by Dale Brown
“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.”
North American Aerospace Defense Headquarters,
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Colorado
That same time
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 radar
s 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.
5
Over the Chukchi Sea, 150 Miles North of Nome, Alaska
That same time
NORAD’s long-range early-warning radars at Point Hope and Scammon Bay couldn’t see them, and even RAPCON’s — Nome Radar Approach Control — precision approach-control radar didn’t spot them until they were well over Kotzebue Sound, heading away from the Seward Peninsula and into the forbidding Arctic wastelands of Alaska. The groundspeed readout for the target did indeed say “540”—540 knots, over 570 miles per hour — but the electrically charged atmosphere, magnetic anomalies, and terrain often confused and scrambled radar plots in Alaska.
Still, with a few sketchy reports of some kind of air-defense activity up in the northeast part of Alaska, reporting even likely radar anomalies was far better than making no report at all. The Nome Approach controller issued a “pending” contact report to Fairbanks Approach Control, with an estimated time of radar contact. At the same time, the RAPCON supervisor issued a similar report to the Alaska NORAD Region headquarters at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage. NORAD would in turn alert the short-range radar station at Clear Air Station in central Alaska to watch for the contact as well.
Except those manning the station would never get the chance to see it.
The activity wasn’t a radar anomaly or magnetic disturbance — it was a formation of two Russian Tupolev-160 supersonic bombers, which had been flying nap-of-the-earth for the past hour, since well over the Chukchi Peninsula of eastern Siberia.
It originally started as a formation of four bombers, but one could not refuel and another suffered engine failure and had to abort the mission. Their route of flight took them not over Siberia but along the Bering Sea close to the commercial polar transoceanic flight routes, where their presence would not cause alarm until the flight approached the American Air Defense Identification Zone. By then the two remaining bombers — fully refueled and with weapon, flight, engine, navigation, and defensive systems all working perfectly — descended below radar coverage and drove eastward toward their objective. Flying at very low altitudes — sometimes just a few meters above the sea — the bombers successfully slipped through the gaps in the long-range NORAD radars along the western Alaskan coastline.
By the time the bombers were detected, it was too late…but even if they had been detected earlier, there were no
fighters to intercept them and no surface-to-air missile systems to shoot them down. The two alert fighters at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks had already been committed to the air patrol over northern Alaska with the E-3C AWACS radar plane; the four F-15C Eagle fighters being prepared for alert duties were still being armed and manned and wouldn’t be ready to respond to an alert call for several minutes. The bombers were completely unopposed as they headed east, into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness.
Eareckson Air Force Base, Shemya, Alaska
That same time
U. S. Marine Corps Sergeant Major Chris Wohl stuck his head in the door, letting light from the hallway spill across the bed inside the small room within. “Sir, you’re needed in the ready room,” he said loudly and without preamble.
Air Force Colonel Hal Briggs was instantly awake — a trait that, although it served him well as a forward combat air controller and chief of security at HAWC, was irritating because he knew that now that he was awake, it would be nearly impossible for him to go back to sleep. He glanced at the glowing red numerals on his bedside alarm clock and groaned theatrically. “Top, I just got to bed five friggin’ hours ago. What the hell is—?”
“Sir, you’re needed in the ready room. Now.” And the door slammed shut.
Hal knew that Chris Wohl wouldn’t awaken his boss if it weren’t pretty damned important — usually. He quickly dressed in pixelated Arctic battle dress uniform, cold-weather boots and gloves, wool balaclava, and a parka, and headed to his unit’s ready room.
Shemya Island was only six square miles in area, the largest of the Semichi Group of volcanic islands in the western Aleutian Island chain. Much closer to Russia than to Anchorage, the Aleutians were barely noticed before 1940; Russian blue foxes far outnumbered humans along almost the entire chain. But the islands’ strategic location did not go unnoticed at the start of World War II. The Japanese invaded them in 1942, occupying Adak Island and attacking Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. If the Aleutians could be captured and held, the Japanese could control the entire North Pacific and threaten all of North America.