by Dale Brown
The Steel Magnolia’s mouth dropped open in shock—it looked like the President’s was about to as well.
“Under these circumstances, the next order would most likely be issued from the portable unit. Since there’s still a possibility that an attack against the United States is underway, you should activate the portable sender.”
“I told you before, General, I don’t want those bombers to launch!”
“Sir …” Freeman paused, controlling his emotions and his own shaking voice, cursing the day he was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At least Colin Powell got out while the getting was good. “Sir, activating your portable sender doesn’t issue any orders—it only allows you to be able to do so, should we need to make a run for the helicopter again. At this point, Strategic Command will determine whether or not the bombers launch under positive control. They—”
“What … did you say, General Freeman?” the First Lady interrupted. “Strategic Command can launch the bombers? What are you talking about? What do you mean they can launch? Is this some kind of coup?” She turned to the President. “I’m telling you, this smells like Seven Days in May.”
“Dammit, ma’am,” Freeman snapped, “under DEFCON Two, we would launch the bomber force under positive control as soon as we detected an attack in progress against the United States. That’s what DEFCON Two means. Because of the nature of the current emergency and your orders regarding protection for our NATO allies, we decided we would launch the bomber force if any attack against any NATO ally, especially Turkey, was detected.”
“A policy I totally disagree with,” the First Lady said disdainfully, rapping on Jack Kennedy’s old desk. “We’re supposed to make the world and the Russians think we’ll start a nuclear war if Turkey is attacked?”
“We already discussed this, honey,” the President interjected, trying to calm her, wishing he could take a job at McDonald’s or somewhere—anywhere but here. “We’ve got American servicemen in Turkey; Turkey is a strong and valuable ally—it’s important we show our support—”
“By starting World War Three? It’s insane,” she lectured, her lip curled.
The President hesitated. They had indeed argued this point for many hours, with the First Lady not wanting to commit to war with Russia over Turkey and its unilateral decision to assist the Ukraine. She had a point, Freeman thought: world wars were indeed started exactly like this. But the NATO alliance was important to America. Every member—especially its most powerful member, the United States of America—had to back up the others. The single RF-111G recon unit and a few frigates was a paltry show of support—launching the nuclear alert bombers was a major show of support. It was a safe and fully controllable response as well—unlike a missile, the bombers could be recalled at any time.
“Our bomber force is so small that reaction time is critical, ma’am,” Freeman said. “As soon as NORAD and Strategic Command get a positive attack indication, they flush the bombers. It’s the only way to ensure survivability.”
“What about the subs and the missiles?” the President asked, sheepishly tearing off the end of a cigar to chomp on—but not inhale. The First Lady glared at him but said nothing. “Strategic Command launches them too … ?”
“No, sir. Only you can order the missiles to launch and the bombers to prearm their weapons and execute their strike missions,” Freeman replied. “However, under DEFCON Two, the nuclear subs carry out certain instructions if they lose connectivity with you. If the loss of communications continues, the subs can launch an attack.”
“I thought you said only I can launch the missiles,” the President said in exasperation, looking confused.
“Sir, that’s true—only you can order a launch,” he said, thinking, Thank God he did avoid the draft—he just doesn’t get it. “But nuclear subs are designed to patrol for months at a time completely undetected. They must expose themselves to receive instructions, which they will do every two to eight weeks, depending on the defense readiness condition. If they come up and don’t connect, under DEFCON Two they will proceed to their launch points and try one more time to connect. If that fails, they will launch.”
“They can launch without my orders … ?” he asked, his face still clouded.
“Sir, the sea-launched missiles are our most important, our most deadly, our most survivable weapon,” Freeman explained, thinking, He isn’t this dumb. He knew this stuff, why is he doing this? Is he panicking? Well, it sure as hell isn’t the time to come unglued. “If the entire command and control system is destroyed by a nuclear attack, we don’t want the subs to be out of commission just because they were down hiding from the bad guys. Therefore, under high-threat conditions like this, sub captains have the ability to launch a limited attack if they don’t get the order not to do so.”
“This is ridiculous, General,” the First Lady said through gritted teeth. “This is a nightmare. What kind of control system is this? A nuclear war can start and we didn’t even order it … ?”
“The President ordered it by going to DEFCON Two, ma’am.”
“Well, cancel the fucking DEFCON Two, then!” the First Lady hissed. “I want control of those warheads, General… I want—” And then she stopped, finally realizing what she was saying. She took a deep breath, patted her hair, recomposed herself, and smiled coldly. “I think any procedure that delegates any measure of authority for the release of nuclear weapons outside this office is wrong, General. I think something should be done about it … that’s all. You see my point.” She was all sugar and spice.
“Let’s worry about that later, honey.” The President sighed. “We’ll keep the planes on the ground and the subs on patrol for now. I think I’ve proven to Turkey and the rest of NATO that I’ll support them, but if we need to launch the bombers to show Turkey or Russia we mean business, so be it. As far as the subs go, I want to stay in contact with the command center”—the President looked at the Navy captain, at the briefcase, at the top of his desk, at nothing, then said—”by telephone. I’m staying right here.”
“Yes, sir,” Freeman said, glad that that was resolved before the Second Coming. He motioned to the naval officer, who packed up his gear and departed to his office on the ground floor. In the meantime, an officer had arrived from the Pentagon with a locked case full of papers. The President spent a moment looking the cover pages over, handed them over to Freeman while the coffee and sandwiches were brought in, then: “So spill it, General.”
“It was a single aircraft, Mr. President, a MiG-25R Foxbat reconnaissance aircraft.” Freeman explained. “We’ve been monitoring many reconnaissance flights over the Ukraine, but this one flew in a long oval track, a total of six hundred sixty miles, right through central Turkey. A simply incredible mission. It passed within sensor range of ten major Turkish and NATO military installations on one twenty-minute pass. Broad daylight, clear skies—it probably took home some great snapshots.”
“It made it out of there?” the President asked incredulously, his cigar almost falling in his lap. “How? Didn’t they have fighter patrols up?”
“There’s a NATO AWACS radar plane orbiting north of Ankara,” Freeman replied. “By the time the AWACS plane detected the Foxbat, two hundred miles over the Black Sea, and fighters could be scrambled to intercept it, it was over land. By the time the fighters were set up to pursue, it was in the turn and heading out. By the time the first fighter got a shot off at it, it was back out over the Black Sea. And the Foxbat flies almost as fast as a Sparrow missile. No ground air defense units ever got a shot off at it—didn’t even see it. It dropped leaflet canisters near Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey—the canisters missed by several miles—but it made a direct hit on Kayseri Air Base. They’re faxing a copy of the leaflets now.”
“Why?” the President asked, amazed. “Why did they do this? What in the hell are they trying to do?”
“It’s a clear warning, sir,” Freeman said. “More psychological than anything else, but we can�
��t dismiss it as trivial. The tactic’s psychological effect can be devastating. The crews see a bomb carrying leaflets one moment, but the next time—who knows?”
“Sorry I’m late, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense, Donald Scheer, said as he entered the Oval Office. “It feels as if I’m always here, but I always miss the helicopter.” He went right over to Freeman, who handed him the report sent over by the Pentagon courier. After reading it for a few moments, he commented, “It’s a warning not to get involved, Mr. President. We’re playing in the Russians’ backyard here, after all. They control the skies over the Black Sea, they have a Coalition-sized force already in place in the region, and they’re moving that force slowly south into the Ukraine. All the undamaged Ukrainian aircraft and base facilities are in Russian hands now. We’re outgunned and outmanned, and the Russians just wanted to remind us of that little fact.”
“It’s bullshit. It’s hubris. It’s grandstanding,” the President mused, as if talking it over with himself, calculating their strategy as if this were some election to be won. “Did they think this was going to be productive or something? Did they think this was going to make us stop what we’re doing?”
Was the President serious? Freeman was more than a bit worried. Here was a man who could do damn near anything he wanted. He had the power of the greatest industrial nation and the world’s finest military behind him—and yet he was concerned about a simple psy-op leaflet drop. The most devastating psychological effect of the Russian mission was obviously done right here … in this office.
“Mr. President, we’ve got a great many things we need to do,” Freeman insisted. “I think our first priority is to get the Cabinet and the National Security Council in here to go over some options I’ve drawn up. We need to contact President Dalon of Turkey and the other NATO ministers and get approval for forward basing for coalition forces. We should—”
“You want more military forces involved in this thing, General?” the President exclaimed. “Put more troops in Turkey, or Greece, or Italy? We put twelve planes into a small base in Turkey, and the Russians blew a supersonic fighter through there. What in the hell will they do if we move a couple thousand planes?”
“Sir, I’m worried about what they’ll do if we don’t respond,” Freeman said. “I’m worried about what President Dalon will say if we don’t contact him right now with a pledge of military support and additional weaponry to prevent any more overflights.”
“Philip, I can’t do it,” the President said wearily. “I don’t believe an increased military response is appropriate.”
“But we’d be leaving a valuable ally swinging in the wind, Mr. President,” insisted Freeman, disgusted by his Commander in Chief’s reluctance.
“The Turks did it to us by not informing us of their intention of helping the Ukraine,” the President pointed out.
“That was several months ago, sir, right after the Islamic Wars. When we found out what the Turks were doing, we were glad to have them take over. We wanted nothing more than to pull out and disengage from all military activities in the region, and we wanted Turkey to take charge of its own national defense. Well, in my opinion, now they need our help.”
“So why doesn’t Dalon just ask for it?” the First Lady asked pointedly. “He’s asked for defensive weapons, but he doesn’t want offensive weapons; he wants strike aircraft, but he doesn’t want Eagles or Falcons or the F-111s other than the reconnaissance models. Why not?”
Freeman was surprised at the First Lady’s use of military terminology—shit, she’d obviously been boning up—that was even scarier than the crisis. Well, almost. “Ma’am, the Turks are fiercely proud of their military forces—”
“A lot of good that does them,” she said dismissively, rolling her eyes.
“—and they’ll refuse to admit they need help in driving out their enemies. That’s seems to be standard cultural bias for any Middle Eastern country, and for Dalon to express any other view would be political and societal suicide. We have to respect that. But Dalon is a realist: he knows he can’t take on the Russians alone. He’ll gladly, but secretly, accept our help if we offer it—he will never request it.”
“So we get to name our own poison,” the President said bitterly. “We have to recommend aircraft that we want to send, troops we want to put in danger—and then we take the political heat when Dalon comes back and says he doesn’t need all this firepower, or his parliament blames us for escalating the conflict or putting Turkey in danger by sending more NATO troops into Turkey. We shouldn’t have to put up with this nonsense.”
“It’s the price we pay for membership in NATO and for wanting an ally like Turkey,” Freeman said. “Sir, we have to make a decision as soon as possible.”
The President turned away from Freeman and stared out one of the polycarbonate bullet-resistant windows. The First Lady went over to him, and the two spoke in low tones.
This was the most aggravating part of this White House, Freeman thought: he could have a staff of fifty professional analysts and staff assistants working all night on formulating a strong but measured deployment of forces to Turkey and the rest of NATO, but their work could—and had been in the past—be completely overruled by the Steel Magnolia. Sure, she was intelligent, and politically savvy, and in general she was fair and open-minded—but she was also strongly opinionated and tended to swing with the current popular political winds, especially those blowing from the liberal “left coast.”
“All right, all right, we’ll act on your recommendations,” the President said after several long moments. His wife did not look totally pleased—Freeman hated to think it, but in a way the First Lady’s displeasure was a major victory for him. “But I want the full NSC and the Congressional leadership in on this. It has not yet been proven to my satisfaction that the events in Turkey warrant a Desert Storm-type response, and I need more information. The current forces we’ve deployed in Turkey will have to stand for now.”
“Sir, I need to present the entire package to you, and I think I should do it before the leadership arrives,” Freeman said. “If it’s your decision to keep the 394th Air Battle Wing out there in Turkey by themselves, we must decide to what extent they can be involved in combat activities.”
“They can fire only when fired upon,” the First Lady interjected. “That seems fair.”
“Ma’am, the 394th is primarily a reconnaissance group,” Freeman said. “They take photos and analyze enemy radar systems from long range.”
“They have an offensive capability, General,” she fired right back.
“Which they should not use at all until a full combat-ready support group is deployed with them,” Freeman said. “Ma’am, the 394th is basically a support unit, not a combat unit unto itself. It flies in support of other strike units. Right now the only strike units it can attach itself to are three Turkish fighter units and a Ukrainian fighter-bomber group.”
“All right, General,” the President said after receiving a cautious nod of tentative approval from the First Lady, “I’ll look at your proposal and decide on which actions to authorize the 394th to do while they’re in Turkey. It won’t include combat—it’ll be purely defensive in nature, intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance, in support of territorial defense for our NATO allies and information-gathering for the Pentagon, but they’ll be able to defend themselves if fired upon over Turkish or international airspace or waters. The rest I’ll look at only after discussing the situation with the leadership—”
“And it includes the actions of the alert bombers,” the First Lady said. “I realize events and procedures are automatic when it comes to the alert force, but I still think this policy should be reevaluated, with all of our advisers present.” The President nodded his complete agreement.
One step at a time, Freeman thought—that was the way to deal with this President. He just hoped that things didn’t go to hell in Eastern Europe while the President—and his wife—tried to make up their minds
.
“The Joint Chiefs, my staff, and myself have a plan to do precisely that—support a joint Turkish-Ukrainian attack mission,” Freeman continued. “The Russian Fleet has been moving steadily southward in the Black Sea, supported by an A-50 radar plane. The fleet has created a strong naval and counterair barrier to try to block any air action by the Ukrainian Air Force, and now they’re a direct threat to Turkey. Colonel Tychina of the Ukrainian Air Force has devised a bold plan for dealing with the Russians, but they need our help.”
“What kind of help?” the First Lady asked skeptically.
The General hesitated, glancing at Scheer and the President. “Excuse me, sir, but as far as I’m aware, the First Lady is not cleared to hear this information.”
The lightning bolts that launched from the Steel Magnolia’s eyes—first at Freeman and then at her husband—could have lighted a city. “We don’t have time for that now, General,” the President said quickly. “Proceed.”
“Yes, sir,” Freeman said. He wished he had another witness in here to confirm the President’s orders, but his career was on thin ice anyway. “Sir, the number-one threat out there to Turkey is the Russian Fleet and the Russian radar plane, which can keep watch over the entire region. Our Vampire bombers can attack the shipborne surveillance and missile guidance radars—”
“It sounds like an offensive plan to me, General,” the First Lady interjected. “Who attacks first, us or them?”
Freeman was dumbstruck by the question. “Why … I hope we get a chance to get into attack position before the Russian Fleet can engage our bombers.”
“So we fire the first shots? I think that’s wrong, General,” she snapped.
“Ma’am, the first shots have already been fired,” Freeman said. “This is a response to Russian aggression. We wouldn’t allow this fleet within three hundred miles of the American coast, yet they’re less than sixty miles from the Turkish coast.”