Nightwatch

Chapter 42

Thirty years of military service had done little to prepare Lowell Spencer for the perplexing situation that he currently faced. He had just completed the second of two bizarre phone calls, both of which had originated from Nightwatch 676.

The first of these calls was made by the 747’s senior pilot.

Spencer knew Major William Foard personally. He was a likable young man, with a propensity for wire-rimmed sunglasses and unauthorized headgear. Both of them had been B-52 commanders in the earlier stages of their careers. Although the General had never flown with Foard, for the Yale graduate to go from nuclear-armed bombers to an important assignment such as Nightwatch spoke well for his many talents.

With such vast responsibilities to shoulder, Foard wouldn’t be the type of person prone to baseless accusations. That was only one of the reasons Spencer had listened closely to the wild tale he had hurriedly related — a story purporting that Admiral Trent Warner was currently attempting to orchestrate a coup d’etat.

According to Foard, it was the Chairman who was responsible for killing the President and attempting to assassinate the Vice President, who was still alive in the Missouri Ozarks and running for his very life.

Foard had also stated that he had solid proof that the Chairman had recently contacted his fellow coup forces in the Ozarks, and had also alerted various military units throughout the CONUS. And to take this wild tale one step further, he claimed that Warner had also created an SIOP file, in which both the Ozarks and the airspace above Iron Man One’s patrol sector off the coast of Georgia were to be targeted by a pair of the U.S.S. Rhode Island’s Tridents.

Before he could learn the grounds for Foard’s accusations, the pilot had abruptly signed off, leaving Spencer seated at his console inside TACAMO’s battle-staff compartment, scratching his head in pure bewilderment. There was always the possibility that Foard was telling the truth — that his facts were accurate — and that a coup was indeed being orchestrated by Warner aboard Nightwatch. Coach could also be the victim of misinformation.

Or he could have snapped.

It was this latter condition that Trent Warner had just called to warn him about. During the course of this curt, one sided conversation, the Chairman revealed his reluctant decision to have Foard placed in protective custody because of a complete nervous breakdown.

Spencer cautiously acknowledged the receipt of a recent phone call from Foard. He also admitted that the pilot had made some pretty wild accusations. To appease the Chairman, he readily accepted his apology for Foard’s aberrant behavior, and they signed off without further mention of the entire incident.

In his thirty years of Air Force service, he had certainly seen his fair share of men who had taken the sudden, unexpected plunge into insanity. No matter the stringent, psychological tests that all pilots had to pass both before and after they received their wings, the pressures of the Cold War had broken many a bomber pilot’s spirit. Perfectly sane one moment, completely deranged the next, they suffered the cost of doing business under stress levels that no man was impervious to.

Foard could very well have succumbed to the enormous pressures of his job, and this breakdown could have generated the paranoid delusions he had so passionately warned about. Yet what if he hadn’t gone insane and the coup was real? Was Trent Warner trying to pull the wool over his adversary’s eyes?

Spencer couldn’t forget how unwilling the Chairman had been to place the blame on the Russians for assassinating the President. He had even balked at accusing the Russians of colliding with the U.S.S. Rhode Island, and had subsequently resisted altering the nation’s alert status in the face of these belligerent acts. Was the reason for his hesitance based on an unwillingness to go to war with Russia for acts that his own forces were responsible for? Spencer hated the idea of having to even consider such a distasteful scenario, though he’d be negligent for ignoring it completely.

“Comm,” he said to his communications officer, who was seated in the aft portion of the battle-staff compartment.

“Now that Nightwatch six-seven-six has got its feet wet, keep me informed of any alert traffic that it might attempt to transmit on its own.”

Almost as an afterthought, he personally contacted the headquarters of the 1st Air Force in Langley, Virginia, and ordered a flight of F-15 Eagles skyward, to escort Nightwatch as it approached U.S. airspace.