He pointed further along the route. “Other messages will include launch reports from the post-strike and each recovery base: NUDET—nuclear detonation—position reports, GLASS EYE combat damage reports, severe weather reports, continental-defense-zone entry reports and sortie recovery and regeneration reports.”
James lowered his pointer and stepped away from the charts. “SIOP communications are extremely important, and the SAC aircraft involved with the execution of our Single Integrated Operations Plan are a front-line asset in keeping the Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Command Authority advised of the progress worldwide of any conflict. We feel we have the world’s most up-to- date and survivable communications networks, but of course it’s no good unless each aircrewman uses it effectively.” He looked around the empty briefing room. “That concludes my annual Mission Certification briefing, Colonel Adams. Any questions, sir?”
“Not bad, not bad—for a pilot,” came a voice from the back of the room. Kenneth frowned at the man who came in now and began to pack up the briefing charts and diagrams.
“Kiss my ass, Murphy,” Ken said. “It was a perfect briefing-even for a navigator.”
Captain Brian Murphy, James’ offensive-systems officer on his B-i crew, had to admit it. “Yeah, it was, Ken. No doubt about it. But why are you spending so much time on that stuff? On an Emergency War Order certification, briefing is done by the radar nav or the defensive-systems operator. Not by the pilots.”
“I heard Adams likes to hit his mission-ready crews with little surprises,” Ken said. “His favorite is mixing up the usual briefing routines to make sure each guy on the crew is familiar with the other guy’s responsibilities. He likes to hit navs with pilot questions, too—how well do you know your abort-decision matrices?”
Murphy shrugged. “I’ll bone up on that stuff before the briefing tomorrow. These briefings are bull anyway... Coming to the Club with us for lunch?”
“In a while, it’s only eleven-thirty. I’ll meet you there at noon.”
“Man, you are so dedicated.”
“Knock it off.”
“No, really, I mean it,” James’ crew navigator said. “You’re always studying. You know your stuff backwards and forwards, and you know everyone else’s too. If it’s not EWO communications procedures it’s security or avionics or computers or target study. You got your hands in everything.”
“That’s my job, Murph.”
“Well, at least you’re getting some reward for it. Making commander of a B-i Excalibur in less than two years was moon- talk until you came along. They’re saying you might make flight commander in a few weeks. You’re really burning up the program.”
James slapped his pencil down on the table, smiled. “You’re buttering me up, man. Okay, okay, I’ll buy lunch. Just let me finish.”
“Hey, hotshot, can’t you take a compliment? I know attaboys are rare around here, but I think you can still recognize one.” James raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Thanks, Murph, but I’m not doing anything special here. I do this stuff because it’s my job and because it really interests me, and because my ass will be grass if I don’t learn this communications stuff by tomorrow morning.”
“Message received. I’m outta here.” Murphy stood and headed for the door, then stopped. “You’re an Academy grad, aren’t you?”
“Right.”
“Top of your class, from what I heard.”
James looked at Murphy. “Get to the point, Murph.”
“I thought so, I just want to know why you chose B-is. You could have had your pick of any hot jet in the inventory, but you picked B-is.”
“I liked them. I always did. They’re big and sexy—just like your wife ...”
“Asshole.”
“. . . and I still have a stick and afterburners and Mach-one speed like a fighter. I hated it when Carter canceled them. I think they should build another hundred of them. At least. Answer your question?”
Murphy nodded. “But you seem a little, I don’t know, out of place.”
“Out of place?” His stomach tightened as he looked closely at his radar nav.
“Yeah. Like B-is are just a jumping-off place for you. I mean, you’re not advertising it or anything, but somehow, old buddy, I get the feeling you’re on your way somewhere. Care to tell?” Ken James forced himself to smile. This big Irishman was hitting too close. “Just between you and me and the fencepost?”
“Sure, man.”
“I did get an assignment, I think. When I filled out my last dream sheet I was sort of... well, daydreaming. Appropriate, huh? Anyway, I put down that I was interested in the High Technology Advanced Weapons Center—”
“HAWC! You got an assignment to Dreamland? I don’t believe it! Do they actually give assignments there?”
“I didn’t think they did, either. Like I said, it was a long shot. And I don’t have any assignment yet. But I did get a letter back from the deputy commander, a Brigadier General Ormack. He sounded interested. It was sort of a don’t-call-me-Tll-call- you letter, but at least I got an answer back.”
“I don’t believe it,” Murphy said. “Dreamland. You realize that all of the world’s hottest jets and weapons in the past thirty years went through there? Those guys fly planes and test weapons out there that are years ahead of anything that exists in the real world. And you're going to be assigned there—”
“I said I don’t have an assignment, Murph. So keep this under your hat, okay? Besides, how do you know so much about Dreamland?”
“I don’t know much of anything, except that anybody who even accidentally overflies Dreamland gets sent to our version of the old Gulag Archipelago. Every now and then you hear about an ex-Los Angeles Center air-traffic controller telling stories about Mach-six fighters or planes that fly vertically to fifty thousand feet over Dreamland. It’s got to be the assignment of a lifetime.”
“Well, like I said, keep all this under your hat,” James said. “Now take off. I want to polish my briefing before we do our dry runs this afternoon.”
After Murphy left, James got up from his seat, went to the door, locked it, put a chair in front of it. He returned to the small pile of red-covered books and manuals on the desk in the front of the conference room and selected one marked: “COMBAT CREW EMERGENCY WAR ORDER COMMUNICATIONS PROCEDURES—TOP secret/noforn/siop/wivns.” It was the master document used by all of the American strategic combat forces all over the world—aircraft, submarines, intercontinental missile sites, and command posts—outlining every one of their communication sources and methods, procedures, frequencies, timing and locations of the nation’s domestic and overseas communications facilities. The hieroglyphics after the title warned that the document was top secret, not releasable to foreign nationals, part of the Single Integrated Operations Plan—the master plan on how the United States and its allies would conduct “the next world war.” This particular volume was dated 1 October 1994, some two months from now, because it belonged to the new SIOP revision scheduled to take place at that time. The procedures in that manual would be used by all strategic forces for the next twelve months afterward.
It made it convenient for him and the KGB, Ken thought, to have to do these once-a-year briefings for the wing commander. The annual Mission Certification briefings were required by law. The wing commander of each SAC base with nuclear missions had to certify to the Commander-in-Chief of SAC, and he in turn to the President of the United States, that each crewman knew precisely what his duties were in case the SIOP was “implemented”—a euphemism for the so-called unthinkable, the declaration of World War Three. Normally the certification briefings were given once, when a crewman became mission-ready. But the SIOP was revised each year, reflecting new rules, new tactics, and so every year each crewman had to dig out the changed books, study them, then brief the wing commander on the revised mission. The top-secret books were trotted out for the certification, studied for a week, then locked away
, usually never to be seen again except for base-wide exercises or inspections. The opportunities were rare to have such free access to these manuals, and Ken had to work fast.
He opened the manual to section four, “ELF, LF, HF and SATCOM SIOP Frequencies and Broadcast Schedules,” and propped the pages open with a couple of books. This section detailed all of the frequencies used by aircraft and submarines to broadcast and receive coded messages from SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with what time of the day these broadcasts would be made. Anyone knowing these frequencies and times could jam or disrupt them, specific broadcasts could be intercepted and decoded. The crew charts had stickers that had only one frequency, but this book had all the frequencies for the nuclear strike force of the United States.
James unzipped a leg pocket of his flight suit and took out what looked like a thick-barreled marking pen. Moving his chair so his body would cast no shadows across the pages, he twisted and pulled the cap, held the device a couple of feet over the pages, and pressed the pocket clip to activate the shutter.
Murphy was close, James thought as he worked. He would have liked to get assigned to F-15S or F-i6s, or the new F-117 Stealth fighter unit, but he went where Moscow told him to go, and that was where he could learn as much as possible about the new B-i’s nuclear-strike mission. Dreamland was the most secret base in the country. B-i Excalibur bombers were fine, but he would give anything to get his hands on the United States newest fighters.
Two minutes later Kenneth James had finished photographing the entire chapter and its accompanying appendices with the tiny microdisk camera. He wrapped the device in a handkerchief to help protect it, then zipped it safely away in his leg pocket, out of sight so no one would be tempted to ask to borrow his “pen.”
Satisfied, he packed up his charts and books and turned them back to the vault custodian. He would put the camera in his car outside the alert facility to prevent discovery during one of the commander’s frequent no-notice locker searches on the alert pad, then deliver it to the prearranged drop point for his KGB contact from St. Louis after he got off seven-day alert.
Dreamland, Nevada
Monday, 3 December 1994, 0730 PDT (1020 EDT)
Ken James was strapped securely into a stiff, uncomfortable steel chair, wrists, ankles and chest bound by heavy leather straps. His head was immobilized by a strong steel beam. The room where he lay on the rack was dimly lit, buzzing with the sound of power transformers and smelling of the ozone created by electronic relays and microcircuits. Two men in Air Force blue fatigues rechecked his bonds, making sure they were extra tight; one of them adjusted a tiny spotlight directly onto James’ right eyeball, smiling as James tried to squint against the glare. The sergeant knew there was nothing James could do to him.
James had been sweating in the steel chair for nearly an hour, the two technicians hovering over him, before another man entered the room. Tall and lanky, he looked considerably older than his mid-thirties, thanks to a bald head and a few stray shocks of gray hair that seemed to be haphazardly stuck onto his skull. He spoke briefly with the techs, then walked over to the rack and inspected the fitting and bonds. He stuck his face close to James, smiled and said, “Now, Captain James, I’ll ask you once more—where were you on the afternoon of August eleventh?”
In fact, Ken James was photographing top-secret documents in a vault at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Very funny, Dr. Carmichael. Now can we get on with this?”
“Couldn’t help it, Ken,” Alan Carmichael, the white-coated researcher said. “Seeing you trussed up gives this place the look of some futuristic interrogation chamber.”
Which was precisely what Maraklov was thinking himself. He was wearing a heavy suit made of a thick metallic fabric. The suit had several thick cables and conduits sewed into it that ran all through his arms, legs, feet, hands and neck. A raised metal spine ran along his backbone from head to tail, so thick that a channel had been cut into the chair to accommodate it. There was a bit of cool circulating air flowing through tubules in the suit, but it did little to relieve the oppressive heat and stuffiness.
“Have you been practicing your deep breathing exercises?” Carmichael asked.
“Don’t have a choice. I either breathe deep in this getup or I suffocate. Are you ever going to tell me exactly what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“Try to relax and I’ll tell.” Carmichael adjusted the volume of a small speaker next to a nearby oscilloscope-like device; the speaker began to chirp in a seemingly random pattern. Carmichael motioned to one of twenty-five lines on the oscilloscope. “Your twenty-five cps beta readouts are still firing. Relax, Ken. Don’t try to force it or it won’t come.”
“What won’t come?” Carmichael said nothing. Ken began to take deeper breaths, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down his back and the cramp in his right calf. After a few moments, the chirping subsided. Progress?
“Very good,” Carmichael said. “Beta is down ... your Hertz waves are increasing. Good. Occipital alpha is increasing. Good. Keep it up.” He turned and with the help of one of the techs lifted a huge device off” a carrying cart that he had brought in with him.
“What the hell is that?” James asked as the huge object was lifted overhead. It was hexagonal, with two wide visors in the front and cables leading to various parts of the suit and to controls and boxes nearby.
“Your new flight helmet,” Carmichael said. “The final component of the suit you’re wearing. The project is progressing so well, we’ve decided to proceed with a full-scale test.”
“Test of what . . . ?”
“Wait.” Carmichael slid the heavy helmet over Ken’s head.
“Watch the ears, damn it.”
“Watch your beta—you’re pinging again.” The helmet was set into place and fastened to a heavy clavicle locking ring on the metallic suit. The braces holding Ken’s head in place took some of the helmet’s weight, but his shoulders were aching after only a few moments.
A microphone clicked on, and through a set of headphones in the helmet came: “How do you hear me, Ken?”
“I think you broke my left ear off”.”
“You’ll live. Try to relax and I’ll explain.” Carmichael’s voice dropped into the familiar deep, even monotone that he had used weeks earlier during several days of screening: in fact, Carmichael was hypnotizing him, not with a shiny watch on a chain, but with his voice only. James’ susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion had made him an especially good candidate for this secret project.
“As you know, we’ve been working here at Dreamland with several projects. We call them all together ‘supercockpit’— designing an aircraft workspace that allows the pilot to perform better in a high-speed, high-density combat environment. You and several other pilots were working with Cheetah, the F-15 advanced technology fighter demonstrator; that’s the state of the art, and her systems will be incorporated in the Air Force’s new fighter in the next few years. Cheetah makes extensive use of multi-function computer screens, voice-recognition and artificial intelligence, as well as high- maneuverability technology . . . Well, we’ve been working on the next generation of fighters after Cheetah, things like forward-swept wing technology, hyper-start engines, super-conducting radar. But the most fascinating aspect of the new generation of fighters will be ANTARES—that’s an acronym for Advanced Neural Transfer and Response.”
“Neural transfer? Sounds like Buck Rogers thought-control stuff.” Comic books were SOP at Connecticut Academy.
A slight pause, then Carmichael said: “It is.”
Inwardly Maraklov was tingling with excitement—Carmichael’s electroencephalograph must be pinging off the dials, he thought. They were actually working on thought-controlled aircraft. . .?
“Relax, relax,” Carmichael said. “It might sound like science fiction but we demonstrated the rudimentary ANTARES technology as early as the late nineteen eighties.”
“But is it po
ssible . . . ?”
“Well, we don’t know that yet. I’m hoping, I’m betting, we’ll find out pretty soon ...”
“But how can you control by thought?”
“The idea is simple, the mechanism is complex.” He waited a few moments while the subject hurriedly fought to control his racing heartbeat.
“That’s better,” he said in his most soothing, uninflected voice. “Here we go. Remember back to your physiology. The human nervous system is composed of nerve cells, neurons. The neurons carry information back and forth from receptor nerves in the peripheral nervous system—nerves in the body in general—to the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord. The information carried through the nervous system is a series of chemical and electrical discharges between neurons. If one neuron is stimulated enough so that its ionic balance is changed, it releases a chemical into the synapse, the gap between neurons, and that chemical stimulates another neuron.”
“Like electricity flowing through a wire?”
“Well, some discharges are purely electrical, like when neurons physically touch, but mostly the connection is chemical. Anyway, this electrochemical and ionic activity can be detected and read by electroencephalographs, which you’ve become very familiar with the past weeks.” He would have nodded if he could. “EEGs in the past could only measure electrical activity—they couldn’t analyze, decode that activity. It was like the Plains Indians putting their ears up to a telegraph pole, which they used to call the spirit trees, by the way. They could hear the telegraph clicks and tell that something was happening, but they couldn’t decipher the clicks or tell which direction the clicks were coming from, and of course, they didn’t know how it was being done, just as we are ignorant about so many things in the nervous system. Sure, lots of clicks usually meant the army was coming, but that was about all. Ditto for us twentieth-century wizards.”
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