by Dale Brown
“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.
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.
Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered the construction of an airfield on Shemya in 1943 to enable the staging of air raids on Japanese positions on Adak and Kiska Islands; Shemya was chosen because it was relatively flat and was not bothered as much by fog as were most of the other Aleutians. By 1945 Shemya housed over eleven hundred soldiers, seamen, and airmen, plus a fleet of B-24 bombers and P-51 fighters. Its tremendous strategic importance as the guardian of America’s northern flank was in direct inverse proportion to the level of morale of its troops, who endured years of stark isolation, lack of resources, the worst living conditions of any base in the American military, no promotions, and severe psychological depression. It was without a doubt America’s version of a Soviet-style gulag.
After the end of the Korean War, Shemya’s importance steadily declined, as radar and eventually satellites took over the important job of watching the Arctic skies for any signs of attackers or intruders. At the end of the Cold War, with the Russian threat all but eliminated, the Air Force station was closed and put into caretaker status, with just a handful of civilian technicians on hand to service the massive COBRA DANE ballistic-missile tracking radar, nicknamed “Big Alice,” and other intelligence-gathering systems. The island became a massive dumping ground for all of the Aleutians, since it was far easier to dump even expensive equipment than it was to haul it back to the States. Shemya became “The Rock” once more.
But since the advent of President Thomas Thorn’s “Fortress America” initiative—eliminating overseas military commitments and building up the defense of the North American continent—Shemya, fifteen hundred miles west of Anchorage on the western tip of the Aleutian Island chain, was busier and more important than ever. Already vital as an emergency-abort base for transpolar and Far East airline and military flights and as a location of ballistic-missile tracking radars and other intelligence-gathering facilities, Eareckson Air Force Base, formerly just an air station but now advanced to full air-base status, was the location of the Aerospace Defense Command’s long-range XBR, or X-band radar, and the In-Flight Interceptor Communications System, which provided ultraprecise steering information to ground-based interceptor missiles fired from silos in Alaska and North Dakota.
Eareckson Air Force Base was now in an almost constant state of upgrade and new construction. Nearly two thousand men and women were based there in modern concrete dormitories, connected by underground tunnels and interspersed with comfortable, albeit subterranean, offices, computer rooms, laboratories, and other amenities. The runway facilities could now handle any aircraft in the world up to a million pounds gross weight and could land a suitably equipped aircraft in almost any weather, including the frequent and usually unexpected near-hurricane-force windstorms that were as much a part of life on Shemya as were Russian blue foxes, the cold, and the loneliness. Every aircraft that arrived in Shemya was housed in its own hydronically heated hangar—sometimes in better facilities than at its home base.
Along with the construction workers and engineers assembling the new missile-defense network, Shemya was host to many other government and military organizations—and that included the Air Battle Force. It was not the first time they had been there: Rebecca Furness’s 111th Bombardment Wing, from where all of the Air Battle Force’s B-1 bombers originated, had been deployed there during the War of Reunification, to prevent an outbreak of nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. Shemya’s strategic location against Russia, China, and all of Far East Asia—especially now that all bases in Korea and Japan were closed to permanent American military forces—made the little island the stepping-off point for most military operations in the North Pacific theater.
Hal decided not to take the tunnel to the ready room out on the flight line—and almost instantly regretted it. Although nights were fairly short in early spring, the changing seasons meant changing weather. In the short walk to the ready room, Hal experienced almost every possible climatic change: It went from cold and frosty to horizontal snow and stinging ice to horizontal freezing rain to windy but clear in a matter of a couple minutes. Once he had to brace himself against a light pole to keep from being knocked off his feet by an errant blast of wind.
There was one consolation: Hal was able to see a rare Aleutian sunrise, the first one he’d ever seen. The golden light illuminated the nearby islands and turned the sea from dark and forbidding to an unbelievable crystal blue. He was almost breathless with amazement—until another gush of icy wind brought his attention back to the here and now.
Hal was hesitant to remove his balaclava to speak, but when he did, he found that it was warming up quickly outside now that the sun was up. All part of living and work
ing in Alaska. As the old saying went, “If you don’t like the weather on Shemya, wait five minutes.” “Duty Officer,” Hal spoke into thin air, “get the door for me, will you?”
“Yes, Colonel Briggs,” the female computerized voice of the Duty Officer responded, and Hal felt the click of electronic locks disengaging as soon as he touched the door handle. The “Duty Officer” was a computerized all-around assistant, handling everything from routine radio messages to complex top-secret mission planning from Air Battle Force headquarters at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base in Battle Mountain, Nevada. Relayed via satellite, the Duty Officer tracked the location and identity of every person assigned to Battle Mountain and instantly responded to requests, even if the person was far from the main base. As it did at Battle Mountain, the Duty Officer constantly monitored and operated all security systems wherever the Air Battle Force was deployed—personnel never carried pass cards or had to worry about passwords or codes. The Duty Officer knew who and where you were and made sure that if you weren’t cleared to enter a particular area—from an aircraft hangar to an individual file drawer—you didn’t get in.
Of course, Hal realized, it would’ve been far easier, faster, and more efficient for the Duty Officer to awaken him if there was something urgent happening—but getting the boss’s ass out of bed was a pleasure Sergeant Major Wohl obviously reserved for himself, no matter what the weather.
The ready room for the Air Battle Force was actually their aircraft hangar, where barracks, planning, storage, and communications rooms had been set up. Two MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet aircraft waited inside. The MV-32 resembled the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor special-operations transport—with a big, boxy fuselage; stubby, high-mounted wings; large tail structure; and a drive-up cargo ramp—except the MV-32 was larger and used four turbojet engines, two on each wingtip and two on the tips of the horizontal stabilizer, in place of rotors. Like the MV-22, the Pave Dasher could take off and land vertically yet fly like a conventional fixed-wing aircraft, but the MV-32 could fly 50 percent faster than the -22 on just a little more fuel. The MV-32 was air-refuelable and had an infrared camera and radar for terrain-following flight and precision navigation and targeting. It could carry as many as eighteen combat troops and also carried two retractable and reloadable weapon pods on the landing-gear sponsons, along with a twenty-millimeter Minigun in a steerable nose turret with five hundred rounds of ammunition.