He hoped that there would be time.
0150 hours, EST (1220 hours, India time), 26 March
Situation Room, the White House
For Admiral Magruder, the evening had dragged by with unmerciful deliberation. It had been four hours since the first report that Jefferson had been struck by a missile. An hour later the communications net had gone down, and for ten suspense-filled minutes, no one in the White House or the Pentagon had known what was going on half a globe away.
Then communications had been reestablished with Jefferson, and Washington learned that Vicksburg and Kreml had both been badly hit.
The President had come close to ordering Mongoose aborted. Magruder knew that, had seen it in the President’s face. When Captain Fitzgerald had come on the line, however, informing the President and the Joint Chiefs that Mongoose was still on, the admiral had watched some measure of tension ease from the President’s face. “I have this problem with my field commanders,” he’d said, grinning at Magruder. “They always tell their Commander in Chief what to do.”
“A piratical lot, Mr. President.”
“Indeed.” The President picked up a mug filled with steaming coffee, a potent brew concocted in the Secret Service office outside for just such occasions as this. “What do you think, Tom? Can they pull it off?”
“There’s a chance, sir. A good one.”
That had been two hours ago. The Indian aircraft had been beaten off.
The catapults on Jefferson had been repaired.
Now the strike force was over Highway 101, wreaking a special kind of hell on the Indian supply lines.
Members of the National Security Council had been coming and going all evening, most working in offices within the NSC complex in the White House basement. Victor Marlowe walked in, a folder in his hand. “Mr. President? These just came in from NPIC.” He glanced uncertainly at Magruder. “I … thought you’d better see them.”
“Do you want me to leave, Mr. President?”
“They’re T-K clearance, sir,” Marlowe said.
“That’s okay, Tom,” the President said. “Just excuse me a moment, will you?”
Magruder sat back, watching as the President leafed through what appeared to be a series of photographs. NPIC, Magruder knew, was the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the agency tasked with processing and producing photo intelligence from America’s chain of reconnaissance satellites. T-K, short for “Talent-Keyhole,” was the level of clearance necessary just to look at some of the photo imagery possible with the new breed of KH-12 satellites now in orbit. Magruder had heard the stories of reading newspapers over a man’s shoulder from two hundred miles up. Ridiculous, of course. And yet … “Oh my God.”
“Mr. President?”
The President looked up, his face ashen. He looked first at Magruder, then at Marlowe. “These were taken when?”
“Within the hour, sir. These are rushes. The tapes and the finished processing are on their way over now.”
“Mr. President,” Magruder said. “Perhaps I’d better wait outside while you-“
“He’s got T-K clearance, Vic. Now. Damn it, I need him!”
“Of course, sir.”
The President slid a photograph across the conference table to Magruder.
He picked it up, careful not to touch the glossy finish.
It looked like a black-and-white photograph taken, perhaps, from the roof of a building. Several men in obviously military uniforms were gathered around a bulky, oblong something partly blocked by the wing of an aircraft.
Magruder squinted at the part of the plane he could see. “It looks like an Air Force Falcon,” he said.
“Very good, Admiral,” Marlowe said. “An F-16 Fighting Falcon. But it’s not Air Force. Not our air force, at any rate.”
Magruder looked at the photo again. “Pakistan.”
“Bingo,” Marlowe said. “The weapon being loaded onto that aircraft is a fair imitation of a B-57 five-to ten-kiloton atomic bomb.”
“My God in heaven.”
“Why now?” Magruder asked. “In the middle of-“
“The battle has drawn Indian planes south,” Marlowe said quickly.
“Stripped their defenses. The Pakistanis probably see this as their one chance to get something in without having it be shot down.”
The President gestured toward the picture. “Where is this?”
“That was taken at a PAF base outside of Bahawaipur from one hundred seventy-five miles up,” Marlowe explained. “I have ground sources checking over there now, getting more data. I expect to hear more shortly.”
“I want to hear it the second you do, Vic. The second.”
“Yes, sir.”
The President took the photo from Magruder and stared at it. “Damn them,” he said. “Damn them!”
“I thought the Pakistanis promised to hold back on this,” Magruder said.
“Promised?” The President’s fist hit the desk. “You’re damn right they promised! Assurances were given-“
“They are fighting for their survival,” Marlowe said. He shrugged. “Or it may be a bluff. Another ‘message.’”
“I’ll give them a message,” the President said. “And her name is the Thomas Jefferson.” He looked at Magruder. “It seems, Admiral, that we must assume that the Pakistanis are loading an atomic device aboard one of their aircraft … and that they intend to use it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The President was quiet for a long moment. He rose from his chair, walked to the window, and stared for a time out across the Rose Garden, at the street lights of nighttime Washington. “Vic,” he said at last.
“I might have something we can try. Who do you have on tap at the American Embassy in New Delhi? Fast? I need to get a message passed on to the right person over there.”
“I think I have the man, Mr. President.”
The President turned to Magruder. “And I think now we’re going to need your people more than ever now.”
CHAPTER 28
1225 hours, 26 March
Intruder 500, west of Naya Chor
Lieutenant Commander Greene held the stick steady as warm air currents above the desert set the A-6 Intruder to bumping and shuddering. They were traveling at 400 knots, less than 500 feet above the hot gravel of the Thar Desert.
“Gold Strike Five-double-oh,” he called. “Coming up on Point Charlie.
The clock is running.”
“Copy, Gold Strike, Five-double-oh,” the airborne controller on board the Hawkeye circling a hundred miles to the south replied. “Roger your Point Charlie. Good hunting, Jolly!”
“Roger, Victor Tango. Thanks. Five-double-nuts out.”
Point Charlie was the village of Naya Chor itself, a collection of whitewashed walls and low buildings sprawled along the straight slash through the desert, marking the railroad and highway that crossed the Thar Desert from Jodhpur in India to Hyderabad on the banks of the Indus. Jolly banked the Intruder left, following the road that, in most places, was nothing more sophisticated than packed gravel.
Smoke curled into the sky from the wreckage of a vehicle close beside the railroad tracks. To Jolly’s experienced eye, it looked like a ZSU with most of the broad, open turret peeled back like a steel-petaled flower. Nearby was the broken ruin of an SA-3 Goa launcher, the six-wheeled utility truck upended in the gravel and overturned by a near miss from an air-to-ground rocket. It was evident that Lucky Strike had passed through the area minutes before, smashing anything that looked like a SAM battery or antiaircraft vehicle.
Desert sped past on either side as the Intruder raced west. “Gold Strike Five-zero-zero, this is Five-one-one.” That was Coot Barswell, another member of VA-89.
“Copy, Coot. Go ahead.”
“We’re on your six, Jolly, range five miles. Save some of the good stuff for us, will ya?”
“Eat our dust, Coot!” He laughed. “No guarantees.” He switched to ICS, necessary for clarity even tho
ugh his BN was sitting right beside him. “How we doin’, Chucker?”
“Range to primary, twelve miles,” Chucker replied. “I’m getting some ground radar now.”
“The primary” had been spotted by a recon satellite at dawn, an enormous ground convoy moving west along the highway toward Naya Chor. It had passed the village earlier that morning, and by now was well on the way to Hyderabad, where Indian and Pakistani forces were gearing up for a major battle. Much of the convoy had been hidden by clouds of dust, but the satellite’s infrared scanners had suggested that the convoy included as many as thirty or forty large trucks: huge Maz-537 flatbed trailers with tanks and heavy equipment, smaller trucks with ammunition and troops, and the all-important tankers carrying fuel or water.
The threat light blinked on, and Jolly heard the warning tone of an enemy lock-on.
“SAM!” Chucker warned. “I see it! Two o’clock low!”
Jolly glanced right and saw it, a white streak rising from the desert.
The Hornets could not possibly have suppressed all of the SAM sites and launchers.
He pressed the chaff button five times in rapid succession and eased the stick forward, letting the Intruder settle closer to the ground, but he kept the strike aircraft steadily on course. As the chaff clouds expanded above and behind the plane, the threat warning stopped its incessant chirping.
“I think we lost ‘em.” Jolly’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering against his seat harness. He kept one eye on the missile as it rose past the starboard wing, traveling at Mach 3 a mile away.
His BN was leaning forward now, his face buried in the hood that shrouded his radar scope. “I’ve got a lock. Solid return … some serious heavy metal up there. Looks like the convoy. Come left a bit … more … there! Hold it!”
Chucker flipped a switch and Jolly’s VDI screen shifted to Attack Mode.
Graphic symbols drifted across the display, outlining possible targets illuminated by the Intruder’s radar, showing position, drift angle, and steering corrections. Numbers flickered off the last few thousands of meters to the release point. Speed was 490 knots.
“Going up,” Jolly reported. He nudged the Intruder back up to five hundred feet, the minimum distance required for arming a Mark 82 General Purpose bomb.
“Gettin’ close,” Chucker reported. “Your pickle is hot.”
Jolly closed his thumb over the release switch, his eye on the targeting pipper on his VDI. The Intruder could be set to release its weapons load by computer, but in a case like this, when the target was strung out over a large area and of unknown composition, Jolly preferred to release manually. A surging, exultant excitement gripped him. Any second now … Suddenly, the empty desert below was transformed into a nightmare out of the Los Angeles Freeway. Trucks, half-tracks, troop carriers, and tanks were crowded on the road or parked alongside. Ahead, the girders of a bridge stretched above the banks of the Nara River.
“Gold Strike Five-double-oh!” Jolly cried. “Bombs away!”
The A-6 Intruder could carry a maximum ordnance load of 15,000 pounds — in this case thirty 500-lb Mark 82 GP bombs. It never failed to amaze Jolly that, during World War II, the immortal B-17 had carried a maximum bomb load of only 17,600 pounds … and that was only for extremely short-range missions. Typical mission ordnance loads for the old Flying Fortress were only 4000 pounds, less than a third of what the Intruder carried.
And the A-6 Intruder could place its high-explosive eggs with far greater precision than the B-17 ever could, and from an altitude of only a few hundred feet.
Thirty quarter-ton bombs spilled away from the Intruder’s hardpoints, a spray of deadly, finned cigars triggered to release in five groups of six along an elongated footprint across the center of the convoy. The retarder fins on each were designed to hold the bomb back just long enough to allow the A-6 to escape the fragments.
The bridge flashed below the A-6 as Jolly pulled back on the stick.
There was heavy congestion on the bridge itself, probably brought on by a breakdown or a traffic accident that had held up the whole column. He almost imagined he could hear the honking of horns, the curses of the drivers … The detonations were like the flashes of a string of Chinese firecrackers, but silent … at least at first. Then the sound caught up with the speeding Intruder, an avalanche of raw, searing, booming noise, thunderclap upon thunderclap rolling across the desert on shock waves that rippled out from the blasts, driving walls of swirling sand before them. Jolly watched the display in his rearview mirror, thirty blasts in the space of less than two seconds. Black smoke, boiling orange fireballs rising like deadly trees, a pall of burning clouds spreading across the desert in a suffocating blanket.
And the explosions continued. White streamers curled out from the epicenter of destruction, flares like Roman candles. An ammunition truck had been hit … and the explosion added to the devastation that was hurling entire trucks, flaming and tumbling end for end, into the sky.
“My God,” Jolly said, awe softening his voice. “My God …”
“Gold Strike Leader, this is Five-one-one. God, Jolly, what are you doing up there? Looks like you just trashed the whole Indian army.”
“Uh … rog, Coot.” He felt none of the earlier urge to banter. “Save your load for the bridge. It’s … easy pickings.”
“Copy that, Jolly. Thanks. Oh, God look at them burn!”
With the drag from the bomb load gone, the A-6 was racing now at almost 600 knots. Antiaircraft fire, scattered and ineffective, was reaching toward him from various sites among the marshes and canals that marked the western edge of the desert. A pair of ZSU-23s that had already crossed the river swung quad-mounted cannons toward the sky and stabbed at them as they hurtled past overhead.
“We’re outa here, Chucker,” he said. The elation he’d felt before was gone. “Job’s over. Let’s go home.”
The Intruder banked left, heading south once more.
1235 hours, 26 March
Tomcat 200
Tombstone broke left, bleeding speed with his air brakes until his F-14’s computer brought the swing wings forward. At less than two hundred fifty knots, he held the turn, left wing pointed at the blur of golden sand below, right wing pointed at the heavens.
“He’s still coming!” Hitman called. “Stoney, he’s still coming!”
Tombstone hadn’t gotten close enough to see the Mig-29’s number, but he had a strange feeling he was facing that same Indian pilot who had come close to killing him more than once already. It was a coincidence … but a small one. Good pilots survived longer than bad ones in the tangle of modern aerial combat … and good pilots tended to seek one another out in the closest thing the twentieth century had to a Medieval joust, knight against knight.
The insistent chirp of his radar threat warning sounded in his headset.
“Tombstone! He’s locked! He’s going to take his shot!”
“Hang on, Hitman! Just a little further around …”
“Launch! Stoney! He’s launched!”
“Chaff!”
“Chaff away!”
He’d deliberately gone into a hard, slow-speed turn directly across the Indian Mig’s line of fire, hoping the other man would fire despite the difficult angle. Picturing the radar-homer’s path in his mind, Tombstone waited another three beats … then rammed the stick back to the right, breaking into a hard split-S. His left hand hit the wing control override, folding the wings back to the sixty-eight degree combat sweep, then slammed the throttles forward to Zone Five burner.
The roar of the twin engines kicked him in the spine like a sledgehammer, driving the breath from his lungs.
Tunnel vision closed in. His HUD readout showed seven Gs … eight … nine …!
His whole body hurt, and speech, even breathing, was impossible. He knew he was on the thin, ragged edge of blacking out, but he held the turn as his compass reading spun through the numbers … one-ninety … two hundred … two-ten … The threat warning was
off. The enemy missile had been decoyed by the chaff … or simply missed, unable to correct for Tombstone’s wild maneuver.
And then the other plane was ahead, crossing from left to right with his belly facing Tombstone’s F-14. The Indian Mig had held his own left turn a hair too long and was still in the break. Tombstone had snapped around in the unexpected maneuver and slid into position for a launch.
It was a tough shot … as tough as the one the Indian flyer had tried a moment earlier.
Blinking against blurred vision, willing the pain in his throbbing head to subside, Tombstone dropped his targeting pipper across the Mig. No … too close, even for Sidewinders. He would have to go for guns.
The Indian was rolling toward him now … had seen him, less than a thousand yards away. Tombstone turned to keep with him, letting the target reticle lead the Mig.
Tombstone’s sharp eyes picked out the hull number: 401.
He also spotted something else. There were no missiles slung beneath the Mig’s wings. The radar-homer he’d just popped at Tombstone had been his last one. Possibly there’d not been time to rearm when he’d landed earlier. Or possibly he’d loosed five of his six AAMS earlier in the fight.
Mig and Tomcat closed with one another. At two hundred yards, Tombstone could see the other pilot, his helmet visor back. He was making no effort to escape but was watching Tombstone’s approach with what could only be described as professional interest.
The guy knew Tombstone had him and was waiting to die.
Tombstone shook his head. What was it Army had always said. Chivalry gets you dead.
True enough, and the Mig pilot still had his cannon. Still, there came a time when there was simply no point in further slaughter. The Indian Mig pilot was an opponent now, not an enemy … and there was a sharp difference between the two. Tombstone waggled his wings in salute … then broke left, passing behind the other plane close enough to feel the shudder of his jet stream.
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