“Lord, please don’t let them be the lucky ones,” he prayed as the 727 disappeared from his sight.
As the President looked down on the city, the word “cindered” kept rolling over in his mind. That was the word that the Federal Emergency Management Agency used to describe those who were left without warning and unprotected in the event of a nuclear detonation. “Cindered” was a term for the casualties. It was the government word for “the dead.”
The helos whisked along, cutting through the cold air. The President watched the tree-lined Potomac slip underneath him, then leaned back and closed his eyes. The Presidential helicopters turned to the north. Following the Potomac River, they made their way toward the Virginia countryside.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
“But, sir,” Nahaylo was pleading.
“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me!” Fedotov cried. “I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. Look at the screen, General Nahaylo. Look at the screen and tell me what you see!”
The general did not look away, but instead locked his eyes with Fedotov’s. “I know what’s up there, sir. I understand the critical nature of the situation.”
“Oh, is that right?” Fedotov replied, waving his arms wildly toward the five dots on the screen. “Well, let me tell you something, General. Those are American cruise missiles. Now maybe they’re nuclear. Maybe they’re not. But do you really expect me to just sit here and wait, hoping they just go away!
“I have to assume the worst here, Nahaylo. I just can’t wait until half of Moscow goes up in a ball of flames. We will be dead by then, General. You. Me. Everyone in this room. Then how do you propose we respond? Which is exactly what the Americans are hoping we do. Can’t you see that. They expect us to wait around in a terrified stupor, hoping for the best, not choosing to escalate things, until it is too late, and we are vaporized into a cloud of black mist.
“So, no, I will not wait. I want our Satans in the air! Get me the launch box! Get me the codes! Now!”
General Nahaylo tried once again.
“Sir, I must remind you. The first missile, the stealth missile, has already been destroyed. Whether it flew off course and crashed, or simply malfunctioned, or just what, we do not know. It is possible the Americans destroyed it. But it doesn’t matter now. It is gone. And though the other five missiles are proceeding to their targets, we still have a chance. It is possible that we might shoot them down. They arc not as stealthy. They are not as fast. And, sir, most important, they might only be conventional weapons. We don’t know that they have nuclear warheads. We must give it a little time. We must wait and see.”
“No! No!” Fedotov shouted back. “I will not sit here and wait to be destroyed. I will not roll over like a dog on his back and expose my jugular vein. They...,” Fedotov pointed toward the red dots on the screen. “They are the ones who asked for this battle. They are the ones who started this fight. Without warning ... without cause ... without reason.
“So, don’t sit there, my friend and tell me to be patient, when in reality, I am just waiting to die!”
Nahaylo stepped toward the president with pleading eyes. “Sir.” The president knew what he meant. But he no longer cared.
President Fedotov turned from Nahaylo and nodded his head to the three-star general who stood at his side.
Within thirty seconds, he was handed a large, black, leather briefcase. It was eighteen inches long, with rounded corners, and a single brass lock.
The President picked up the briefcase. He was watched very closely by his military aides as he unlocked it and opened it up. He was surrounded by nine heavily armed and specially trained military guards. A look of puzzlement came over Fedotov’s face as he opened the briefcase and stared at the unfamiliar keyboard. Anticipating he would need help, a command-and-control specialist emerged from the crowd of military advisors and came forward to talk the President through the launch codes and procedures.
It didn’t take much time. Once the briefcase was open, it was only a matter of seconds before a single SS-18 ICBM missile was launched and sent climbing upward to its cruise altitude of 150 miles above the earth. Within five minutes, the missile was over the Greenland Sea on its way up over the pole.
Inside the missile, a digital computer was hard at work. Dual laser-gyros determined the missile’s actual position and fed the information into the navigation computer. The navigation system then made tiny adjustments to keep the missile flying along its intended flight path.
As the missile leveled off in sub-orbit, the computer began to feed the target coordinates to the ten individual nuclear warheads. Two of the warheads were commanded to fall over the White House. Two were directed to Capitol Hill. Two were given the coordinates of the leafy, tree-filled courtyard that sat in the center of the Pentagon.
The Russians were strong believers in redundancy. They always sent at least two warheads to every priority target. Their philosophy was, if one missile was good, then two had to be better.
With six warheads targeted for D.C., there were still four warheads yet to be given an objective. The targeting computer continued to search its memory bank. After several seconds, it found what it was looking for. The coordinates of the secret Underground Presidential Command Center in central Virginia were then fed to the remaining four warheads.
When the four warheads descended back through the atmosphere, they would maneuver away from each other until they were two hundred meters apart. They would then spread into a box pattern. Their detonation sequence was set to “impact delay,” which meant the warheads would not detonate until they had penetrated the soft earth that lay over the Presidential Command Center. By the time their mushroom clouds of glowing fire were sent climbing over the gentle Virginia countryside, the President of the United States would already be dead, recorded in history as one of the “cindered.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
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REAPER’S SHADOW
AMMON KNEW IMMEDIATELY WHAT HE HAD TO DO WHEN HE SAW THE missiles launch.
Jamming his engines into full afterburner, he pulled back hard on the stick. The Bone began to accelerate skyward, climbing through the air in a vertical angle. Ammon felt disoriented and dizzy as he stared up into the darkness. His head tumbled and his eyes lost their focus as nothing but sky filled his windscreen. He checked his altimeter. Eight-thousand feet. He rolled the aircraft inverted and pulled while hanging upside down in his harness, then rolled the aircraft once again. He was level at 10,000 feet. High enough. The signal to the missiles should get to them from this altitude.
Reaching forward, to the left of his seat, he flipped up a yellow safety cover, exposing the toggle switch that was hidden underneath. He pushed the switch down. A light tone began to sound in his headset as a message appeared on his CRT.
“SELF-DESTRUCT MECHANISM ACTIVATED. SELECT DESIRED MISSILE TO DESTROY”
Ammon began to furiously punch in the numbers. He would have to destroy the missiles one at a time. He finished punching in the coded indentifier of the first missile. He hit the “SEND” key. A two-second, coded, microburst radio signal was sent out from Reaper’s Shadow’s lower antenna, commanding the first nuclear missile to self-destruct. The last-ditch safety recall mechanism kicked into gear, blowing the missile into a thousand tiny pieces.
“MISSILE YB#$YB45 DESTROYED.” appeared on Ammon’s screen.
Morozov looked up and sucked in his breath.
“DO YOU WANT TO SELECT ANOTHER MISSILE?” the computer asked Richard Ammon.
“Y,” Ammon tapped into the keyboard.
“SELECT DESIRED MISSILE.”
Ammon typed as fast as he could. Morozov screamed and cursed from the back.
“YS86(^ 75AB.” A tap on the SEND key. A three-second delay.
“MISSILE DESTROYED.” flashed again on the screen.
Two missiles down. Three to go. Ammon continued to punch at the keys.
KERYCHOYA HILLS, NORTH OF KHAR’KO
V
Sergei Motyl sat up with a jolt as the fighter sped by overhead. The roar from the aircraft had jerked him out of a fitful sleep. He looked to the sky and located the aircraft, its flaming tailpipes glowing a faint orange against the cold winter night. He watched as the fighter receded into the distance, toward the northwest. Within half a minute, it was followed by several more. All of them were flying very low, no higher than a thousand meters. Mig-31 s, probably from Kazakiezainkpof, just on the other side of the border.
The fighters had disappeared. Motyl continued to stare to the west. The clearing in which he had been sleeping was small, but still it offered him a clear view at the now starry sky.
Suddenly, the air crackled and roared once again. Four more fighters flew overhead. These too were flying very low, but instead of continuing westbound, they climbed and began to circle overhead.
Motyl suddenly had an idea. This was it. The perfect opportunity to do a check on the product. Shooting down a fighter was something he would remember for the rest of his life. And Motyl didn’t care who he killed. Russian, Ukrainian, it didn’t really matter. He held them both in equal disdain.
Motyl rolled onto his knees and began to fumble in the darkness. His breath formed into tiny clouds of white vapor as he pulled one of the missile warheads from his pack.
REAPER’S SHADOW
Ammon glanced at his navigation display. They had just passed over the Ukrainian border and were only a few minutes away from Khar’kov. He punched in the last of the numbered codes.
“MISSILE DESTROYED,” appeared for the fifth time.
Ammon immediately pushed the nose of the aircraft toward the earth and hooked up his terrain-following system. The aircraft descended abruptly, dropping toward the ground at over 20,000 feet per minute. The darkness rushed up to meet him. He leveled off at 200 feet above the ground and began to pray.
He knew that by climbing so high to send the code to the missiles, he had certainly betrayed his position. Without the hills and terrain to hide behind, without the frozen ground to clutter up the Russian radar screens, without the benefit of low-level flight, he was no longer hidden. Every aircraft, every SAM site, every piece of aerial artillery, now knew exactly where he was.
And then he saw it. A sudden flash in the darkness. Straight ahead of him. Two Russian fighters. Their afterburners glowing orange against the night sky. He stared again. He could see the twin engines. SU-27s or Mig-31s. Like a pair of sharks, they moved through the night. He took a deep breath. One of them broke to the right. The other broke to the left. They knew something was there. Must have picked up a trace of his radar and were coming around to have a quick look.
Sergei Motyl heard the bomber before he ever saw it. He could hear and feel its massive engines as the aircraft approached from the north. Looking down from his hilltop, he caught an occasional glimpse of the aircraft’s gray wings, the dark paint flashing against the white powder-topped trees. The aircraft was flying up the valley, approaching with incredible speed. Even as he watched, the bomber raised its pointed nose and began to climb up the mountain where Motyl stood hidden among the trees.
Ammon pushed himself down in his seat, shoved his engines into full burner and pushed the aircraft through the speed of sound. If he could outrun the fighters as they turned back to meet him, maybe....
He felt something cold and hard poking into the flesh of his neck. Slowly he turned his head. The barrel of the gun jabbed even deeper. Ammon turned to look into Morozov’s cold eyes. The dim lights from the instrument panel bathed his face in a pale green and blue. Morozov’s thumb moved up to the hammer and pulled it back.
Motyl hoisted the SA-18 launcher onto his right shoulder. He had already loaded it with a missile. He flipped the battery on as the aircraft approached him. Peering through the optical sight, he followed the bomber as it flew over his head.
The sound from the four engines almost deafened him. It shook him and rattled his bones. He turned as the aircraft overflew him.
The receding aircraft filled the eyepieces. Motyl flipped the arm switch and pressed on the trigger.
The blast nearly knocked him to the ground as the SA-18 missile fired from the shoulder-mounted tube. The heat seeking missile immediately picked up on the aircraft. With 140,000 pounds of heat and thrust flying in its face, there was no way the missile would let the bomber get away.
Everything seemed to turn in slow motion. Ammon recoiled from the weapon. Morozov lifted his thumb from the hammer. Ammon closed his eyes.
A long moment of silence. Ammon waited to die.
Morozov called out over the roar of the cockpit.
“Carl, I wish that I had already killed you. That is my only regret.”
Morozov moved his finger to the trigger of the gun.
The missile’s flight lasted only two seconds. That’s all the time it took to cover the 2,000 feet that separated Motyl and the receding bomber. The missile impacted and exploded on the aircraft’s left side. As it detonated, it sent thirteen pounds of high explosives into the number one and two engines. The engines immediately blew into a thousand white-hot pieces of burning steel, then disintigrated into two hollow shells.
Baseball-size chunks of metal were sent flying through the Bone’s tender wings and body. Some of these metal chunks were the shrapnel from the missile. Some were pieces of the GE-101 engines that had just blown themselves apart. Whatever the source, it didn’t matter, the damage they did was the same. Hydraulic lines were immediately severed. Precious electrical cords were burned and cut. One particularly large piece of steel made its way through the wing root, puncturing a huge fuel tank that ran along the entire length of the wing. As fuel spewed from the gaping hole, it immediately burst into flames. The heat burned through the number one primary hydraulic line, providing even more fuel for the blaze.
Sergei Motyl watched the aircraft explode into bright yellow flames. He stood for a moment, not knowing how to react. As he watched, the aircraft began to roll and descend down the back side of the small mountain. It soon was lost to his vision by a row of high trees. He waited and listened, expecting to hear a loud explosion as the aircraft impacted the ground.
THIRTY-NINE
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REAPER’S SHADOW
MOROZOV WAS THROWN FROM HIS FEET AS THE AIRCRAFT RATTLED AND shuddered. The explosion blew him against the floor, his gun was thrown from his hand. For a moment he lay there in a daze. The aircraft bucked and rolled beneath him, bouncing him violently into the air. His face contorted in pain and rage. The entire cockpit was bathed in a faint red sheen as dozens of fire and warning lights began to blink on the instrument panel.
Morozov tried to stand. The aircraft lunged and cracked with whip-like force. He was knocked to the floor once again. Another explosion. Then a dull yellow light began to illuminate the cockpit; warm, like a flickering fire. It grew and began to blend with the harsh red lights that flashed on the instrument panel. Morozov felt the floor begin to tilt to his left as Reaper’s Shadow began her death roll.
The cockpit blared with warning horns. The Bone continued to roll.
Ammon fought with the bomber. He shoved the stick all the way to the right. The rolling slowed, but then continued. The enormous bomber had already banked up to almost ninety degrees. Her nose began to drop toward the ground. Through the side of his canopy window, Ammon could see the dim shadows of the trees that sped by underneath him, less than one hundred feet below. They seemed to be reaching out, pulling him earthward, as the Bone rolled onto her side.
Ammon shoved his right rudder all the way to the floor, jamming his foot against the steel pedal. The aircraft’s rolling motion stopped. Ammon glanced once again at the passing trees, unable to force them out of his peripheral view. He shoved again at the pedal. Then slowly, ever so slowly, a few degrees at a time, the aircraft bcgan roll back to the right. It heaved and shook as it rolled to an upright position. Fiberglass panels
began to vibrate loose from the cockpit ceiling. Ammon’s main CRT screen shattered with a dull paaang, unable to withstand the violent vibration. The entire aircraft threatened to rattle apart.
Ammon glanced at his Master Caution Display, where there were no less than thirty warning lights flashing. He tried to note the more critical ones in an effort to determine how badly Reaper’s Shadow was damaged. He began to count the systems that he had lost: two engines, three hydraulic systems, two of three generators, three flight computers, two main electrical buses. The list went on and on.
Ammon realized his time was almost over. There just wasn’t much more he could do.
He glanced around the cockpit and saw Morozov in a heap on the floor. It was ironic. Morozov had chosen a very bad time to get out of his ejection seat.
DARK 709
Major Vasyl Peleznogorsk pulled his head to the right. He banked his SU-27 slightly up on its side as he scanned his eyes through the moonlit darkness.
There it was again, a flicker of fire. It flashed and then quickly disappeared. He stared down through the thick Plexiglas of his canopy at the spot where he had last seen the flame.
Then he saw it again. No more than six kilometers away, off at his two o’clock and very low. The aircraft couldn’t have been any higher than thirty meters. He could see the fire as it burned, huge yellow and blue flames flowing back from the bomber, billowing horrible and bright in the night. He squinted at the burning aircraft. As his eyes focused in the darkness, he began to see the vague outline of the enemy bomber. It seemed to be in a slow roll as it sped along the ground.
“I’ve got good visual on the Bandit!” the fighter pilot screamed into his microphone. “Six kilometers, two o’clock, low!”
No less than fifty other aircraft, both Ukrainian and Russian fighters, heard the pilot’s frantic call.
Shattered Bone Page 39