Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  Lindstrom didn’t move his head out from under the Subaru’s hood. ‘Did you fill her up?’ He checked the lead to the distributor.

  “Course I did. I’ve tried just about everything to get it started and I’m getting nowhere fast.’ Annie folded her arms and stayed on the step.

  ‘Be with you in a minute’ Lindstrom checked along the bulkhead in front of the windshield. ‘Why, it looks like you’ve got a fuse gone there. That’s what the trouble is…’

  Laura walked across the wide baked-earth street. ‘Did Carl say where he was goin’?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Annie. ‘He just grabbed his shotgun and took off with those three boys up towards Cohagen.’

  ‘Oh…’ Laura looked puzzled. ‘He didn’t say anythin’ much but I had the feelin’ somethin’ had gone wrong. Listen, is your phone okay? Mine just went dead.’

  ‘I’ll go and check. Maybe the Army cut it… Did you hear that, Sid? Laura’s phone’s out.’

  ‘Be with you in a minute,’ said Lindstrom. He turned to the driver. ‘See that? Every goddam fuse has blown clean out. Now just how do you suppose that happened?’

  CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

  Rizzik, the CIA man running the base camp, sent one of the diesels up to the Ridge with a message for Wedderkind. He was in the command hut. He looked at the message and passed it without comment to Brecetti.

  It read: ‘All electric power failed at 9 A.M. No radio or telephone contact with Glasgow AFB or Miles City. Await instructions.’

  Brecetti passed it to Lovell. ‘Maybe you’d better let the others know about this.’

  Lovell read the message. ‘Mmm. I take it this means we now have an even larger cutoff zone?’

  ‘It does,’ said Wedderkind.

  ‘That should present us with a few interesting problems.’ Lovell pocketed the message and left.

  ‘Sixty-nine point one miles?’

  ‘Give or take a few yards,’ said Brecetti. ‘Do you want to put ten dollars on it?’

  ‘No, thanks. You’ve cleaned me out too often.’ Wedderkind led Brecetti into Allbright’s empty office and studied the large map on the wall. Wedderkind checked the scale of the map. ‘We may be in luck, but only for the moment. It looks as if the edge of the new zone will still be on the north bank of the Yellowstone.’

  ‘Leaving Miles City in the clear.’

  ‘Yes – but only just.’ Wedderkind looped one end of his handkerchief around a finger and the other around a ballpoint pen. He measured off thirty-five miles and drew a circle around Crow Ridge.

  As predicted, the edge of the circle fell short of Miles City but overlapped the airport and several small settlements between Miles City and Forsyth. The biggest place within the enlarged cutoff zone was Cohagen, about twenty-five miles north of Crow Ridge. Population, two hundred and fifty.

  Brecetti tapped the name on the map. ‘They must be wondering what hit them.’

  ‘So must Bob. He was due at Broken Mill at ten minutes past nine.’

  ‘My God, yes – of course. Would the plane be all right?’

  ‘It depends which part he was flying over. I saw some really desolate country south of the Fort Peck reservoir. One of the pilots told me it could take two days to walk out of the area. Provided you land in one piece. It’ll be a light aircraft so the control problem won’t be acute. All they’ll lose is their power and instruments. The weather’s good. They should get down okay.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better send out a search party?’

  ‘It’s probably already gone, but we can check with the base camp,’ said Wedderkind. ‘They’ll have sent a diesel up to Broken Mill. Those cadets are pretty bright. I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t already got it together. Do you want to drive down with me?’

  NATIONAL GUARD ARMORY/MILES CITY/MONTANA

  Up until 9 A.M. Sunday morning, Army Colonel Reese, commander of the airborne unit spearheading the evacuation, had been pretty well pleased with the way things had been going. All the ranches and farmsteads in the designated area, had been contacted during Saturday morning. They had all been briefed on the situation, and arrangements had been made over the transport each family would require to move their personal belongings, furniture, and livestock. Estimates had been made of the number of military personnel required to assist in loading and moving all transportable items. Departure times had been scheduled. People living in wheeled trailer homes had already been towed clear of the fire zone and resited in the camping and recreation areas north of Jordan. Checkpoints were being set up and detour signs posted. Eight helicopters were patrolling the area and liaising with the ground units. With their normal radio equipment rendered inoperative by the fade-out, the Army was maintaining contact with medium-wave sets. Since anyone with a transistor radio could listen in, they were using cryptic code words, transmitting on one channel and receiving on another. Sunday was going to be Colonel Reese’s big day. The remaining evacuees would be packed and waiting for the Army trucks that were already on their way. The ground and air units would move into position, sealing off the 1,250-square-mile area. The Air Force units and CIA personnel would leave Crow Ridge. The stage would be set for the final phase of Operation CAMPFIRE.

  By 09:45 hours, it was clear that the Pentagon’s plans had begun to misfire. Colonel Reese tore up the laconic progress report he had planned to send to General Wills and sent a more urgent signal to Washington. It read: ‘All radio contact lost with CAMPFIRE units north of Miles City. Air and ground transportation in same area inoperative due to unknown electromechanical fault. Telephone links severed. Please advise.’

  To his second-in-command Colonel Reese said, ‘Round up all the horses you can find in Miles City.’

  USAF SPECIAL WEAPONS CENTER/KIRTLAND AFB/NEW MEXICO

  At about the same time Connors was bracing himself for a forced landing on the banks of the Little Dry, the two-seat F-4H Phantom bringing General Allbright from Nebraska touched down at the desert airbase east of Albuquerque and popped its striped, slatted dragchute. Allbright dropped into the Base Commander’s office, then drove over to the far side of the airfield where the two huge B-52s selected for Operation CAMPFIRE were stationed next to a guarded bunker containing the specially-modified nuclear bombs.

  Known as SAC’s ‘long rifle’, the B-52 first entered service in June 1955. Now, over three decades later, it still formed the backbone of SAC’s manned bomber force. One hundred and fifty-five feet long and with a wing span of 185 feet, eight engines, and a tall tail like a jib of a windjammer, the B-52 had gone from model B to H, each variant getting heavier, flying farther and faster, and capable of carrying more clout to Mother Russia. Firebreak One and Two were Model Gs, built by Boeing at Wichita.

  Alongside the aircraft was a temporary trailer encampment housing the two six-man air crews and the ground crews that had flown in to keep the planes serviced and ready for the special assignment that had kept them separated from the rest of the huge base for the last five weeks.

  Alternately winners and runners-up in the last two annual SAC bombing competitions, both crews had been personally briefed by the President, Fraser, and Allbright on the purpose and importance of the mission and, as Connors had suspected, had been prepared to take out the Ridge in the event of a sudden crisis that might have made evacuation impossible.

  The waiting period had been spent in intensive practice bombing runs over a simulated target deep inside the White Sands missile range near Alamogordo to enable the bombardiers to perfect their handling of the obsolete but now-vital optical bombsight. Every day, as Allbright had told the President, they had flown over Crow Ridge without anyone below knowing they were there. Swallowed up in the unbroken blue of the sky at over forty thousand feet, the B-52’s approach is silent, and invisible to the naked eye.

  At 10 A.M., Clayson came on the line from Washington and told Allbright about the enlarged cutoff zone that Reese had reported – without knowing what it was. Allbright summoned the two air crews and th
eir crew chiefs, the SAC controllers, and the Air Force engineers who had modified the arming mechanism of the bombs. Dressed in an impeccable flying suit, with a blue scarf around his throat, he sat on the edge of the table and watched the twenty-six men file into the operations trailer. Most of them he’d known personally before Operation CAMPFIRE, and since then he’d made a point of getting to know the others. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly, yet tinged with respect.

  Allbright stood up. ‘Okay, sit down, gentlemen. I’m glad to see the desert air has done you some good. Anyone who wants a permanent posting to this sandpit should see me afterward. Now – I’ve just got word of a new situation which has a bearing on our mission, so let’s start with a quick look at the overall picture.’

  He picked up a stick of chalk and turned to the blackboard. ‘TARGET – CRUSOE… and as you now know, COMMISSAR… TIME – 5 P.M., twenty-fifth and 6 A.M., twenty-sixth…’ Underneath, Allbright wrote ‘FADE-OUT – GLOBAL. We’re now beginning to lose medium-wave transmissions. If the conditions of the previous fade-out are duplicated, we can expect total loss of all radio communications by next Sunday. Telephone line transmissions are being hit by static but they are still the best alternative method of communication.

  ‘MAG FIELD – HEAVY DISTURBANCE… Anyone who’s tried to find his way around with a compass will already know about this. Reports coming in from geophysical research organizations indicate that the whole of the Earth’s magnetic field is temporarily disoriented. We’ve also recently had confirmation that there is, at present, a magnetic south sub-pole centred on Crow Ridge. There is a similar polarization around the second site in Kazakhstan. Up to now, INS has spared us from the navigational problems posed by these disturbances. Apart from that – and the fact that there are no civilian airlines operating – everything is perfectly normal – ’

  There was some quiet laughter and muttered asides from his audience.

  ‘Except in our neck of the woods,’ continued Allbright. He wrote ‘CUTOFF ZONE’ under the other headings, then pointed to the words with the chalk, ‘Last Wednesday, when the fade-out returned to wipe out our radar and UHF/VHF frequencies, the radius of the cutoff zone around Crusoe jumped from zero to 3.5 miles. At approximately 0900 hours this morning, that radius increased to thirty-five miles…’

  As Allbright wrote the figures up on the blackboard, he heard a rustle of consternation behind him. He turned to face the roomful of men. ‘The Russians confirm that the same conditions exist around Commissar.’

  Colonel Rick Westland, Commander of Firebreak One, leaned forward. ‘Does that mean that there’s a total loss of electromotive power within that entire area?’

  ‘Above two hundred and fifty microvolts,’ said Allbright. ‘Crusoe is now enclosed in an electrically dead circular zone, seventy miles in diameter, and rising in a semicircle to a height of thirty-five miles.’ He moved to a clear part of the blackboard and drew a semicircle standing on a baseline and put a dot in the middle of the line. ‘So, gentlemen, the question is – without power from the generators or the backup batteries, and all your aircraft electrical systems inoperative, can you still fly through this new cutoff zone and hit your target with the required degree of accuracy?’

  There was a moment’s uneasy silence, then the air crews started muttering among themselves and soon the SAC controllers in the front row turned around and started putting in their two cents’ worth. When they reached a consensus, Colonel William ‘Smokey’ Stover stood up.

  ‘Okay, Smokey, what’s the verdict?’

  ‘It’s a tough ball of wax. Let’s start with the good news. The engines will keep running, and so will the engine-driven fuel pumps. Basically they’re gravity fed so there’s no problem. The other EDPs will give us hydraulic power and we’ll have the PCUs. And that’s about it. The bad news – first, we lose all the flight instruments except for the standby ASI, VSI, and pressure-sensitive altimeter – not very accurate. Autopilot will be out, plus main electric trim. We’ll have to hand-trim. No intercom between crew stations, we’ll have to use sign language – that’s going to be sensational on the run-in to the target. All the engine instruments will be out so we’ll have no idea how they’re running. There’ll be no engine overheat warning light and no engine fire extinguishers. No warning lights of any kind and in fact, we’re not going to be able to switch anything on or off. No fuel booster pumps, which we need to prevent engine surge at altitude – and best of all, if we do flame out, we can’t restart the engines. Oh – we have one other cockpit instrument working, our E.2B compass. But that’s only accurate to ten degrees and with the mag field distortions, it’s shot to hell. The real pig – we lose our Inertial Navigation System once we hit the zone. The only way we can keep on course is to map-read our way over those last thirty-five miles – from forty thousand feet…’ Stover sat down.

  ‘Is it hard to pick out the Ridge from that height?’ asked Allbright.

  ‘Well, sir, it depends on the atmospheric conditions.’ It was the bombardier of Firebreak One who had stood up. ‘Above twenty thousand, the whole of that area becomes a solid slab of OD.’

  ‘But don’t the trees on the Ridge help?’

  ‘Yes, sir, they do, but as I’ve said, it depends on the conditions. If there is any haze or low patchy cloud you’d have to abort.’

  ‘How about bombing from a lower altitude?’ asked one of the SAC controllers.

  ‘Oh, fantastic,’ said Stover. ‘A zero-length fuse on fifty kilotons from under forty thousand? That’s gonna roast our fannies.’

  ‘How about somebody flying a desk in at low level?’ asked an unidentifiable voice from the back.

  ‘Okay, then put in a delayed-action fuse.’ The SAC controller looked a little miffed.

  ‘Too risky,’ said one of the USAF engineers. ‘We’ve gone right back to basics with this weapon. A time fuse is just one more thing that could go wrong.’

  ‘And it would take too long,’ said the man next to him.

  ‘So how does that leave us?’ asked Allbright.

  ‘Crabbing sideways, sir.’ Westland, the Firebreak One commander, stood up. ‘We don’t have an artificial horizon, or a turn-and-bank indicator, no Doppler to measure drift. We can fly – but how do we fly accurately enough to give you a CEP of under fifty yards?’

  ‘Can’t you hold it on a heading with the E.2B compass?’

  ‘No, sir, the magnetic field deviations are making the E.2B oscillate from side to side.’

  ‘Got it… that’s quite a problem.’

  One of the engineers who hadn’t spoken stood up. ‘It sounds crazy, but I think we’re gonna have to rig up one of those old open cockpit speaking tubes for the pilot and the bombardier.’

  ‘Remember we’re on oxygen,’ said Stover. ‘We also need to change the instruments by the aiming panel.’

  Electronically guided to the target, the B-52’s bomb load was normally unloaded with clinical precision on to a radar image of the target. It enabled the aircraft to bomb accurately through solid cloud, but even in clear weather the crews rarely, if ever, saw what their bombs were hitting.

  Firebreak One and Two had been fitted with a perspex panel under the nose so that the bombardier could use the optical bombsight Beside it had been fixed an electrically-powered altimeter and an air speed indicator. They now had to be changed for the older types of instruments that worked solely by air pressure. Everyone was aware that the whole precisely-planned operation was rapidly becoming a hit-or-miss affair.

  ‘There is one way around some of these problems, sir.’ It was Joe Mischak, electronic warfare officer aboard Firebreak Two. With none of his gear working and nothing to do, he probably had had a little more time to think. ‘We could mark the target with two crossed lines of flares, and lay a line of flares to guide us on the run-in – and also beyond the target to give the pilots something to fly on.’

  ‘That’ll work,’ said Stover. ‘But who’s going to stay behind and light them? The
Crusoe Project people are supposed to move out by midday tomorrow. I don’t know of any flares that can stay lit for, what – seventeen hours? Unless you’re planning to use the Olympic flame.’

  ‘Why not? You could use oildrums,’ said Mischak.

  ‘Never last,’ said Westland.

  ‘And if they did, they’d cover the whole fuckin’ area in smoke,’ said Stover. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘That’s okay, Smokey,’ said Allbright. ‘Total freedom of expression is what this thing’s all about. Mischak’s idea will work. Let someone else worry about who’s going to light them. The roads are going to be empty, it’s not going to take all that long to drive twenty miles.’

  Mischak stood up, vindicated. ‘You could link the flares in series so that as one burned out, it would ignite the next. That would give everyone time to move out.’

  The bombardier of Firebreak One stood up again. ‘Could we add some white smoke pots to give us a last-minute check on wind speed and direction to help us calculate drift?’

  Allbright nodded. His eyes searched out the other bombardier. ‘Are you happy about the arrangements?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It should put us in there with an even chance.’

  ‘We need better odds than that,’ said Allbright. ‘We may only get one shot at this,’

  Stover stood up. ‘Sir, we’ve been coming on strong with a lot of negative waves but it’s only because a lot of stress has been laid on hitting this thing right between the eyes. On behalf of both crews, I just want to say that as long as that aeroplane’ll fly, we’re gonna press on in and do our damnedest to lay one on him.’

  ‘If I’d doubted that for one moment,’ said Allbright, ‘none of you would be here.’

  There was a knock on the door of the trailer and an SAC officer came in with a loaded slide projector. ‘I’ve got the pictures you were expecting, sir.’

  ‘That’s good. Set them up on that stand at the back.’ Allbright pulled down the projection screen in front of the blackboard. ‘Blinds, please.’