Chapter 32
EVEN AS THE DOGFIGHT raged over the torn countryside north of Paris, preparations were underway a few hundred miles outside of another European capital.
In the quiet woods surrounding the Greenham Common NATO air base in the north of England, sixty huge camouflage nets lay strewn in large green lumps amid the deep tracks of hundreds of huge tires. Freshly cut trees that had stood for centuries now lay at crazy angles across the rutted fields, short stumps marking their original positions.
The ruts marked a random network of tracks leading across the fields that separated the edge of the forest from the base’s runways.
Just a few hours ago, the base had been a beehive of activity, ground crews and armament specialists frantically working to complete the nearly impossible task of preparing a huge airborne armada for an operation known as “Rolling Thunder.”
Now all was quiet, even peaceful. The only sound was a soft wind through the trees and the rustle of leaves on the ground.
But this would be temporary.
At the end of the field, the quiet was shattered as eight huge engines coughed to life and began an ear-splitting din as they were cranked up to full power. When the sound had reached its deafening crescendo, the engines lurched forward on the empty tarmac, dragging half a million pounds of plane and payload reluctantly down the runway.
The huge tapering wings sagged almost to the ground at their tips, separated by more than 160 feet of steel skin from end to end. In fact, small wheels and struts had been added to the wingtips to support the thousands of gallons of jet fuel that sloshed in the bomber’s massive internal wing tanks.
As the massive airplane gathered speed down the runway, the wing sag diminished rapidly until the small wheels left the ground, floating up several feet as the wingtips flexed. The huge fuselage trundled along the tarmac, as four sets of twin tires mounted on massive struts crabbed the plane slightly to center it on the runway. The wheels straightened out, and the engines’ roar increased another measure as the heavily laden aircraft began to pick up speed for takeoff.
Slowly, but inexorably, the dark green behemoth ascended into the cloudy English sky, undergoing the transformation from balky, droop-winged bomb truck to graceful, winged warrior.
When the thunder of the bomber’s engines had faded, the deep quiet descended on the base once more.
Almost a hundred miles ahead, inside the cockpit of the Strategic Air Command B-52 Stratofortress, Lt. Colonel Rick Davis of the 52nd Bomb Wing’s headquarters staff was adjusting his oxygen mask and intercom microphone.
Seated in the left-hand seat of the big bomber, Davis had just received confirmation that the last plane in his formation had left the ground back at Greenham Common, and was now joining the long formation at thirty thousand feet.
Minutes later, the grouped-up B-52s reached their jumping off point just off the eastern coast of England. With a single radio burst from Davis in the lead bomber, instructions were transmitted to the navigators in each crew. In turn, the navigators fed in a series of complex targeting coordinates to their bomb-coordinator counterparts seated next to them in the cramped confines of the big bomber’s innards.
Once the sixty heavy bombers had computed their individual targets and flight plans, they began to peel off the formation and dive for the deck. Davis managed to sneak a quick look at the orderly formation’s blossoming, as bombers on either side rolled off on their outboard wings to plunge into the darkness below. Each had a separate target, and eventually each would take a different route to get there.
The 52nd Bomb Wing had been ordered from their SAC base in California to the tiny Greenham Common field two days after the war broke out.
Flying in pairs, they had hopped across North America to the windswept airport at Gander, Newfoundland, then on to Keflavik, Iceland. There, two bombers previously stationed at the base would fly in a huge semicircle at high altitudes, almost reaching the Canadian coast. Then they would drop down to a heart-stopping two-hundred feet above the frigid Arctic sea and race back to Iceland undetected.
Later, covered under the dark of night, the two SAC B-52s would lift off from Iceland and skim the waves over to England’s rocky coast, setting down with not too much room to spare on Greenham Common’s short airfield. Once the base was secured by the SAS unit, the big bombers were concealed in the woods surrounding the base. Hundreds of trees were lopped off to allow the huge B-52s to ease into the edge of the forest. Then the cut trees were propped back up in huge holes dug by British engineer crews.
From the air—or from a photo satellite’s probing eye—all that could be seen was the dense green of England’s woods. Even the heat signatures of the big bombers had been blotted out by covering the airplanes with a blanket of C02 foam.
It had been quite an operation so far, Davis thought.
It was only when the sixty huge airplanes arrived in England, jamming the woods around the small RAF base, that they had received the orders that explained Operation “Rolling Thunder.” Special convoys brought secret ordnance loads up to the flight line, and the huge BUFFs—Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, as the aircrews called them with varying degrees of affection—started being loaded with a very special menu of ordnance.
For eighteen straight hours, the bomb crews struggled in the thick woods, cursing and sweating as they painstakingly loaded each bomber according to its pre-determined mission.
Finally, the long-awaited “go” order was given, and the Brits had leveled the trees from their temporary post holes and the laden B-52s had trundled out onto the runway.
And now they were in the air, headed for a date with destiny over Eastern Europe.
Colonel Davis mentally reviewed the Bomb Wing’s mission, the product of an endless review of the dwindling options that faced NATO in Europe.
While the combined fighter strength of the Free World’s air forces had drained the huge Soviet reserve of interceptors from the critical Eastern European corridor, the Bomb Wing had been pondering its targets.
Intelligence had been unable to estimate exactly how much reserve troop strength and spare equipment was being rushed into the front by the over-extended Soviets, but it was clear that the highways and rail lines were crowded with everything needed for the Red Army’s final offensive.
And that was the key.
Because the objective behind Rolling Thunder—and, in fact, the virtual last hope of the democratic alliance—was for Davis and the big bombers to prevent that equipment and those reserves from reaching the front lines.
Davis felt himself drawing heavier than usual from his oxygen mask.
Despite the myth about combat pilots—that they were ice-water-in-the-veins bomb delivery men—Davis did feel like the weight of the Free World was on his shoulders. As Bomb Group Leader, the success of the whole mission while it was in the air was in his hands.
Now, as he looked out on the darkened European mainland coming up before him, he suddenly felt transplanted in time. He knew that nearly a half century before, other men had flown this route, crossing the Channel to fly over Fortress Europe in battered B-17s and B-24s. By their efforts did they fail? Was all their sacrifice and misery and terror in vain? Dammit, didn’t they do the job right the first time?
He shook away his anger and took a half dozen deep gulps of the pure Big O. No, the men in those Flying Forts and Liberators had smited their enemies, and the planet was at relative world peace for nearly five decades as a result.
Until now.
As his airplane reached landfall and dashed above the countryside, Davis imagined he could see the ghosts of the men killed in those old prop-driven Forts and Liberators begin to rise up. There was nothing different here, he thought. The cause was the same—the defense of freedom. The opponent—ironically once an ally—had simply changed uniforms.
The men who died trying to free Hitler’s Europe had not perished in vain. They had won their war, defeated their enemies.
Now it was ti
me for Davis and his men to do the same.
A burst of static from his radio brought him back to the business at hand.
“Green Flight, at departure point,” the message came over. “Breaking at three-four-niner …”
“Roger, Green Flight …” Davis quickly replied.
The message meant that twenty of his bombers were wheeling off to dash across the flooded Low Countries and strike at the Soviet’s forward supply lines and railheads in westernmost Germany.
He entered their departure in the mission log then rechecked his own position.
He knew that the enemy’s front-line surface-to-air missile installations, battered by two continuous days and nights of “Weasel” attacks, would offer Green Flight little resistance. And he himself expected only scattered threats deeper into enemy territory.
But he also knew that—despite the on-going dogfight raging just south of them—his B-52s could encounter Soviet fighters at any time, either going to or coming from the battle area. And the secrecy of Rolling Thunder had dictated that his Buffs fly without a highly visible fighter escort. The only defense the lumbering B-52s had were the twin 50-caliber machine guns in the tail—and that was no defense at all against the enemy’s stand-off air-to-air weapons. So the BUFFs would have to rely on their electronic jamming gear, decoy flares, and metallic “chaff” to elude enemy fighters and then-deadly missiles.
“Blue Flight at departure point,” his radio crackled again. “Breaking at three-three-three …”
“Roger, Blue Flight …” Davis replied.
The bomber force had split again and now Blue Flight would veer off and eventually take a roughly parallel course across the Danish peninsula to penetrate deep into East Germany and Poland right to the front step of the Soviet Union itself. But they would not cross the line. Under strict orders from NATO’s highest command, the SAC bombers were not to come within a hundred miles of the Soviet border. As throughout the entire war, no NATO bombs had fallen on Mother Russia itself. The thinking was that if the US didn’t bomb the Soviet homeland, the Soviets wouldn’t bomb America. It was an oddly tacit agreement between warring parties, an unspoken promise that had, so far, held up.
But Davis had no intention of coming anywhere near the 100-mile exclusionary zone. He wouldn’t have to.
Tactically, his mission was actually little more than an elaborate air-launched cruise missile operation, one that he and his pilots had practiced endlessly for the past six years. In his hold he held weapons that could “think,” that could be told what and what not to do. With their pre-programmed terrain-following aiming system, they were smart enough to punch out a target one inch this side of the 100-mile buffer. And if nothing else, that fact would make any Soviet planner consider the difference between the West’s technological prowess and his own side’s battering ram approach to things.
Forty-five tense minutes passed by.
“Approaching our flight sequence departure point, Colonel,” the co-pilot called out, once again shifting Davis’s concentration back to the task at hand.
“We break at four-four-seven … in twelve seconds.”
“OK, roger,” Davis answered, snapping a few buttons on his flight console and tightly gripping the steering controls before him.
The huge bomber had been on autopilot ever since they’d flown over the choppy waters of the Channel, its on-board computers keeping the Buffs nose a mere four hundred feet off the ground. But now, they would have to fly even lower, at two hundred feet, and the on-board computer was not smart enough to handle that. From here on in, Davis knew it would require all the skill that he, his copilot, the navigator, and millions of dollars of sophisticated equipment could muster to stay low enough to avoid enemy radar detection, while trying not to plow the B-S2 into the ground.
The co-pilot cleared his throat. “Departure point in five … four … three … two … one … now …”
“Roger,” Davis said. “Beginning departure now …”
Slowly, the big bomber began to descend.
Scattered across the skies of enemy-held Europe, fifty-nine other B-52 pilots were wrestling with similar flight plans, plowing through the sluggish air just a couple hundred feet above the ground. Each one knew that it was just plain crazy—perhaps, even suicidal—to risk everything on a bunch of half-century-old bombers doing a job their designers never dreamed they would be asked to do. But such were the times …
“Approaching IP, Colonel,” Davis’s bomb-coordinator called out deliberately over the cabin intercom.
Davis quickly scanned the mission checklist which he already knew by heart. But now the words took on a new meaning. When the big bomber reached its preassigned Initial Point, the bomb coordinator would have complete control of the aircraft.
Or more accurately, his computer would. From the mission-planning data fed into the system, the bomb control computers would synchronize the big jet’s airspeed, altitude, heading and other navigational data with the pre-programmed ballistics information derived from the weapons load in their bomb bay. Then, analyzing the target coordinates, terrain contours, and wind speed and direction, the computer would spit out the precise release point for each weapon.
Every twenty seconds, the data was rechecked and updated by millions of transistorized brain cells in the bomb control computer’s electronic brain.
“IP in ten seconds …” came the call from the bomb coordinator. “Nine … eight … seven …”
The young lieutenant seated at the small radar screen was at least two generations removed from the bombardiers of World War Two, who used the then-advanced Norden bombsights to aim lethal loads of “dumb” iron bombs over Hitler’s Fortress. But like those leather-jacketed men of yesteryear, he was the focus of attention in the aircraft as he called off the flight control commands of the computer’s readout.
“IP in six … five … four … three … two … one … now.”
The bomb coordinator’s voice rose slightly in his excitement.
“Come right to one-one-zero and hold steady …” he told Davis. “Alpha release in thirty seconds …”
Davis nudged the big plane around in the dense air, ignoring the creaks and whines from the shuddering bomber’s airframe. His only job for the next half a minute was to keep the gossamer-thin needle of the special Flight Control Indicator centered where the bomb computers calculated it had to be for an accurate launch.
Right now, the needle was dead on.
“Alpha launch in ten seconds,” the bomb coordinator reported evenly. “Arming switches to ‘on’ position.”
He reached over to click off the green safety covers of the toggles, flipping up the switches underneath.
Davis tore his eyes away from the thin white needle of the FCI to steal a glance out the thick cockpit glass. The B-52’s menacing shadow, outlined by the thin moonlight, stole across the flat ground of the East German plain, rippling along like a serpent.
In its path was a double line of railroad tracks.
“Weapons doors opening … now.”
The old bomber shuddered as the huge bomb bay doors yawned open underneath its fuselage.
“Weapons door open confirmed …” called the co-pilot.
“Alpha launch, now!”
The young bomb coordinator mashed the first button on his “pickle” firing switch. Instantly two tapered cylinders fell out of the bottom of the bomber, released from the large rotary holder suspended inside.
“Weapons away!” he yelled.
Two lights blinked on the console in front of Davis.
“Weapons launched confirmed …” he said.
Directly beneath them and traveling on a parallel course with the B-52, the two projectiles each sprouted tail fins, a pair of stubbly wings, and a radar sensing port opened in each nose section.
In four seconds, the drones had found the railroad tracks. Two more lights popped on in front of Davis.
“I have a weapons lock indication,” the bomb coordina
tor called up to him.
“Roger, weapons lock confirmation …” Davis answered.
At that instant, the two weapons diverged from the bomber’s flight path at sharp angles, each heading in the opposite direction.
Light years more advanced than the massive sticks of iron “dumb” bombs that had rained on Nazi Germany, these two projectiles were “smart” drone-bombs. Actually, more advanced than the better-known air-launched cruise missiles in many ways, the super-drones had been preprogrammed to search for and destroy targets of opportunity. Images of specific weapons-carrying rail cars were fixed in their electronic brains, along with those of enemy tanks, personnel carriers, trucks, self-propelled guns, aircraft on the ground and even certain slow-flying aircraft in the air. Davis’s B-52 carried twenty of the weapons, each laden with its own store of submunitions.
The westbound drone sliced along the railroad track, its lifeless radar eye searching the steel ribbons below for any sign of movement. The intense beam pulsed the ground, interrogating the empty tracks more than eight times each second.
Fifty miles beyond the launch point, the radar sensor detected a moving object on the rails below. Then another. Then another. It instantly flashed a message back to the B-52 mother ship: “Target located.”
The drone’s electronic microprocessors sent a series of signals to the munitions dispensers inside its short fuselage. Then, in a feat of remarkable electronic ingenuity, the superdrone performed a flawless 180-degree turn, reducing its speed at the same time.
In seconds, it was silently cruising above the speeding train …
Increasing its pulsing rate to sixteen times a second, the missile’s brain calculated the speed of the train, the direction of the tracks and any obstacles such as tunnels, mountain or over-hanging trees that lay ahead. It quickly decided that an upcoming twenty-second window was the optimum time for attack.
Five more seconds passed. The tracks curved and flowed into a four-mile straightaway. The missile’s computer-brain clicked and then, on its command, the drone’s own weapons bay door opened.
Final Storm Page 24