Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  Ben David stood up and turned to the generals surrounding him. “Stop this nonsense. You have taken this scenario too far. The Iraqis never used chemical warheads and I seriously doubt the Arabs will ever use chemical weapons against us. They understand how we would respond.” He was a tough old man who had lived his life on the edge of conflict and had definite ideas about his enemies and how best to deal with them.

  The minister of defense, Benjamin Yuriden, stood up beside him and placed a hand on his prime minister’s shoulder. “Yair,” he counseled, “a war does not stop. We will not be prepared if we refuse to consider worst-case scenarios. That’s why we’re here.” He gestured at the order of battle board that listed the enemy units facing them. “We know the Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, all have chemical weapons and are trained in their use. It is logical that when they are losing, like in today’s scenario, they will use them against us.”

  “Are you saying,” Ben David shot at Yuriden, “that we are victims of our own success? We cannot win a decisive military victory because the Arabs will retaliate with chemical weapons on our people?”

  “It is a situation we must consider,” Yuriden answered.

  “Then my answer is simple.” Ben David’s blocklike hands cut through the air, his combative instincts in full play. “They use chemical weapons and we escalate. We’ll continue with the exercise. Stand down from combat the aircraft we need to upload all our nuclear weapons.” The prime minister’s jaw was rock hard and his lips were compressed into a tight line.

  The minister of defense took the decision calmly. This was an exercise. “Are you sure you want to upload all our aircraft-delivered weapons at this point. We are winning the ground war.”

  “I said all.”

  “Standing down that many aircraft will seriously hurt our conventional offensive operations.”

  Ben David glared at the general. “How many aircraft does that require?”

  “Eighty-seven.”

  Ben David’s knees gave out and he sat down. “We have that many atomic bombs?”

  “That’s only aircraft-delivered weapons,” Yuriden told him. “We also have thirty-five tactical nuclear weapons that can be fired from one-hundred-fifty-five-millimeter howitzers and fifteen warheads for our Jericho Two missiles.”

  Then a strange calm came over the prime minister. He wanted details. “Which are the smallest?”

  “The artillery-delivered weapons—two kilotons.”

  “The largest?” Ben David was fascinated. Like all Israeli politicians, he knew that his country was a nuclear power, but until now, he had no idea of what that meant in the harsh reality of making war.

  “The aircraft-delivered weapons—thirty kilotons.”

  “We may not be able to win,” Ben David said, “but then neither can they. I want to see how this scenario plays out. Order one of our largest bombs dropped on Damascus. Have our ambassador at the UN relay the warning that we will use more unless the gas attacks stop immediately. We will not be driven into the sea.” Then another thought occurred to him. “What casualties can the Syrians expect?”

  “Approximately a thousand times the number of ours from gas attacks,” Tamir said quietly from the rear of the room. The stunning announcement drove a wedge of silence across the room as his estimate was repeated to those who had not heard.

  The prime minister spun in his chair and glared at Tamir. “Too high.”

  “No, probably too low.”

  Ben David knew Tamir. “How can you be so sure?”

  “I tested the weapons.” It was a simple statement of fact, the expert telling what he knew.

  “Then we will use a smaller weapon to demonstrate our resolve,” Ben David announced. “The Arabs understand power that comes from a sword.”

  “The destruction on a city will still be terrible,” Tamir said. “I don’t think Israel can live with the political consequences.”

  “You’re now an expert on political consequences?”

  Tamir lowered his head and spoke quietly. “Syrian civil defense is a shambles. They do not have the rescue or medical facilities to handle the casualties even a small weapon will cause. They will throw open their country to every reporter imaginable and let them record the destruction for the world to see. The facts will condemn us.” Tamir raised his head and his voice. “It is a major escalation, a holocaust of our making. The Soviets and the rest of the Arab nations that have stayed out of the war will enter against us. The war will become an uncontrollable fire that will consume us.”

  “You assume too much, Tamir,” the prime minister said.

  “I tested the weapons,” was his only reply.

  Ben David turned his back on Tamir. “What is our smallest weapon?”

  “Two kilotons,” came the reply.

  “We will drop one such weapon on Damascus.”

  Tamir left the room, sick to his stomach. In the corridor, he leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths. This is only an exercise, he told himself. “I never thought …"he whispered to himself, barely audible, “never believed”—his despair was growing and twisting inside of him—“that it could go this far.”

  2

  The strident tones of the Klaxon had jolted Matt and Haney into action. It was a “Smoke” and he and Haney ran for the cockpit.

  “I’m up.” Haney’s voice came over the intercom, cool and collected, the moment Matt slipped into the seat and jerked his helmet into place. They were patched together by communication cords that ran from the ceiling of the bunker to their helmets. The same com cord connected them to the command post whose call sign was Dogpatch. After an engine start, they would go on internal power, unplug the cords, and establish radio contact with Dogpatch.

  Matt glanced at the set of command lights mounted in the ceiling above the open blast doors. All three were red. If the bottom light had been green, he would have started engines and held in the bunker. If the middle and bottom light were green, he would have taxied for the runway and held to await a takeoff order. If all three were green, he would have launched for a holding orbit to await a coded strike message that would send him and Haney into a nuclear war. Matt thumbed his transmit button. “Dogpatch, Romeo Zero-Four. Standing by for words.” His voice was amazingly calm.

  “Roger, Romeo Zero-Four,” Dogpatch answered, “continue to hold.” They could hear chatter in the background as other alert birds checked in on status.

  The wing had deployed to its Colocated Operating Base at RAF Stonewood in the United Kingdom as part of a Reforger exercise the United States mounted every September. Near the end of the active phase of Reforger, the political situation in the USSR had turned into a shambles as contending factions struggled to gain control of the decaying empire. Finally, the hard-line military clique had gained control and started to make ominous moves in the forward area and reoccupied Poland. NATO had responded by increasing its state of readiness, which in turn had triggered a harsher response by the Russians. Then Matt had found himself and his back-seater, Mike Haney, sitting Victor Alert at Stonewood, ready to man a nuclear-loaded F-15E that was parked in a hardened bunker. Frantic political maneuvering had reduced tensions and the day had started out as just another routine tour of alert duty.

  The bottom command light flicked to green, the order for an engine start, and Matt pulled the T handle of the Jet Fuel Starter at his right knee. Before the small starter engine could spin up, the middle command light changed to green. Now they were cleared to taxi. Matt could see the image of the Security Police truck that was parked in front of the bunker as a block to an unauthorized taxi move out of the way. “Looks like a go,” he mumbled under his breath, waiting for the engines to spin up and the inertial nav system to align.

  The top command light changed to green, ordering a launch, as the command post controller transmitted a coded strike message. “All Victor aircraft, this is Dogpatch with a Zulu Yankee message …” Both Matt and Haney copied the coded message down.

  “I cop
y a valid strike message,” Haney said, much faster than Matt in decoding the transmission.

  “Roger,” Matt answered, not bothering to finish his own decode. Trusting Haney, he gunned the throttles and taxied for the runway.

  Forty-five minutes later, they had reached their departure point over Denmark and were dropping down through a thick ceiling to start their low-level ingress into hostile territory. At five hundred feet, they broke out of the overcast and could see approximately five miles in front of them. “Better and better,” Matt said. He flipped open the small map booklet that traced their route and used it to double-check their position, which was also on the Tactical Situation Display. “I hold us on course, on time,” Matt said.

  Haney confirmed Matt’s call with a hasty “Roger.” He was sweating and breathing hard. A bright light flashed off to their left, momentarily causing their gold-tinted visors to go opaque, saving their eyesight from the searing light of a nuclear explosion. Then their visors cleared and they could see again.

  “Damn,” Matt yelled. He had been hand-flying the jet, not relying on the autopilot, and had inadvertently ballooned to seven hundred feet when his visor blanked out his vision. He slammed the F-15 back onto the deck. Two surface-to-air missiles flashed by over the canopy and exploded behind them.

  “Oh shit!” Haney yelled from the pit. “Master Caution light.” They had taken battle damage.

  “Fire warning light on number two,” Matt told him.

  Haney started to read the emergency checklist for Engine Fire or Overheat. “IP in two minutes,” he warned Matt. Now they were running the emergency checklist, shutting down their right engine and double-checking all switches, making sure the nuclear weapon they were carrying was armed and would release. “Break right!” Haney yelled. “Bandit four o’clock. On us.”

  Instinctively, Matt reefed the fighter to the right, trusting Haney’s call. He called up the air-to-air mode on his HUD and selected an AIM-9L Sidewinder missile. The plan form of a MiG-29, the Soviet equivalent of the F-16, flashed in front of him, turning away from the fight. Matt turned hard after the MiG, the G meter reading five g’s. A reassuring growl came through his headset—the seeker head on the Sidewinder was tracking. He hit the pickle button, sending the missile on its way, and wrenched his jet back to the deck, dropping below two hundred feet.

  “Hard left!” Haney yelled. “Bandit …” Before Matt could react, the cockpit shook violently and a loud explosion deafened them. Smoke filled the cockpit. From memory, Haney yelled out the Smoke and Fumes checklist. Matt reached and pulled the emergency vent handle and the cockpit cleared.

  “What the …” Matt gasped, surprised by the toxicity of the fumes. He hadn’t expected that. He scanned the sky for the bandit. No joy. It had been a hit-and-run attack. They had most likely been hit by a Soviet Aphid, a decent air-to-air missile.

  “Keep coming left,” Haney ordered. “IP on the nose.”

  Matt could see the railroad bridge that was their Initial Point. They were seven miles out from their target, a Soviet Army headquarters. Another flash from a nuclear explosion sent their visors opaque and again Matt inadvertently ballooned the jet. But this time, there was no reaction from the defenders. The detonation had been too close. The F-15 rocked from the shock wave, the needles on the G meters bouncing, registering a 3.

  “Son of a bitch!” Matt yelled. “The CAS is tits up.” The Control Augmentation System that electrically adjusted inputs into the aircraft’s control surfaces had malfunctioned owing to battle damage from the last hit they had taken. Now the pilot had his hands full just flying the aircraft.

  “My screens are out,” Haney shouted. The four video screens in front of the wizzo had gone blank. He jerked his map booklet out of the map case and flipped open to the target run page. “It’s gonna have to be visual with an emergency release.” The backseater could not believe how tired and thirsty he felt. Still, he kept talking, telling Matt to come right or left, when to roll out, as they bore down on their target. Streams of tracers filled the windscreen as Matt jinked back and forth. The defenders were fighting for their lives. Then Haney shouted, “Pull!”

  Matt honked back on the stick and hit the emergency release button on his weapons control panel. They felt a slight shudder as the bomb separated cleanly, arcing high into the air—a standard toss delivery for an airburst. Matt slammed the F-15 into a descending left-turn escape maneuver. He pushed the throttle of his one remaining engine into full afterburner in a desperate attempt to gain separation distance.

  Again, their visors went opaque as their bomb exploded behind them. The F-15 started to buck uncontrollably, sending signals that it wasn’t going to fly much longer. But they had done their job and gotten their weapon onto target. “Matt,” Haney said, his voice again calm and resigned. “We’re gonna have to eject.”

  “Hold on,” Matt said. “Preejection checklist.”

  “Whaa …” Haney said. He had never heard of that emergency procedure.

  “Preejection checklist,” Matt answered. “Remove helmet. Spread legs. Bend over. Kiss your ass good-bye.”

  The simulator at Luke Air Force Base gave two hard jerks as the instruments indicated they had impacted the ground. The TV screens surrounding the mock-up of the cockpit went blank and the lights in the big room came up. The pilot from Standardization and Evaluation stuck his head out from behind the control console. “Very funny, Lieutenant, very funny.” There was no humor in his voice. “It was a decent check ride until the last wise-ass remark.”

  “Miss Temple.” Gad Habish’s voice cut through the clamor surrounding the baggage turntable at the Málaga airport. “Here please.” Shoshana turned to see a paunchy, balding, middle-aged man holding her two suitcases. It was her case officer. So far so good. “LaziDaze Travel arranged for your transportation,” Habish added, confirming he was her contact. Shoshana followed him out to a waiting car, leaving the rest of the passengers who had flown in from Montreal, Canada, on the KLM flight with her still searching for their bags.

  “How was the flight?” Habish asked as he wheeled the car into traffic and headed south for the town of Marbella on the Costa del Sol.

  “Long and tiring,” she said. “But no problems.” Habish only nodded his head. He didn’t ask any more questions for she had told him all he needed to know—Shoshana had made the roundabout journey through Paris and Montreal without incident. As planned, she had made contact with a Mossad operative in Montreal and exchanged her Israeli passport for a Canadian one along with a batch of credit cards, health insurance card, a social security card, a California driver’s license and a U.S. Resident Alien card. All said she was a Canadian citizen named Rose Temple living and working in California.

  “Why Rose Temple?” Shoshana asked, not liking her cover name.

  Habish hid a grimace. She was obviously new at this with much to learn. “Easy to remember. Shoshana means ‘rose’ and Temple is very similar to your last name.” He didn’t remind her how an agent, even a very experienced one, could forget a cover name at an inopportune moment.

  They drove in silence to the Atalaya Park Hotel. Habish deposited her at the entrance with a few instructions. “Take a few days to learn the town. The hotel has visiting privileges at the Marbella Beach Club so sunbathe and swim there. That’s the only reason we’ve booked you in here. Remember, you’re on an expense account. Use your credit cards when you can—keep a receipt for everything else. You’ll have to justify every penny. You’re not on a vacation. I’ll contact you in a few days.”

  Shoshana’s spirits lifted and her fatigue yielded a notch when the bellboy escorted her through the large hotel to her room on the fourth floor. The small room had a balcony with a stunning view of the hotel’s gardens and the Mediterranean. She unpacked before changing into the swimsuit that had so upset her father. She thought about wearing the old shirt she used as a beach wrap and then about the casually undressed guests she had seen in the lobby. “Time for some sun,”
she told herself. Then she tossed the shirt on the bed and left the room.

  Every eye followed her progress through the lobby as she asked for directions to the Marbella Beach Club. So far, not bad, she decided.

  “The boss man is gonna have a piece of us,” Haney warned his pilot. The two were in the squadron’s lounge at Luke Air Force Base, waiting for the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Locke, to call them into his office. “Stand Eval takes those check rides in the simulator very seriously.”

  “What the hell,” Matt muttered. “We got the bomb on target. I thought that was the bottom line.”

  “The mission of Standardization and Evaluation is to conduct evaluation flights to insure all crews are proficient in flying and adhering to standard procedures,” Haney parroted. “That’s why we have to fly a nuke mission in the simulator before Stand Eval certifies us as fully mission-ready.”

  “Big efing deal,” Matt groused. “Just what chance is there that we would ever drop a nuke for real?” The squadron commander’s door opened and the Exec came out. He motioned for Matt and Haney to enter and closed the door after them.

  Locke leaned back in his chair and kept the two young officers standing at attention while he studied the Standardization and Evaluation report on their check ride in the simulator. “Interesting,” he began. “You worked your way through exceptionally heavy defenses and still got your weapon on target, on time.” Locke raised his head and fixed Matt with a hard look. He does look like his grandfather, he allowed, sizing up the lieutenant—tall, sinewy, slightly hawk-nosed, fair complexion, sandy brown hair and possessed of the brightest blue eyes. “But you made some mistakes …”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt interrupted. “We took a SAM hit when I ballooned the jet after a nuke blast. But that was a goat rope—a bad call by Stand Eval. No way a missile could track us in that environment.”

  “Perhaps …” Locke wanted to say more, to get involved in a detailed discussion of weapons and tactics. But this wasn’t the place or time for that. The squadron commander kept comparing himself to the lieutenant, remembering when he had been young, full of piss and vinegar, and confident—exactly like Pontowski. But was the lieutenant a good stick with the potential to make him worth saving?