Chains of Command

THIRTY-THREE

“For the alert force, for the alert force, klaxon, klaxon, klaxon.”

Those words blared out of the loudspeakers at the RF-111G Vampire strategic alert facility at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, and at other alert facilities around the country: a B-1B Lancer supersonic heavy bomber wing in Rapid City, South Dakota, carrying cruise missiles and short-range nuclear attack missiles; an F-111F medium bomber wing, also loaded with nuclear SRAMs, in Clovis, New Mexico; a B-52H Stratofortress heavy bomber wing in Spokane, Washington, all carrying cruise missiles; and a B-2 Black Knight stealth bomber wing in Whiteman, Missouri, the aircraft most capable of penetrating stiff Russian air defenses and therefore the only group still carrying nuclear gravity bombs. The TAAN (Tactical Aircrew Alert Network) radios clipped to aircrews’ elastic flight suit waistbands crackled to life with those fateful words, heard by anyone for the first time in over four years, and heard for the first time by one-fourth of the nation’s crewmembers — the ones who had never pulled strategic alert before.

The phrase “klaxon klaxon klaxon” was not just a term for a loud raucous horn repeated three times — it was an order, with all the force of federal and military law behind it. Upon hearing those words, or a klaxon sound for longer than three seconds, or by seeing a rotating yellow light on street corners on base or flashing lights marked “Alert” in theaters or hospitals, aircrews on strategic nuclear alert were directed to report to the aircraft, start engines, copy and decode the subsequent coded message that would be read on the network, and comply with the message’s instructions. The crews could act like cops on a high-speed chase or fire trucks responding to a fire — they could (cautiously) speed through intersections, drive on aircraft taxiways and runways, even commandeer cars. At Plattsburgh all that was unnecessary: because of bad weather and the base’s close proximity to Russian ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic, the crews were restricted to the alert facility.

Air Force Reserve major Laura Alena, a thirty-seven-year-old computer-aided design engineer in civilian life, had just kicked off her boots and was about to unzip her flight suit and get some sleep when the klaxon sounded. After being in the Air Force Reserves only four years, she had never heard a klaxon before, but there was no mistaking what it was. The sound was inescapably loud, tearing at your auditory nerves, and Alena found herself leaping to her feet.

Her roommate, Captain Heather Cromwell, the Sortie Four weapons officer, was sound asleep when the klaxon went off. She kicked off the old rough green military horse blankets which were tangled around her feet and somehow got up without killing herself. “Shit!” Cromwell yelped, almost rolling off the wrong side of the bed and smacking into the whitewashed concrete wall.

Alena reached for the light switch and flipped it on, instantly blinding them both. “Get dressed, Heather!” Alena shouted. “Don’t forget your thermals.”

Cromwell fumbled for her thermal underwear and flight suit — she had made the mistake of hanging all her clothes up neatly in the wardrobes, and for a brief moment she couldn’t find anything. “Do you think this is an exercise, Laura?”

“No. They briefed us there wouldn’t be any exercises,” Alena replied. She was formerly a KC-135 tanker navigator, so she was familiar with strategic alert. In the old days, alert exercises were common and expected — not anymore. “It’s the real thing, Heather. Hurry and get dressed.”

“Jeez, I… I can’t believe it.” Cromwell used to be a T-37 “Tweet” FAIP (First Assignment Instructor Pilot) for a year before she was RIFed out of the active-duty Air Force, and like Alena, she couldn’t get an assignment as a pilot and was forced to retrain as a navigator and weapons officer. She spent several years as a Reserve KC-135 tanker navigator before cross-training to the RF-111G Vampire, and had no exposure to strategic alert. As a civilian she was the wife of the president of a major New York construction firm and a mother of one chill. Cromwell was a skilled crewmember and good military officer, but her exposure to the realities of life as a combat aircrewman was limited.

Of course, the same could be said for most of the members of the 715th Tactical Squadron, even those who had once pulled alert in the active-duty Air Force. Nuclear war was supposed to have ended. The RF-l11 G Vampires, although still called bombers and still retaining a bombing capability, were now only Reserve reconnaissance and stand— off missile launchers — they were not supposed to carry nuclear weapons deep into enemy territory.

For many crewmembers, especially the young, inexperienced ones like Captain Heather Cromwell, the alert was like a nightmare.

“We don’t know what the alert means, Heather,” Alena said. “It could be to reposition the alert force, or just a report to aircraft, or… something else. Just stay calm. Don’t run in the hallways, but once you get outside the doors, run like hell,” She finished zipping up her boots, threw on her cold-weather jacket and flying gloves, and headed out the door.

The klaxon horn, an ancient-looking cast-iron thing, was mounted right outside her door, and Alena could hardly hear herself think. Crewmembers were dashing through the halls, knocking into her mindlessly. “Don’t run inside the facility!” she shouted. “Walk until you get outside!” But it didn’t do any good. A moment later Cromwell came out of her room, started running right past Laura Alena, and plowed headlong into a crew chief who was running out of his room. The impact sent Cromwell flying, but no one stopped.

“You all right, Heather?” Alena asked as she helped here to her feet.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Cromwell replied shakily. With dozens of crewmembers dashing past them, they headed for the outer doors at a slow trot.

“You sure you’re okay?” Alena asked, releasing Cromwell. She seemed pretty steady on her feet.

“I’m fine.”

“Good. I’ll see you after we get back,” Alena said, and sprinted off for her pickup truck.

Her partner, Major Robert Harcourt, and their two crew chiefs were already in the truck with the engine running. “Where were you?” Harcourt shouted as he put the little pickup in gear and stepped on the accelerator.

“Somebody smashed into Heather,” Alena replied.

“You worry about your own butt, Laura,” Harcourt said angrily. “Cromwell is a spoiled brat who can’t stand to be away from her chalet in the mountains.”

“Hey, go to hell, Bob,” Alena responded. “If it was one of your ‘bros’ on the deck, you’d be helping him out.” That was all the time they had for that argument, and the topic was forgotten as they pulled the truck up to the parking space between the shelters. A security guard with his M-16 rifle at port arms flashed a finger sign, Harcourt gave the countersign, and they were waved into the aircraft shelter.

Alena took enough time to pull the engine inlet cover off the right engine and fling it off to the side of the shelter before getting on the ladder and yelling “Ready!” When she heard Harcourt yell “Up!” in response, she scampered up the ladder and undogged her cockpit canopy, making sure that he was doing the same. Crews that manned nuclear-loaded bombers had to adhere to the “two-officer policy,” which meant that two nuclear-certified and knowledgeable officers had to be present when access to nuclear release or nuclear launch systems was possible. From the largest nuclear submarine to the smallest nuclear artillery shell, compliance with the two-officer policy was mandatory.

The RF-111G Vampire was indeed loaded for nuclear war. The 48,000-pound aircraft weighed over 119,000 pounds gross weight, loaded to the gills with fuel and weapons. Along with a full internal fuel load of 32,000 pounds, the Vampire carried four external fuel tanks with 14,400 total pounds of fuel — the outermost fuel tanks were on nonswiveling pylons, so the wings could not be swept back past 26 degrees unless those outer tanks were jettisoned, which would be only after the last refueling and when those tanks were finally empty, before crossing into enemy territory. On the innermost wing pylon, the Vampire carried an AGM-131 short-range attack missile with a 170-kiloton nuclear warhead, and on the outside of the number 3 and 6 pylons the bomber carried an AIM-9P Sidewinder missile for self-defense. Finally, two more AGM-131 attack missiles were nestled in the internal bomb bay.

Both crewmen jumped into the cockpit, strapped in, and put on helmets. While Alena retrieved her decoding documents and booklets, Harcourt flipped on battery power, flicked both starter switches on the center console to CART, and yelled “Clear cartridge start!” His crew chief, standing with a fire extinguisher by the left engine inlet, gave him a thumbs-up, and Harcourt lifted the throttle grips up over the cutoff detent, brought both throttles briefly to military to get a good shot of fuel into the system, and set the throttles to idle. When he lifted the throttle grips, battery power set off two large high-pressure smoke generators installed in each low-pressure engine turbine section, which started the turbines spinning. In less than sixty seconds, both engines were at idle power, and Harcourt began bringing up all aircraft systems.

After monitoring the engine start, Alena turned her attention to the coded message. The Plattsburgh command post was reading a long string of characters on the radio. When the controller said, “I say again, message follows,” Alena knew it was the beginning of the message, and she started copying the letters and numbers with a grease pencil on a nearly-frozen plastic sheet, one character per box. When she had the first ten characters, called the “preamble,” she began decoding, using the proper day-date decoding book.

The first character told the crew if this was an exercise or an actual message — and it read “actual.” “Bob … dammit, cross-check this,” Alena said. Harcourt stopped what he was doing, double-checked that she was using the right decoding document. It was correct. “It’s a ‘taxi-to-the-hold-line’ message,” Alena said after breaking out the preamble.

“Authenticate it,” Harcourt said.

“We don’t need to,” Alena said. “We only authenticate a launch message.”

“Hell, I’ll authenticate it myself,” Harcourt said. He clicked on the command radio: “I got a ‘taxi,’ “ he said. It was not proper procedures, but they were playing with real marbles here, and he wasn’t about to screw anything up.

“Taxi,” another voice said. They recognized it as the Sortie One pilot. One by one, all six pilots of Alpha Flight reported the same thing.

“We take our time,” Harcourt said. “I want a full stored heading alignment, I want you strapped in, and I want … I want everything perfect, dammit. We’re not moving until everything is perfect.”

A full stored heading alignment took only three minutes, and Alena reported that her system was ready to fly. She motioned to the green padded containers mounted under the instrument panel glare shield. “Tac doctrine says we gotta use ’em,” Alena said. Harcourt hesitated, then nodded, and both crewmen opened the containers.

The crew chiefs watched their crewmembers get ready. Suddenly one of the RF-111Gs, the Sortie Six airplane, began taxiing out of its shelter. Harcourt stood in front of his shelter, waiting for the taxi light to come on his bomber. A second bomber taxied out of the shelter. Then he saw his crewmembers take off their helmets and slip something over their heads that he couldn’t quite make out before replacing their helmets. Then they clipped something onto the outside of their helmets.

They were PLZT goggles — electronic flashblindness goggles. The other thing they put on under their helmets must’ve been eyepatches for use in case the electronic goggles failed or if it was too dark to use the goggles. The crew chiefs had had briefings on them and had seen them demonstrated once, but they were never to be used …

… unless it was the real thing.

With the goggles and oxygen masks in place, Harcourt and Alena looked like two Darth Vaders sitting in the Vampire cockpit. Harcourt turned on the taxi light, signaling he was ready to taxi. The crew chief kept his arms crossed above his head until the second RF-111 bomber taxied past, then motioned Harcourt to move forward, and they taxied clear of the shelter and onto the parallel runway.

Standing in the dark, freezing cold night, with the roar of six nuclear-loaded RF-111s bombarding him, the Sortie Two crew chief saluted the pilot. The eerie death mask turned toward him, looked at the lone figure for a moment, then slowly returned the salute — possibly for the last time.

THIRTY-FOUR

“What the hell do you mean, it was a leaflet drop?” the President thundered. “You mean to tell me the Russians flew a supersonic bomber right over Turkey, in broad daylight, right over the base where the American planes had just landed, and dropped leaflets …?”

“That’s exactly what they did, Mr. President,” General Freeman acknowledged. They, along with the First Lady and their young daughter; the National Security Advisor, Michael Lifter; two Secret Service agents; and a Navy captain assigned to carry the “football,” the briefcase with the codes necessary to execute the nation’s nuclear forces, were standing in the pouring rain on the west lawn of the White House, just a few yards away from the whirling blades of Marine One. The large VH-53 helicopter had flown out to retrieve the President and members of the National Security Council when the latest alert was sounded. Seconds earlier, Freeman had received word that no attack was in progress, and the group, now drenched, was heading back into the White House.

The President did not go to the Situation Room, but made his way back to the Oval Office instead. He threw his wet raincoat into a corner and ordered coffee and sandwiches. The First Lady entered the Oval Office a few minutes later with her hair dry and wearing a business suit — it had to be the fastest cleanup in history — and stood beside her husband. “I would like to know,” she said crisply, her hands balled into tight fists at her side, “what in hell is going on here? General Freeman, getting chased out of the White House twice in just a few days on a false alarm is not my idea of fun.”

“It was no false alarm, ma’am,” Freeman said, swallowing hard, shifting from one foot to the other. To the President, he said, “I’ve got the intelligence branch on their way over for a briefing, sir.”

“All right,” the President drawled wearily. He stood by his chair, his fingers pressing into the brown leather back, taking a few deep breaths, then swung the chair around and sat down heavily. “Something in North America or Europe, Philip?”

“Europe, sir, over Turkey,” Freeman replied. “Attack warning. There was no reason why the leadership-evacuation warning was sounded. I’ll check into that personally.”

The Navy captain with the nuclear codes followed along and unobtrusively took a seat in the corner of the room, the case open on a table beside his chair, a cord running from the briefcase to a wall outlet. He then stood and approached the President, waiting for an opportunity to speak. “Captain Ahrens would like to activate your code card, sir,” Freeman told the President.

“What for?”

“Sir, we should establish full connectivity with the National Military Command Center immediately,” Freeman explained. “When the Russian aircraft were detected on what appeared to be a bomb run, we transmitted a taxi-to-the-hold-line message to the bombers and a standby-to-launch message to the Peacekeeper missiles and submarines.”

The Steel Magnolia’s mouth dropped open in shock — it looked like the President’s was about to as well.

“Under these circumstances, the next order would most likely be issued from the portable unit. Since there’s still a possibility that an attack against the United States is underway, you should activate the portable sender.”

“I told you before, General, I don’t want those bombers to launch!”

“Sir …” Freeman paused, controlling his emotions and his own shaking voice, cursing the day he was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At least Colin Powell got out while the getting was good. “Sir, activating your portable sender doesn’t issue any orders — it only allows you to be able to do so, should we need to make a run for the helicopter again. At this point, Strategic Command will determine whether or not the bombers launch under positive control. They—”

“What … did you say, General Freeman?” the First Lady interrupted. “Strategic Command can launch the bombers? What are you talking about? What do you mean they can launch? Is this some kind of coup?” She turned to the President. “I’m telling you, this smells like Seven Days in May.”

“Dammit, ma’am,” Freeman snapped, “under DEFCON Two, we would launch the bomber force under positive control as soon as we detected an attack in progress against the United States. That’s what DEFCON Two means. Because of the nature of the current emergency and your orders regarding protection for our NATO allies, we decided we would launch the bomber force if any attack against any NATO ally, especially Turkey, was detected.”

“A policy I totally disagree with,” the First Lady said disdainfully, rapping on Jack Kennedy’s old desk. “We’re supposed to make the world and the Russians think we’ll start a nuclear war if Turkey is attacked?”

“We already discussed this, honey,” the President interjected, trying to calm her, wishing he could take a job at McDonald’s or somewhere — anywhere but here. “We’ve got American servicemen in Turkey; Turkey is a strong and valuable ally — it’s important we show our support—”

“By starting World War Three? It’s insane,” she lectured, her lip curled.

The President hesitated. They had indeed argued this point for many hours, with the First Lady not wanting to commit to war with Russia over Turkey and its unilateral decision to assist the Ukraine. She had a point, Freeman thought: world wars were indeed started exactly like this. But the NATO alliance was important to America. Every member — especially its most powerful member, the United States of America — had to back up the others. The single RF-111G recon unit and a few frigates was a paltry show of support — launching the nuclear alert bombers was a major show of support. It was a safe and fully controllable response as well — unlike a missile, the bombers could be recalled at any time.

“Our bomber force is so small that reaction time is critical, ma’am,” Freeman said. “As soon as NORAD and Strategic Command get a positive attack indication, they flush the bombers. It’s the only way to ensure survivability.”

“What about the subs and the missiles?” the President asked, sheepishly tearing off the end of a cigar to chomp on — but not inhale. The First Lady glared at him but said nothing. “Strategic Command launches them too …?”

“No, sir. Only you can order the missiles to launch and the bombers to prearm their weapons and execute their strike missions,” Freeman replied. “However, under DEFCON Two, the nuclear subs carry out certain instructions if they lose connectivity with you. If the loss of communications continues, the subs can launch an attack.”

“I thought you said only I can launch the missiles,” the President said in exasperation, looking confused.

“Sir, that’s true — only you can order a launch,” he said, thinking, Thank God he did avoid the draft — he just doesn’t get it. “But nuclear subs are designed to patrol for months at a time completely undetected. They must expose themselves to receive instructions, which they will do every two to eight weeks, depending on the defense readiness condition. If they come up and don’t connect, under DEFCON Two they will proceed to their launch points and try one more time to connect. If that fails, they will launch.”

“They can launch without my orders …?” he asked, his face still clouded.

“Sir, the sea-launched missiles are our most important, our most deadly, our most survivable weapon,” Freeman explained, thinking, He isn’t this dumb. He knew this stuff, why is he doing this? Is he panicking? Well, it sure as hell isn’t the time to come unglued. “If the entire command and control system is destroyed by a nuclear attack, we don’t want the subs to be out of commission just because they were down hiding from the bad guys. Therefore, under high-threat conditions like this, sub captains have the ability to launch a limited attack if they don’t get the order not to do so.”

“This is ridiculous, General,” the First Lady said through gritted teeth. “This is a nightmare. What kind of control system is this? A nuclear war can start and we didn’t even order it …?”

“The President ordered it by going to DEFCON Two, ma’am.”

“Well, cancel the fucking DEFCON Two, then!” the First Lady hissed. “I want control of those warheads, General… I want—” And then she stopped, finally realizing what she was saying. She took a deep breath, patted her hair, recomposed herself, and smiled coldly. “I think any procedure that delegates any measure of authority for the release of nuclear weapons outside this office is wrong, General. I think something should be done about it … that’s all. You see my point.” She was all sugar and spice.

“Let’s worry about that later, honey.” The President sighed. “We’ll keep the planes on the ground and the subs on patrol for now. I think I’ve proven to Turkey and the rest of NATO that I’ll support them, but if we need to launch the bombers to show Turkey or Russia we mean business, so be it. As far as the subs go, I want to stay in contact with the command center”—the President looked at the Navy captain, at the briefcase, at the top of his desk, at nothing, then said—”by telephone. I’m staying right here.”

“Yes, sir,” Freeman said, glad that that was resolved before the Second Coming. He motioned to the naval officer, who packed up his gear and departed to his office on the ground floor. In the meantime, an officer had arrived from the Pentagon with a locked case full of papers. The President spent a moment looking the cover pages over, handed them over to Freeman while the coffee and sandwiches were brought in, then: “So spill it, General.”

“It was a single aircraft, Mr. President, a MiG-25R Foxbat reconnaissance aircraft.” Freeman explained. “We’ve been monitoring many reconnaissance flights over the Ukraine, but this one flew in a long oval track, a total of six hundred sixty miles, right through central Turkey. A simply incredible mission. It passed within sensor range of ten major Turkish and NATO military installations on one twenty-minute pass. Broad daylight, clear skies — it probably took home some great snapshots.”

“It made it out of there?” the President asked incredulously, his cigar almost falling in his lap. “How? Didn’t they have fighter patrols up?”

“There’s a NATO AWACS radar plane orbiting north of Ankara,” Freeman replied. “By the time the AWACS plane detected the Foxbat, two hundred miles over the Black Sea, and fighters could be scrambled to intercept it, it was over land. By the time the fighters were set up to pursue, it was in the turn and heading out. By the time the first fighter got a shot off at it, it was back out over the Black Sea. And the Foxbat flies almost as fast as a Sparrow missile. No ground air defense units ever got a shot off at it — didn’t even see it. It dropped leaflet canisters near Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey — the canisters missed by several miles — but it made a direct hit on Kayseri Air Base. They’re faxing a copy of the leaflets now.”

“Why?” the President asked, amazed. “Why did they do this? What in the hell are they trying to do?”

“It’s a clear warning, sir,” Freeman said. “More psychological than anything else, but we can’t dismiss it as trivial. The tactic’s psychological effect can be devastating. The crews see a bomb carrying leaflets one moment, but the next time — who knows?”

“Sorry I’m late, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense, Donald Scheer, said as he entered the Oval Office. “It feels as if I’m always here, but I always miss the helicopter.” He went right over to Freeman, who handed him the report sent over by the Pentagon courier. After reading it for a few moments, he commented, “It’s a warning not to get involved, Mr. President. We’re playing in the Russians’ backyard here, after all. They control the skies over the Black Sea, they have a Coalition-sized force already in place in the region, and they’re moving that force slowly south into the Ukraine. All the undamaged Ukrainian aircraft and base facilities are in Russian hands now. We’re outgunned and outmanned, and the Russians just wanted to remind us of that little fact.”

“It’s bullshit. It’s hubris. It’s grandstanding,” the President mused, as if talking it over with himself, calculating their strategy as if this were some election to be won. “Did they think this was going to be productive or something? Did they think this was going to make us stop what we’re doing?”

Was the President serious? Freeman was more than a bit worried. Here was a man who could do damn near anything he wanted. He had the power of the greatest industrial nation and the world’s finest military behind him — and yet he was concerned about a simple psy-op leaflet drop. The most devastating psychological effect of the Russian mission was obviously done right here … in this office.

“Mr. President, we’ve got a great many things we need to do,” Freeman insisted. “I think our first priority is to get the Cabinet and the National Security Council in here to go over some options I’ve drawn up. We need to contact President Dalon of Turkey and the other NATO ministers and get approval for forward basing for coalition forces. We should—”

“You want more military forces involved in this thing, General?” the President exclaimed. “Put more troops in Turkey, or Greece, or Italy? We put twelve planes into a small base in Turkey, and the Russians blew a supersonic fighter through there. What in the hell will they do if we move a couple thousand planes?”

“Sir, I’m worried about what they’ll do if we don’t respond,” Freeman said. “I’m worried about what President Dalon will say if we don’t contact him right now with a pledge of military support and additional weaponry to prevent any more overflights.”

“Philip, I can’t do it,” the President said wearily. “I don’t believe an increased military response is appropriate.”

“But we’d be leaving a valuable ally swinging in the wind, Mr. President,” insisted Freeman, disgusted by his Commander in Chief’s reluctance.

“The Turks did it to us by not informing us of their intention of helping the Ukraine,” the President pointed out.

“That was several months ago, sir, right after the Islamic Wars. When we found out what the Turks were doing, we were glad to have them take over. We wanted nothing more than to pull out and disengage from all military activities in the region, and we wanted Turkey to take charge of its own national defense. Well, in my opinion, now they need our help.”

“So why doesn’t Dalon just ask for it?” the First Lady asked pointedly. “He’s asked for defensive weapons, but he doesn’t want offensive weapons; he wants strike aircraft, but he doesn’t want Eagles or Falcons or the F-111s other than the reconnaissance models. Why not?”

Freeman was surprised at the First Lady’s use of military terminology — shit, she’d obviously been boning up — that was even scarier than the crisis. Well, almost. “Ma’am, the Turks are fiercely proud of their military forces—”

“A lot of good that does them,” she said dismissively, rolling her eyes.

“—and they’ll refuse to admit they need help in driving out their enemies. That’s seems to be standard cultural bias for any Middle Eastern country, and for Dalon to express any other view would be political and societal suicide. We have to respect that. But Dalon is a realist: he knows he can’t take on the Russians alone. He’ll gladly, but secretly, accept our help if we offer it — he will never request it.”

“So we get to name our own poison,” the President said bitterly. “We have to recommend aircraft that we want to send, troops we want to put in danger — and then we take the political heat when Dalon comes back and says he doesn’t need all this firepower, or his parliament blames us for escalating the conflict or putting Turkey in danger by sending more NATO troops into Turkey. We shouldn’t have to put up with this nonsense.”

“It’s the price we pay for membership in NATO and for wanting an ally like Turkey,” Freeman said. “Sir, we have to make a decision as soon as possible.”

The President turned away from Freeman and stared out one of the polycarbonate bullet-resistant windows. The First Lady went over to him, and the two spoke in low tones.

This was the most aggravating part of this White House, Freeman thought: he could have a staff of fifty professional analysts and staff assistants working all night on formulating a strong but measured deployment of forces to Turkey and the rest of NATO, but their work could — and had been in the past — be completely overruled by the Steel Magnolia. Sure, she was intelligent, and politically savvy, and in general she was fair and open-minded — but she was also strongly opinionated and tended to swing with the current popular political winds, especially those blowing from the liberal “left coast.”

“All right, all right, we’ll act on your recommendations,” the President said after several long moments. His wife did not look totally pleased — Freeman hated to think it, but in a way the First Lady’s displeasure was a major victory for him. “But I want the full NSC and the Congressional leadership in on this. It has not yet been proven to my satisfaction that the events in Turkey warrant a Desert Storm-type response, and I need more information. The current forces we’ve deployed in Turkey will have to stand for now.”

“Sir, I need to present the entire package to you, and I think I should do it before the leadership arrives,” Freeman said. “If it’s your decision to keep the 394th Air Battle Wing out there in Turkey by themselves, we must decide to what extent they can be involved in combat activities.”

“They can fire only when fired upon,” the First Lady interjected. “That seems fair.”

“Ma’am, the 394th is primarily a reconnaissance group,” Freeman said. “They take photos and analyze enemy radar systems from long range.”

“They have an offensive capability, General,” she fired right back.

“Which they should not use at all until a full combat-ready support group is deployed with them,” Freeman said. “Ma’am, the 394th is basically a support unit, not a combat unit unto itself. It flies in support of other strike units. Right now the only strike units it can attach itself to are three Turkish fighter units and a Ukrainian fighter-bomber group.”

“All right, General,” the President said after receiving a cautious nod of tentative approval from the First Lady, “I’ll look at your proposal and decide on which actions to authorize the 394th to do while they’re in Turkey. It won’t include combat — it’ll be purely defensive in nature, intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance, in support of territorial defense for our NATO allies and information-gathering for the Pentagon, but they’ll be able to defend themselves if fired upon over Turkish or international airspace or waters. The rest I’ll look at only after discussing the situation with the leadership—”

“And it includes the actions of the alert bombers,” the First Lady said. “I realize events and procedures are automatic when it comes to the alert force, but I still think this policy should be reevaluated, with all of our advisers present.” The President nodded his complete agreement.

One step at a time, Freeman thought — that was the way to deal with this President. He just hoped that things didn’t go to hell in Eastern Europe while the President — and his wife — tried to make up their minds.

“The Joint Chiefs, my staff, and myself have a plan to do precisely that — support a joint Turkish-Ukrainian attack mission,” Freeman continued. “The Russian Fleet has been moving steadily southward in the Black Sea, supported by an A-50 radar plane. The fleet has created a strong naval and counterair barrier to try to block any air action by the Ukrainian Air Force, and now they’re a direct threat to Turkey. Colonel Tychina of the Ukrainian Air Force has devised a bold plan for dealing with the Russians, but they need our help.”

“What kind of help?” the First Lady asked skeptically.

The General hesitated, glancing at Scheer and the President. “Excuse me, sir, but as far as I’m aware, the First Lady is not cleared to hear this information.”

The lightning bolts that launched from the Steel Magnolia’s eyes — first at Freeman and then at her husband — could have lighted a city. “We don’t have time for that now, General,” the President said quickly. “Proceed.”

“Yes, sir,” Freeman said. He wished he had another witness in here to confirm the President’s orders, but his career was on thin ice anyway. “Sir, the number-one threat out there to Turkey is the Russian Fleet and the Russian radar plane, which can keep watch over the entire region. Our Vampire bombers can attack the shipborne surveillance and missile guidance radars—”

“It sounds like an offensive plan to me, General,” the First Lady interjected. “Who attacks first, us or them?”

Freeman was dumbstruck by the question. “Why … I hope we get a chance to get into attack position before the Russian Fleet can engage our bombers.”

“So we fire the first shots? I think that’s wrong, General,” she snapped.

“Ma’am, the first shots have already been fired,” Freeman said. “This is a response to Russian aggression. We wouldn’t allow this fleet within three hundred miles of the American coast, yet they’re less than sixty miles from the Turkish coast.”

“General, I think the First Lady is right,” the President said. “Is there any way we can work it to make our involvement purely defensive in nature? Let’s let the Turks and the Ukrainians call the shots on this one.”

Freeman shook his head in obvious frustration. Christ, how I loathe both of them. He took a deep breath and replied, “Sir, I understand your concern, but that’s not the way we should operate. Our primary concern is the safety of our crews, and sending them against a hostile force with orders to fire only when fired upon is wrong and outdated thinking. If we launch those Vampire bombers, they should go in fighting.”

“This is not between America and Russia, General,” the First Lady informed him as if he were just too thick to understand real policies. “This is between Russia and the Ukraine. Turkey was an innocent bystander — President Velichko said the attack on the Turkish ships was wrong, and I believe him. If we attack Russian ships without provocation, we’ll be drawn into this war, and it’ll be your fault.” She crossed her arms and affixed him with a stare, just daring him to challenge her.

Freeman felt like raising his hands in utter surrender — his words were being deflected away from the President like bullets off cold steel. “Sir, I have a plan for your review,” he said finally. “It meets your criteria for defensive action and support for our allies.” He hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t make any concessions to the First Lady when it came to his troops in the field, but said, “We may be able to adjust the rules of engagement to allow only nonthreatening surveillance actions by our crews, but I—”

“I think that’s a wise idea, General,” the First Lady said pointedly.

THIRTY-FIVE

Rebecca Furness and Mark Fogelman were flying at ten thousand feet over the rugged coastal mountains surrounding the Marmara Sea near the city of Yalova. It was after two A.M. in Turkey, and the night was overcast and very cold — Rebecca could see a light dusting of frost on the leading edge of the wings and hoped the icing wouldn’t get too bad. They had barely reached the Marmara Sea, the body of water between the Dardanelles and the Bosporus Strait in western Turkey, when the TEREC (Tactical Electronic Reconnaissance) sensor system and radar threat indicator came to life. “Naval search radar, one o’clock,” Mark Fogelman reported. “Analyzing … I’ve got an S-band naval search radar, probably a Head Net or Top Steer radar. That must be the cruiser we’re picking … nope, wait, now I got two S-band radars, one farther north. The closer one must be the destroyer and the farther one must be the cruiser.”

“Copy that, Mark,” Rebecca Furness acknowledged. “Let me see the satellite photos again.”

Fogelman gave Furness a small binder with satellite photos of Russian warships stationed off the coast of Turkey, delivered electronically just a few hours earlier. There were actually two groups of warships directly off Turkey’s northern coast in the Black Sea: a guided-missile cruiser task force, led by the cruiser Marshal Ustinov, with two guided-missile destroyers and two light frigates escorting it. Farther east, halfway between the Crimean Peninsula and Turkey, was an aviation cruiser task force, spearheaded by the carrier Novorossiysk, which carried missile and antisubmarine-warfare helicopters and several Yak-38 Forger vertical takeoff and landing fighters. The Novorossiysk battle group was escorted by two guided-missile destroyers and four frigates with powerful air search radars. Antisubmarine sonars patrolled the waters between the two groups, making sure nothing sneaked in between the two powerful Russian battle groups.

“Thunder One-One flight, use caution for Russian patrol vessels at your twelve o’clock, one hundred miles,” the air traffic controller at Istanbul Air Control Center told them. “They have requested that aircraft be vectored at least sixty miles around them.”

“Roger, copy, Istanbul,” Furness acknowledged. On interphone she remarked, “The magic number: sixty miles. Ten miles outside range of our radar reconnaissance pod.”

“And just outside maximum range of the cruiser’s SA-N-6 missile system,” Fogelman added, copying the details of that call down on his kneeboard. “I’m going to transmit and see if I can pick ’em up. Radar’s going to transmit.” He switched on the attack radar, set the range to one hundred and twenty miles, and turned the tilt down. “Bingo. Radar contact, three vessels, about one hundred miles north of our position and about eighty miles offshore, due north of Istanbul.” He hit the manual video button on the attack radar, which recorded the radar’s video image on tape for later analysis. “Can’t break out individual ships yet — there’s supposed to be five ships in that group, but I only see three so far. Not picking up any jamming yet. Going to ‘standby.’ “ He flicked the mode switch to STANDBY, which kept the system warmed up but did not allow any transmissions that the ships could use to home in an antiradar missile.

“Okay, the cruiser is supposed to have an SA-N-6B Grumble missile system, and we’ll be within range of that in about two minutes,” Fogelman said, reading from the order-of-battle card given to them by NATO intelligence officers back at Kayseri. “The next system is an SA-N-3B Goblet system. The destroyer has an SA-N-7 Gadfly missile system good out about twenty miles, and that’ll be our primary threat.”

“That and fighters,” Furness reminded him. “We’ll be under constant radar contact from that cruiser, so fighters will be under full radar control — and as long as they’re over water, they’ll have the balls to come down and get us. We gotta stay sharp.”

“Bingo,” Fogelman called out. “TEREC picked up a strong data-link signal, looks like a Pincer Chord microwave steering signal. Nothing on the RHAWS scope yet, but they don’t need a fighter radar if they got naval. Now I’m picking up a search radar at one to two o’clock. That must be the AWACS plane.” The Novorossiysk battle group was stationed directly under the loitering area of an A-50 “Mainstay” airborne early warning and control radar plane which had been detected flying over the central Black Sea. From its position, it could see the entire Black Sea and detect the approach of any aircraft from sea level to forty thousand feet.

“Well, we can assume we’re busted,” Furness said grimly. “Let’s hope we can convince them we’re just taking pictures.” On the scrambled HAVE QUICK FM interplane frequency, she radioed, “Okay, guys, we’re feet-wet and moving in. Stay as tight as you can.”

Two clicks of the microphone was the only acknowledgment from Thunder One-Two, Furness’ wingman, manned by Paula Norton and her temporary navigator, Curt Aldridge. Of course, the two RF-111Gs were prepared in case the Russians didn’t buy that argument. Furness’ RF-111G carried four AGM-88C HARM antiradar missiles and two AIM-9P-3 Sidewinder missiles under the wings, along with the TEREC electronic reconnaissance pallet in the bomb bay.

Norton’s aircraft was configured completely differently. She carried an AN/ALQ-131 electronic countermeasures jamming pod mounted between the ventral fins in the rear of the jet and a total of twelve ADM-141 TALD (Tactical Air-Launched Decoy) gliders mounted on pylons under each wing. The TALDs were small four-hundred-pound unpowered gliders resembling small cruise missiles, with small wings that pop out after release. The TALDs carried chaff dispensers, radar reflectors, tiny radar transmitters, and heat emitters that would make the eight-foot-long missiles look like slow-moving attack aircraft to a weapons officer or fire control officer. Two more two-ship RF-111G Vampire hunter-killer formations — half the Vampires deployed to Turkey — had been launched that night to probe the boundaries of the Russian Fleet stationed not far from Turkey’s shores and to take an indirect part in the first counterattack by the Ukrainian Air Force against their Russian invaders.

“Thunder One-One flight, warning, you are endangering your aircraft by proceeding in that direction,” the Turkish radar controller said. No shit, Rebecca thought. “What are your intentions?”

“Thunder One-One is due regard,” she replied.

“Understand, One-One,” the controller said. Furness noticed that the air traffic controllers sounded much more official and their English was very good — the civilian controllers must have been replaced by military controllers in critical centers such as Istanbul. A civilian controller might not know that “due regard” meant that a military flight was going off to parts unknown — this controller knew and understood right away. “Cleared to proceed, contact me on this frequency when able.”

For a moment Furness and Fogelman thought he was going to add “Good luck,” but he did not.

“Thunder, go active,” Furness radioed. That was the signal to Norton and Aldridge to take spacing as briefed in mission planning and to go to their briefed radio frequency. “Shut ’em down and button up, Mark,” Furness said on interphone. Fogelman began turning off exterior lights, turning the identification beacons to standby, turning off the Doppler radar, attack radar, and other transmitters, and buckling up their oxygen masks, donning gloves, rolling down sleeves, and lowering the clear visors on their helmets. Fogelman set 243.0, the international UHF emergency frequency, in the primary radio, and the prebriefed AWACS secure voice channel in the secondary radio.

“Thunder, this is Banjo, good evening,” the NATO E-3B AWACS controller said a few moments later. “Fence check, stand by. One-One.”

At that, Fogelman briefly shut off the Mode Four transponder which provided secure identification for the AWACS controller, then turned it back on. “Fence check complete, One-One,” Furness replied. The controller repeated the process for all the Thunder aircraft. They could not hear it, but Turkish and Russian-speaking controllers on the same plane were checking in other aircraft as well.

“One-One flight, push blue,” the controller said. Fogelman switched the radio to the second prebriefed frequency, where one controller would control only their two aircraft. On the new frequency, the controller did not check them in again; he assumed both aircraft had made the jump to the new frequency: “Thunder Flight, you have bandits at two o’clock, high, eighty miles, not paired on you.”

“The destroyer is lit up like a Christmas tree,” Fogelman reported. “S-band search radar, F-band director for the Gadfly missiles, even the X-band for the cannon. They must not be talking to their AWACS or … ah, they’re going radar-silent now. I still see a side lobe from an H-band close-in weapon system radar — they’re ready for cruise missiles.”

“Thunder, range to first target, thirty miles.”

“We’re well inside Grumble missile range, coming up on Goblet range,” Fogelman said. They were still flying north toward the guided-missile cruiser Marshal Ustinov and its escorts, still at ten thousand feet. “Inside Goblet range, still no sign of the F-band. They’re staying cool. Coming up on Gadfly range.”

Then, on the emergency frequency, they heard in English, “Unidentified aircraft fifty miles north of Istanbul heading north, this is the Russian missile destroyer Stoykiy. You are endangering yourself by approaching our vessels. Suggest you turn away immediately and maintain a fifty-kilometer space from our vessels. Suggest an immediate heading of zero-four-five for at least ten minutes. Thank you. Please respond immediately.”

“Gadfly range, now,” Fogelman announced.

“Arm ’em up, Mark,” Furness said. Fogelman had already displayed the weapon status page on the right Multi-Function Display. On his weapons panel, Fogelman turned the weapon status and control switch to ALL and made sure that all four of the AGM-88 HARM legends were highlighted on the right MFD, indicating they were powered up and ready. When he received good READY lights from all four missiles, he depressed the number-three weapon cassette, rotated the weapon select switch to the number-three position, and selected BOMB on the mode switch. On the right-side MFD, only the missile on the number-three pylon indicated ready.

“All weapons check good, number-three missile selected,” Fogelman reported.

Almost at the same time they heard a brief “Pump” on the secure radio. At that, Furness chopped power and began a rapid descent. Thunder One-Two had released two TALD decoys, which would fly straight ahead and begin a slow descent, and they had also begun electronic countermeasures to try to get the Russian radar plane to break lock and lose track of the Vampires. The pod Thunder One-Two carried was designed to jam the Russian AWACS plane, but not the naval search radars — hopefully this would force the ships to turn on their search radars, and hopefully give Furness and Fogelman a chance to kill it. The TALDs were not programmed to fly closer than fifteen miles to any ship and would crash in the ocean someplace far behind the Russian cruiser …

… if they were allowed to continue flying. At that moment, Fogelman cried out, “SA-N-7 up, eleven o’clock!”

“One-One, working Gadfly,” Furness reported on the command radio.

“The Gadfly’s still up … okay, it’s fading, he’s locked on to the decoys,” Fogelman reported, activating the radar altimeter and setting the warning bug for one thousand feet. “You’ve got five thousand to level … two thousand to level … decoy’s been out for thirty seconds … one thousand … five hundred … coming level.” They were now flying at an angle away from the lead Russian destroyer, maintaining a range of about twenty miles — just outside the deadly SA-N-7 Gadfly missile’s range. “My HARM is receiving telemetry, first one will be from the number-three pylon. Go to ‘Attack.’ “

“Thanks, Mark.” Furness set her ISC (Integrated Steering Control) to ATTACK, which would take range information from the TEREC system and give her steering information to the nearest threat.

“Okay, boys, you gonna just watch them go by or—”

Suddenly they saw a bright flash of light off in the distance, and a missile’s motor plume briefly illuminated the profile of a large military vessel — they were twenty miles away, but it seemed close enough to touch. The Russian ship decided not to issue any more warnings — at a range of about seventeen miles, the destroyer Stoykiy opened fire with an SA-N-7 surface-to-air missile. “One-One, Gadfly liftoff,” Furness reported on the AWACS network. Then, on the international emergency frequency, she radioed in the clear, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, any radio, Thunder One-Zero is under attack. Repeat, we are under attack.” She started a turn to the left to center the steering bars.

“Missile one is locked on,” Fogelman reported.

“Roger.” On the AWACS net, she radioed, “One-One, magnum,” indicating a HARM missile launch to other friendly aircraft, then said on interphone, “Clear to launch. Kill the sucker, Mark.”

Fogelman reached down to his weapons panel, moved the launch switch from OFF to MANUAL, and pressed the pickle button. Immediately the left wing swung up, then stabilized, as the leftmost AGM-88 HARM missile dropped off the number-three pylon. The missile fell for a few seconds as it stabilized itself in the slipstream — which allowed enough time for Furness and Fogelman to close their eyes against the bright glare of the missile’s motor. The HARM’s motor seemed to explode as it started, and an impossibly bright column of fire erupted in the night sky. In seconds the big missile was traveling over Mach-one, in a slight overhead arc directly at where the SA-N-7 missile had lifted off. About eight seconds after launch, as Furness started a gradual turn back to the east, they saw a bright flash of light on the horizon, followed by several smaller flashes and what appeared to be missiles cooking off and spinning into the Black Sea.

“Banjo, One-One, good magnum hit, I see secondaries,” Furness radioed.

“Oh, man, oh, man,” Fogelman breathed. He dropped his oxygen mask with a flick of his wrist, as if he couldn’t draw enough air through it. “Goddamn, we actually hit something. We hit a real live fucking ship.”

“C’mon, Mark,” Furness said. “Stay focused.”

“Becky, it’s just that I… hell, I never thought I’d actually fire one of these for real.” He fastened his oxygen mask to his face, took a deep breath, and began checking the TEREC threat indications again. “Okay, it looks like the F-band is off the air … okay, the S-band search radar on the cruiser is back up and hitting us right in the face. He could be taking over the air intercept for the Russian AWACS if he’s being jammed. That’s the one we want.”

“One-Two, give us some music,” Furness radioed to Norton.

“One-Two, pump,” Norton replied as Aldridge ejected two more TALD glider decoys.

Fogelman selected the antiradar missile on the number-six pylon, then continued to check his sensors. “Still got a lock on the S-band air search … shit, the SA-N-6 just came up! I’m selecting the missile on four … dammit, c’mon, man, take it, take it … got it! I got a fix on both the Grumble and the S-band. Command bars are on the target.”

“Turning,” Furness replied, and began a steep 60-degree turn toward the Russian cruiser. The HARM missile had to be aimed within 5 degrees of its intended target before it could lock on. She keyed the mike: “Banjo, One-One …”

“Missile launch!” Fogelman cried out.

At that, they could see first one missile, then another, then four more missiles rise vertically from the horizon, drawing bright lines of fire in the sky. The lines began to curl a bit — the first one or two missiles were obviously going for decoys, but the cruiser had rapid-fired enough missiles for all of them.

“Missiles away!” Fogelman cried out, and hit the launch button. When the HARM missiles were away and well clear of the Vampire, Fogelman depressed the four jammer switchlights on the front instrument panel, and the forward XMIT light came on immediately — the SA-N-6 Grumble was locked on to them solidly. “Grumble at twelve o’clock,” he said. “I lost sight of the missiles … I can’t see them!”

“Set one hundred feet on the LARA bug!” she shouted, and began a rapid descent to one hundred feet above the sea without changing heading. Their smallest radar cross-section was head-on, and if they turned they would be exposing more of themselves to the Russian missile guidance radar. “Gimme chaff.” Furness began a short-frequency up-and-down oscillation, no more than a hundred feet, trying to impart a rolling motion to the missiles that might throw them off.

“I see the missiles! Still headed right for us!” Furness called out. She began a slow side-to-side rolling action. The Grumble didn’t seem to be going for it. On the command radio, she shouted, “One-Two, give me a couple more.”

“Copy,” Norton replied. “Decoys away.”

The extra decoys worked. Just as the flare of the missile’s motor winked out, Furness could see that the SA-N-6 missile was beginning to climb higher and higher until it was far overhead, tracking the decoys that were hundreds of times better targets than the Vampires. A moment later, Fogelman shouted, “Got it! Shit hot, we got both the air search and the Grumble missile emitter! We nailed ’em!”

It was confirmed by an entire series of explosions just about twelve miles off on the horizon as the hundred-pound warheads from the two HARMs fired thousands of tungsten alloy cubes in a deadly cloud of metal all across the center and aft sections of the Russian guided missile cruiser, setting off several SS-N-12 “Sandbox” antiship missiles sitting in exposed angled launch canisters on deck.

Just when it appeared the secondary explosions had subsided, a tremendous explosion erupted on deck, illuminating the sea around the Marshal Ustinov for miles in all directions. They could even see a helicopter afire on the aft landing pad.

“We might have a kill!” Furness said in delight on interphone. “We might’ve gotten the cruiser!” She keyed the command radio mike button: “One-Two, did you see that? Banjo, this is One-One, I think we got the cruiser.”

“One-One, Banjo, give me an ident.” Fogelman briefly shut off the Mode 4 transponder, then turned it back on again. “Received, One-One,” the controller said in a low, somber voice. “One-Two is faded at this time. Turn right heading one-one-zero and say what state magnum.”

It was as if both Furness and Fogelman had been hit in the stomach with baseball bats. The NATO radar plane no longer had contact with Norton and Aldridge. One of the SA-N-6 missiles that they thought was going after a decoy must have hit them instead.

Just like that, in the blink of an eye, two fellow crewmembers were gone.

The radar warning receiver blared to life, and an “N” symbol appeared on the scope. “Mark?” Furness said. No reply — Fogelman was staring at the TEREC sensor, but he was as still as a rock. “Mark, come on. That must be the lone destroyer out there. Let’s get this puppy and get the hell out of here.”

“God … it can’t be …” he said, mulling over the deaths of Norton and Aldridge.

“Mark, dammit, run this shot.” On the command net, she radioed, “Banjo, One-One has one HARM left. Stand by. We’re pressing on the easterly destroyer.”

“Copy, Thunder. You have bandits at eleven o’clock, fifty miles, may be converging on you. The destroyer is at your ten o’clock, sixty miles. You’ve got chicks engaged at twelve o’clock, one-two-zero miles.”

“Roger.” She reached over and shook Fogelman’s left shoulder. “C’mon, Mark. Maybe they got out. Maybe they’re in the water. We can’t do anything for them. Let’s burn this last guy.”

But without the TALD decoys to induce the Russians to turn on their radars, the destroyer Rezkiy, which was patrolling alone between the guided missile cruiser and the aviation cruiser, wasn’t going to get sucked in quite as easy. Fogelman even tried turning on his attack radar to attract attention from the ship — nothing. But it did attract the attention of the fighters nearby: “One-One, bandits on you, twelve o’clock, forty miles. Range to the destroyer, fifty miles.”

“We’ll give it a few more seconds,” Furness said. “We’re still outside his SA-N-3 missile range.” Once they got within range of the SA-N-3, Furness tried climbing slightly — the Goblet had a minimum effective altitude of three hundred feet, so she tried climbing to five hundred feet to get the destroyer to commit. Still nothing. This was the one problem with carrying all antiradar weapons and nothing else — if the radars didn’t come up, the missiles were nothing but deadweight.

The destroyer’s radar didn’t come up because, with the AWACS feeding radar information to them, it wasn’t needed. The Russian AWACS was proving to be a real problem. They had a plan to deal with it — hopefully that plan was coming together right about now.

THIRTY-SIX

The other four RF-111G Vampire bombers had hit the Novorossiysk carrier battle group from two sides, cutting in from the southwest and from the east in a supersonic pincer. Captain Frank Kelly and Lieutenant Colonel Larry Tobias in Thunder One-Three, the most experienced team in the attack, killed the Russian destroyer Burnyy with a salvo of three HARM missiles, but their fourth HARM refused to power up or take any commands. The frigate Revnostnyy was hit by two HARMs fired by Major Clark Vest and First Lieutenant Lynn Ogden. After that, all the Russian ships refused to turn on any radars even with decoys flying everywhere — Captain Joe Johnson and Major Harold Rota, firing TALDs for Kelly and Tobias, even fired a decoy directly at a frigate, coming within a few hundred yards of hitting it, and the vessel refused to even activate a radar for its close-in weapon system.

Once Russian fighters started showing up, the Vampires were effectively out of the fight — but to the Russian “Mainstay” AWACS radar controller’s surprise, the four RF-111Gs turned south only twenty miles south of the Novorossiysk and began a climb, with radars and radios blaring. The American bombers climbed right on up to twelve thousand feet, well within lethal range of the cruiser’s SA-N-3B and SA-N-7 missile systems. But with the destruction of the Burnyy by the Vampires, the aviation cruiser wasn’t going to risk a sneak attack by the other two Vampires that they knew were operating farther west. After all, they had a full complement of twelve Yak-38 fighters, sixteen helicopters, and over 1,600 sailors on board. So they never fired another shot. It was going to be up to the Russian fighters now.

The Vampires were tempting targets for the Russian fighters operating over the Black Sea in support of the naval task force and now howling south to take up the chase. Deployed to bases on the Crimean Peninsula, only 120 miles to the north, were several wings of MiG-29 and Sukhoi-27 fighters, mostly providing air cover for the Russian radar plane. When the Vampires were first detected by the Mainstay radar plane, the fighter wings at Sevastopol and Yevpatoriya were placed on full alert, and when the attack began on the ships south of the Crimea, the airspace over the Black Sea was filled with over sixty fighters, the maximum the controllers aboard the A-50 Mainstay radar plane could safely handle. Spread out on both sides of the Novorossiysk carrier battle group so as to not interfere with the ship’s self-defense capabilities, the Russian fighters fanned out to hunt down the fast, low-flying American bombers. Twenty fighters deployed west to cover the Marshal Ustinov group, ten stayed with the Mainstay radar plane, and thirty fighters pursued the four Vampire bombers retreating toward Turkey. It seemed as if the RF-111G aircraft were unaware that they were being pursued — the Russians knew the Americans had an AWACS radar plane of their own up, but the Vampires were still flying at a high, very vulnerable altitude.

They were too vulnerable, too tempting a target — and it was designed that way. As the Russian fighter sweep moved south, eighty MiG-23 fighters from the Ukrainian Air Force swept up from the south. The Russian pursuers suddenly found themselves the pursued — what was just a few seconds earlier an easy thirty-on-four advantage had turned into an eighty-on-thirty disadvantage. The Vampires were soon forgotten, and all four escaped to the safety of the Turkish coastal highlands.

The single-engine Ukrainian MiG-23 Flogger, however, was no match for a Russian MiG-29 or Su-27 fighter. Even at night, the more advanced fighters were capable of killing many times their numbers of the older, much less sophisticated Ukrainian fighters, especially with an A-50 radar plane directing them. But they never got the chance — as soon as the Russian fighters started pairing up against their former Soviet brothers from Ukrayina, the MiG-23s turned southbound and ran at full military power without firing one missile. It was a planned retreat — they never had any intention of trying to mix it up with the advanced fighters …

… and the reason soon became apparent. As the bulk of the Russian fighter coverage moved toward Turkey’s north coast chasing the Ukrainian fighters, a flight of ten Ukrainian MiG-27 and ten Sukhoi-17 fighter-bombers swept in from the east at supersonic speed. The Mainstay’s radar controllers were swamped with so many planes on the scope that they didn’t see the low-flying newcomers until they were only sixty miles from the remaining five ships of the Novorossiysk carrier battle group. The Russian fighters were far out of position and had to use precious fuel to turn and engage the large number of bombers streaking in from the east. The Ukrainian tactical bombers were lightly loaded with extended-range fuel tanks — they had to fly three hundred miles farther than their MiG-23 brothers in order to outflank the Russians and successfully sneak up on the aircraft cruiser group — and they carried only one weapon, so they were very fast.

That one weapon — the Kh-59 missile — was the most devastating weapon in Ukrayina’s air arsenal. Called the AS-13 Kingpost by NATO and nicknamed the SLAMski because of its resemblance to the U.S. Navy’s AGM-84E SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile), the Kingpost was a TV-guided subsonic 2,000-pound rocket-powered missile with a 300-pound high-explosive warhead. The MiG-27 and Su-17 bombers fired their missiles at a range of about thirty-five miles from the warships, then turned back to the east. The missiles first climbed rapidly to thirty thousand feet, then began a steep descent down toward the Russian warships. The last twenty seconds of their flight would be controlled by the Ukrainian pilots via a television and steering datalink back to their fighters.

Once the Kh-59 missiles made their climb, however, they were sitting ducks for the Russian fighters — the A-50 Mainstay radar plane could easily track each of the twenty missiles fired at the Russian warships. Since most of the fighters were still too far south to chase down the cruise missiles, the Mainstay directed all but two of its own fighter escorts to try to shoot down the missiles. Eight Sukhoi-27 fighters broke out of their combat air patrols and sped eastbound, locking up the big one-ton missiles on radar and maneuvering to intercept. The radio datalink between missile and fighter was used as a beacon to locate each missile, and the sophisticated track-while-scan radar of the eight Su-27s allowed almost the entire complement of Kh-59 missiles to be targeted …

… which sealed the fate of the Russian Mainstay radar plane, which was the joint U.S./Turkish/Ukrainian task force’s main target all along. While the main bulk of the Russian fighters was turning northeast to intercept the Ukrainian strike aircraft, and all but two of the Mainstay’s escorts were trying to intercept the Kh-59 cruise missiles, ten MiG-23 fighters blasted in from the southwest at forty thousand feet.

They were led by Colonel Pavlo Tychina himself.

Like the strike birds, they carried fuel tanks and only one weapon each — an R-33 long-range air-to-air missile with the NATO reporting name AA-9 Amos. The R-33 was one of the largest air-to-air missiles in the world, weighing almost 1,000 pounds, but it was one of the most sophisticated. It had a range of ninety miles when launched from high altitude, a top speed of Mach-three, and a 225-pound warhead. It used three types of guidance: semiactive radar homing, where it homed in on reflected radar energy from its launch aircraft; active radar homing, where a small radar unit in its nose cone steered it toward its target; and passive radar homing, where the missile could home in on radar energy transmitted by other aircraft — especially the big rotodome of the A-50 Mainstay radar plane.

The R-33 missile was not a typical weapon of the MiG-23 fighter — the Flogger’s radar could provide only basic navigation information and no guidance signals — but the power of the Mainstay’s radar sealed its own fate.

Out of ten missiles launched against the Russian Mainstay, two hit home.

The 380,000-pound aircraft lost the rotodome and its vertical stabilizer, but the main crew compartment stayed virtually intact. Its crew of twenty-four officers, who watched the R-33 missiles home in on them on radar, were alive to feel the impact as the huge aircraft crashed into the Black Sea.

They joined the aircraft cruiser Novorossiysk on its way to the bottom of the Black Sea, and because it was easily the biggest, most easily identifiable target for the relatively inexperienced Ukrainian pilots, six of the twenty Kh-59 missiles that survived their short flight hit the cruiser. With its landing deck full of Yak-38 Forger aircraft ready to launch in support of fleet defense, the fires and destruction on board the 43,000-ton vessel were devastating and complete—356 officers and seamen would perish in the attack.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“Thunder One-One, many bandits at one o’clock, twenty miles, high. Chicks at two o’clock, seventy miles. Burner disengage east, bugout south. Acknowledge.”

“Banjo, One-One copies, we’re outta here,” Rebecca Furness replied. She swept the wings of her Vampire all the way back to 72.5 degrees, shoved the throttles into full afterburner, and began to accelerate past Mach-one. “Let’s get the Sidewinders on-line, Mark,” she said.

“They’re ready to go,” Fogelman replied. “The HARM is ready to jettison too if you want to get rid of it. I’ve got trackbreakers on and countermeasures set.”

The one remaining AGM-88 antiradar missile on the number-five pylon did not limit their top speed at all, but it did increase drag slightly and made the ride a little choppier. “We’ll try to hang on to it for now,” Furness replied. “We’ll need all the HARMs we can—”

Their E-3 AWACS radar plane orbiting over central Turkey suddenly radioed, “ ‘Apex,’ Thunder, twelve o’clock, fifteen miles … ‘Apex,’ Thunder, twelve o’clock … ‘Apex’ …”

“Missile launch!” Fogelman shouted. “The Russian fighters are launching missiles! But we don’t have a missile-launch indication or an uplink signal. I don’t know where they are.”

“It’s an IRSTS attack,” Furness said. The Russian IRSTS, or Infrared Search and Track System, allowed fighters to launch air-to-air missiles by combining range information from a ground or airborne radar with a heat-seeking sensor on their planes. The fighter radar needed to be turned on only for the missile’s last seconds of flight. “Stand by, the uplink should be coming.”

Suddenly a bat-wing symbol appeared directly in front of them on the threat warning scope, well within lethal range, and they got a bright red MISSILE LAUNCH indication and a fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone in their helmets.

“Fighter attack off the nose!” Fogelman shouted. He used two fingers to eject chaff bundles out of both left and right internal dispensers. “Chaff’s out! Vertical jinks!”

They could not perform a break maneuver or a hard turn to try to throw the missile off, because they would only further highlight themselves — they had to hope their jammers would take care of the missile uplink and the enemy fighter radars would lock on to the decoy chaff instead.

The sky was filled with air-to-air missiles fired at them — the Russian fighters were close enough now so that they could see the missiles in the night sky as tiny winks of light as they launched. A missile exploded about two hundred yards off their left wing, close enough for them to feel the shock wave against their aircraft.

“Thunder, many bandits twelve o’clock high, twelve miles, line abreast, continue burner east, junk ’em, and hunker down.” The AWACS controller’s brevity messages were ones of desperation — he was telling Furness and Fogelman to fly balls-to-the-wall right through the line of Russian fighters, continue electronic countermeasures, and hope for the best. “First bandits now at ten miles, twelve o’clock. I’ve got bandits hooking north — they’re expecting you to break south after the merge. Recommend you continue to extend eastbound at best speed. Lead bandits five miles.”

Just then Furness heard it — the unmistakable growling of an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile locked on to a target. She did not hesitate, but squeezed the safety release button on her control stick and hit the launch button. The small heat-seeker on the left pylon darted out into space and was quickly lost from view.

“Thunder, bandits breaking left and right … head’s down.” The missile missed.

But it still had a good effect — the Russian attack formation had been broken up and was now on the defensive. “Banjo, can you get us the hell out of here?”

“Thunder, bandits at your ten o’clock, twenty miles high,” the controller responded. “What state heat, Thunder?”

“Thunder has one.”

“Roger, Thunder, snap to zero-three-zero nose high to engage.”

“Yeah, baby, I like it,” Fogelman exclaimed. “Let’s get ’em.” The AWACS controller was suggesting that they try to scatter the Russian fighters who were maneuvering to get a tail shot on them by trying a “snap shot” with their last Sidewinder missile — if they could get those fighters to turn away, even for a few moments, they had a chance to get away.

Furness rolled into a hard left turn toward the middle of the Black Sea — it was a totally unexpected move, with the safety of the northern Turkish coast only sixty miles to the south — and as soon as she raised the nose to 20 degrees above the horizon, she immediately got a growling tone and punched off the last remaining Sidewinder missile at the approaching Russian fighters. She then banked hard right, descended to two hundred feet above the sea, and began a full-afterburner power run to Turkey. They were out of weapons — speed and low level was their only hope now. “Gimme the TFRs, Mark,” Furness said.

Fogelman already had his hands on the terrain-following radar switches, and he set them up as soon as Furness gave the word. “TFRs engaged, left TF, right SIT, hard ride.”

“Thanks, Mark. Good work.” Two vertical lines on the E-scope told them the system was in “LARA override,” meaning their altitude over the water was controlled by the radar altimeter until they got within a few miles of the shoreline. On the command net, she radioed, “Banjo, Thunder is ‘Winchester,’ request bogey-dope and vector to home plate.”

“Thunder, your bandits are at five o’clock, fifteen miles high, converging rapidly, additional bandits at seven o’clock, twelve miles, recommend … ‘Apex,’ Thunder, Apex, seven o’clock, eleven miles.”

Fogelman was practically sitting backwards in his seat searching visually for the missiles. He then set the threat scope to IR, which used a heat-seeking sensor atop the vertical stabilizer to scan for heat sources behind them. “I don’t see them, Becky,” he said. “Nothing on the—”

Just then they got a MISSILE LAUNCH light on their instrument panel and a warning tone — the threat scope had picked up another Russian fighter launching missiles and automatically ejected both chaff and heat-seeking decoy flares. Furness shoved power to zone 5 afterburner, rolled into a 90-degree left bank, pulled on the control stick until the stall-warning horn blared, and released the back pressure on the stick. As soon as she did so, there was a terrific explosion less than one hundred feet from their right wingtip.

“Chaff and flares!” Furness shouted. Fogelman ejected more chaff and flares, and Furness rolled into a hard right turn. She had to sweep the wings forward to 54 degrees to keep from stalling the Vampire from all the hard turning.

“Thunder, threats at six o’clock, five miles, suggest you extend left, chicks at ten o’clock, thirty miles … threats now at seven o’clock, four miles high, feet dry in two minutes, continue to burner extend … threat at six o’clock … Atoll, Thunder, Atoll!” At the same time as the “Atoll” call, which was a warning against a suspected enemy heat-seeking-missile launch, the MISSILE LAUNCH light illuminated once again …

… but this time the flare ejector on the left side of the Vampire jammed, so flares ejected only out of the right dispenser. While Fogelman ejected chaff, Furness started a hard 5-G right break — right into one of the Russian AA-11 missiles. The AA-11’s 33-pound warhead exploded between the right engine nacelle and the right cockpit canopy, nearly ripping the right engine and wing completely off the Vampire.

It was Rebecca Furness who initiated the ejection sequence, squeezing and pulling the yellow-and-black-striped handle by her right knee. The action fired several pyrotechnic initiators that tightened their shoulder harnesses and set off a guillotine-shaped linear charge all around the cockpit, including the wing gloves, from behind their seats to forward of the instrument panel at the forward tip of the long, slanted windscreen. A split-second later a powerful rocket motor blasted the cockpit capsule free of the stricken aircraft fuselage, with a smaller stabilizer rocket ensuring that the capsule did not pitch over backwards in the jet wash. The force of the primary rocket motor was like being hit in the back by a car going twenty miles an hour — not enough to kill, but guaranteed to make you remember it for the rest of your life.

The primary rocket motor burned for less than five seconds, but it was powerful enough to propel the capsule more than two hundred feet higher than the stricken aircraft. After motor burnout, accelerometers computed when the capsule had decelerated out of Mach speed, and a small pilot parachute and two flaps underneath the capsule “wings” were deployed to help the capsule stabilize. Almost at the top of its parabolic arc, the three main thirty-foot-diameter parachutes deployed. Twelve seconds after pulling the ejection handle, the Vampire capsule was under three good parachutes.

“Mark, you all right? Mark …?”

“I’m here,” Fogelman replied weakly. “Over here.”

“I hope you’re just trying to be funny, nav.”

But there was no more time to talk. Four large air bladders — a large mattress-shaped impact-attenuation bag under the capsule, two large pillow-shaped flotation bags under the rear “wing” of the capsule, a mushroom-shaped anticapsize bag behind the pilot’s canopy, and a large pillow-shaped righting bag that covered the navigator’s canopy — automatically deployed a few seconds later, just before the capsule hit the icy waters of the Black Sea. The gusty north winds kept the parachute inflated for a few seconds after hitting the water, and the capsule was dragged along the sea for a few dozen yards before flipping upside down.

The cockpit was completely dark, and the sudden pitchover completely confused Furness. She was upside down in her seat, hanging from her shoulder and crotch straps, with ocean sounds all around her — it felt as if she were sinking to the bottom like a rock. The capsule was supposed to be watertight and could even keep water out if completely submerged, but that was only if the glass or structure hadn’t been damaged. What if the thirty-year-old capsule had split apart or the missile had fractured it? What if the pressure of the seawater was finding some tiny weakness in the canopy and was about to break it wide open?

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic, she told herself. She unbuckled her oxygen mask, then detached it completely and stuffed it in the storage space beside her seat. There was no water collecting on the canopy over her head, only checklists, papers, pencils, and fear — fear was collecting in that cockpit faster than anything else.

She heard a moan — was that from herself or from Mark? — and she reached over to him. “Mark, you all right?”

“I think I broke my face again,” Fogelman said. He was also hanging in his straps, but his arms were hanging down onto the canopy. She reached for his oxygen mask — it was already broken free of his helmet. She found blood coming from his nostrils, but it was nothing serious. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“Are we still upside down? I can’t tell right now.”

“Just relax,” Furness said. “We’ll turn upright in a minute or two.”

The large pillow-shaped flotation bag on the right side of the capsule was supposed to automatically right the capsule if it was inverted — the sinking parachutes must be holding it under. On the center overhead beam in the cockpit were four yellow handles. The easy way to remember which handle did which was the “cut-cut, float-float” method — starting from the top, the handles cut the capsule free of the aircraft, cut the parachute risers, deployed the parachute, and deployed the flotation bags. Furness pulled the capsule-severance handle, which unguarded the parachute riser-release handle, pulled the second handle, and a few minutes later, aided by the surging action of the icy-cold Black Sea, the capsule rolled to the left and flipped upright.

Both crewmembers sat in the darkness of the Vampire capsule for several minutes, not speaking and not moving. Both knew how lucky they were to be alive.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Even after two years in office, this was the first time the President had picked it up. In this day of high-speed satellite communications, it was an anachronism, sure, almost a joke — but the Hot Line, the direct line between the White House and the Kremlin, was still in use. Upgraded, it was going to be used right now. “This is the President of the United States. To whom am I speaking?”

“This is President Vitaly Velichko,” the Russian president responded. “How are you this evening, sir?” The tone of voice was a bit strained — who wasn’t these days? — but it sounded friendly enough. Velichko’s English was very good — although the Russian president was an avowed Communist, part of the new right-wing politicians that wanted to return Russia to some semblance of its greatness of the Soviet Union, he was also well educated and rather cosmopolitan.

“I’m fine, Mr. President. I called because—”

The Hot Line was a satellite communications system, so there was no landline delay in their voices. “I am glad you are fine, Mr. President,” Velichko said, his voice seething. “I hope you are sane and intelligent as well. If you are, you will withdraw your bomber forces from Turkey, return your nuclear bombers and submarine-based missiles to normal alert, and stop interfering in affairs between Commonwealth allies that do not concern you. Otherwise, Mr. President, I may unfortunately see you roast in hell.”

And the line went dead.

“Well, so much for that,” the President said wearily. “Talking to that asshole is like talking to a brick wall. Christ, why couldn’t people have listened when I wanted to prop up Yeltsin? They wouldn’t listen to me, they wouldn’t listen to former President Nixon when he warned us about this two years ago. Then our NATO allies gave Boris diddlysquat in aid. Now, look at what we’ve got. Shit — they can’t say I didn’t tell them so.”

His advisers, and the First Lady, were gathered around the old Jack Kennedy desk, nodding in sympathy. They had certainly wanted more funds for aiding Yeltsin, but they’d seen how the country balked, claiming America needed to take care of its own first. And then when the Russian Congress started chopping away at Yeltsin’s powers, bit by bit, the President knew it was a lost cause. Yeltsin’s days had been numbered. And it could have been prevented.

A sharp pain shot through the southerner’s stomach — his newfound ulcer was acting up — and continued straight up to his temples. The entire evening was grinding him down, something that usually happened only when his wife was being difficult. His entire adult life was in politics. Southern politics — down-and-dirty, rough-and-tumble, the worst kind. Southern politicians in an election were about as nice as starving junkyard pit bulls. It was constant work, constant attention to every detail, constant pressure, just to stay in office. He had never been in the military, but twenty years in public service was, he had always thought, like being in the military. It was a way of life, not just a job.

But being the President of the United States was like politics and military service combined, only amplified a thousand times.

All day long there had been a constant procession of people telling him he was wrong, and that exacerbated the ulcer even more. First he heard it from the Joint Chiefs of Staff — all of them. They all had plans on what to do, but one thing was for certain: they wanted more. No more bit-by-bit military expeditions — the Joint Chiefs wanted a Desert Storm-type mobilization and deployment. Nothing else would be acceptable. Orchestrated by President George Bush, the 1991 war with Iraq was fought with massive overwhelming strength, and it was over in one hundred days — never mind that they had unlimited fuel, six months to prepare, a third-rate opponent, and it had cost U.S. taxpayers sixty billion dollars. Led by the President, the Islamic Wars of 1993 were fought with units and weapons brought into the theater over a period of several months, and it lasted almost a year — same result, same casualty rate, but it cost only twenty billion. The Yugoslavian question had been stalemated for years until Germany led large numbers of NATO forces into that country, and the peace had lasted for almost a year now. That one cost the U.S. virtually nothing — except its leadership role in Europe, ceded over to a strong, reunified Germany.

Next came the senior senators and representatives, the Congressional “leadership.” Most advocated caution. But they also liked it when the President and General Freeman from the Pentagon briefed them on the multinational skirmish in the Black Sea that had just taken place, which netted two Russian destroyers, a frigate, a guided-missile cruiser, an aircraft cruiser, and a Russian AWACS radar plane. Although they had lost two American planes — and the Ukrainians and Turks had lost none — the payback for the attack on the Turkish ships and the gratitude of the Turkish government for the RF-111Gs’ action was a tremendous boost to everyone’s spirits, and they were asking the President for more. Perhaps another aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps two more. Two hundred thousand troops to be sent to Europe — but not any closer than Belgium or Norway. F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16C Falcon bombers deployed to England, but none to Germany, and perhaps more F-111s deployed to Turkey. They loved the F-111, the Turks said. America was retiring and boneyarding all the F-111 Aardvarks anyway — why not sell them to Turkey?

Now he was just finishing up with the third group: the political advisers and media consultants from the President’s party. “Economic sanctions of course,” the party chairman was saying. “Sends a strong message, lots of feedback in the news, fairly safe, lots of play.”

“But if the leadership is so rabid over the apparent success of the air attacks against those Russian ships, why not go for it?” a media type said, tipping his mug of coffee to the First Lady, who gave him a disdainful glare in return. “You hit the media with strong leadership, bold decisions, decisive actions, all designed to look good to the voters during the upcoming election year. This proves what you’ve been saying all along, Mr. President — limited-action military responses can be successful.”

“We lost two RF-111G aircraft in that attack,” General Freeman interjected. “That probably sounds like a trivial number to you—”

“Hey, General, don’t go putting words in my mouth,” the media hack said. “I’m sorry for what happened. But to me, the loss was pretty small and the results were pretty dramatic.”

“The unit we sent over lost two of its twenty-four crewmembers and one-sixth of their aircraft in one night, dammit!” Freeman thundered. “The Russians figured out what was going on almost immediately and shut down their radars, which makes antiradar weapons completely ineffective.”

“We can replace the aircraft and crewmembers, General,” the party chairman said. “Those men knew—”

“And women,” Freeman interjected.

Freeman’s comment froze the party chairman in midsentence — he had completely forgotten women were involved in the conflict. “One of the crewmembers lost was a woman …?”

“I briefed you ten minutes ago, sir, that the pilot on one of the planes shot down was First Lieutenant Paula Norton.” He watched the chairman’s eyes grow wide — everyone had heard of Paula Norton. “She was practically a one-person recruiting operation for the Air Force Reserves. Your son probably has a poster of her in his room.”

“Let’s stick with the subject, which is what to do about any further Russian aggression.” The President sighed, dipping into a bag of Fritos sitting next to a glass of Coke.

“Excuse me, sir, but the question is not what to do about further Russian aggression,” Freeman said. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he was going to be burning a very big bridge. “We need to discuss, uh, leadership of this crisis. Mr. President, what do you want to do about this?”

“I think the President’s views are clear on this subject, General,” the First Lady interjected, glaring at Freeman. “The President wants the Russians to stop making war on former Soviet republics and stop threatening our allies.”

“I know that, ma’am. My thought is, we need to formulate a plan. We need to establish thresholds of action. We need to build consensus and a sense of purpose. What we’ve done so far is symbolic and reactive — we’re responding after something happens instead of anticipating and planning what may happen, and what we’ll do about it if it happens.”

“Well, how in the hell are we supposed to do that, General?” the President mumbled, the frustration obvious in his voice. “Who would’ve expected the Russians to invade a fellow CIS member — that’s like America invading Canada or England, for God’s sake! And who would’ve known they’d use nuclear weapons?” Little bits of Fritos were flying out of his mouth onto the desk.

“We have some of the best minds in the world working for you in the Pentagon, in the State Department, and right here in the White House,” Freeman responded. “We can give you our estimate of what we think the Russians will do next. But it’s a very broad list, so our planned response will be sweeping.”

“Including mobilizing and deploying hundreds of thousands of troops, I suppose,” the First Lady interjected, picking lint off her pants suit.

“I submit, ma’am, that the Russians’ course of action, especially their use of low-yield nuclear weapons, means we need to prepare for an equal or greater military response and hope that we can solve this with a peaceful response,” Freeman answered. “The Russians set the precedent here, and I haven’t seen any sign of letting up. We have little choice but to prepare for an escalation of hostilities — and work like hell to avoid them.”

The phone on the President’s desk rang. “Yes …? Okay, just for a minute.” The President’s physician entered the Oval Office, shook his head in obvious disapproval, and had the President use a hand-held finger-cuff device to measure his blood pressure and pulse.

“You look like hell, Mr. President.” He clucked. “How about calling it a night early — say, before three A.M. this time? And lay off all this junk food.”

“Very funny,” the President drawled. The doctor had the President work the device three times to make sure the readings were correct. He was about to take a seat to chat with his patient, but the President said, “Just leave me a full bottle of Tagamets. We’ve got work to do.” The doctor thought about checking up on the First Lady, but she warned him off with a cold stare and he quickly departed. She could see how tired and upset her husband was getting, so she ordered all of the politicos to leave as well.

“All right, Philip,” the President said to General Freeman, after everyone but the Vice President, Freeman, Scheer, Grimm, and Lifter had departed, “I’m listening. Give me your best guess as to what’s going to happen next.”

“The Russians will retaliate,” Freeman said firmly. “A massive but centralized attack, someplace that will punish the Ukrainians for their attacks and possibly the Turks and us for our role in helping them. My staff’s guess is Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. Secondary target would be Kayseri, where the Russians know we’ve got most of the Ukrainians based — except now we’ve dispersed both the American and Ukrainian aircraft to other bases in Turkey in anticipation of an attack, and we’re getting the Patriot systems set up as fast as we can.

“The most likely alternate targets: Golcuk, the Turkish industrial and naval center; Istanbul, the historical and cultural center of Turkey and strategically vital; or Ankara, the capital itself. My staff feels the Russians will not restrict themselves to military targets but will expand their target list to include command and control, industrial centers, and communications hubs.”

“A nuclear attack?”

“My answer to that, sir, is ‘why not?’ “ Freeman replied. “Why wouldn’t they use those neutron warheads against Turkey, like they did in the Ukraine?”

“Because we’d blow their shit away and they know it!” Grimm retorted.

“General, be realistic,” the First Lady said wearily. “The Russians would not dare to use any more nuclear weapons, especially against a NATO ally. That would be suicide.”

“Would it, sir? Would it, ma’am?” Freeman asked. “What exactly would you do if the Russians attacked Turkey? Send in the bombers? Sir, we have not demonstrated the resolve to do anything, let alone stage a thermonuclear attack on a Russian target. The attack on the Russian ships in the Black Sea was a fluke, a lucky shot, and we only had six aircraft involved in the operation — the Ukrainians had over a hundred. The Russians have used nuclear weapons on multiple targets in the Ukraine, along with destroying several Turkish warships, and you have not had one meaningful conversation with President Velichko of Russia or made any sort of equivalent response.”

The First Lady rose to her feet and said icily, “I advise you to watch your tone of voice, General.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying, ma’am, and it’s my job to say it,” Freeman shot back. “We deployed virtually no forces overseas, we did not mobilize any additional Reserve forces, and we did not federalize any forces except the ones who would go on strategic alert. The entire Western World thinks we’ve abandoned them, sir.”

“That’s bullshit, Freeman, and you know it,” Grimm retorted with a snort, looking to the First Lady for support.

“Their neutron weapon is a powerful terror tool, sir,” National Security Director Lifter said. “They can set off a nuclear device and actually control the casualties they want to inflict — but it’s not a weapon of mass destruction, per se. Over a populated area it can kill tremendous numbers — but over a nonpopulated area, it will do little or no damage.”

“Mr. President, killing ten thousand persons by neutron bomb or by high-explosive bombs doesn’t make any bit of difference to me,” Freeman said, “and it obviously doesn’t make any difference to the Russian military or government. In fact, it’s a cost-effective and very efficient weapon.”

“You sound like some kind of Dr. Frankenstein,” the First Lady snapped. “The end justifies the means, is that right, General? Do whatever it takes to get the job done?”

“There’s no bad way to kill,” Freeman said. “Or any good way to die. There’s just killing and death.”

The First Lady rolled her eyes in disbelief. “I think that’s nonsense too,” the President said, popping more Fritos into his mouth along with a few Tagamets. “This is almost the twenty-first century, Philip. Modern-day wars must be fought with restraint and carefully controlled escalation, with stops and checks and pauses put in to encourage the conflict to end and diplomacy to begin again. We’re not trigger-happy, for God’s sake. We have the weapons and the technology to destroy with precision and strength without resorting to nuclear weapons. Besides, Velichko or some other wacko in Moscow probably’s got his finger on the button night and day — we let loose with a nuke of our own, and the whole world goes up in smoke.”

“That’s a myth, Mr. President,” Freeman said. “We’ve learned that a lot of the ideas we had about nuclear warfighting just don’t hold true.”

“Like what, General?” asked the First Lady skeptically.

“Like the idea that a finger is poised over a button in Russia someplace, and at the first sign of attack, the whole world is a goner,” Freeman replied. “In fact, it takes three persons in Russia — the President, the Minister of Defense, and the Chief of the General Staff — to order a nuclear attack, and only one person to stop it; in our country, of course, it only takes one to start it, but many persons can stop it and it can even stop itself, with our system of built-in termination and fail-safes. And this assumes that the Russians can in fact detect a launch or even an impact: we’ve learned that Russian surveillance satellites and other long-range detection systems aren’t as good as we once thought, to the point that a nuclear detonation in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, or Siberia might go completely unnoticed.”

“What’s your point, General?” the President asked impatiently.

“The point is, sir, is that wars aren’t started or stopped quickly, especially nuclear wars. Russia knows we’re ready to fight a nuclear war, sir, and even though we don’t have very many weapons on-line, the ones we have are devastating. Velichko isn’t insane, no matter what Sen’kov or The New York Times says. He would do the same as you’re doing right now, sir — meet with his advisers, discuss a plan of action, then proceed. He serves a constituency too.”

“Yeah — a constituency of other hard-line neo-Communist wackos.” But the President was silent for a moment; then: “So let’s assume they attack both the Ukraine and Turkey, and even use more nuclear weapons — maybe even full-yield weapons. What then?”

“That’s the question I’m posing to you, sir,” Freeman said. “What’s our priority? What’s your goal? What kind of role do you want to play? Do you want to protect a NATO ally, or punish Russia, or both? Do you want to wait and see or do you want to act?”

“Every time you say that, General, I want to bust you in the face,” the First Lady suddenly exploded, “and I consider it my job to say it. You make it sound like a cautious, wait-and-see attitude is wrong. You make it seem as if action — and I read that as war, pure violence—is the only response you’ll accept.”

“Ma’am, I’m paid to give my professional opinion, based on the information I have and my knowledge and experience.” Freeman sighed. “The President can take my advice, adopt it, reject it, fire me, or hire someone else. If he tells me to jump, I’ll salute and ask ‘How high?’ but I’ll also give him my thoughts and opinions on the way up and on the way down.”

“I think you need to step back and reevaluate your priorities here, General,” she replied coldly, glaring at her husband as if to say, We’ve got to get rid of him.

“I didn’t start this conflict, ma’am, and I didn’t set the limits. But we’ve got two dead U.S. airmen now, and an important ally that, I feel, is going to get nailed any minute now. We need to formulate a plan.” He turned to the President and concluded earnestly, “I’ll do whatever you want, sir. I’m on your team. Just tell me what you want to do.”

The phone rang again and the President shook his head. The Chief of Staff answered it, then put the caller on hold. “Sir, it’s Valentin Sen’kov, calling from Moscow.”

“Tell him to call back later.”

“He says it’s urgent.”

The President was going to refuse again, but this time the First Lady reached over and took the phone. “Dobriy vyechyeer, Valentin. Kak dyela?” She listened for a moment, then turned on the speakerphone and set the receiver back on its cradle. “I’ve got you on speaker-phone with the President and some members of his staff, Valentin. Go ahead and repeat what you just told me.”

“Dear,” the President said irritably, “what in hell do you think you’re doing?” Along with feeling as if he were being pulled apart by the flurry of voices and activity around him, adding the pompous Sen’kov’s voice to the soup wasn’t going to help. He also didn’t like his wife’s growing proficiency in Russian, especially when Sen’kov was involved.

“I am very sorry to disturb you, Mr. President,” Sen’kov said on the speakerphone, “but I feel this is very urgent. I know you just called President Velichko. I must inform you that Velichko is no longer in Moscow. He is on the underground railway to the alternate military command center at Domodedovo.”

“What?”

“Why is he doing that, Valentin?” the First Lady asked. “We’re not doing anything here. We don’t have any operations planned against Russia.”

“Ma’am, please,” Freeman admonished her. “That’s an open line!” She ignored him.

“I do not have precise information, sir,” Sen’kov continued, “but I believe he has evacuated the Kremlin. He is very disturbed about the attacks over the Black Sea, and I fear he might retaliate immediately.”

“Retaliate? How? When?”

“I do not know,” Sen’kov said. “I cannot talk longer, sir. But I must say this: Velichko is unstable. The military will follow him, but they are ambivalent and are simply looking for leadership. They will follow Velichko into Hell … or they will follow me into true reform and progress. Mr. President, I am asking for your assistance. I know precisely where Velichko will be thirty minutes from now. I am sure your CIA has detailed information on Domodedovo. You have bombers in Turkey, cruise missile submarines in the Aegean and Mediterranean, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Destroy Domodedovo. Kill Velichko before he starts World War Three.”

“Sen’kov, are you insane?” the President retorted. “I’m not about to use nuclear weapons to kill the leader of a nation.”

“I am sorry, Mr. President, I can speak no more,” Sen’kov said. “I will be in contact with you later,” and the line went dead.

The President and his advisers looked at the telephone with stunned expressions, as if the device had just come alive and was squirming on the desk. Finally, after a long silence, the President’s advisers began to speak. Harlan Grimm said, “He’s totally out of line, Mr. President.”

“I don’t think that’s a viable option, sir,” Scheer said. “It’s totally out of character for an American president to specifically target a national leader.”

“I think it’s the first good suggestion I’ve heard in days,” Philip Freeman said.

“General Freeman, are you insane or just having some kind of a nervous breakdown?” the First Lady asked. “Are you trying to be funny? The man just suggested that we try to assassinate Velichko with a nuclear bomb.”

“I can’t think of a better thing to do, a better weapon to use, and a more rotten person to use it on,” Freeman said. To the President he said, “Sir, we had a great victory in Desert Storm, but we suffered one major defeat — we missed Saddam Hussein. That decision, although it seemed appropriate and right and moral then, we now regard as a major mistake. Saddam cost this country a lot when he rose up again two years ago.

“Vitaly Velichko will do the same thing. I truly believe that Velichko will not stop until he precipitates a third world war, or until NATO knuckles under and allows him to take the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Georgia back under Russian rule. He has used nuclear weapons, and I truly believe he will continue to do so. If we target Velichko now in his bunker in Domodedovo, we’ll get him and kill perhaps a few thousand more.”

“And risk a massive nuclear retaliation by the Russians,” the First Lady declared, her eyes burning on Freeman.

“Not in my opinion, ma’am,” Freeman said. “If we get Velichko and members of his cabinet and the military command, and get the codes, no attack will take place. If Sen’kov really can take control of the government and the military — and I think he can — he might be able to head off any kind of nuclear retaliation. But if we don’t do it, Velichko will continue to escalate the conflict, hoping we’ll back down. Ultimately we’ll be forced into a corner and have to resort to a massive nuclear attack on Russia to make the conflict stop. Instead of stopping the conflict after killing only a few thousand — far less than the Ukraine has already suffered — hundreds of millions might die in an all-out nuclear exchange.”

The President rubbed his eyes wearily as the First Lady and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shot glares at each other. After several long moments, the President opened a red-covered folder on his desk — it was the Pentagon’s joint analysis of the progression of the conflict and a list of recommended military options. “Tell us what you’re thinking, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Harlan Grimm said.

“I want …” the President began, swallowed, took a deep breath, and wondered how in the hell history would judge him for what he was about to do. This was the most critical event of his Administration so far. The people of the country had short memories, but history did not. He had gotten into politics and run for office because he’d wanted to put his stamp on America. He had run for President and won against all odds because he’d wanted to shake things up after the complacent four years of George Bush and the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s Armageddon view of reality concerning what the American military really needed. But he had never, never been pushed to the wall like this. And history was waiting, calling him to respond as so many presidents had been forced to do before him … from Truman to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush. “I want this fucking war to stop, right now,” the President continued. “I want Russia to immediately cease all overflights and patrols threatening our allies. I want Russia to immediately begin a pullback of all ground forces out of the Ukraine and Moldova. I want Russia to immediately withdraw their Black Sea warships to Russian ports—”

“And if they don’t, Mr. President?”

“If they don’t, then I’ll—” He looked as if he were on the verge of exploding or totally breaking down — Freeman couldn’t tell. “If they don’t, we will attack and destroy a military target in Russia.”

“What?” gasped the First Lady, horrified.

“The General’s right,” the President told her. “We’ve acted with restraint, and all we’ve gotten is more violence. I don’t see an end to it unless we act, unless we answer force with force. I’m not playing the peacemaker anymore. I tried it in the Islamic Wars, and it took the Turks to bail me out. I tried it in Yugoslavia, and Germany bailed me out. So far in this fight, Turkey’s bailed me out again. I’m not sitting back any longer.

“I will take the fight to Russia — no economic sanctions, no negotiations, no screwing with words while more American airmen get killed, no more Hot Line phone calls where the asshole hangs up on me. The Russian people will find out what it’s like to get nuked, to see loved ones die of radiation poisoning, to watch the skies and wonder if the next plane will drop a neutron bomb on their house and destroy everything. I will launch a nuclear bomber attack into Russia against a military target and obliterate it. I will send the stealth bombers into Russia and destroy a military base. I am going to end this damned war or I will carry it through to the fucking end!”

There was no sound in the Oval Office for several long moments, except for the sound of the President’s deep breathing and the sound of the First Lady pacing back and forth after she’d gotten up. “All right, General,” the President said resignedly. “I want a plan to destroy this bunker — this Domodedovo airport. How soon can you have something to show me?”

“Preliminary assessment within the hour, Mr. President,” Freeman said, still amazed the President capitulated. “A detailed briefing ready to present to the leadership and the Alliance in three … no, two hours.”

“I want it surgically done, with as little collateral damage as possible,” the President ordered. “Do we have any of those low-yield things the Russians use?”

“Even if we did, it wouldn’t work against the bunker, sir,” Freeman said. “The neutron radiation can’t penetrate through more than eighteen inches of concrete — the bunker probably has more than eighteen feet of concrete, if it’s anything like Strategic Command headquarters or the NMCC. We have to dig it out, and that means at least twenty kilotons and a direct hit, with an airburst fuzing height of no more than five thousand feet.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” the First Lady gasped. Over the sudden hubbub of voices the phone rang again, and the Chief of Staff picked it up. “I can’t believe I’m actually witnessing the planning of a nuclear attack against Russia.” The President took the phone from his Chief of Staff when it was held out to him. He listened for a few moments, then handed it back.

“Looks like we’re going to need that plan, General Freeman. There’s been a Russian cruise missile attack in Turkey. Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul and the Golcuk naval base were hit.”

“Any nuclear weapons used, sir?”

There was a long pause. The President lowered his head and took a deep breath. “Both targets,” the President said. “Subatomic warheads, exploded at ten thousand feet.”

“My God,” Scheer said. “I can’t believe it… the Russians actually dared to launch another nuclear attack.”

“The loss of life may be low,” Freeman offered quickly, shocked at how depressed and stricken the President appeared right now — he looked as if he might be on the verge of tears or a violent outburst. “The Turks dispersed the fleet based at Golcuk days ago. The facility is large but fairly isolated, in very rugged terrain, so neutron radiation would be isolated to the local area. The nearest city is ten miles away, out of the hazard radius for a neutron device, and it’s small. As far as Istanbul-Ataturk International, it was closed to commercial traffic when the Russians attacked the Turkish Navy, so there would be just a skeleton military security team there. The city is close, about three to four miles northeast, but it would probably not be affected — the danger radius of the weapons the Russians exploded in the Ukraine was only one to two miles. The Russians picked their target well, sir — maximum shock value but very low loss of life.”

The President clung to that bit of news and actually seemed to appear relieved. He clasped his wife’s hand, who had now gone over to his side, and looked at her stunned face with concern. “It’ll be all right, honey,” he said in a low voice. “Everything will be all right.”

“Sir, perhaps you should think about evacuating Washington,” Freeman said. “A flight of Russian cruise missiles launched from a submarine can devastate this city.”

“No way,” the President said resolutely. “I left once before, and it was the worst embarrassment of my life. I will consider sending the Vice President and other Cabinet members out of town — but I’m not leaving.

“I want a statement drafted up immediately, ordering the Russians to pull out of the Ukraine and cease all hostile activities. And I want that Russian target list made up as soon as possible. If I don’t get an answer back from Velichko immediately, I’m ordering the air strike for tomorrow night.”

THIRTY-NINE

Ever since he got the assignment to Plattsburgh and the RF-111G Vampire, Daren Mace knew he’d be back at Batman Air Base in Turkey. He didn’t know why he knew. Obviously the trouble in Eastern Europe, the capabilities of the Vampire bomber, and the Turks’ love of the beast had a lot to do with it.

He stood alone on Batman’s large parking ramp area, in front of the base operations building. Batman was one of the most modern military bases in the world, with large concrete hangars and extensive underground aircraft-maintenance facilities. It was the headquarters of the Turkish government’s defense against Kurdish and Shi’ite Muslim rebels and extremists in the east, as well as being in the center of a powerful industrial and petroleum-production region, and was therefore very well defended and purposely isolated. Located near the headwaters of the Euphrates River of eastern Turkey, with tall mountains to the south and east, the base was also very beautiful. During Desert Storm, Batman was the little-known headquarters of the U.S. Special Operations Command, operating secret combat search and rescue and “unconventional warfare” missions throughout Iraq and the entire Middle East region …

… and it was also the headquarters of Operation Desert Fire, the mission to destroy an Iraqi military bunker with a thermonuclear weapon if Saddam Hussein used chemical or biological weapons during the war. Back then, Daren Mace had come within seconds of launching the nuke. Now it seemed the whole world was insane enough to use nuclear weapons.

Mace heard a helicopter approach a few moments later. It was a Turkish Jandarma (Turkey’s interior militia) S-70 utility helicopter, a license-built copy of the UH-60 Black Hawk. The helicopter had a load slung underneath, and Mace motioned four of his maintenance techs to move a large roller cradle over to get ready to load. It was the escape capsule of an RF-111G Vampire bomber — Rebecca’s bomber. The capsule was carefully loaded onto the cradle, and then the S-70 landed and dropped off a single passenger.

Before she had taken three steps away from the jetcopter, Mace had rushed over to Rebecca Furness’ side, taken her in his arms, and kissed her deeply. Rebecca returned his kiss, then buried her face in his shoulder.

He finally led her away from the roar of the rotors. “Jeez, Rebecca, I thought I lost you,” Mace told her.

“You didn’t lose me,” Furness replied. “You won’t lose me unless you’re stupid enough to let me go.”

He smiled, then held her face in his hands. “No chance of that,” he told her, punctuating his promise with another kiss.

They went over to inspect the capsule. “The missiles blew out the right flotation bag,” Furness said, “but we stayed afloat pretty well even though we were low in the water. Everything worked — radios, survival kit, flares.” She held up a helmet bag and added, “Two bottles of Chivas Regal — that’s all I could scrounge off the Turkish Navy. For your survival specialists and airframe maintenance crews.”

“I’ve got them too busy to drink it right now,” Mace said, “but they’ll appreciate the thought. Never hurts to suck up to the survival-gear gods. Where’s Mark? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Furness replied. “He aggravated his back injury in the ejection, and the medics found blood in his stool, so he’s being taken to Incirlik for tests. He did real good out there — he’s turned into a real crewdog after all.”

“That’s good,” Mace said. He held her tightly, then said, “I’m damned sorry about Norton and Aldridge.”

“They didn’t find them?”

Mace shook his head. “The Russians recovered them and what’s left of the plane. They said they’ll release the bodies after the fighting stops. Sorry, Rebecca. Norton was a real fighter. She could have wimped out like Ted Little, but she didn’t.” He hesitated again, then said, “You and Mark did good, Rebecca. The whole squadron did good. Two destroyers, a frigate, and a guided missile cruiser — you and Fogelman got two out of the four. The Ukrainians got the Russian AWACS and the Novorossiysk aircraft carrier.”

“I remember the excited looks of the crews when they got back from a successful mission over Iraq during the war,” Rebecca said. “Funny — I don’t feel like that at all. I mean, I’m glad we flew the mission, and that we hit back, but I don’t feel like anything was accomplished.”

“You heard about Golcuk and Istanbul International?” he asked, referring to the low-yield nuclear attack by the Russians.

“Yes,” Rebecca replied. “It’s incredible. Were there very many casualties?”

“About two thousand so far,” Mace said. “The radiation hasn’t run its course yet — they may get several thousand more.”

“My God. What are we going to do here?”

“I think we’re going to find out,” Mace said. “Colonel Lafferty wants to see us immediately. Mass briefing in about fifteen minutes.”

The squadron meeting was being held in a briefing room in one of the underground hangar complexes. As Mace and Furness headed for the briefing, Mace suddenly stopped, went down another corridor, stopped at a door marked INFIRMARY, and said, “We’d better stop in here first.”

“Who got hurt? I thought everyone made it back okay?” In a room by herself, they found First Lieutenant Lynn Ogden, wearing a paper gown, lying on a bed on top of the sheets, curled up into a fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably. “Lynn?”

When Ogden saw Furness, she gave a loud cry, then reached for her with trembling hands. Furness held her tightly. “What’s the matter, Lynn? Are you hurt? Where’s Clark? Are you guys okay?” Lynn did not reply, only cried harder. After holding each other for a moment, Lynn suddenly seemed to just melt away from Rebecca, and Daren had to help guide her limp body back onto the table. “Lynn, what’s the matter with you? What happened? I thought you made it back okay. Lynn, stop it, you’re scaring me.”

“She’s can’t hear you, Rebecca,” Mace said. “She’s been like that ever since the raid. She and Vest hit a frigate with two HARMS and sent the sucker right down to the bottom — no survivors. She was morose after hitting the ship, but when she found out she sunk it, she went schizo. They’ll take her to Incirlik for evaluation — probably airevac her out to Germany if it’s safe to fly. Her family is flying out to Germany.”

“She’s not sick? No injuries? Did they take skull X-rays or anything?”

“I’ve seen this before, Rebecca,” Mace said as a nurse guided them out of the room — they could still hear her sobbing even after leaving the room. “Call it shell shock, or posttraumatic-shock syndrome, or battle fatigue — she’s so traumatized by the mission that she can’t control her emotions. She’s aware of everything and everyone around her, but they can’t make her stop.”

“Shouldn’t they sedate her or something?”

“They did. That’s her after the sedative wore off.”

As they exited the infirmary, they ran directly into Colonel Pavlo Tychina, the wing commander of the Ukrainian Air Force contingent. “Ah … Major Rebecca Furness. I am very glad to see you.” He shook both their hands and gave her a hug, pressing his gauze-covered cheek to hers instead of kissing. He still wore the white sterile-gauze mask everywhere — he refused to be seen without it. “I have heard of your fellow crewmember, Lieutenant Ogden. I am most sorry. I hope she will be fine.”

“Dyakoyo. Thank you,” Rebecca said, using one of the few bits of Ukrainian she had learned after the short time spent with the Ukrainian aircrews. Despite his horrible visage, she had found Tychina to be a very likable man, animated yet very by-the-book with his men, formal with the Turks, and polite, almost effusive, with the Americans. He was always working and always the commander, although he seemed at least ten years too young for the job. Of course, with the mask on, it was hard to tell if Tychina was thirty or sixty. His nickname “Voskresensky,” “Phoenix” in English, was well known throughout the joint air forces, and his heroic story was also well known, as was his sad story about his fiancée’s death from neutron radiation. “I think she’ll be all right.”

“Of course,” Tychina said solemnly. “Your crew very brave. You are brave … and pretty.” They walked together until reaching the main briefing room.

As was their custom, the Turkish aircrews were standing in the back of the room and along the walls. They all looked on with undisguised disgust as Furness entered the briefing room. A Turkish F-16 pilot curled his arms up along his chest, put his fist up to his mouth as if he were sucking his thumb, and whimpered like a dog. The Ukrainians reacted just the opposite — they got to their feet, applauding and cheering, and they slapped her on the back and the butt as if she were a man as she made her way to the front of the conference room and greeted Lafferty, Hembree, and the other American crewmembers. “Welcome back, Rebecca,” Lafferty said, putting his arm around her. “Sorry you lost your plane, but you did a terrific job.”

“Thank you, sir. Lieutenant Fogelman sends his regards.”

“He called from Incirlik,” Hembree says. “He’s ready to come back already. The docs don’t know yet.”

“He did really well out there last night, sir,” Furness told Lafferty. “I’ll fly with him anytime. I’m sorry about Paula and Curt, sir. Lynn too.”

“Me too. Their loss is hard on everyone here. Losses always hit small units the hardest. We just need to pull together.”

“So what’s going on?” Mace asked.

“We’re getting a briefing by some NATO and Central Command brass,” Lafferty said. “They should be here any minute. You know about the Russian attacks in Turkey, right, Rebecca?” She nodded. “I think the White House is finally going to get into gear. I don’t know what role we can play, but something’s happening.”

As if on cue, the room was called to attention, and three officers entered, followed by several Turkish staff members. The American officers snapped to attention …

… and as they reached the stage and stepped up to the podium, Daren Mace could not believe who he saw: along with General Suleyman Isiklar, the base commander of Batman, and General Petr Iosifovich Panchenko, the Ukrainian Air Force chief of staff who had arrived that morning, was Major General Bruce Eyers, U.S. Army, and Major General Tyler Layton, U.S. Air Force — the very same officers in charge of Desert Fire, the abortive nuclear attack against Iraq four years earlier. He suddenly felt a sinking in his stomach.

“Seats,” Isiklar’s aide ordered. Everyone took seats — everyone except Daren Mace. Eyers and Layton noticed the one man still standing, but refused to acknowledge him other than giving him a stern look and an unspoken order to sit down.

Isiklar made a short bow to the portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey — the portraits and little shrines to Ataturk were everywhere in Turkey, and they were treated as politely as if the man were in attendance — then said to the audience without preamble, “Death to the enemies of the Turkish Republic and to evil aggressors everywhere. We begin our campaign to drive away the Russians tonight, with the help of God, the blessings of Kemal Ataturk, and spearheaded by the brave Ukrainians and the Americans. May I please introduce Major General Bruce Eyers, the deputy commander of NATO Forces Southeast.” Amidst the growls, cheers, and cries from the Ukrainian crewmembers, Isiklar turned the stage over to Bruce Eyers.

Eyers gave Ataturk’s portrait a perfunctory nod, stepped up to the podium, and said, “I am here to inform you that, as of oh-one-hundred hours Eastern European time, in accordance with Article 12 of the North Atlantic Treaty and by unanimous vote of all member nations, the Republic of Ukrayina and the Republic of Lithuania have been formally accepted for full membership in the North Atlantic Alliance. Therefore, in accordance with Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, all member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance have been put on full military alert, including the forces of the United States of America. Although the Congress of the United States has not made a declaration of war, the President of the United States has ordered two hundred thousand troops deployed immediately in support of NATO operations. The government of Turkey has authorized the deployment of one hundred thousand troops on its soil. An attack upon one member nation shall be considered an attack upon us all.”

The Ukrainians went crazy with joy at the news, yelling and cheering like madmen. Colonel Tychina let it go for a few moments, then raised a hand for silence.

“I would like to announce that effective immediately General Petr Panchenko, Chief of Staff of the Air Force of the Republic of Ukrayina, is hereby designated commander of joint NATO air forces, eastern region, and will be the overall air forces commander of NATO units in Turkey, the Ukraine, and Lithuania. He will report directly to myself as NATO task force commander for this emergency. General Panchenko, the command is yours.” Again, the room erupted with sheer bedlam as the crazily happy Ukrainian officers welcomed their leader to the podium.

Panchenko was not proficient in English, so he had Pavlo Tychina translate for him: “The General says that his message is simple and direct. Fellow warriors, today we begin the liberation of Ukrayina.” He waited until the cheering and applause died down, then: “However, we have no illusions of grandeur here. Our force is small, and we are committed to the defense of our host country and fellow NATO member, Turkey, as well as the defense of our homeland. We cannot hope to win this war ourselves. Rather, we must hold out until our NATO brothers can arrive in force. But we will not be idle. As we discovered last night, although we cannot kill the Russian bear, we can sting the hell out of him.

“The suppression of enemy air defenses will be our primary mission,” Tychina continued, translating for Panchenko. “The more effectively and the deeper inside Ukrayina we can destroy Russian air defense weapons and radar sites, on land, sea, and in the air, the more effective NATO air strikes will be. Our mission is to control the skies over the Black Sea and render all Russian-held air and naval bases along the Black Sea combat-ineffective, which should allow NATO forces free access to the Black Sea to open a second front of attack.

“I will conduct a briefing for all flight commanders immediately following this briefing, in which I will outline my objectives and my outline for the first month. The first launch will be at nineteen hundred hours tonight. Our objective will be the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk and the air bases at Rostov-na-Donu and Krasnodar. If we can destroy these two air bases and the naval base, we can relieve Ukrainian Army units in the Don region from Russian air attacks and cut off Russian naval and air units in the Crimea from routine resupply. This concludes my briefing. May God bless and keep us all.”

No sooner had the briefing concluded than Eyers motioned for the senior American officers to follow him into an adjacent room. The door was closed and locked — and Eyers greeted Daren Mace with a large grin. “Why, hello, traitor — I see you remember me.”

“Who are you calling a traitor, Eyers?” Mace hissed. “Who let this psycho in here?”

“I hoped you were dead, Mace,” Eyers said evenly.

“I hoped you were alive so I could kill you myself, you wacko.”

“All right, both of you, shut up,” General Layton interrupted. “General Eyers, can we get on with this briefing?”

“What in the hell is going on here, sir?” Colonel Lafferty asked. “Daren, you know General Eyers?”

“Only by voice — and by smell.”

“You shut your mouth, yellow-belly. Who in hell made you a colonel, anyway? Certainly nobody in my country’s air force.”

“It appears that everyone in this room has had a promotion in the past four years except you, Eyers.”

“I said button it, Colonel,” Layton interjected. “General, like it or not, we’re all going to be working very closely together in the next few hours, so—”

“We ain’t gonna be working together — I’ll be giving the orders, and this time you better be carrying them out, sonny boy,” Eyers interrupted loudly. He stepped closer to Mace, got right in his face, daring him to shrink from him. Mace did not — which only angered Eyers even more. “If I had my way, chicken-shit, I’d put you in leg irons in Leavenworth or at a nice remote radar site in Thule, Greenland.”

“He’s not leaving, General,” Layton said, “and you know it.”

“I know, I know,” Eyers snapped. “It’s a major fuck-up for the Chairman to choose the bastard that chickened out, refused to obey orders, nearly got himself shot down, and nearly killed his pilot during Desert Storm.”

All eyes turned in stunned disbelief at Daren Mace. He said, “They don’t know it, Eyers, because it’s not true. Maybe they don’t know that you were the one who ordered me to launch a nuclear missile on Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War.”

“I should bust you for mentioning that, Mace,” Eyers said. “That’s classified information.” All eyes swung back in even more stunned disbelief at Eyers — but this time, instead of a horribly angry face, they found a pleased, satisfied smile. Eyers said, “Yeah, Colonel, I did order you to launch an attack. It was a lawful order from the President of the United States. I was right to issue that order and you were wrong to refuse.”

“I refused because it was rescinded.”

“It wasn’t rescinded. You guessed it had been, like some goddamned psychic or something. Well, guess what, hotshot? The President has just ordered you to do it again. You’re going to lead another nuclear missile attack against the Russian western air forces military district headquarters at Domodedovo.”

Everyone in the room was thunderstruck. “What did you say, General?” Lafferty asked.

“You heard me,” Eyers said, the smile disappearing. “We’re going in with the Ukrainians to bomb Novorossiysk, Krasnodar, and Rostov-na-Donu, but after they finish having their little fun pretending that they’re actually contributing something to this war, we’ll take your RF-111s up along the Ukrainian border, up into Russia, launch a SRAM or two on the Russian bastard Velichko’s underground bunker at Domodedovo, and split for Lithuania. The Lithuanians are going to cover your retreat. We take out this base and the underground command center, and the air war is over for the damned Russians. The President wants to teach the fucking Russians a lesson, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

“We’ve been ordered to launch a nuclear strike against Russia?” Furness asked in complete disbelief. “Are you sure? We’ll start World War Three.”

“I see you’ve been spreading your pacifist bullshit along with screwing her, eh, Mace?” Eyers said with a laugh. “Yeah, we’ve known about you two since you arrived at Plattsburgh, Mace, you and your drug-dealing biker buddies. If you survive this mission, Mace, I’ll still see your ass hauled into prison for twenty years for associations with known international drug traffickers. I’m sure we can even trace your smuggling activities to right here in Turkey — I knew there had to be a reason why you had so many consecutive assignments here.…

“The President’s going to push this war to the next logical step, troops, and he wants us to spearhead the attack,” Eyers continued. “He gave the big prize to me.” He turned to Daren Mace, gave him a disgusted chuckle, and said, “Now we’ll see what you’re really made out of, boy. And just for laughs, guess who’s going to be your aircraft commander? How about Major Furness?”

“You can’t do that, General,” Layton insisted in protest.

“Excuse me, General,” Colonel Lafferty interjected, “but I’ll decide who crews these sorties. As senior wing officer, I should be the one who pilots that—”

“It’s already been decided,” Eyers said with a sneer, “and I don’t want to hear shit from any of you. Furness is a flight instructor and training flight commander — hell, Lafferty, she gives you check rides, for Christ’s sake. Furness is the best pilot, Mace is the most senior weapons officer. End of story. Lafferty, you’ll command the backup SRAM shooter, and you’ll pick the best four RF-111s you got to fly with you as SEAD antiradar escorts. The rest of the wing will be participating in the air strikes with the Ukrainians. I’ve got all your charts, your flight plans, your communications documents, and your intelligence material, and the RF-111s with your SRAM-B missiles should be arriving within the hour.”

Eyers turned to Mace, reached into his blouse pocket, extracted a red plastic sheath, and gave it to him. “Just to make sure, Colonel, I got you a copy of the executive order authorizing this mission. You’ll find the precise procedures for terminating your mission — no more second-guessing, no more chickening out because you think somebody screwed up. If you don’t launch the missile, it’ll be because you screwed up, you chickened out, or you were killed. I suggest you do your duty this time—if you have the guts. I’d hate to see the pretty major there splattered across some Russian peat bog because you weren’t man enough to get the job done. Now get out of my sight and get to work. You are dismissed.”

FORTY

Mace and Furness were preflighting their RF-111G Vampire in preparation for launching that evening. They were in a large semiunderground concrete shelter, but the large steel and concrete blast doors covering the hangar were partially open. The aircraft had just come from the United States, and it had been completely inspected and checked in a very short period of time. The internal bomb bay held the two AGM-131 SRAMs (Short-Range Attack Missiles), and the two crewmen were inspecting the weapon right now.

“I’ve seen these things for years now,” Furness commented as they crawled in under the bomb doors with a flashlight and inspection mirror, “but it seems — different this time. It’s like this thing is alive.”

They inspected the general condition of the weapon. The missile was rather small, with a triangular cross section and three stubby moving fins in the rear — the two missiles fit comfortably in the bomb bay with just a few inches on each side and about one inch between them. It had a soft rubbery outer layer that burned off as it flew through the air at over Mach-three to protect it and to absorb radar energy, making it “stealthier” than earlier models. The nosecap of the missile was hard composite material that covered a radar altimeter for arming and detonating the weapon. There was an inspection access door on the bottom of the missile, and they checked the missile settings together.

“Twenty-kiloton yield,” Mace recited. The missile was set for its lowest yield — the highest setting was a full 170 kilotons. “Primary fuzing is an air burst at five thousand feet, with a backup ground burst option. Dual motor burn for a high-altitude climb at Mach-three, then an inertially-guided ballistic flight path to impact.”

“Checks,” Furness said. She stuck the inspection mirror up between the missiles and shined the flashlight up on the right side of the missile. “Warhead safing plug’s been removed.” She checked the second missile, then handed the mirror and flashlight to Mace, who double-checked both weapons. “Man, I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said; then she turned to Mace, realizing what she just said. “And you almost did it. That’s what you were carrying back over Iraq when you rendezvoused with me — nuclear bombs.”

“I was carrying two of these things,” Mace said uneasily. “They were X-models, modified for only a five-kiloton ground burst, no backup fusing option. But yes, I was going to launch one on a bunker south of Baghdad.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because the order was rescinded. They just didn’t tell us officially, but I knew it had been,” Mace replied. He told her about Operation Desert Fire, how the Scud missile attack on Israel was mistaken for a biological-chemical attack, how his mission was executed. “It was obviously a screw-up — Coalition planes everywhere, hundreds of them right over ground zero. I would’ve fragged all of them. I withheld the launch — kept the doors closed until the missiles timed out. Eyers was in charge. He didn’t plan it properly, and sold the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President a bill of goods. General Layton was the air boss. He knew there was a problem, knew that the execution order had to be terminated. When the coded terminate order didn’t come through, he tried to terminate me by broadcasting in the clear. I listened, and I terminated. I got nailed for it.”

“But you did as you were ordered to do.”

“Not in Eyers’ twisted mind,” Mace said. “I disobeyed a lawful order. Only General Layton kept me out of prison.”

Furness fell silent for a moment, stung by the enormity of what he had experienced — but there was still one last unanswered question. “Would you have done it?” she asked him. “Would you have launched? If there was no terminate call, no friendlies in the area — would you have done it?”

“Rebecca, I think that’s a question every crewdog has to answer for themself.”

“I need to know, Daren,” she said. She reached out to touch the gray missile hanging before her, but pulled her hand away as if she could feel the radioactivity pulsing within its fuselage. “I need to know … because I’ve never had to face it. I wonder if I can.”

“Yes, you can,” he said firmly.

“How do you know that?”

“Because you’re here, and you’re wearing the uniform, and you’re under this bomber preflighting these weapons,” Mace said. “Everyone here on this base can do it. If they can’t do it, they end up basket cases like Lynn Ogden or sniveling cowards like Ted Little — or dead like Paula Norton and Curt Aldridge. You’re here because you and Mark Fogelman had the skill and the drive to make it. I hate to talk like this about the dead, Rebecca, but you’re here and they’re not because you’re better than they were, pure and simple. If Mark didn’t get his wake-up call when you got nailed by those F-16s, if he didn’t pick up his books and get his briefings and screw his head on straight while he was in the hospital back in Plattsburgh, you’d be dead or injured or grounded and someone else would be flying this mission. Crewdogs don’t make it because they don’t have the mental capacity, the skill, or the courage to kill.”

She didn’t know what to say, but took his hand and squeezed it to show her thanks. “Plus,” Mace added, “you can do it because you got me.”

His joke finally broke the tension, the unmovable fear burning in her head. She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, please—give me a break.”

“This is my baby, Rebecca. This beast and I are one. If it can be done, we will do it.”

When they exited the bomb bay and finished their preflight inspections, they noticed Colonel Pavlo Tychina standing in the partially open doorway; a security guard was blocking his path. Both Furness and Mace stepped out of the hangar to greet him.

“I shake the hands of all brave crews before an attack,” Tychina said. He motioned to the Vampire behind Mace and Furness. Unlike the Charlie-Flight aircraft, the four Bravo-Flight bombers carried external fuel tanks on the number-two and seven nonswiveling pylons, as well as AGM-88 HARMs on stations three, four, five, and six, and AIM-9P Sidewinder missiles on stations three and six — and, of course, the first two Vampires carried SRAMs in the bomb bay. “Extra fuel tanks on an eight-hundred-mile round-trip mission, Major Furness? I not know this.”

Furness was a bit confused by his question. “We’ve got the legs to go all the way, sir,” she replied, “but a little extra gas never hurt.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.”

But Pavlo Tychina still seemed confused. “It’s more like two thousand miles on the sortie, sir, not eight hundred,” Mace added. “We’ll need the extra gas in case we need to use ’burners.”

“Two thousand miles, Colonel?” Tychina asked. “I not understand.”

Furness and Mace finally got the message: “Sir, the mission against the bunker complex? Domodedovo? Near Moscow?”

“I know Domodedovo,” Tychina said, his puzzlement slowly turning into anger, “but I not know about mission. You have a mission to attack Domodedovo?”

“Oh my God,” Mace muttered, “you don’t know about the air-strike, Colonel Tychina? Rebecca, we should fill him in right away.”

“No shit.” Furness waved to the shelter guard, telling him that Tychina was authorized to accompany her, and after he was searched and left his helmet bag and equipment with the guard, she took Tychina over to the bomb bay. Tychina’s eyes grew wide as he peered at the missiles nestled in the bomb bay.

“These are bombs?” he asked. “Very strange bombs. Antirunway weapons, perhaps?”

Furness hesitated for a moment, then led Tychina and Mace back out of the hangar and away from the guard post, out of earshot of everyone. “No, sir, they’re nuclear cruise missiles,” she told him. “We have a new additional mission, Colonel — after leading your strikers against your three targets, Bravo Flight is going to launch a nuclear attack against Domodedovo Air Base, near Moscow. Russian president Velichko is supposed to be holed up in the underground bunker there. Those missiles will destroy the bunker and Velichko.”

Tychina’s eyes grew wide behind his sterile gauze face mask. “No! Is it true what you say?”

“It’s true, sir,” Furness said. “I … I assumed the Ukrainians knew about this. I think General Panchenko should be informed of this right away.”

“I don’t think anyone else in NATO knows about it except General Eyers,” Mace said. “He’s the one who planned it.”

“Eyers?” Tychina retorted. “Bruce Eyers is big bullshit. I no like him. Why your government not tell Ukrayina about this secret mission?”

“I don’t know,” Furness replied. “Maybe because Ukrayina doesn’t have the capability of delivering this kind of weapon.”

“What you mean?” Tychina asked. “My men, we can do anything, fly anywhere. You only fly four Vampire planes into Russia? You have no escorts, fighter escorts? We escort.”

“No air patrols,” Mace said. “We go in with antiradar weapons and our Sidewinders only. No fighters can keep up with us.”

“What you saying? I can keep up with you, Colonel Daren. My MiG-23s, they can escort you into Russia.”

“Your fighters don’t have the legs — er, they don’t have the fuel reserves, sir,” Furness said. “We researched it. It’s impossible.”

“And you can’t fly terrain-following altitudes,” Mace added. “We’ll be down at three hundred feet or below the entire flight.”

“Anything you can do, I can do,” Tychina said. “You fly low, I fly low. You fly to Moscow, I fly to Moscow. I escort you.”

“Sir, there’s only six hours to launch,” Furness said. “You can’t reconfigure your fighters in time.”

“You say nee, nee, I say tuk,” Tychina said. “I do it. You come off-target at Rostov-na-Donu, I find you, I rendezvous.”

Furness and Mace looked at each other. Furness said, “If he can do it, Daren …”

“I can get him a chart and a threat map during the weather and final mission briefings,” Mace said. “If his MiGs have IRSTS, they can track us without us using lights or radios.”

“I go now. I report secret mission to General Panchenko, and I fix planes. I see you.” The young colonel picked up his flight gear and trotted away, flagging down a maintenance truck and hopping a ride back to headquarters.

“Well, well,” Daren Mace said to Furness as they watched Tychina race off. “Maybe the Iron Maiden isn’t quite as hard as I thought. In fact, that was a very unauthorized thing to do.”

“Hey, we’ve been given a mission to do and I’m going to do it.” Furness shrugged. “Now, I don’t know why the Ukrainians weren’t told about our mission, but if Colonel Tychina can get us some fighter escorts, at least part of the way into Russia, I’ll take it. I’m following orders, but I’m also looking out for my butt. And yours.”

“In that case let’s finish up this preflight and catch up with Pavlo,” Mace said. “I have a few ideas that might turn this whole stinking mission around for us.”

FORTY-ONE

The launch began at nine P.M.

The Charlie Flight RF-111Gs launched first — they had more than enough gas for this mission — followed by the Bravo Flight Vampires, then the Sukhoi-17s and the Turkish F-16s. The F-16s would provide air coverage over the Black Sea, but would not cross into Russia. Finally launched were Mikoyan-Gurevich-23s, then MiG-27s, and lastly ten very strange-looking MiG-23s and Su-17s. Eight MiGs and two Su-17s were festooned with fuel tanks: one nine-hundred-pound standard centerline tank; one tank on each swiveling wing section, which would prevent the wings from being swept back past takeoff setting until the tanks were jettisoned; and one tank on each fixed-wing section, for an incredible total of five external fuel tanks — the external fuel load was equal to the plane’s total internal fuel load, effectively doubling the fighter’s range. Instead of six air-to-air missiles, the MiGs carried only three: one AA-7 radar-guided missile on the left-engine intake pylon and two AA-8 heat-seeking missiles on a double launcher on the right. The Sukhoi-17s were configured similarly, but with special stores on the two fuselage pylons instead of missiles.

The last surprise was at takeoff: these heavily laden aircraft used military power for takeoff, instead of fuel-gulping afterburner, with the help of four rocket packs attached to the rear fuselage to boost them off the ground. Even with the added boost, the fighters stayed at treetop level long after they left the runway so they could build up enough speed to safely raise the nose and climb without stalling. As soon as they were safely airborne and clear of any populated areas, the spent rocket packs were jettisoned; then, as soon as the strike force reached the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, the empty outboard tanks were jettisoned, and the planes could sweep their wings back to a more fuel-efficient 45 degrees. The tanks that dropped into the sea were recovered by the Turkish Jandarma for reuse.

Another Russian A-50 Airborne Warning and Control radar plane was up that night patrolling the Black Sea region, and again the NATO air forces under General Panchenko were prepared. A small twenty-aircraft Ukrainian strike force was sent straight north at high speed, aiming for the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula, along with six MiG-23s flying at high altitude on another anti-AWACS missile run from the west.

The Russian radar plane, which was orbiting over Nikolayev in southern Ukraine instead of over the Black Sea, immediately turned and headed farther north, vectoring in fighters from Simferopol and Krasnodar as it retreated. When the high-altitude MiGs fired their AA-9 missiles, the Russian AWACS shut down their radar, accelerated, and dispensed decoy chaff and flares.

At the same time, a Russian Antonov-12C four-engine turboprop plane accompanying the A-50 radar plane, carrying electronic jammers and other decoys and countermeasures, activated its powerful jammers, making it impossible for any radar transmitters, including the radars in the nose of the AA-9 missiles, to lock on …

… however, it also made it impossible for any other radars to operate normally as well, including the Russian fighter radars and ground-based radars. The An-12C shut down the early warning and intercept radars along the Crimea and at the naval base at Novorossiysk, leaving it wide open for attack. The naval facility was the headquarters for the Russian Fleet oiler and tanker fleets, and had many vital oil terminals and storage facilities as well as a long-range radar site and air defense missile facility. Being nearly surrounded by the Caucasus Mountains, it was naturally defended by steep ridges and high jagged coastal peaks, a cold, snowy Russian version of Rio de Janeiro.

Not one surface-to-air missile was fired as the Ukrainian attack force swept in. Flying up the coast of Turkey, then crossing into the republic of Georgia and following the Caucasus Mountains, they were completely undetected until just a few miles from Novorossiysk. The fixed SA-10 missile sites and long-range radar sites along the Black Sea coast were hit with dozens of cluster bomb packs and antipersonnel mines from the first group of MiG-27s and Sukhoi-17s, and dock and warehouse facilities and a few tankers in the naval shipyard area of the base were hit by TV- and laser-guided bombs. One MiG-23 flying a medium-altitude combat air patrol was hit by an infrared-guided anti-aircraft-artillery gun seconds before a direct hit by a TV-guided bomb from a MiG-27 took out the gun site.

But if the attack on Novorossiysk was unexpectedly easy, the attack on Krasnodar was all the more difficult.

Again, it was necessary for the second strike group to stay at low altitude over the Caucasus Mountains to hide in the radar clutter and avoid detection as long as possible, but the attack on Novorossiysk and the feint on the A-50 radar plane alerted all the other Russian bases in the area.

The short twenty-mile run from the Caucasus Mountains to Krasnodar became an almost impenetrable no-man’s-land. The Russians had wised up, and did not activate the SA-10 surface-to-air missile radars or their surveillance radars, but simply swept the skies with clouds of 23- and 57-millimeter antiaircraft gunfire, directed by electro-optical low-light cameras, by infrared sensors, or simply by sound. This forced the Ukrainian Su-17 and MiG-27 strike aircraft up above twelve thousand feet, which made their bombing less accurate and made them vulnerable to fighter attacks.

The MiG-23 fighters engaged the oncoming Russian air patrols, but again the Russian fighters had the advantage — the Ukrainian fighters were no match for the advanced Russian warplanes. Directed by the A-50 AWACS radar plane and armed with superior radars and weapons, the Ukrainian fighters were being shot down with fierce regularity — sometimes two MiG-23s would be shot down simultaneously by one Russian Sukhoi-27 fighter. But the Ukrainian fighters could not run as they did before — they had to keep the third strike team (along with the Domodedovo strike team) from being jumped by Russian fighters before they had a chance to attack the large industrial area and military airfield. They were taking a beating.

The MiG-27s and the Sukhoi-17s from the first bombing group broke the battle open, but at a very heavy price. After dropping their bombs on Novorossiysk and retreating back to Turkey, they arced north, climbed, and made a supersonic dash for Krasnodar at treetop level. The antiaircraft artillery was deadly for low-flying planes, but their range was far less than normal — possibly out of the range of standoff weapons. The Russian fighters had no choice but to disengage from the Ukrainian fighters and intercept the low-level attackers. This gave the Ukrainian fighters who had run out of weapons a chance to flee back to Turkey, and for the rest to set up an air patrol for the third strike team.

The tactic worked.

The Rostov-na-Donu and Domodedovo strike teams proceeded north unchallenged, along with twenty MiG-23s that still had weapons and were not shot up enough to abort.

The attackers from Strike Team Two were able to make high-altitude bomb releases on Krasnodar, and although the mines and bomblets scattered much more than desired and the sticks of bombs were not nearly as accurate, the airfield was rendered temporarily unusable and the air defense radar sites were seriously damaged.

The twenty MiG-27s and Su-17s from Strike Team One aborted their feint out of range of the murderous guns surrounding Krasnodar’s military airfield — right into the waiting gunsights and radar locks of the Russian fighters. In less than a minute, twenty Ukrainian fighter-bombers had been shot down.

Rostov-na-Donu — Rostov on the Don — was the capital of the industrial, mining, and agricultural region of southern Russia, located at the mouth of the Don River. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the military clashes between Russia and Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Ukraine, the military airfield there grew in importance and size, until it had become a major heavy bomber, tactical bomber, and troop transport base.

Knocking out this base and its associated long-range air defense systems would be vital.

The city was out of range of the A-50 radar plane, so all of Rostov’s air defense radars were up and operating — the Charlie Flight Vampires had a field day launching HARM missiles. Using simultaneous launches, as many as eight surveillance, fighter-intercept, and surface-to-air guidance radars were destroyed at once. The smaller mobile SAM systems and antiaircraft-artillery gun sites were forced to switch to electro-optical or infrared guidance, which greatly reduced their effectiveness.

The RF-111Gs had wised up after their first assault on the Russian warships as well — instead of being loaded down only with AGM-88 HARM antiradar missiles, they carried only two HARMs and a variety of other stores, including two GBU-24 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs, with a PAVE TACK laser designator in a rotating cradle in the bomb bay; twelve CBU-52, CBU-58, CBU-71, or CBU-87 incendiary, antipersonnel, or antivehicle cluster bomb units; two GBU-15 TV-guided 2,000-pound bombs; and twelve BLU-107 Durandal antirunway rockets. Each RF-111 launched its HARM missiles at a radar site, climbed to a safe altitude over antiaircraft guns, and then started aiming and destroying targets.

Two Vampires from Charlie Flight were shot down — one by a Russian MiG-29 from a range of nearly fifteen miles, and the other after peppering Rostov-na-Donu’s main runway with an entire load of Durandal rockets. The Durandals parachuted down toward the runway until just a few feet above the surface, when a rocket motor would blast a thirty-three-pound warhead through the concrete surface and heave it upward.

Once the enemy air defense threats were dealt with, the Ukrainians’ Strike Team Three moved in on the base.

The major weapon for the MiG-27s and Su-17s here was the AS-10 “Karen” missile, a laser-guided missile with a 240-pound high-explosive warhead; or conventional 500-pound “dumb” bombs. A fully loaded fighter-bomber could carry twelve of these AS-10s or twelve 500-pound bombs, plus two external fuel tanks for the added range necessary to reach the target. There was no time for loitering in the target area, no reattacks, no second chances — every target located was hit with at least one Karen or four bombs, and as soon as their ordnance was expended, they ran for the mountainous Georgian border to safety and then back to Turkey for refueling and rearming.

The Ukrainian fighters again were hammered by Russian MiG-29 and Su-27 fighters, and losses were high.

FORTY-TWO

“Final strike report, sir,” the executive officer said as he handed the teletyped report to General Petr Panchenko at his headquarters at Kayseri Air Base. Panchenko reviewed the Ukrainian-language copy as General Eyers and General Isiklar read off the English-language version.

“Pretty damn good news, I’d say,” Eyers said, his hand resting on the military-issue Colt .45 holstered to his belt as if he were Gary Cooper in High Noon. “Reconnaissance aircraft report numerous buildings, warehouses, and oil terminals destroyed at Novorossiysk, along with several docks and … good God, they got six tankers, plus two destroyed in drydock. No sign of any signals from air defense radars.”

His brow furrowed in dismay as he read on: “Krasnodar appears it might still be in commission, General,” Eyers said to Panchenko; an interpreter translated for the NATO air boss. “Minor … minor bomb damage to the runways and taxiways only, and a damned Su-17 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by an SA-10 missile from there — I guess we know the SAMs are still operational.”

Panchenko said something to his executive officer, who saluted and ran off. The interpreter said, “The General says that Krasnodar’s fuel depot was hit, so Russian fighters that land there might be trapped or be low on fuel if they launch. He has ordered Major Kocherga to plan another sortie right away to attack Krasnodar.”

“Good thinking,” Eyers answered, grudgingly admitting to himself that maybe this Panchenko had something on the ball after all. He read on: “Looks like your boys blew the shit out of Rostov-na-Donu, General. Two runways destroyed, taxiways and parking ramps hit by bombs and missiles, extensive damage to airdrome facilities, several recorded hits by antiradar missiles, no air defense radar signals. Good going, General.” Eyers gave a thumbs-up to Panchenko, who acknowledged the gesture with a slight bow.

But Eyers’ satisfied grin went away as he read on: “Christ … Jesus, we got mangled on this one,” he grumbled. “Ten Su-17s lost, fourteen Flogger-Js, and … fuck, forty-eight MiG-23s destroyed, plus another dozen or so shot up. We’re down to eighty-seven operational airframes, including the ones still airborne — that’s seventy-seven planes here still operational.” Eyers closed the report and wearily rubbed his eyes. “We’re less than 50 percent, General. I think we’re out of the ball-game.”

The translator was giving Panchenko a steady stream of words, and up until now he had been nodding, reading, and listening — but now Panchenko was on his feet, shooting a stream of angry words at Eyers. “The General says that he will fight to the last man,” the translator said. “Once Krasnodar and the naval air base at Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula are destroyed, the Doneck and Char’kov army divisions in eastern Ukrayina can start to move west safely, and Odessa can be relieved. With access to bases, factories, and depots in Ukrayina again, the Air Force can be regenerated—”

“Meanwhile, Russian bombers blow the shit out of Turkey,” Eyers interjected. “No can do, General. If your fighters get wiped out before substantial NATO forces can arrive, NATO’s entire eastern flank could collapse. We’re going into a defensive mode, General Panchenko. After Krasnodar is taken care of, your boys start doing air patrols with the AWACS plane. We’ll let the surviving RF-111s take care of any ships or air defense radars that pop up—”

Panchenko interrupted him with another blistering retort: “The General says that you are talking about abandoning Ukrayina. He will not allow that to happen.”

“You tell him that the Ukraine is already dead, “ Eyers shot back, his hand firmer now on the Colt .45. “If we lose all our aircraft on more of these useless hit-and-run missions and allow the Russians to conduct massive air attacks in Turkey, we’ll lose two, maybe three NATO countries. If we pull back, we can perhaps save Turkey and Greece. Tell Panchenko that he will reconfigure all his aircraft for air defense missions and set up an air defense plan of attack, and do it immediately. If one Russian bomber or cruise missile crosses the border, I’m holding him personally responsible.”

FORTY-THREE

“Search radar, ten o’clock,” Mace reported. “Must be Chervonoye airfield.” He adjusted a small red reading light onto the chart in his lap. Chervonoye was a small fighter base in the Ukraine that had been occupied by Russia early in the conflict. “Showing MiG-29s and mobile SAMs there. Forty miles west of us.”

Daren Mace and Rebecca Furness were the lead ship of a massive thirteen-aircraft armada streaming into southwestern Russia.

They had successfully navigated the killing grounds of the Kuban and Don River valleys, staying in the Caucasus Mountains as the attack formations streamed into Krasnodar, then staying at two hundred feet until crossing Taganrog Bay and back into Ukrayina. The terrain was flat and forested in the Don region north of the Azov Sea, so once they were outside the radar coverage of the Russian A-50 radar plane orbiting about two hundred miles to the west over the Ukraine, it was safe enough to set one thousand feet on the terrain-following radar and relax a bit.

Flying in close formation with them were three Ukrainian MiG-23 Flogger-K fighters, one on either side and one slightly behind and above Furness and Mace. The Ukrainians were taking an incredible risk flying with the Americans. The Vampires had to leave their electroluminescent strip lights on so the MiGs without infrared sensors could follow the American bombers — one cloud, one bout of the “spins,” or following the wrong light strip could be deadly. Twice they had to shut the lights off when they detected fighters nearby, but somehow the Ukrainians always made their way back. Three of their eight MiG-23 escorts had already been shot down by fighter attacks — one as they crossed into the Ukraine from Russia over Taganrog Bay, the other two in isolated dogfights along their route of flight. Their prebriefed procedure was for the MiG-23s to break out of formation and chase down any fighter that might be pursuing the attack force, and although the Russian fighters never made it in, they lost an escort fighter every time.

Five miles in trail behind Furness and Mace was Thunder Two, crewed by Lieutenant Colonel Hembree and Lieutenant Colonel Larry Tobias. They were the “backup shooters.” They were escorted by two MiG-23s, who seemed perfectly content to fly just a few hundred feet above the ground in marginal weather without being able to see a blasted thing out their cockpits.

About a mile behind them was Tychina and his wingman, flying Sukhoi-17 “Fitter-K” bombers, with two MiG-23s escorting them. Unlike the MiG-23s, the Su-17s would be able to go all the way with the RF-111s — the MiG-23s would be turning around any minute now. Flying a few miles behind Tychina were Johnson and Rota in Thunder Three — they had no MiGs escorting them because they had already been shot down by fighter attacks as they crossed from Russia into the Ukraine. Thunder Three had one HARM missile remaining. Fay and Dutton in Thunder Four had already expended their AGM-88 HARM antiradar missiles at radar sites along the route and were making the treacherous trip south through occupied Ukrayina back to Turkey, with one MiG-23 flying alongside for protection.

“Step it down to three hundred,” Furness said. Daren reached down to the center console and clicked the clearance plane knob on the terrain-following radar control from 1000 to 300, and the RF-111G Vampire obeyed, sliding gently down toward the frozen earth below. The RF-111’s terrain-following radar system would automatically fly the bomber three hundred feet above the ground, following the contours of all but very steeply rising terrain.

When they leveled off, the “S” symbol on the threat scope no longer appeared. “Search radar down,” Mace said. “High terrain, ten miles, painting over it. City off to our right, power line running across the track line. My notes say it might be four hundred ninety feet high.”

“Try five hundred feet on the TFRs,” Furness said. Mace stepped the TFR up to five hundred feet, and the S symbol and a slow deedle deedle deedle warning tone on the interphone returned when they climbed above four hundred feet. “Nope, they can see us at four. Back to three hundred.” The signal went away again at the three-hundred-foot clearance plane.

Suddenly, the S symbol changed briefly into a 12 with a diamond around it, then back to an S.

“Oh, shit, they got an SA-12,” Mace said. “They know we’re out here.” The SA-12 was a high-performance mobile antiaircraft-missile system, capable of shooting down low-flying aircraft out to a range of almost fifty miles, part of a new generation of Russian SAM systems that could pop up anywhere along a strike route and kill with speed and precision.

“Give me two hundred,” Furness said. Mace stepped the TFR to two hundred feet, the lowest setting. The S symbol had changed back to a 12 symbol on the RHAWS scope — and then a yellow MISSILE WARNING light on Furness’ eyebrow instrument panel came on, and a set of crosshairs appeared around the 12 symbol on the threat scope. “Missile warning, nine o’clock …” She jammed the throttles forward to military power, swept the wings back to 72 degrees, and the Vampire bomber accelerated from 480 knots to about 600 knots — ten miles a minute.

“Hey, the MiGs are gone,” Mace said. He switched off the exterior formation strip lights — there was no one out there to use them anymore. “Maybe that’s why we got the SA-12 up — those MiGs must’ve—”

Suddenly they heard a fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone, the 12 symbol on the RHAWS began to blink, and a red MISSILE LAUNCH warning light began to blink.

“Missile launch, nine o’clock!” Mace made sure the trackbreaker switchlights were all on and that the jammers were transmitting.

“I see it!” Rebecca shouted. Far off in the distance she could see a streak of light disappear into the night sky, followed by another immediately after the first. “It’s flying behind us.”

“C’mon, guys,” Mace muttered. “Where are you?” Just then on the scrambled VHF frequency they heard, “Magnum. Bye-bye.” Mace quickly deselected the trackbreaker switchlights. “Magnum” meant that Johnson and Rota were launching a HARM missile — the missile’s performance could be spoiled by too much friendly jamming, which was why Mace shut his jammers off. “Nail it, baby, nail it …” Seconds later the SA-12 symbol in the threat scope disappeared. “Way to go, boys.”

“Nice shooting, guys,” Furness said to Johnson and Rota as she pulled the power back to 90 percent and swept the wings forward again to 54 degrees to conserve fuel — there was no way she was going to suggest climbing above two hundred feet again, though. It was now just four of them left — two American bombers, two Ukrainian bombers — and twenty minutes left to go to the SRAM launch point.

The warning tone from the RHAWS system came alive again. “I’ve got triple-A at nine and ten o’clock,” Mace said. “That’s the main highway between Moscow and Char’kov. Must be troops heading down that road. My trackbreakers are still off. Two hundred hard ride — we’re there.”

Triple-A, referring to the radar-guided mobile antiaircraft-artillery unit called the ZSU-23/4, or Zeus-4, had a maximum range of about two miles — they were at least twenty miles away from the road — but the same infantry units that had a Zeus-4 usually had mobile SAM systems as well.

“Search radar at eleven and two o’clock,” reported Mace. “Man, it’s getting hairy around here.”

The closer they got to Moscow, the more they would encounter surveillance radars — Moscow was the most heavily defended city in the world.

“Power’s still at 90 percent,” Furness said. “I’m ready with a prelaunch check if you’re—”

Just then a bat-wing symbol — an inverted V — appeared at the bottom of the threat scope — and it stayed there. “Shit, we picked up a fighter,” Mace cursed. “Fine time for the MiGs to bug out.” Just then two more bat-wings appeared on the RHAWS scope, this time at the top — and then two more appeared, off to the right near the top. “Crap, we got fighters all around us. Jammers coming on. Step on it, Rebecca.”

As Mace selected the trackbreaker buttons again, Furness pushed the power back up to military power and swept the wings back to 72.5 degrees. She was sure she would not move the throttles or wings again until they were out of Russia.

A diamond symbol danced around the bat-wing symbols on the RHAWS, denoting the most serious threat — the fighters behind were gaining fast, while the ones ahead were closing slowly, as if circling above them, getting ready to swoop down for the kill. Mace reported: “The guys on our tail are closing … coming up on the turnpoint, next heading zero-two-three, safe clearance altitude one thousand feet … one minute to turn, I got a watch running … I got high towers left of the turnpoint, two hundred twenty and eight hundred and fifty feet tall … power line after we roll.”

Suddenly they got a red MISSILE LAUNCH and IRT warning lights, and a hard, fast warning tone — the infrared detection system detected the flare of a missile’s rocket motor igniting — and they could see the glare of decoy flares dropping behind them as the aircraft defense system automatically ejected chaff and flares. “Missile launch!” Mace shouted. “Break right!”

Rebecca jammed the control stick to her right knee, rolled into a 90-degree bank turn, pulled on the stick until their chins were forced down onto their chests from the G-forces, then relaxed the pressure on the stick and rolled out, ready at any time to do another break if necessary. The terrain-following radar system faulted and tried to fly them up when Furness exceeded 40 degrees of bank, and the TFR warning lights were still on even after she rolled out. “I got a problem with the TFs, climbing to SCA,” she said. With the little finger of her left hand, she depressed the paddle switch to keep the terrain-following radar from trying to do an emergency fly-up, started a gentle climb to the safe clearance altitude for the segment of the route, and reached down to the TFR control panel to recycle the TFR mode switches.

Meanwhile Mace was frantically searching the skies behind them for any sign of a missile launch. It would be nearly impossible to see, but… “There!” he shouted, pointing above and to the left. “I see two missiles! I—”

Suddenly they saw a ball of fire erupt in the sky ahead, and there was a lot of joyful shouting on both the UHF emergency channel and the scrambled VHF interplane channel.

“What in hell …? Who is that …?” he asked.

“It’s the Ukrainian MiGs,” Furness said. She was still recycling the TFR switches — both yellow TFR FAIL warning lights were on. “They didn’t leave us — damn, they just shot down a Russian fighter. Call up the next point.”

Mace sequenced the navigation computer to the next turnpoint and they headed north. “I got search radars at eleven and one o’clock, and bat-wings all over the damned place,” Mace said. “I don’t know which is which — they’re all bad guys now as far as I’m concerned. Twelve minutes to the initial point. I’m doing a prelaunch check.” He configured his weapon release switches, placing the bomb door mode switch to AUTO — and left it there this time. He wasn’t going to try to withhold anything this time.

Coming up to the next turnpoint, he checked offset aimpoints in his radarscope. “I got a problem — radar pedestal looked like it crashed,” he said. “That last break must’ve jammed something. I’m resetting my radar.” He hit the ANTENNA CAGE button, which should have moved the attack radar dish to its straight-ahead position — it stayed rolled over to one side, producing only a streak of light in his radarscope. He turned his system to STANDBY, waited a few seconds, then back to XMIT — no change. He shut the system completely off, waited ten seconds, then turned it back to STANDBY — still nothing. “Shit, the attack radar pedestal is jammed.”

“That means the terrain-following radar is out too,” Furness said. “Fuck, we’re stuck at SCA.”

Mace rotated the TFR mode switches to SIT, which would give them a profile-only view of terrain ahead — it was the only radar they had working now. Without the TFRs or the attack radar, they could not safely descend below the safe clearance altitude. “Christ, what a time for the system to crap out.”

The S symbol at the ten o’clock position suddenly changed to a 10, and they heard the fast, high-pitched warning tone of an imminent missile threat: “SA-10, ten o’clock — the Kaluga site came up on us,” Mace said as he depressed the trackbreaker switchlights to turn the jammers on again. “Come left and let’s get that sucker.” Mace made sure his AGM-88C HARM antiradar missiles were powered up and ready. The Vampires did not carry a Tactical Electronic Reconnaissance sensor pallet in the bomb bay — they had a very different load in the bomb bay that night — so the HARM missiles had to find, identify, and process their own attack information, which took much longer than normal.

Furness made the turn, aiming the HARM missile at the SAM site … and the MISSILE LAUNCH warning lights came on.

“Missile launch!” Mace cried out.

“I see it, I see it!” Furness shouted. “Chaff—now!”

Mace pumped out two bundles of chaff and Furness banked hard left. The XMIT lights on the forward trackbreakers were on, trying to jam the uplink signal steering the missile. The SA-10 missile turned right to follow them.

“Chaff!” Furness shouted again, then threw the bomber into a hard right break. Mace pumped out extra chaff, two bundles at a time.

The SA-10 banked left in response — it wasn’t being jammed. It was locked on solid and tracking them all the way. Rebecca had to sweep the wings forward to 54 degrees, then 36 degrees to keep from stalling … she had no more airspeed to do another break to get away from this missile.

Furness and Mace saw a huge fireball pass overhead and then heard on the interplane frequency, “Magnum, Thunder One, magnum. Hang in there, guys.” Hembree and Tobias in Thunder Two had launched a HARM missile at the SA-10 site, right over their heads. They had to keep on jinking for another few seconds.

“Vertical jink, Becky,” Mace shouted. “Go vertical!”

Furness shoved the control stick forward with all her might, descended three hundred precious feet — leaving them no more than one hundred feet between them and the highest terrain in the area, although they could see nothing ahead of them and could hit the ground at any second — then hauled back on the stick with both hands. Mace kept on pumping out bursts of chaff. When Furness looked up, she saw the SA-10’s burning rocket motor, the only light she could see except for the stars caused by her pounding heart and straining muscles.

Simultaneously, the 10 symbol on the RHAWS scope disappeared as the HARM missile hit the SAM site — and the SA-10 missile self-destructed less than one hundred feet behind them.

The shock wave from the SA-10’s 280-pound warhead was like a thunderclap right outside the cockpit canopy. The MASTER CAUTION light came on, big and bright, right in front of Rebecca’s terrified eyes. “What have I got, Daren?” she shouted as she punched the light off with a quick two-fingered stab.

Mace checked the caution light panel on the lower left instrument panel. “Rudder authority light … TFR lights … oil-hot light on the left engine,” he said. “We might have an oil leak.” He shined a small flashlight that he kept clipped to his flight suit pocket on the oil pressure gauges. “A little fluctuation on the left engine, but it’s still in the green. I think we can make it.” He checked the other gauges. “Aft-body fuel quantity is fluctuating — we may have taken a hit in the aft-body tank. Fuel distribution caution light. I’ll switch fuel feed to the forward-body tank or else we’ll be nose-heavy when the aft body drains out. Generator panel’s okay. Let’s get ready for that other SAM site to the right of track. Watch your altitude — one hundred feet low.”

Rebecca pulled back on the stick to correct her altitude and found it took more force than normal to move it. “Stick’s getting heavy already,” she said as she fed in more trim. She rolled out of her turn with the steering bug centered, then reengaged the autopilot — but seconds after clicking it on, it kicked off again, and the bomber nosed lower. “Dammit, autopilot won’t hold it.” She cursed, grabbing the stick and feeding in more nose-up trim. “This thing better hold together — I don’t want to punch out of two Vampires in one deployment. They won’t renew my union card then.”

The search radar at two o’clock suddenly turned to an “8” indication, but they were lined up and ready for it.

“I’m tracking the ‘Land Role’ radar,” Mace said. “Processing … locked on. Ready to launch … now.” Seconds later they fired their first HARM missile at the missile site … and nothing happened. The 8 indication on the RHAWS disappeared, only to reappear a few seconds after the missile should have hit.

“Two, can you get that sucker for us?” Rebecca radioed on the scrambled VHF channel.

“We got it, lead,” Hembree replied. “Magnum …” But just as he said the word, they got a MISSILE LAUNCH warning, and they could see four missiles ripple-fire into the sky and arc out toward them. “Missile launch!” they heard Hembree shout on the radio. “I’ll go right, lead.”

Rebecca hit the afterburners and swept the wings back to 54 degrees. “Chaff!” she shouted, and she banked hard left — she tried to break, but she didn’t have the strength to pull the control stick over the heavy nose-low loads until Mace got on his control stick with her, pulling with his left hand while ejecting chaff with his right. Their break was only half the authority of a full-power break, but they quickly ran out of airspeed and had to stop. Their airspeed was down to half normal speed, and nothing else except 24-degree wing sweep would keep the angle of attack in the normal range. Furness pulled the throttles back to military power, and with the wings at 24 degrees they could get 350 knots and six alpha — slow and sluggish, but still flying.

“I don’t see the missiles anywhere—” Then, far off to the right behind the right wing, he saw a blazing streak of fire fly into the earth and explode, illuminating the snowy ground for miles in all directions. “God, somebody got hit!” Mace screamed. “Thunder Two, do you read me? Thunder Two …?” There was a long, terrifying pause — no reply. “Thunder Two, respond!”

“I copy, lead,” Hembree replied. “It was one of the Ukrainians. Thunder Ten, do you copy me? Over.”

“Yes, I hear you,” Pavlo Tychina, flying the lead Su-17, radioed back. “It was my wingman. I did not see the missiles coming until they hit him.”

“We’re IP inbound,” Mace reported solemnly. “Coming up on the missile launch point in four minutes.”

“Okay, Two, we’ve got a forward CG problem, and we’re barely maintaining three-fifty. Dick, you wanna do the honors? You got the lead. I got one HARM left. I’ll cover your butt.”

“I got the lead,” Hembree replied. A few moments later, Hembree said on the channel, “Fence check, Thunder Flight. Arm ’em up, lead is hot.”

“God, this is it,” Furness muttered. She made sure her flight suit sleeves were rolled down, her zippers zipped up, her helmet and oxygen mask on tight, and her shoulder harness as tight as she could make it. Mace did the same, then checked Rebecca. They then pulled their flashblindness curtains and canopy screens closed, turned on all the interior lights full bright, and turned the cockpit pressurization to COMBAT. She lowered her PLZT (Polarized Lead-Zirconium-Titanate) antiflashblindness goggles in place on her helmet and activated them. “I’m ready, Daren,” she said. She looked at her partner after he lowered his goggles in place. “My God, you look like the Fly.”

“I feel like it’s déjà vu all over again,” he replied. He checked the RHAWS scope. “Search radars at one o’clock, Rebecca — that’s Moscow. Two minutes to launch point.”

“I think we’ve gotta be crazy, Daren,” Rebecca said. “I mean, I can hardly think … I can hardly breathe. How can anyone do this? How can anyone launch a nuclear weapon?”

“Part of the fucking job. SA-10 coming up,” Mace said. “Give me 10 degrees left and we’ll launch our last HARM.”

Furness made the turn, the missile processed and computed its target, and they let it fly. The launch and destruction of the SA-10 SAM site was anticlimactic, almost boring. “Two weeks ago, the idea of launching so many HARMs would have been overwhelming,” she said. “Now it feels as if I just shot a spitball compared to what we’re about to do.”

“SA-10’s down,” Mace reported. “One minute to launch point. Missiles powered up and ready.”

Rebecca clicked on the interplane channel. “Godspeed, Thunder,” she radioed.

“To you too, Thunder,” Hembree replied. “Over and out.”

“Thirty seconds. Prelaunch checks complete, doors in MANUAL, center up the steering bars, Becky.” The Vampire banked slightly to the right, then leveled out. “Twenty seconds …”

“Missile away, Thunder One,” they heard Hembree say. The first missile was on its way to its target — it would hit about half a minute before their own.

“Can’t get a final radar launchpoint fix … I hope the system’s running tight enough with GPS,” Mace said, his voice still carrying a sharp, determined edge. “Search radar, twelve o’clock … that’s Domodovedo. They’re trying to pick up Dick Hembree’s missile. They got an SA-17 system but it’ll be too late—”

“Daren!”

“It’ll be all right, Rebecca. Let’s do it and get it over with.” He flicked the bomb door switch to OPEN. “Ten seconds … doors coming open …”

Rebecca gripped the control stick and throttles as tightly as she could, waiting for the wrath of God to hit. Something is going to happen, she thought. She was sure of it. No supreme being was going to allow any human to unleash this much destructive force on—

“Missile away, Rebecca,” Mace said as he mashed the pickle button and started a stopwatch. She could feel the three-thousand-pound missile leave the bomb bay, and suddenly her stick felt lighter and control returned. “Left turn, heading two-five-nine, let’s get the hell out of here.” Rebecca swept the wings back to 72.5 degrees as she cranked the Vampire bomber around and accelerated away from Domodedovo. “Missile-one flight time thirty seconds, impact in thirty seconds.” Their speed was building slowly, but they would be over forty miles away from the target when the missiles hit.

“Coming up on missile-one impact … now.” Rebecca could hear a loud roaring in her ears — her heart was pounding blood against her eardrums like a jackhammer. Daren glanced into his radarscope and turned a switch. “I’ve got video from the AS-13 missile,” he said. He grasped the tracking handle and gave it a few nudges to the right. “I think I see Malino Airfield — I’ll try to set this thing in there.” Malino Airfield was a small fighter base outside Domodedovo. “Hey, these Ukrainian missiles work pretty well.”

Rebecca shook her head, wondering how he could be so flip at a time like this. Just before launch, the order for them to fire the nukes was recalled. It seemed the President had had a politically expedient change of heart. Or the Steel Magnolia did. Anyway, the nukes were still going to go off … it was just that the President had decided, and the Ukrainians agreed, that the Ukrainians would do the dirty deed. Which was why she and Mace were now carrying Ukrainian weapons, and the Ukrainians were carrying the American nukes. “Daren — how can you joke about something like this when you know what’s about to … happen?”

Mace ignored her. “Impact,” he said. “Direct hit on the terminal building. Should be plenty of fragments to find.” He shut off the attack video system, sat upright, and pulled his shoulder harness tight. “Okay, to answer your question: you have to joke about something like this. You think too much about it, well, then you really have doubts. But, Rebecca, this whole mission is a joke, anyway. Leave it to the President to wimp out again. Letting the Ukrainians fight our battle for us is going to make us the laughingstock of the world. But it’s what our beloved commander in chief wants … or his wife does, anyway. Actually, it’s a pretty shrewd political move: the President’s getting to knock out Velichko and cover his ass at the same time. Nobody can say we launched the nukes, which is a lot more palatable to his liberal constituency than actually doing it. Boy, I bet Eyers was ready to spit bullets. They’ve robbed him of his chance to play John Wayne.”

Furness sighed. “Well, as much as I like Pavlo and the Ukrainians, I’m frankly glad they’re cooking them off. After all, it’s his homeland and his fight. He might as well have the chance to finish it.”

The system was running perfectly, Pavlo Tychina thought. The AN/AQQ-901 electronic interface pod, mounted on his left fuselage pylon, had taken several GPS satellite updates in the past few minutes and had made its final position update. The Doppler radar velocities compared favorably — the system was tight.

Tychina did not need to refer to a checklist — the switches had been configured for him, the computers were in command. The unlock and weapon prearm codes had been entered in for him by Colonel Mace before takeoff — even though they were now allies, no American was going to allow foreign officers any access to classified codes and arming procedures. It was just as well. Pilots should be pilots, not locksmiths.

They had fought their way past the best of Russia’s defenses and sacrificed many good pilots and aircraft for this moment. The war had come full circle. Like the mythical Phoenix of his nickname, his life had begun in the radiation-fuel fires of L’vov Air Base, and it was about to end in those same nuclear fires again, this time over the capital city of his enemy. His eyes sought out the control indicator — and just as he focused on it, he saw the MISSILE POWER light begin to blink as the AGM-131 Short-Range Attack Missile he carried on his right fuselage pylon received its final navigation-data dump from the AQQ-901 pod, performed a complete self-test, sampled the air outside the Sukhoi-17 bomber, quickly tested its stubby control surfaces, decided it was ready to launch, then dropped clear of the fuselage.

Three seconds later, the missile’s first-stage motor ignited, and the missile leaped into the sky on a long tongue of flame.

The sight of that missile rising into the sky toward Domodedovo made him smile. To think that the Americans, not the Ukrainians, had originally planned to do this awful task! Americans simply had no inkling of what it was like to have their homeland invaded, their people killed by the thousands, their entire way of life ripped away from them far beyond their control. America would have been hated if it had accomplished this attack. Ukrayina was acting in self-defense — it had a moral and legal right to mount any soft of attack in order to defend its homeland.

Pavlo knew that his flight plan said to turn west and try to make it as close to the Belarus border as he could before flaming out — he didn’t have enough gas to make it out of Russia, let alone back to Ukrayina — but he kept the nose pointed toward the bright city lights of Moscow and even started a slight climb so he could get a better view. He knew he was supposed to put on his antiflashblindness goggles and close off the cockpit too, but that would be depriving him of the best seat in the house.

It was time to record his last will and testament, indulge in a few seconds of rhetoric — he had earned as much by successfully accomplishing this fearsome task. He set his primary radio to 243.0, the international emergency channel, keyed the mike, and said in Russian, “Good morning, Russia. This is Colonel of Air Defense Aviation Pavlo Grigor’evich Tychina of the Air Force of the Republic of Ukrayina. I am of sound mind and body, acting under orders of the President of the, Ukrainian Republic and the Parliament.

“I have just launched an RKV-500B missile at Domodedovo air-port, where I understand the butcher Vitaly Velichko is hiding. I wish him a swift journey to Hell.” He hoped that lying about the missile, calling it a Russian cruise missile rather than an American AGM-131, would leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the attack was launched by Ukrayina, not America — at least he wanted to get full credit for this deed.

“This strike is in retaliation for my beloved fiancèe, Mikola Kor-neichuk, who was killed by a similar weapon fired by a Russian Tupo-lev-22 bomber several days ago in the attack against Ukrayina, and for the other nuclear bomb attacks against Ukrayina that left thousands dead or maimed. It is done on behalf of myself, my country, and the good people of the Republic of Turkey, who offered their hand in friendship. I hope this action stops the conflict between Russia and the NATO allies. If it does, I wish you all peace. If it does not, I will see you all in Hell very soon. I hope that—”

He could not finish his sentence because a blinding flash of pure white light obliterated every sound, every sense in his body. He felt no pain, heard no engine sounds. He missed the familiar rumble of the old Sukhoi-17 between his legs, but he knew he had done his task well.

Colonel Pavlo Tychina was twenty miles from Domodedovo airport, ground zero for the twenty-kiloton AGM-131 SRAM-B missile, when it descended and exploded at precisely five thousand feet above ground. The fireball was five miles in diameter, completely enveloping the airport and vaporizing everything it touched, including the entire twenty-story command post and senior leadership bunker set under forty feet of concrete under the airport, and throwing millions of tons of debris a hundred thousand feet in the air with the power of ten volcanoes.

Vitaly Velichko was reduced to superheated gas in a millionth of a second as he conferred with his military commanders, sitting around a table on the sixth floor of the bunker, drinking vodka and plotting the invasions of Romania, Turkey, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Alaska by Russian troops.

Pavlo Tychina was not caught in the fireball, but the overpressure from the explosion swatted his Su-17 out of the sky like a tennis ball hit with an overhead smash. Only God could see the smile on his face as he crashed into the frozen Russian ground.