Plan of Attack

4

It was one of the most difficult dances in all of aviation, made even more difficult because all the aircraft and the damned drogues were icing up. Someone once described this exercise as trying to stick your dick into a bull while running across a pasture — except now the pasture was slick with ice and snow.

Aviatskiy Kapitan Leytenant Josef Leborov was very, very good at plugging the bull, but even he was having a tough time of it.

This morning, in and out of clouds heavily laden with ice, a formation of twenty-four Tupolev-95MD Modifikatsirovanny Daplata aircraft led an even larger formation of thirty-six Tu-95MS-16 Modifikatsirovanny Snaryad strategic bombers on their mission. Spread out over several kilometers, the six formations of four tankers with their six bombers below and behind them made for a very impressive sight. What was not so impressive was watching each bomber trying to plug in to its tanker.

It was Leborov’s second try — and he was doing better than the others. The ten-meter-long refueling probe was fixed on the Tu-95’s nose, right on the centerline and in plain sight of both pilot and copilot; it had three small lights on the outside edge of the nozzle to illuminate the drogue as it got closer. Once the tanker was forty meters ahead and a few meters higher than the receiver, the tanker’s refueling observer in the tail compartment — formerly the tail gunner’s station — would slowly unreel the drogue. The drogue would swing around wildly for several meters until it got outside the tremendous prop wash behind the plane, but it would then stabilize and begin to drop slightly as the weight of the hose pulled on it. At maximum extension the observer would flash a green light, and the receiver could move forward and plug the drogue.

The drogue — a large, two-meter-diameter padded lighted steel basket at the end of the fuel hose — did not move around so much. The bomber, on the other hand, seemed never to be in one place long enough to get a good feel for positioning the boom. Unlike Western-style boom aerial refueling, here the tanker’s observer could not assist the hookup — it was the bomber pilot’s show all the way.

Leborov cruised slowly up to the drogue, trying to make small control and power corrections — but it was no use. The drogue whistled left just enough for the nozzle to hit the rim, which caused the drogue to skitter away. Leborov pulled off a smidgen of power and swore loudly as he backed away for another try. “This fucking pig! I have either not enough control authority or too damned much!”

“Just think of fucking that pretty little waitress you met a few months ago, Joey,” said Leborov’s copilot and friend, Aviatskiy Starshiy Leytenant Yuri Bodorev. “That’s what I do.”

“Shut the hell up, asshole,” Leborov said, as good-naturedly as he could.

“Refueling behind one of our own planes isn’t as easy as it sounded when they first came up with this idea,” Bodorev remarked. Without external stores, Tupolev-95 bombers had a maximum range in excess of twelve thousand kilometers — air refueling was usually not a necessity. But several months ago they started practicing air refueling again, using Tupolev-16 tankers. Then, just weeks ago, modified Tu-95 tankers had been brought in. No one understood the reason for all this innovation and experimentation — until now. “Want me to give it a try, Joey?”

“No, no, I’m just out of practice,” Leborov said, forcing himself to relax. “How are the gauges looking?”

“RPMs are matched, trims are within limits, power settings are within one or two percent of each other, and fuel tanks are balanced within two hundred kilos,” replied the flight engineer, sitting right behind the copilot.

“Just plug this whore and let’s go, Joey,” Bodorev said. “You’re the flight leader — show the other kids how it’s done.” That seemed to be all the encouragement he needed — along with the image of the long probe protruding from almost right between his legs aimed right for his girlfriend’s manda—because on the next pass Leborev plugged the drogue smoothly and easily, as if he’d been doing it every day for years. The fuel transfer would be agonizingly slow, just a thousand liters a minute, so they would be plugged in for about fifteen minutes just to get a partial offload and allow the other bombers to cycle through.

It took three hours of formation flying with this huge armada to complete the refueling. Along the way five bombers and two tankers had to drop out, because they either couldn’t transfer fuel, couldn’t receive fuel, or because of some other major malfunction; one aircraft had a serious weapon problem that forced it to jettison two weapons on two different wing pylons. Fortunately, they were able to divvy up fuel from the remaining tankers to the remaining bombers, so all were able to get their scheduled onloads and continue the mission.

Since one plane had weapons problems, the formation leader decided that all the weapons had to be visually inspected, in addition to the routine safe connectivity-safe continuity checks. “Weapon safety checks complete, all weapons showing safe, no malfunctions,” the bombardier in the downstairs nose compartment reported. “Clearing off for visual check.”

“Navigator clearing off to assist.”

Leborov turned around and said, “Stay put, Arkadiy. I need a stretch. I’ll go. Pilot clearing off for visual weapons check.” Bodorev donned his oxygen mask — the pilot flying the aircraft was required to wear it while the other pilot was out of his seat — and gave his partner and friend his usual good-luck sign: thumb and forefinger forming a circle, meaning “asshole.”

With his parachute, walkaround oxygen bottle, gloves, heavyweight flight jacket, helmet, and oxygen mask on, Leborov stoop-walked past the engineer’s and electronic-warfare officer’s stations, patted the navigator on the shoulder in the very aft section of the cockpit, undogged the hatch to the lower compartment, climbed down the ladder to the lower deck, sealed the upper-deck pressure hatch, and followed the bombardier aft to the weapons bay’s pressurized bulkhead hatch. There were no ejection seats on the Tupolev-95, either upward or downward; the flight-deck crew slid down a pole that extended through the entry hatch that carried them out into the slipstream and away from the aircraft, while the bombardier and gunner simply rolled out through downward escape hatches in their compartments. Now the bombardier unsealed the aft bulkhead hatch, and he and Leborov crawled aft into the weapons bay.

The deck was slick with frozen condensation and leaking coolant from some of the electronics bays, but the men ignored it and continued aft. They could hear the loud click-click-clack-click sounds of the navigation system, which used Doppler radar and radar fixes to update an analog computer as big as a refrigerator that still used gears and levers to provide position, heading, and velocity information. The noise from the big dual counterrotating propellers beating on each side of the fuselage was deafening, even through their helmets and ear protectors. Leborov found the switch for the port-side weapon pylon inspection light and flicked it on — and there it was. He had seen it and preflighted it on the ground, of course, but somehow it looked different when the Tu-95 was in the air.

The left weapon pylon held one Kh-90 air-launched attack missile. These were experimental missiles, fielded for the first time when two missiles had been launched at a CIA base in Uzbekistan just recently during an operational test. Then the missiles had carried high-explosive warheads.

But now these missiles carried two one-kiloton thermonuclear devices.

Code-named Sat Loshka, or “Garden Hoe,” the warheads were actually copies of American nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs developed after Desert Storm to destroy deep underground bunkers, cave complexes, and biochem-weapon storage facilities without risking large numbers of civilian casualties. The warheads used rocket motors and armored nose caps to drive themselves down as much as thirty meters underground, even through layers of steel or Kevlar armor, before detonating. That meant that the fireballs would be relatively small and that blast and overpressure damage aboveground also would be small. Each cruise missile had its own inertial-navigation system — a system of electronic gyroscopes and pendulums that gave the navigation computers heading and velocity information — but the addition of GLONASS satellite navigation gave the missiles better than twenty-meter accuracy.

The bombardier walked down to another porthole to inspect the aft section of the huge Kh-90 missile. It was as if they were carrying a small jet fighter on their wings, Leborov thought. He saw a tiny bit of ice around the air inlet under the nose, but that would not be of any concern; less than a minute after launch, the exterior of the missile would heat up to several hundred degrees Centigrade as it approached its top speed of five times the speed of sound. He nodded to his bombardier, indicating they were done with their inspection, then shut off the inspection light and moved to look at the starboard missile. Everything having to do with nuclear weapons always had to be two-officer, even if it meant looking at the weapons from inside the plane.

Two thermonuclear bunker-buster missiles, faster than any antiaircraft missile — and Leborov’s sortie was only the leader of a thirty-one-plane gaggle of similarly armed Tupolev-95 bombers. Each missile had two independently targeted nuclear warheads designed to burrow underground and destroy even the best-protected bunker. The Americans would never know what hit them. Poor bastards.

The bomb bay itself contained a rotary launcher with six Kh-31P long-range antiradar missiles. As they closed in on their launch point, Leborov and three of the other lead bombers would be responsible for shutting down the local radar sites along their intended route of flight, including Yellowknife, Pine Point, Uranium City, Lynn Lake, Fort Nelson, Cold Lake, Edmonton, and Whitehorse. The ramjet-powered Kh-31s had a range of two hundred kilometers and a maximum speed of Mach 3, with a ninety-kilogram high-explosive fragmentary warhead that would shred a radar antenna or a building into pieces in the blink of an eye.

The inspection complete, Leborov and the bombardier crawled along the narrow catwalk back the length of the bomb bay and looked in on the gunner, seated in the very aft tail cabin. They did not ask him to open his pressurized hatch — that meant he would have had to put on his oxygen mask and depressurize his compartment — but instead just knocked on the porthole and got a thumbs-up from him. The gunner was surrounded by box lunches filled with low-residue snacks, a small stack of magazines, numerous bottles of water, and metal boxes to store his relief bags. Normally the gunner stayed up front with the crew in a jump seat until close to enemy territory, but during formation flying his job was to keep an eye on the wingmen through his large windows and tail radar, so he had to spend the entire mission in his little compartment.

Despite the bone-chilling cold, Leborov was bathed in sweat by the time he’d returned to the cockpit and strapped himself into his seat again. “Pilot’s back up,” he reported.

“You look like shit,” Borodev said cross-cockpit to his aircraft commander. “You didn’t rot yego yebal with the bombardier again, did you?”

“Screw you.”

Borodev looked at his friend carefully. “You okay, buddy?”

Leborov was silent for a few moments. Then, “Ah, shit, Yuri, no one deserves to die in their bed under a fucking nuclear fireball.”

“That’s not our concern nor our decision, Joey,” Borodev said. He liked calling his friend the anglicized version of his name, because he was so obsessed with the dichotomy of Americans — their strange mixture of strength, humor, ruthlessness, and generosity. Some thought his preoccupation with all things American would affect his job performance — and, Borodev admitted, maybe they were right. “Our targets are missile-launch facilities and underground command posts for nuclear-warfighting units, not bedrooms. Besides, what’s the difference between dying beneath a fireball and a one-thousand-kilo high-explosive bomb? Dead is dead.”

“You know damn well there’s a difference….”

“No I don’t, partner. I don’t believe there’s a difference. Just like there’s no difference between the American attack on Engels and this attack. These are military attacks against military targets. Maybe some civilians will get killed — that can’t be helped, and we’re doing everything possible to limit civilian casualties, including decreasing the yields on our weapons to limits that very well may not destroy the target. And you gotta enjoy the irony of attacking the Americans with a mini-nuke that they invented and deployed….”

“I’m not in the mood to appreciate irony here, Yuri.”

“Joey, we’re more justified in doing this than the Americans were attacking Engels — we weren’t fighting them, we were fighting the damned Taliban that raided our bases in Turkmenistan,” Borodev went on, driving the point home as hard as he could without attracting the attention of the others behind them. The last thing they needed to hear was their copilot trying to convince the aircraft commander that what they were about to do was right. “The Americans attacked us for no reason. Remember that! They attacked us.

“Damn it, Joey, we were there. We could’ve been killed in that raid. One-third of our own regiment was wiped out that night, Joey. One-third. I lost a lot of good friends in that attack, Joey — so did you — and I know a lot of kids who lost fathers and who can’t stop crying at night because they’re afraid of American bombs falling on top of their heads again. Russia’s finest bomber base is abandoned now — a ghost town. And I’m convinced that the Americans would not hesitate to keep on attacking, using every weapon in their arsenal and threatening us with every other weapon they had, including nukes. That’s why this attack is necessary. I give President Gryzlov a lot of credit for having the courage to order this mission.”

“But why are we using nukes, Yuri?”

“You know damned well, Joey,” Borodev replied. “It’s a tactical decision, not a psychological one — we’re doing a job, not trying to send a message. We’re using nukes because the Kh-90s wouldn’t have the destructive power if we put nonnuclear warheads on them. They wouldn’t put a dent in any of the targets we’re going after.” He looked at the pilot with an exasperated expression. “You know all this stuff, my friend. You certified this mission to the commanding general just three days ago, and he chose you to lead this gaggle specifically because you explained it all so well. Don’t wuss out on me now, zalupa.”

“I’m not wussing out. I believe using nukes and biochem weapons is different from using other kinds of weapons, that’s all.”

“You’re a dipshit, Joey. What’s going on? You get your girlfriend pregnant and now you dream of a perfect world with no fighting and no war? Wake up, pal.” He looked at his friend carefully. “You got her pregnant, didn’t you?”

“Worse — I married her.”

“You jerk! You never listen to a thing I tell you!” Borodev said, slapping him hard on the shoulder. “Congratulations! When were you planning on telling the general?”

“I submitted the paperwork to him three days ago. He signed us off yesterday.”

“The great Josef Leborov, scourge of the gay bars — I mean, the taverns—missing in action because he has a wife and a rug rat now. I’m glad I lived to see the day.” He patted his friend on the shoulder. “Good man. If we make it, you have someone to go home to…and if you don’t, your name carries on. Well done, Senior Captain. Now, can we please get back to fucking work?”

“Affirmative,” Leborov said. On intercom he reported, “Crew, all weapons have been visually checked and are ready, and we have visually ensured that our gunner is still with us. Station check.” Every crew member did an oxygen check, checked his equipment, and reported back in order. “Very well. Naviguesser, position report?”

“Thirty-two minutes to the start-countermeasures point,” the navigator responded. The start-countermeasures point was the farthest point from which American radar planes based at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska, could detect them. So far their intelligence had not reported any airborne, but Leborov knew that could change at any time, and without warning. “Approximately three hours to the launch point.”

“Thank you,” Leborov said. Borodev looked at him, and he realized that his voice sounded a little high-pitched and squeaky, a combination of his heavy breathing from crawling around almost the entire length of the plane and from the realization that time was passing quickly and the action was going to start very, very soon. He flashed his friend their mutual “okay” signal, ordered a crew-compartment and oxygen check, then decided to finish off his last box lunch now, before things started getting hairy.

If Ayou don’t mind my saying so — and I don’t care if you do or not — you all sound like a bunch of bickering, whining children,” Secretary of Defense Robert Goff said, slumping wearily in his seat. He had just received a rundown on the current emergency from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commander of Air Combat Command, the commander of Air Intelligence Agency, and finally Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan — and his head really hurt now. The emergency meeting was called because of the alert sent by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, sent directly to the chief of operations in the secretary of defense’s office.

When the warning from NORAD sounded, the White House was instantly put on alert, and the complex mechanisms put in motion to evacuate the president and other senior members of government. Per the plan, the president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and any of the service chiefs in close proximity, and any available members of the congressional leadership would get to Andrews Air Force Base as quickly as possible and board an Air Force E-4B aircraft known as the National Airborne Operations Center. The E-4’s extensive communications suite allowed anyone on board to communicate instantly with virtually anyone anywhere on planet Earth. If the president was traveling, as he was now, he would take airborne one of the two VC-25 “flying White House” aircraft known as Air Force One and communicate with military commanders from there.

If they couldn’t make it to Andrews, key government leaders would be evacuated immediately to an “undisclosed location,” which almost everyone in Washington knew to be the Mount Weather Special Facility, code-named “High Point,” the 434-acre mountain base near Berryville, West Virginia, operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to implement the National Continuity of Government Plan. From the High Point underground-bunker complex, the A-list government and military leaders holed up there had a direct secure videoconference link with the White House Situation Room, Air Force One, the Pentagon, the Navy’s E-6B National Command Post, and the Air Force’s E-4 National Airborne Operations Center — anywhere the president or the strategic warfighting commanders were likely to be in an emergency. But neither the president nor anyone in his cabinet would evacuate Washington unless absolutely necessary, and it was up to Secretary of Defense Robert Goff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Venti to give the president their recommendation.

After receiving a fast status briefing from Venti — and a slightly more detailed briefing from the commander of NORAD, General Randall Shepard — Goff immediately called the White House operations staff and gave them a “no imminent threat” message. It was not an easy message to send: If he made a wrong decision, it could mean the avoidable loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives, including those in the highest levels of government. Goff was usually ebullient, cheerful, and smiling, but when he was angry, his expression and features turned dark, bordering on wide-eyed maniacal. The Joint Chiefs chairman, Air Force General Richard Venti, had not seen the secretary with such an evil visage in quite some time.

Naturally, the person responsible for giving him this expression was the same person that caused him to have it the last time: Patrick McLanahan.

“I find plenty of fault to go around here,” Goff went on, “but let’s start with the main instigator of this mess. General McLanahan, to say you overstepped the bounds of your authority is being far too generous. It’s as if you have never heard of a chain of command, a direct order, or a commanding officer. Your actions in this entire episode are a disgrace to your uniform, and I think it’s about time we investigate whether or not you should be wearing an American military uniform.

“However, just because we don’t like the person who pulled the fire alarm doesn’t mean we can ignore the smell,” Goff went on. “General Houser, I understand and concur that you have plenty of reason to be angry at this gross contravention of authority and chain of command. I’m not an analyst, but I tend to agree with your opinion that we don’t have enough information to make an accurate assessment. However, your recommendation that we do nothing is astounding to me. If it were any other person giving you this information, I think you’d do more, but because the information came from McLanahan, you recommended no action.” Goff turned to General Venti. “General? Recommendations?”

“Sir, I know how everyone feels about General McLanahan, but I happen to think the man is a true professional and that his analysis is timely and accurate,” Venti said. “If he thinks there is a danger out there, we should do something about it. I recommend that we establish an airborne-radar and fighter patrol over northern Alaska immediately while we fully activate the North Warning System. General Muskoka?”

“The Third Wing from Elmendorf provides AWACS radar coverage for northern Alaska,” Thomas Muskoka, commander of Air Combat Command, responded from his headquarters at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia via a secure video teleconference link. “The Three-fifty-fourth Fighter Wing from Eielson provides F-16 alert fighter patrols, backed up with alert F-15s from Elmendorf — fifteen to twenty minutes away, max. This can be set up in a matter of minutes.

“Over the rest of the northern U.S., we deploy AWACS radar aircraft from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma over central Canada, deploy Air National Guard air-defense fighters from Fresno and Klamath Falls to northern bases, and reconfigure other Air National Guard fighters from St. Louis, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, and Minnesota for air-defense duties. The AWACS planes can be deployed within a few hours. Reconfiguring the fighters will…take some time.”

The shock on Goff’s face was obvious to everyone, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. “How long, General?” he asked.

“The Fresno and Klamath Falls fighters on ready alert can launch within a few minutes,” Muskoka said. “If we can arrange tanker support, which is almost a certainty, we can put them on airborne alert, armed and ready for action.” He spread his hands resignedly. “The other aircraft were never meant to be alert aircraft, but respond only to general mobilization and—”

“How long, General?”

Muskoka shrugged. “Seventy-two hours at the earliest, sir,” he responded. Goff’s lips parted in surprise. Muskoka added quickly, “Fresno and Klamath Falls should be able to launch perhaps a half dozen aircraft, F-15s and F-16s, within a few minutes. They’ll have to do a unit recall to get more aircraft, but with regular ongoing training sorties, we should have another half dozen aircraft ready to go in an hour or two. If you need more than a dozen fighters right now, sir, I’d say we’re in deep shit.”

“I just never dreamed…I mean, I never thought it took so long for us to get fighters in the air, especially after September eleventh,” Goff said.

“Sir, we can get a fighter in the air with guns to cover one hundred percent of the U.S. that’ll look real tough and pretty for CNN,” Muskoka explained, “but launching a fighter to chase down a Cessna 182 who makes a wrong turn and flies over the White House is a lot different from chasing down a Russian bomber or a cruise missile — doing real air-defense work.” The frustration on Muskoka’s face was obvious. “Besides, I want to know who’s going to pay for all this — it sure as hell shouldn’t come out of my budget! — and mostly I want to know why we’re putting so much stock in McLanahan’s analysis. He’s a bomber guy, not an intel weenie, for Christ’s sake!”

“As you were, General,” Venti warned.

“Excuse me, sir, but you’re talking about putting a half dozen air-defense fighters on airborne alert over Canada, plus recalling a bunch more — on McLanahan’s say-so? With all due respect, sir, I’d prefer a little more reliable confirmation myself.”

“You’ve got all the confirmation you need, General,” Venti said. He looked at Goff, who nodded and made an entry into an electronic notebook. “Make it happen.”

“Roger, sir,” Muskoka said, and he could be seen in the videoconference screen lifting a phone to his ear and giving the orders.

“General Shepard, what’s the status of your sensors and radars?”

“Operational and ready to respond, sir.” U.S. Air Force General Randall Shepard was the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, in charge of monitoring and defending against a missile or bomber attack on North America; he was also “dual-hatted” as the commander of U.S. Northern Command, in charge of defending against military or terrorist attacks on the United States. “The long-range radars of the North Warning System are currently operational, with a few maintenance exceptions, which should not impact the system’s effectiveness. The long-range radars have a range in excess of two hundred miles, depending on terrain and atmospheric conditions. The short-range radars can be activated within a relatively brief period of time, depending on local conditions.

“All NORAD-gained fighter-interceptor units are fully operational: four F-16Cs on alert at Eielson, four F-15Cs at Elmendorf, and four CF-18s on alert at Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada — plus the Klamath Falls and Fresno units,” Shepard went on. “I believe each wing can generate one or two more aircraft in a matter of hours, and they can generate their entire force in about two days.”

“Only twelve fighters available for all of western North America?” Goff asked incredulously.

“Sixteen, including the continental U.S. fighters,” Shepard said. “We’re at full authorized manning, sir. We have just enough funding to field the units we have out there right now. The southern-U.S. and drug-interdiction duties get all the funding, and have for many years.” He looked at Patrick McLanahan’s image on the video teleconference screen and added, “I still find it hard to believe we’re under a Russian bomber threat, but be that as it may, we can respond to any threat.”

“What about OTH-B?” Goff asked.

Shepard at first appeared to be confused, then pained, before replying, ‘Sir, I think the staff or General McLanahan is in possession of outdated information. We operate only one OTH-B array, out of Bangor, Maine, which is dedicated only to atmospheric sampling and experiments as directed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or on request by the Department of Homeland Security — which, by the way, has never put in a request to use it. The West Coast OTH-B system is in warm storage, and the Alaskan system was canceled about fourteen years ago and was never even completed.”

“Can the West Coast system be reactivated, General?” Goff asked.

“Yes, sir — but it would take about two weeks to calibrate it and certify its accuracy and reliability,” Shepard replied. “Even then it might not be reliable enough to give you the information you want. The AWACS planes are your best bet, sir. You get them airborne, and we can plug them into the network right away and have wall-to-wall coverage. The AWACS information is merged into North Warning and all the other ground-radar facilities, and it forms a very complete three-dimensional picture.”

“The AWACS are on the way, General Shepard,” Venti said. He turned to Goff and said, “Sir, I request that NORAD direct Eielson, Elmendorf, and Cold Lake to generate NORAD-dedicated Bravo-force alert sorties as quickly as possible.”

“Agreed,” Secretary Goff responded. The “Bravo” alert sorties were additional crews and fighters readied for duty behind the frontline planes and crews; unfortunately, it usually took several hours to prepare them for action.

“On the way, sir,” Shepard said immediately, picking up a phone. General Muskoka made a note and handed it offscreen to his deputy. NORAD usually requested support from Air Combat Command for additional planes for the fighter-interceptor alert mission, so he wanted his fighter units ready to get the call and start lining up birds.

“General Houser, what other support can you provide for this operation?” Venti asked.

“Sir, the best support Space Command can offer, other than the systems already mentioned, is the Defense Support Program constellation,” Houser replied. “The DSP satellites are designed to detect the ‘hot dots’ from ballistic-missile launches but can be tuned to detect smaller heat sources, such as bomber exhausts, traveling across the cold ocean or polar icecaps. It’ll take away from their primary function of ballistic-missile launch warning, and as such I recommend against retuning DSP. Once we get the AWACS planes airborne, sir, I think we’ll have all the coverage we need.

“Unfortunately, HAVE GAZE and SLOW WALKER are committed to operations in Central Asia, and it’ll take several days to focus them in on any specific area of northern Alaska or Canada.” HAVE GAZE and SLOW WALKER were infrared satellites and sensors designed to detect and track small missiles and aircraft. But unlike DSP satellites, in which just three satellites could cover the entire globe, the other two satellites had to be focused on a specific area to be effective. “DSP and AWACS are the best options we have without degrading our strategic surveillance.”

“I agree,” General Shepard said. “If the Russians really are gearing up for some sort of offensive, NORAD relies on DSP for the first indication of ballistic missile launch, both land-and sea-based. All our other ballistic-missile launch-warning systems are limited because they require the missiles to cross the relative horizon — that reduces launch-warning time anywhere from two to eight minutes. Only DSP gives us instantaneous launch warning.”

“Very well — we won’t reconfigure DSP,” Goff said. He was ready for the meeting to be over with. “All right, we have AWACS planes on the way from Eielson, plus the alert fighters, plus fighters on the way from the CONUS bases, and we’re firing up the North Warning radars. Anything else we’re overlooking?” No response. “In that case…”

“Sir, I’d suggest dispersing the bomber and fighter fleet to alternate-generation bases or to civil airfields,” Patrick McLanahan interjected. “If the Russians do attack, I believe they wouldn’t go after civilian targets, only military ones. Military aircraft would therefore be safer at civil airfields.”

“General McLanahan, I’ve agreed to the increased surveillance measures because I think that’s a prudent step and because we have much of that infrastructure already in place,” Secretary Goff said irritably. “But I’m not going to agree to any more moves that would disrupt day-today operations or create increased anxiety among our people, our allies, or the Russians until I get more information.” He paused, looking around the conference table. “Anything else?”

“Yes, sir,” General Muskoka of Air Combat Command chimed in. He looked uncomfortable but pressed on: “General Luger of the Air Battle Force submitted a mission plan to me that could supply you with the information you need. His proposal is to send a small armed recon force into Yakutsk, Russia, to ascertain the exact level of tanker-aircraft activity there. According to the satellite images, Yakutsk is turning into some kind of major Russian tanker base all of a sudden. General Luger feels that we may only be seeing a small portion of the aircraft there.”

“That damned Air Battle Force outfit is not an intelligence organization,” Houser retorted.

“Pardon the fuck out of me, Houser,” Muskoka said, “but I’m not here to listen to your opinions about my operations forces!”

“Knock it off, both of you,” Venti warned.

But Muskoka wasn’t nearly done shooting back at Houser. “This is what I’m telling you, Houser: Dave Luger’s Air Battle Force ground team is in the Aleutians, and they’re in position and ready to do a sneak-and-peek operation to Yakutsk,” he went on. “Now, unlike McLanahan, I trust Luger.” Patrick’s face remained stoic despite the direct indictment, but if Muskoka noticed Patrick’s lack of reaction, he made no indication of it. “If it was McLanahan, he’d already be in Yakutsk by now raising all kinds of hell. Luger pushed his men to the limit of his authority and stopped, and I commend him for it. The question I put forth to the secretary and the Chiefs is simple: Do you want Luger’s boys to go forward or not?”

“What’s your recommendation, General Muskoka?” Secretary Goff asked.

“Luger’s Tin Men are the only assets we have in that entire region prepared to get us the information we need,” Muskoka replied. “His plan is simple, it involves only a few aircraft and men, and it has a fairly good chance of succeeding. In about two hours, we can get the scoop on Yakutsk. I recommend you authorize them to proceed. They might appreciate a Marine Force Recon or Army Special Forces team standing by to back them up.”

“I’ve got a unit ready to go,” offered the commandant of the Marines Corps, General Paul Hooks, after quickly studying a report handed to him by an aide. “Bravo Company, First Battalion, Fourth Marines, Eleventh Marine Expeditionary Unit — Special Operations Capable, is right now at Fort Greely, Alaska, finishing up a joint-forces exercise with the U.S. Air Force. We should be able to back up your guys.”

“Hold it, hold it,” Goff said, raising his hands. “I’m not authorizing an armed incursion into Russia at this time — I don’t care how good they are. Tell General Luger to stand by and wait for my word. I don’t want to aggravate the situation any more than we already have. Anything else?” Goff asked. Before anyone could reply, he said, “I wish you all could be in the room when I give this to the president — maybe you’d have a better understanding of the consternation you cause when communications break down and personalities and emotions get in the way of clearheaded thinking. General Houser, General McLanahan, stay with me. Everyone else, thank you.”

When the others had logged off the secure connection, Goff went on, “General McLanahan, General Houser has requested that you be relieved of command of the Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing, pending the results of a court-martial. I think you’re familiar with the charges. As is traditional in these cases, I’m offering you the opportunity to resign your commission in lieu of standing for court-martial.”

“With respect, sir, I object to the offer,” Houser said. “I request that McLanahan be bound over for trial.”

“Your objection is overruled,” Goff said. “General McLanahan?”

“Sir, before I respond to these charges, I have one last report to make to you and to General Houser concerning this air-defense situation—”

“There is no ‘air-defense situation,’ McLanahan!” Houser snapped.

Patrick held the classified folder up to the camera. “May I, sir?”

Goff sighed, then nodded. “Make it quick, General.”

“Sir, I ran a scenario through the Strike Assessment Catalog computers using the latest intelligence data coupled with the information we now know of deployment of Russian strategic forces in Siberia,” Patrick said.

“What scenario?”

“The possibility of success of a Russian bomber attack on the United States of America,” Patrick replied.

“Give me a break, McLanahan!” Houser cried.

“It is the absolute latest information available,” Patrick went on. “To make it even more conservative, I accelerated defensive time frames in our favor by fifty percent and decreased the size of the Russian forces by fifty percent. The results were the same: The United States can be successfully attacked from the air by Russian strategic air-breathing forces, and about half of all American nuclear-capable forces, especially land-based missiles and bombers, would be destroyed.”

“That’s nonsense!” Houser retorted.

“Sir, my report is done, and I conclude that not only is this attack feasible but it is imminent,” Patrick said. “The Russians are modifying their bombers for intercontinental missions, repositioning their strike and support forces, and preparing some sort of coordinated attack using long-range aircraft. I believe that their objective is to destroy a good percentage of our land-based nuclear-deterrent forces. This attack could commence at any time. Our only hope of surviving it is to get as many armed interceptors and surveillance aircraft airborne as quickly as possible and to keep them airborne until we determine exactly what the Russians’ intentions are.”

“McLanahan, you have gone too far this time!”

“Hold it, General Houser,” Robert Goff said. “General McLanahan, I’ve let you have your say, which is more than I should have done, but I think your past record gives you the right to be heard. I know you to sometimes overstep your authority, but I believe you do it for good and true reasons — in your own mind, at least. I don’t see any reason to sound the alarm based on a computerized tarot-card reading, but I’m going to do my due diligence here and give you much more of the benefit of the doubt than I think you deserve at this particular time.

“I want you to upchannel that report right away. I want to let everyone take a look at it and offer opinions.”

“Sir, I don’t think there’s time for that—”

“Too bad, General,” Goff said heatedly. “That’s a direct result of your attitude and the way you conduct yourself and your units. You’ve stepped out of line so much that no one trusts you. You created this mind-set, Patrick — not myself, not General Houser, not General Samson, not the president.

“General Houser, I want McLanahan’s report evaluated and passed along as expeditiously as possible from your office. I already know how you feel about McLanahan’s analysis — put it in writing, then send the report on up the chain to my office. No holdups. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the best I’m going to do for you now, Patrick,” Goff said, “so that report had better be able to stand on its own, because I don’t think you’ll be around to argue or defend it. Charges and specifications have been brought against you. Because of your rank and outstanding service to your country and to the Air Force, it is within my authority to set aside these charges and avoid a court-martial in exchange for voluntary separation from military duty, to avoid any embarrassment to yourself and your family as well as to the service. How do you respond?”

“I will not resign my commission, sir,” Patrick responded. Houser looked shocked, before breaking out into a satisfied grin. “I do request that I be allowed to travel to see my family instead of being confined to quarters, since my family is in Sacramento and did not accompany me to San Antonio.”

“General Houser?”

“No objection, sir,” Houser replied.

“Very well,” Goff said. “General McLanahan, you are hereby relieved of duty. The charges and specifications filed against you by General Houser remain; however, you retain all the privileges of your rank and are free to move about freely within the United States on your own recognizance. You will submit yourself to any hearings or proceedings as directed by the court-martial’s presiding officer. That is all.”

The video teleconference ended. Houser stood, then snatched the report from Patrick’s hand. “I’ll read it over, then give it to General Samson while we’re on our way to Offutt to meet with STRATCOM, Air Combat Command, and NORAD,” he said. “But I don’t give it a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the light of day. This is a childish tactic to discredit me and General Samson and focus attention on yourself. Everyone’s going to see this report for what it is: a worthless, pointless piece of crap.

“You can fly your little plane back to Sacramento and take a little vacation. Enjoy yourself — because you’ll be in prison before you know it. It was nice to know you, Muck. Too bad Brad Elliott twisted your brain into knots. See ya around, nav.”

Start countermeasures point, crew,” the crew navigator of the lead Tupolev-95 Bear bomber announced.

“Acknowledged,” the electronic-warfare officer responded. “My jammers are still in standby mode. All frequencies are clear. I expect to start picking up the North Warning long-range radars in twenty minutes,” the EWO added.

Josef Leborov, the aircraft commander, shook his head in surprise and checked his watch and flight plan just to be sure what he heard was correct. It seemed like only minutes ago that the EWO had first given a status report. “Acknowledged,” he responded. “Crew, station check. Prepare for ingress procedures.” He took a last sip and secured his canteen in his flight bag, hoping like hell he’d have another chance to drink from it. He flipped to the “Start Countermeasures” page in his checklist. “SCM check, Yuri,” he ordered.

The checklist was long. It directed them to extinguish all external lights; turn off transponders and any other radios that automatically transmitted a signal, such as the formation distance-measuring equipment and air-refueling rendezvous beacons; make sure radio switches were configured so no one would accidentally transmit on an outside frequency; turn down all interior instrument and cabin lights; and reduce cabin pressurization so any piercing of the fuselage would not produce an explosive decompression. Even the smallest, tiniest lights still left on in the cockpit seemed like searchlights in the ink-black sky, and he found himself checking each light switch two and three times, then finally pulling the circuit breakers to make sure he could not accidentally turn them on. He had done this checklist so many times in training missions and simulators, but it took on a whole new level of importance now.

He had no sooner finished the checklist a few minutes later when he heard a buzzing sound in his headset, and sweat spontaneously popped onto his forehead and the back of his neck, chilling him instantly. “Threat warning, India-Juliett band!” the EWO shouted. “F-16 Falcon interceptor!”

“Low-level-descent checklist!” Leborov shouted, and simultaneously pushed the nose over and pulled the throttles of his four Kuznetsov turboprop engines back to keep the airspeed below red line. “Copilot, notify the formation, evasive action, proceed to opposed ingress routes immediately.” In order to ensure that the maximum number of planes made it past the defenses, the four six-ship formations would break apart and go in single-ship, following slightly different routes — some planes were separated by only one or two degrees of track, less than a hundred meters’ altitude, or less than a minute’s time. Borodev’s voice was as excited and high-pitched as a woman’s as he got on the radio to notify the rest of their package that enemy fighters were inbound.

That would be the last transmission to his comrades until they all met back at base…or in hell.

An F-16! They hadn’t expected an F-16 up here for another hour at least. He adjusted the propeller pitch of the rearmost propellers to increase drag so he could increase his descent rate. “Has he seen us yet?” It was a stupid question — they had to assume that the American fighter had them. They also had to assume that there was more than one fighter out there — the American Air Force almost always traveled in two-plane formations. Fortunately, the F-16’s radar did not have a true look-down/shoot-down capability, so they had a chance if they could make it to low level. The radar clutter of the Arctic Ocean and then the ruggedness of northern Canada would hide them very effectively.

“I don’t think so, sir,” the EWO responded. “His radar is still in long-range scan, and his track has not changed. He’s heading northeast, across but away from us. He might lose track in a couple of minutes.”

But then again, Leborov thought, if he did what he was supposed to do and establish a patrol orbit, along the most probable inbound path for bombers from Russia to take — like the one they were on right now — he was bound to find them. They were quickly running out of time. “Any word from our support package, copilot?” Leborov asked.

“Negative,” Borodev responded woodenly. “No idea where they are.”

“Are we on time?”

“About two minutes early,” the navigator responded. “Good tailwinds.”

“Good tailwinds, my ass — two minutes is all the time that F-16 needs to sound the alert.” Shit, thought Leborov. Soon the entire American and Canadian air forces would be howling after them. Mission and radio security was one thing, but shouldn’t they know where the rest of their strike package was? “Okay, we can’t stay up here any longer,” he said. He put the airspeed needle right on the red line by dumping the nose even lower. “Our best chance is to try to duck under his radar cone before he comes around on his patrol orbit — we may be able to slip past him.”

Leborov unconsciously let the airspeed creep up past the red line in an attempt to get down faster, but soon he could feel Borodev pulling back on the control column. “Let’s not rip the wings off this old hog, Joey,” he said. “We’ve still got a long way to go.” He pulled the nose up to get the airspeed back down below the red line. Damn, Leborov thought, how many of his wingmen had started their descent? How many were still up high? He hoped everyone used proper crew discipline and was ready when that fighter appeared — or they’d be dead meat.

Knifepoint, Knifepoint, Hunter Four, blue four.”

“Hunter, this is Knifepoint, strangle mode three and Charlie, go active, stand by for mickey check…. Hunter, acknowledge. Verify you’re single-ship this morning.”

“Knifepoint, Hunter checks, I’m single-ship. My wingman will join up later.”

“Copy that, Hunter. Negative contacts, cleared into track Gina-two, deploy, advise joker.”

“Hunter copies, wilco.”

To tell the truth, thought U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Forman, she preferred being up here by herself, without having to keep an eye out for a wingman or flight lead. The Alaska sky was an absolute delight to fly in — clear, crisp, and cold, with only the stars above and a very, very few lights below. She sometimes felt as if she were the only person in the sky right now….

Which was obviously not true, or else she would not have been sent up here on such short notice.

The twenty-six-year-old mother of two boys was a newly operational F-16C Fighting Falcon pilot in the Eighteenth Fighter Squadron “Blue Foxes” out of Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. Although the Blue Foxes were a ground-attack fighter unit, using the LANTIRN night-attack and low-level navigation system, they were often tasked with the air-defense mission as well, operating with the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron’s F-15 Eagle fighters and the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron’s E-3C AWACS radar planes out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. But tonight she was all by herself. Even after an hour, she was still by herself — her wingman was still broken, still on the ground. Another F-16 had just taken off a few minutes earlier, with one of the 168th Air Refueling Wing’s KC-135 tankers based at Eielson, and wouldn’t rejoin for another thirty minutes.

Forman was two hundred miles northwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, over the seemingly endless expanse of the Arctic Ocean. She had just entered her assigned patrol orbit, which was a narrow triangular course aligned northwest-southeast, at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. She was the “low CAP,” or combat air patrol, the altitude that allowed her APG-68 radar to see all the way down to the ocean’s surface, at her radar’s optimal range of eighty miles, and all the way up to thirty thousand feet, on its normal long-range-scan mode; once her wingman joined her, he would take the high CAP, twenty-four thousand feet, so he could see as high as fifty thousand feet.

As briefed, Forman reduced speed to save fuel and started her turn northwestbound in the triangle. “Hunter Four’s established in Gina-two,” she reported to Knifepoint. Knifepoint was the call sign of the Alaska NORAD Regional Surveillance Center, based at Elmendorf Air Force Base, which combined radar information from the North Warning System, Federal Aviation Administration, Transport Canada, and other military and civil radars into one regional control center. Knifepoint was different from an air-traffic-control center — unlike air-traffic controllers, who strived to keep aircraft safely separated, the Knifepoint controllers’ job was to maneuver fighters as close as possible to other aircraft.

“Roger, Hunter,” the controller responded. “No contacts.” Up here, at the top of the United States, Knifepoint relied on the North Warning System radars to see any intruders — the FAA radars in Fairbanks and Anchorage did not have the range to see this far north. The North Warning System, or NWS, in Alaska consisted of four long-range partly attended radars, nicknamed “Seek Igloo,” plus eight short-range unattended radars, called “Seek Frost,” which closed the gaps in the longer-range systems.

Air patrols were a combination of monitoring the instruments, keeping track of the aircraft in its patrol track, twisting the heading bugs at the corners to head down the next leg, watching the radar and radar-warning receivers for signs of aircraft — and staying awake. Forman enjoyed air-defense exercises because she knew there was going to be an intruder, and it was her job to find it. In the real world, she had to assume there was an intruder out here in all this darkness. Many times air-defense fighters would be launched after being detected by the FAA or North Warning System, and she would be vectored into position while radar-silent and intercept the intruder from behind to attempt an identification. Those were damned exciting.

Not so this time. She didn’t know the exact reason she’d been launched and sent to this patrol, but so far there was no sign of intruders. Often fighters were sent into air patrols because the Russians had spy planes nearby, or because NORAD, the Air Force, or the Canadians wanted to test or observe something. It was impossible to know, so she assumed there was a bad guy out here that needed to be discovered.

But she’d been launched right at the end of her duty day, after studying for a pre-check-ride written exam while doing her normal training duties. An eight-hour duty day followed by several hours’ flying in the wee hours of the morning…swell. This could turn into a very, very long morning.

She had just turned eastbound after completing her initial fifty-mile northwest patrol leg when she heard, “Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight, blue four.” It was Forman’s wingman, finally checking on with the NORAD controller.

“Hunter Four, Knifepoint, your company is on freq.”

“Roger that, Knifepoint. Hunter Four checking off to talk with company aircraft. I’ll monitor your frequency and report back up.”

“Roger, Hunter, cleared as requested.”

Forman switched over to her secondary radio: “Eight, this is Four on tactical. ’Bout time someone showed. Girls don’t like being stood up, you know.”

“Sorry about the delay — nothing’s working right on the ramp this morning. Must be a full moon. We’re about two hundred miles out. How’s everything going?”

“Nice and quiet. Established in the low CAP. The bird is doing okay.” She punched instructions into her navigation computer, checking her fuel reserves. “Joker plus one on board.” The “joker” fuel level was the point at which she had to leave the patrol area and head for home; she had one hour left on patrol before she had to head back in order to arrive with normal fuel reserves, which in Alaska were substantial. Because weather and airfield conditions changed rapidly here, and because suitable alternate airfields were very, very few and far between in this big state, every fighter flying in Alaska took as much fuel as possible with it on patrol; Kelly’s F-16 had two 370-gallon drop tanks on board, along with four AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles, two AIM-9L “Sidewinder” heat-seeking missiles, and ammunition for the twenty-millimeter cannon. Aerial-refueling tankers were precious commodities.

“Roger that. I brought the gas can with me. Any sign of Roadkill?” “Roadkill” was the Blue Foxes’ name for their brethren in the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron — their squadron emblem, a stylized gamecock, looked to many folks like a squished critter on the road. The F-15Cs of the Nineteenth, coming with their E-3C AWACS radar plane, were the air-defense specialists; the F-15s had much longer legs, two-engine reliability, and a better look-down, shoot-down radar to find any bad guys that might be up here. They would undoubtedly take over the air-patrol mission once they arrived, although the F-16s liked to play with them as much as possible, too.

“Negative.” There was a lot of static on the channel all of a sudden, which was fairly common at the higher latitudes, usually because of sunspot activity. The northern lights were beautiful up here, but the solar flares that caused the sky to light up with waves and waves of shimmering light played havoc with the radios.

“Rog. I’ll give you a call if I hear from them. See you in a few.” Despite the growing static, Kelly instantly felt much better. Although she enjoyed flying by herself, it sure was comforting to hear a friendly voice on the airwaves, to know that friendly forces were on the way — especially the tanker.

Forman was a couple minutes from her turn to the southeast when the radar target box winked on, at the extreme center-left edge of her heads-up display. Got a nibble, she told herself as she made a hard left turn to center up on the newcomer. It was high enough so it probably wasn’t an ice floe or some other—

When she rolled out of her turn, she couldn’t believe what she saw: radar targets everywhere. She thought she had a radar malfunction, so she turned her radar to STBY, then back to RADIATE — and the targets were still there. Maybe two dozen targets, all at different altitudes.

“Ho-lee shit,” she muttered to herself. Frantically, she switched back to the command channel on the primary radio. Through a haze of static, she radioed, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Four, ‘gorilla,’ I say again, ‘gorilla,’ northwest two-four bull’s-eye.” “Gorilla” was the brevity code for a large formation of unidentified planes in indeterminate numbers. Forman gave the target’s position relative to an imaginary point that changed on every patrol. She couldn’t give the targets’ altitude, speed, or any more precise information because there were so many of them out there.

“Say again, Hunter.” There was a loud squeal in the radios that the frequency-hopping communications system couldn’t eliminate. “Be advised, Hunter, our status is ‘bent,’ repeat, ‘bent.’ Keep us advised.”

Jamming — someone was jamming them! Forman switched to her secondary radio and found it hopelessly jammed. The squealing was drowning out all recognizable sound even before she keyed the mike. Maybe whoever was jamming her radios was jamming the North Warning System radar, too — the “bent” code meant that the ground radar was inoperative. So now she was all alone up here with a huge number of planes bearing down on her, with no way to contact anyone.

The only thing she had left were her orders and her tactical doctrine: Any unidentified aircraft entering the Air Defense Identification Zone had to be identified, and if they acted in a hostile manner, they were to be shot down immediately, as quickly as possible before reaching U.S. airspace. She was to continue the interdiction mission until she reached “bingo” fuel, which gave her the minimum fuel state over the intended recovery base only.

Forman thumbed her stick controls and designated the lead aircraft in the lead formation, placed the radar pipper just to the left and below center in her heads-up display, and headed toward it. This guy was screaming for the deck, descending at fifteen thousand feet per minute. Too late, pal, she thought — I got you….

The radar-warning receiver blared again — but this time, instead of a steady electronic tone, they heard a fast, high-pitched, raspy sound. “Fighter has locked on,” the electronic-warfare officer said. “Eleven o’clock…moving into lethal range.”

Leborov couldn’t believe the speed of that thing — it seemed only seconds ago that they first got the warning. “What the hell should I do?” he shouted.

“Turn left, head into him!” the EWO shouted. “That’ll increase his closure rate, and he’ll be forced to maneuver.” That wasn’t necessarily so with an F-16—they could shoot Sidewinder missiles directly into your face all day long — but he had to give the pilot something to do until they got low. “All jammers on and operating…chaff and flares ready.”

“Passing two thousand for five hundred,” the navigator said.

“Screw that, nav — we’re going to one hundred meters,” Leborov said. “If he wants to come down and play, let’s get way down into the weeds!” Bravado? Maybe, but he wasn’t going to get shot down without a fight, and there was one place the Tupolev-95 liked to fly, and that was down low.

Thirty miles…twenty miles…the plane was still heading down, passing five thousand feet and descending fast. She was at ten thousand feet, not real anxious to chase this guy down until she started rolling in behind him for an ID. He turned slightly into her, so they were going nose to nose now. She configured her cockpit switches for low-light operations and lowered her PVS-9 night-vision goggles. The view was matte green and with very little contrast, but now she could see a horizon, the shoreline far behind her, details of the outside of her jet — and a spattering of bright dots in the distance: the unidentified aircraft. There were so many that it looked like a cluster of stars.

Forman thought about trying to contact the plane on the international emergency “GUARD” frequency, but the jamming was too heavy and getting stronger as she closed in. Was that considered a “hostile act” right there? Probably so. Fifteen…ten…

Suddenly one of the other myriad radar targets on her heads-up display scooted across the scope to her right, traveling…Shit, the guy was supersonic. She immediately pulled up, jammed her throttle to zone-five afterburner, and turned hard right to pursue. The first guy never went above four hundred knots, even in a screaming-ass dive, but this newcomer was going twice as fast! He would reach the coastline way before these others — if she didn’t catch him first.

Again she tried to radio Knifepoint and her wingman of the new contact — but the jamming was still too heavy. Each one of those incoming planes must have enormous jammers to take out digital radios and even the North Warning System radars at this range! Even her APG-68 radar was getting spiked, and it had plenty of antijam modes.

The fast newcomer was at forty-three thousand feet, traveling just over the speed of sound, heading east-southeast. Forman locked him up on radar easily after getting behind him and tried to interrogate his Identification Friend or Foe system. Negative IFF — he was a bandit, all right. Supersonic, no modes and codes, flying way off transpolar flight routes through a curtain of electronic jamming — unless it was some Concorde pilot hot-dogging it for his rich passengers, he was a bad guy.

The bandit was passing Mach 1.1, the speed limit for her F-16 Fighting Falcon’s external fuel tanks. No Alaska fighter pilot ever wanted to punch off external fuel tanks, especially if there was a tanker anywhere in the area, but she would never catch him otherwise, so, reluctantly, off they went. As soon as this guy was ID’d and the Nineteenth showed up, she was done for the evening — even with a tanker on the way, no fighter pilot played very long up in Alaska without plenty of extra fuel.

It was funny the things you thought about at a time like this, Kelly mused to herself. Here she was chasing down a bandit, in the midst of hostile jamming, and all she could think was that someone was going to have to pay for a couple 370-gallon fuel tanks.

She tried the IFF interrogate switch a couple more times — still negative — then hit her MASTER ARM switch and selected her twenty-millimeter cannon instead of her radar- or infrared-guided missiles. This guy definitely met all the criteria of being a bad guy, she thought, but she had enough gas right now to try to do a visual ID. At Mach 1, he was still fifteen minutes from reaching the Canadian coast. She had forty-five minutes to bingo fuel — a number that was dropping rapidly every minute she spent in zone-five afterburner — so she decided to go in close for a visual.

She kept the power up and was starting to get into visual range in just under five minutes when suddenly her radar-warning receiver emitted a high-pitched, fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone. An enemy fire-control radar had locked on to her! The heads-up display categorized it as an “unknown,” position directly ahead of her. But there were no other aircraft except the guy in front of her….

A tail gun! That’s the only thing it could be! The damned bandit had locked on to her with a tail-mounted fire-control radar.

And sure as hell, moments later she saw winks of light coming from the still-dark silhouette of the bandit in front of her. The bastard was firing a tail gun at her! She immediately punched out radar-decoying chaff and flares and broke hard right to get away. She heard a couple hammer taps somewhere on the fuselage, but there were no warning messages.

Kelly was not scared — she was incensed! She’d been shot at by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles while doing patrols for Operation Southern Watch, and she’d taken on plenty of simulated surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, and every kind of air-to-air missile possible in training — but she’d never been shot at by a tail gunner. She didn’t even know that any planes had tail gunners anymore! Furious, she flipped her arming switch from the cannon to her Sidewinder missiles and tightened her turn, getting ready to line up on the bandit.

No question any longer — the guy was a hostile. She wished she could tell her wingman or the Nineteenth about the other bogeys heading in, fearing they all might have tail gunners, but the jamming was still too heavy. No matter — this guy was going down.

But as she lined up for her first shot, her night-vision goggles blanked out a tremendous burst of light coming from the bandit. It was a missile launch — but the missile was huge, hundreds of times larger than an air-to-air missile. The tail of fire had to be two hundred feet long! The missile shot straight ahead for a mile or two, then pulled up abruptly. A few moments later, she heard a sonic boom, followed by a large flash of light, and the missile accelerated and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Oh, Christ, Forman thought, he’s firing attack missiles toward Canada. They were too fast to be cruise missiles. They looked like…like…

Like air-launched ballistic missiles.

As soon as Kelly got a lock indication, she fired a Sidewinder. Seconds later another big missile launched from the bomber. “Oh, my God,” she muttered, and she fired her last Sidewinder. The first Sidewinder veered from the attack plane and went after the second missile, but it accelerated off too quickly. The Sidewinder couldn’t reacquire the plane and fell harmlessly away until it exploded. Just milliseconds before the second Sidewinder hit, the bandit launched a third big missile.

Her second Sidewinder hit the enemy aircraft directly in its right engine. The bandit veered right, stabilized, veered right again, started to turn left, then made a slower, steadier right turn, crossing directly in front of her. Forman closed in for the kill. At four miles, as the bandit made its turn, she recognized it as a Russian Tupolev-22M bomber, nicknamed “Backfire,” its variable-geometry wings slowly swiveling forward. It had two large external fuel tanks beside the fuselage on each side. Smoke and fire were trailing from the right engine, getting heavier each second. She switched to her cannon, zoomed down on him, and opened fire. Shells peppered the fuselage and left wing, and now through her night-vision goggles she could see puffs of fire coming from the lef tengine. The Backfire aimed right for the Canadian coast, still over a hundred miles away. She doubted if it would stay aloft for—

Her attention was drawn to a bright streak of fire above and to her left. She realized with horror it was another one of those huge air-to-surface missiles. In her desperation to shoot this guy down, she forgot she was single-ship, that there might be more bombers out there — and that she was responsible for them all until help arrived! That was probably why this Backfire turned right instead of left — to distract her enough so the wingmen could launch their missiles.

Forman turned sharply left and started a climb, selected her AMRAAM missiles, and quickly locked on to the second bandit just as it launched a second big air-to-ground missile — but then her radar-warning receiver screeched again, and this time the hammer blows and shudders she’d felt before came back twice as hard. In her drive to hose the first Backfire and then diverting her attention to the second bandit, she’d flown too close to the tail end of the first Backfire and gotten into its kill zone.

The engine instruments were still okay, but she could feel a vibration in her control stick and rudder pedals — and then she noticed it, the right-wing fuel gauge dipping well below the level of the left. She immediately started transferring fuel from the right wing to the fuselage and left-wing tanks, but there was probably no room in the other tanks for the right-wing fuel — she was going to end up losing it. Fuel was life up here in the Arctic.

And as she fretted about her fuel state, the second bandit launched a third missile, then started to do a one-eighty. Now she assumed that each Backfire carried three of those big honking missiles, and she assumed that there were more up here, so instead of pursuing the second bandit, she searched farther west and south for more high-flying fast-movers. Sure enough, two more supersonic bogeys appeared.

She quickly verified that they were not transmitting any friendly IFF codes — they were not. She had to fly west a few minutes to get within range, which was not the direction she needed to be flying. Kelly didn’t have to check the nav computer to know that if she didn’t turn around now, she might not make it back to base. Even though Alaska had the best search-and-rescue units in the world, there was no way you wanted to eject over northern Alaska — and sure as heck not over the Beaufort Sea. She had to turn back….

But the Backfire she didn’t attack might be the one that launched a missile and destroyed Eielson, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Elmendorf, or Washington, D.C. — and there was no friggin’ way she was going to let that happen! She started a gradual climb and turned westward to get within position to attack with whatever ammunition she had left.

As quickly as she could, she maneuvered and locked up both Backfires, interrogated for friendly IFF codes once again, received a negative reply, then fired one AMRAAM missile at each. Both Backfires immediately started ejecting chaff and flare decoys, but she was close enough for the decoys to have no effect and the missiles to stay on target. The first Backfire was hit on the left side of the fuselage and started to spin almost straight down into the Beaufort Sea. The second was hit in the belly, and the hit must’ve detonated the missile in its belly, because the Backfire blew apart in a spectacular cloud of fire. The explosion then ignited the two external missiles, adding their destruction to the tremendous fury of that blast. Forman had to peel off to the north to stay away from that massive blast — she swore she could feel the heat right through her bubble canopy and winter-weight flight gear. Kelly repeated the attack with two more supersonic targets. One AMRAAM missed; she scored another hit on a Backfire but couldn’t see what happened to it because she had removed her night-vision goggles due to the longer ranges involved. Next…

“Warning, fuel low,” the computerized “copilot,” nicknamed “Bitching Betty,” intoned. One more glance at her fuel gauges: The right wing was almost empty, and the left wing and fuselage tanks were less than half full. Crap. She was right at emergency fuel level — sixty minutes of fuel, sixty minutes’ flying time to Eielson. But the tanker was on its way, and there was one emergency airfield at Fort Yukon that she might be able to use. She still had plenty of ammo in the cannon. Time to get busy.

Forman lowered her night-vision goggles and did strafing runs on two more Backfires, scoring hits on both but unsure if she’d done any damage. She then turned farther to the west to look for more targets — and there they were. As she saw it, there were several waves of attackers — multiple levels of slower-moving planes, most of them descending to low altitude, and another wave of high-speed attackers at higher altitude that appeared to be blowing past the slow-movers and launching huge hypersonic missiles, perhaps to pave the way for the slow-movers.

“Warning, fuel emergency,” Bitching Betty chimed in. In her drive to get as many enemy planes as possible, Kelly had ignored her fuel state. She knew that her wingman was coming, but he was still at least twenty minutes away. She was almost out of ammunition — admittedly having been a little excitable and trigger-happy on her first gun pass, but being more frugal as her supply got lower and lower. She tried the radios again — still jammed. The datalink hadn’t activated yet, meaning that the AWACS plane from Elmendorf hadn’t arrived yet. There was no indication that her wingman was anywhere in the area, so she couldn’t even lead him to the bandits.

With the sky full of enemy planes all around her, she came to the horrifying realization that she was done for the day — she had no fuel and no weapons. The enemy aircraft were heading farther to the southeast, within visual range of the Canadian coastline by now. They were heading away from Eielson, so she couldn’t pursue. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she had no choice except to break off and head for home.

And then she saw them: more missiles flying overhead. The Backfires that she couldn’t down were launching their missiles! And she was powerless to stop them.

Forman pointed her F-16’s nose toward Eielson, entered the emergency beacon code into her transponder, and throttled back to max-range power. On radar she could see even the slow-movers down low passing her easily. Her radar tracked twelve bandits cruising on their way toward North America, and it detected even more missile launches. She kept trying her radios, but it would be no use until every one of the bandits had disappeared from radar.

As she slowed to her best-range power setting, the vibration in her stick and rudder pedals got worse. She couldn’t go below three hundred knots without the fighter’s shaking so violently that she thought she could lose control at any second. That was not good. It meant that air refueling was probably out of the question.

“Hunter Four, this is Hunter Eight on company, how do you read?”

Thank God the jamming had subsided enough to hear human voices, she told herself. “Two by, Eight,” she responded. “How me?”

“Weak and barely readable,” her wingman said. “We tried to raise you earlier, but no response. I have you tied on, three-zero at one-two bull’s-eye, base plus eleven. What’s your state?”

“Eight, I engaged seven, repeat, seven bandits,” Forman said breathlessly. “Do you copy?”

“You engaged seven bandits? Did you make visual contact?”

“Affirmative. Russian Backfire bombers. Two of them launched what appeared to be very large air-to-surface missiles. I got six of the bandits. There were several groups of bandits, the Backfires up high and slower-movers that descended to low altitude. They were headed southeast. I have been unable to contact Knifepoint. Can you try? Over.” Hunter Eight was farther south, away from the Russian planes that were jamming them — she hoped he’d have better luck.

Now Forman’s wingman sounded as breathless as she did. “Stand by,” he said. On the primary radio, she heard, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight.” It took several tries to reach the NORAD controller. “Hunter Four has engaged large hostile attacking bomber force.” He gave the approximate position and direction of flight.

“We copy all, Hunter flight,” the controller responded. “We encountered heavy MIJIing on all frequencies. We have lost contact with all SEEK IGLOO and SEEK FROST sites. Unable to provide service at this time.” The controller paused, then said, “We saw the gaggle go by, but we couldn’t talk to anyone — and then we lost our radars. There wasn’t a damn thing we could do.”

Triple-C, this is ADOC, we have a situation,” the intercom announcement began. “Alaska NORAD Region has just submitted a radar outage report. They report losing contact with four long-range radars and seven short-range radars of the North Warning System. They’ve also submitted a Fighter Status Report and indicate they have lost contact with one of their fighters scrambled out of Eielson. This is not a drill. Both Alaska NORAD and Eielson report communications outages as well.”

“ADOC, Command copies,” responded U.S. Army Colonel Joanna Kearsage, the command director of the Combined Control Center. “All OCs, stand by. Systems, warm up the hot lines. This is not a drill.” Kearsage was a former Patriot air-defense-brigade commander from Fort Hood, Texas, and a twenty-two-year Army veteran. She once thought that nothing compared to deploying her brigade out to the field on short notice and putting her beloved Patriot missile system through its paces — and then she got the assignment to the Mountain. She’d been wrong. For eight hours every day and a half, information from all over the world flowed right to her fingertips, and she made decisions that affected the lives of two great democracies and the peace and freedom of the entire world. There was nothing else like it.

At first the idea of living in a huge underground bunker was not very appealing. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was a series of massive excavations covering four and a half acres deep inside the Mountain. Inside the granite excavations was a rabbit’s warren of fifteen steel buildings, most of which were three stories tall, all mounted on springs to absorb the shock of a nuclear blast or earthquake. There was no contact between the buildings and the rock; flexible corridors connected the buildings. The complex had its own emergency power generators and water reservoirs, along with its own dining halls, medical centers, and barracks, and even such creature comforts as two exercise centers, a barbershop, a chapel, and a sauna. The whole complex was enclosed behind massive steel doors, each weighing over twenty-five tons but so precisely balanced on their hinges that only two men could push them open or closed if necessary.

The command director of the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was the person in charge of the round-the-clock global monitoring network of three major military commands: the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Strategic Command, and the U.S. Northern Command, all responsible for the defense of the United States and Canada. Kearsage’s forty-person Charlie crew manned the extensive communications and computer-network terminals that collected information from everywhere in the world and from space and merged it into the displays and readouts presented to the command director and her operations staff. Her battle staff was broken up into operations centers within Cheyenne Mountain: Missile Warning, Air Warning, Space Control, Intelligence, Systems Control, and Weather. Each center’s combined data was displayed in the command center on several computer monitors of various types and sizes.

Kearsage was seated in the command center along with her deputy commander, Canadian Forces Colonel Ward Howell, and the noncommissioned officer in charge of command communications. Dominating the command center were four wall-size monitors with graphical compilations of the global threat and continental defense picture. The left-center screen showed the current threats for North America, and the right-center screen showed threats around the world. Flanking the two large center screens were two other screens showing the status of air-defense and strategic-attack forces. Two rows of computer monitors in front of Kearsage and her deputies showed up-to-date information and reports from the individual operations centers themselves.

Her attention was riveted on the North America display, which showed the circles representing the optimal range of the long-range radars, or LRRs, and short-range radars, or SRRs, of the North Warning System in northern Alaska and northern Canada. The circles were blinking red, indicating a malfunction or degradation. The North Warning System was the first line of defense against air-breathing threats to the North American continent — and for some reason a good chunk of it was suddenly shut down.

In addition, there was a blinking red inverted V, indicating the last known position of the F-16 scrambled out of Eielson Air Force Base on cryptic orders from the Pentagon. She could still see the two other groups of symbols, representing other airborne assets: one F-16C and a KC-135R tanker from Eielson, which were supposed to rendezvous with the lone F-16; and two F-15Cs and an E-3C AWACS radar plane flying northeast from Elmendorf Air Force Base in southern Alaska to temporarily set up a long-range radar and fighter picket northwest of Alaska over the Arctic Ocean. But the other two groups of symbols were steady green — on course, on time, and in contact. What happened to the first F-16?

“ADOC, talk to me,” Kearsage said, using the acronym for the Air Defense Operations Center inside the Mountain, her group responsible for tracking and identifying all air targets over North America. “What do we have? And where is that fighter?”

“Village is trying to ascertain the status of those radars and to make contact with the fighter,” the Air Warning Center’s senior controller responded. “Remote transmissions appear to be experiencing heavy interference.” “Village” was the call sign for the Alaska NORAD regional headquarters at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

“SOLAR, would sunspot activity be responsible for the comm interference?” “SOLAR” was the nickname for the Weather Support Center at nearby Peterson Air Force Base, which provided weather support to Cheyenne Mountain.

“Unknown at this time, ma’am, but we’re not experiencing any abnormal solar activity.”

“Triple-C, this is MWC,” the controller at the Missile Warning Center at NORAD reported. The Missile Warning Center was responsible for detecting, identifying, and monitoring any possible missile launches anywhere on the planet, using heat-seeking satellites, and predicting if the missiles posed a threat to North America. “We’re looking at some events near the long-range and short-range radar sites in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Not very high threshold readings — definitely not ballistic-missile launches. Stand by.” “Events” were how they referred to whatever hot spots the heat-sensing Defense Support Program satellites could pick up — anything from oil-well fires and forest fires to ballistic-missile launches.

“Village, this is Anchor, what do you think?” “Anchor” was Kearsage’s code word for NORAD headquarters.

“Ma’am, we’re in contact with the fighter’s wingman, who took off from Eielson, and we’re in contact with the F-15s and AWACS that launched out of Elmendorf,” the senior controller at the Alaska NORAD Region headquarters responded. “Some sort of localized interference over the Beaufort Sea.”

“Are you going to submit an ECTAR?”

“Negative. Not at this time,” the senior controller responded.

Kearsage allowed herself to relax a bit. An Electronic Countermeasures Tactical Action Report, or ECTAR, was an important notification, because it was often the first indication of an enemy attack. If there was some kind of jamming, the NORAD Regional Operations Centers were supposed to launch airborne-radar planes and prepare to transfer control to them. So far they had not lost tactical command — that was a good sign. “MWC, what you got for us?”

“Triple-C, we recorded a few brief hot events,” the Missile Warning Center’s controller responded. “Not sunlight glints, but very brief flares. Perhaps a fire or explosion.”

Kearsage and Howell turned and looked at each other. “Electronic interference, loss of contact with both the radars and our fighter, and now possible explosions near the LRRs — looks pretty suspicious to me,” Howell said.

“But we don’t have any indication of a threat,” Kearsage said. “And we have contact with all other airborne assets….”

“Colonel, that message from Air Intelligence Agency was pretty specific — a possible bomber attack against the United States, similar to the attack on that CIA base in Uzbekistan.”

She looked at him, looked at his eyes to read the seriousness of his words — and what she saw scared her. Howell was the former fighter pilot on this command crew. He’d been involved in strategic air defense for almost his entire career. He was always the stoic, unflappable Canuck — and if he thought this was a real emergency, he meant it. He also rarely called her by her rank, except if VIPs or commanding officers were in the Mountain — if he used her rank now, he was probably scared, too.

That warning from the U.S. Air Force was certainly weird. Normally intelligence data flowed directly from whatever source, usually Air Intelligence Center or sometimes directly from the U.S. Space Command, to NORAD. This time a warning had been issued by the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. This indicated some kind of turmoil in the Pentagon. That was usually very, very bad news. Someone had broken the chain of command, which usually resulted in confusion and chaos.

She heard through the grapevine that it was a flap in Air Intelligence Agency, involving its powerful commander and the new commander of one of its information-warfare wings, none other than Patrick McLanahan. That, Kearsage thought, explained a lot. McLanahan had the worst reputation of any general officer since Lieutenant General Brad Elliott. He was, simply, a flakeoid. He couldn’t be trusted. He’d obviously said or done something that got everyone at the Pentagon riled up — his specialty. Now they had to expend lots of time, energy, manpower, and resources proving how stupid the guy was.

Kearsage studied the map of North America. The lone F-16 and the tanker from Eielson would soon be in the last known area of the first F-16, and the E-3C AWACS and the two F-15s from Elmendorf would join up a few minutes later. Assuming there was a big outage of several North Warning System radars, their first priority would be to fill in those gaps.

She looked over at the list of available assets in Canada and was pleased to see that two NATO AWACS planes were based at Four Wing, Canadian Forces Cold Lake, Alberta, probably deployed there to support a MAPLE FLAG air-warfare exercise. “Let’s get an AWACS and a couple CF-18s airborne from Cold Lake moving north to cover that gap in the North Warning System,” she ordered.

“Roger that.” Howell picked up his telephone and hit the button that would connect him immediately to Canadian Air Defense Forces headquarters in North Bay, Ontario. The NORAD-tasked fighter units in Alaska and Canada were very accustomed to these sudden air-sovereignty missions — they would have those three planes launched in less than half an hour.

“MWC, I’m about to wake up the world,” Kearsage said seriously. “I need to know if we have an attack, an incident, or an anomaly. Give me your best guess.”

There was a slight hesitation before he responded, “Triple-C, MWC believes we do not have an attack. We may have sustained some sort of large-scale power outage or malfunction of a communications network, but without further investigation. I’m not prepared to say it was an enemy or terrorist attack on our radar sites.”

“Very well,” Kearsage said. The first rule of NORAD surveillance: When in doubt, report it. Even though it could be nothing more than a short circuit or a polar bear eating through a power cable — that happened all the time — the loss of those radars needed to be reported.

She flipped open her checklist, filled in some blanks with a grease pencil, used her authenticator documents to insert a date-time group, had Howell check it over, then picked up the telephone and dialed the Air Force Operations Support Center in Washington. When she was connected, she read from the script: “Monument, this is Anchor with a Priority Secret OPREP Three BEELINE report, serial number two-zero-zero-four-four-three. We have lost contact with three LRRs and five SRRs of the North Warning System, and we have lost contact with a single Foxtrot-sixteen assigned combat air patrol, reasons unknown. DSP reports brief unexplained infrared events with no tracks taking place near the radar sites. We are investigating further but do not believe that these are attacks against NORAD assets that would require a PINNACLE FRONT BURNER report.

“We have deployed additional air-defense and airborne-surveillance assets in the affected area, and we are investigating the radar and radio outages.” She ended the message with the date-time group and the proper authentication code. A BEELINE message was an alert notification to the U.S. Air Force only, letting them know that there was a problem and what NORAD was doing to fix it. It was one step below a PINNACLE FRONT BURNER report, which was a notification of an actual attack or deliberate action against NORAD.

Kearsage received an acknowledgment from the Air Force Operations Center — they were now responsible for channeling the report to the proper agencies. She would surely get a phone call in the next few minutes from the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, asking for updates and clarification. “MWC, anything?” Kearsage asked after she received an acknowledgment that the report had been copied and understood.

“Negative,” came the response. “No further events. Village still reports negative contact with their LRRs and their F-16s, reason still unknown.”

“Roger, Triple-C copies.” Joanna sat back in her chair, wishing she could light up a cigarette. There was nothing else to do but wait and see what the troops in the field could find out next.