from the wreck, right under Chatham as it charged in. That meant risking an over-the-side shot by the British ship’s triple torpedo mounts, but the closing speeds were so high that the frigate didn’t get a solid fix on her until it was too late.

The German sub skipper divided his attention between the sonar display and the plot. Every minute spent at full speed cost him five hours’ worth of battery charge. Like all conventional submarine captains, he had to constantly weigh the advantages of speed with the risks of running out of power.

“All ahead two-thirds.”

Ritter’s escape-and-evasion plan was simplicity itself. If he could break contact with these three warships, the rest of the estuary was clear all the way out into the North Sea. He had the endurance at medium speed to reach open water, where the British would have a very hard time finding him.

Argyll’s helicopter was his undoing. The submarine’s high-speed burst, although only a minute long, created a wake in the shallow water — a wide vee shape streaming away from the fleeing U-boat. Even as U-32 slowed, the Lynx flashed over Chatham at masthead height and dropped two depth charges just in front of the point of the vee.

The depth charges splashed into the water, sank rapidly, and detonated a fraction of a second later. One was just ten meters away from the German submarine’s hull, the other only five. Caught by two bubble pulses of explosive shock and gas,

U-32 tumbled and shook. The twin shocks tore equipment loose from its mountings, bounced the crew off the bulkheads, and even deformed the pressure hull. She lost half her batteries and her AIP engine shut down — badly damaged. Even her fire control system went dead in a shower of sparks and fused circuit boards.

Chatham, cued by the hovering Lynx, heeled over — coming round in a tight, high-speed turn to attack the crippled German submarine. Her active sonar found and fixed U-32 at almost point-blank range. A Stingray torpedo plunged into the water.

Inside U-32, the crew worked desperately to restore her propulsion and her fire control systems. But the British frigate’s sonar pulses were already deafening and growing louder.

Screee.

Panicked faces turned aft, toward the new noise in the water.

“Torpedo! Bearing two four five!” The sonarman’s shouted report was redundant.

Ritter ran his eyes over the plot one last time and then looked at his haggard men. They were finished.

U-32’s damage was too great, and the British ships were too close. There were only twenty-three men in U-32’s crew, but they were as close as brothers. He would save what he could by surrendering. “Blow all tanks! Emergency surface!”

Chatham’s Stingray barely had time to steady up before its active sonar found U-32. The submarine, unable to dodge, lay right in its path.

The British torpedo slammed into the U-32 just as her conning tower broke the surface. The Stingray’s shaped-charge warhead, intended to kill much larger vessels, hit aft and exploded, obliterating the sub’s engineering compartment. With her hull ripped open, U-32’s ballast tanks could not keep her afloat. Only five of her crew, all sailors stationed in the conning tower, managed to scramble out before she slid downward in a maelstrom of bubbling foam, oil, and wreckage — joining her victims at the bottom of the estuary.

In a reluctant concession to the war raging across the Channel, the soldiers stationed around London’s famous public buildings and government offices wore combat gear instead of their colorful, full dress uniforms. Bearskin caps and scarlet coats had given way to Kevlar helmets and camouflaged body armor.

Admiral Jack Ward strode out into the Defense Ministry’s inner courtyard between sentries who snapped to attention. Lieutenant Harada, his flag secretary, followed right behind. Their ride out to Heathrow, a tiny British Army Air Corps Gazelle helicopter, sat on the pavement with its rotor already slowly turning. A U.S. Navy Grumman COD — carrier onboard delivery plane — was waiting on the tarmac at the airport, ready to take them back to sea.

He bent low to clear the Gazelle’s rotor blades and hauled himself inside, taking a seat on a narrow folding bench behind its two crewmen. Harada squeezed in beside him and pulled the helicopter’s side door shut.

The admiral leaned forward to speak to the warrant officer piloting the helo. “Anytime you’re ready, mister.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll just be half a tic.” The sandy-haired warrant officer grinned round at him. “We’re only waiting for our clearance from those Nervous Nellies in Air Defense Command. Right, Tony?”

His copilot looked up from flicking switches and nodded. “The bloody Frogs and Jerries are at it again, Admiral. Over Southampton this time. It’s a right mess, they say.”

Ward grimaced and sat back impatiently. He couldn’t afford to get stuck ashore under enemy air attack — not now. Events were moving too fast.

The sudden surge in French and German attacks against British airfields and harbors had come as a very unpleasant, though not wholly unexpected, development. Stymied in every attempt to sink Ward’s juggernauts, his three carrier battle groups, the EurCon high command had apparently decided to concentrate their air and naval resources against the weakest link in the sea line of communications to Poland — the United Kingdom itself.

Cost-cutting and the end of the cold war had slowed the U.K.’s efforts to rebuild its long-neglected air defenses. The RAF’s E-3 Sentries, a few, overworked squadrons of Tornado interceptors, and Patriot missile batteries could knock down some of the attacking aircraft, but they couldn’t stop every incoming raid — not when EurCon planes based in France were only minutes’ flying time from targets in southern England. There were too many potential targets and too few fighters and SAM batteries available to protect them.

As a result, Ward knew, EurCon’s first attacks had been disturbingly effective. The Mirage raid on Brize Norton had killed nearly one hundred soldiers and airmen. Hundreds more were wounded, many seriously. Later raids on other bases had inflicted similar losses. The initial enemy air and submarine attacks had also destroyed a number of transport planes and cargo ships that were worth their weight in gold.

EurCon’s leaders must be hoping that expanding the war to British soil would throw the United States and its allies off balance. Certainly the losses they’d inflicted would slow the movement of British troops to Poland. And they probably hoped the Combined Forces air commanders would strengthen the U.K.’s defenses by diverting some of the American F-15 and F-16 squadrons now bombing installations inside France and Germany.

Of course, by demonstrating just how vulnerable the United Kingdom was to any enemy attack, the EurCon raids had helped spur Washington and London into approving drastic retaliatory and preemptive measures. The men in both Paris and Berlin were about to relearn the law of unintended consequences, Ward thought dourly.

He had been summoned to London from midocean late the night before — forced to endure a bumpy, low-altitude COD flight to arrive in time for this morning’s meeting hosted by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Although it had cost him a badly needed night’s sleep, a stiff neck, and a bruised backside, the show had proved well worth the price of admission.

For all his three stars, the admiral had soon realized he was a small fry in a very select group. Aside from a number of very silent junior officers present as aides, the active participants had included Britain’s Prime Minister, the heads of the British Army, the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations, and the U.S. Air Force general who served as vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The Prime Minister’s first words had ended any idle speculation that they were there for a simple update or get-acquainted meeting. “I’ve just come from a secure-line conference call with the President and the Norwegian Prime Minister, gentlemen. You now have a new mission — one you will accord an equal priority with our resupply and reinforcement operations for Poland. Beginning immediately, you will exert every effort to eliminate the French tactical and strategic nuclear arsenal.”

Ward could still remember the sudden, startled murmur that had greeted the Prime Minister’s soft-spoken, matter-of-fact announcement. Going after French nukes was a serious upping of the ante. Despite the warning order he’d received from Washington indicating that such a move might be in the works, he’d never actually expected the politicians to show enough guts.

“So far, thank God, there is no indication that our enemies intend to use nuclear weapons against the United Kingdom or Norway itself, but their willingness to use them at all is rather unsettling.”

Ward shook his head, still bemused by the Prime Minister’s classic British understatement. Seeing that hideously beautiful fireball blossom near his ships had been daunting enough, The prospect of more nuclear weapons going off, this time over cities and towns, was too horrible to contemplate.

“If we win this war, and we shall do our utmost to win, Paris could well find itself with its back against a wall,” the Prime Minister had continued. “We cannot predict the actions of desperate men. Accordingly, while we know this will take substantial resources, it is vital that our national territories be protected against a last-ditch nuclear strike.”

Some of the steps the Prime Minister detailed were familiar to Ward. After all, he’d helped plan them. Other precautionary measures raised hairs on the back of his neck. Commanders aboard several of America’s Ohio-class SSBNs had been ordered to retarget their missiles — aiming them at France and, to a lesser extent, at Germany. French nuclear-capable forces were the primary targets, along with the command centers of both countries’ armed forces.

The Royal Navy’s own SSBNs were engaged in the same doomsday process. More ominously still, the RAF’s tactical nuclear weapons were being dispersed from its heavily guarded stockpiles to operational bases — ready for immediate use if need be. Selected American subs and surface ships were being rearmed with nuclear land attack Tomahawk cruise missiles and deployed into firing positions off the French coastline.

Although the Combined Forces would not initiate the use of nuclear weapons against populated areas, they were absolutely determined to make the French realize who would win and who would lose if the gloves came off.

The Gazelle pilot’s voice broke in on his grim thoughts. “Understood, Lionheart. Safe corridor is direct to Heathrow. Two six two degrees at five hundred feet.” He twisted around in his seat. “Buckle up if you please, gents. We’re on our way.”

“That was your okay?” Ward asked, complying with the tactfully disguised order.

The pilot nodded. “ADC reports the Frogs are outbound from Southampton. Our assigned flight path is clear.”

Lieutenant Harada snapped his own seat belt and shoulder harness in place. “What happens if we stray outside that corridor?”

The sandy-haired warrant officer grinned abruptly. “Then we’re fair game for any trigger-happy bugger with a gun or missile.” He faced front again and pulled up on the collective while rotating the throttle to full power.

The Gazelle lifted off in a shaking, teeth-rattling roar, sliding slowly toward the far end of the ministry’s courtyard as it climbed. Five hundred feet above the ground it spun left and dipped its nose slightly, transitioning to forward flight.

Ward stared down out the side window, fascinated by this close-up view of London from low altitude. It had still been dark when they’d arrived early this morning. Now he could see the vast city stretching out on all sides — mile after mile of public buildings, residences, and office blocks, some elegant and some drab, tall church spires, and lush, green parks.

They flew low over the landscaped splendor of St. James’s Park and past the imposing walls of Buckingham Palace. Heads on the streets below turned upward in alarm. Londoners had long-held memories of danger from the skies, and the steady stream of emergency BBC news bulletins since dawn had rekindled those memories.

Sirens howled, off in the distance at first and then closer in — audible even over the Gazelle’s clattering roar.

“Shit.” The pilot spun the helicopter right and dove, picking up speed. A broad expanse of trees, grass, and paths opened up before them. Sunlight glinted off a mile-long lake, Hyde Park’s Serpentine.

Ward and Harada heard his shouted explanation over their intercom earphones. “ADC just set Warning Red! There’s another raid inbound — heading for London this time. I’ve been ordered to set down and set down fast. When I say go, both of you hop out and run like hell for the nearest cover!”

The Gazelle swooped low over the park and flared out near a stand of trees. Its landing skids bounced lightly once and then settled firmly onto the ground. New-mown grass whirled above the cockpit, caught in the rotor wash.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Harada flipped open his seat belt and slammed the helicopter’s side door open. He dropped outside, followed a second later by Ward. Air currents whipped by the whirring rotor blades tugged and tore at their uniforms.

Crouched low to clear the rotor, both Americans raced for the trees — a clump of tall, spreading oaks. This far away from the helicopter, they could hear the air raid sirens still wailing across the city.

As he ran, Ward eyed the buildings visible to the north and south, weighing their chances of reaching a shelter in time. Then he shook his head. Hyde Park was nearly a thousand yards across at this point, and they’d come down almost smack-dab in the middle. They would have to ride out whatever was coming right here.

Once they had the Gazelle’s engine shut down, the two British crewmen scrambled out of the cockpit themselves and sprinted across the open ground, heading for the same grove. The helicopter stood deserted behind them with its doors wide open.

Ward slid to a stop beside one of the oaks and dropped prone, breathing hard. The others joined him just in time.

Bright lights streaked into the sky, moving south and east at incredible speed — missiles rising on columns of white smoke and fire. Several British-manned Patriot batteries were deployed near key installations around London. Now they were firing at attackers who were still well beyond visual range.

Seconds passed. Ward caught one blinding flash low on the southern horizon. Then nothing.

Whummp. Whummp. Whummp.

A series of muffled explosions rumbled across the park. More smoke, black this time, stained the sky to the east beyond the city center’s soaring modern office towers.

The helicopter’s copilot shaded his eyes against the sun, studying the billowing cloud. “That’s oil burning. The bastards must be hitting the docks.”

They nodded. The freighters and oil tankers tied up along the Thames were prime targets. They were also sitting ducks.

Ward squinted, trying to estimate the damage inflicted by the lightning-fast French air raid. One hell of a lot of smoke, he thought. More than one ship must be on fire downriver. He tried to remember if there were petroleum storage tanks near the docks. Something moved on the edge of his vision, silhouetted against the rising pall — a tiny dot growing larger very fast.

“There!” He pointed.

An arrowhead shape screamed overhead, barely over the treetops but climbing steeply as it turned. The four men on the ground caught just a split-second glimpse of a delta-shaped wing, gray and light blue camouflage paint, and tricolor roundels on the fuselage. It was a Mirage exiting the battle area!

Ward turned, following the French attack aircraft as it climbed. He suddenly realized this was the first time he’d actually seen one of his enemies with his own eyes. He’d watched every other battle in the sterile, artificially calm confines of a CIC, tracking different-shaped blips on radar screens and computer-generated displays. But this was real.

“Admiral! Look!” Harada gestured back the way the French warplane had come. A new jet, larger and with swing wings, came into view — higher up but closing rapidly. A Tornado. But whose? German or British?

The tan-colored “hemp” camouflage gave him his answer. It was an RAF interceptor!

The Tornado flashed past, turning to match the Mirage. For several seconds, the two jets kept turning and climbing — visibly slowing as their maneuvers bled airspeed and energy. Then, for one brief instant, they came nose-to-nose. Both fired and veered away, each pursued by a heat-seeking missile.

Ward tracked the Mirage as it twisted and turned, vainly trying to shake off the pursuing Sidewinder. Flares tumbled through the sky in its wake, each briefly brighter than the sun. None of them worked. The proximity-fused Sidewinder detonated only yards away, sending a hail of incendiary fragments slashing through the French jet’s fuel tanks.

The Mirage exploded. It arced across the sky as a rolling, tumbling ball of flame. Burning pieces of wreckage cascaded down across the rooftops and city streets below.

“Oh, Christ,” someone muttered behind him.

Ward turned and saw a stricken look on the Gazelle pilot’s face. The sandy-haired Englishman had been watching the RAF Tornado. It had been hit, too.

Trailing smoke, the British fighter turned south, wobbling from side to side. Orange and red flames licked under its fuselage. They were growing brighter as they fed on leaking fuel.

“Get out. Get: out.” The warrant officer’s hands balled into fists. “Come on, mate. Eject!”

But the Tornado crew stayed with their dying aircraft. They were nursing it toward the Thames, Ward realized, riding the burning plane down to make sure that it didn’t come down on top of houses full of women and children.

Ward and the others watched in silence until the Tornado vanished beyond the buildings lining the southern edge of Hyde Park.

Boston’s short, black-haired skipper was as Irish as his sub’s namesake city, and he had the temper to go with it. Right now Commander Pete Conroy fought to control his natural impatience, following orders that went against his instincts and years of training.

Boston and two other Los Angeles-class subs were hunting a French ballistic missile submarine, and they were doing it exactly the wrong way.

Boston was in the center of a line of three submarines, spaced three miles apart. He felt very vulnerable steering a straight course at five knots just below the thermocline, the sound-reflecting boundary between layers of warmer and colder water. These were French waters with French airspace overhead. Even though CINCCOMBFLT had promised fighter cover to drive off any enemy ASW aircraft on patrol, things could still go wrong. What if the Frogs escorted their Atlantiques with a strong fighter force of their own? The last thing Conroy wanted to hear was an air-dropped homing torpedo whining right up his sub’s ass.

Worse still, he and his crew probably wouldn’t find a damn thing. Commander in Chief, Combined Fleet’s staff had reason to believe that these waters were an SSBN patrol area. That was an educated guess they’d pulled together from several different things: French ASW patrol plane patterns, the water depth and conditions, and a few intelligence sources they wouldn’t even describe. Based on those clues, they were betting that one of France’s few ballistic missile submarines was close by — creeping along in silence, waiting for an order to launch her sixteen MIRVed warhead missiles.

The only problem was that SSBNs, “boomers,” don’t like to fight. Their whole mission depends on staying hidden. To accomplish that, they carry very sensitive sonars to let them detect a prowling enemy boat long before it can hear them. At the first whiff of an enemy ship or sub coming after them, SSBNs just quietly run away.

Conroy frowned. Although his Los Angeles-class SSN didn’t make much noise at five knots, it made a little, and that would probably be enough to give the hunt away.

Worse yet, there were three subs looking. In submarine warfare, there is no safety in numbers. Stealth and surprise are strength — not numerical superiority. Once he detected the first American sub, the Frenchman would probably spot the other two quickly. The SSN sweep probably covered one entire side of the enemy’s patrol zone, but that left the SSBN’s skipper plenty of room to run. If pushed hard enough, he’d even leave his patrol area.

No, Conroy, thought, he and Boston received the wrong end of this deal. Even if they did detect another sub, they would have to positively identify it before firing. With so many friendlies operating so close to one another, throwing torpedoes out against an unidentified contact was a good way to commit fratricide. For the same reason, all three American SSNs had to follow a precisely laid-out path…

“Conn, sonar. Contact bearing one three five, almost directly ahead of us.”

Conroy almost sprinted to the sonar shack, but controlled the impulse enough to slow to a fast walk. It only took seconds, in any case. Poking his head into the crowded space, he asked softly, “What’s it look like?”

The chief sonarman, standing behind the two seated operators, replied. “Single transient, sir. Loud and broadband. Depression angle says it’s deep.”

Conroy realized that the chief was letting him make his own evaluation. The description only fit one thing. “An explosion?”

“I concur, Captain.” The chief shrugged. “No way to tell who fired or what hit what, if it hit anything at all. Damn far off, though.”

Both operators sat up. One of them tapped his screen.

“Same thing again, Chief. Two of them this time, closely spaced. Torpedoes, most likely.”

Both Conroy and the chief studied the display, which showed two sudden, broad pulses of light. More explosions off in the distance. Somebody was dying out there. But who?

They could only wait and listen and hope.

Five minutes later, a new signal appeared on the sonar display. It was a coded sonar pulse, the kind sent out by a communications sonobuoy. Dropped by a friendly ASW aircraft, the transmission ordered all three SSNs to radio depth. It took several more minutes to carefully come up and signal they were in position.

The SSBN hunt was over. A controlling P-3 Orion passed the word. A fourth Los Angeles-class boat, Louisville, hunter to their hounds, had just sent a Le Triomphant-class missile sub to the bottom. While Boston and her companions came in from one side of the French patrol area, Louisville had crept in from the other direction — almost drifting with the current more than using her single screw for propulsion.

Once inside the patrol area, she had positioned herself along the SSBN’s most likely escape route.

When the French boat moved to avoid Boston and its companions, it had become slightly more detectable itself. That was when it had fallen prey to Louisville.

Only one of the first two torpedoes it fired had hit, but a second salvo finished the wounded boat. Sixteen missiles carrying ninety-six 150-kiloton nuclear warheads were lost to the French cause. So were 135 crewmen.

The Orion’s brief report was followed by new orders. They were going hunting for the second French boomer reported at sea. Any celebration would have to wait until they returned to port. Damn Louisville’s luck, Conroy thought. Maybe he would get his chance for a kill next time.

The Plateau d’Albion lay east of the southern French city of Avignon, in the Haute-Provence. On one side of the plateau, the ground rose sharply, climbing to meet the first foothills of the Alps. To the west, it fell away into the vineyard-laced Rhone Valley.

The plateau was home to the silos housing eighteen intermediate-range ballistic missiles — the land-based component of the French strategic nuclear forces. Organized in two squadrons of nine missiles, each S3 IRBM carried a single 1.2-megaton warhead and had a range of nearly 2,200 miles. One hit could turn a city the size of Moscow or London into a charred, radioactive ruin. Determined to preserve their nation’s strategic independence and status as a world power, successive French governments had spent billions of francs building, maintaining, and periodically upgrading its “force of last resort.”

They spent hundreds of millions more protecting their investment from ground or air attack. Bunkers and minefields ringed the missile complex, manned by soldiers wearing the large midnight-blue berets of the 27th Mountain Division. Batteries of Roland and Improved Hawk surface-to-air missile launchers were deployed to provide a last-ditch defense against enemy air raids. But the IRBMs’ main protection came from the underground silos themselves — layer after layer of heavily reinforced concrete hardened against nuclear attack.

Battery A’s electronics van was parked under camouflage netting a short distance away from its trailer-mounted target acquisition radar. Its crew had the van’s door open to catch the remnants of a gentle night breeze tinged with the aromatic smell of pine and eucalyptus. Three triple-rail Hawk launchers surrounded the van and radar trailer.

“There they are again, sir,” the sergeant manning the SAM battery’s radar console announced with some reluctance. “The same bearing as before, but closer.”

Captain Claude Jussey sighed and set the technical manual he’d been studying aside. By rights, the tall, lantern-jawed officer thought wearily, he should be in bed, not sitting inside this crowded van watching men watching blank radar screens. Unfortunately, ever since the Americans and British began bombing targets in northern France and Germany, periodic drills and false alarms had been cutting into his sleep time. He rolled his chair closer to the console. “Where?”

“It’s gone again.” The sergeant sounded frustrated. He was a man who liked dealing in certainties and right now he seemed to be seeing ghosts. “I can’t seem to get a solid return, just faint sparkles that fade to nothing in the next second.”

He sat up suddenly. “There! You see them?”

Jussey blinked, not sure whether he had or not. The radar traces had flickered out so fast — literally from one second to the next. Was there a glitch in the target acquisition program? Or was there really something out there? Something able to absorb or deflect the radar pulses striking it? Would the Americans risk their precious stealth aircraft this far from England?

Irritation turned to unease. He lifted the direct line link to the central Air Defense Command center.

Outside the van, a bomb fell through the night sky. Seconds from impact, the Paveway III sensor rigged on the bomb’s nose “saw” the laser light illuminating its target and fed a series of guidance commands to fins at the back. The 2,000-pound GBU-24 veered, settling onto a slightly different course while still falling.

“Command Center.”

Jussey kept his eyes on the glowing radar display, noticing the faint sparkles again. “A Battery here, we have a possible air contact bearing…”

The electronics van exploded — torn apart by a massive blast that threw fragments over a wide area and left the mangled wreck ablaze. Jussey, his sergeant, and the five other men inside died instantly.

Within seconds, the 5th Air Defense Regiment’s other SAM batteries met the same fate — obliterated by a perfectly timed and perfectly aimed salvo of laser-guided bombs.

Six miles away and six thousand feet above the plateau, twelve very odd-looking aircraft banked north. Black against a pitch-black sky, they were extremely hard to see with the naked eye. More important, the U.S. Air Force 45th Tactical Fighter Wing’s F-117A stealth fighters were practically invisible to enemy radar.

Radar-absorbent materials and mesh screens over their engine intakes helped reduce each jet’s radar signature, but the real stealth secret lay in its strangely shaped fuselage and wings. Each F-117 was made up of a series of small flat surfaces, or facets, angled in different directions. Radar pulses striking each plane could only bounce back from those few sections aimed straight at the radar set itself. In flight, no facet would ever point toward a given radar for very long. So the aircraft would literally “appear and disappear” in seconds — confusing search radar crews and making it almost impossible for SAM and antiaircraft gun fire control sets to lock on.

In 1991 America’s stealth technology had proved itself in the skies over Iraq. Now, seven years later, it was proving itself over France.

With their mission accomplished, the twelve F-117As headed home for a base in southern England. Behind them, the door to the Plateau d’Albion missile complex lay wide open and unguarded.

If the men aboard the big, lumbering E-3 Sentry AWACS plane were nervous about being so far inside French airspace, they were hiding it well, Brigadier General Robert Keller decided. The voices coming through his headphones were remarkably steady.

He looked up from the radar repeater display at his command station. Rows of equipment consoles crammed the converted 707’s interior, each manned by a U.S. Air Force officer or enlisted man. From time to time, their hands moved, adjusting settings or fine-tuning controls, but mostly the operators stayed still — keeping their eyes glued to the glowing displays in front of them. All told, they were responsible for coordinating the movements of more than eighty U.S. aircraft.

One of his strike controllers came over the intercom circuit. “Lion Tamer exiting the target area. The SAMs are down.”

Here we go, Keller thought, tensing. The stealth fighters had done their work. Now it was up to the rest of his strike force to finish the job. Reports began pouring over the intercom in a rapid, precise sequence:

“SpaceCom confirms Keyhole will be up in five.” The general nodded to himself. One of America’s KH-11 spy satellites would be coming over the target area horizon in five minutes — ready to transmit high-resolution pictures back to the photo interpreters in Washington. For this strike, realtime BDA, bomb damage assessment, was critical. They couldn’t afford to leave any undamaged missiles behind.

“Pile Driver, Strongman, High Wire, and Freak Show are all in position.” The strike’s attack aircraft, fighter escorts, SIGINT, and jammer support planes were ready, Keller clicked the transmit button on his throat mike. “All Circus units, this is Ringmaster. Initiate attack!”

The cluster of blips on the radar display representing his strike force surged ahead. The general watched carefully, alert for any last-second hitch or unexpected enemy move. But his eyes kept straying to the second hand sweeping around a clock mounted next to the display. Since no one knew how the French National Command Authority would react to the threatened destruction of its precious missile force, no one could rule out a French decision to launch their nuclear missiles under attack.

If Paris gave its commanders the order to fire, Keller’s planes would have just two hundred seconds to destroy the silos before the first S3 IRBMs roared aloft.

Colonel Neil Campos watched the darkened landscape roll away beneath his F-15E Strike Eagle. The chain of fires marking destroyed French Hawk batteries flashed past and vanished astern. “Got anything yet, Mac?”

His backseater, Jeff McRae, spoke up. “Nope. But the computer says we’re still on course.”

The thirty-six F-15Es under the colonel’s command were converging on the French IRBM complex at high speed — racing through a radar and radio jamming corridor created by two EF-111 electronic warfare aircraft. Two squadrons of F-16s followed behind, ready to jump any French fighters that tried to interfere.

The Strike Eagles carried drop tanks on their wing hard-points and two LANTIRN infrared pods on special hard-points — one for targeting, the other for navigation. Sparrow radar-guided missiles mounted next to their drop tanks provided air-to-air combat capability. Each of the two-seater attack aircraft also carried one massive GBU-28 laser-guided bomb on its centerline pylon.

The 4,700-pound GBU-28 was an extraordinarily powerful weapon developed under extraordinary circumstances. During Desert Storm, several of the first U.S. attacks on Baghdad’s hardened command and control bunkers failed when 2,000-pound bombs bounced off or failed to pierce multiple layers of reinforced concrete. Frantic requests for more potent air ordnance resulted in the GBU-28 penetrator, commonly called Deep Throat. Designed, built, and shipped to the combat zone in seventy-two hours, the weapon was a miracle of ingenuity and improvisation.

The Deep Throat was also as ugly as hell. To manufacture it, U.S. arms experts had snagged surplus eight-inch gun barrels, machined them out, and buried them upright in the ground. Then bucket gangs of men wearing protective suits took turns pouring molten explosive right into the open barrels. Once the explosives cooled, specialists fitted a delay fuse and laser guidance system to the front and control fins to the back. The whole result looked very much like a giant, homemade pipe bomb.

But it was incredibly effective. When dropped on Iraqi targets, the GBU-28 had vividly demonstrated that it could punch through more than twenty-two feet of reinforced concrete or more than one hundred feet of packed earth before exploding. Now America’s war planners were betting the same weapons could rip open the French missile silos.

Campos hoped they were right. The penalties for failure were too terrible to contemplate.

The colonel checked one last time, making sure his wingman was still back there — ready to attack immediately after he and McRae rolled off the target. The Eagles were attacking in pairs. Their orders were clear: even if the first bomb scores what looks like a solid hit, dump the second Deep Throat in right after it. When attacking heavily protected weapons that could kill millions if they got off the ground, air force doctrine was explicit — bounce the rubble.

“Bingo!” McRae had spotted their assigned missile silo several miles ahead and several thousand feet below!

A new steering cue appeared on the F-15E’s HUD.

In the Strike Eagle’s backseat, McRae stared hard at the LANTIRN display. Despite the darkness, the surrounding barbed-wire fence and an adjacent radio mast showed up clearly in infrared. He looked for the flat concrete slab that covered the silo itself and found it. His hand settled on the laser designator, switched it on, and held the beam right in the middle of the slab. “Anytime you’re ready, Neil.”

Campos nosed over into a gentle dive and held the Strike Eagle on course so he wouldn’t pull the laser off target. Sure that he had the right parameters, he thumbed the weapon release on his stick.

The GBU-28 dropped away from the F-15 and fell toward the French missile silo.

Guided by McRae’s laser, the bomb slammed nose-first into the thick silo cover. Still moving at more than six hundred miles an hour, it smashed through layers of steel and concrete and exploded inside the silo itself — just meters away from the forty-five-foot-tall S3 ballistic missile.

White-hot fragments shattered the delicate mechanism of the missile’s nuclear warhead, turning the deadly device into useless junk. Others ruptured the missile casing and plowed into tons of packed-solid fuel propellant.

The propellant ignited.

The whole concrete cover bulged and then blew off — tossed to one side by what looked like the world’s biggest Roman candle. A blinding plume of fire and flaming gas rocketed hundreds of meters into the air, turning night into day across the Plateau d’Albion.

The picture being transmitted from a point 22,300 miles above the earth’s equator showed a darkened globe fringed with sunlight spilling along its eastern horizon.

For more than twenty years, data from American DSP early warning satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean had been routinely processed at the Woomera facility, code-named Casino, before being transmitted to the United States. But nothing about this morning was routine for the air force officers crowding around the monitoring station. They were watching for the first pulses of light that would signal French missiles roaring up and out of their silos.

Even though the Circus strike had been timed so that one of the two operational G-PALS constellations was over northern Europe, no one knew how effective the system would be against a real missile attack. And no one really wanted to find out. The space-based defense system’s Brilliant Pebbles had proved they could knock down satellites following predictable orbits. Detecting and intercepting ballistic missiles arcing up from the atmosphere was likely to prove considerably more difficult.

Bright white lights blossomed suddenly across a small section of southern France.

One of the watching officers, a colonel, turned ashen. “Flash message to the NCA! Possible IRBM launches from the Albion complex!”

Another man, this one monitoring satellite-relayed radio transmissions from the strike controller, interrupted him. “Negative! Negative! Ringmaster radar shows no missile tracks! Repeat, no missile tracks! Those plumes are secondary explosions.”

Some of the men closest to the screen whistled softly in admiration. All of the eighteen white-hot tongues of fire bathing the Haute-Provence in an eerie glow had appeared within seconds of each other. General Keller’s F-15 crews had achieved an almost perfect time-on-target attack.

France no longer possessed a land-based strategic nuclear deterrent.

Pairs of Mirage F1Es soared off the long, concrete runway, climbing fast into the gray, predawn sky. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. The interceptors and fighter-bombers based at Juterbog had been flying sorties over the Polish front since the war began. But these planes were flying west — back to France.

Colonel Manfred Witz stood near the windows of the base control tower with his hands on hips and an angry expression on his face. The small, spare Luftwaffe officer scowled down at the frantic scene unfolding on his flight line.

French ground crewmen in greasy coveralls scurried back and forth between aircraft shelters, ordnance bunkers, and maintenance workshops. They were loading gear aboard a long line of canvas-sided trucks guarded by French military police. Other crews were mustering beside a camouflaged C-130 Hercules transport.

Despite heated German protests, the French Air Force squadron at Juterbog was pulling out — under orders from Paris. Witz knew they weren’t the only ones going. He’d seen message traffic recalling at least two other air units and several SAM batteries. With U.S. and British planes apparently roving over France at will, the French were desperately trying to strengthen their own air defenses.

The colonel grimaced. Transferring so many aircraft away from the Polish front was madness — especially right now. Caught between their own combat losses and the steady tide of U.S. reinforcements flying into Poland, the Luftwaffe and the French Air Force were already increasingly unable to control the air over the battlefield. This latest move would only make the situation worse.

He turned abruptly and stomped away from the window. The tower’s junior officers and enlisted personnel saw him coming and hastily bent to their work. When the colonel was in one of his rages, it was safest to stay out of his way.

These French idiots have opened a hornet’s nest and now they’re clutching at straws, Witz thought bitterly. The Combined Forces were stripping away French and German military capabilities one at a time. Round-the-clock air raids and cruise missile attacks had sunk most of the Confederation’s naval units. Those few ships and submarines still afloat were being bottled up in port by enemy minefields. Now the Americans and British were going after French nuclear forces. And once they were finished with that, he knew only too well whose air bases would be next on the target list.