by Dale Brown
“Do they think they own that airfield now? Do they expect us to just look the other way while they load up their transport and fly away again? We should hit that transport immediately with another air strike — blow the Americans to hell, where they belong!”
“Sir, I strongly suggest we let that transport load up and leave Yakutsk unharmed,” Stepashin said measuredly, not risking angering the already frantic-looking president but trying to be firm at the same time. “They undoubtedly have Russians in those shelters with them — they could be helping our soldiers. It is a humanitarian airlift, not an offensive strike. We should not interfere with it, especially since we did nothing similar ourselves to help survivors at Yakutsk.”
“Are you saying I am a coward, Stepashin?” Gryzlov shouted. “You will be silent, Stepashin, or you will be dismissed! I will not tolerate insubordination in my own command center!”
“With all due respect, sir, I was making a recommendation,” Stepashin said, his rising anger barely restrained. “We should not attack an unarmed humanitarian rescue mission.”
“I do not care if they flew in a children’s choir carrying daisies and magic pixie dust, General — I want that plane destroyed!” Gryzlov shouted. Stepashin noted the large, dark bags under his eyes, the drooping shoulders, the shaking hands, and the pale complexion — the man probably hadn’t had any sleep for the past two days and was subsisting mostly on cigarettes and coffee. “See to it immediately! I want—”
At that moment the conference room’s telephone rang again. Gryzlov jumped, then stared at it as if it were a gigantic hairy spider. He’s losing it, Stepashin thought as he picked up the phone. “Stepashin…Yes, I copy. Alert all air-defense sectors. Keep all other air-defense radar systems in standby, and use optronic sensors to locate it. Repeat, do not use radar — they will only be destroyed as well.”
“What the hell happened, General?” Gryzlov gasped.
“Air-defense alert issued by Novgorod air-defense region,” Stepashin said. “Small, subsonic aircraft detected east-northeast of the capital. Intermittent and very weak return, too small to be a stealth aircraft. Possibly an unmanned aircraft or reconnaissance drone.”
“My God…he’s here,” Gryzlov murmured, eyes bulging in fear. “McLanahan’s here! He’s decided not to attack our Siberian bases but is going to attack Moscow itself!”
“McLanahan is not the only threat out there, sir,” Stepashin said. “Our air defenses are much more capable around Moscow than anywhere else in the world. Perhaps this is just—”
“Order an attack, Stepashin,” Gryzlov said. “I want a full retaliatory strike launched on the United States.”
“Sir?” Stepashin retorted. “You want to order a nuclear attack on the United States? You cannot do this!”
“They are attacking my capital — I will retaliate with everything I’ve got and make them pay for their actions!” Gryzlov shouted. He stepped quickly over to the Strategic Forces officer carrying the special briefcase and snatched it out of his hands — he had to drag the officer to the conference table, because the briefcase was still handcuffed to him. Gryzlov unlocked the briefcase, withdrew a circular slide-rule-like decoder device from under his shirt, dialed in the current Greenwich Mean Time, wrote down a series of numbers, then selected a card from arowofred cards in the briefcase. He punched the series of numbers into a keypad in the bottom of the briefcase, then inserted the card in a slot and pressed a green button. He then turned to Stepashin and said, “Enter the authentication instructions, General.”
“Are you absolutely sure, Mr. President?” the chief of the general staff asked. He took the card but held it up to the president, using it to focus Gryzlov’s attention. The president couldn’t seem to keep his eyes steady on any target for more than a second or two, and it appeared as if he was having trouble keeping his eyelids open. “This will certainly start a world war, Mr. President. Millions of lives could be lost in the next hour if you proceed.”
“Our lives will be lost and millions of our people’s lives will be held hostage if we do not do this,” Gryzlov said. “Give the authentication code, General.”
Stepashin sighed. He looked around the room, hoping to find someone who might be sympathetic or help him try to talk Gryzlov out of this, but there was no one. He withdrew his own decoder from inside his tunic, glanced at the clock, dialed in the time, inserted the red card in the slot, and entered the resultant code and his own personal passcode into the briefcase device. Moments later a strip of paper printed out of the briefcase. Stepashin tore it out, read it over to be sure it had printed correctly, then nodded.
“Do it, General,” Gryzlov said through clenched teeth. “Let us get this war over with. I want McLanahan to pay, not with his own life but with the lives of his fellow Americans.”
Stepashin walked over to the telephone on the conference table, picked up the receiver, dialed some numbers, and waited. After a short wait, he spoke. “This is Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation General Nikolai Stepashin. I am with President Gryzlov in the Alternate Military Command Center at Oksky Reserve, Lybedskaya Street, Ryazan’. I am prepared to authenticate.” He waited another few moments, dialed in the date and time again on his decoder, and said, “I authenticate iyul’ pyatnadtsat’. Authenticate noyabr’ shyest’.” He waited again, checked his decoder, then said, “That authentication is correct. I have a priority emergency-action message from the commander in chief. Advise when ready to copy.” He waited once more, then read the characters from the printout twice. “Go ahead with your readback.” Again he was silent for several long moments as he checked off each character. “The readback was correct,” he said finally. “You may hand over the phone to your deputy, who will reread the message back to me…. Yes, I hear you clearly, Captain. Go ahead with the readback.”
The second authentication readback seemed to be taking longer than the first one. Gryzlov had been through many exercises simulating this procedure — he had in fact devised most of these very same procedures himself, when he was chief of the general staff — but for some reason this seemed to be taking longer than usual.
Gryzlov lit up a cigarette and was halfway through it when all of a sudden he saw two officers running toward the conference room, with two armed security men behind them. Stepashin turned toward them, the phone still to his ear, then held up a hand, silently ordering the men not to enter. The officers hesitated, conversed between themselves for a moment, then decided to enter anyway.
“What is the meaning of this!” Gryzlov shouted. “Get out of here! Go back to your posts!”
“Sir!” the senior officer said, snapping to attention momentarily. “I am Captain Federov, the communications-section commander of this facility.”
“Get out of here, Captain,” Stepashin said. “We are busy here. That is an order!”
“Sir…” He saw the phone in Stepashin’s hand, his eyes bulging in surprise, then turned to Gryzlov and said excitedly, “Mr. President, we have detected an unauthorized overseas call being placed from this room!”
“A…what?” Gryzlov shouted.
“Someone…” The captain turned to Stepashin, swallowed, and said, “Sir, the chief of the general staff is making an unauthorized telephone call — to the United States of America.”
Gryzlov turned to Stepashin, his mouth dropping open in surprise. “The United States? I thought he was talking to the communications center! He is relaying an emergency-action message—”
“He called the United States, sir — specifically, the general exchange at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base in Nevada.” Gryzlov looked as if he were going to pass out in shock. “He has been connected to the Battle Management Center and is speaking with the facility commander, Brigadier General David Luger. They have been connected for the past several—”
“No!” Gryzlov shouted. Ignoring the phone and the open connection, he threw himself at Stepashin, grasping him by the throat and wrestling
him to the floor. Stepashin put the phone under his body and held on to Gryzlov’s wrists, not allowing the president to choke him but keeping his body atop his so the security guards couldn’t grab the phone. Ultimately, he heard the phone clatter to the floor, so he assumed that Federov had pulled its cord from the wall.
“Pizda tyebya rodila!” Gryzlov was shouting. “You fucking traitor!” Stepashin barely noticed the muzzle of the semiautomatic pistol pushed up under his left cheek before he heard a loud bang, felt a brief sting in his left eye, and then felt nothing at all.
It seemed like a long time later when Gryzlov finally got up from on top of Stepashin’s nearly headless corpse. “Mandavoshka,” he swore. “Shit-ass bastard. You turned out to be a coward after all.” The echo of the gunshot and the stench of gunpowder and blood still hung in the air.
Just then the sound of an air-raid siren started wailing throughout the facility — but it could not drown out the sound of explosions overhead that slowly but relentlessly drove closer and closer, until the lights flickered and went out, the ceiling of the underground facility caved in, and there was nothing but waves of fire, shock, smoke, and flying debris all around him…and then nothingness.
* * *
I’ve got secondaries already, One-one,” radioed the mission commander aboard Bobcat Two-four, the second EB-1C Vampire bomber on the attack run. “Two-three opened something up right under those coordinates we received. I think we found it.”
“Roger,” Patrick McLanahan responded. “Launch all of your Wolverines on those coordinates. I’ll withhold mine in case we get any more tips from the Russian chief of the general staff.” Patrick’s EB-52 Megafortress was thirty minutes behind the two Vampire bombers. The two Vampires had sped on ahead of the lone surviving Megafortress bomber, launching antiradar weapons at Novgorod to plow a way through Russia’s air defenses. Although Patrick had targeted the Ryazan’ alternate military command center as soon as he escaped the devastation at Yakutsk seven hours earlier, he didn’t really know exactly where to launch his weapons.
Until the call came from Ryazan’ itself, from a man calling himself General Stepashin, the chief of the general staff, reading off the exact geographic coordinates of the underground facility and even describing its location so it could be found by reading a street map! The first Vampire bomber launched two Wolverine cruise missiles with penetrating thermium-nitrate warheads on the coordinates, still not prepared to believe that the information was factual — but when the secondary explosions revealed the underground complex below, they knew they had the right spot.
“It looks like a volcano down there, sir. We hit either that command center or some huge underground weapons-storage area, or both,” the mission commander said. “What next, boss?”
Patrick plotted a course that would take them through southwest Russia, the shortest path to the Kazakhstan border — near Engels Air Base, it so happened, the base Patrick’s bombers had attacked the year before, the attack that apparently drove Anatoliy Gryzlov crazy enough to first engineer a coup in Russia and then wage nuclear war with the United States. Patrick then deconflicted the course with all available intelligence data, then beamed the flight plan to the two Vampires.
“Next we get the hell out of here,” Patrick said. “Let’s go home.”
Epilogue
Bellevue, Nebraska
January 2005
So help me God.”
The chief justice of the Supreme Court shook hands with the newly inaugurated president, but unlike in past years when the new president of the United States completed his swearing-in, there was now no applause, no “Hail to the Chief” playing in the background, and no cheering. The crowd was just a fraction of its normal size, just a few hundred people — vastly outnumbered by troops, law enforcement, and Secret Service agents surrounding the venue, a large tent set up in what remained of a farmer’s home, just a few miles outside what once was Offutt Air Force Base.
The chill January winds sent icy bits of frozen rain swirling through the tent, which made everyone inside skittish. They were assured that there was no longer any danger of radioactive fallout, but even so, many attendees took the opportunity of the cold to cover their faces tightly with scarves to avoid directly breathing the air.
“Good luck, and may God watch over you, Mr. President,” the chief justice said.
“Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice,” President Kevin Martindale said. The fifty-two-year-old Republican had just repeated history: He was only the second president in U.S. history, after Grover Cleveland, to be elected president after being previously voted out of office. Like Cleveland, Martindale was a bachelor, so rather than having one of his Hollywood-actress girlfriends hold the Bible for his swearing-in, his vice president, former secretary of state under Thomas Thorn, Maureen Hershel, held it for him.
Hershel was likewise unmarried; for her swearing-in, Maureen had asked Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan do the honors. When President Martindale stepped up to the podium, Maureen stepped back beside Patrick on the dais, and her hand slipped into his. He looked at her and smiled — and then she saw him glance over her shoulder toward the empty, snow-covered fields and beyond toward the devastated Air Force base. She had grown accustomed to the “ten-thousand-yard stare,” as many called it — instantaneous and jarring remembrances of death and near-death, destruction, and horrifying events.
But Patrick was not the only one she saw with that look — many others in America had it these days, men and women in the military especially, but many others whose lives were forever and utterly devastated by the nuclear attacks on the United States.
“My fellow Americans,” President Martindale began, “I want to thank you, and especially thank President Thomas Thorn, for allowing me the privilege of changing the venue for my inauguration from Washington to Nebraska. The security difficulties in granting this request were enormous, but President Thorn accepted responsibility for all the logistics necessary to honor my request, and for that I thank him.
“Normally, inaugurations are supposed to be joyous occasions: joyous because we as Americans celebrate the pride, the respect, and the gift of another peaceful transition of power. Events have overshadowed the joy. It may have been in the best interest of the nation for us to celebrate, butthis nation has been deeply scarred, and wounds so deep take a long time and much personal reflection and community strength to heal.
“I know that the attacks of last year hurt us, emotionally as well as personally. I was saddened by President Thorn’s decision not to run for reelection, and I was equally saddened when no other candidates chose to run and the voter turnout was so low. But I also understand that America needed time to heal, and healing means drawing and lending strength and support from family and community. Politics means little to a country that has suffered so greatly as America has suffered.
“But as I stand here before you today, on an American’s property that was leveled by the attack on Offutt Air Force Base just a few miles away, I call upon my fellow Americans to join me to begin to put America back as leader of the free world. It is time, my friends, to stand tall again. America is still strong. Although its military has suffered incredible losses, we are still safe from any enemy that threatens us, and I promise you we will become stronger still.
“We have been forced by circumstances and evil intentions to rebuild our military forces. I promise you, with the shades of the men and women of Offutt Air Force Base and the other bases destroyed and damaged by nuclear attack as my witnesses, that I will build the most modern, the most effective, and the most powerful Air Force the world has ever seen. I once challenged our military leaders and planners to ‘skip a generation’ in developing our military forces, to discard the remnants of past wars, ineffective strategies, and outdated thinking. Unfortunately, the events of last year force us now to do exactly that. The structures and weaponry that served us so well for decades have been ripped from us. Now is the time to rebuild them, better and smarte
r than ever. With God’s help and your support, I will do just that.
“I once chided President Thorn when he didn’t show up for his own inauguration, choosing instead to march directly into the White House one minute after his term of office began and getting immediately to work. I thought, how can any man be so uncaring, so ignorant of what had just transpired? Here there was taking place a peaceful transition of power of the most powerful nation on Earth, and the new president was completely failing to acknowledge that event in history.
“Some may well be ridiculing me after this, but I’m going to continue President Thorn’s example today: I’m going back to Washington, and I’m going to get to work rebuilding our nation and our military forces. I know that few Americans feel like celebrating anyway. But I want all Americans to celebrate, each in your own way. Celebrate by hugging your children, by raising your voices in song, by lowering your heads in prayer, and by offering your strength and your help whenever you can. Celebrate the continuity of the greatest nation on Earth, and do everything you can to make sure our flag still flies and our nation still stands strong and proud.
“I assure you, America still has heroes we can look to for the strength, leadership, and wisdom we need to rebuild.” He paused, turned, looked directly at Patrick, and nodded before turning back to the microphone. “We lost many good men and women in the American Holocaust of 2004, but I can tell you, my fellow Americans, that the soldiers who served us so well trained an entire new generation of capable men and women to take their places. Thanks to them, America is in worthy hands.
“As the new commander in chief, I’m telling you this: Mourning time is over. It’s time to start the rebuilding. The wounds are well on their way to being healed — now it’s time to start exercising the muscles, retraining the mind for the challenges that lie ahead, and getting back into the race — the race to ensure and defend peace, democracy, and freedom here in America and around the world.”