Nightwatch

Chapter 39

Red somewhat halfheartedly prepared to initiate her computerized scan of the phone logs, unable to give this project her complete enthusiasm. Though she had a sincere respect for Coach, the bizarre warning that he had shared with both her and Commander Cooper sounded more like the disturbed rantings of a paranoid conspiracy buff. Of course, this was definitely not the type of behavior that one would expect from the senior pilot of one of the Air Force’s most important aircraft. She knew that Coach and his fellow flight crew members were subject to frequent, intensive physical examinations that included a comprehensive psychological evaluation. There was no way that he’d be allowed to command Nightwatch unless he passed these tests with flying colors, and Red supposed that a mental ailment was most likely out of the question.

Coach therefore deserved her support, and she felt a bit embarrassed for questioning his sanity. After all, it took immense courage on his part to even share this warning, and for him to pick Red showed how much he trusted her. To properly investigate an unthinkable event of this magnitude, an open mind was needed, and she decided to hold back further judgment until the facts were on the table.

To access the proper phone log, she needed to input the Chairman’s personal key number. Each crew member aboard Nightwatch had one of these numbers, which had to be fed into the computer before initiating either a telephone, radio, or data transmission. Because she was responsible for placing the majority of Warner’s calls. Red was most familiar with his key number, and she in putted the sequence 4-6-1-3-3 into her keyboard.

Before initiating her query, she looked up from the monitor and took a moment to scan the Operations Team Area to see which senior officers were present. She felt like a conspirator herself upon determining that neither the Chairman nor any members of his immediate staff were in the compartment. Across the aisle. Sergeant Schuster was busy with a systems diagnostic, with Colonel Pritchard last reported to be aft in Technical Control.

If she was going to proceed without being caught, now was the time to do so, and she took a series of deep, calming breaths before readdressing her keyboard.

She began her search on 2 July, at seventeen hundred hours.

This was the approximate time that Air Force One had landed in Simferopol, and if a coup were being attempted, this time segment would be all-important.

A list of over one hundred transmission transactions filled her screen. Most of these were individual phone calls, dialed on the Chairman’s behalf by either herself or Sergeant Schuster. The majority of the numbers were in the 703 area code, with the most frequent party being the Pentagon’s NMCC. Another frequently dialed number was STRATCOM operations, located outside Omaha, Nebraska.

It was hard not to miss the dozens of calls to the Russian Defense Ministry. Most of these Red had dialed, and though she knew the supposed reason they had been made, she couldn’t help but wonder if General Alexi Zhukov was part of the plot.

Iron Man One was yet another frequent contact point. General Spencer would be an ideal individual for the Chairman to be working with if a coup were being attempted, though Red was unable to forget the caustic nature of their conversations.

Most of them were characterized by intense arguments, not the type of cooperation one would expect from fellow coconspirators.

She came across a long series of calls that had apparently been dialed for the Chairman by Sergeant Schuster. They corresponded to a variety of military installations located throughout the United States, and Red recognized the numbers to COMSUBLANT, NORAD, SOCOM, COMSUBPAC, and a number of Air Force and Army installations, ranging from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to Georgia’s Fort Benning. Several calls to individual combat units had also been made, leading Red to wonder why the Chairman would bother taking the time for such conversations when his subordinates could surely handle them for him.

She was in the process of scanning the most recent series of calls when she looked up momentarily from the monitor, in time to see Major Hewlett headed her way from the direction of the briefing room. She immediately hit the keyboard’s escape button, the screen going blank just as the serious-faced Marine passed by her workstation. Red couldn’t fail to miss the way he seemed to intentionally turn his head in an effort to see what she was working on. She met his inquisitive gaze with her best smile, and the SIOP advisor redirected his glance to the rear of the compartment without acknowledging that she even existed.

Disturbed by this encounter. Red wondered if Hewlett had been sent to spy on them. Could he be part of the coup? Hewlett was a new addition to the Chairman’s battle staff, and as SIOP advisor, he would be an all-important ally if a coup effort were to succeed. Red supposed that his phone log could provide them with a wealth of information, and it was while wondering how she could get his access code that a sudden thought hit her. What proof did she really have that a coup d’etat was really being attempted?

Other than the wild tale that Coach had shared with them, she had yet to come across any solid evidence to support the Vice President’s bizarre accusations. All of the phone calls that Warner had made these past couple of hours could be attributed to his routine duties as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Surely she was only letting her imagination run wild, and becoming overly paranoid herself.

After another series of deep breaths. Red decided to exit the phone log and reassess her participation in this foolish, time wasting effort. To close the program, she had to reaccess the activity screen, and as the log reappeared on the monitor, her eyes were drawn to the very last entry. It referred to a phone number that had been placed sometime within the past minute from the Chairman’s personal stateroom.

Since it was out of the ordinary for Warner to make such a call on his own. Red took a closer look at the number he had dialed. The area code 573 was an unfamiliar one, and she fumbled through her directory in an attempt to identify it. When this effort failed, she debated whether or not she should contact an associate in the NMCC and have her look up the number.

Discretion overrode expediency, and Red decided to do the detective work herself. She addressed her keyboard, and accessed the INMARSAT communications satellite serving this portion of the mid-Atlantic. It was in this manner that she reached a computerized information operator back in the United States.

“What area of the CONUS does the area code five-seven three correspond to?” she queried via her keyboard.

Only a few seconds passed before her screen filled with the data — SOUTH-CENTRAL MISSOURI.

Red was unable to forget that Vice President Chapman’s SATCOM warning was supposedly broadcast from this same location, leading her to wonder who it was in the Missouri Ozarks that Admiral Trent Warner had just gotten off the phone with.

While Red was in the process of taking a closer look at the Chairman’s phone log, Brittany was seated in the briefing room, her open laptop before her. Now that Major Hewlett had left the compartment to join Colonel Pritchard in Technical Control, she was free to reinitiate her investigation into the possibility that a coup was being conducted from Nightwatch.

As it turned out, the Chairman’s SIOP advisor had just instructed Brittany to document in detail their reaction to the Russian missile launch that had occurred earlier in the day. This gave her the perfect opportunity to access the battle staffs tactical log and look for any suspicious deviations.

It was a joint staff decision that had brought them to DEFCON Two shortly after the initial warning from NORAD had arrived.

Brittany also couldn’t find fault with the decision to implement Counterforce package Zulu Tango in the event that the Russian missile had turned out to be an ICBM headed for the CONUS.

She noted with interest that the log stated that this was one of the rare instances, during these past couple of hours, when General Spencer aboard Iron Man One actually concurred with the Chairman. Normally the two commanders would be reading from the same page, and for a difference of opinion to be part of the official record was most unusual, as was the sealed folder she came upon at the end of the log. It contained their current SIOP options, and Brittany tried several different passwords to unlock it.

Knowing full well the Chairman’s penchant for using football slang for his passwords, she tried every such term she could think of. She typed in “pigskin,”

“gridiron,” and “quarterback sneak,” along with dozens of other words and phrases, all to no avail.

Since golf terminology was another one of his favorites, she was about to try this avenue of approach when the term “audible” popped into her head. She tried it, and the folder miraculously opened.

The targets listed were the exclusive responsibility of their Atlantic alert platform, the U.S.S. Rhode Island. Brittany needed an atlas to identify the corresponding longitude and latitude coordinates that the Trident warheads would be headed to in the event of war. Most of the targets were situated in central Russia and Siberia, with another scenario featuring a limited strike inside the People’s Republic of China.

The final scenario possibility demanded but two of the Rhode Island’s Tridents. Code-named Yankee Hotel, the targeting coordinates were vastly different from the previous strikes. Once again Brittany needed the atlas to determine that one of the submarine’s nuclear-tipped warheads was targeted at the airspace off the coast of Georgia, while strangely enough, the other was directed squarely at the Ozarks region of south-central Missouri.