Red Hammer 1994

by Ratcliffe, Robert

  Winding one hundred yards through the dense trees, the group emerged into a partial clearing. Here they would wait until further instructions.

  The setting was surreal. The secretary of defense and of state and top generals and admirals from the Joint Staff were gathered in a picnic area at Mathews Arm, surrounded by troops. Despite the September heat, the night brought a chill at this elevation. They all stood awkwardly in suits and dress uniforms. Except for the clothes, it could have been something out of the civil war. The only thing missing was a campfire.

  At thirteen minutes past nine, Alexander convened a stand-up, ad-hoc war council. Alexander had to raise his voice to be heard. The Rangers had provided makeshift lighting.

  “I want this to be short,” began Alexander, kicking the dirt. “We’re not going to make any decisions until I’m certain the vice president has taken the oath of office. Besides, it will be more than two hours before the bombers reach the pole and another five or six until they complete their missions and we know the outcome. General Bartholomew?” He and Thomas had patched together a status report from various sources.

  Bartholomew stepped forward. The command and control system was holding up fairly well. “NEACP is over Tennessee. Looking Glass has slipped west toward the Rockies, and the rest of the PACCS network has shifted north to help with line of sight to the bombers. TACAMO survived and are off each coast, linked to the submarines. We have confidence that all EAMs have been transmitted and received by the nuclear forces, including at-sea ballistic-missile submarines.” His tone was flat, unemotional.

  Alexander interrupted. “That’s fine, but when does the network start falling apart?”

  “Well,” the general stuttered, “certain aircraft will have to come down in ten to twelve hours. NEACP can last twenty-four.”

  Alexander exploded. He was frustrated.

  “Looking Glass was already up for hours when the attack broke. They’ve got to be running out of gas. The EAMs are out. We have to concentrate on reconfiguring for tomorrow and the day after.” He measured the group in the dim light.

  “But, Mr. Secretary,” said a voice from the generals, “we may need to recall the bombers.”

  “That’s bullshit,” shot back Alexander. “The president’s dead, the vice president is airborne God knows where, and the C in C of STRAT is scrambling to set up his mobile command post. And we’re standing in the goddamn forest!” The secretary glared, challenging someone else to make a stupid statement. “Nothing’s stopping the bombers,” he added.

  A stunned silence descended. No one moved.

  “Do we have direct comms with anyone?”

  Thomas answered this one. “NEACP, Looking Glass, and CINCLANT through the helo’s radios. Not the best links, but we can communicate. We can relay to CINCPAC through an auxiliary command post. No luck with CINCEUR yet.” Thomas had been busy the last hour.

  Alexander turned reflective, thinking out loud. He had calmed considerably. “We’ve got to get comms with STRATCOM’s mobile HQ and the vice president. Get ready for round two. We have to pull the government together before we’re overwhelmed. The civil authorities can limp along for a day or two, that’s it. Then they need our full attention. That gives us two to three days to fight this war and end it.”

  Alexander thought for a moment about what he had just said. It sounded ludicrous. Something else came into his head. He looked at Thomas. “Anything on losses?” It was a topic no one wanted to discuss. Thomas would try.

  “Estimates are eight-to-twelve-million deaths.” He waited for a reaction. The group exchanged injured looks, some lowering their heads. “My God,” a voice cried softly.

  “So far the Russians haven’t hit soft targets like refineries and power plants near cities. That’s what has kept casualties lower than the first estimates. If they start hitting those, the number could grow to twenty to twenty-five million. We have to watch their bombers; they’re the key over the next eight to ten hours.”

  Alexander seemed unaffected. “The Russians?”

  “Hard to say. It’s all speculative.” The exchange was bizarre and clinical, like talking about grain futures.

  Colonel Harcourt walked up to Alexander and interrupted. He whispered a short message. Alexander’s expression collapsed.

  “What is it?” Genser asked softly. The secretary of state hadn’t spoken since departing the helo. He correctly sensed he had no role at this point.

  “Air Force Two,” said Alexander, “Air Force Two has gone down. The vice president is dead.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Three seconds to mark. Mark,” Buck said evenly.

  Joe punched a GPS satellite-provided latitude and longitude into the plane’s autopilot. They had made landfall at the southern tip of Banks Island, over seventeen hundred miles north of the US/Canadian border. The sleek bomber rocketed straight for the North Pole, the point of no return, the line in the ice. An emergency recall would have to be received in short order, or they’d hurl their nuclear-armed bomber directly at the thicket of Russian air defen-ses, primed for a nasty reception.

  “Right on track,” stated Joe. It was his first verbal expression in over an hour.

  Their flight had been flawless ever since decoupling from the tanker over Canada. On signal, they had turned north, skirting the rugged edge of the Canadian Rockies and then dropping to the plains of Alberta. Two hours over miles of pancake-flat terrain preceded a splendid journey into the Northwest Territories, the last pristine wilds on the North American continent. Among the highlights were the magnificent Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes. The intensely beautiful and peaceful landscape, which flashed below, accentuated their fatigue and troubled thoughts. How could such a lovely world breed such a monstrosity as nuclear war? The forthcoming jab into the Russian heartland would reverse the geography of the trip through Canada—farmland and prairie, to tundra, to ice. Only they wouldn’t be admiring the scenery.

  Buck grabbed and unfolded the appropriate aeronautical chart and scanned the northern latitudes. They’d pass one more major landmass, Prince Patrick Island, before traversing twelve hundred miles of frozen wasteland. Then they’d slide down the other side of the globe toward hostile Russian territory. Given their advanced position at the starting gun, they had been guaranteed the honor of being one of the first to broach the stiff Russian air defenses.

  Buck mulled over their mission so matter-of-factly that he feared he had been purged of all emotion. Hard facts rolled around in his head, tempered by two years of instructor duty in North Dakota, putting planes and crews through grueling paces. He knew only too well what the bombers and the men who flew them could realistically be expected to do. Their training was good, no question, but the real thing, an actual penetration of Russian airspace, would transport them beyond anything they could ever imagine. He wasn’t sure if the younger guys really understood. They would learn together, on-the-job training, with no room for error.

  Buck instinctively glanced at his black chronometer, but realized the local time was meaningless. Approaching eighty degrees north, the multicolor time zones depicted on the maps drastically constricted, squeezing the cadence of life into a flatness that rendered the senses useless. Night all but disappeared in the summer, with only an ephemeral flicker of darkness visible from the ground. At altitude, Buck and his crew would never lose sight of the sun’s soft glow on the horizon. But during the winter, the top of the world was plunged into eternal blackness. It was always one extreme or the other at this polar wasteland.

  The far-northern environment was further degraded by ever-shifting magnetic anomalies, which debilitated radar and high-frequency communications, twisting and bending the RF energy along unintelligible paths. And only the sturdiest higher-frequency satellite line-of-sight communication links could penetrate the strange atmospherics. Bomber crews became isolated in a bizarre yet pacific world of overwhelming whiteness. The electro-magnetic permutations did, however, provide a temporary haven for thos
e in harm’s way. The same forces rendered the Russians’ probing search radars impotent. But in three short hours, Buck and his bomber would become vulnerable to detection, triggering Russian defenders like an owner releasing a vicious attack dog straining at the leash.

  The air battle lineup was strikingly similar. The United States had a handful of AWACS aircraft airborne from Alaska, to be joined shortly by others rushing northward from the States. They would orbit over northern Canada and the broad approaches to Alaska, their two-hundred-mile-radius radar envelopes overlapping along a strung out battle line to pick out low-level leakers. The supporting cast were dozens of interceptors, F-15 Eagles and Canadian CF-18 Hornets, some airborne, others on alert, waiting for the emergency signal to sprint skyward, vectored by the air controllers fighting the battle aboard the AWACS. They would hunt down the lumbering Bear H bombers carrying their deadly cargo of AS-15 cruise missiles and the modern Blackjacks with a mix of cruises and gravity bombs. Few in number, the B-1 look-alikes posed the greatest threat for the outnumbered US defenders. They would be the top priority. Numerous peacetime computer simulations envisioned a lopsided US victory in the air game, but the Russians had been first out of the gate, and the Bear and Blackjack pilots would surely press their attacks.

  As in most military hardware systems, the Russians mirrored US efforts down to incredible detail, never being one to reinvent the wheel when espionage paid such huge technological dividends. The Russian air-defense forces possessed the less-capable Mainstay AWACS, staged at numerous forward Arctic bases. They would string along the northern periphery of the Russian landmass, and, like their American counterparts, search the heavens and the seas for the US bombers intent on attacking Mother Russia. Despite inferior early detection and warning abilities, the Russians did possess an ace in the hole—the legions of modern interceptors such as the MiG-31 Foxhound, MiG-29 Fulcrum, and the Su-27 Flanker. These frontline aircraft, backed by huge quantities of surface-to-air missile batteries, blanketed the flat approaches to the Russian homeland. This potent forward defense would attempt to destroy the bulk of the American cruise-missile carriers before they could release their weapons and then thin the ranks of the newer penetrating bombers. At this juncture, stopping the cruise missiles was the highest priority of the Moscow planners. Once loose in Russian airspace, the diminutive, cigar-shaped flying rockets were next to impossible to track—let alone shoot down.

  Much had been made about the crumbling condition of the Russian air-defense matrix. The early nineties had no doubt left holes caused by poor maintenance. But as a system, integrity had been maintained, and shortfalls were compensated by tremendous redundancy.

  The US penetrating bombers would first hit the vanguard surface-to-air missiles and then fight their way inland. Waiting in the wings were hundreds of VPVO interceptors—the new mixed with the old—and still more SAMs. Even the older Floggers and Foxbats were a serious threat to an exhausted bomber crew or a crippled plane. And fickle geography played into Russian hands. The American B-1Bs and B-2As would funnel into two distinct corridors after crossing the Polar ice cap, some east of the Urals for heavy industrial targets, while the majority would slip west, bearing down on the Russian heartland.

  Although the odds seemed heavily stacked against them, the penetrators were far from helpless. The B-1B was a beautiful aircraft, sleek, fast, and lethal. It handled like a fighter, right down to the inclusion of a stick instead of a wheel for flight control. The combination of the tried and true swept-wing design with responsive, hydraulically boosted flight controls made the pilot’s job a breeze. When the wings were fully forward, quick takeoffs or operations on short runways were a piece of cake. When fully swept to the rear, supersonic cruise at altitude, or high subsonic, low-level flight were the norm. The latter was the B-1B’s forte, and low meant very low—on the deck, scraping the tree tops. Training runs were done at four hundred feet, the superb terrain-following radar expertly guiding the aircraft over hill and dale.

  The more demanding EWO missions called for dropping to a scant two hundred feet. With the long, graceful wings laid back, the B-1B would hurtle across the earth at 640 knots like a black dagger, the landscape becoming a dreamlike blur. At night, it was terrifying. But the radical flight profile was the key to survival. Even during the peak of the day, the B-1B would be extremely difficult to track through the radar clutter generated by irregular terrain and bad weather. Any hostile aircraft would have to have a perfect intercept solution to take out the B-1B.

  The Russians’ weakness? An overreliance on fixed, ground-intercept control sites for their airborne interceptors, a prime target for the B-1B’s supersonic SRAM II missiles. These babies would be dispensed to blast gaping nuclear holes through the VPVO’s architecture. In the end, when all was said and done, the issue would be how extensive was the damage to the air defense infrastructure before the bombers arrived. The US SIOP, or nuclear war plan, called for ICBMs and SLBMs to soften up Russian defenses by breaching broad avenues of devastation for the bombers. But that was a full SIOP. Anything less would leave the defenders essentially intact.

  “Fuel consumption?” Buck began firing questions to shake his crew back to life. He had to start building them to an emotional peak before they entered the fringes of the Mainstay’s radar picket line. That’s where Ivan would be his freshest, and they must be too. If they could punch through that firstline of defense, they had half a chance of completing their mission alive.

  “Right on target. Looks good,” Joe answered smartly.

  “What’s the CPA to the Pole based on this heading?”

  “No more than two hundred miles.”

  Buck glanced over his right shoulder, even though he spoke through the intercom.

  “Defensive Electronics?”

  Johnson sat up straight. “Built-in test reports all systems up.”

  “Johnson, remember they’re going to screw with their search radar frequencies. Don’t expect to see anything familiar. They might even use the AWACs, figuring we would have them blanked in our ESM receiver.”

  “I got you, Buck.”

  “And they might have aircraft farther north than we expect.”

  “I know.” Johnson’s tone expressed his displeasure at the tutorial.

  “Ledermeyer, everything check out OK?”

  “That’s affirmative, Buck.”

  “How about remote arming?”

  “Already taken care of. What’s wrong? Don’t think I’ll be around?”

  Buck didn’t answer. His thoughts had quickly turned back to the mission. Every time he did, his breathing accelerated. Take it easy, he warned himself.

  The clear evening sky began to give way to thickening clouds that encircled them like wisps of angel’s hair. Nothing too threatening, thought Buck. Momentarily satisfied, he settled back and mentally created a map of central Russia. Slowly the key features sprang into sharp focus. He and his crew would drop down to two hundred feet as soon as they left the polar icepack, or sooner if they detected faint emissions from the Mainstay. The benefit of sensitive electronic support measures, or ESM gear, was that you could detect an adversary at over one and one half times the distance that he could get you. That’s when the chess game started. Do you avoid detection at all costs? Or do you tease the Mainstay then slightly alter course and hopefully slip by misdirected interceptors. The Russian pilots would get one pass before having to break off and hunt for other prey. No one knew the best strategy, especially when placed in the van. Buck didn’t relish being the lead plane through the gauntlet looming only hours ahead.

  After skimming four hundred miles over the Kara Sea, they would traverse the Obskaya Guba, an appendix-shaped, seawater gulf protruding deep into the Motherland. Buck would stick close to the shoreline, praying the distinctive contrast between land and water would play havoc with the Russians’ search-and-look-down/shoot-down radars. Making landfall, he would most likely veer sharply to starboard, making a sprint for the Urals, atte
mpting to seek shelter by hugging the protective eastern slope. The next seven hundred miles would severely tax his skills as a pilot. Switching off the terrain-following guidance system to protect against autonomous jammers sprinkled throughout the mountains, he would manually wind in and out of deep canyons and narrow valleys, skimming the earth as low as one hundred feet. He had flown the perilous route so many times in the simulators, it was burned into his brain. The 3-D display at the training center was breathtaking in its clarity; the multiple shades of brown and gray were brought to life by dual light sources reflecting off the irregular granite surfaces. By the end of the hour, he was drenched in sweat. At first he had always bounced off a canyon wall within the first few minutes, but through patience and hours of practice, he had managed to score well enough to be certified for this class-one mission, the most difficult rating in STRATCOM. If for some reason he bought it, Joe was ordered to break off and hit secondary targets along a less-demanding path. The less experienced copilot wouldn’t stand a chance at the primary route.

  Danger would most likely visit when Buck had to break out of hiding and line up on his first target, a large thermal power plant near Sverdlovsk. He knew the Russians were well versed in American bomber tactics—they wouldn’t be easily fooled. Then the other target locations rolled across his mind—Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Kazan, Kuybyshev, and finally Volgograd. Fifteen power plants, a handful of refineries, and key oil and gas pipelines, his lone plane would cut a vicious swath of destruction that would paralyze Russian economic activity for decades.

  If his mission was accomplished, Buck would guide his bomber further south, dashing for the Turkish border, and a prearranged, secret rendezvous with an American support team. Buck gritted his teeth and swore that he would come home with an empty plane or die trying.

  CHAPTER 25

  The promised two to three hours had turned into nearly four. It was after midnight when Alexander and crew reboarded their helo and headed down the Shenandoah Valley. The valley was black, except for an occasional light powered by a portable generator. Power was gone as far as the eye could see.